You have a finite number of hours each week, and two main gearing engines competing for them: Mythic+ dungeons and raid. They reward gear differently, cap differently, and snowball differently across a season. If your goal is the highest item level for the least playtime, the honest answer is "it depends on which week of the season you're in and how much you raid." Here's how to actually decide.

How each system drops item level

In The War Within, both systems feed off the same six-tier gear track (Explorer, Adventurer, Veteran, Champion, Hero, Myth), but they hand out different rungs.

  • Mythic+ end-of-dungeon loot scales with key level. Roughly, a +2 to +3 drops Champion-tier gear, the mid keys push into Hero track, and a timed +10 caps your in-dungeon drops and your Great Vault Hero-track reward at the ceiling of that tier. Pushing keys past +10 raises your score and difficulty but does not raise the item level of the loot that drops at the end.
  • Raid loot ladders by difficulty: Normal drops Champion, Heroic drops Hero track, and only Mythic raid drops the top Myth-track items plus the tier-set pieces at the highest baseline ilvl.

The practical headline: a timed +10 and Heroic raid land in the same Hero-track neighborhood. Mythic raid is the only place the genuinely top-end gear and the highest tier-set pieces come from. So "which is better" splits cleanly by how high you're aiming.

Speed of acquisition: M+ wins the early grind

Mythic+ is the better ilvl-per-hour engine for the first few weeks of a season, and it's not close. A dungeon takes 20-35 minutes and drops one or two items every single run, with no lockout. You can run the same dungeon back to back. If you're a fresh 80 sitting at low ilvl, chaining +2 through +7 keys will rocket you up the Champion and into Hero track far faster than waiting on weekly raid IDs.

Raid, by contrast, is gated. Each boss drops loot once per character per week per difficulty. A full Heroic clear might be 8 bosses across a 2-3 hour night, and you're competing with 19 other people for those drops. Your expected items-per-hour from raid is low, even though each item can be high quality.

The Great Vault is the real multiplier

Both systems pay into the weekly Great Vault, and this is where smart players optimize. You get up to three reward choices: one row for Mythic+, one for raid, one for other content (PvP, delves, world). The M+ row unlocks slots at 1, 4, and 8 dungeons run that week.

The key insight: eight Mythic+ runs gives you three Hero-track Vault choices. That's potentially three Hero-track items per week for roughly 3-4 hours of dungeons, on your own schedule, no group commitment beyond a 5-stack. For a solo-leaning or time-poor player, that is the single most efficient ilvl-per-hour path in the game once you can comfortably run +10s.

Raid's Vault row needs 2/4/6 boss kills to fill its slots, which usually means one or two raid nights. If you raid anyway, those Vault slots are nearly free value, so a player doing both gets up to nine Vault options to cherry-pick from.

Where raiding pulls ahead

Mythic+ has a hard ceiling. Once you're clearing +10s and your Vault is feeding you the top Hero-track items, M+ cannot push you higher. Every dungeon above that point is for score and crests, not ilvl. To climb past the Hero ceiling into Myth track, you have two routes:

  • Mythic raid kills, which drop Myth-track gear and the best tier-set tokens directly.
  • Crest upgrades. Both systems award crests (the upgrade currency), and at the season's high end you funnel Gilded crests to push individual pieces up the Myth track at the upgrade vendor. M+ generates crests efficiently, so even non-raiders can slowly upgrade key pieces, just not as fast as a Mythic raid team.

Tier sets deserve a special note. The set bonuses are often a larger DPS/HPS gain than several ilvl of raw stats, and the tokens come from raid bosses (and can be crafted or Vault-claimed). A raider assembling a 4-set early will frequently out-perform a higher-ilvl M+-only character who's missing the bonus. If your spec's tier set is strong this season, that tilts the math toward raiding even when the per-hour numbers favor dungeons.

So what should you actually do?

For most players, the efficient season looks like this:

  • Weeks 1-3: Spam Mythic+ from low keys upward. It's the fastest ilvl-per-hour ramp and it builds the score and the gear you need to get raid-ready.
  • Once you're +10 capable: Lock in 8 M+ runs a week for three Hero-track Vault picks, and add Heroic raid if you have a group. The two stack instead of competing.
  • For the last few ilvl: Mythic raid or patient crest-upgrading. This is the slow, grindy tail of the season.

Be honest with yourself about that tail. The jump from a comfortable Hero-track set to a near-BiS Myth-track set is dozens of hours of progression raiding or weeks of crest accrual for a handful of item levels. If you're chasing a specific score, a clean timed +10 in every dungeon, or a Heroic clear before a tier ends and you're short on group time or stuck on one wall, that's a reasonable moment to consider a dungeon carry or raid carry as a time-for-money trade, the same way you might consider a gold purchase to skip a farm you don't enjoy. But if you have a steady group and a few free evenings, the gear gap closes on its own, and the climb is most of the fun. Buy the shortcut when the bottleneck is access or time, not when it's just the normal pace of a season you're enjoying.