I don’t remember what QA it was but I’ve been told that mutators were added just cause they didn’t want to keep increasing enemy # and hp. But the weird thing is how many of the more fun mutators are literally just that, and how many of the hated ones are the gimmicks. ‘Just Die’ is one I’ve come to appreciate more and more cause it effectively canceled out one nuke spell in a way that simply increasing HP wouldn’t have done.
But I think requiring a friend is simply asking for too much. The nice thing about random queue is that you can play at any odd hour for any reason and the MM does the work for you. Even though I (was) an active member of the sc2 coop discord, people weren’t available the vast majority of time. I’m currently on hiatus until they do something about this, cause the game feels more like grinding xp in diablo than RTS.