Today, several members of the WoW Community Council met with World of Warcraft designers Morgan Day, Matt Villers, and Andrew De Sousa.
The discussion covered many topics related to the development of Mythic+ Dungeons, especially in Dragonflight going from Season 1 to Season 2, thoughts about players’ experiences with affixes, and how the Encounters team approaches making improvements to the system.
Please feel free to use this thread for any follow-up questions or discussion that you might have.
One question I thought about asking and we ran out of time was to ask Morgan/Andrew/Matt about the possibility of removing the affix rotation?
What I mean is that there would no longer be affix weeks, and every key would have a random set of affixes within the possible combinations. (Maybe keep a Fort/Tyran week if gating the rating is something that still wants to be considered)
I think this would alleviate the idea of “Bad week” and “Push week” feeling like you can’t play at all, or have to play more than average in a given week, when you can also be excited about getting a certain affix combination instead of just a SMBG key.
I would be interested in knowing thoughts on seasonal rewards moving forward; I know there was a big ruffling of feathers about getting a ground-only mount as the KSM reward.
You could argue that you can ride said mounts in the dungeons themselves, but you can’t mount in half of dungeons anyways. In fact, next season you can only mount up in three- Freehold, Underrot, and Brackenhide. Even in Season 1, we had a dungeon, Nokhud, where you could dragon ride. It makes no sense as to why we would get a non-flying mount, let alone something that isn’t a dragon skin. The only other endgame progression reward that fits this descriptor is the PvP Seasonal reward (where you can mount in ALL BGs/Arenas). Gladiators get a dragon riding skin, raiders get a Raszageth skin, M+ gets a ground-only-pug-lizard and…some hardly noticeable lightning VFX on tier we have to otherwise go out of our way to collect the appearances for?
M+ is now one of three major pillars of endgame progression, and I would love to see fitting rewards for it. Thank you for the chat yesterday, I look forward to doing more!
I would love to see something similar to the idea that Letholas had (time stamp 35:45) but based more around the boss mechanics as well. FYI, this is coming for someone who pushes raiding more than M+.
Something like set one or two base affixes (mostly for trash variance) then scale the dungeon with key level and treat boss encounters like raiding where you unlock new abilities for each boss depending on the key level.
ie.
Skyreach - Ranjit (1st boss)
Key Level 2-8 → boss casts windwall, Fan of Blades and Piercing Rush
Key Level 9-14-> same as 2-8 plus Four Winds
Key Level 15±> same as 2-14 plus Spinning Blade
Of course, the key level would affect damage or length of affect (longer loss of control) to make it a little deadlier. Granted the entire expansion’s dungeons would need to be tuned for this like each raid tier.
My negative would that it would not change the game play up as much as it is now with zone wide weekly affix rotations. I know a lot of raiders that get bored with M+ by the end of the first tier in an expansion. I would this could be remedied with a rotation of dungeons like you are doing in DF now. 1/2 of present dungeons and 1/2 TW for each of the first two tiers then a jumble on 3rd/4th/etc tier so you are not doing the same for the entire expansion time frame.
