This would be insanely boring because the optimal way to play would be to stand around and wait for cc to come up between each pack, stand and wait for CD’s, stand and wait for lust etc. No thank you.
Gotta love all the l33t gamerz in this thread with obviously no experience in game design or user experience.
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To be fair, I can’t claim any experience in game design but I am a mobile app dev at least, which I would like to think lends a bit of user experience knowledge but 
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Maybe that’s fun for some people. Maybe not fun for you, but some people only pvp and some only pve. You know, different strokes.
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I think it’s fair to say they also have no clue about what the rest of the playerbase wants.
You mean M+ doesn’t ever have cheese strats? Strange, I seem to remember a Motherlode strat where the party just mounted up and ran all the way to the end boss, all died, then rezzed there via SS or stealthed druid or whatever…
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Making everything an AoE farm doesn’t add to the complexity of a dungeon. Reducing AoE spam means you need to interact with the dungeon’s mechanics more.
12 years in software engineering actually.
“Players will optimize the fun out of the game” is a mantra that must be taken seriously. Many games have fallen because they did not take seriously this idea that players will drive themselves and the entire game into the ground in the pursuit of power that is otherwise out of their reach.
The XCOM franchise has gone through this exact “crisis”. XCOM: EU started with no timers and the content revolved around cheesing single pulls and waiting for cooldowns. Then the expansion added Meld canisters to “encourage” you to play faster for bonus rewards, and that partially motivated people to go faster but at times people would just slow it down if the rewards weren’t “free” enough. XCOM 2 then made mandatory timers and parts of the community FREAKED OUT like lunatics just like in this game, and while the devs continue to maintain, and I would agree, that the timers worked and succeeded in their goal, they ended up trying an entirely new type of encounter design in their 2nd “expansion” for XCOM 2 (the first expansion for XCOM 2 played with some alternatives to timers, like a much heavier focus on boss battles, and while that did work to a degree, a number of people like the “trash” aspect of XCOM missions).
The new mission types in Chimera squad were sort of on-rails linear sequences where you’d face trash -> instantly port to the next room via a cutscene and start fighting more trash -> instantly port into the next room via a cutscene and fight a boss, with no stopping for CDs etc. It solved the problem of people slowing down and waiting for CDs etc because you would constantly be thrown into the action but it also lost the dungeon-crawling vibe as well. And because a lot of people enjoy the dungeon-crawling type vibe, I doubt that will be the future of XCOM.
If I had to wager $$$, I would guess that they’ll settle on timers for XCOM 3 for most missions, simply because that was their most balanced and functional design, with some dungeon crawls with challenging boss fights here and there. The untimed “Alien Base” mission is popular enough that they’ll probably put at least two of these into XCOM 3 but that’ll potentially be the extent.
Looping this back into WoW, I imagine WoW will follow the same trajectory. I think Blizzard will eventually realize that two mega-dungeons per expansion will scratch the itch much, much better than one per expansion, and then settle on M+ going forward. They may continue to explore alternate designs but fundamentally the M+ system just works for the most part.
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The optimal way to play will always be the fastest way to the rewards. We’d still have the best players pulling huge packs to get through the dungeon faster.
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yeah they f´ed up with the aoe cap useless change that only made some classes more desirable then others im pretty sure theyll just scrap it next xpac like most of the global cd changes
Don’t dispute that a bit, but personally I think a preferable solution is to not focus on content where optimizing the fun out of the game nets any kind of benefit. If it’s a sidegame it doesn’t matter if players optimize it to dust.
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It isn’t really a “side-game” though. A number of people play M+ as their main form of progression.
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Disagree, about the timer. Vanilla/TBC were hard and required CC and not timer base. There is a population of people who would like to run a dungeon similar to how it worked in those versions and want to complete them. People already cheese strat in mythic+ if they can find a way and who cares if some folks find a way to cheese it, its a preference of endurance vs speed run; I’m for the endurance run.
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I know, I’m saying it might ultimately be better off as a sidegame.
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actually giant aoes required a lot of interaction and planiing from the players, in bfa to enable some of the big pulls in freehold or siege of boralus you needed to assign kicks and stuns from all players in the group
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Why would this be good again?
You under stand that if you want the same loot as timed M+ it will have to be balanced to the point that if your group couldn’t time a key there would be no way you would be able complete it. And it would probably need weekly lockouts as well. Basically 5 person mythic raiding.
It’s difference between M+ and raid. The timer is a DPS check. Need X amount of damage in Y amount of time. Raid is survival check.
It just wont be take as much time as you want and collect your M+ loot.
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I love classic and played it a ton but nobody uses CC there.
I have a feeling CC in TBC will be minimal as well.
Pass on spending hours in a dungeon.
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I dunno if it’d be good for the playerbase, but it’d be more effective at Blizzard’s apparent goal of curbing AoE prevalence in M+.