A question for Tanks that do M+

I haven’t swapped toons since starting M+ in SL S1.

Interesting article with some metrics and dev comments that makes it clear that the metrics in m+ this season arent’t great and wow devs agree that perception is important.

“Compared to Dragonflight specifically, we are seeing a pretty sharp decline in Mythic Plus participation in The War Within,” Raider. io general manager Kelsey Cox told PC Gamer. "Almost every season will see a decline in participation numbers from Week 1 of that season, but in most of the Dragonflight seasons the numbers stayed pretty steady after the initial Week 1 drop-off.

“That’s not what we’ve been seeing in this current season though: TWW Week 14 had about one-fourth the Mythic Plus participation of Week 1, in terms of total dungeons done worldwide.”

From the article author

This season was different. We rapidly discovered that our group’s lack of key abilities to handle specific dungeon mechanics without having to swap to different characters was utterly punishing. We quit the season early after hitting a wall at +12s and getting passed easily by groups that typically didn’t reach those levels, but had the “right” classes.

Despite our early exit, our Raider. io team points—which take into account your relative ranking among others playing your specs—put us on the home page of the site, in the top three teams in the world (Number 1 in North America) for weeks. It’s not because we’re world-quality players; it’s because no one with half a brain was playing our dumpster-tier combo of specs."

From Cox (raider. io guy) again

'“Many of those changes have been great, but some have created a situation where the jump in difficulty between levels is pretty excessive,” Cox said. That difficulty compounds dramatically if you don’t have a steady group and are trying to play with a random collection of people.

“This has likely been one of the largest contributing factors in the decline in participation we’ve seen this season,” Cox said. “The first aspect is simply that there are players who would previously engage with Mythic Plus at the lower key levels that are instead just running it at the base Mythic 0 level instead, due to the dungeon tuning differences.”

Even players easily capable of running a +10 in a set group quickly found that if their friends weren’t available, pugging a +10 might be largely out of reach.

“Considering a +10 is the minimum level required to get Mythic item level loot in your [weekly reward] Great Vault, that would understandably be a target for a lot of players,” said Cox. “However, when you realize that pugging a +10 is absolutely not an easy feat—especially if you’re not one of the very few meta specs—it is pretty demoralizing.”

As a pres evoker these were the exact perceptions I was talking about.

Blizzard dev Hazzikostas said they are aware of these perceptions and while they aren’t well accounted for in the current PTR build they are in upcoming patches which will be doing more spec balancing.

2 Likes

The problem is more complexe than just resistance. And it’s not just a tank issue.

All dmg taken should be way less, same with healing, the entire process of losing HP and recovering should be way slower. The nuke and reverse nuke heart attack yoyo hp gameplay is not interesting, but most importantly not necessary at all.

Remove tons of defensives and sustain if necessary to streamline the gameplay loop and keep healing fun and necessary if needed, but the surprise near death experience from basic white swing is just not good design. Objectively speaking.

2 Likes

I completely agree, tanks don’t feel like tanks anymore.

All of this is true in lower keys. If that’s what you’re looking for is there any reason you can’t just do lower keys?

It’s not really, though, because in lower keys players are also less skilled at interrupts and if it’s a pug there’s usually no coordination, players are missing mechanics that sometimes cause groupwide damage, etc.

That’s not true at all, the ratio of dmg versus healing at lower key is ridiculious, we take 200k dmg and get healed for 600k, at higher keys we take 1 million and get healed for 800k, that’s the kind of scaling happening in M+. The healer throws something sometimes in lower keys and then just DPS waiting for the next little dmg to happen.

What I’m suggesting is both the dmg taken AND the healing should be lower so the movement of our HP bars is more like old times and not some sudden nuke followed by a giant heal. I want bunch of small dmg slowly chipping away at people, and small heals slowly getting people back to full. We don’t have that in retail now, it does not exist.

So how would it feel in lower keys?

People go from 100% to 50% and that takes… 30 seconds to heal up?

(But if there was no healer in the entire dungeon, they would not die.)

It sounds boring. It sounds like there is no risk of failure, and if you can’t lose then there’s no excitement in winning.