Honestly, I really think changes at Blizzard are being routed through someone who is just a miserable human being.
Like, Every SINGLE time we get a thing that is nice, it’s caveated with something that sucks and makes absolutely no sense / undermines the good thing they did. This is yet another great example of this.
They did the same thing with Warbands and Transmogs… Like… Oooh! We don’t need to run xmogs on every toon now! Just kidding! You still can’t unlock Transmog loot for gear that is class specific if you’re not on that class… so you still need to run xmogs on every toon!
It would be funny if it wasn’t EVERY change. They literally can’t just take a simple W without drop kicking a pint of dung down players throats. It’s like they have some good devs with great ideas… and they bring those ideas to the team leads and the team lead is like “That’s a great idea! But before you can implement it, we have to ruin it first.”
They did it with the new talent trees too. Like “Hey guys, we’re going to get rid of MoP Talents and go back to talent trees!!! But actually we’re just gonna make it so it’s basically the same thing as the MoP talents… and most of the talents won’t be meaningful choices – you just have to spec into all of your class defining utilities because we don’t care to think of new talents. Also we’re going to design the tree paths in a way that makes you waste a ton of points on choke points in the trees and take stuff you don’t care about before you can make cool choices on things you do want… but you won’t actually have enough points to make your build actually complete. Except for Ret Paladins, they can have everything they want and the pathing in the tree will actually make sense / solve every problem Ret Paladins could possibly ever have except the one thing they all keep saying they want which is more mobility!”
While that’s typically true, that’s not my position.
But when it comes to M+, we keep coming back to a central observation: when it comes to the easy/hard part of this equation, there is a disproportionate amount of focus on the affixes being the difficulty, when the level of the Key inherently does that.
bah I’m late for work. But one thing I could suggest would be something like bombs/destructible environments that you could use to create alternate routes.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY whatever you do in M+, should be designed around a WQ so that you can PRACTICE on your own without dragging down 4 other people.
Every mechanic in M+ should be mimicked in a WQ so people can practice on their own time.
Not sure if someone already said this but: say F is on 4 and up for the week. At 10 you will have F AND T. Next week at 4 will be T and at 10 both will be active.
The “Challenger’s Peril” affix seems to hint that most dungeons are going to continue to lean heavily on one-shot mechanics, which is a gameplay design that is far from ideal. It absolutely should be punishing when you get a mechanic wrong, but not every mistake should result in an instant death.
At that point the game devolves from something that is fun and enjoyable to a sweaty, stressful, no-mistakes Olympic-style dance-competition. Perfection or failure, with nothing in-between; no room to actually be a human being that makes normal mistakes. That’s not what a game is supposed to be; and yes, that applies even to difficult content.
There are other types of penalties besides death, such as stuns, slows, snares, debuffs, etc. Example: 50% Damage reduction for 15 seconds. In timed content, you couldn’t have everyone simply ignoring that, but it wouldn’t be overly punishing if you made an honest mistake once or twice during the run either. And I’d like to think that the people who are actually being paid to come up with creative ideas could do even better than that. There is nothing “creative” about having most mechanics one-shot you.
This was the exact quote that was used, and from what I understand they said at the end that they would also be doing minor tuning but that was not part of the package which makes it seem more substantial
And wowhead seems to think it will be a big change as well
What I suggested would be a part of the dungeon strat-- period. And there are lots of ways to implement it beyond just “throw a bomb at a wall” (which is honestly the worst way to do it).
It’s a dynamic game and yet everything is so lifeless. We don’t truly interact with our environment in any meaningful way … and I would make IMMEDIATE steps to change that.
What makes WoW different from WC3/RTS is that we play in a WORLD. It’s not just a 2D map. This is a fully realized WORLD. Yet everything about it feels like a 2D map.
Yeah… they said the same thing about Heroic before those goalposts were moved.
1> You can’t practice anything when mechanics don’t matter/ you 1-shot everything.
2> You’re still relying on 4 other people. You’re fundamentally not understanding what “practice” is.
Yes, there is such a thing as BAND practice, where we all get together and work on a song.
But if we all get together once a week for 4-5 hours, I practice my instrument on my own EVERY … DAY.
That analogy is what I’m talking about. I want “practice” in WoW to mean: I can learn, understand, figure something out at my own pace without having to WASTE EVERYONE ELSE’S TIME.
Hey. You can’t really get by on being a consistent hater.
You can’t just give negative feedback to everything because it didn’t happen quickly enough.
When something good happens, we should react positively as a community to let the devs know that we like it when we get good changes and are listened to.
Only the folks who never ran M+ and had no interest (and still don’t) in M+ were complaining about affixes in that way. So… 10 years is a long time, but also completely irrelevant - unless you count GD trolls who perpetually complain and whine about neigh on everything and anything.