But how would you step the difficulty in dungeons?
Currently, we can activate HM in Op Mechagon, but even that is effectively just a half step up in difficulty and it’s not even for all of the bosses.
I’m all for additional forms of content, however, loot needs to be fixed so hardcore progression guys don’t need to feel required to do it all.
I would love to hear an idea on how you can make 5 man dungeons evergreen and non trivial. Simply having a hardmode trigger isn’t enough as it’s just one step when you need effectively an infinite number of steps.
This, we never truly had evergreen challenging dungeon content until M+. Even with M+ if you only care about your weekly 10 it eventually becomes trivial.
One of the reasons you can do that is because often your BIS gear in Classic isn’t max level based. That is horrible design.
Classic dungeons are infinitely easier than m+ for equality quality gear. I am saying this in comparing getting your “BIS” from Classic and “BIS” from m+. Ignoring TF/WF completely.
Classic’s loot system wasn’t anything to write home about.
Mythic+ isn’t going anywhere, m+ is fine. Here’s the thing, if all you do mythic+ for is gear and you don’t care about your score then all you have to do is run level 10s, and those are super easy. If you want to take time in a m+10 to cc enemies then you can, there is plenty of time to cc in low level keys and still time it.
I can definitely agree with you here. They could start with fewer dungeons at the start, then add 1 or 2 with each raid tier to help keep something fresh for the dungeon players.
M+ is not an alternative, it’s a replacement. It completely destroys raid gearing due to being pushover easy at low levels, and even at 10 you can fail it and are still awarded a welfare mythic raid piece.
Perhaps if they rebalanced the loot from M+ so that it doesn’t destroy raid gearing, put a lockout on each M+ dungeon etc so they can’t be spam farmed it might actually be reasonable.
I’d be fine if the weekly cache where based on the highest key successfully timed. I think that would balance things better making it harder to get paid carries. I’d also be fine with not getting mythic level stuff from the cache until a 15.
This is the biggest problem with M+ spam farming. You can get fully heroic raid geared within a Day. The loot needs to be slowed down in M+.
Maybe, instead of giving loot at the end of every M+ run, make it so M+ only gives loot from the cache. The cache might need to drop more loot to compensate, maybe up to 3 pieces based on some predetermined criteria. However, I see no reason for loot to be rewarded at the end of a M+ dungeon.
Yes, I really think that both those changes are needed. Mythic raid gear for failing a 10 has to stop. Loot should be based on successfully timing the key. (Timing is the whole point of M+).
I’m not sure if that would be better, or a lockout. Either way, the loot needs to be tied to successfully timing the dungeon. Perhaps lower quality loot for completing over time.
Something i think would help M+, would be don’t downgrade the key level on a failed timer when the dungeon has been completed. However, breaking the key by not completing the dungeon at all should downgrade the level.
Combine that with only getting M+ cache loot based on successfully timed M+ i feel would balance the loot distribution. Make it easier for people new to 10s to learn the new affix by giving them more “time” by not requiring them to repush a 9 on a failure, but still leaves them the option of breaking a key to get a level they can complete for the loot.
Combine that with not frontloading 5 man dungeons and staggering releases of them throughout the expansion and I feel 5 man content could become fresh again.
Op Mechagon was fun for the first few weeks, but then as it just consistently got easier and easier, even HM is getting boring. I just wish my group could manage to get the buttons right on the first try
Exactly. Rather than one dungeon like this an expansion if we’re lucky, give us 2 or 3 of these a major content patch. I’d quite happily have smaller raid instances if it meant we could have fun and challenging 5 man content.
I may have been raiding for 15 years, but outside of a few milestones like killing cthun/kaelthas/illidan/KJ etc, I’ve always had much more fun in smaller group content ie 20 and 10 mans, and 5 man epic dungeons.
I mean you can queue up for normal and heroic 5 man dungeons or PuG a mythic 0 dungeon so what is the point of this thread? If its the speed that people run though normals and heroics, at this stage when everyone out gears Normal which is still tuned to like 285 ilvl things melt and go fast… Simple solution make a group label it Mythic 0 chill run and just go though it at a easy pace
All you’re doing is making it subservient to raiding which is not what we want. Let me be clear. I have zero interest in raiding. So I don’t raid. Dungeons are basically an end game for a lot of us.
Raiding has always been something the vast majority of MMORPGers don’t enjoy in this game. Throwing LFR in helps get people to do it but if no story existed behind the raid it would be dramatically lower than it is now.
Instanced content is why the vast, vast majority of people dislike it. We’re not interested in the elitist, exclusive race of getting BIS at the expense of family and friends / social life. The interesting thing about M+ lower keys is you can do them with family and friends. It’s a nice alternative to the toxic mess the developers created in the end game before (raiding).
Edit: I’ll add this. Once upon a time the difficulty curve of raiding wasn’t so bad. So it was at least an approachable concept for a lot of players out of the instanced loop. People without connections and exposure basically. However all of that came to a crashing halt with M20 and the race to make everything mechanically complicated. You can see this same problem in M+. Legion M+ was far more enjoyable when Blizzard wasn’t putting their ‘touch’ on it.
MMORPG can be about challenges but the challenge that exists now in the end game misses the point entirely of what the game is. You’ll never get Dark Souls complexity into an MMORPG involving 20+ people. So you need something 20+ people will manage, on average.
What we have now is a very small population crying that the much larger share found a home for their RPG power gain / goals without having to interact with that highly toxic raiding scene. I don’t blame them but I do blame Blizzard for the M20 concept and basically instancing everything of value in the game. Those two things made the community what it is today.
Yes. Before some of the dungeons like Botanica can be frustratingly hard but it does give us more of a sense of accomplishment when we do beat it. Back then CC is important and knowing which mob to take down first so the group does not go down fast. Even if you are geared not CCing the proper enemy and just pulling whole groups can mean insta death for even geared tanks and subsequently the whole group haha. Mythic for me is like Diablo Rift.
Citation needed. You don’t enjoy it, which is fine. But to say the vast majority don’t enjoy it is stupid. Raiding has a friends and family difficulty: normal. It’s really easy. It’s also fun to run with friends and family - we run it often with people who just aren’t interested in Heroic - people who aren’t terrible, they just are not up to heroic (or mythic) levels of dedication.
You’re wrong on a number of levels. But I find M+ to be way more elitist and exclusive than raiding ever was (not counting mythic raiding - talking normal and heroic). You only have to see the constant crying about raiderio to know this.
Mythic raiding isn’t the be all and end all, especially now that you can get equivalent loot by failing a M+ or drawing circles in the sand. Many, many people are content to clear the flex (10-30) difficulties and have fun doing that.
No, the community is what it is today because of group finder and the fact it has caused zero server community due to everyone being randoms you’ll never meet again.
You only have to look at classic to see why the community there is 100x better(at least on the oceanic servers I play on). This is because we’re back to actually recognising people we group with, building up reputation and such to run instanced content. If you be a dick, you can’t hide or name change your way out of it and people will remember.
If only this were true. We both know it isn’t. People often use normal and heroic as an interview process to get people for M20. Almost all guilds I see online do this. If you show up not knowing what to do you WILL be kicked from a heroic or even normal a lot. The thing is you can’t know what to do having just showed up for the first time but to many this is unacceptable because they’re used to BIS scenarios on these encounters.
Raider io complaints have far more to do with class balance. In BFA, M+ class balance is atrocious. It’s the worst I’ve seen in years. The disparity between RDRU and everything else is absurd. Sure, some of this imbalance can be countered by just not running certain weeks or bringing some crutch classes (like WW to RSHM for the poison) but really these are big problems that shouldn’t be a thing. Especially warlocks and movement required fights. If these class imbalances didn’t exist there would be a lot less QQ over raider io.
Failing a run? They don’t fail. They just don’t beat the timer to upgrade the key. A failure in this case is leaving the dungeon without finishing which I do a lot. That’s failing a run.
So you made some valid points here but you only see half of the issue. The other half of the issue is someone who just wants to login and play the game a few hrs on Friday night who doesn’t have the time to gather mats, read wowhead, look at bloodmallet or icy veins all day theorycrafting. They don’t have the time to youtube encounters or tips on wowhead. Certainly not research and play required for M20 but yet normal raiders expect them to.
The emphasis is on expectations because even if you’re just playing around in normal the raid organizers are going to want to push higher. So someone showing up not knowing what to do is a non-starter.
This is why M+ is more attractive. A smaller number of people to deal with, a zone where they know the mechanics from leveling up and essentially what amounts to a more integrated experience they’ve had since launch.
Raiding is the entire opposite of that. Contrived, exclusive, mechanically over complicated for the sake of challenging an exceedingly smaller number of people, etc.
It’s just been clear for over 20 years now that instanced raiding isn’t what people think it is. It’s not the foundation of the MMORPG experience for sure.
