Casual Players Have No Endgame in BFA: Low Level M+ Needs a Redo

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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This is going to be a long one so….

TLDR Version: M+ was good endgame content in Legion especially for casual players. In BFA it is simply too difficult, too long, and the rewards don’t make it worth the trouble.

Long Version: I am writing this in the hopes it gets back to the design team. I and many of my guildmates have reached a level of frustration with BFA and I am not sure how long I can keep my guild together or how long I can continue to stomach BFA myself. Right now I play for my friends, not because I am really enjoying the game that much. Compared to Legion, BFA is not good in my opinion and it needs help quick.

My perspective – I strongly believe perspective is important. I am not a Mythic raider, so I don’t think my voice should count there as well as I don’t think Mythic raiders have any business commenting on the game that I play. I am the Co-GM, lead tank, and occasional raid leader (when we do them) for a social/casual guild. I used to be a raider. Between Cata and WoD I bounced between more progression minded and more casual raid guilds eventually becoming a raid leader myself. I am skilled enough to do Heroic raids and M+ up to a certain point but I am no Mythic raider or someone who could push far past a M+10 in current content.

My guild has some skilled former raiders. My guild also has very casual and non-skilled players (the kind of folks you would kick from normal mode raids or M+2 for standing in the fire). We formed the guild to be social and inclusive. We don’t have a standing raiding group. When we do content, we allow anyone to be part of it no matter what their skill level is (sometimes we do put gear level requirements on things). Our guild is made up of all ages (20-70). Many of them have jobs, families, and other time constraints.

Legion endgame was very good for our guild. At the beginning, lots of folks were very angry about all the quests that forced players into Mythic dungeons. However, we found that Mythic dungeons were not really all that “mythic”. With a little more gear, some patience, and maybe one or two of the more skilled players, we could help those more casual players get through Mythic dungeons. Many of our more casual players started requesting both to do more dungeons and for those of us with raiding experience to teach them how to be better.

I will repeat that……the Legion Mythic dungeon experience was good enough that super casual players wanted to be better and were willing to take the time to learn how to do it.

We eventually got almost the entire guild into doing M+. Now we weren’t setting records or anything. Depending on which guild members showed up (raiders vs. non raiders) we might end the night at M+5. On some nights the former raiders would get together just to see how far we could go. It was good content that gave solid rewards. It also scaled nicely. We could get pretty much anyone into M+2 but there was a point where we would hit a wall based on skill levels of who was in the group that night. The increase in difficulty was based on the affixes and the more you got, the more skill you needed.

The timed Kara runs were also very popular content. At the beginning we could only carry 1 or 2 “non-raiders” but as gear levels increased we could carry more. Eventually we got every single person in the guild (even the 70 year old woman who is partially blind and plays with a trackball mouse) the mount.

BFA is the other end of the spectrum. The Mythic and M+ experience has not been good for my guild and currently no one is requesting to do that content. In fact, I am seeing the opposite where members are telling me they would rather do other stuff and would rather NOT see a Mythic dungeon run on the calendar.

This is the same group of folks who were begging for M+ runs in Legion and asking me to spend special time with them to help them learn how to be better players.

Now I am not going to speculate as to what the design team intended with BFA. I can only comment on the results. Following is what both my guild members and I find wrong with BFA M+ and why we are not happy especially compared to the Legion experience:

  1. Dungeons are too long and have too much trash – In Legion we could get in 2 to 3 runs per night. This was good because it gave enough chances for drops that most everyone saw some gear (some reward) for doing the content. BFA dungeons are slogs. The is way too much trash that takes too long to kill. In BFA our guild gets in about 1 run per night. With jobs, kids, family and other real life requirements, 1 run simply isn’t enough to guarantee loot drops (personal loot makes this even worse).

  2. Lower level M+ is too difficult (for the reward)– In Legion the difficulty came from the affixes and M+2 wasn’t too bad. The mechanical requirements rose with the affixes. Even our more casual players could be taught to deal with M+2 mechanics for most of the dungeons (final boss of Mythic Vault can die in a fire btw). In BFA the mechanical difficulty is present even in Heroics. More casual (non raider) players have a limit of how many mechanics they can handle. When you dump in trash pacts with 4 different things that NEED to be interrupted while both fire is hitting the ground and every mob is casting other spells to fake our your interrupts, casual players just give up. The only solution for this is just overgearing. Speaking of which….

  3. M+ gear rewards are too low – In Legion the average casual player in our guild needed to overgear content by a certain amount to be successful. However, even when doing that they still would generally see relevant rewards (especially in the weekly chests). In BFA those same players require much more gear to overgear lower level M+ content. In fact, they require so much, they don’t see any reward that is an improvement. Combine this with the gear that comes from Warfronts and World Questing and it is no wonder no one in my guild sees any point in doing M+ content.

Side note – I can completely sympathize with those folks pushing higher M+ who are using Raider IO to filter out the more casual players who haven’t demonstrated they can do the content. Item level used to mean that you were capable of the content that you got it from, but now anyone can have Mythic raiding gear without even stepping into a dungeon. It has gone too far.

  1. Tanking in BFA isn’t fun (this one is personal) – Tanks were in a good place in Legion. I even taught several of our more casual members how to tank and they progressed far enough to tank low level M+. Now I am the only tank. No one else in our guild will do it. In Legion many mechanics punished the person who failed it. You stood in the fire and you died. In BFA, many mechanics kill the tank. The DPS misses an interrupt and I die. Tanks are across the board weaker in BFA with some classes like Guardian Druid being deleted from the game. And finally there is threat. This was a change aimed at the high M+ esports crowd that made the rest of the game much more difficult. If threat needed to become a “mechanic” at higher levels of M+, then it should have been an affix at those levels where the extra challenge was needed (say maybe M+7 or M+10). Tanking a low level Mythic in BFA with a group where some casual players are missing interrupts and is an overly stressful experience. M+2 feels like M+11 to me. While I am all down for challenge, I don’t think tanking a M+2 should be the same level of difficulty as what Method does.

Again, sorry for the long post, but I wanted to provide as much detail as possible for the dev team. BFA just isn’t fun for my guildmates or me. Compared to Legion, BFA M+ isn’t good endgame content for more casual players. For the time being I am holding the guild together but I don’t think Warfronts are going to hold everyone’s interest for the rest of this xpac. We need a scaling endgame like Legion M+ that casual players can both enjoy and be challenged by.

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Fair enough argument. The true casuals would find it difficult in low M+, and the rewards definitely don’t match the level of effort they’d have to put in. The main reason is that trivial content is awarding better gear without having to learn mechanics for dungeons. You’re right - there’s little incentive for casual players to learn harder/complex mechanics (or just more going on at once).

BFA was supposedly going to cut back on frills, but they’ve ended up feeding gear to people for little effort. This is likely because Warfront sand islands were a flop, so they “incentivised” people with easy gear rewards.

There’s no problem with someone else getting high ilvl gear as such, but when it removes the initiative for a player to work for something and earn it, it negatively effects the gaming experience in a loot driven MMO like WoW. It often robs the player of the satisfaction of achieving something hard or technical and being rewarded for it.

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“tanks were in a good place in legion”
:frog:

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I really appreciated this post ,Dromlock, as it says very well what I believes needs to be said.
In Legion , Mythic Plus brought so many players back to dungeons and very probably into raiding. In previous expansions dungeons were dead within the first three months of release … the last week of Legion before the BFA pre patch dropped I was running Eye of Ashara with as much enthusiasm as I did in week one. Blizzard famously said that they dont tune content around elite players but they did exactly that when it came to mythic plus.

It is so obvious that they watched the MDI tournament with the top teams mass pulling , kiting and destroying trash packs and based the BFA dungeon design on trying to stop them doing that. The problem is that nobody else doing keys was doing that ! I finished the expansion running keys in the high teens and no group I ever got in was good enough to do that. They designed BFA dungeons to thwart high level players making it look too easy. The irony is of course that the super mythic plus players pushing high keys are going to keep on pulling big but the casual and semi casual players have pretty much bailed on dungeons , which is a shame. Blizzard need to act fast on this or this expac is pretty much over (truth be told I think it is already too late).

I think the two most important reasons that casual players have given up on mythic plus after only six months into BFA is that the dungeons are much harder than in Legion and the level two affix. The biggest difference from Legion is that the trash is so much deadlier with multiple interrupts and dispels required not to mention just straight up CC on some pulls. When you are asking for rogues cause you need to cloak a +5 , not because you are saving time but because you think you may not kill that encounter - that is too much.

I know there are those who may counter with that classic comeback “Git Gud” and I completely agree to a point. There is always friction between those who push to be better and those who don’t push as much or at all , but we all are in this game and it must serve both to be successful. We must remember though that this game is getting on in years now and so is much of its player base. Many are like me , working full time , married , children. I am a semi casual - I enjoyed running mythics in Legion and had 4 toons running mythics in the teens by the end. I would run a few mythics either in guild or pug and was happy to use raider io. There were pugs of every level from mythic 0 to 18s and 19s and it never took more than a few minutes at any time of day to find myself a suitable one.

These days in BFA everything is totally different. Most nights I can’t find a dungeon to run that suits me or the requirements are 375-380 and raider io for a level five - People asking for a rogue or a DH for a level six. I think raider io is great as it shows your experience but this is too much and it is because the dungeons are too tough. The level two affix needs to be removed as it requires casuals to get good too early. In Legion the difficulty progression was smooth , you could move from mythic 0 through five or six quite easily , at seven there was a bit of a curve as you mixed in the second affix and it really didn’t get hard until you hit the wall at ten.

I think a perfect solution would be to revert it to legion affixes. Get rid of Tyrannical / Fortified at level two , keep the affixes at four seven and the seasonal affix at ten. Then at level sixteen you bring back Tyrannical / Fortified. This marks the clear delineation between the casual and the serious gamer. The casual get to strive for his ten , then his Keystone Master at fifteen. Beyond that level is "Git Gud territory.

I believe tank threat needs to be buffed again. The reason it was originally there was to , yes, make it easier to tank - it is perverse to make tanking harder when the game is crying out for players to take up tanking.

The dungeon trash needs to be nerfed a bit too , drop a few abilities here and there or just change them to be not an issue at low levels but a real challenge at high level - any one remember the cats in Darkheart Thicket or the Rizen Scout’s knive dance in Blackrook Hold?

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Thanks for this well thought out and well articulated post.

IMO, Gear is too easy to get and removes any reward from low level mythic plus dungeons. By the time a casual can start seeing upgrades it’s well into the difficulty curve (5+, 6+). I assume dungeon tuning has the average gear level in mind, further increasing difficulty. The affix order I can’t comment on since I know nothing else.

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While this post is very well written and though out, I disagree for the most part. While I am currently a mythic raider and push high keys, I used to be an officer in a casual-ish legion guild.

I personally do not feel that the mythic+ system is design for casual player, and that’s intentional. Blizz has said before that they want m+ to be an alternative way to gear outside of raiding. I would consider a +10, particularly at the start of a tier, comparable to a mid-level heroic raid boss in difficulty, and the end of the dungeon awards gear comparable to that, and even awards a guaranteed weekly item of near or higher mythic quality for your troubles.

This right here is the problem, and to put it bluntly, is that if this statement is true, your guildies just arent very good at m+. You’re saying that people are having trouble doing +2’s, that’s a sign that they shouldnt be doing m+. +2 is NOT hard, ever. You can ignore half the mechanics and still beat the timer.

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With all due deference I would take that statement as ‘one’ of the reasons for mythic plus. I think Blizzard are regretting their decision to make the dungeons harder and very linear and the wall affix now at two instead of ten. As a casual player my favorite part of Legion was mythic plus and I ran decent keys with players far worse than me and completed them in time.

You are correct that a decent group with approriate gear can blast through a plus two without dealing with much mechanics but a casual group of learning players may not. To say that they should’nt be in a plus two is a bit harsh. In the Legion system players who weren’t very good could be found making timers in +5s and 6’s as long as there was one or two decent players in the group. Now with Fortified and Tyrannical kicking in at level 2 the progression for many players becomes much harder. Many , including myself are feeling that Blizzard have closed the door to inclusive group content by making low level dungeons too hard for casual players because they were too easy for high level ones.

The great thing about Legion mythics was it’s viability for players of every level - just looking in the group finder now shows a large amount of very high key groups and a large amount of very low keys. I see hardly any mid level groups and mostly they are for Freehold or AD which seem to be considered the easiest ones.
This suggests that many casuals and semi casuals (intermediate) players just aren’t listing their keys. While you can put forward the argument that mythic plus is designed for elite players to gear up outside of raiding I suspect that Blizzard had more in mind for it than that.

When you are getting no where near the numbers running mythic plus as a mere six months ago that is not a good situation for the game at all.

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Can we stop pretending that these affixes do anything sub 7. The multipliers only make certain things longer and it isn’t until the 3rd affixes time waste that it’s even noticeable. Tyrannical, bosses will last a bit longer and trash will melt. Fortified, trash will last a bit longer and bosses will melt. It does effectively nothing to the difficulty.

A +2 adds less than 10% health and damage to a dungeon. 8% iirc. Without the +2 affixes it is no additional challenge at all. If you’re a group of 350ish players, 0 is a breeze and +2 is a minor challenge. If they didn’t have so much +5/normal gear being thrown at anyone, you wouldn’t feel the need to skip over everything 4 and below where the difficulty curve is very shallow.

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I completely stand by my statement. If you are 360+ and cannot do a +2, you need to get better or stop doing m+. Fortified/Tyrannical is an exponential buff. It’s borderline negligible on a +2 and really all the way up to maybe +4 or +5.

A +5 or +6 in legion is about the same as a +2 or +3 now because legion dungeons went up to +15 and legion dungeons were a joke compared to BFA, so it makes sense that low level and casual players could get them done.

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Tyrannical bosses have 40% more health and do 15% more damage , that extra health is far from nothing. The trash does 30% more damage on fortified - thats a lot of extra meat on those hits on a pull.

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It’s really not. M0 trash his for around 5k per swing per mob before mitigation (including armor). 5k plus +2 modifier of 8% (was 20% in legion) is 5100 then 30% fort its 6500. Armor reduction on a low geared prot warrior is 45%. So now it’s 3k ish. Blocked attacks reduced by 28% (with a trash shield) so now it’s around 2.1k. IP is 50% now that mob is hitting for a whopping 1.05k when it swings. And not every mob even hits the tank. It does nothing at low keys. 2(8%) and 3 (16%) don’t do enough damage to a tank to matter from a damage point of view. Health only makes it last longer so effectively just a time sink.

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The point being made here is not that content shouldn’t be hard , hard content absolutely should be. I think that BFA shouldn’t have been made this tough right out of the gate. The mythic plus system will increase the difficulty itself , the higher you go. A lot of dungeons in Legion were considered quite easy at launch but became completely different once the levels rose and certain affixes kicked in.

Good and great players will get to the content that challenges them , those that aren’t as good or who have not as much time to devote to getting better are getting shut out. Even very good players who run high keys have stated that these BFA dungeons are designed very unforgivingly and are overly challenging for lower level players. Legion dungeons were not a joke actually , they had some very hard ones (I still think that a lot of Legion bosses were nastier than many in BFA) they simply seem easy now compared to BFA.

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What I’m saying is that they are being incentivized to skip content that matches their competency. No judgment in that, but as Fyre said 2s and 3s are nothing and they’re nothing because Tyrannical/Fort multiplied by 0 is still 0.

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You are absolutely right , if you can’t do a 2 then you prolly should stick to warfronts and emissaries. However when you hit that five or six , tyrannical will make difference.

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Trash melee hits are generally irrelevant. It’s the trash spells & abilities being buffed by 30% that matter. 30% on Motherlode Rock Blasts or Sonic Blade, or FH’s Frost Blasts, or KR’s bolt spells & Poison Barrage isn’t trivial if you are already not very good at the game.

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meanwhile a DH solo’d a +11 atal dazar in season 2…

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Which is what I said originally. Around 7 is where you notice Tyr and Fort. I wouldn’t say anything about what other players should be doing with their time, but in raiding, you don’t skip directly to the final boss regardless of your ilvl.

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Nice list of avoidable and interruptable mechanics. It won’t 1 shot you in 2 or 3. Those aren’t even 1 shots in 11s. The melee hits are the most consistent damage of all the dungeons. Therefore, they are the metric by which you measure the effect of damage modifiers. FH has a damage profile which is 85% melee hits. If you’re going to exclude that form of damage to make a point you’re going to fail.

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lol I spend most of my time doing pet battles and reps vs Mythics and I am at 388 on my DPS set and 389 on my tank set.

Seriously? Mythic +0 is a joke and quick to run. Please do not make the game even more casual friendly even I can see this is a major issue.

Are you even attempting to get the free gear Ion is giving you right now?

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Avoidable and interruptable? Yes.

But these are people who are bad at the game. DPS that don’t seem to realize that they have a spell interrupt are very common, people who have to hit 50% before they realize they’ve stood in fire, healers that seem to have a 2s reaction time, etc.

Melee attacks are predictable. Burst damage is the threat, and that comes from abilities. My point was that I was listing relatively high damage abilities, and 30% on something that already hits hard is way more important than 30% on a steady stream of incoming damage unless that stream of damage is near your HPS limits already.

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