Starting at keystone level +7, a new affix, Challenger’s Peril, directly affects the dungeon timer. This affix emphasizes precise play and strategic execution, placing greater risk on players’ decisions.
Challenger’s Peril - Dying subtracts 15 seconds from time remaining rather than 5 seconds.
Many “high key” pushers have complained that one-shots are the limiting factor. They do not enjoy this, and would prefer the timer to be the ultimate decider of whether or not the party times a key.
Fair enough, however the vast majority of players do not push high keys. This new affix is Blizzard’s attempt to address this problem.
Why is this being included in +7 keys? The people doing +7s are just trying to get loot. These are not “high key pushers”.
Blizzard should move this affix into the +12 row, since these are the players that care about this.
Key Leavers
Many, many people on the forums complain about people leaving their keys after the first wipe. This affix is going to massively increase that number - since the risk of not timing the key literally triples.
Blizzard’s idea of high keys is probably more related to the rewards rather than actual key level. Once you are hitting 9s, anything after that is like, well, alright lol.
This is a totally separate but related problem. Incoming damage making health bars look like the sound meter at a rave is a massive problem and needs addressed still.
Address that and the 15 second affix is justified. Until then I agree it’s rubbish.
Infinite scaling makes 1 shots an inevitable outcome unless damage is very low and timers extremely tight so lack of dps stops key pushes and healing/defensives never really become a concern.
Going to go out on a very short limb and say this:
Those people are going to leave anyway, regardless of this affix
If people are leaving low keys it’s probably because the group is god awful, not because the timer might run out. Although those two things probably go hand in hand in lower keys
so yeah, really don’t think anything is going to change
This is a good change. It’s not good for the game when you can full group wipe multiple times in a key and still +1. M+ is supposed to punish you for failure.
You guys wildly underestimate how much the timer is going to be forgiving with no affixes like Sanguine etc. 15 seconds off timer for death is nothing.
I’m actually tired of reading this. Yes it’s infinite scaling, but what’s lost in this throw away rationale is that players are fighting defensive use and living before they’re ever fighting the timer and that’s a massive issue.
Sure one shots are inevitable in infinite scaling content. Biggest “duh” cop out answer ever. The focus being taken away from pulling the key to time and shifted to pulling to live is trash tier design and darn near every top player shares that sentiment.
If anything, as much as you hate M+, having it about the timer and needing to actually output good damage to time it prevents more bads from getting free mythic loot than presently.
Players could die in prior expansions too. I know you enjoy it so there’s no point in any back and forth. You staunchly defend rubber banding health bars. So I think we know we probably won’t agree. I don’t know how anyone can enjoy it where if you’re not full HP and popping a defensive you’re dead but I’m glad at least someone does I guess.
Complaining about unavoidable 1 shots in higher keys has been around since Legion, not sure what you want people to say. It’s inherent in the game mode it’s not a cop out.
If people don’t want that they could cut timers by 40-50%. That makes healing/defensives irrelevant and makes it solely focused on dps, uncapped aoe, and giga pulls (into bosses where possible).
Honestly they could be more creative to address death skips if that is the intent. But, I don’t think it is. I think this is more meant to target poor play and happens to affect people using the death skips. If blizzard had issues with skips in general they would be nerfing the other multitude of methods the players use as quickly as they find ways to do them. But they don’t.
I’m not convinced this is targeted at combatting deathskips.
I think what we’re seeing is that Blizzard is trying to indicate to player where an appropriate stopping point might be for them. The transition to current S4 key scaling (increased M0 difficulty and +10 is the max key for rewards) was jarring for a lot of players for whom low keys were their comfort zone.
I think, frankly speaking, M+ is too ubiquitous for Blizzard’s taste, and I’m guessing that with the introduction of Delves they are actively seeking ways to pull players out of the M+ system who don’t actually enjoy it but feel it’s the only meaningful way to progress their character and move them over to the Delve system.
This gives them the opportunity to make changes to the M+ system without negatively impacting the lower end of the playerbase.
TL;DR, Blizzard is trying to indicate to people that M+ might not be for them, but Delves are.
I think you’re still missing the point. I didn’t play legion so I won’t comment on that, but the dynamic of getting to where you’re hard rotating defensives many key levels before you’re worried about the timer has only existed in DF and soon TWW.
Fix that and you can 1 shot me when I get to that point, but a whole expansion where the timer was hardly ever a barrier has been lame and will continue to be such.
I know a lot of people think they cooked with these but I’m not sold at all. Given how many players seem happy I think this is close to what we will get. If that’s the case I will probably lose interest in M+.
The stacking damage modifiers and everything associated has turned it into a survival game instead of time trial. It’s awful.