Some preamble. I’m a former CE raider who now plays in an AOTC guild and is part of a regular M+ push group who consistently goes above “just portals” but not to “title range keys.” We’re smart, effective players who communicate well and are having what we feel is our best season as a team (in terms of communication, cooperation, and personal play), while simultaneously also having the worst time in the keys/game itself this season.
Below I’ve listed an array of issues I’ve seen or that our team has experienced and called out. (this is not an exhaustive list)
Kick and Stops change allowing infinite recasting
– Groups without multiple melee kicks are punished. But the current dungeon pool is frequently punishing for melee (moreso for multiple melee)
– Sure, VDH was too strong with all of their control in late Dragonflight, but the complete and total pendulum swinging pivot the other way, this change feels FAR too punitive for groups coordinating with one another (let alone pugs)
Difficulty scaling even moreso than in DF S4 (where the dungeon scaler change first went into effect)(Yes, I’ve seen the recent change to Guile, but even before getting to that point, things are already notably more difficult than DF S4, but a wide margin)
Drastically widening the gear gap between M+'ers and Mythic Raiders
– Crafting nerfs (by way of enchanted crest requirements going up from 60 to 90 on Myth Track equivalent items)
– Expanding Myth Track to 6/6 without Expanding Hero Track to 8/8
– Vault 3 - 9 all reward hero track (nearly the entire range of keys that will be doable by folks this season)
– Mythic 0 gear sacrificed at the altar of the Delve - Half-joking aside, this change made M0s completely worthless. Again.
– Key depletion’s impact on crest gain from 12 to 5. Wiping on a raid boss but killing it 5 minutes later you still get your maximum crests for the kill. Wipe in an M+, your crest value gets cut in more than half and you deplete the key.
++ (Honestly, it feels like some folks there really just hate M+ folks getting gear, and it’s demoralizing)
Mechanic Overload (leading to cognitive overload)
– The last boss of Ara’Kara basically never stops mechanic vomit
– The last boss of Stonevaults basically never stops mechanic vomit
– Machine Crafters in Stonevaults basically never stop mechanic vomit
– Last boss of Grim Batol’s overabundance of tentacles
Visual Clarity / Fairness of abilities
– Last boss of Grim Batol, even with the resizing of the boss, and adding orange hue to the tentacles, is still a nightmare to parse visually with everything going on (and some of our team members are color blind)
– Last boss of Grim Batol, no ever-present clear marker for collapse point. Yes it pulses from here, but the coggy load of trying to watch for that while dealing with individual role responsibilities and tentacles everywhere is TOO much. This should be clearly visible as it was in it’s Pre TWW rework state.
– Swirlies on basically everything Siege. No clearly defined edges on abilities from bosses 1, 2, and 4 often lead to unfair feeling deaths.
– Necrotic Wake Marauder “Frontal” abilities hitting in a 180 degree arc, often times even seeming to hit BEHIND themselves with no visual indicator.
– Siege frontals being brown dirt/mud on brown surfaces
– City of Threads last boss orb-prediction swirlies being incredibly difficult to see (purple blue in a purply/bluey room)
Wildly Different dungeon tuning from one to another
– Mists is “free” for basically all groups, but…
– Grim Batol last boss is only “free” for groups with tentacle clears, and
– Ara’Kara last boss is only “free” for groups with multiple poison dispells or Poison Cleansing Totem.
– Stitchflesh ~exists~. Tuning is incoming, sure, but it still, by all accounts, looks like a BUFF to his fight for coordinated groups that were 3x spearing.
– Siege Last Boss with 1 dispell vs a second dispell goes from practically undoable, to “easy” at some key levels.
The BUGS!
– Dawnbreaker ~exists~ (Rasha’nan’s health. The ability to tunnel through the ship itself and die. The movement of the ship causing movement abilities for various classes to bug out. Flight orbs not always spawning correctly. AMZ making abilities invisible, and so on)
– Siege: First boss flagged as in combat getting pulled despite not being targeted. (by things like Starfall)
– Siege: The spotters yeeting themselves into the rivers becoming unsafe for melee to target them (due to shark infested waters)
– Siege last boss cannon fire sometimes just not working at all.
– Grim Batol Lavabender frontals often coming out in half the time they should (visual bug or cast time bug, not sure atm, but it’s killed multiple people in our static group as well as pugs)
– City of Threads RP “Assassin” monsters often evading and dropping targets.
The trend the game has had in difficulty/complexity/punishment/reduced rewards seems to have, overall, gotten more difficult and less rewarding since Shadowlands. To the point where, if the trend continues, I’m personally likely to not play in Midnight. I don’t want to feel like I have to be constantly on at 100% ALL the time the ENTIRE key when not even getting into push / title range keys. It feels like y’all’ve found every button, knob, lever, and other tuning instrument and leaned on them juuust a bit in the “make this suck for the player more” direction, and the multiplicative effects of it - it’s just too much, y’all.
There is a balance to be struck between effort and ease, for sure, but in my opinion, this is not it. You’ve gone a fair bit too far and on too many vectors.
M+ is the biggest game-side feature that keeps me playing this game. Running keys with friends and feeling appropriately challenged and rewarded is an AWESOME feeling. I’m happy to see that some changes have come for M+ and the Reward System for it, but I feel like there’s still a lot more to be done here, and hope y’all take the time to really examine what it is you want M+ to be, and hopefully, re-tune things a bit to be more rewarding and fun for the playerbase.
They do hate the idea that gear is infinitely farmable. That’s what all the M+ difficulty is about. If something is infinitely farmable they want you to have to earn it. Raid is more forgiving because of logistical challenges and because coordinating 20 people to do a mythic boss is much harder than coordinating 5 players to do a key. It is always going to be harder to get tippy top gear through m+ than through raid for that exact reason. Because raid has 4 pieces of loot spread throughout 20 people once a week per boss. While m+ has 2 pieces of loot spread between 5 people all day every day
This is absolutely a core problem. A common headline in every expansion has been Blizz trying to make dungeons more complex, difficult, and engaging. I feel they finally reached a point they went too far with this.
At this rate come Midnight only the most CE players will be able to get past a +5. Which would truly kill this game mode.
M+ was designed in a time where every new game mode has some infinite farmability. You logged in and always had something to do. Think Artifact Power.
Possibly a very controversial opinion but I think M+ needs to be reworked completely.
what’s the infinite farmability of pvp gear when conquest is capped every week? What’s the infinite farmability of raid gear when you can only kill a boss once?
There are three ways to get end-game level gear in WoW
PvP
Mythic plus
Mythic raid
Your argument is since M+ was introduced last and is infinitely farmable that all gearing alternatives (ie raid and pvp) should be balanced around infinite farmability??
You said
What are the “new game modes” you’re talking about?
Why did you ask if i thought raids came out in Legion???
Island expeditions and Torghast come to mind. Although they certain toned down that infinity playability as time when on because the players complained about the game not respecting their time.
I was talking about game modes as a whole. Perhasp I should have used the term “game system”? I pointed out the azerite farming to show the design philosophy for new content back in the day was all about something you can just keep on farming.
True youre def right, and there was player power tied to it in that your neck went up. But the players hated that and blizzard nipped that stuff for the same reason - they dont want infinite farmability to be a thing for min-max raiders. thats why you cant get myth track items from keys itself, just the weekly vault
There is a large component of raiders on this forum that believe taking 75 pulls on a static fight until everyone learns it is harder than anything else ever created.
It’s pretty obvious that if Blizzard doesn’t incentivize raiding it will die out in favor of M+. Did you see the poll that they did in these very forums?
Top 3 most popular game modes were M+ (by a country mile) followed by PvP.
Simply because of its reward structure. Unless you’ve got a tight knit group of friends who you enjoy spending 6-9 hours a week with, showing up for weeks on end and getting nothing to show for it is terrible. Feels like wasted time, better spent in a pillar where your time and effort has something to show for it.
The only piece of loot I’ve received from raid this tier was a helmet, which I’ve since replaced with a converted M+ piece because it was a higher ilvl.
Because spending countless hours of your time to socially shame people into not throwing your run, dealing with people who are manipulative over loot, etc, gear being based on who you know and not how you yourself play, over what amounts to a weekly mobile game lootbox reward ain’t worth it.
Blizzard needs to scrap raid lockouts, great vault entirely, delete creation catalyst, deemphasize gear crafting so it’s only catchup and not card swipe BiS. They need to reformulate gear acquisition so that the ilvl itself is timegated instead of loot quantity, as it’s in a bad state where you’re sitting in timeout for 6 days out of 7 for the weekly mobile game login reward disbursement. That’s super unengaging and not meaningful, and affords no real agency over progression.
By that logic we could say that M+ is available to everyone while mythic raiding is not (for logistical reasons), and as such any gearing available in M+ is available to everyone and any gearing in mythic raids is locked away from a significant portion of the playerbase for purely logistical reasons.
You’re conveniently leaving out that those 32 pieces of loot that have to be spread across twenty people are all mythic track pieces. M+ does not drop mythic track gear and is purely vault- which raiders also get.
You are also approaching this like mythic raiders aren’t running M+. I’ve never met one that doesn’t.
Crests still have a cap and we only get so many sparks. Dropping gilded in a +7, making all completions drop full crests, and/or making the crafted items cost 60 instead of 90 isn’t going to give M+ players any more gear- it just gives them the same gear sooner.
Even moving mythic track vault to a +9 instead of a +10 wouldn’t hurt mythic raiders as M+ players are still capped at one a week, whereas mythic raiders will get their vault PLUS an average of 1.6 drops a week (assuming full clear).
because it is. the logistical challenges of getting 20 raiders to do mechanics correctly over 8 minutes far outstrips infinite farmability of m+. i hate that blizz takes logistical challenges into account over in-game challenges. Sign of bad design. Make it 10m raids.
Yes agreed, I think Blizzard is off-base in keeping mythic raid the most convenient way to get myth track loot when the challenge is scheduling, not execution. I think they should see that mythic raid is so hard for many in the playerbase to interact with because of lockouts and 20 people/scheduling requirements that they should reduce those requirements. Make mythic lockouts per boss, make 10m raids a thing. If they have 10m raids they can make encounters more challenging since it only requires 10 people to execute, not 20.