It was revealed yesterday that the first season of M+ in Dragonflight would consist of 4 new dungeons and 4 old ones.
While i think that idea is… interesting, it exposes quickly a problem Blizzard has failed to recognize in recent tiers and expac ; item accessibility.
Some classes, spec will be hurt simply by the fact that you don’t have access this tier to those really good items in the other four dungeons. You might not be able to get a weapon in m+ for the tier, or your trinket, and that creates many fustration. Old dungeons gear won’t be as optimized as current ones.
There are some solutions to it
-Valor could be used to buy a targetted piece from the other four dungeons.
Giving you a choice to either upgrade ilvl the gear you farmed in the available four dungeon in that season. Or buy the piece your spec really needs from the inaccessible dungeons. If we were to use the current season as example, you could target a 262 piece ( or even lower ilvl if the value seems too high ) or upgrade 1 maybe 2 items to 272 for same price.
-Another solution would be the same concept, but with the coins you get from the vault.
Right now, a bad vault is just fustrating. Slightly better with the socket, but it’s still nowhere near the value of good rng. With maybe two weeks of coin? Buying an item from those other dungeons seem entirely fair to me instead of nothing.
And a third solution, would be to simply replace the four old dungeon loots with the new one.
I think it’s important to avoid situations where a class has a hard time competing with others because they simply cannot get an item. Adding a bit more protection to RNG is also a bonus.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I don’t see how unobtainable gear being theoretically BiS is a problem. In fact if they took ToP out of season so I didn’t have to farm a Ruby for the 4th time I would be happy. I certainly wouldn’t want to go farm badges to buy a scuffed one.
I might be missing something here, but I’m not really understanding the problem here. Is this the crux of the issue, that there’s only going to be good gear from the 4 new dungeons because the 4 “old” dungeons’ loot isn’t going to be properly optimised? It’s a pretty big assumption, we don’t know yet what the gear is going to look like in these upscaled dungeons, I would have assumed it would be itemised similar to what the new dungeons are.
I’m all for more deterministic means of getting gear in general, though.
I’m sure there will be good gear from the older dungeons, but they are still removing a bunch of loot arbitrary.
Take for example if Inscrutable Quantum Device wasn’t available for a tier, how much that plays into balance overall for some classes. And how fustrating it will be for some spec to suddenly not have any access to that item.
There is a bunch of example, like Poxstorm, Ruby trinket.
Rotating the dungeons each season means there’s going to be a whole new loot table to pick from each season. No need to farm the exact same items as last season, just all over again, it’s going to completely change what’s going to be BiS instead of copy-pasting it from last season, bringing it a lot more in line with raids, which have completely new loot tables each season too. I think that’s a wonderful change :>
The fact that the available loot will change with each patch is one of the things I like best about the idea. It will shake up the meta with each patch, and spare us from having to farm the same trinket from the same dungeon every tier.
Thanks for raising the concern! Itemization is definitely a big piece of how this will all need to fit together in order to work, and the goal would be for each season’s dungeon pool to provide deep and varied loot options. In some cases, that may mean modifying or supplementing loot from older expansions’ dungeons. If we were to mix in M+ versions of Mists of Pandaria dungeons alongside new Dragonflight dungeons, for example, we’d make sure that the resulting seasonal pool provides full itemization coverage for all specs. It’s likely that we’d also take a close look at trinkets in particular from Mists dungeons, which weren’t necessarily created or tuned with cutting-edge performance in mind (since back then dungeon difficulty capped out at Heroic; Challenge Mode only gave cosmetic rewards).
If we ended up landing in a situation where a specific item from the prior season’s dungeons was beating higher item level alternatives from the following season, we’d make tuning adjustments to correct that. You shouldn’t need to worry about “missable BiS” being a thing. But on the other hand, we’ve heard tons of feedback about how re-farming Soulletting Ruby, IQD, etc., every season hasn’t exactly felt like a compelling progression experience, so we’re excited at the chance to shake things up there.
Aside from a complete itemization refresh from season to season, our hope is for the dungeon gameplay itself to feel fresher, and like a new set of puzzles for the community to solve each season. We’ve seen really mixed (often negative) experiences in the past when we add brand new dungeons into an existing pool of dungeons that the community has already mastered, and try to set them up as equivalent in terms of difficulty and rewards. And while the hardcore M+ community may not experience this issue firsthand, it’s hard to overstate how daunting it can be for someone to try to get into M+ PUGs or try a new role like tanking for the first time deep in an expansion, when the established community is largely focused on routing micro-optimizations and time-saving tech, and groups likely assume complete baseline knowledge of all boss mechanics, positioning, target priority, and so forth.
We’re well aware of the risk that it might be disappointing to not get to experience M+ versions of all eight new Dragonflight dungeons during the first season, but our hope is that mixing in some dungeons that have never before had an M+ component (e.g. Shado-Pan Monastery) will make for a fun new experience there, and that in the long run the complete rotation will make for a much healthier and more dynamic Mythic+ experience over the course of the expansion as a whole.
In this case - with the dungeon pool being mixed up each season - I think this is a better option than allowing old seasons items to be upgraded into a new season (something that has been suggested for Shadowlands elsewhere on the council forums). I think we’re seeing this now as well with items like Old Warrior’s Soul and the Edge of Night daggers still being used by the best players in the world.
I’m also glad to hear you acknowledge that “missable BiS” could be a thing in these seasons and I am glad its on your radar. Needing to re-farm the same items over and over has not been a rewarding experience in Shadowlands.
Are there plans aside from the regular seasonal affixes we have come to know? Or just the fact of learning new instances from a Mythic+ perspective?
Speaking of affixes, are individual affixes and affix combinations being looked at going into 10.0? You’re referencing MoP instances, and I’m shuddering to think of some of those bosses on Tyrannical, and trash packs on fortified, etc.
Honestly, I don’t mind this a lot, knowing that we’re going to be getting the other ones in another season. Is there any thought to rotating the dungeons more often, like weekly or monthly? or is seasonally going to be pretty set in stone?
So there is a lot of really great info on this thread so far, but there are two things that stand out the most to me right now (and they may not yet have answers):
will all 8 dungeons be available as M0s, and on that note, if an upgrading system (like valor, currently) exists, would the M0 gear from the “off season” dungeons still be targetable/upgradable?
in whatever version of the Great Vault we will likely see, will the vault have only DF gear (current season rotation, or both current and off season dungeons), or will it drop gear from any of the current season dungeons, DF or older xpacs?
Again, not that these questions have answers at the moment, but I think its worth considering. If this style of 4 for s1 and 4 for s2 was active in SL, it may have felt pretty bad to feel obligated, yet constrained, in farming DoS once weekly for the trinkets (I’m looking at you, bloodscale).
They said in one of the interviews that this will only affect M+. That all of the DF dungeons will be available in the other 3 difficulties the entire time.
I can find the interview if you want, but I read it like yesterday on one of wowhead’s summaries so it should be easy to find for yourself if you need.
I understand that all 8 DF dungeons can be ran on M0, but if say a trinket or weapon is hands down the best item for a spec/class, even if it’s just an upgraded M0 item (272 from an off season dungeon), it could in theory be better then a 278 item from a current dungeon season from the vault, thus the rotating dungeon aspect be fruitless for a gear acquisition point of view.
I think I understand the concept the Devs are going for, and I don’t necessarily disagree with it - things to “shake up” the game and make it feel more fresh are, at the minimum, a great goal.
But yeah, there are definitely some details that will have to be hammered out in the coming months ^^.
As I couldn’t find any details on this, what does “M+ versions of MoP” mean? As I understand, the idea is to have several Dragonflight dungeons, and several dungeons from a previous expac, and have those be the M+ pool. This worries me.
I started playing WoW in 7.3.0, close to .5. After the BfA release I didn’t set foot in BfA dungeons until 8.1 and I didn’t start doing M+ until 8.2. The experience I have in M+ is that the dungeons look great visually, and that mechanics are relatively modern. We have audio and visual cues for mob abilities, and mechanics are relatively modern as they follow a certain design pattern.
This changed with Legion M+. After the initial M+ TW event I’ve not set foot in any of the Legion M+ dungeons. While the visuals are still okay, you can clearly feel that the dungeons have been designed with a different play style in mind, probably because Legion simply worked differently. I enjoy M+, yet I don’t like Legion M+ TW. There’s something off about it, maybe it’s the dungeons and routes, maybe it’s the older mechanics and design choices.
I don’t want to play M+ in Dragonflight and then be limited to dungeons that feel old in both looks and mechanics. While for example MoP isn’t the worst looking, it has certainly aged a lot. Will those dungeons receive tweaks in terms of graphical fidelity, and will mobs and mechanics be reworked to be up to modern day WoW standards?
If the goal is to make M+ more fun and healthier, I think there are a few other changes that would do so much more instead of giving us old content:
Get rid of Tyrannical
Get rid of Fortified
Rework Explosives so that the challenge isn’t your UI, but an actual gameplay mechanic
Rethink how affixes should work in terms of weekly rotation
Add more and shorter 1~2 boss M+ dungeons so that we have more variety
Add seasonal trinkets in M+
If not seasonal trinkets, make it possible to upgrade previous season gear with valor (perhaps a high price?)
Make it possible for Valor gear to be upgraded to its vault ilvl counterpart so that you can actually target the gear from dungeons instead of having to wait for a lucky vault
The problem isn’t that we’re stuck with the same dungeons with the same loot, the problem is that the loot for the same dungeons doesn’t change between seasons with no means to upgrade our old gear, effectively throwing BiS items away due to an arbitrary limitation.
Reusing old content is fine as long as it’s complementary. I’m not going to wait a year for the next expansion just to end up playing dungeons from 10 years ago.
I would also consider dropping the seasonal affix from 10 to 5 so that more players can experience it, and get attuned to the mechanic. I often see players say that they are intimidated by it at level 10 because of the challenge of bringing a key up to that in the first place, as well as the fear of messing up the route because of inexperience with the new seasonal.
“Why did you kill Wo, when we’re fighting the boss?!” as an example. Although not a blow to the run as it does give you a damage reduction while in the boss fight, it’s essentially a wasted mechanic because of the loss of stealth + speed to skip an important pack.
Gaining that experience at a level +5 and up will help ease the transition on higher keys while the players can focus more on the added normal affixes and the run itself.
