I had created a post on exactly this topic a week or so ago in a separate forum section. I’ll repost here as it looks like it’s more likely to get read in this thread than where it was. A bit long but I think it lays out the largest issue many progression Mythic + players have with key access.
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A portion of the community views Mythic + dungeons as a form of end-game content and I count myself among them. Progressing in this style of end-game is beating the next tier up of the dungeon. You aren’t doing it for loot - you are doing it to beat your previous best. If you’ve cleared a 17 Freehold, you are now less interested in anything below an 18 Freehold because that is what you need to progress. It begins to resemble Greater Rift content in Diablo III - loot drops but if you get an upgrade, it’s more of a happy accident than expected. Your goal throughout the season is to clear the highest level of each dungeon that you can.
I think Mythic + fills other roles as well (gearing through weekly 10 chest for instance) but, if Mythic + is meant to be evergreen progression content throughout the season (and since it scales without limit, I expect it is), I do believe making access to this end-game content have a bit less friction in the system would be a good design goal. As it stands now, esepecially with the removal of key deletion, a challenge that many of us that run Mythic + as progression content is gaining access to the keys we are trying to push.
At lower key levels, random access to keys works reasonably well. Mythic +0 to +3 kind of fills a LFR role (easily pugable by much of the community and quite easily available to find groups). Mythic +4 to +7 fills sort of a Normal role (a bit tougher to get into but still quite accessible), +8 to +12 or so is Heroic (getting tougher to find groups and gear/score requirements are stricter), and +14 and above is true Mythic type premade group content. Adjust the numbers as you see fit but you get the idea.
Once you move into the higher keys, random access (random keys from chest and completion of other dungeons) starts to have a good deal of friction. You can’t reliably find higher keys in LFG and honestly you probably would prefer to do them in a premade group anyway if you want the best chance for success. At this point, you begin to rely upon the keys you’ve been granted each week and the ones you can unlock.
If you have a 5 man Mythic + team, you start the week with 5 random keys one level lower than what you’ve cleared. Based on the affixes you are facing in the upcoming week and your current progression on the 10 dungeons available, there’s a reasonable chance you won’t get the key(s) you are looking to progress. Your only way to progress at that point is to run the keys you do have and hope the random number generator plays in your favor at the end to get you a key you want to progress. Not only do you need the specific dungeon but you also need it to be of a level that will progress you forward.
With each dungeon taking in the realm of 45 minutes (preparation mapping route, travel time, dungeon completion cumulatively), you might expect to get 4 done in a play session. Let’s say you had a 3 day mythic + raid week structured that way. In the current random drop key access system, you can easily spend 80% your “raid” time that week trying to get access to what you want to work for - not based on your performance but based on your luck of the drop – and only 20% actually doing the progression content you want.
The example above is not theoretical - this 80% time gaining access and 20% time playing the keys we want to progress is a good thumb-in-the-wind ratio of how I would caption the post 8.1 weekly experience of the 5-man team I run with, which is why I am taking the time to offer feedback about a part of the game I care deeply about.
Conversely, in a proper raiding guild, during mid-tier end game progression, you can clear the content you already have beaten relatively quickly - maybe 1-2 hours of your raid week and then get on to progression content the rest of the week. I think a good design goal would be to advance some sort of system that would allow Mythic + groups focused on progression to more quickly target the keys they need to progress so we flip the equation a bit (i.e. spend ~80% of our time pushing progress keys and ~20% of our time acquiring them).
As a concrete example of the above, with the weekly reset last week, our team was fortunate and 3 out of our 5 chest keys were possible progression keys (2 x 17 WCM and 1 x 17 ML). We ran all 3 of those the first day of reset. In addition, we also had to run 2 x 17 AD, 1 x 16 AD, and 1 x 16 WCM to fish for access to more progression content.
Netting that out, 3 “progression” dungeons and 4 “access” dungeons so roughly 40% progression / 60% access ( I’m rounding, let me be ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
) . . . and this was a good night. From our access runs, the only progression key we found was another 17 ML (which we need because we missed the timer there by 44 seconds).
So after the first day, we had possession of exactly one progression key and the remaining 4 we have are access keys. The rest of the week went that way with roughly 20% progression / 80% access dungeons ran each night.
I know viewed through other lenses, random access may meet design goals perfectly or at least adequately but when the goal is Mythic + progression, random access kind of feels like being on Mythic Uldir progression and after every pull being told to go clear to and kill a random Heroic Uldir boss before you can pull in Mythic again . . . and sometimes one Heroic Uldir boss is not enough, maybe you should kill 2 or 3 this time.
The analogy is not meant to be snarky. I’m just trying to crystallize in game terms how this feels to the player.
The problem defined above, I figure it might be worthwhile to offer some potential solutions. One way would be to make Mythic + access look like Diablo III Greater Rift access. For instance, the season begins and you walk into Mythic Freehold for the first time at Mythic 0. You 3 chest it. The next time you walk into Freehold that season, you have a pull down to run it at Mythic +3 or below. If you 2 chest Mythic +3, your pull down is now 5 and below. So on and so forth.
Each dungeon is advanced separately. In the scenario above, your Freehold access is 5 and below but when you walk into Tol Dagor for the first time, it is at 0 still and will need to be progressed in the same fashion. In this way, teams and individuals can target the content they want when they want it. This removes the friction and time involved in accessing content you want and puts more of the time in playing the content you want. Even Diablo III realized this early on - originally there was the trial where you had to earn a key of a level and it felt unnatural and it wasn’t long before the game moved to allowing the easier access described above.
I understand some of the feedback from the Blizzard team has been that we need to balance the dungeons and we need people to run all the dungeons so we know what we need to balance. I would argue this sort of greater rift access would very quickly point the dev team to what needs to be balanced. If suddenly the data shows a huge spike of people running Temple on a particular affix week, one might quickly deduce something about that week is making it “easy”. There would be no noise in the system - because people could run what they want, the data would quickly point to which dungeons might need balancing on a particular affix. It wouldn’t take too many cycles of affixes to spot which dungeons tended easier or harder on any given week - because people would run them accordingly.
All of this said, I do understand that Mythic + is just one cog in a much larger machine in World of Warcraft whereas Greater Rifts are pretty much the default end game in Diablo III. If for some reason greater rift style access is a non-starter due to other considerations - and random access is a design requirement, as a compromise what if we allowed the Seal of Wartorn Fate vendor to reroll a key up to 2 times a week. Give him a reforge slot where you can insert your key and reroll it?
It could be a free action that you could only do two times before he would say come back next week. Or, if it was desired to have an economic cost, then give the option for gold, war resources to pay for the service. A key reroll service like this is not ideal in my opinion as I still think it retains unnecessary friction to access in the system. I’m just throwing out a compromise solution that would improve what feels very bad right now while still maintaining some element of randomness if that is a core design requirement.
At the end of the day, anything that could be done to improve targeted access is extremely desirable. I know personally a large part of why I came back after a long layoff from the game was the M+ system. The better it feels, the more likely it is to retain players like myself - or, if the system starts to feel really good, moves into player acquisition which is always a bottom line design goal for any game.
If it is all a goal to have Mythic + to become an evergreen part of the game (like PvP) that you can progress in throughout a patch front to back, I do think we have to get to a solution that allows you to spend more of your playtime pushing progression content and less trying to break down the gates to progression content. The better it feels, the better player retention is throughout the patch because there is something to strive for even if other content has been retired/defeated. Access is the most glaring issue that I feel needs to be resolved. If we make it feel like greater rifts (or at least provide some more reliable, less time-intensive way to target progression keys), I think the community would embrace that entirely.
Then we add in things like in-game score, seasonal titles, achievements, mounts (akin to how PvP system feels in game) and we I believe we have something very, very compelling.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
![:grin:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/grin.png?v=6" ":grin:")