For those who want Mythic Plus without the timer

Community General Discussion
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Disclaimer

I’ve got a bit of a pitch to toss out for Blizzard’s consideration. I haven’t done much refining on the idea, so I’m open to suggestions and criticism. If you don’t like the timer in M+, this idea is aimed at you, so please give me your feedback! If this doesn’t apply to you, please give this thread a pass.

The Problem

Having participated in a number of discussion threads with various takes on the subject, it seems that a lot of people want the looting opportunities and scaling difficulty of Mythic Plus without the timer. This dungeon concept aims to create that as an entirely separate option without altering Mythic Plus in its current state while borrowing some of the elements that make Mythic Plus work.

The Proposal

First, let’s consider which elements of Mythic Plus we want to borrow. To start, I am suggesting the following:

  • Affixes (But not necessarily the same ones as M+)
  • Scaling Difficulty
  • Trash and Boss Kill requirements
  • Scaling Rewards

If you feel I’ve left something out that needs to be on this list, please tell me.

Now that we’ve identified what we want to keep, how do we determine the difficulty of the dungeon? To that end, I suggest an introductory boss at the beginning of the dungeon whose purpose is to gauge the party’s damage output potential. Based on the amount of time the party takes to dispatch the boss, who would not have Affixes, the rest of the dungeon would be scaled appropriately.

Once the Intro Boss has been defeated, party members may not change their specialization, although Tomes and other similar items may be used to change talents and any similar expansion-specific elements. However, if the group is unsatisfied with their performance on the Intro Boss, they may leave and attempt to do better to increase the difficulty of the dungeon.

Once the group has accepted their Intro Boss kill and the associated difficulty and killed the first boss in the dungeon proper, the group is saved to the dungeon and may not attempt the same dungeon on this difficulty until the next daily reset. This mode would not require a key of any kind and would be selected from the character portrait menu as Dungeon and Raid Difficulty are.

The content/story model I think this would work best in is Timewalking, as an Infinite Dragonflight boss could be employed to be the introductory boss without breaking immersion too significantly.

Outstanding Questions from Me

Just a few questions I have for those who feel this content would be a good fit for them:

  1. Should there be a time limit on the dungeon at all? For example, 1-2 hours?
  2. Should trash respawn? If so, how often?
  3. Should players who release spawn at the entrance of the dungeon? If not, should boss-based respawn points be used?
  4. Relative to Normal/Heroic/Mythic raid gear, what are the highest and lowest gear scaling levels you feel are appropriate for this dungeon model?
  5. Should party members be able to be replaced if someone drops? Why or why not?

Outstanding Questions from Contributors
  1. Should rezzes be a limited resource?
    Yes (Wariya)
    Yes, with YDYD mode available (Paladina)
  2. How would you control for unbalanced party comps?
    I think it would be necessary to have the Intro Boss deal percentage-based damage and deal it to the party as a whole periodically (Chronomatic Entropy pulses?) in addition to percentage-based damage dealt to the tank. While I dislike percentage-based mechanics, this seems to me to be the only way to control both against unbalanced groups (5-tank, etc) while ensuring that healers and tanks cannot commit to full DPS mode for increased rewards. (Ohgodmyeyez - Author)
  3. Should trash respawn? If so, how often?
    No, trash respawns would cause people to drop group, ruining the run. Additionally, players may enjoy exploring the dungeon after clearing trash. (Turnberry, Snowslight)
  4. How would you control against cheese strats against trash, like hard CC (Sap, Poly) and snares/kiting?
    Provisionally, as difficulty increases, trash would become less and less susceptible to CC, with reductions in total duration increasing with difficulty. Snares would be less and less effective in their magnitude (% speed reduction), with full immunity at the highest difficulty available. (Ohgodmyeyez - Author)

I'm under no illusions that this is a perfect concept, but I'm curious to see who would be interested. Please be polite to one another as we explore this concept, and again, give the thread a pass if you wouldn't be interested at all.

13 Likes
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I like when people say they’re open to suggestions like it matters at all. What is the point of anyone offering you any suggestions? I’m glad you’re open to them, though. Whew!

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So they can be discussed and potentially added to the pitch. I believe I stated that in a couple of places.

7 Likes
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Sounds good, bro
:+1:

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. Nope
. Nope
. Having limited rezzs for the entire dungeon would be great
. Smaller the gap the better it prevents massive ilvl gains over the expansion
. Nope, because players would abuse this and kick everyone before the final boss and sell spots.

7 Likes
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Thanks, Wariya. On this one:

Do you mean limited rezzes for players (e.g. Healer rezzing a DPS after combat, but a non-wipe) would count against the total, or just players releasing?

Are we punishing wipes, or deaths in general?

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Like you have 5 rezzs for the entire dungeon , if one player dies 5 times thats it no more rezzs for the group.

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Cool. Thanks for clarifying. :slight_smile:

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I also like the idea of a hard mode, where you get zero rezzes, dead and done.

5 Likes
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Ooh, like hardcore mode for a dungeon. Neat idea, I like it.

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I think this is great actually. Along with requirements to kill X and Y and do Z objectives, like turn off this, disable that, it would give groups an adequate dungeon difficulty.

To do this though you must have the iLVL scale also, so if a group kills the boss nice and slow but than smashes out the instance they don’t just get free loot to their level.

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Whenever I see ideas for M+ without a timer I think of 2 things.

  1. A vast majority of people complained that Operation Mechagon was way too hard on release. At the time it was scaled to a +7-8 key difficulty for 8.2.

  2. If there is no timer why wouldn’t you just bring 5 tanks, or 4 tanks and a healer? Why would you ever bring a DPS?

5 Likes
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Yep, if I haven’t made that clear, the idea is that the higher the dungeon scales (based on that initial kill), the better the loot is.

Because the scaling of the dungeon would be based on the speed of the intro boss kill. If you go in with multiple tanks, you’re not likely to kill that boss quickly, and thus the loot won’t be valuable to you.

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I for one would not want to spend 3 hours in a dungeon.

Also they need to scale iLVL, and if they put that into the time you take to kill the first boss, having 5 tanks means you will effectively get lower iLVL gear because you took too long.

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Then just do M+? The people who don’t want timers want to spend hours in these dungeons.

So we don’t want timers but we are going to put a timer on the first boss of the dungeon to determine the rewards? I guess this doesn’t really make any sense to me.

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  1. I think it should. That way it stops people from doing a pull at a time while waiting for their cd. How much time I dont know. But I think it should scale depending on the level of the keystone

  2. Nope. Have certain spawn point like how we have now

  3. No clue. But I think there should be some scale that the longer you take the lower the ilvl you will get in the end ( I know it’s a timer but I prefer there is some sense of urgency in the dungeon and not take 24 hrs (exaggerating! or am I) to complete the dungeon)

  4. Definitely not. Being able to replace party member can lead to abuse and more ticket for blizzard to sort out

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Not quite. The dungeon would scale based on time taken, not time remaining. I’m also kind of toying around with the idea of the party being able to reattempt the intro boss if they weren’t satisfied with their performance on it, but honestly they could probably do that just by leaving and resetting.

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good point. Yea I can see a dungeon that only best way to clear it is 4 tanks and a healer. More reason for dps to QQ

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You’d just have to make it impossible to change specs after the Intro Boss is killed.

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yea and no. Multiple tanks also means you can pull half the dungeon and aoe it down. Probably not gonna happen at the start of the xpac. But it will happen sooner than you think