No key required. Difficulty setting, a la Dungeon/Raid settings accessed by right-clicking your portrait. Participants would have to manually travel to the entrance of a given dungeon.
I expect there would probably be a requirement to beat the dungeon in question on M0 once before being able to access it on this hypothetical difficulty.
That’s going to create a new problem. The rewards would be better than M+ since you can target them. For instance, mages would just run this over and over for Workshop to try to get bracers.
If the rewards got up to +15 level everyone would just do this instead for gear and it would kill M+.
The best way to make this work is to have it not only scale in the beginning, but scale depending on how fast you clear the trash and how much damage you take (as well as how often you die). The main problem with timers is that people want to dictate their own tempo. The solution to that is to have a fluidly scaling dungeon that adjusts at certain intervals (say, each boss), based on performance up to that boss and during that boss.
So out of clarity, it’s more of an alternate approach to M+ but not in place of it.
With reduced number of difficulties whilst significant difficulty increases, so maybe 5 different scaling difficulties, that players can use as an alternative to M+ for players who would prefer to play without a timer in favour of direct dungeon difficulty.
Yes, exactly.
Hm, that’s a good point. Although, wouldn’t the difficulty scaling (assuming it is effective and actually creates a genuine challenge) and the time investment reduce the impact of that to some extent? Assuming loot drops at the end of the dungeon, that is, and not on individual bosses.
A genuine challenge for who? For people doing high keys the challenge is the timer, not the dungeon. Even if you had a +19 equivalent with no timer give +15 loot, it wouldn’t be a challenge for people consistently timing 15s.
Does the reward scales as well with how fast you clear the boss or whatever? Isn’t that basically adding a timer?
Then I’d say push it higher than a +19 equivalent, until a sufficient challenge is achieved. None of this is even potentially being implemented here yet, so there’s not much sense in quibbling about numbers.
Ideally, people who routinely clear 15+ keys should be able to enter this mode and get a challenge out of it, but the challenge is clearing the dungeon at all, not beating a timer. At a certain point, M+ is going to be more challenging because you can just keep getting higher keys, whereas this mode would have a cap.
It’s just different.
It’s different in that you make your own time. The clock doesn’t do it for you. “The clock” is a huge psychological stress factor and why most people who hate timers hate timers. Even if the time limit is one where you can easily complete the mission, the timer simply adds that stress. It’s just how they’re wired. If it’s not a stress factor for you, you won’t get it. But, once you give them -control- over their own pace, that stress factor is removed.
Even if it’s “effectively” a timer, it doesn’t act like one for the brain.
But if i saw “Your team does this dps, you’ll get X rewards if you clear with this speed” and X is lower than my expectation, i’d just leave the group or try again (depending how easy it is to redo the dps-check).
That’s an option for the whole group. The idea I have in mind is that if the group doesn’t like how they did on the Intro Boss, they can walk out the door and do it again.
I should add that to the OP.
Then it would be wayyyyy easier than M+, you just have to tryhard on the first boss, the rest is super chill downhill.
If the dungeon scaling is done properly, the tryharding/minmaxing on the first boss would translate to an extremely difficult and punishing experience in the dungeon-proper (unless one has hit whatever the difficulty cap is and that difficulty is now trivial for them, in which case M+ would still be a faster and more rewarding experience in terms of loot).
If the rest of the experience is downhill after the intro boss, then that would mean Blizz screwed up the scaling.
I’ve found a few pointers can massively increase performance, provided people are willing to listen. With more than one DPS check in the dungeon (several in fact), you can adjust accordingly. If nobody is willing to work together in a cooperative challenge, though, it’s a bad group anyway and one that won’t get far in mythic+ either.
This is no timer right? im super sure my prot warrior can do as much dps as pure DPS if im allowed to CD every pull.
I think the skill gap is too large to have any chance at proper scaling. Like I said, the audience for this is mostly going to be lower skilled players, unless you make it too rewarding (like being able to target loot) then you’ll have the worlds best players also.
Trying to make a challenging experience for both of these parties within the same system is impossible.
At higher difficulties, I would fully expect our hypothetical dungeon to almost require CDs for every trash pack. The idea is to let people go as slowly as they want. That may mean requiring them to wait a few minutes between pulls if they want to succeed. The time investment should deter those who want to gear themselves swiftly, as M+ would be faster for that purpose.
You really might be right. If we’re looking at a limited number of potential difficulties to scale to, then perhaps the only people who would ever see the highest difficulty available would be those players, and they might avoid it entirely because there are more loot opportunities in the same amount of time in M+.
For those people, the only reason to run this content would be the novelty.
If the true cause the dislike for timers of those who say they feel that way is the timer itself, the reward won’t matter and they’ll get better, or hit a plateau.
You sure? I’ve seen many anti m+ people say that they miss dungeons like brd and that they hate being rushed by a timer. So the fact that people want a timer removed and be able to spend as much as they want in a dungeon would probably mean that, yes, you are okay with spending 3 hours in a dungeon.
If you don’t, then I don’t see why you’re against a timer if the dungeon is balanced around being completed in that set amount of time.
I just don’t think it’s relevant anymore. I’m nostalgic of BRD also, but the reason people spent 3 hours in there was because it usually took 30min+ to get a group, then 30min+ to get to the dungeon and if anyone left someone had to hearth out to spam again then take 30min to get back.
In the age of LFG, 15 min hearthstones, and flying, people aren’t as committed to groups as they were in the past. There is no timer currently for LFR, go ahead and see how many people leave the group after 1 wipe.
The flaw with this system is that classes CD are balanced around its cooldown, with your design a class that has 4 minute cooldown will be way stronger than a class with 2 minute cooldowns, because in that instance 2 minute and 4 minute cooldown doesn’t mean anything.
Im genuinely sure 99% of the population will choose this route simply because its “slow but sure” kind of content, especially if you only have to do this for weekly chest.
This is also problematic, it requires mandatory wait time, which is kinda not your initial design (doing the content at your pace).
Later down the line players will ask for “fast forward” feature, because waiting for my mandatory 10 minutes cooldown every pull just because its required seems pretty weird direction.