How do you think M+ could be different?

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Been wondering about a few things while I browse the forums, like how mythic+ is probably one of the most baller systems put in the game for a long time. I think its great and its my most played content. But aside from some tweaks like affixes getting added/removed/retuned or the chest/vault, the systems around actually doing keys is mostly unchanged since its inception. I’d love to hear some takes on how you think things could get shaken up. Whether you want stuff to be added, taken out, quality of life, anything. Share what you think! I’ve got a few ideas of my own I’d like to share. Tell me if you like or hate them.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a “M+ is too hard or too easy” kind of post. No crying about a depleted 16 and wishing they’d nerf sanguine or delete quaking etc. I’m trying to spitball functional/system changes for how M+ could work in the future. With that, let’s begin.

1: GET RID OF KEYSTONES
This is a big one and will be controversial, but I think the system of keystones is archaic. With how the system functions, you have to choose between building up your personal key of random dungeons or you can find friends or pugs to run with. Feels bad when you’re grinding away and you’re like “aw man, my key rolled into a Life Pools now. I hate that dungeon.” or even worse, maybe your group did one at that key level already. I understand we have rerolls and you can drop key levels, and that’s good. But what if we didn’t need that anymore? What if, for example, we could just freely attempt key levels or even enable/disable affixes directly from the font of power, sorta like hardmode/challenge mode dungeons? In my opinion, a large degree of toxicity in pugs directly stems from the keystone design. You have only one try once that timer starts and that’s it. The pugs have never seen each other before and likely never will again but they must now fiercely cooperate for the next 20-30+ minutes. That’s stressful and it creates toxicity because people just want to get their IO, get their loot, and go next. But this isn’t a perfect world. Sometimes that key depletes, it happens. People rage, flame each other, then leave. Now you have to find people to replace and attempt the key that’s now degraded down a level or maybe you want to to find something to pug instead because now that its degraded it wont be good IO for you anymore. I think that feels bad and could be smoothed out with this keyless suggestion.

The upsides:

-Control of difficulty. I think this would give players the opportunity to actually practice difficult and demanding content. M+ is not casual friendly or new player friendly. This would be a good way to give people more organic experience in M+ where they don’t have to worry about bricking a key. Just tick completion or write learning in the group finder description and the problem should mostly filter itself out simply enough. This would still benefit higher end players too. For example, coordinated groups could easily have trial runs to see how someone can hang in 20’s or higher. Would also allow for easy experimentation with talents/gear/party comps in a live and dynamic pve environment where you directly control the modifiers. Not just hitting dummies that don’t fight back.

-Less stress and pressure. The timer wouldn’t be your one and only chance, it would be possible to have a redo if things go wrong. If you scuff the first few trash pulls or the first boss you could reset and have a restart without degrading. Or maybe you just don’t like your talent setup or need to change a trinket or whatever it is. Reset and go again, not a big deal. I like to see this as just a quality of life and toxicity preventer instead of completely removing stakes or hardness. The difficulty of the dungeon doesn’t go anywhere. M+ should still be challenging and demanding content.

The challenges:
-Would require a massive restructuring of how IO rating is awarded. If you could enable/disable modifiers then people could absolutely just easy mode their dungeon, picking affixes that are low impact or just not enabling any affixes at all. How would we discourage this? We could obviously award less IO. But how much less? Hard to say. I think this could be cool at the same time though and let people attempt some crazy dungeons. Maybe you could enable multiple affixes. Imagine watching some madmen do a +25 with grievous/bursting/quaking/spiteful/bolstering/storming at the same time. They’d deserve massive IO for pulling that off. How do we calculate that though? And how would this work between fort/tyran? I don’t have the answers, unfortunately.

-Loot/vault would be very complicated to balance. If you could pick M+ levels and affixes from the font, what’s to stop you from picking ezpz affixes or no affixes at all and farming your bis at will and filling your vault with fat gear while putting forth relatively low effort? In my opinion, I lean towards saying screw it and who cares. We already spam dungeons trying to farm things for our characters. And I dunno about you, but it kinda sucks and I hate it. I don’t really have fun pug farming a dungeon for an item I want that’s at a high enough key level to not ruin my vault but also not too high because pugs are more likely to fail it. That’s not very enjoyable to me. I’m just trying to win myself a trinket for my alt or whatever item it is at the time. The point is that we already spam farm dungeons for loot and I don’t believe it would be all that different. I understand this could be very abusable. I understand the tryhard gigasweats would 100% leverage this to get their characters geared out very quickly. Personally, I don’t really care. Maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture though. I don’t have all the answers and I’m interested to hear what you all think.

-If you could just reset over and over again then you might run into two big problems. Either people wanna just redo and redo and redo until they get a perfect no mistakes run or you get people that will grief you because there’s no actual key to brick. Do we require a vote to go again? Are there leaver penalties? Open to suggestions.

2: NOT ALL AFFIXES NEED TO BE HARMFUL/NEGATIVE

I don’t have as much to write about this one, I’d just really like to see more affixes that are buffs, not things that add difficulty or are supposed to eat up the timer like spiteful or sanguine. I got this idea when I compared how much power we got from Shrouded in Shadowlands S4 versus Thundering in the first season of dragonflight. Combine this with being able to set key level and affixes and you could have some crazy combos going on in your dungeon. It would be insane, it would be madness, and it would be really fun.

The problem is it would be miserable to balance. Tuning the affixes, figuring out how it would effect IO, if it even gave IO at all, interactions with the actual mob mechanics, it would be a nightmare. Maybe taking the negatives gives more rating and taking the buffs awards less. Mix and match and tradeoff. The specifics would take a lot of ironing out and these are just ideas after all. This also leads into the next suggestion

3: FIX THE EXTREME DISPARITY IN AFFIX DIFFICULTY
This one also won’t be very long. Its pretty simple. Some affixes are so low impact they’re barely noticeable. Some can wipe you more brutally than the mobs can if you don’t deal with them properly. Some do nothing for anyone but the tank or the healer. I’ve never thought it was good design to have weeks where you think to yourself “ooh this is push week cuz these affixes are easy but wow, next week is ANNOYING. I probably won’t get much progress done. Next fortified week will be free. I’ll get mad IO then!”
I just can’t help but think this could be done so much better. Maybe the affixes do just need simple buffs and nerfs or different scaling. Maybe we need more new affixes, or less affixes rotating around. Share your thoughts

I think I’ll end it here for now so its not a complete novel. Just wanted to get some thoughts out there and see if I could get people talking. Happy keying and happy looting everyone.

1 Like
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Interesting ideas. I enjoy keystones the most as far as current content, even though 90% of mine are pugged. I do think a good idea (keys in this case) can always be improved upon. As far as this particular bit that I quoted, there could potentially still be a weekly set of tougher pre-programmed affixes that, if chosen, could award better gear/more valor/cosmetic awards/what have you. Choosing to run an instance with no affixes is essentially a m0 though, unless you were thinking it could still scale in difficulty - that would basically be a 5-man raid, which I suspect won’t ever happen. I do like the idea of making more affixes that might require strategizing or even buffs, versus incredibly irritating ones like explosive.

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Maybe they could just remove the delevel feature if you don’t time it. You don’t advance the key, but it doesn’t lose a level either.

This still ensures you have to earn your higher keys, but doesn’t set you back as much if you don’t time. I think it used to work this way some time back. Not sure why they changed it.

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I think the biggest issue with m+ is that it feels like an activity that blizz begrudgingly accepts as something the playerbase enjoys when they really want to encourage raiding as the pinnacle WoW activity.

I’d love to see it become a stand-alone endgame pillar, treated as distinct like they did with PvP. Let people who want to raid for gear, raid for gear and not feel like they have to run m+, maybe by making m+ gear scale differently when in a key like pvp gear does in pvp environments. Or maybe make m+ seasonal sets that are superior in m+ and bonuses don’t work in raids.

This ofc leads to people “needing” two sets of gear (or even three sets if they do pvp/raid/m+), but I think it’s really the only way for m+ to be free of it’s impact on raiding and would give blizz more space to develop the m+ scene.

The fact that it’s so tied to raid performance since it’s such an effective gearing option, it ends up being a thorn in blizz’s side.

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It used to “deplete” it, meaning that you could run it again but it wouldn’t give loot. It made it quite a bit harder to push super high keys when they did this because previously you could just reset if your run went badly.

I’d personally like to see this return as most keys are run for weekly vault, not for gear. One of the big issues with class balance is that if you’re off meta without a score way higher than the key level you want to run, you get one chance a week at pushing your key and so you’re ironically going to contribute to the problem by not inviting anything but people way over the key level and generally playing meta.

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Exactly, you can’t even fault people for meta slaving because of the nature of keys. If your spec isn’t meta then you often get told to eat dirt and kick rocks and end up having to rat your way into whatever runs you can get

I ended up in this niche myself where I don’t really like to raid much. I think it takes way too much time. LFR and normal is way too easy but getting a consistent group to run heroic with can be a major pain. I literally just run it this season because I wanted tier and some of the good trinkets.

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Remove the timer aspect and redesign M+ for it. It only breeds toxicity, makes people stressed out, supports meta slaving (who can blame the people for it), and gives people little to no chance to help each other out as everyone is just mad someone failed and they either leave or have to move on as the timer is running out. Its contra MMO and community on every level and shouldn’t exist except for leaderboards and maybe non player power related like transmog/mounts/achievements.

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i’d like to see a system where you can kind of pick your own affixes (at least between tyrannica/fortified)…like a freestyle mode with its own ladder/rating. The PTR kinda works like this

they have a similar system in diablo 3, which i thought was fun :nerd_face:

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Well that’s just it. M+ IS leaderboard content. That’s your IO. Which is why I like to try and kick ideas around because the root of the toxicity is the core systems of the mythic keys. The keys are what’s pissing people off because you got your one shot and that’s it.

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I’m fine with this to a certain level and that level isn’t 20, probably 15. If keys never depleted, people would abandon keys after just a couple pulls if literally anything went wrong. The meta for high keys would be to keep practicing the first pull and almost nothing would actually be carried to a completion.

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That kind of already happens though, doesn’t it? People give the 26 a chance, it doesnt work out. They just leave and try another.

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Not really, at least not at the level you’re describing.

There are absolutely a lot of keys in the 21-23 range kind of bouncing back and forth as people time / deplete their key across the week, but as you get towards the 24s 25s those keys are in very short supply and the people running them aren’t necessarily pugging.

What happens at that level is you usually have people who play together consistently. If they fail the 26 they don’t just get to try again with someone else’s key, they’ve got to build another one and get their reps / practice in on lower levels.

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This isn’t at all what I’m talking about. I’m referring to full on 100x attempts at the first pull of a dungeon. This is the sort of stuff that happens on tournament realm at the great push. The incentive is to never let a flaw go. So teams would have some unfortunate death in the first 5m or so and completely run it over and over.

26 keys are well outside the scope of this conversation and are a red herring. 1 death on first boss, key holder leaves and rebuilds until there are 0 deaths… In a 10.

You think you solve leavers with this, but you actually encourage it. There’s no bigger waste of time than running the same key twice.

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You could also just not join these groups? Just like I dont usually join groups that list for completion because I’d rather time something and move on instead of spending two hours wiping to a boss. That’s what raiding is for. I don’t actually believe we’d see widespread perfectionists going “no no, I messed up and died once, we have to restart that level ten right now” because that’s ridiculous and wouldn’t be worth the time to shave that 5 seconds plus the walkback off your key. Nobody would care a lick that you had a sick nasty no death ten clear, just like nobody would care about it right now.

A more realistic application of my suggestion would be a group that was a minute or two over time because of silly mistakes, couple dumb deaths. Your group talks to each other, goes yeah we could time that if we ran it back. And they do it this time.

I’m not solely after solving leavers, though the culture of the game promoting habitual leaving behavior is created by the key system. Just because its always been this way doesnt mean it needs to stay this way

That’s what I meant. They give it a go, it either works or it doesn’t, and they go down the roulette of their group’s keys to see if they can get any done.

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Yes, but right now that process requires doing a lot of keys they’ve already done to rebuild. If you could get your single 26 AV, for example, and pound at it resetting every time you made a mistake or missed the timer, the landscape of keys above 22-23 would look very different.

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Yeah it would look very different. So what? You’d see people optimizing the heck out of their runs at high levels. So what though? I fail to see how that’s a bad thing, as most players don’t care for that level of play or more likely they aren’t capable of it anyway. What’s the big deal?

Is it supposed to be fun and enjoyable part of the experience for a key to regress back a level because something went wrong and bricked your run? Because its not. Doing 20’s and higher is already really freakin hard, why the extra kick in the shin for messing up? Sometimes its not even in your control. It never made sense to me and still doesn’t.

If your group didn’t have what it takes to clear that key level in the first place, they’re still not gonna do it even if they got a couple cracks at it. Nor is it likely the group would stay together that long. The difficulty isn’t going anywhere.

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I don’t necessarily think it’s a problem, just that it’s different and would have implications that should be considered. I do generally prefer the way depleting works now (At least in the 20+ key range) because it disincentivises an expectation of constant growth. People straight up wouldn’t do keys they’ve already done because there’s no incentive / necessity to do so, be that trying to reroll your key or having a key that’s lower than your own maximum for that dungeon.

I think things being a bit more fluid is a good thing.

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They probably wouldn’t do the same key over and over. They’d presumably go up, right? Or perhaps if we did hypothetically get the option to pick our affixes they’d do that differently.

This is just getting in the player’s way for no reason. To artificially slow us down I guess? I’m not a fan.

Its like when a dark souls boss has a really long or difficult way back to attempt it again and that’s why those bosses are hated in the series. You already lost and died, or in wow’s case you depleted the timer. That’s punishment enough.

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It slows people down, I guess, but it also mixes them up. Were keys to never deplete you’d likely end up with much more segregated brackets with much less overlap.

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I’m not sure what you mean by this.

I also think the part about depleting keys is just a mistype. Dungeon timer would still deplete obviously. They just wouldn’t regress in level because we’d have no keystones. You wouldn’t need to build up a key either, which I believe would deliver some smoothing out to the game where you could start/join groups of whatever kind of dungeon you were going for.