I’m seeing a lot of band aid, beat around the bush stuff. But some few finally are getting the balls to admit that healers need to be buffed.
You aren’t getting people to play healer unless that happens. They need to do something about lust and brez and then start addressing the healers individually.
If it’s me, I’m looking to cut healer’s external CDs by half at least. There is no reason to have 2 minute CDs on externals. They’re gating the game at the micro level, another example: being stingy with interrupts. It’s just straight up gating.
If there’s ever such a thing (it will never happen) the limitation would only be applied to the dungeon finder. A full group, carries included, would not be affected.
If I get flak for someone else taking avoidable damage, I’m outta there.
Sabotaging m+ in the hopes it improves engagement metrics on other modes is not the winning move.
The winning move is to remove raid lockouts and put myth track into end of dungeon chests. It is none of your business to control how other people play the game, sorry. The control freak removal of player agency on progression so it feels fake in its current iteration is why it’s so bad right now and people do not tolerate hard content.
Lower the max reward of vault for all game modes so playing the timegate for welfare lootboxes isn’t the means of progression. Utter garbage and makes the whole game feel worthless.
Cap off vault to veteran gear, and make people earn highest tier drops in content. It’s not progression to sit in timeout for your mobile game weekly lootbox and is quit material.
You’d be surprised to find out how many people actually start tolerating hard content and playing a lot more and not simply minmaxing the timegate if you give them agency over their own progression.
People maxing out their gear isn’t a hard stop if the game is designed accordingly with a tertiary reward structure like participation currency you grind for, for mounts and mogs. It is developer failure to add negative reinforcement systems whereby they take away agency completely and people into timeout and wait on weekly lootboxes and raid lockouts, rather than design positive reinforcement systems.
Additionally, they could even keep timegate around, but let players retain agency so it doesn’t feel intentionally bad, by altering the loot quality rather than quantity on a high level.
It is 100% developer design failure and “phoning it in” to have kept these bad systems around.
Although I’m not sure why I’m responding to raid boosters who have a bad faith interest in keeping everything terrible and funneled to mythic raiding so they can protect their IRL job.
Keys not depleting wouldn’t fix all of those things. It might alleviate some of it, but people would still not want to waste their time on a group that can’t clear even if the key doesn’t deplete. The anxiety shifts from “if I don’t time this, my key will deplete and I’ll have to build it up again” to “I’m going to waste 30 minutes or more of my time”.
If I’m understanding this, the idea is that every dungeon would have only an upward trajectory? The issue is that later into the season there’s even less incentive to do lower keys because you don’t ever get knocked down a rung for failure. People who manage to eke out a 10, are never going to go back to 9s if they can help it. If they’re consistently at 9 sometimes manage a 10, get knocked back down to 9, other people who are working through 9s have someone to play with.
True. But in order to do that you have to fix the cause of the shortage. In this case, that is the fact that people in m+ are elitist jerks. Fix that, more tanks and healers.
Have you even played the game? The issue is, indeed, there are not enough tanks or healers available for group content. If anything, the “ratio” you are speaking of favors the opportunity to have more tanks and healers than are needed. And realistically, there are plenty of both to go around, they are just not engaging in pugged content because people are so toxic.
Yeah that’s not how that works. We can debate whether keys should be depletable or not, but none of this will have the effect you think it will. Preventing keys from depleting on its own could potentially take a little bit of the pressure off folks, but that wouldn’t address the other issues.
Each dungeon having its own track doesn’t eliminate the problems there, it just creates several different brackets each with the same issues.
And most of all none of that will eliminate the toxicity, metas, queue times or lack of tanks and healers.
Metas: I’ve been creating content for other games for 20 years now, and one thing people miss is that things that are “meta” are considered meta for a reason. They’re considered top performers and often people play them because they can be fun to play. From a programming perspective there is only one way to ever truly get rid of metas, and that’s to buff underperforming specs and keep everything within 5% of everything else and then DON’T FIX WHAT ISN’T BROKE. You can’t just nerf your way out of metas, because then you just create a new more toxic meta built around people demanding everyone else that’s not them be nerfed for the crime of being good.
Queue time and lack of tanks/heals: All of this goes together. Prime reason as to why you have a lack of tanks and healers is because too many sweatlords take m+ WAYYYY too seriously and need to touch grass instead of acting like it’s life or death. They get all uppity if it’s not a picture and frame perfect run and act like it’s the end of the world. Because of that they treat the tanks and healers like absolute crap, often for things that were their own fault. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen DPS that will stand in junk on the ground, not interrupt things, not use a defensive if they have to, or similar stuff from LFR, all the way up to heroic and beyond. Then when said DPS is taking a dirt nap they want to blame the healer or the tank for it. Nah dude that big fat red circle you stood in was your own fault. Tanks and healers don’t want to deal with that foolishness and thus the DPS get to eat longer queue times as a result which is their own fault.
Of course all of this is part of why I still say m+ as a whole needs to just be deleted at this point since only 5% of the game touches it and 1% tries to hardcore push it. Blizzard’s stats not mine btw. Getting rid of m+ alone would get rid of a ton of toxicity and stop alot of the constant class changes since they wouldn’t be balancing around the 1% of m+ pushers anymore.
People should feel rewarded for helping out others in this game, and not need gold payments to do so. The current state of WoW chases players away into being greedy minmaxing for themselves rather than play together at the risk of a suboptimal group.
It’s one of the reasons raid lockouts are bad in this game, as helping out suboptimal groups punishes you unless you’re in it for a gold boost. It’s not just an issue with m+ keys lacking reasons to play.
Trust me key depletion is very much needed. Go play on the tournament realm next time it’s up. If you can some out and restart without penalty then groups will want to. And restarting every little mistake just sucks.
To counter leavers you need to make friends. At the end of a good key message people who played well and ask for their btags. Once you have a list of friends you’ll see leavers fade in the past.