When a business begins to actively drive customers away from one product in favor of another, because of some in-house principle, one has to question the wisdom of such a decision.
I have to believe they Blizzard has information that we don’t which makes them feel confident in their design choices. I don’t, but I have to, because there is nothing else I can do.
And when there is another game already (classic) where that game mode IS the only thing to do PvE endgame.
Thanks classic for ruining whatever good was left in retail.
Where are you getting the math to support this? Your statement isn’t even remotely accurate, and even if it were, you’re still not allowing for bonus rolling an item you already possess or an item that isn’t an upgrade.
I’m sorry, but when you’re presenting the idea that a majority of mythic raiders will be fully geared within 6 weeks it’s obvious you don’t really have a clear idea of what’s actually happening.
You’re still assuming that every piece of loot that drops is useful. While that is possible, most groups are going to see repetitions and non optimal drops that are wasted. If you’re going to talk about the gearing process for raiders, you should be talking about the experience the vast majority will have and not the lottery winner that has everything fall into place for weeks in a row.
I already acknowledged that there should probably be a way to reward M+ players with extra loot for consistently pushing the highest keys.
I don’t think this is clear. You get a mythic piece of gear in the cache from a single Mythic+ completion; you don’t for a single mythic raid boss kill. You need three boss kills for mythic raid gear in the cache; at three Mythic+ completions, you get two choices. In addition, the three raid boss kills have to be different bosses, while it seems like the three Mythic+ completions can all be the easiest dungeon.
Which would require that both paths leave the max rewards out of the hands of the undedicated. Mythic raiding does that, mythic plus does not. Scrap the chest, make the gear scale to the non casual levels of mythic plus. Now, if you can’t do mythic raid, you’re objectively worse off (as you are now) and if you can’t do +2x your gear shows it. Right now, they are giving free “max” loot to heroic quality players through m+ for what is essentially nothing and I think that’s the cause of frustration for raiders.
In BC, I never made it past the few bosses of t5 and I didn’t have BT or Hyjal or Sunwell equivalent gear.
I guess you could leave it in for both for BLP, but treat it like they are going to treat the raid side of the vault.
Why? That was the only part relevant to dungeon design. The other one’s a player preference that has nothing to do with design budget.
The issue for me personally though, isn’t the investment time in raids vs. dungeons. It’s the size of the raid and the time it takes to get through it all and the coordination of a large group that I like. Dungeons are fine a couple times, but they get cleared the first time you see them, they’re tiny, the group coordination is limited because the group is a quarter or a raid.
Investing more time and money into a new set of 10 dungeons every patch isn’t going to make me like dungeons more than raiding.
I think you’re making a conclusion in the last part that’s completely informed by Blizz’s current budgeting/design choices, and isn’t really considering what would happen with more “investment”.
First, obviously if they invest more into new dungeons, you’re right that it’ll address that concern, and it will be more tolerable. With greater “investment” though comes the potential for actually complex dungeon design. Right now most of it is an afterthought; trash makes much the majority of a dungeon’s complexity and time spent versus raiding where the emphasis is on the bosses, whether that’s oneshottable bosses or 300+ pull bosses. Mythic+ is an environment they’ve chosen to build purely around speedrunning, which doesn’t leave room to allow people to have to learn/err in the same way - the concept of being stuck at, say Lord Stormsong, and having to devote time to strategise and progress is alien because they haven’t invested much effort into design complexity, and just slapped a timer, some health/damage scaling and a few generic affixes to create “difficulty”.
On top of that, dungeons are integrated into the levelling/initial gearing system, where raids are not. Dungeons are tiny because Blizzard designs them to start small, and be puggable before level cap (for a bunch of them), and most people’s first experience with them is there. By contrast, raids are something people experience as an “endgame”, after they meet certain gear requirements or w/e, and the easier versions (e.g. LFR) are pared down from Blizz’s starting point. Moreover, they try and keep it so that “raiders” don’t have to step down into those mode. Back when I raided, we basically did our obligatory Heroic clear, with maybe the last boss taking effort, while we waited for Mythic to unlock in week 2 to really START our raiding content for the patch.
Imagine if easymode raids were part of your levelling and gearing experience, and raids were designed such that you weren’t doing one raid, but hopping in and out to do separate easily-farmable wings. And you were speedrunning each wing to get loot, and starting over if you didn’t make the timer, and the raid was designed around that behvaiour. That’s probably change how you view “coordination” or “epicness” of a raid.
Even when taking a “big, expansive dungeon” like Operation:Mechagon or Return to Karazhan, Blizzard breaks it down into smaller chunks so that it feels tiny and fits within the speedrun system, rather than actually leaving it to be a uniform, more complex experience. Investing in dungeons wouldn’t/shouldn’t be just about slapping on 10 new forgettable dungeons every patch, and we shouldn’t think of it that way.
And that doesn’t make raiding “better” by any objective standard, just like the people who find raiding as boring as I find dungeons don’t get to declare dungeons “better” by any objective standard. They are two different things that appeal to different players for different reasons. Finding the way for them to coexist successfully as endgame options is much better than trying wage war on people that like something different than you and have their content eliminated because you don’t like it.
We’re agreed on that point. I think we can throw PvP into that mix as well. People will prefer what they prefer, for the reasons they prefer, and that’s valid.
Where Blizzard are erring is twofold:
Sounds like the answer to get the bean counters off your back is to simply stop investing the vast majority of your development money and time into raiding at the expense of everything else. It will also bring in way more players who don’t want “raid or die”.
I’ve heard a lot of M+ proponents talk about the speed of M+ as something they like, the focus on trash, especially for tanks and healers, being more exciting, and the speed component being a more interesting competition for them than racing to boss kills.
If you make the dungeons bigger, put the focus on progression style bosses, and take the speed part away, it sounds like you’re 15 extra players in the group from just making a raid. What am I missing here?
I agree with you, but I’ve been hesitant to say it because your proposal makes gear even harder for the majority of M+ to get than it will be in the SL plan, and I didn’t want further accusations of raid elitism.
I think groups consistently pushing high keys should see better rewards than groups barely scraping a couple 14s together every week.
I don’t think I have the game balancing expertise to create a system that would work correctly, but I would be in favor of anything that has the higher M+ groups gearing at a roughly equivalent pace and ilvl with Mythic raiders. I don’t know where the breakpoints should be for M+ groups that don’t fall into that higher status, and I’m fairly certain that if there were a system there would be wars waged on the forum about why people should or shouldn’t make cut.
I think your idea of gear that scales with key levels, but in a meaningful way, is the best one I’ve seen. The number of drops would just need to be balanced or somehow gated to mitigate the spammable nature vs. the weekly lockout for the raiders.
Liking speed is very different to just slapping a timer on something in lieu of content/mechanics. It’s not like dungeons haven’t had gauntlets, or timer mechanics, or enrage mechanics before speedruns became the thing. But that doesn’t preclude actual mechanics or complexity, which we do get when dungeons are more properly designed around that aspect (and other dungeons are not).
I’ll reframe it another way - if Blizzard were constrained in raid design such that The Lich King had to be not too significantly more difficulty or complex than Marrowgar/Funship, or Garrosh to Immerseus, or N’Zoth to Wrathion, and they had to be no more than slightly meaningful speed bumps at the end of a time trial, not even “epic 20/25-man coordination” or whatever could have saved them.
If you make the dungeons bigger, put the focus on progression style bosses, and take the speed part away, it sounds like you’re 15 extra players in the group from just making a raid. What am I missing here?
I’m not following - you literally answered your question right there.
People who value downing content in large raid groups will still feel a greater epicness in having a 20-man, 40-man or whatever raid group. For those that prefer smaller group content, part of the appeal is the not having to deal with “15 other players”, which means not having to deal with all the overhead/admin that really isn’t the fun part of playing a game. It’s much more fun when you get to the meat of the content; the encounters themselves. Or that, as a group of 5, they have more freedom over when to start, as opposed to being locked into a schedule because 25 people from different parts of the country needed to be herded into being on at the same time to even start. I certainly will never fit raiding back into my life any more, because life simply no longer works that way.
A factor in you associating “bigger”, and “progression style” with more raid-like (sans 15 other players) is because all the effort goes into raid design, and dungeon design is phoned in (comparatively). Putting that into dungeons still leaves room for players to prefer large raid groups if that’s what they want. As long as they didn’t skew rewards one way.
The number of drops would just need to be balanced or somehow gated to mitigate the spammable nature vs. the weekly lockout for the raiders.
If anything, I think the problem there is the weekly lockout system, and how limiting it is to the entire game as a whole, but that’s the whole 'nother TED talk, and I doubt Blizzard are ever going to change their approach on that.
Each boss has a loot table of 3 or so items. Multiply that by the number people who share your loot spec in a raid. Even with the spammable nature of keys, 12/14 items suck eggs. Your also unlikely to have too many extra chances by loot spec trades. Ilvl isn’t king in the game. I’m by no means implying that I would even get to the loot cap, but if 1k players can, it would be the same as top 500 guilds (with some fudging.
I think far too much weight is put on the spammable bit. Just because you can throw yourself at it 12 hours a day doesn’t mean you will ever see the item you want. You have to have the right key at the right level and get the less than 10% drop of the specific item you’re after with a max of 5 chances. Those are longer odds than 1 chance per week plus targeted bonus rolls at a 1/3 chance with an average of 4 other players who can trade the item to you. (the average players for trade is made up, but with rings and necks being universal, weapons being on class tokens, 4 armor classes, 20 players and 3 main stats for trinkets, it’s not far off).
And this gear, unlike M+ chest gear, can be traded.
All I see in your post is ad hominems and outright lies, pretty poor for someone who supposedly prides themselves on their debating chops.
Not during the gearing up process, which is what this discussion is really about, and I’ve already advocated twice for M+ having the gear up process as a result of the end of dungeon chest instead of the weekly chest, which would make M+ gear tradeable the same as raid gear.
Being snarky with you isn’t an ad hominem. I identified that you didn’t understand how raid gearing works, correctly I still believe, and proceeded to inform you where your analysis is faulty. That isn’t an ad hominem.
There is nothing false about anything I’ve written. You have constructed the most perfect possible way for someone to become fully mythic geared, where all of the stars align exactly right for weeks at a time and then extrapolated that to the raiding community at large. I’ve tried to point out all of the ways your analysis doesn’t line up with reality based on over a decade of raiding. Loot acquisition doesn’t work the way you think it does in actual fact, and trying to help you understand that isn’t a personal attack against you or a lie.
My experience to gearing exclusively through dungeons is limited to the beginning of expansions while we prepare for the first tier, so I am not familiar enough with what it’s like for exclusively M+ player patch after patch. I know that it usually takes a week or so of spamming dungeons to get ready for raid, but that does assume access to any dungeon you want whenever you want it, which is not the case in M+.
I have two primary concerns with M+ loot acquisition coming from end of dungeon chests, and the first is just insuring that there is a balance in the rate so that it closely approximates the general rate from raiding, without encouraging M+ players to go 24/7 to shatter the curve. If you think the rate is already comparable, I think you have the experience to back that up, but isn’t there still a need for a cap of some form?
The second is a potential unintended consequence. Obviously armor stacking is a thing even in raids, but the size of the group makes it impractical to give up all of the class diversity for uniform loot. 5 man groups already can’t get all of the buffs and utilities so they’re making sacrifices anyway. Does a system of end of dungeon loot make it virtually impossible for anyone who doesn’t play leather or plate to get a group? I’m not saying this would happen necessarily, I’m just asking someone who I believe has a better feel for the M+ community why you think it wouldn’t happen.
If the end of run cap was set at 23, I wouldn’t have a single 475/485 item. You can have scarcity in drop rates or you can have scarcity in difficulty. Right now raid loot is scarce based on how quickly your guild gets a boss on farm. The idea being that you’ll eventually get that item if your group can do it.
M+ is scarce based on a loot limit of 1 per week. Speaking only of top end, since I hate balancing around mid level. Any level of mythic plus chosen as loot cap arbitrary, so just take the number of players who get CE in 60 days and put the cap where the players line up. In most seasons, 22 is a real achievement, completed by fewer players than CE. Make timing the key a part of it. If you fail the timer, the loot is - 5.
Even with spammable dungeons, it can take weeks to get a specific drop.
Duplicate gear, which is your argument why raiders won’t gear up quickly, can be traded.
I understand what you’re saying now, I apologize if I misinterpreted where you were going with this.
Trading duplicates helps someone else in the raid, but not the person who won the gear in the first place. Part of their 20% loot ratio just went to someone else, meaning they are no longer at 20% for purposes of gearing up.
You might say that someone else will simply trade a duplicate to them later, which is obviously possible, but can’t necessarily be counted on, especially if the person is missing universal items that everyone in the raid can equip as opposed to armor type items.
It also doesn’t take into account items that have limited value, like a tanking trinket. Once both tanks have that item, further duplicates are useless beyond off spec, which I hope you aren’t putting in your full mythic geared calculation. I don’t expect many dps would consider themselves in full mythic gear if they have an off spec healing and/or tank trinket.
While I understand the points you’re making, it seems like you’re still trying to use the fastest mathematically possible gearing timeline as a standard, instead of recognizing that you’re creating a far statistical outlier that doesn’t represent the experience of most players actually doing it.
This I think is the hardest part of balancing M+ loot acquisition around the end of dungeon loot. Where do you set the breakpoints for key levels so that it reflects the effort and difficulty, but also doesn’t create a tier long brick wall for the vast majority of the community.
I’m just thinking out loud, but as someone who does a high volume of M+, what would you think of an escalating end cap? Each key would drop a certain ilvl, and for every 5th key (or 4th or 6th or whatever makes sense), the ilvl would increase (to some level off point). People who consistently do higher keys would receive higher rewards, and people who only dabble a bit wouldn’t be able to mine them for fast upgrades.
I understand that, but the vast majority of people aren’t CE or pushing keys into the high 20s, so even though I’m not a heavy M+ player, I’d like to see the medium range M+ groups acquiring comparable gear at a comparable rate as medium range Mythic raiders. I know perfectly equal isn’t likely, but close shouldn’t be out of range with the right system. Same for the top end M+ with the Top end Mythic raiders and right down the line. I just don’t know what that system looks like.
On average, everyone in the raid gears up quicker.
It also doesn’t take into account items that have limited value, like a tanking trinket. Once both tanks have that item, further duplicates are useless beyond off spec
Just as well then that tanks can (and usually do) always have loot spec set to their DPS specs so that this never happens, except for the 1 fight each expansion where the tanking trinket is actually good (e.g. Opulence), and even then you can switch back to DPS loot spec after you got the trinket.
This actually never happens except by accident since trinkets are the only kind of loot that is spec-specific, and you can just change your loot spec to avoid getting the same trinket twice (or getting it at all if it’s trash, like most tank trinkets are).
Curious to your thoughts on a solution, like the below.