If only. They would make so much money, huge market for that.
That’s why I played several lower level key dungeons so I’d get enough practice in for the higher keys 
(not that I’m even playing particularly high keys right now, but my ilvl needs some catching up!)
If you’re struggling, go to a lower difficulty until you’re not struggling any more.
Players aren’t just miraculously good at the game. They practice
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This is a pretty bad take. If Blizz’s design goal is to push pugs out of M+ they might as well shut down the game. M+ is the most popular end game activity and pugs make up the majority of the groups. The last 2 seasons have been the easiest ever for pugs so it seems Blizz is doing the opposite of what the OP suggests.
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Owning mistakes is 100% the proper way to go and gets a better response.
This is also true of life in general, not just WoW.
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Thanks for not reading what I said:
So thanks for addressing what I already addressed.
Because they’re having difficulty with 0s now. Difficulty they didn’t have in keys prior to this season. I had them hit 485+ to go into 0s and they were still difficult for them, so we hit 490+ and it got easier, but still not what they were used to.
We’ll see how things go with the difficulties and if anything is evened out better. I think it would have been better to implement this in a new expansion rather than end of an old one.
But… no one in my guild is happy about losing those low keys. We liked timers and affixes. We didn’t ask to lose those. But now we’re screwed because others whined.
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Ah yes, “you dont like it because you cant handle it” deflection.
I could be wrong, but based entirely on statistics, im 99% sure ive beaten content you’ve never even tried.
Dinosaurguy - Zul’jin. Check the early SL stuff.
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brevity plox, amirite?
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I have declared hostility towards you. We are at war
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I haven’t deflected anything. Do you even know what that word means?
Lol your Nathria parses are pretty meh at best. Get carried by ilvl lol.
Nothing super impressive. Lower ilvl parses and you mostly did 15s key wise.
Definitely nothing you should be flexing.
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LOL you and needing to try and “brag” in every thread you visit. I can guarantee you that snozex is a better player than you.
This is someone who tried to flex on me saying I “peaked at KSM”.
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Guy played guardian in SL and his damage parses are carried by ilvl.
On top of that he didn’t kill SLG or Sire till the .5 patch which is fine but at the same time he killed each of them once and never went back. Then quit for the rest of SL.
You know what that means. Paid carry.
It was really a no win situation.
If we can blame anything as a root cause? Ultimately that would probably be the playerbase aging and developing less flexible schedules IRL as a result (many got a reprieve for a while due to Covid’s effects on jobs, but that seems to have been fading, and that’s assuming you weren’t an essential worker for whom it was business as usual, like myself).
The upshot is you had a lot of players for whom traditional untimered content was their jam, but once they stopped being able to raid (ever looked for a raid group when you aren’t available in specifically that critical after-dinner time slot most days? True night-owl, midnight oil burning guilds - 9pm isn’t late night, guys! - are rare and from what I’ve seen they are almost always going for CE at the least and usually explicitly for the Hall of Fame as well, ones that are less sweaty are true unicorns), they were left without a spot.
Old M0 was legit far too easy.
To go beyond that in 5’s meant accepting the switch from sedate dungeoneering to the race against time. That’s been another problem with the system, there’s no way to separate the difficulty level from “timered or not” - the timer was always going to have to be a feature that came in above a certain threshold and stay there. The Diablo 3 equivalent worked a lot better because you had choice of regular or Greater Rifts and you had the option to, but didn’t have to switch to Greaters till quite high up the ladder: IIRC Torment XVI is somewhere around the mid-upper 70s on the GR scale. I suppose Blizzard could have added another tier of untimered dungeon and left the original Mythic, but how would that have dovetailed with the system, especially with the weekly locks on the untimered versions?
And I can’t say we haven’t had a few stinkers (that miserable Crash Bandicoot outtake of a dungeon De Other Side from SL comes especially to mind) where even a +2 timer is a pain for those casual-mid groups.
Blizz probably did go a little too far. Perhaps +5 as a baseline rather than +10 would’ve been better, and perhaps even ideal (especially with the older affix thresholds, since that would’ve meant +2 and +3 would be +7/+8 which tended to be about where most casuals ceilinged, but without the more annoying affixes since those wouldn’t show up till +4 = +9).
But to dismiss people as “whining” and expecting them to just bore out of the game just because they don’t have enough after-dinner-slot play hours which was basically where we were headed is a bit much as well …
Because they were. If they have time to slog through current M0, they could run a few 2s— where the timers don’t even matter.
They had options.
Now those of us who ran that bracket have nothing.
So which is better? Losing a bunch of subs because a key bracket was deleted or hoping you retain some random casuals who won’t run those 0s anyway, because they’re now complaining the 0s are too hard?
Guess we’ll see how it goes in season 1.
A few issues with 2’s -
- 2’s were barely any better than 0’s in terms of loot, excepting the Great Vault piece on Tuesday.
- Not all quest items dropped in a key, forcing you to drop all the way back down to Heroic unless you still had the M0 lockout available for the week (and some quests have to be done on Mythic anyway).
- You had to have someone that actually had a key for that particular dungeon.
- RIO is a thing. If you end up with a bunch of untimed 2’s just out of wanting to play “laid back” you’re gonna have a lot to answer for if you do try and move up in the world because to all anyone can see you’re such a dogwater player that you can’t even time a 2 (AND unlike logs, there’s no way AFAIK to prevent RIO from indexing your runs … an insidious side effect of repairing the “big realm Tuesday rush” problem that was a thing in the early years of M+ scoring I guess).
Partly things also stem from the lockout on M0, I suspect: people got pushed up into running keys because hitherto, Heroic dropped loot that was worthless except to sell or DE (even solo overworld stuff usually outdid Heroic loot before long) and M0 has the nasty issue that most people don’t want to run it on characters that are loot locked. In particular that means tanks and healers get used up with the result that weekend warriors have a terribly frustrating time (they were almost forced into keys whether they wanted to do keys or not).
The fact that Tuesday is the traditional release day for video games (and thus informs the weekly reset date for Western online titles) has, I fear, caused no end of problems for MMOs; perhaps it would be best moved towards the weekend, perhaps Friday (allowing for maintenance to still be done on a traditional office morning, and patches starting on the weekend should even be a boon for streaming as well as more people would be home to watch content races as they begin).
These M0 issues are still the case now, but at least now Heroic actually drops useful loot for most people unless you specifically need Epics for a particular reason (i.e., Enchanting).
I do suppose we could have left M0 as it is and just bumped up loot like used to be the case in olden times, but that has its own problems (in particular, the easier it is to get great gear compared to the content, the harder it is to learn mechanics at a level where learning is still tolerated - BFA especially had this problem in spades since WQs dropped you off at an ilvl where you were already needing to run 7’s and up to get even the slightest improvement).
That’s definitely a problem. I checked out my old guild on RIO and I’ve noticed that while headcount still remains large, key participation is way down outside of the mostly insular group that always ran hardcore keys back in SL. Folks that used to do a few keys a week have barely touched them this season, although there’s still been a fair amount of M0 activity (which kinda validates the timer issue though otoh? since I remember they hadn’t been too enthusiastic about 10’s in the past).
Given the role delves apparently are supposed to have in progression, I wonder if there’s a specific move to isolate players around our skill level from the game (i.e., put us out to solo pasture) in order to help the community build a better moat, due to the stream of negative feedback when folks push a little too high and drag down the people just above their skill level as a result (i.e., due to smooth progression, you gradually slip over the line into your point of failure and thus are much more likely to join those groups and get in a little over your head, while a large difficulty jump signals the situation and means you have to be a lot surer of yourself)?
Compare the situation over in FF, where there’s virtually no intermediate content at all (you go from the equivalent of LFR to around AOTC level content with almost zero ramp up) and there’s much more ability of the community to build a moat (there’s an explicit server enforced option in their Party Finder to block people who haven’t cleared, and their high end raiding community seems to be much more distilled and prickly with a lot more fixation on demanding you “prove yourself elsewhere first” - notably, while we have resources here like WoW Made Easy, attempts to found similar discords in FF have not met with shining success, or really, any success tbh). It’s actually frustrating af (especially because it tends to engender extreme content rush mentality and eventually you can easily end up where you can get really good at the first two or three minutes of a fight but not be able to find groups to push further) but may have points.
It was definitely a tipping point to finally checking out the simple joys of Era, I’ll definitely say that (mind you, Dragonflight never really inspired enthusiasm for me; I actually liked Shadowlands, meanwhile, especially once the first season warts were past) …
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I disagree - its a single player mmo with optional group content. The game is designed to be able to be played and complete all relevent story and experience all dungeons/raids completely as a solo experience. You dont have to manually group with or speak to another player, ever.
The leveling content is completely doable as a solo play, offering only increased speed by playing in a group. Dungeons have a follower mode that allow you to complete all related story and quests within them. LFD for dungeons require zero knowledge about them and will give you a random buff for joining them solo (this buff doesnt happen if you qued with friends). LFR is a mode to complete story/quests without the requirement of finding a group or speaking to another player and a stacking buff system helps neegate failure.
This basic game foundation allows you to see their entire game and neveer leaves you with that feeling of “im not good enough to raid and im missing out on what happens inside them” while also comepletely negating the requirement of self improvement.
The optional group play is your choice. End game content designed around required group play has been a means of increasing the enjoyment of those who do choose to participate, offering higher level rewards. In a world where all ilvl rewards where exactly the same you would find a huge majority of the playerbase no longer willing to patricipate but there would still be players doing said content.
Delves are an amazing design because it caters for significantly higher rewards than current rewards, without having to feel forced into optional group content, but they will still prove a means for group play for those who enjoy that.
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You’re free too. But you’re wrong.
You mean the secondary part of the game that’s leveling? Endgame has always focused on group content.
Sure you have the option to only play solo but the games not designed around you playing solo.
You literally can’t finish major story quests without raiding.
Delves are going to cause so much crying in the solo player community because they won’t be super easy
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That’s possible. I didn’t care enough to deep dive the logs