M+ S2 feedback

Community General Discussion
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Hello! I am Angrystare.

Who am I to be giving feedback? I am purely an M+ Player. Currently a 3300+ DH tank with resil 15s. I have a 3k+ Rsham, and my 2 DPS are working on their resil 12s when I’m bored. I do not raid, collect pets, collect mounts or mog farm (very much). I didn’t even bother finishing the opening quest to undermine. The grand majority of my keys are found by opening the group finder and signing up. Sometimes I run with my guild. I sometimes list my key if it’ll bump my IO.
Here is some feedback in no particular order.

The good:
Compared to last season, keys are much more manageable. Likely due to the fact that Aug isn’t mandatory, tanks aren’t dying to white hits anymore or getting combo’d by literally every trash mob. A tank death is the tank’s fault, as it should be.
Gearing alts is INCREDIBLY easy through hero track. My mage went from level 79 to doing significant damage in 10s in a weekend. More on this in the ‘bad’ section though.
The visual clarity improvements to dangerous abilities are wonderful. No more blue circles on blue floors or brown frontals with no defined edges on wood textures.
The Resil feature is flawed but a great starting point. It should be warbound and apply all the way down. Bricking a 10 on a dps alt is catastrophically bad. Trying to find people for a 9 is an all day adventure, more on that later. Also if i have all 13s, and 2 missing 14s, im not going to que my resil 13 and hope on the 1 in 4 chance it rolls into a useful key I only have a single attempt at. I’m going to queue up for a 14 that I need. All that aside, still better than before.
The dungeons are just more fun this season. I don’t have a burning hatred for something like COT.

The bad:
Threat. -Why is this even remotely an issue still? If I don’t single target the Arcane mage’s target I get ripped off every time. On my arcane mage i rip off every time. Pally divine storms too early? Dead. Tempest proc going away? Dead. Juicy blood beast explodes? Gigadead.
Healers have very little agency in keys. Tanks have too much agency in keys. in my experience most of the time a key is bricked because the tank pulls a mega-dangerous pack that combos the DPS to death. The healer can do nothing for them because they die in sub 2 seconds.
The vault is terrible. There needs to be a targeted way to try to get myth track gear outside of raiding. 3 pieces as the season is ending from the cartel chips is not it. Gear is a means to a higher IO score. Getting a dud vault is a PERMANENT nerf because there is no catch up mechanic for myth gear. Starting an alt in the middle of the season suffers from this as well. Every missed myth track vault lowers that alt’s effective rating ceiling. A person that ONLY does M+ cannot compete with people that raid….at M+. This isn’t even acknowledging the OP cantrip weapons rings and cloaks.
Crest shortages. For most of the season you were short crests. I got runed of the undermine week 3(ish). I got gilded of the undermine when turbo boost came out. 1 ilevel a week is a slog(assuming you even get the right gear TO upgrade.)
Queuing low level keys(<12) as a DPS is ROUGH. There is no punishment for someone that bricks another person’s key. Playing poorly only affects the keyholder THEREFORE the keyholder is going to get the most overqualified people imaginable. I don’t have a solution for this other than making resil warbound. I’m much more willing to help someone learn in a 10 if I know I don’t have to spend the next hour queuing a 9 I don’t need.

Feedback by dungeon:
DFC - Pretty mid dungeon with a pretty lenient timer. Cart section would be infuriatingly terrible if the timer was tighter so that’s a great call. I like the last room as a tank because I can pull everything into the boss assuming I can survive without horribly testing the dps or healer. Feels like a DK is required because of mobs that throw uninterrupable rocks.

ML- Great route variation and skip potential. Feels good to get the meld skips before the last boss down, that pack is terrible to heal. First boss is a gimmie with min-max potential depending on how you kick the bombs. Good play is rewarded with a faster kill. Most keys are bricked on the last boss because people don’t understand how the safespot works. That boss REFUSES to move though so dragging it around the arena is not an option.

Priory-One of my favorite dungeons. I love the route variety even though I don’t think I’ve EVER gone right. The paladins could stand to lose some DPS on the sacred toll, it does too much damage too often. The templar are incredibly dangerous but I like the fact that they can be purged to make them less so. Foresight to bring a purge is rewarded. Second boss is scripted but people still somehow mess it up. The mechanic is trivialized by having a DK which I’m not a fan of. Mandatory classes in certain dungeons feels bad.

TOP- Straight line single target zug fest. One of the lowest target dungeons in the game. No strong opinions either way. Shouldn’t have 4 ring options, farming a specific one and getting one of the other 3 is terrible. Gorchop tankbusters too often. Tanks don’t have any defensives left halfway through the fight and have to eat one or two raw.

Rookery-Nerf to the timer and buff to the bosses was too much. Tightest key by far. The last boss takes 5 minutes to kill and can’t be pulled with any other mobs for efficiency. At the start of the season it was free and needed a nerf, but BOTH was overkill, either would have sufficed. Good call on making the debuff from the second boss leave a visual effect on the player. Can easily see who can and can’t take a new one, without this it’d be a weakaura fight.

Workshop -Straight line pretty boring. Peak “we made the dungeon too short now we need to waste as much time as possible with a conveyor belt and robots that send you to the start”.
The last boss first phase is incredibly boring with too much hp. The second phase is fine. Second boss is boring because you wait behind a box for half of it.

Floodgate - Best dungeon(maybe except priory, hard to say) released this xpac. Excellent route variation, every pull is like 15 mobs. Interrupts are required on specific targets but not every mob casts annoying spells. More of this. Every boss has a giga tank buster that’s manageable but punishing if messed up. Only note is Bubbles is terrible. Putting a heal check mini-boss after a heal-check boss sucks. Putting bubbles after the duo boss would have been fine, but after swampface healers are completely out of CDs expected to do infinite healing.

Brewery- Having 2 intermission phases on the first boss makes it my least favorite. Remind me of every WOTLK dungeon. IPA feels excellent to move around the room. Goes where you position it unlike last boss in ML. Hopgoblins are terrible, less so after the nerf but still annoying. Spawning adds with a new threat bar mid while people are sending AOEs means tanks have to run around like headless chickens. Less so on the high end, but every 10 i’ve ever DPS’d i have aggro on those things. The 4 pack before the last boss feels like a colossal waste of time. It’s not even hard, just time consuming.

Thanks for reading my thesis.

23 Likes
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Agree with a lot of this as a less progressed player. I do think this is one of the best seasons World of Warcraft has ever had; the raid is good, M+ rotation is mostly good, gearing is accessible and mostly convenient. If Blizzard keeps on progressing, I think they can really nail it for S3 where most players are going to be happy.

Here’s my list of complaints:

  1. Catchup Sparks just need to be a 100% drop rate for any mode of content you’re doing. Fenagling around with Pinnacle Cache/Renown Caches is annoying, inconvenient and having 100000000 quests when you hit level 80 or pick up weeklies is mentally draining. It’s annoying to do raid and see sparks not drop. It’s annoying to do M+ and see sparks not drop. So on and so forth. Don’t make us game the system please.

  2. Cinderbrew Meadery is an annoying dungeon. The entire run you are just dealing with annoying mechanics and the Ogres + Kobolds have way too much HP. You just sit there, wailing and wailing on them and the HP doesn’t move. Then they cast their annoying mechanic. Rinse and repeat until done. The first boss is also awful. How does baiting the Clouds of Annoyance even work? I don’t think anyone understands it. Even if you stack and drop puddles in one place they somehow find a way to spawn in a different spot. Whatever. Benk also has way too much HP it feels like or the Bees have way too much HP. I loved the fight in lower difficulties where he dies faster, but in higher M+ levels he lives for like 4 minutes. The exploding kegs are also pretty much impossible to target.

  3. Darkflame Cleft is a dungeon that would be completely fine if Annoying Immovable Rock Throwers did not exist. The Knockback from the big Kobolds is also really, really bad not because it makes the dungeon more difficult, but because it is annoying. There’s nothing quite like gathering up these annoying mobs in pull 1 - 4 and then losing it because of the stupid, annoying knockback. The mini bosses between boss 2 and boss 3 are also way too much HP; thank goodness they can be skipped. Boring AND annoying. I really, really enjoy the rest of this dungeon. It is fun.

  4. Just buff Tank threat again to where it was before. S1 TWW was a nice experiment to try and make tanking “fun” but clearly no one has enjoyed tanking with threat nerfs and survivability nerfs. You have most undone the survivability nerfs, now it’s time to undo the threat nerfs. If you want tanking to be fun and engaging, you need to work on the specs themselves. There is nothing fun about lazily pressing 4-6 buttons for EVERY tank class that barely do anything. DPS specs are fun because there’s rotational complexity that keep you on your feet, Tanks…not really. I know some coping tank is gonna come in here and talk about Shield of the Righteous, Shield Wall, Shuffle etc but the reality of these ‘complexities’ is that you gain your basic defensive buffs by just pressing the basic buttons. Tanking isn’t complicated and so, its not fun.

  5. Motherlode is just a boring dungeon and I’ve never liked it, and I think this is mostly because of the last area with the walking mines. They’re not fun to deal with, they’re annoying. Safe spot(s) on last boss are also annoying to check for. Just add a line affect to the flying coptors.

  6. Workshop is a dungeon that is okay. It would be 10x more fun if Bomb tonks didn’t exist. Running Workshop be like: “Oh, we don’t have a Prot Paladin, Balance Druid, or Death Knight…so I guess we’ll have to pull 2x packs at a time instead of the whole room. Yay.” Conveyor Belt – just get rid of it. It’s annoying. Bot section – same story. It’s annoying. Especially when you have finished it, but the healer or tank are uniquely getting tied up because they don’t have movement speed buffs available or they become impatient when the last 2 bots take 15 seconds to create an opening. Good Lord. It’s just annoying. Stop doing these things.

Overall this is one of the best seasons, IMO, but some of the dungeons are extremely annoying. I am never thrilled to do Motherlode, Cinderbrew or Workshop.

Can we get some real man dungeons like Shrine of Storms, Seat of the Triumvirate, Cathedral of Eternal Night, The Arcway, King’s Rest, any of the Cataclysm Dungeons, etc? I think they’re missing a huge opportunity by not remaking any dungeons from Vanilla - WotLK as well.

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Yeah it’s time for the next iteration here.

Allow people to sacrifice all 3 columns for a single targeted slot, or something. I know Blizzard is not a fan of deterministic loot in their seasonal model game, but games like FFXIV have shown it works, and it works well.

There is no worse feeling in the game right now than spending a ton of time filling that vault up with Raid/M+ slots just to get junk. I have alts that haven’t seen a Mythic tier piece (or a catalyst-usable item) in 4 weeks of vaults. That’s absurd.

I promise, Blizzard - allowing people to choose a slot once a week isn’t going to kill the videogame.

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Missing vaults has always been my issue with the design. I really wish there were a way to simply complete more dungeons to catch up. Yeah it’d be a lot to grind through, but I’m honestly okay with that. I run a lot of dungeons between a couple healers usually, and sometimes a tank too. I just hate the fomo design going on currently because I’d like to rotate through them rather than do 12-24 dungeons a week.

But getting dud vaults is worse currently because there’s just nothing you can do. My priest has gotten several dud vaults now despite still needing at minimum 3 myth track items to replace hero track stuff (ideally more, but crafting is carrying me there). I’ll probably push up farther in io this season than I typically do out of boredom, but pugging it is pretty rough.

ps: the comment about purges in priory was gold. There are so few people that actually purge/spellsteal it’s wild. Rookery is another example – those caster packs have a 25% cast/attack speed buff on them just waiting for someone to spellsteal or purge. Floodgate has the spin move guys right before swampface who can be purged if a cast goes off. the list goes on. Purge/spellsteal value went way up this season I feel like.

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I agree on a lot of things, but I have some comments.

It really isn’t that much of an issue for most classes, but DPS definitely has to understand that tank needs a few seconds to establish threat and gather the pull before they go crazy. It’s reasonable and makes the fight a little bit more than just blasting target dummies I’d say.

Those mobs can be played to not throw a single rock during the fight, and everyone who’s pushing keys should know how to do that (stand in melee). Blizzard should absolutely provide information about m+ mobs in the dungeon journal, but if you’re pushing keys you’re already likely to look up information on your own. If you’re not pushing keys, mechanics doesn’t matter because nothing really hurts below a +12.

I wish shadowmeld was simply removed, or dungeons reworked so that you can’t skip certain things with meld or that you can skip it all even without meld. I can accept being forced to play meta specs at world first key, but being forced to eventually play meta races is ridiculous. Would also be great if they just fixed things like the safe-spot so boss can be played the way it’s intended.

100% agree. I don’t mind certain abilities being able to counter things to some extent, but being able to fully cheese the most dangerous mechanic about the boss is ridiculous.

Can’t say I see a problem here. His tankbusters are purely physical so you can cover it more than fine through just active mitigation even in high keys.

Once again, I just wish Bubbles was either impossible to skip, or equally trivial to skip regardless if you’ve got a night elf tank or not. Remove meld.

Agreed, rather add some mechanics to it that makes it an actual encounter instead of hp sponges. Preferably with a way to avoid the heals without wonky cheeses.

I believe this is more of a problem with tank differences. With a warrior or vdh they’ll solo the interrupt through their aoe interrupt, would be great if other tanks had an aoe interrupt too. Pala got their own version with avenger shield so I can’t say I think they need one though, but DK’s for example would be as simple as making Gorefiend’s Grasp silence (talented) before it grips mobs, rather than after. As it stands now, that silence talent is rather useless since it doesn’t function to interrupt a cast.

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only one class really stuggles with this as far as i know and that is vdh but their threat is bugged and blizz wont fix it for some reason. alot of it though is on the dps not to be dumb and hit the prio target as well as not to unload to early.

its a hard to balance this problem but leaning towards tanks is always safer than not considering if they die the group generally dies.

this is plain and simple a planning issue. if i pull in pug the same way i do for my push keys we would wipe as well because there is alot less coordination and teamwork.

now there is dinars for bad luck protection but the vault is literally just free gear. blizzards thinking ok this though is that they want to keep mythic gear drops in mythic raid. personally i would be cool if like 15 or 16 keys dropped mythic gear.

this is fair and its annoying that the cap lasts for so long they need to get rid of it after the first few weeks not months.

all your dungeon takes are pretty spot on though, i will say for brewery as a prot warrior the amount of dot damage in there is annoying.

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Buff threat. I’m tired of dying for using primordial storm.

2 Likes
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This was a fun post, thanks op. :slight_smile:

I want to add to your motherload assessment:
The “safe spot” is bad game design, and I treat it like an exploit when I tank. The fact it exists means every pug I pull actually doesn’t do the mechanic and then blames me for them not knowing how to do the mechanic.

The circles on the floor should be large, red squares for the visual, and there should be 6 of them, because the room is split into 6 hextants. There should be a small red laser beam as a visual up on the Z-axis - I like the mechanic that you have to move the camera to look up, but the boombas look a direction and flash a dull orange. The players should be able to look up and see some kind of “L” made from two beams or something more visually stimulating before the bombs drop right below.

And just because: the best non-cheese strat I’ve found is to take 4 quadrants of the 6 hextants, tank him in the middle of them, and quickly pull to the safe one when the boombas move. On phase 2, this is challenging because you have to predict the boombas location before they get there because the tempo speeds up.

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I felt like candle king was a bit to demanding for pugs. Over pretty decent tier but that one was a pain point.

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I agree with most of OP’s feedback except resil being applied to below +12.

Other than trying to make all dungeons more fun and similar in difficulty, I just wish for two things.

  1. Resil should be +1 of the player’s resil level (ex. if you time all +12s then your key becomes +13 resil).
  2. Players should be able to earn at least 1 reroll token per week for vault.
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Agree with some sort of vault protection. A week of a really terrible vault is such a downer and there is no way to catch up without mythic raiding. This week my main had 2 C tier trinkets and a ring with the worst stats for my class.

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Delete vault.

Downscale mythic gear in m+ to heroic.

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it is brutal though. as a devoker i gotta wait a minimum of 5 sec before targeting anything then wait a sec and then dps or i will 100% die within my first engulf when i rip aggro. if the tank isnt normally a tank or to good at keeping threat i cant dragonrage on trash or i will rip aggro and die.

there not blp though. thats just the buzz word there using.

resil should be on 10s since thats what everything is tuned to. though i gotta say 12 and up are so much better and more fun than below 12s. not having to deal with the garbage affix and being able to just play the dungeon that gets harder each level is how m+ should be but sadly it isnt and we have to deal with the extra crap because blizzard is so out of touch with the game and playerbase.

i ran out of sockets to buy early on so when i get another bad vault im taking it either just for ilvl or i take the gold since its worth more than the item vendored. either way it feels awful. ide rather trade all 3 slots for being able to pick 1 armor slot and having the vault be that. even if i have to say spend all of this weeks vault slots so next week there the same. like say i pick gloves now next week my m+ vault will be 3 slots of gloves. might not be the ones i need or want but at least im able to target slots.

delete mythic raid and upscale drops from 12+ into myth track. i can say dumb things to.

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Unlike you, I want content to be better than how it currently is. Your post is just spiteful.

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no. no it isnt. my post is just as dumb as yours is. there is no difference

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There’s a world of difference.

Capping ilvl at heroic allows for greater competitive equality. Gets rid of people cursing about bad vaults, and it allows for better raid progression.

Farming gear in m+ ceases to be the high point rather quick.

Edit:

Oh, you don’t do content, and just farm forums, Carry on.

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its literally what they are though. people want them to be like the dragonflight ones(me included) but by every definition they are a bad luck protection.

this isnt that crazy to allow a tank 10-15 secs to gather and establish threat. people just want to blow there load immediately.

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I’ve had a ton of fun with m+ this season. This is the best overall group of dungeons in a season yet.

Floodgate and priory are my two favorites.

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The intention of resil keys is not to facilitate endless farming of 10s for people who are not capable of timing 10s. It is to help with key pushing. Also, resil +10s would mainly help key sellers.

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Preach!!! The best available gear shouldn’t be locked behind a weekly gacha freemium login bonus. It feels so, so cheap for a title like WOW to have this gross mobile game feature.