Unavoidable AoE can be mitigated to an extent by people popping personal/party-wide defensive CDs and drinking health potions/consuming health stones. Keys die because of the following factors:
Boss/trash mobs do a lot of unavoidable AoE.
People don’t use defensives.
People don’t do enough DPS.
People don’t do mechanics properly/interrupt kill casts.
Healer can’t keep up because the damage going out requires personal defensives, interrupts, AND high enough DPS to kill the offending boss/mob before it kills everyone.
Punishing mechanics is a problem, yeah. But the biggest offender is people not countering them in the first place.
I also think one of the biggest issues, and maybe it’s not possible to solve for those that don’t want to try, is many players really don’t developed a detailed understanding of every boss and trash mechanic for every dungeon, and then how best to use their class tools to counter it.
Now, this is a tall ask, there are ALOT of abilities. But this isn’t something expected to be done in a day, or watching 1 video, it’s conscious paying attention and deliberately learning them all over weeks with both practice and then re-reading guides or the dungeon journal. By the time players are doing max level keys they absolutely should know them all, the same way anyone raiding mythic knows the mechanics of every boss.
Now, you can easily group some into “don’t stand in bad, dodge frontal, etc.” which helps simplify things, but really understanding the damage patterns, priority interrupts, when burst is needed, when your defensive is needed, etc. all go a LONG way to being able to complete content.
Preemptive defensive use is one of the most helpful skills to learn, but you need to intimately know the fights as well.
Agreed. The point I was trying to make is that people are doing mechanics but that isn’t whats holding people back. Using all the tools of your class is something that appears foreign in WoW and is a much bigger problem. The margin for error on higher keys is very tight right now and getting everyone in a pug in sync with defensive and such can be quite challenging. Gear is the crutch to alleviate this but with that removed I wonder if players will step up or get discouraged and quit.
I don’t think it’s a far-fetched to assume Blizzard’s intention is for people to learn how to use their utility/defensive skills in lower keys before moving on to higher ones. Unfortunately, that’s never going to be the case and you’d think their designers would know better by now.
Players won’t step up. Not enough of them will anyway and those who do will stop vocalizing their frustrations because they’ll be chasing ilvl, rating, or whatever.
I am fairly certain that is wrong strictly speaking im pretty sure I got ksh before df. That said I don’t learn details about myself I let other people correct me. ;p
Agree with OP on this. I think the big issue for me is the lack of progression.
Currently I’m a little over 1500, focusing on 4s and 5s. I’m only ilvl 608 now, which unfortunately means that I have about 10 ilvls of improvement before I hit the heroic wall.
In previous seasons I would have slowly worked my way up. Solidly get heroic level gear clearing +13-+15. Then start farming mythic crests at +16 to boost ilvl a bit, then start targeting +18 to get mythic track gear that can further boost ilvls a bit. Toward the end of the season, I can then go for portals.
That was a really engaging progression that kept me playing for most of the season. I understand other more talented players could accomplish this in a few weeks, but I enjoyed the challenge and felt like I was constantly progressing in one way or another.
This season, however, I’m currently able to farm T8 delves to get 616 gear in the vault. This leaves practically zero progression on the M+ side. The only thing I’m able to do is run +4s to get crests to go from 616 to 619. That is … not a long term form of progression.
I’ve already cancelled my sub. Will try to get KSM before it runs out, but otherwise planning on checking back in S2 to see if it’s any better. If not, then I’ll likely take the rest of TWW off. M+ is what kept me subbed for almost all of dragonflight, and without that there’s not really a big draw for this game.
You act like you can farm Vault loot daily. Yes you can get 616 gear from the vault, but that’s one per week. Otherwise you are getting 603 and having to spend a ton of crests and valor to upgrade. You still have a progression path and able to work your way 1 key level at a time as before. You can farm 4-5s like you said, do world tours for 6, 7, 8, and grind 9s for crests.
