I don’t know how much of a role, having a buffer plays into it.
I think people cluster at the same place regardless, driven by rewards.
(lack of above 10, so people don’t go there.)
The buffer plays a role in how fast it takes before the max rewards bracket gets over saturated with carried players. You’re right that it would happen regardless, but it would take longer for them to grind their way up. Right now it’s just +2 → +5 → +8 → +10. Before it was a lot more steps including any failed keys where they would have to go back a step.
Also having 1 set of scores compared to two.
Having two sets of scores encouraged people to run stuff twice sometimes.
That’s a benefit skill wise at least.
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I think this is the accurate take. Players are clustered in 10s for the myth track vault slot. The portals are secondary at best. It’s a nice little bonus, but loot is the priority.
Ironically I think the encounter design is making loot a trap. Gear used to have a much greater impact on progression. All the gear in the world won’t save you from today’s one-shot mechanics, so to making it less impactful and harder to acquire feels like a double-whammy.
Everybody is quitting, hopefully just for the season. The cost of failing is too high to warrant. It’s more time/sanity effective to just wait till next season and ride that initial catchup wave.
There are a lot of major headaches that need to be addressed to salvage season 2 (this season is already cooked).
- Key depletion
- Role responsibilities
- Rewards:Effort
- Alt catchup
- Tank/Healer QoL
I’ve been phoning this season in while I get through the newborn phase. Season 2 looks like another one where I’ll get the portals and just weekly vault-log. I need to know what they’re going to do about these problems. And for next season, specifically, I need to know what they’re going to do about the cleft. That mine cart mini-game cannot be the real thing.
DF S3 had 196,593 characters time all dungeons at +20 at 13.3%ile.
After 2.5 months in, we are sitting at 149,818 characters timing all dungeons at +10 sitting at 14.3%ile.
We have to ditch the notion that the current 10s are far and away in terms a difficulty in comparison to DF S3 which is what’s constantly being referenced.
If we drop to timing all +8s because that’s what you need for Gilded crests and access to 636 crafted then we jump up to 284,968 characters at 27.2%ile. More if we look at those timing or running +8s, but have not yet timed all of them
Key Depletion to some degree is warranted. Removing it completely will be a massive mistake. If anything give them 2 or 3 charges for finite attempts, but isn’t 1.
We already have roles? More than that is personal communication. If you don’t say anything then don’t expect anything.
I don’t see an issue with rewards in relation to effort right now. It seems relatively on par with raids far better than where it was headed. I’m okay with them making the access to gear easier as long as it’s congruent and they tune down raids the same.
Agreed.
This is largely blown out of proportion. The “tank nerf” isn’t noticeable. People complaining about it are experiencing a self fulfilling prophecy backed by confirmation bias. Yes, we lost some ability to self-sustain for long durations. This was required to limit how often we are soloing encounters after everyone else is down. Even though our self-sustain is lessened, our ability to mitigate through proper play and management of defensives is in a good place.
I won’t speak for healers since I don’t play one.
You know me, I play all the tanks usually. This season, I had to pick one. Partly the crest situation, partly the new baby. But I picked Bear cuz it’s always my favorite, after doing BDK for the raid.
I picked wrong. Prot pallies are living it up out there. They got fixed. Bears, blood DK, and monks are giga doo doo. Prot warrior also feels pretty good, but its lack of group utility kinda dooms them. I haven’t touched VDH, still in fatigue from season. 3/4 DF.
There are at least a half dozen places where if I don’t coordinate before hand for externals, I will run out of CDs and just literally get globaled. Coming out of a 2.5 season stretch where I was completely in control of my own survival makes it incredibly frustrating.
Tank busters and tank casts are too frequent. I tanked something close to 750 keys runs a season all through Dragonflight. I’m mostly a dps now. I like tanking, and I like tanking hard things. The way they’re doing it right now just feels egregious.
I think to an extent, this is how it should be. The top reward keys, in my opinion, should require high levels of play and CD management. Prot Pallies were right next to BM for the first two months of the season and even then, I was saying it was fine. Even post-patch, I get globaled sometimes due to my own error.
I agree though that they definitely should do a better job at balancing the tank specs.
It goes against their stated plans with the tank changes. It’s like the encounter design team didn’t do their side of it. Tanks were supposed to have less self sustain, but take damage smoother, less spikey, and have the tools they needed to deal with tank pressure moments.
Instead, 5/8 dungeons have several mobs that cast largely unmitigated tank busters every 12-18s. It just feels half implemented. But they definitely need to do something about the tank/healer situation they’ve created.
I can agree with this to a degree; however I only really see this in GB and SV. The other dungeons have some tank busters, but they are sporadic. The Flamerender in GB can be stunned at least for their tank buster. The Despoilers in SV is the biggest threat since they can’t be stopped.
Overall though, minus the tuning issues with the outlier dungeons I think tank mitigation is fine.
Fine as a prot paladin or fine as a blood dk? A brewmaster? A guardian Druid?
Fine for all except for BM. This is looking at it from the lens of Prot Paladin pre-patch when we were the second to least represented next BM.
Overall, mitigation through proper play is fine. I acknowledge that some dungeons, or specific mobs rather, could be better tuned to not have tank busters so often or not hit as hard.
We know that Blizzard doesn’t tune things from the extreme top end especially because it scales infinitely. What they tend to do is scale and balance for top rewards, which is currently +10.
| 12/11/24 | Warrior | Paladin | Death Knight | Monk | Druid | Demon Hunter | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| +4 | 22.5% | 23.7% | 17.6% | 6.7% | 14.9% | 14.6% | Runed Crests |
| +7 | 22.7% | 25.1% | 17.7% | 6.5% | 14.0% | 14.0% | |
| +8 | 21.9% | 29.6% | 16.5% | 6.3% | 12.7% | 13.1% | Gilded Crests |
| +9 | 23.6% | 24.0% | 18.4% | 6.7% | 13.8% | 13.5% | |
| +10 | 22.3% | 30.2% | 16.7% | 6.3% | 12.5% | 12.0% | Myth Vault + Portals |
| +11 | 23.5% | 33.1% | 14.6% | 5.6% | 12.0% | 11.3% | |
| +12 | 22.1% | 47.7% | 9.3% | 3.8% | 9.4% | 7.7% | ~1%ile |