Just quick bullet point feedback about why I do not do nor want to do m+ this expac anymore. Never pushed keys hard, primarily pugged, highest score I’ve gotten is 3.2k. All of this is just my opinion/experience, obviously not fact.
-M+ was much more of a fun, relaxed but still challenging experience when it was about pulling as much as possible as fast as possible without being inundated with mechanics like constant interrupts that threaten your group if not taken care of. Massive, fast and efficient pulls were the primary mechanic.
-Focus on how to “punish” players is driving m+ design into a frustrating spot for pugs. Increased death timer, aoe CC/stops not giving interrupts an internal CD so they just recast once the cc is over, non stop casts in dungeons, etc. This effected affix design over the years as well.
*Its also exacerbating the meta problem as keys being more punishing via deaths and mechanics leads to people having to try harder to not waste their time, leading to more selective picks.
-Current affix is a great kiss/curse affix, but personally I have not felt excited about it, mostly from healer pov. It doesn’t feel like it adds anything amazing to the dungeons themselves. I don’t mind the affix, but I would have loved to see some well received affixes come back permanently (no rotation).
*Examples would be Reaping and Awakened from BfA. Both were very well received. Awakened changed up dungeon pathing making it more interesting, and reaping was loved because it made certain pulls much bigger, which meant slamming more damage which was fun. The devs back then said they disliked reaping since it was too easy, but thats why it was so enjoyable. It wasn’t frustrating or purposefully trying to punish players, it was just fun.
I don’t really want to log into the game to do m+ and feel like I’m doing something frustrating. I do m+ because its the most repeatable end game piece of content to do where I can just play my spec, but it has increasingly become less fun and more punishing imo. If I could, I’d combine BfA M+ design with the current thought process of having a permanent affix or two like the ones I listed above.
Another good example of how fun vs frustation impacts m+ is how easy DF s3 was in comparison to other seasons, a ton of people were pushing keys that season and LFG was usually always filled. There have been far less keys in LFG this season in general so it seems people are generally not having fun with this mode right now. I want to do m+, just hate this current iteration of it.
the big problem is tunning and them not adjusting the scale of tuning Imo if 10s right now were as hard as the 8s people would be pumping and timing 10s all day long and no one would be complaining season 2-3 dragon flight was great most of shadowlands was great after season one and bfa wasnt to bad for tunning
I listed when that was. Bfa and legion was pretty relaxing, the one thing that really hurt those dungeons and mostly every season of m+ were affixes though. Like the point of what I was saying was I would love bfa mob design/dungeon design/etc instead of what we have now, combined with what we have now for our affix. I think dungeon design/mob design has gotten worse since then, but the affix problem is largely solved.
A good example is how fun/stress free DF s3 was for m+. It was by far my favorite season because I could just log in and chill even pushing higher keys. That was mostly the case because we had veng DH and to a lesser extent prot pally eliminating most of the mechanics that trash had ie interrupts, which made the dungeons far more enjoyable. Any time I pugged without a VDH it was a lot more stressful. Theres a reason for that.
All of the things that are implemented to combat the best players in the game have the affect of barely changing their play, or causing them to simply change their approach, but end up having a much bigger impact on the players who weren’t prompting the change in the first place.
For example, stuns locking out casts was giving too much leverage to the most organized teams so changes were made. But of course, those changes just inspire more creativity from the top players and left those who benefited from the DF style interaction -the ones who weren’t leveraging that power to trivialize anything- to actually pay the price for the change.
Too many changes like this have been implemented in the name of protecting the game from the best players, barely affecting them, but putting out thousands upon thousands of the lesser skilled players in the long run.
Just one of the many negative impacts of placing too much emphasis on difficulty instead of fun.
Exactly this, like that is the best way to put it. They are constantly trying to implement new ways to challenge high level players/top level players but by doing so they have slowly made pugging miserable to the point where lfg is almost dead, some days it is completely dead. I used to be able to queue for 25s/26s in DF with lfg, now there are almost no 13-15 keys in lfg at all even during prime time.
Adding interrupts to mobs like they did in DF to challenge coordinated high level groups just made m+ feel more like a chore to everyone else, and then as you said making it so aoe stops dont lock out casts made things even worse for the general playerbase.
Another one is the death penalty, making that worse in TWW was atrocious for pugs, was causing groups to fall apart much sooner than they would have previously. This was to punish high level players more/m+ers in general more and nobody likes it. It was awful, still is awful even after the change.
They are focusing too hard on punishing players, and soon enough the only people religiously doing m+ will be the mdi team players. The more stressful it becomes the less people will want to actually play. DF s3 is a great example of what happens when you dial back the mob mechanics in m+ (veng dh/prot pal eliminated a lot of them), people queue up.
Theres also other issues contributing of course like damage profiles are terrible because dps have too many defensives and passive defensiveness leading to damage intake being pretty horrid, and the tank changes this expansion gave us a nice tank shortage.
Yeah, if 10s were as hard as 8s, people would be getting a piece of Mythic tier loot every week for doing basically nothing. I don’t even understand why people think it’s fun to get unearned rewards.
This is a false argument that keeps being parroted. The Challenger’s affix essentially replaced affixes that also affected the timer.
Bolster: Added %HP to surrounding trash. Yes, you could try to prio high HP trash to AoE them down but this was rarely achieved in pugs. This added minutes to the run.
Sanguine: Healed trash standing in puddles. Yes, tanks can mitigate most of the healing, but since there was no delay between puddles dropping and healing it still added minutes to the timer. This was especially bad for certain pulls with Lieutenant mobs and casters who chain cast and can’t be interrupted. The high movement also impacts DPS because we had to move them out of AoE.
Explosive: Each global used to pop an explosive was a DPS loss. Limited pull sizes. Adds minutes to the run.
Necrotic and Bursting: Limits pull sizes effectively turning certain pulls into two which doubles the encounter time for the same pull than usual. Adds minutes to the run.
People are overly fixated on the 15 second loss per death when it’s mitigated by just doing the mechanics. You couldn’t avoid the other affixes like you can with this one.
The problem is most people aren’t comparing Challenger’s to any of the affixes it replaced. They’re comparing it to no affix, which is what they actually wanted.
Over and over again, people with various levels of transparency indicate they want massive pulls that aren’t threatening and no affixes, so they can run up big numbers and get free loot. They’ll tell you it’s not that at all, but that’s 100% what it is.
the community is full of people like you and i bet you get your ksh and never help people get there ksh so if you think your so good join mdi i think there are plenty of people who could join higher keys and such just the rewards are so offset from the difficulty imagine your the only one in the groups you join who use interupts or cc its immposible to time your keys going forward and your left behind so think your good all you want people are suffering mentally over this
So much to unpack here and all of it is based on one assumption after the next. Your entire argument is built upon circular reasoning.
Here’s another thing. No one is expected to “help people get their ksh”. We don’t know these strangers and we don’t owe them anything. Putting that aside, I have helped plenty of people get KSH simply from joining keys for my vault.
It’s clear that your issue is your sense of entitlement.
You are building a narrative using extreme examples. This is another sign that your argument is terrible. You basically said that plenty of people could do higher keys, but the rewards are offset from the difficulty. This means that you acknowledge that they are not skilled enough to do the content without overgearing it. This means that it isn’t the group that’s holding them back. It’s themselves. If groups are constantly failing then who is the common denominator?
KSH doesn’t belong to anyone until they earn it. And I primarily pug, so just by doing +10 vault keys every week I’m sure I help plenty of people. I still see the occasional feat of strength popping off.
Where did I say I was especially good? I’m good enough to hit my goals each season without paying for it or begging for carries, and that’s good enough for me.
In good groups I do about 50% of the interrupts. In bad groups that can get as high as 90%. The bad groups are more numerous than the good groups, so this scenario you’re asking me to imagine really isn’t that difficult.
It’s a game. If the challenge gets to the point where someone is literally suffering, they should reevaluate why they play and what they’re trying to accomplish. If 10s are too hard, fill the vault with 8s. Or 6s. Or don’t do M+. There’s no reason why we should expect every player in the game to hit the highest level of rewards.
If having gear that says “Mythic” is more important to you than anything else, then you just have to keep practicing until you’re comfortable with the difficulty of the content.
Yeah I didnt hide that fact at all, thats quite literally what I said. I’m not usually someone that pushes for that kind of thing either, I mean I’ve raided at a high level in this game for most of the time I’ve mythic raided, but I do think there is a point where M+ becomes more frustrating than it should due to changes made over time.
At the very least, what I’m saying is maybe there were other ways to make it more challenging that don’t result in the pug scene dying off? Because what we have now is not great.
I’m not even sure why we have health bars on 10+ keys. Miss an interrupt, you’re dead. Clip the edge of a mechanic, dead. Miss a defensive as the tank, instant death. Just revert the interrupt change and remove fort/tyrannical from the game. It really is just that simple. Scaling goes back to being linear instead of random jumps in difficulty.
On a +10 you should die if you can’t figure out the borders of a mechanic.
In a +10 you should die if you miss a defensive on a tank buster.
Fort/Tyrannical doesn’t mean anything on it’s own. It all depends on base scaling and to that point, the base scaling is significantly easier than it was in DF S1 or SL S1. They nerfed Tyrannical for this season.