Hello everyone, my name is Jason. I’m currently a 2400 (well, 2398, forgive the stretch) Brewmaster with experience in both MDIs, coming 4th in Americas in the last tournament and top 8 world in the first. I have quite a few world 1st keys to my name and have been heavily involved in the community since the 7.2.5 season. All this is to say I am very passionate about M+ and have a great love for what the system is at its core: a scaling challenge where I can compete with the best in the world for the highest levels and fastest times. A dungeon, unlike a raid boss, is so long and has so many parts to it that there is almost never going to be a perfect solution found for any dungeon. New and emerging strategies are always coming forward and pushing the boundaries of what was previously thought possible which is always a fun challenge. With that said, my desire for M+ to be all it could be is what brings me to write this post. I believe there is a lot that can be done to improve not just the rest of BFA, but the future of M+.
I’ll start off by saying I’m going to do my best not to make suggestions where possible. Historically speaking, suggestions don’t usually get taken at face value and are usually taken as something to read through and see what the reason someone might be making a suggestion is. The best way to get our thoughts and feelings through to Blizzard is to get to the heart of a problem and explain it rather than have them try to infer what a problem is from a suggestion as they might not come to the same conclusion as you. I’ll break this post into several categories to keep my criticisms organized and easy to refer to.
Changes from Legion
What better place to begin than the beginning. Several things were changed from Legion with few being as impactful as the loss of gear swapping. I have mixed feelings about this change. I felt like it was definitely degenerate gameplay to have so many gear swaps in dungeons that you actually had to get another 10 from a Weakaura. Personally as a Brewmaster towards the end of Legion I had 16 gearsets that actually saw use in M+ which is definitely ridiculous and I don’t miss that part of it at all. However as we get to higher and higher keys we begin to run into the same wall we had reached in Legion where if you can’t run tank trinkets, you have to bring classes with enough defensives to survive the 1 shot boss abilities. Similarly, if everyone without defensives is running tank trinkets to survive boss encounters, they’re not going to be doing enough damage to beat cutting edge keys. I think a lot of this comes down to boss design, so I won’t go much further on that here other than to say if we weren’t presented with this problem, I would not have any doubt that no gear swaps is a good change.
Another pretty significant change for more casual players is the move to having Fortified and Tyrannical at every level of M+ instead of at +10. I don’t really have an opinion on the matter as I don’t typically run keys at levels where this would come into play. I’d be curious to hear what people who are running those keys feel about it. Along with this change came a new affix at levels 10+, Infested. I have feelings on this that I’ll get to in the Affix Design section.
The last thing to talk about here is mostly regarding class design and general CC/utility. While I have some more thoughts on this later, generally speaking there has been a large loss of CC throughout the game. I agree that the emergent gameplay of pulling large, chain CCing and destroying massive packs was not particularly challenging or engaging when running with a fotm Blood DK since it basically removed all the difficulty of those otherwise very scary packs. I also know that the kind of gameplay we saw in the MDI in Nelth’s Lair where the tank would pull absolutely massive packs together, put out some threat, and then kite until they die was particularly stupid. It wasn’t fun to do as a tank as there was a lot of pressure on getting everything grouped up and enough threat put out in the duration of a couple stuns to hold the pack for the rest of the pull and then nothing else to do the rest of the fight except run away. I do think this problem was solved twice however with the changes to Tank Threat and having enemies cast on the closest target many of their abilities. It’s kind of unfortunate a lot of the time being forced to stay in melee as a tank when I want to kite as part of my kit since it means melee will die if they stay in themselves. It’s the kind of choice that isn’t fun for me, especially when combined with affixes like Sanguine or Necrotic (or both, yikes) since it either seriously limits pull size in a way that doesn’t feel good when I could do a pull when combined with some kiting which should be a part of my toolkit. The threat change is already punishment enough for trying to kite extensively in a lot of cases, I feel like we’re not far from going back to a triple range comp to get around the issue for some dungeons.
The removal of Pylons is also some important utility in Legion that allowed for death skips by non stealth classes that has led in part to the rogue meta of this first season. I have more to talk about with regards to class balance, but I can’t talk about Pylons without talking about what the result has been. Shroud was in the game for a long time and was absolutely utilized in Legion M+ but it didn’t feel as required as it does now. There is a lot of very punishing trash where the reward doesn’t match the difficulty/time it takes and shroud solves that problem like Pylon did in Legion. I don’t want to say we need Pylons back but something that gives us the ability to dodge trash that we don’t want to do since a big part of the fun of M+ is coming up with new routes and strategies which includes skipping trash.
Boss Design
A common complaint in Legion was the prevalence of bosses that could combo people down in an extremely short span with very little counterplay except to run tank trinkets and get lucky. Bosses like Hyrja, Xavius, and Viceroy Nezhar were brutal at the highest levels of play because of their rapid-fire abilities that could target the same person in quick succession and kill them at even moderate key levels. It led to people running immunity classes, tank trinkets, and praying to get through the bosses at the highest levels. I’m happy to say these types of combos are much more rare in this expansion. Very rarely are there bosses with unavoidable damage that can combo up in a way that kills people without counterplay. One of the instances where this was the case, Overseer Korgus, who could stack 2 or even 3 stacks of his dot on people which would almost definitely result in deaths was changed this week to not be able to do that. This is absolutely positive. As a result of this week’s changes however, Lord Stormsong has the possibility of Mind Controlling someone and then when they break the MC they can get combo’d down with Mind Rend without much of a counterplay. The timing on breaking that MC is already really tight and it’s not usually viable to wait for the boss to cast Mind Rend to break it. This kind of change felt regressive to me since I feel like it adds unavoidable deaths that are totally down to RNG.
I talked about not being able to change to tank gear being a major limiter to the key levels we’ll eventually be able to do. Even then of course there will still be an upper limit based on unavoidable damage we can take but I personally don’t enjoy this kind of limiter. The counterplay to these situations is to bring default tankier classes and gear more defensively which is not going to play well with the time limits in dungeons and will still have an artificial limit. As much as I understand why scaling is what it is and no matter what you will always have some sort of upper limit, I feel like the timer is already such a strong limiter that there doesn’t need to be what is in my eyes an artificial cap on what you can do from unavoidable one shots by bosses.
A couple quick examples of problem bosses that don’t really fit the previous 2 categories before I move on. The Captains boss when Eudora and Raoul are together is vastly more punishing that other combinations. The Blackout Barrel has to be cheesed with a rogue and other immunities to have much of a chance at surviving it if Eudora does her Grape Shot at the same time. The trio boss in King’s Rest has its moments of being pretty hard without ability overlaps from the other bosses you already killed, but getting Zanazal’s Call of the Elements cast while fighting another boss is an almost impossible task. Between the boss getting shielded and having to kill 4 totem’s worth of health, it extends fights that don’t feel balanced around having that mechanic to the point of obsurdity. Beyond that, it is totally random if you get it or don’t. And with the time it takes to deal with the 1st totems, you can pretty easily get a 2nd set as well. Aka’ali’s Barrel Through in other phases as well can be pretty rough since it’s not always clear where she is until she is about to charge. This is where I would have mention Elder Leaxa being completely unfair and unfun as at high enough keys you were forced into a 4 DPS strategy to beat getting 2 or 3 adds but thankfully you had mercy and made that boss totally manageable while still being extremely punishing if you don’t bring at least 3 melee kicks including the tank.
Trash Design
I mentioned earlier that a lot of CC was stripped away from classes (and blood elves) which crushed the usual strategy of pull big, chain CC, blow all CDs, pull small until next time that’s possible. That was paired with trash in every dungeon becoming much more complex than it was in Legion to the point where that strategy wouldn’t even be doable at the same level it was without losing all the CC. That said, I think in general it is a healthy change to put more emphasis on trash being the pressure points of dungeons and where the most challenge is. This is simply because this is where the most counterplay can take place and where strategies have the most room to grow and evolve. Having dangerous trash doesn’t completely limit your strategies to pull 1 thing at a time, instead it makes you consider a more staggered CC order to interrupt important abilities as well as makes interrupting much more important than in Legion (though this is also majorly due to Arcane Torrent’s removal). It also makes you consider what you’re pulling together. Instead of “our cooldowns are up, let’s pull the 2-3+ closest packs together and blow them up” it often becomes “our cooldowns are up, this very hard pack is in the way of a large pull we could do so we can do it now and save CDs” or “we can try to combine this with very low danger trash” or “we could skip it with shroud and do the big pull right away”, etc. Not to say this didn’t happen in Legion, but it is much more common now. I like this kind of challenge and the strategies it helps to create.
That said, I do feel like I’m unable to make these kinds of decisions at all with some infested patterns, but that is for another section. I’ll also say there is some trash that feels really unfair and unfun. The recent hotfixes have addressed a lot of my issues and I don’t want to spend too much time detailing every single enemy I have issues with so I’ll just go over some highlights.
Spectral Berserkers in King’s Rest are insanely punishing. The change to make them CCable again didn’t do anything because, before the 8.1 patch, they were already CCable. Their bleed effect hits very hard baseline, let alone when you pull 2 of them, it is an extremely punishing dot. If they are able to stack another on you, it’s a really low survival rate. This is another mob that you can’t kite effectively either since it will target someone else if you aren’t in range, often sacrificing that person in the process. If you have a pet class in the group, you can bait the bleeds onto that but it feels in general too punishing.
Staying with King’s Rest for a second, Shadow of Zul is not a fun encounter. He does incessant and extreme damage for a prolonged amount of time where, funny enough, the counterplay IS to run as far away as possible after your CDs are over. I don’t have the tools to deal with that enemy after I blow through my CDs and he comes right before a very hard hitting boss. It’s a frustrating rock and a hard place situation. There are some other trash monsters that I have issues with, but generally speaking it’s safe to say my problems come from enemies that have no-win situations like the ones listed here.
Dungeon Design
I want to talk about dungeons in the context of being vehicles for an interesting M+ challenge rather than for storytelling as that is not something I can comment on since I don’t play the game for the story. On the whole, I feel like dungeon design has not evolved from Legion in a lot of areas. I don’t have a problem with dungeons being or feeling linear at its root. Several dungeons are very linear that I feel are very well designed like Shrine of the Storm or The MOTHERLODE!! What those dungeons do very well is they give you a lot of choice in what you pull and when. MOTHERLODE!! in particular along with Freehold have excessive amounts of trash that really makes it feel like you can do anything you can imagine in those places and it’s not wrong. It gives a lot of creative freedom when we’re developing strategies and makes for a dynamic and interesting experience. As I have said before and will always say, the trash for me is where the focus of M+ should be as it allows for you to play around it and make strategic decisions more than just the execution part.
Where I think the mark was missed is in Temple of Sethralis but especially in King’s Rest. Temple still has some choices you can make early on but exactly 52.73% of the trash is required to spawn the last 3 bosses. This along with some trash you can’t reasonable skip and most of the decisions are made for you. However the by far biggest offender is King’s Rest where 64.29% of the trash is required just to spawn the bosses, advance through the instance, and not get destroyed by Mchimba. Beyond that, there isn’t even that much trash in that dungeon and you’re left with a total of 2 or 3 pulls where your route can differ at all. There is no real choice here and it makes that dungeon feel bad from a strategic point of view. So much of the fun is developing interesting new strategies but KR is basically a numbers and execution check, like the Patchwerk of dungeons.
Another sticky point for me is Waycrest Manor’s extreme randomness in determining your route. 3 possible routes with rotating witch spawns and infested makes that place a nightmare to strategize around. A big problem with this too is that you’re forced down a much less efficient route when you get either of the right side openings but especially the top right where you have to go through the least efficient trash in the dungeon (Raal’s hallway filled with maggots worth only 1 count each but very deadly in large numbers.) There is also the problem of enemies directly in your path not being worth count towards Enemy Forces such as the Gorestained Piglets or even enemies a little outside the path but still a potential option were they worth anything like the Faceless Maidens next to the top right path. My personal belief is that anything you can or should reasonably be able to pull that there aren’t just absurd amounts of like the Rowdy Revelers or Footbomb Hooligans in MOTHERLODE!! should be worth something to pull. But anything that is 100% in the path should be worth something and accounted for in the enemy forces needed (I know I wasn’t going to make suggestions, probably just this one.)
On a final note here, I have only done the horde version of Siege of Boralus but I am told that the Alliance version is much much more difficult. I don’t have anything to say on the matter but I’m curious about what other feel on that version of Siege of Boralus and if it’s something that bothers them.
Affix Design
This section is hard to talk about without getting into the reward structure since one of the only reasons for people to push very high keys is to be ranked on a 3rd party website against each other. This makes it hard to find reasons to even do M+ on weeks with prohibitively hard or time consuming affix weeks. So for this section, I’m simply going to be talking about the enjoyment level of the different affixes and how they feel together without considering how worthwhile they are to do.
The big one to talk about is obviously Infested. Being an affix that is omnipresent but has a 3 week rotation around it was an interesting idea, but the execution feels bad in a lot of cases. The biggest problems with Infested were how it would sometimes artificially limit what you could pull by making an non-CCable mob infested which meant you were basically forced to kill it before you could move on or skip it. Being able to combine pulls and find new strategies to do so is a big part of why M+ is fun and Infested doesn’t feel like it’s providing a fun challenge when it blocks the ability to do so. The times where infested felt cool was when you were able to CC a mob in 2, 3, or 4 different packs at the same time and, after you kill all of the non-infested enemies, fight all of them together. That was a cool and interesting challenge for me since it once again served as a solvable problem with clever play and strategy rather than a fixed point wall like a miniboss.
The other big problem I have with Infested is how it combines with other affixes to be a lot less of a fair challenge and more like the game is cheating you. Sanguine, for instance, can be a really silly combination with Infested as they can and will run through or even spawn in sanguine pools that could be very large. The biggest problem though is its interaction with Fortified. The fact that the Spawns of G’huun have 20% more HP on fortified weeks is really silly to me. It as an affix is already challenging enough, why does it need to be further compounded on by Fortified?
Speaking of Fortified, it’s clear that there is a much greater parity at this point in the game between Fort and Tyrannical with Tyrannical actually being the preference so far. This should change after we reach high enough key levels with boss health and unavoidable damage scaling faster than trash health. Fortified being harder isn’t a bad thing in my eyes as it means the trash is hard enough and interesting enough to merit that fact. However, some of the interactions with Fortified have unjustly increased the difficulty in my eyes despite the affixes alone being totally competent without being buffed further. I mentioned the Infested interaction already but it has the same interaction with Teeming and Explosive of all things. I feel like it shouldn’t be too difficult to make Explosive not interact with Fort as it is already a hard affix on its own, it doesn’t need 20% more HP on top of scaling with key level.
Sanguine is no longer a non-affix with how tight a lot of the corridors are and that’s a change for the best. That said, the fleeing mobs feel like a slap in the face in Tol Dagor since the counterplay to enemies running is to just keep pulling packs backwards. Also since there are many more casting enemies you can find yourself stuck on a mob that just won’t move and can’t be moved by anything since they’re already doing their casts. It’s not a good feeling, but there is counterplay to it so I don’t feel like I have no options on enemies like that.
Necrotic is a really frustrating one this expansion, especially when combined with something like Sanguine where you need to control the placement of enemies. As previously mentioned, there are many mobs that will cast on the closest target if the tank isn’t in range and necrotic completely and totally necessitates kiting. This doesn’t feel like a fair interaction, especially on a Brewmaster where I have to kite long before I’m close to death or I will die to stagger and the necrotic dot in combination. As an affix I think this creates a lot of interesting challenge but is simply not fair at all on some packs if you want to bring melee to anything.
I’ve mentioned Explosive’s interaction with Fortified being at issue but I should say that, as its own affix, it still feels really bad when only a couple of my abilities even hit it and not my strongest one. I saw in the patch notes that targeted abilities will hit it now, but I don’t know if that means things like Keg Smash since, while it’s targeted, it differs from the abilities given as examples since it isn’t a chain but a pure AoE. I seriously hope it does and look forward to testing it out since many classes, myself included, rely on what are technically AoE abilities to do ST damage. I understand completely not being able to AoE explosives but as long as you cannot hit them with core abilities, I will never think this is a good, fun, or fair affix.
Bolstering and Explosive both slow down a dungeon pretty immensely but Bolstering in particular can force you into a comp that feeds damage into a Subtlety Rogue so that you can kill non-CCable enemies that are only pulled with smaller, easy to kill enemies. There are a lot of instances of this and it often requires DPS to not press buttons in their core rotation when fighting a pack so they don’t passively cleave down low HP enemies. It isn’t fun to have to not press your buttons so consistently throughout a dungeon.
Once again, the relative difficulty and time increases of some affixes is vastly disproportionate to others and it leads to a situation of not wanting to even bother with them. If there were a reason to do more than a single high key every week, this wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll talk more about this later.
Class Balance
I don’t want to talk about this too much (but apparently I will anyway xd). It was clear towards the middle and end of Legion there was 1 top tier tank and 2 top tier healers and that wasn’t a problem of community perception but too much utility being given to those specs. Generally I feel like class balance is in a better state than the last half of Legion but still room to grow. A lot of the problems are community perception and those will change, especially when the MDI comes and people have an opportunity to try new combinations and find some new powerful combinations. That said, there have been some clear outliers this season as too strong or required in the DPS category, those being Rogues in general.
The shroud utility along with sap to skip enemies is incredibly potent in most dungeons. I’ve already gone over part of why I think that is and I don’t think that just making shroud terrible is the best option. Skipping enemies is, as I’ve said, a key part of what makes M+ so interesting. Having shroud or restro druid stealth be the only option, however, isn’t healthy and pigeonholes groups into a comp they might not run if given other options. It also causes a really large disconnect between what the top groups that everyone watches can do and what groups doing less competitive keys can reasonably do, even if they wanted to do similar stuff. Rogue is also a very tanky DPS in general with strong defensive cooldowns and a cheat death. Subtlety was nerfed this patch for good reason, as their focused ST damage with cannon fodder has been huge for a long time and it was just as strong before the patch. That said, every Rogue spec performs quite well in M+ even now, there’s just no reason not to bring one and lots of reasons you need one.
Demon Hunters have also been highly sought after DPS this entire expansion, once again being extremely tanky and bringing Imprison which also lets you skip a lot of enemies, especially when combined with Sap from a Rogue. To add to it, they have a group CD in Darkness which is very potent in some circumstances but is essentially always free damage reduction on demand for the group or tank. Something of a sore spot is them being the only thing to bring the 5% magic damage debuff, Chaos Brand. 3/5 buffs can be brought at 70% power with consumables, so it’s a little obnoxious that the Monk and DH are the only ones to bring those buffs at all. That said, DH is not nearly as required as Rogue in the current meta and serves mostly as a very powerful pick in near every situation without much downside.
Mage and Boomkin I’ll talk very briefly about as a lot of what I said about DH can be said about both of these. Boomkin having extremely high armor to mitigate physical damage, a short CD defensive in Barkskin while being able to effectively offheal in a pinch, along with very potent burst damage when using Lively Spirit along with other utility spells has put them as a clear and safe choice for a ranged spec when building a group. Mage has brought unmatched slows as Frost and extremely high AoE burst as Fire while having an immunity (or 2 with Frost) and a cheat death as Fire. Their on demand barrier spell can also act as a quick max HP increase for incoming burst. I expect to see more ranged classes to see playtime with recent adjustments to these specs though I don’t see either of these losing their spot as top ranged spec.
Briefly touching on the tanking situation, it’s obviously been the DK show once again with Monks also making appearances in very high keys. I think a lot of this is community perception, but DH is the only tank in the game that brings anything like DK utility (mass grip) without the survivability. Monk bring unmatched survivability with limited utility like Ring of Peace, offheals, and the best kiting toolkit in the game for when that’s possible. Every tank needs to bring something other than being able to face tank a normal amount of stuff and I think time will tell if the other tanks just haven’t been played yet or if they are truly lacking. Hopefully with the relative buffs to other tanks and nerfs to the fotm 2 we see more diversity in the near future.
I can’t really speak for healers other than my own experience playing with a handful. I feel like Druid and Mistweaver are able to tunnel into healing ST or burst AoE heal very effectively while Disc is very good at AoE healing while they have a hostile target to hit. They also bring 2 very good damage reduction cooldowns to augment their low ST healing. I haven’t seen other healers in play, I’d love to hear what those that play feel like in keys are their weaknesses or what keeps them from doing higher keys.
Bugs, Abuses, and Preparations
To say there were a lot of bugs to begin with in BFA would be an understatement. That said, most of them were resolved quickly enough or at least eventually, one of the biggest being pulling things through the floor in Waycrest Manor. There are still some serious pathing issues, often I’ll find going anywhere near any sort of doodad results in me getting teleported into the center of a pack and getting hit from all sides. There are some pretty insane bugs being abused by essentially every group right now in a few dungeons. The one where you could pre-pull enemies and avoid spawning them with infested has been mostly fixed (although I still think Frost DK’s Fury could reach through the wall like it can with MOTHER in Uldir.) But that you can pre-spawn Skycap’n Kragg and Trothak in Freehold is very silly.
That kind of leads into the required preparations for pushing the highest keys. I’ll say that we as a community are pretty widely responsible for this ourselves since as soon as one group does something, another does it and so on until it’s basically required to keep up with everyone doing these tricks. Something that saw prevalence this season was pre-stacking Archive of the Titans stacks and getting healthstones before the key started which results in a lot of downtime. I’d personally love to see everything but consumable buffs like flasks and food stripped when the key starts like in PvP since, if there is a significant power gain from something like pre stacking a buff or getting healthstones/mage food before keys, we’re going to do it. As much as I prefer we save ourselves where we can, I don’t think this particular arms race is healthy or fun nor is it going to change.
Reward Structure
This part is where I feel the most disappointment. Until patch 8.1 there was only 1 achievement in the game for BFA M+ and a Server First Feat of Strength. While there are a few mounts you can get, none of them are rewards for going as high as you can but just for completing the dungeon in general. Raids have new Transmog, achievements, mounts, and titles for every tier. PvP has the same. If M+ is supposed to be progression path for small groups that don’t want to PvP, why does it feel like it’s been ignored? Even the weekly cache, supposedly the equivalent of a Mythic raid item, only drops 380 gear instead of 385. The point is, everything about M+ feels unrewarding unless you are already a part of the community that recognizes and acknowledges those that push for rating on a 3rd party website.
As much as I didn’t want to give suggestions, I strongly feel like there needs to be an ingame ladder system as well as a reason to push high keys on weeks with theoretically poor affix combinations for pushing the highest keystones. For instance if I do an 18 Freehold and that’s the highest done on a hard week like Bolstering, Explosive, Tyrannical, even if the highest key ever done in that dungeon for any affix combination was a 22, I feel like there should be the maximum reward for completing that 18 on a hard week. Ultimately, regardless of the solution, there needs to be a reason to do keys at any time rather than on specific easy weeks. It would make it easier for everyone to find groups and do keys if people felt rewarded for doing so, and not just on easy weeks.
Having something akin to a PvP ladder system would give merit to the people pushing to be competitive with each other more than just a 3rd party scoring system. PvPers and most recently Raiders with the Hall of Fame achievement but even before with achievement dates have had those kind of in game bragging rights for a long time. M+, as the D3 community has shown and as people’s interest in the highest groups has shown, is not about completing a set challenge as fast as possible but about going as high as you can. That said, having the only rewards cut off at certain arbitrary levels of keystone isn’t as productive to the system as having a ladder/reward system that scales with what people are actually able to do. I hope that you are willing to change to this kind of system in the near future to help incentivize playing what is more or less evergreen content for you like PvP.
Conclusions
Judged on its own, there is plenty to like about M+ in BFA. Many interesting new dungeons and a focus on trash has definitely kept me engaged in a lot of our time doing keys this expansion. That said, when comparing to Legion, I can’t help but be very disappointed at the lack of growth from what was a brand new system. It feels like a lot of our feedback from last expansion fell on deaf ears and what we got in return felt shoehorned in rather than being a primary focus of the game. Everything from the complete lack of achievements to the comparatively weaker loot since Azurite gear only comes from the weekly cache and only if you’re extremely lucky do you get something that’s actually good. Some of this was fixed in 8.1 but it’s almost like it was an afterthought. I hope my feedback reaches you and I hope the community is able to chime in and debate or bring their own opinions to the matter. If I forgot anything I’ll try to add it in the comments. Thank you for reading!