Mythic Keystones: Season 1 in Review

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
48

Biggest M+ problem is this:
of the 12 affix combinations, there are only 4 which groups are actually interested in pushing (because there is zero recognition for pushing a lower key on a difficult affix combination).

Raging,volcanic,T
(3 weeks pass)
Bursting,skittish,T
(4 weeks pass)
Teeming,volcanic,T
(2 weeks pass)
Bursting,quaking,F

Do yourself a favor and remove explosives and necrotic as an affix. Or make undesirable affixes (bolstering,necrotic,explosive) occur only 2/12 - 4/12 of the weeks. I personally don’t mind it, but it makes people not want to play the game. I’ve seen many of my friends I’ve grouped with start playing overwatch, csgo, PUBG during these weeks, and they don’t come back.

If you had some kind of system in-game which ranked M+ groups (which could be formed similar to the way guilds are formed) relative to other groups pushing the same affixes in the same week, it would solve a lot of the problems, and make m+ far more interesting to people. (example, having a percentile ranking system for each affix combination, on each week, which contributed to an overall percentile, which is publicly viewable – this would be huge)

1 Like
49

I’m gonna vote no to stripping hearthstones and mage water off - as a healer, I usually track down some mage water before finding a group to run with, because I don’t know if there will be a mage. Mage water is better than pretty much every other water in the game (plus it heals!), so that would only make the “needs mage” problem worse. I’m really not seeing how spending 10 seconds dropping hearthstones/mage table really hurts your prep time?

Also, I find as a holy priest (11 is my highest timed, so I’m not pushing super high), if my group is good and the affix not something like grievous, I can spend a lot of time dpsing. I’ve hit 5k in a 10 before when people knew their stuff. I personally feel the build is viable if you understand your cooldowns, work with the tank to manage yours and theirs (I have a tank friend I run with so we can do this), but suffers from the typical “disc is best because top players run it” that infects pugs at lower levels. Especially after the disc nerfs, I think holy has a chance to come up in par, with only the best disc players always beating a great holy player due to damage brought. Community attitude towards certain classes in general, though, is not easy to combat.

1 Like
50

Excellent post, just wanted to add on some points on class balance and utility within M+ in general.

I don’t think it is possible to achieve true spec balance (in mythic plus) in the current design paradigm where devs want every spec to be unique in their spec identity and utility toolkit. However, with the explosion of M+ popularity over the last 2 expansions, this stubborn design model has to evolve.

Look, we already have different_flavours_of hard CC available to every class which has been in game forever. These have never negatively affected spec identity and if done well have even served to further reinforce the spec’s fantasy. By hard CC I am referring to spells like Sheep, Sap, Imprison, Paralysis, Trap, Hex etc. They all do the same thing to slightly different target types, but are different enough in their flavour to reinforce the class fantasy.

Why can’t the same be done for some other important meta defining abilities that makes meta specs more desired over the have-not specs? I will broadly group up the utility archetypes and list what we currently have and what can be added still to specs to balance it out a bit.

– Group Stealth –
Current: Rogues only
You have to either severely limit what can be skipped in dungeons (not fun and feels bad for Rogues), or give similar abilities to other specs.
Ideas
Feral - Group critter transformation that makes you neutral to mobs for 15secs, you die if another player or mob steps on you while in critter form.
Survival Hunter - Camouflage/Dust trap, fire a trap that creates a 40yd Dust cloud that severely reduces aggro radius of mobs. 3 charges on 7min CD
Arcane Mage - Group Invis. Activate spell again to teleport group back to original position when aura was applied and reset all aggro. 7min CD

– Mob Displacement/Control –
Current: Deathknight Grip/Mass Grip, Monk Ring of Peace, Druid Typhoon and Vortex, Fire Blast Wave, Elemental Thunderstorm
Counters Sanguine, Interrupts some unkickable abilities, knockbacks assist Tank kiting especially for Necrotic, general mob control and grouping for more efficient AOEing and cleaving.
Arcane Mage - Swaps your current position with your non-player target. 1min CD. Not quite grip but I think it’s interesting with some thought involved.
Warriors - Meat Hook. Pulls in all targets in a straight and narrow 20yd line. Hook is telegraphed on ground before firing. 1.5min CD
Priests - Lesser Mind Control. Forces a non-player target to move to your targeted location within 40yds, 5sec duration. Target will not cast as long as they are moving. 1.5min CD
Enh and Ele Shaman - Reverse Spirit-link Totem (rename it). Life total of all non-CCed, aggro targets within 30yds is distributed evenly over 30secs. I think this allows for creative usage and helps on pulls where you need stuff to die evenly (eg. Bolster). 1.5min CD

– PERSISTENT AOE Slows (50% and above, excludes area slows like Traps) –
Current: Assassin Crippling Poison, Fury Piercing Howl, Blood Grip of the Dead (not persistent but 90% decaying slow boosts its power a lot), Brewmaster Special Delivery,
Useful for helping tanks to kite on high keys for several reasons.
Hunters - Tar Trap radius increased to 15yds
Shamans - Earthbind Totem radius increased to 15yds
Feral - Rip and Primal Wrath applies a 10% snare that increases to 50% after 15secs. (bleeding out makes you slower) Refreshing the dot maintains the slow.
Frost DK - Remourseless Winter is now 50% slow instead of 20%
Unholy DK - Defile talent also has Grip of the Dead effect
Ret - Consecration Talent now also slows like Prot version. Unbound Freedom (PVP Talent) is now baseline

Ok, some of these may not be the greatest ideas, but what I’m trying to do is spread out the abilities that define the meta across more specs, in their own flavour. You can call it limited homogenization of core utility abilities, but in my opinion there is no other way.

2 Likes
51

If your 380ish geared characters can’t get through a +10 in time without resorting to kiting then you’re probably running with sub-part tank/heals/dps, any of those. I rarely kite when doing 10s on my main, it’s just not needed most of the time, unless I’m doing an ambitious pull, which again is not needed.

Also to the person who said MDT is “required” to time a 10: I use that addon for maybe 5% of my dungeons, basically on teeming weeks and if I have a rogue and don’t know how to make up trash. Other than that, I don’t use it, and I almost always time my dungeons (if I don’t it’s not because of MDT it’s from people screwing up). MDT is helpful but if the tank knows the %s and knows the pulls it’s definitely not mandatory, not for 10s.

52

What are your thoughts on Teeming?

I’ve always hated it more than the other affixes. It seems like more of an artificial time waster that you can’t avoid. With other affixes, any time they significantly slow you down it’s most likely because they caused you to wipe. Don’t kill 2 explosive orbs and you wipe. Take too much damage from greivous? You wipe. Kill too much stuff at the same time bursting week and its a wipe. Basically if you complete the mechanic you wont wipe.

But what mechanic is there to avoid with teeming. There are more ads in the dungeon, and each ad is worth less so you cant exactly avoid those extra mobs. Theyre there and they will slow you down regardless of what you do. Its almost like just taking away time from the key. And thats without acknowledging the fact that those extra mobs can still lead to wipes.

Of course an argument could be made that time is being taken off the week with other affixes. But I just dont feel like holding back on Bolstering week so that ads die at the same time does that to anywhere near the magnitude that Teeming does.

In the end I feel like a better Teeming would be one where a few dungeon mobs are replaced with someone different/more dangerous to keep the different dungeon styles but without making it feel like a static time consumer.

53

I think explosive, bolstering, teeming are all pretty similar in what they do except that you can actually still pull pretty big on teeming most of the time. Explosive adds a lot of health to a dungeon too, even more on fortified, as does bolstering no matter how well you play it.

I do dislike the random teeming patterns found in some dungeons and the instances where it pairs an infested non-CCable mob with another non infested like in Waycrest before the 4th boss when those align. Teeming was a pretty good push week last expansion and I hope infested going away lets that happen again.

54

Most affixes act to prevent large pulls. Explosive and Bolstering do that directly. Teeming and Fortified do it indirectly, as when you would normally pull 10% here in 3 packs you can only handle 2 on teeming. Sanguine does it by running you out of room, Grievous by turning incidental AE damage into deadly threats.

Volcanic is supposed to do it by creating a threat like Explosive by making you watch your feet and move a lot, but in practice after the nerfs it’s more of an annoyance to ranged dps & certain healers. That’s why people like volcanic weeks to push.