Mythic plus has a set of fundamental design flaws with respect to its scaling. These flaws inevitably lead the formation of meta comps, filled with classes that are specifically chosen to target and minimize these flaws, to the exclusion of every other class. Unfortunately, these flaws only rear their head once you get into the very high end of keys. However, even though these issues only affect the very high end, the strategies to overcome them end up trickling down to the majority of the player base, creating a pseudo gate-keeping effect that impacts the entire mythic plus player base, very much to its overall detriment.
I want to specifically call out two aspects of the scaling of keys that I consider to be the biggest problem points.
- How you are required handle trash pulls. Once you get to a high enough key, if any mob in any pack ends up doing anything short of white hitting your tank, someone is going to die. The generally accepted solution for this is to bring as many AoE stops as possible to shut down anything and everything a pack does until it eventually dies. This inevitably leads to classes or specs that lack such utility being looked down upon or seen as a burden to the overall success of a key. In particular, if a class can bring multiple such stops, it ends up being seen as required.
The best example of this is how Vengence DH is regarded in the community at the moment. With access to 2 of each of Sigil of Misery, Sigil of Silence, Sigil of Chains, along with Chaos Nova and Imprison, they are quite literally unmatched in their ability to shut down multiple mobs all at once, repeatedly, with no external help. No other tank, let alone any other class, has anywhere near as much AoE crowd control.
- You have to be able to survive the unavoidable and eventual one-shot level of damage. Again, once you get to a high enough key, the damage of enemy abilities, specifically boss mechanics, becomes a real concern. From this season, consider Yazma. If you don’t have a damage reduction available for every Wracking Pain and Soulrend hit, you are simply going to die. There is no outplaying it, you will simply die. Certain classes inevitably will not be able to handle the damage profile, and as a result, be seen as a burden to the overall success of a key.
Versatility and cheat death mechanics play a massive role here. Classes such as Rogues that naturally, or classes that have the option to, hard stack Versatility or have built in cheat death mechanics end up being the only classes capable of handling such mechanics. Other classes are simply viewed as a liability.
With both of these flaws, there is no “getting good” or anything approaching outplay potential. You either have enough AoE stops to stunlock a massive pack of mobs until they die, or you don’t and your group dies. You either bring classes that have kits that can survive the damage profile of the unavoidable trash and boss mechanics, or you don’t and your group dies.
The most glaring offender of all of this is the Augmentation Evoker. They bring no less than 2 on-demand stops (Dracthyr Racials), 1 pseudo on-demand stop (Upheaval), an ability that multiplies the duration of any other AoE stop (Oppressing Roar), group survivability in the form of both an AoE damage reduction (Zephyr), raw health (4% passive, 8% on demand), and group versatility via Shifting Sands. Their kit is quite literally designed to target both of the aforementioned scaling issues.
Another point that is particularly troublesome is the fact that these problems surface well before players do not have the raw group DPS to time the key. That is, bosses and trash mobs will start one-shotting players well before they are at a point where they cannot meet DPS checks to time the key.
I’m not saying I have a solution for either of these problems. In truth, I am not even sure if the developers, or the community at large, consider these points to be problems. Rather, this could very well be how it is intended. Perhaps the trash mob perma-stop gameplay is by design and is the intended way to handle trash in high mythic plus. Perhaps the inevitable scaling of mob and boss abilities to one-shot levels is by design. In my opinion, both cases lead to degenerate gameplay behaviour and the inevitable exclusion of certain classes simply due to their kits.
I’ve tossed around several ideas over the past few seasons to address these scaling problems and I’ve listed a few below. The primary goal of the changes would be to put more of a focus on the individual roles of the group, rather than a groups ability to survive one-shots or permanently lock down a pack until it dies, and reduce the negative incentive of bringing those classes that lack things like AoE stops or perma damage reductions.
- Party-wide, unavoidable, or non-tank targeted damage stops scaling past a certain key level, or is otherwise switched from front-loaded hits to DoTs.
- More of a focus on mob and boss health scaling, along with mob white hit (or other tank directed damage) scaling, putting more of an emphasis on players maximizing their damage output and tanks reducing their damage taken.
- Give mobs some sort of global CC DR or otherwise de-emphasize the need for AoE stops.
- This suggestion will definitely be seen as contentious, as right now AoE stops are quite literally the only way to survive high keys. My suggestion is to make such stops more of a luxury in a group instead of a hard requirement. This could be done in any number of ways, such as dramatically reducing the number of things each mob does, or making their use have some sort of downside, such as reducing the damage any CC’ed mob takes; that is, every time you cc a mob, it gains a stacking “determination” buff, increasing its health, gaining some damage reduction, or increasing their damage done to the tank.
In essence:
- Let DPS be DPS, not a set of ping-ponging health bars giving healers heart attacks every time a mechanic happens.
- Let healers be healers, and give them more control over their teams survivability, rather than requiring every DPS having a million DR talents at the ready to carry them through every unavoidable hit.
- Let tanks be tanks, and let the size of a pull be dictated by how many mobs they can survive against, not how many AoE stops the group has.