Mythic Plus Impact on raids discussion (Hopefully good feedback.)

Community WoW Community Council
21

Thanks for pointing that out about the choice of rewards. I somehow skipped over your section about the prompted choice to select between which content you did that week actually rewards you in the vault.

Would that not cause players to still feel compelled to do Keystones or raiding once one of the options now had the better chance at upgrades and BiS items from the respective loot pools?

I think the speed at which people gear in Keystones is more related to the end of Dungeon Loot but I think you are right at looking at vault options as well.

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22

Currently, you have to do exactly that… the difference you would still need to do them once but not each week, which is the problem I try to get rid of. Feeling forced into each content each week is really tedious, esp. if you’re any serious about gear progression to the max.

Keystones for ppl like me that pursue mythic raiding usual matter out of 2 reasons - early on for heroic equivalent loot (esp. the first week a raid opens) and in the long run only for vault options. If the vault option wouldn’t force us into doing keys for the vault we wouldn’t likely bother with them. If we are not obligated to do them weekly to fill the vault this would be a big plus - can imagine the same situations for those who enjoy M+ they would only need to venture out to raiding once at all to unlock the loot options.

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23

Okay, I see where your mind is at I think but there are some variables where this would not work as well as you might think.

In one scenario, a raider can clear through the first few bosses as they progress through the raid. For this example, most of the upgrades they want in the raid are from later bosses. This example player is still under similar pressures as they might have felt in the current system but has the added wrinkle of now losing options to select a potential upgrade.

A second scenario would be the player that is chasing their best in slot items and has comparable options from different end-game activities. They are now forced to ignore progress from all but one source for vault options. In this scenario, the player may feel that a significant portion of their efforts are being wasted.

In both of these scenarios which option to do is more about using a sight like Raidbots to determine the mathematically superior option and doesn’t address the End of Dungeon drops which for many raiders offers significant upgrades in a much more efficient manner.

24

I may have not framed that perfectly, out it wouldn’t matter how many bosses (at least 2 of a set difficult) you defeated. Once you killed at least 2 bosses, you unlock all loot options for set difficult besides those two bosses at the end (which have higher ilvl - those would need to be killed to unlock their loot for vault).
For Example, you killed 5 bosses in normal and 2 in heroic, you would still get 3 Heroic Loot Options from the Vault - this would also solve the problem of having ppl being benched on mythic raid bosses and offer them the loot as well.

25

Yes, it would be. We had that in WoD and it was really silly. It reduces the incentive to try higher difficulties because you’ll already have a bunch of gear from it, so killing bosses becomes less satisfying because you end up disenchanting even more of the loot

That doesn’t really solve the issue, because what makes M+ so attractive early on isn’t just the vault (although that certainly helps, with it not requiring you to unlock the loot options at high ilevel by progressing bosses). The absolutely massive incentive currently is the infinite farmability of end-of-dungeon loot. It allowed you to go from 450 to 470+ with absolutely no lockouts this tier. That’s basically heroic ilevel except you’re not limited to 1 kill per boss per week. The difference between doing that and not in a guild that clears heroic week 1 and steps into mythic is easily something to the tune of 10-15 ilevels (our rshaman vs the guys who farmed a ton of M+).

Anyway, I have 2 main areas of feedback regarding M+ and its impact on raiding: reward design and class design. Not going to get into ideas for how to resolve the described issues, despite having some, because that’d be way too much to read and it’s not super relevant.

Reward design:

WoW’s endgame gearing has historically been focused almost entirely around weekly/biweekly lockouts. PvP and raiding both still adhere to this fully via Conquest and raid lockouts respectively. M+ does not. Ever since it was added in Legion, it allowed you to keep running dungeons for as long as you had time/patience/playable keystones, and you’d keep getting rewarded.

The ilevel of those infinitely farmable rewards has typically hovered around heroic raid ilevel. When combined with M+ being incredibly generous with the ilevel you get relative to the difficulty of the content, this makes it very hard for a lot of people to justify raiding, because they could just spend their time doing keys for better gear than they would be getting from raiding.

It also heavily incentivizes spending a ton of time farming M+ early on in the season if you’re a “serious” raider, because doing so lets you kill bosses more easily. Killing bosses more easily means you can kill more of them in the time your raid group is playing, and more bosses killed means you get even more loot, creating a snowball effect. This is an issue of misalignment between “when you get the gear” and “when you want the gear” for raiding, but the reverse is true for actual dedicated M+ play.

For raiding, you want gear ASAP because the way progression/rankings work is that killing bosses the earliest is the goal. However the way “your” loot works is that you’re restricted by weekly lockouts, and by actually killing bosses which costs you progress time which is incredibly inefficient in terms of getting loot.

For M+, the final scoring of your performance is at the very end of the season. What matters is having the most gear at the end of the season for the last few push weeks. So getting a high “guaranteed” baseline ilevel in the first few weeks of the season is mostly irrelevant, as you’ll be gradually pushing key levels over the course of the season anyway.

The quantity of loot also favors M+, which seems counterintuitive as surely the lockout-based source should give more efficient loot. In M+, you get 0.4 items per key per player, in raid you get 0.2 items per boss per player. So in the time you spend capping out your weekly vault, an M+ player should expect to see 3.2 items, while a raider would expect 1.4 (or 1.8 if you full clear the raid). Of course the raid has multiple difficulties, but those vary in ilevel, whereas the M+ player can continue running “heroic ilevel” keys as long as they want.

The weekly vault also favors M+, because it skips the progression step that raiding has to go through. You have the entire loot table available at the same ilevel immediately, giving you access to a variety of weapons, trinkets, jewelry and armor pieces. The ilevel of the weekly vault has also always been unbelievably generous for M+, with mythic raid equivalent coming from keys in the 10-20 range depending on what time period you look at.

Compare this to raiding, where you have a variety of restrictions. First you need to spend time progressing the boss, otherwise the loot won’t show up at all. This means the options in the vault are heavily restricted, particularly early on when it matters the most. Then you need to kill specific numbers of bosses, which can be quite annoying from a social/management perspective on mythic, as you’re simply not able to “fix” somebody’s vault if you run out of bosses on that difficulty This is unlike M+ where you just play more keys, or lower raid difficulties where they can just kill the bosses they missed. This also means you simply can’t cap out your vault with the maximum ilevel during progress, always having a trailing vault slot or 2 at lower ilevel.

I think end-of-dungeon loot being infinitely farmable is something that must be changed, as it’s not healthy for raid and M+ coexisting. It means “serious” raiders outside of dayraiding guilds spend more time running M+ than raiding during early weeks, and it also means that M+ rewards can’t be as targeted or cap out quite as high as raid rewards (without breaking the game even more anyway)

Class design:

This one is not something I really expect to be fixable, but I still think it’s important to point out.

For a spec to function in M+, it needs to do both AoE and ST. You cannot have specs specialized fully into being strong ST tunnelers. That’s a niche specs like Feral, Subtlety, Arcane used to fill. In raid it works because you have enough spots that you can build your comp around big strengths and big weaknesses. In 5man it doesn’t work, everybody needs to be a generalist.

Burst is also very strongly emphasized, because blowing up a big pull before it can kill you is how you save a lot of time. This means specs with flat damage profiles or which require a lot of setup/ramp suffer massively. Examples of this were Shadow, Feral again.

So thanks to M+, we can no longer have heavily specialized specs (ST, low cleave, spread cleave etc), flat/sustained DPS specs, setup/ramping specs. That sucks, because being a specialist and getting to do “your thing” feels great on a raid boss.

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26

Totally agree it doesn’t solve the issue of infinite end of dungeon loot - what I can see here is that it gets a lockout as well - per week you only can drop 3 items per track (vet/champion/Hero) like the crest work now just as charges similar to the catalyst. Limiting it this way, you kinda slow down the general pace of gear acquisition from M+ and put it more in line with normal / heroic raiding. You basically would spend a charge on opening the end of dungeon chest (You should get crests then default when defeating the last boss of a dungeon).

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27

I think the biggest gap between the two is in drops. N+ you can target farm BIS items whereas raid you get 1 pass with fingers crossed for the drop and roll win. Simply, the ammount of drops per boss in raids needs to be increased to match that of M+. Personally, I would also like to see the bonus rolls come back and be useable in both raid and M+.

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28

You receive 2 drops for 5 people at the end of a run of a keystone dungeon. I understand that you are asking for 4 drops for a 10-person raid. What I don’t understand is that you undermine your math by pointing out that there is the ability to repeatedly farm keystone dungeons so the actual chances of loot are effectively limited only by your time.

That means that even increasing drop rates would not solve the issue as you describe it. I don’t believe removing the loot lock-out for raid bosses to be a viable move so I don’t think that loot parity between the two is a matter of increasing raid drops.

To me, I find the better path may be increasing the challenge of keystones to be commiserate to the rewards and I have seen the team moving the reward track in that direction in DF. The issue is that players hate when things that came easy before become more out of reach later. So I think this must be done with small calibrations and multiple iterations.

29

The solution is to remove the endless loot farming from M+ (and redesign its reward structure with that in mind), but that will never happen because people would be incredibly mad.

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30

After that has been done would you not also need to also cap the rewards from PvP as well? A similar issue might also come up with Delves in TWW. Is the answer to have all systems only provide X amount of loot per boss?
I don’t believe that to be viable either as each additional source of end game loot will still feel “mandatory” to players that want as much power as possible. The lack of an upwards cap means that players choose Keystone Dungeons OR PvP. It is my opinion that introducing a cap on both will just mean players will feel pressure to do both activities up to that cap.

31

Honor gear is so much lower ilevel that it’s not really an issue. Yes, Delves should also not be infinitely farmable for good gear.

Having to hit cap in 3 activities is better than spending the first 1-2 weeks farming M+ far beyond the point where your vault is maxed out (ie spending more time on a side activity than your main activity). PvP also requires a noticeably different skillset to actually cap out (whether that’s 2.1 or 2.4k rating), to the point where most people simply can’t do it. M+ doesn’t, certainly not at the levels being farmed/needed for weekly vault cap.

32

You say M+ doesn’t require the skills or offer the challenge when capping out on gear or going beyond that point. That to me points to the team’s efforts to shift the end of dungeon rewards and the rewards from the vault appropriately. This season you need to complete higher keys to reach the myth track items. More than that the highest item level rewards come exclusively from the raid. Perhaps, a greater differential between ilvl would also be an avenue to balance the rewards.
There are also other aspects to reward in parity or differentiation that number of drops. I believe it is more efficient to raid in order to cap out on dream crests. The trinkets in the raid continue to over perform those from dungeons (at least for my spec of enhancement). Raid bosses also continue to drop professional patterns, materials and other items that are strictly gear which does not happen in Keystone Dungeons.
I know this conversation has been squarely about volume of gear drops (to the point that we have ignored every other aspect of the OP) but I agree with Tradu’s point that the player base would have a strongly negative reaction if the solution implemented was nerf the Keystone Dungeon reward structure into the Stone Age.

33

By like 1 key level or something, while keys themselves are significantly easier than last season. It was quite comfortably possible to max out the M+ vault week 1 of the season, while not a single person fully capped the raid vault week 1 (world first Fyrakk wasn’t until week 2), and only like 10 guilds even filled out the raid vault’s slots with mythic. The equivalent would be something like only MDI/TGP competitors being able to fill out their M+ vaults with 20s.

7.5 dungeons vs full clearing a raid difficulty. In terms of time efficiency on farm you’re right, but conversely during progress you will never cap out the crests from your progress difficulty from raid alone.

This varies from season to season and spec to spec.

I assume you mean aren’t, and yeah, it’s a bit silly. At the same time, adding them to the pool of infinitely farmable items from M+ would absolutely crater their value.

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34

Accepting the qualifications you put forward in your latest post, do you believe that the only path forward is the complete homogenization of rewards amoung all the end-game activities?
I think you have quietly conceded that the difficulty of keystones can be adjusted to be commiserate with the gear awarded but I don’t think I should assume that.
A design element that the team has not explored is introducing additional dungeon-specific mechanics at higher difficulty levels. We already see this in raids and I think that at the higher end of key levels the team can reasonably expect players to be able to deal with some additional wrinkles.
I worry that the mechanics would have to be generic enough that it would not mandate a specific comp or class to handle it. Additionally, it would make each dungeon have a larger upfront “design cost” when they introduce or reintroduce dungeons.
The second worry I am less concerned about; because, the team is bringing back old dungeons already and so the team has more experience in this field. It will also allow some dungeons we have already revisited since S4 Shadowlands to get an additional fresh coat of paint when they return later down the line.

35

It can be, but it has to be done every season or key difficulty relative to player power has to be kept constant (and so far keys have gotten easier relative to player power with each season within an expansion). I also just don’t think Blizzard would actually ever put gear rewards at as high key levels as they’d have to, because those key levels are incredibly unbalanced in terms of what specs/comps are good. People would also be mad that they used to be able to get mythic raid equivalent gear and suddenly they only get normal equivalent.

They could, but the game mode is still inherently very different because progression works completely differently. That makes building a proper reward structure that works for both raid and M+ difficult.

36

I would argue this as I am in favor of keeping everything the same (Except bring back bonus rolls in raids please):

One thing I dont see a lot of in this thread is a look at it from the other end of things. The casual end of things. Casual players are a big part of any genre, heck its such a big market there is an entire Casual Games genre of its own. So when looking at changing systems you need to also look at the large casual gaming audience. Those players who may grind a little bit, or who do dungeons because they simply dont have time (Or a group) to raid.

As someone who didn’t push heroic straight away and doesn’t have a raiding guild, its exceedingly difficult to get into any form of a pug group for heroic as everyone wants you to have AOTC by week 2 or you can shove off. This is exceptionally frustrating but anticipated. The same can be said for M+. If you didnt get rating early on you have to claw your way up unless you are a meta spec.

I saw it mentioned that historically things revolved around the Tuesday reset, which is true. They did for a long time, and kinda still do in many aspects. HOWEVER, as a wise man once said ‘Times Change’. And WoW has to change what it offers to match that.

The gearing process itself has been evolving since Classic when you needed Resist gearsets in order to raid. Didnt have em? You dont get to raid, so the social pressure isn’t a new thing with modern WoW. You were EXPECTED to come with that gear, and the resist potions, and X and Y of all this other crap. (To be clear I never want to return to this era, I just experienced it)

BUT! Things changed a bit in TBC. Heroic Dungeons came out. Primal Nethers came out and crafting had some really good items to make for raiders.

Wrath was the first to introduce dungeons along with the content to offer catchup options for people with Trials 5-man and the trio of ICC dungeons.

Cata introduced the LFR system (With a TON of controversy behind it)

There has also been a large difference in pacing this expansion. Raids aren’t lasting 9-14 months anymore, and we will once again see a season that brings them back at an increased ilvl (Fated). Raids have become an Option, but not THE Option to get gear.

So why is it NOW that someone like myself should give up the option to grind dungeons for loot? Why would I want to take away my options as a causal player to increase my characters power when both styles of play are not only widely used but also intermixed quite a bit?

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37

It’s not “now”, it’s been ever since they introduced M+ in Legion.

Most solutions to the infinite M+ grind would benefit casual players. Think about the change they made to the rep from seeds in the Emerald Dream. The first 5 maxed out seeds give DRASTICALLY more rep than previously, and then it drops off. This means people who only do a few get way more rep, but people who grind experience severe diminishing returns on more time spent. That same concept is how M+ gearing should work, except it should be a hard limit instead of just diminishing returns. Currently M+ gearing has increasing returns/a positive feedback loop, which is not healthy when the gear is also strong in other content.

Additionally, as even Blizzard admitted in their post regarding the Crest cap reductions, lowering caps (going from infinite to a cap is effectively this) doesn’t actually impact more casual players much if at all, because they aren’t going to be hitting the caps anyway. Crest section of this bluepost

That’s kind of the problem. They’re forcefully intermixed. If you want to raid at a decent level, you have to also farm M+. At practically every level of raiding, you’re going to see a ton of value in terms of player power from doing at least your weekly keys. And vice versa, M+ players need to raid for a few specific pieces of loot to push their keys with.

Letting people choose the content they want to do is much better. I’ve done way more of the world/side content this expansion than past expansions because it was my choice and I did it on my own time, compared to Legion/BfA/SL where I got pushed into doing it for player power in my main content.

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38

This is how I feel as well.