How would it be competition? You’d be only competing against yourself. No one mentioned ranked behavior competition.
I like Chromie time honestly. I don’t like m+ though.
Start of the week I had 3 AD’s in row where someone didn’t know how the totems work. This was in the 15-18 range.
How does that happen?
Well a big part of it is people are doing what they’ve been told to do when they can’t get into groups, they run their own keys. Great, and all the power to them.
The other part is M+ design. You don’t learn M+, you learn AD in the 10-16 range with these specific affixes. All the dungeons are dungeon specific knowledge.
So there’s a big disconnect in what keys people are awarded with and the experience required to get it. It’s too easy to come in and run 3 or 4 of your own keys and end up with a 15-17 key for a dungeon you’ve never been in and for a key range 2 levels higher than you’ve ever run.
And there’s a point where the carry that got you there stops working.
First of all, if this is what you got from what you said and what I pointed out … read it again. Because you missed the most important parts. As you are correct, the MT didn’t have 32 different challenges so that’s not what makes MT what it was. And precisely NO ONE wants M+ at a base-level to pose the same dangers that the MT does!
Secondly, Delves aren’t dungeons. They are specifically designed to not adhere to any of the traditional dungeon design. So making a comparison between Delves and M+ is a false dichotomy. It is on par with saying “Well it is good in raid so it must be good in M+ as well”. Just because the common denominator is PvE doesn’t mean that it is functionally the same. Not to mention Delves are designed as a solo-content which M+ very much so isn’t.
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L-take. Oof. So many words that aren’t “remove the physical key and let people play at whatever dungeon level they qualify for”.
KISS, tbh.
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You keep on insisting that M+ is keeping the game alive for some reason, when the fact is, new content is the lifeblood of MMOs, not recycled dungeons. This might keep a small portion of hardcore players playing, but the vast majority of MMO players sub for new content, then leave when they finish it.
I absolutely think that M+ is taking the place of new content getting made. The entire end game has been consumed by this single activity. I’m okay with it existing, but it should not be the primary way people gear up. Having people completely geared in heroic gear in 2 weeks of a new season is just dumb design.
Some day there is going to be a post-mortem for WoW, and I can guarantee people will be able to point to the addition of M+ being one of the main contributes to the eventual demise of the game.
No one is trying to remove content from you dude, none of us have that power, stop playing the victim here. If you think Blizzard is actually listening to people on these forums, then I don’t know what to say here. Every time this topic is brought up, you throw these tantrums like people actively have the ability to remove content from you, none of us are developers here.
People are making suggestions that would bring the game back to a place that is healthier and fun for everyone. Having content that scales endlessly and showers players in rewards is terrible content for a MMO. It was a system ripped right out of an Action RPG, it works in those games because those games are designed from the ground up to accommodate that type of gear acquisition. M+ creates too much competition, toxicity, and it invalidates a ton of content due to how lucrative the rewards are.
The community council member summed up the issues very well in one of their posts.
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.
I like how you say that M+ is lazy recycled content (means it takes little dev work)…but its preventing new content from being made (something that is a lot of dev work).
You can make that claim. Its easy to make claims that have no chance of actually happening.
Dont confuse me disagreeing with your vague statements as a tantrum.
Except it isnt. You dont like it. And thats ok. Many people like endlessly scaling content.
If you want to discuss changing the gearing of M+ to be more in line with raiding, thats a different topic and one I am open to.
If you want to state that Blizzard is not making enough content, as we have people literally complaining on the forums that Blizzard makes too much content…thats on you.
If you want to pretend that NEW CONTENT is why people stay subbed to WoW, then you will never find that I agree. Because that has absolutely never been the case in any MMO in the history of MMOs.
Every single successful MMO relies on repeatable content because NEW CONTENT is done extremely fast. Its why every single MMO has a bump in people playing when new content drops, and those people quit shortly after. And every single MMO has a decline in population until the next new content drop.
Repeatable content keeps people subbed outside of those new content drops, which only attracts some players momentarily.
“No one wants to remove content, we just want to remove the endlessly scaling m+”
How do you wrap your mind around that mindset?
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I think the major flaw in the argument is that they are saying M+ doesn’t push people to create consistent teams… But all of the front-page highest keys have been completed by consistent teams, if you look, most of the names are repeating with many of the same players playing with the same players they were with in the other keys.
If you network and get involved with forming a more consistent team of players, you will have a more consistent and successful experience rather than playing exclusively as a pug player for a rather large number of reasons:
More coordination/communication for stuns/CC/interrupts/DPS cooldowns.
Faster progression through keys (If the key is bricked, can drop it and join another member’s key or try and push up the bricked key immediately)
Consistent players/specs with less variance from pug performance
Can arrange times for play so that less time is spent searching for a group or players to fill
Can arrange loot specs to increase chances to funnel a high-value piece to a member of the team
Can play with set expectations that aren’t based upon sometimes less-accurate criteria like the io score which only measures what they have already completed but not the limit of what they are capable of completing.
After grabbing KSH this season, even with it being easy mode, I can honestly say M+ doesn’t feel right for this game. Nor did it ever.
I like the micro challenges. I like the challenge in general. What isn’t fun [to me] is grabbing 2 ilvl and suddenly going up 3-4 mythics. How is that fun? You learned most of what you need to know from your previous level. Now you’re sitting in a gear grind. A grind raiding has always done much better [in my opinion].
And the gear just rains from the sky to the point you’re suddenly destroying that level of mythic and experiencing 17s then 18s then 19s. Next thing you know you’re in 20s with 475 gear and there’s still 10 ilvl you can get. I just don’t get it. I don’t see the fun in it.
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Thank you. I don’t think any game should require at 40-60+ hour time commitment (even raiding doesn’t for the hardest of hardcore guilds).
Yes, the dungeon scales as you get past 25s+ but that’s not the core issue or where the time sink comes from. It comes from the core issues of not having a system in place that allows players to do said activity in a timely fashion.
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The game doesn’t account for you being bad at the game. It doesn’t inherently restrict you from completing it in a timely fashion.
Tindral took a guild 1000 attempts, while the encounter itself is under 10 mins.
Just like how a +25 key is taking you HOURS while it’s under 40 mins…
- Incorrect. This is a naive understanding of how systems work. Multi-billion dollar companies have solved the problems you’ve described since the early 2000s.
Everything you wrote, is a valid opinion and concern, but as I said, none of this is new nor is it hard to do. Many games have such systems that work extremely well.
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Lol, which games have systems that work extremely well?
The only real issues that affect most people (other than the 1% that does 15+) is:
-Key Depletion (this should be removed)
and
-They should add Mythic 0 to LFM.
The reason for Mythic 0 added to LFM is because it gives an introduction to Mythic+. There really isn’t valid reason for not doing it.
Please re-read the post if you need clarification. This isn’t about being “bad” or not able to complete a key. This is about taking an absorbent amount of time to SUCCESSFULLY time a key, which depends on FOUR other players, and depends on the synergy of the team.
That time comes from the first few core issues around forming groups as I described.
Hence why a solution is ELO based SOLO queue, where you know, SKILL is what determines if you complete the key, not spending hours playing manager.
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The system wouldn’t work for m+ because so many things are dependent on other players. If someone can more efficiently do critical tasks, you don’t need to do them. If the tank can’t pull as large or is unwilling to do so, that too impacts stuff.
There is no real way for Blizzard to assemble a group that is guaranteed to time a key for you. And any such score attempting to do so, will be heavily flawed because there are many things to consider.
And your ELO must be near zero cause you’re willing to write this post.
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M+ doesnt require a 40-60 hour time commitment.
Raiding definitely does for the hardest of hardcore guilds.
What would be a system in place which allows players to do said activity in a timely fashion?
If the issue is how often keys fail, then what is the alternative? How can you ensure fewer keys fail with a WoW system itself? Outside of the system of guilds, communities, making friends?
If the factors are coordination, skill levels, and dungeon difficulty, only 2 of those are things that can be addressed in a system. Difficulty will always exist in an infinite scaling system.
What suggestions do you have of a system in place to combat the factors of coordination and player skill level?
A MMR/ELO system will not have any impact on any of this.
We already have systems for creating “rosters” for M+.
If your goal is that you want a system in place to make it easier to community, coordinate, and keep up with the people you run M+ with…we have that.
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Correct. That works for a certain key level. The game does not punish mistakes until you get to a certain level where mechanics are what they were meant to be.
Systems account for things like this quite trivially, it’s all a part of the algorithm.
Nope, not impossible. There is generic data and learning from the sheer tons of logs, blizzard data, and class data. Games use this information all the time, and a basic understanding of algorithms allows this to also be trivial.
Again, I wouldn’t worry too much, see algorithm above.
You could potentially gear faster in a pre-made group if you managed to have people boost you, otherwise you can’t trade gear reliably.
Agreed that yes, routes, pulls, cds are all great, but my main issue is forming such groups is a near impossible depend on what key-range you are in. Why have such a bad game design where the answer is “LOL JUST FIND A DISCORD??”
And this is the crux of the issue with M+. I think it causes massive burnout and it turns actually loses more players post expansion launch than it is supposed to retain.
I don’t understand why people need this game to be the only thing they play every day? How is this a compelling argument? That you’re advocating for more grinding, more time played. People act like it was easy to get raid ready in the past, or that it is somehow bad for people to just to raid log once they reach a certain point.
M+ was a nefarious system devised to keep people playing. It is a time waster, and a tool to farm played time metrics for Blizzard’s corporate overlords.
You all are being gamed and don’t even realize it. Imagine
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what, 16-23 hour days for one to two weeks hahaha…
Just to killl… 9 bosses.