Except no one really cares about your ilvl. You are not getting invites because of score. This is also more of a result of 2 months going by and a lot of players having 10s on farm. We see this every season where once people get x score they just farm 10s or 20s for vault. The 619 ilvl and the barrier to 10s are not mutually exclusive.
Players at this point could also have 6 crafted 636 slots. The ilvl debate is pretty dead at this point.
I don’t think people really avoid CoT from what I’ve seen. People join whatever is filling and looks good in terms of group leader’s score and composition.
What is there left to remove? They gutted all of the affixes to the point where there’s only 1.
We are worried that many players will use their keys and constantly fail while dragging in countless pugs. This is a net-negative to the pug community. There are already enough players failing upwards, we don’t need to add more fuel to the problem.
I understand your concern. In the end if someone buys a carry, I don’t think they’ll then be wasting time to fail those keys. I would imagine they’d spend their time better. I honestly think that this won’t be a big issue and changing the system has more benefits than downsides.
I don’t think paid carries happen widely enough for it to be a concern. When referring to carried players, it is moreso those who got carried unintentionally by crest and vault farmers. Which are a lot of players in key/score ranges they personally are not ready for.
I get that you think there would be more benefits, but there are going to be significant drawbacks that will only impact pugs.
I do think it would marginally reduce the problem and I have always been against them reducing it. They should have kept the Crest reward for finishing untimed keys.
New kiss/curse affixes are a lot better then what we had before. As long as you do the affix correctly you get a 30-40% uptime of the positive buff the entire dungeon run.
Both Fortified/Tyrannical together at +10s and higher makes the difficulty consistent.
Bosses seem to be tuned to be shorter encounters usually around <2.5 minutes on average.
Con’s:
Challenger’s affix punishing people with -15s off the timer seems a bit much when it starts at +7. It really should be something on +10s and higher.
You still need to farm +10s for the best vault loot.
+12s and higher have a noticeable difficulty jump with the loss of the weekly affix and +10% more scaling.
Dungeon tuning is still questionable. CoT has bosses that are easily 2 key levels harder then other dungeons.
7 out of 8 dungeons have curses/poisons which makes some specs meta.
I was curious what the dps item levels were of my 10s and 11. Per raider.io
+11 AK 626, 619, 615
+10 DB 625, 617, 631
+10 DB 617, 624, 623
+10 Mists 620, 624, 625
+10 SV 629, 626, 622
+10 NW 628, 622, 620
+10 SoB 622, 625, 615
Overall seems to be low/mid 620s, something you can reach with 2 crafted items from doing 8s. I’ve had 1 lone 630+ person, they seem pretty are. Quite a few still less than 620.
You think more people are pugging 4/8 Mythic than doing 10s?
This is the key issue. It’s not “still”. For every season previous you only needed to farm 8s for the best vault not 10s. Moving from 8s to 10s has put a lot of people in a position where the level to get max vault is above their capabilities. And 10s are a lot harder than they used to be because every 10 has both Tyrannical and Fortified.
And this in turn has led to the situation where people are extremely selective, so even if you are someone who is capable of timing 10s, you just aren’t going to get in those groups because the risk of failure is too high to invite someone who’s only just good enough.
I agree that this shift has created a lot of tension, but I think it was the right call in an effort to try and balance gearing between Raids and M+. The problem we have is mainly driven by players who are punching above their weight class all for the sake of getting the best loot while making the experience worse for everyone. They don’t have the common sense to gradually progress higher into keys. Too many of them think that doing a key level once means they are ready for the next level. The norm of getting max tier loot needs to change to match the norm for Mythic Raiders in that the majority of them wont get CE or get fully BiS’d out from Mythic difficulty. The double standards and the expectation people formed about easy M+ gear is the problem and I hope Blizzard learned how detrimental a DF S3 had on the community.
That was never the case before anyway, except in S4 with bullions. You will never get BIS gear from M+ vault because BIS gear is always found in mythic raid. The only time this wasn’t true was when you could purchase mythic raid gear with bullions.
Someone getting 1 vault a week from M+ is gearing at half the speed as someone doing the first 4 mythic bosses each week.
Well it’s mythic, so it’s not easy enough to still kill the boss with 5 people missing. As soon as 1 person leaves your PUG is done 90% of the time. Because nobody is joining a mythic pug in progress.