Mythic Plus should be FUN, not a JOB

The forums have two competitive points of view regarding current M+. So has my guild to some degree although most of them are more inclined to my perspective. I want to explain the perspective difference between the “Get good, you can’t time 9+s because you suck” crowd, and the rest of us.

There is a band of players somewhere in the top 70% to 95% that are feeling the most pain right now. That’s where I’d describe myself and most of my guild. In the past like in AMTDH, we got 6/9M and most of us had IO scores over 2500. All of us in that category are not having fun right now. The few in my guild that got over 3k in DFLIGHT s3/4 don’t see these problems as being too bad. There are a few main differences between these kind of players.

The big gap is in the past it has been relatively challenging but worthwhile to get at least 8 8s done per week. We’d maybe fail 2-3 of these per week because of a bad group, but it was easy to push up a 7 through pugs and get back to an 8 to close the gap and fill up our vault. Now this is impossible, so the best I can hope to get a single 10 and a lottery ticket to maybe 1 MYTH piece. I will never get the gear needed to slowly nerf the Mythic Raid. Neither will most of my guild and I can feel the energy being sucked from the group. This is not healthy. This is not playing poorly and asking to be “handed” myth gear. We’ve never been handed Myth gear. We get a LOTTERY TICKET ONCE PER WEEK. To get my much crappier lottery ticket I now need to smash my head into 8-10 painful 9s in hoping to time 2-3 of them for a shot at 1 10 key to beat on completion. No thanks, I have a job, kids, other games, a wife, chores, and the occasional recreational outing outside Azeroth if you can believe such things.

The higher band of players in my conversations with them tend not to do any of that stuff, but they are the overwhelming loud minority of players. They are in this forum, probably already typing their reply to me to once again tell me to get good. This is the only serious game they play, and they push for score not gear. Their game mode already existed in keys higher than 8s. They care about portals, and score. They play for pride and for a “Souls Like” challenge. So give it to them, and stop screwing over good players that want to not have their time wasted.
Below are my quick hit arguments:

  1. People struggling in 7-10s right now are not bad, they are mid mythic raiders like me.

  2. Because of crest dropping even with the fix at 8, i’m still not rewarded for my time at all when I fail 50% of 8s for only 5 crests even though i’m at 620 ilvl.

  3. It was healthy to make the curve of getting gear easier in the first couple weeks with gilded from 6s and vault at 8s. The grind was still longer than people seem to remember to cap your crests and already didn’t leave much time to do other things in life.

  4. The players who like this are playing 5+ nights per week, just look at their keys. We should not listen to these players, they are not the norm or majority.

  5. The fun of high end WOW content comes from consistently getting smaller little progression bumps, and then FEELING that power in the form of more DPS/Health. You can feel yourself being in less danger from a big hit or doing a new double pull that was too hard before.

  6. These bumps can’t happen when it’s completely unrealistic to get the myth gear slowly needed to achieve this goal.

  7. The ALT friendly dream is dead, because I now have to put any free time I have to run content into my one mythic raid character to have any chance at progressing.

  8. Games for players like me are supposed to be something with a decent level of challenge but not a giant time sink to the point where I feel like I must dedicate my whole life to the game to play well enough. This is what dragonflight got right that TWW is getting COMPLETELY WRONG.

That’s the summary of the issues so I’m going to suggest below all the fixes that would keep the challenge there for the sweatiest without disaffecting the 95% of players that currently just want to give up. I don’t want to feel this way. I love this game. I used to like M+ but I LOVE MYTHIC RAID. I want to be able to do it without this insane wall.

  1. Crests from 7s, MYTH VAULT from 8s. It matches the difficutly level of raiding up well.

  2. Deaths costs no timer by default, new 7+ affix adds back the original 5s death timer. Death already costs you runbacks, resources, and damage. It already slows down your key.

  3. Nerf overall damage of every single ability in M+ by around 30% by a 10. This could be done with the per dungeon base scaling numbers. Nerf healing by 20% to compensate. The giant spikey health bars problem is insanity and requires much higher healing skillcap compared to Mythic Raid.

  4. Give underpowered tanks like Monk/DH/Paladin a chance to live. More HP or Armor or something. Tanking is an unfun mess. In a 10 last night the laser beam from first boss in Dawnbreaker was 80% of my HP at 620. That’s just wild. Why must it be like this.

  5. MOST IMPORTANTLY - consider the source when listening to feedback. Look and see how much time some of these people are putting into your game, and stop listening to people who do LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE WITH THEIR LIFE. They are not the ones paying the majority of the subs. They are not driving your revenue. They will be there because you already had content for them. They we’re already playing high M+ for weeks after I could care less because they wanted to push their score. They we’re still having fun. Their opinion about the occasional player like me “ruining” their high end key environment is not based in reality.

This is my overall view on the landscape of things. Have at it trolls.

P.S. I want to love this game again, please just fix it Blizzard. In the meantime I’ll be playing way more D4 VOH, because it’s really good, and WOW doesn’t feel good at all.

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The second I started running with 2 guildies, I cleared 11 db, 10 sob, and 10 mists. It really is a pugging issue. Youre relying on 4 other people to not suck.

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I definitely related to that second paragraph, being right outside the top 5% right now feels like you’re in the bottom 5%. But after yesterday’s hotfix, I immediately pushed another 150 rating, got my gilded weapon crafted last night. I’d give these nerfs some time to marinate and see how it turns out. If your guildies can get their hands on a 636 weapon as well it’s going to make the dungeons a lot more manageable. I will say there were many, and I mean MANY quick depletes yesterday even of +8s but I don’t think there’s anything people can do about that. Many tanks giving us a full kick rotation just to get instantly deleted by packs because they didn’t hit any sort of cooldown before running in.

10s feel pretty comparable to the first 3 mythic raid bosses atm. Seems fine. Maybe some specific bosses are outliers but they’re being brought into line overall.

I wish they’d buff mists though, it’s comical how much easier it is than everything else.

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The data here just obviously disproves this. There is a massive precipitous drop off in terms of keys being done.

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As there is going into mythic in the first place. M+ myth track awards being comparable to early mythic makes sense. My only real complaints at this point are with specific boss abilities / trash and challengers peril.

A 30% nerf across the board is insane.

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But its not comparable. From those bosses you get MYTH drops instantaneously. With M+ you get a myth gear lottery ticket once per week. I stressed this in the OP for a reason. It’s not the same thing.

And regarding the 30% nerf, it’s only insane if you didn’t nerf healing to match. The spikey damage is far too much. Way too many 60% + damage hits. Mythic Raid doesn’t have this.

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Pugging was fine for four expansions.

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Thanks for your feedback!

Maybe I can help to some extent with strategies that have been somewhat effective for me:

  • Slow and steady appears to be the feel of the season. My timed +9s were all almost 2 pack pulls and a couple single ones. I feel like the ‘5 pack lust’ strategy is just too high risk.

  • This is obviously very biased but melee compositions just rock this time. My best runs have been myself, my enhancement and paladin friend at the core assigning kicks to each other.

  • Get a good score, make own party and be picky. Biggest fallover point in this has been people making high parties without score themselves (which has worked before but not this season).

Last bit is be flexible. I think at the start I didn’t really want to tank I’ll admit. I’ve done it for a long time. But I saw the signs and started my main more towards tanking after seeing how barren it was.

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This is the anti-social mentality that is killing the game right now. This shouldn’t be the kind of gatekeeping we’re doing all the time. For last few bosses of mythic or really high M+ this kind of selection should exist. You should have to be much more concerned about group composition and those things, but for 7+? That’s a new world that doesn’t create the kind of inclusivity that allows the game to thrive. It’s going to lose the “massively” in MMO.

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But aren’t we basically doing keys that give us Mythic raid level weapons and crafts? (and gear upgrades).

You can choose to not gatekeep in other ways. My 10 Dawnbreaker and 9 Seige on Wish-Thaurissan done using non-resto shaman healers.

No pain, no gain

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Then why haven’t you done it yet. You even get Gilded crests from killing the last boss on heroic. If you can kill that, you can kill the first couple on mythic pretty easily, and could have had at least a few vault slots available at that tier by now.

Oh, I forgot. You’re the only one with a valid opinion on content you’ve barely touched. Everyone else is just trolling. My bad.

For the record, I agree that M+ is more difficult this season than it has been previously. I have a feeling that’s down mostly to the removal of affixes. Meaning they’ve shifted a ton of mechanics onto the trash…which increases the learning curve. I’m just not sold on the notion that anyone is being “screwed over” by this. It offers you the best gear in the game. If it takes a dozen wipes to kill an early mythic boss, it should also take plenty of depletes until you finally start timing 8+ keys.

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But is that FUN? Cause it’s clearly not, based on the Data.

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People were going to mass unsub for being hard stuck at 619. That’s why. When the game is for 1% of players, don’t be surprised when only 1% stay subbed.

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But like, if the community cannot perform, the content is good as dead. Still requires a fix.

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Fun is subjective. Just because you don’t find it fun doesn’t mean others share your opinion.

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Fun for most people seems to just be watching their ilvl number go up.

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Tbh, Blizzard can touch the content and nerf it to oblivion to the point of boredom, at most. This is mostly a community issue with pugs, the system is not forcing anyone to gatekeep content, but people do so regardless for the guarantee of a clear.

No one wants to have their progression screwed.

I think the biggest issue comes from the condensed progression. Given that a +10 is the equivalent of a +20 in DF, the spike in difficulty is sharper with the progression in keys.

Maybe they should return to previous method, and make the range of rewards more sparse?

I didn’t really like essentially the ‘be happy with what you have now scrub’ mentality a coupla forum goers had, or even one guy in YouTube like ‘make em drop from 10s’.

My guess is it probably feels good to say at the time but like you said might not feel so great when they see PF is dead.