At first I was like, yea that seems like a good change.
My first this week as a 476 hunter was a 4+ Ruby and we timed +3. Overall felt pretty decent about keys.
Now im not a GREAT tank on my Paladin - but im not crap either. I also did Season 1 so know a few of the Dragonflight dungeons as mythic. I was a Key Master on my paladin and hunter in all 3 seasons and Keystone Hero for a few dungeons as well.
This week I have been unable to complete an M2 Algathars on my tank and have struggle don a lot of M0. The main stopper seems to be Vexamus, people just arent getting how to manage orbs.
But I think the key difference is just people are not up to the challenge of the new system. They keep popping into PUG’s at M0 and M2 expecting it to be a cakewalk, they dont know the fights and they just arent up to it. My last AA I was out-DPSing the Mage on the Tree fight.
In terms of pugging this change absolutely sucks because the quality/ability of the players seems to be out of touch with how hard the keys are now and people just dont realise it.
Ive wasted over half my available game-time this week for absolutely no gain simply because PUG groups keep failing.
That isnt fun or cool. Im sure it will improve once people start acquiring gear - but I think id rather have the older system which Elitists were saying was “too easy” over this pile of garbage which was introduced just to keep high end content out of reach of casuals.
myself and others like the changes because keys levels, especially at the lower end, used to all blend together. now there are clearer steps in difficulty between levels for the most part. players are exposed to dangerous yet important mechanics sooner so they’re incentivized to practice and become competent at handling them earlier. M0 was made relevant again. Tuning outpaces affixes so you get more experience with the dungeon itself before another layer is added on.
The changes have their flaws but i think they were healthy for the most part.
It’s less that the early content blended together, it was largely non-existent. Normal and heroic were mostly untouched and the first 10 key levels could be powered through by almost anyone without knowing mechanics. All this has done is cut out the part most people never interacted with. The more casual players may see a shock at first but it’s actually easier than before. Last seasons m+12 rewards can be had with only having to deal with tyrannical/fortified, up to m+19 rewards can be had without have to to ever see the third affix.
Gearing to hit ilevel requirements for queued content is also easier. I picked up my hunter for the first time since S1 and within a couple days was able to go from 410 to 463 through running heroics and crafting 486 gear with whelping crests.
I think a huge factor to this that you are not thinking about is that heroic dungeons are supposed to offer better loot (old mythic 0) and be farmable now too. This may be where undergeared characters from previous seasons need to play for a bit. I think this is a good intention too as heroic dungeons were actually non existent before.
Maybe your characters aren’t ready for 2’ (12’s) and need some gear.
I’m not sure it’s even that high. Base score for keys is like 99. Timing all 2s is going to be very close to 2k. Two chest a key or two and KSM is all 2s.
I think that this is pretty much it. I think people are just so used to 0s and 2s being “pull everything to the boss,” keys. I know I am guilty of this.
I was in a 2 key the other day where the tank did a massive pull in rlp and turned the corner and died in like 3 seconds. My little legs couldn’t keep up to heal. We laughed it off and they said they forgot defensives. It happens. I like keys with dialogue and we did well the rest of the key. Dude pulled out almost 200k damage overall which was nuts. I think that that was the only key I pugged out of the 3 characters I have played so far this season.
OP, I am sorry about all of your wasted time. I can only really suggest finding people to play with that aren’t pugs as that can not only make it more fun, but you will probably have more success.
Blizzard changed the mythic system because NM, HM and m0 were useless before the patch. You can skip all of them to join the M+ group. Also, finding a group for mythic BH is hard when you need to get locked at BH for your professions. No one literally cares about m0 before the patch.
It’s actually higher now. Part of the change was to move the affixes and the affixes granted a large amount of score (+10 normalized score per affix per tyran/fort). Previously you needed 13s with some 14s but you got both affixes for +20 normalized score per tyran/fort, but now the first affix doesn’t happen until +5 so you don’t get that huge boost. I’ve been tracking it and now you need to do on average +5s across the board for both affixes (you can less if you have some above +5).
To get to 2k you need 250 score on average per dungeon (8 dungeons). As of today I have a ++4 and ++5 Ruby lifepools and the total score for the dungeon is 248 (remember even if you get 99 points for a dungeon on fort, you get 33 on tyran for the same level key for the same dungeon next week.
Heroic is not good enough gear to transition into M+ though. So it’s M0 spamming until geared. Heroic is still basically pointless for anyone coming out of the previous season with KSM or AoTC full gear.
It IS what the devs wanted.
They have been implementing changes in WoW to save on server space for years. Something like 40-60% of payers cap at the old +10 keys in m+ in any given season. If they are alienated from the content, that frees up a heck of a lot of instance server space, and server space is expensive. Money saved is money earned.
