-Drop your key in and select which mode you want to run: Normal (the way things are now) or No-Deplete
-If No-Deplete is selected, this would happen:
a. If you time the dungeon, the exact same end-of-dungeon experience you have now plays out (gear, vault credit, score, +1-3 on your key level)
b. If you fail the dungeon, your key’s dungeon can still change. You only loot Veteran (2-5) or Champion (6+) Warbound gear which you could send to alts, equip or vendor. You receive no score and no vault credit. However, your key level does not deplete and you do not have to re-run a lower level to try to bring it back up. If you still want your key to deplete for any reason, the depletion NPC is still available for your use.
Mythic+ keys should not exist. Treat them like Delves are currently, where you progress to higher levels, and are restricted by the lowest available level among all players in the party.
This encourages players to start where they should at a +2 and not try to jump to higher keys straight from delves with no M+ experience.
Change the Vault row for dungeons to be unique dungeons. This way people couldn’t just spam the quickest dungeon 8 times now that they can easily select which one and at which level to fill their vault.
This gets rid of key depletion and allows players more flexibility to farm for specific items if they want.
problem with this is not everyone “should” start at the same level. especially on second or third tiers of the season. We go into tier 2 decked out in mythic gear and are fully capable of stepping right into 7-10s week 1.
I don’t hate your idea. I like the compromise between keys not dropping and loot degrading.
You guys know that if you time all 12s your keys become resilient and don’t deplete, right? Just have to put up the effort up front in order to get the non-depletion reward.
Edit: I don’t think it would be healthy for a heavily pugged (in low keys) system to give lesser rewards at the end of dungeons for not doing them in-time. You already won’t get the IO which is a really big deal for progression. At least if you gain an item level or two you can punch through the keys that were a pain previously, and with more practice, move forward to greater challenges when your character and knowledge level increases.
Add in a cooldown on the keystone that (maybe the same amount of time as the dungeon timer) resets upon completion, to prevent resetting and trying something new immediatly once some kind of set-back occurs in a push key.
Otherwise this is the first no-depletion idea I can see myself support, with some minor tweaks.
Edit:
Updated with a more extensive list a couple posts down.
You could have 2 separate keystone pillars to enter the key into to make sure less shady tactics occurs. You could also have the little tooltip with timer, bosses, %, and keystone level say RESILIENT to make it more clear whats being played. Could also turn the yellow shell at the countdown blue for resilient keys for an extra visual indicator.
Would it though? Might encourage more teams, and less pugs. Might be less meta driven. I don’t think a delve like progression would be a bad thing, but I’m not upset with the current system either.
A potential drawback I can see with resilient keys even at key levels you haven’t currently timed, is that the amount of unattractive keys (like 9s or 11s) will be even less than now.
Had no idea you couldn’t drop the key for non-depletion. Now I’m a little disappointed lol, defeats the purpose.
Like, can’t bring your friend into a key for a try at a non deplete at a lower level. Why?! Or whatever it is you wanna do. Guess they don’t want people to fail a 10 and have a second go at it? What a weird waste of a potentially cool reward.
I’ve considered it some more. Here’s what I would like to do to your options.
Keys 2-10 are Normal by default, keys 11+ are No-Deplete by default. The current changes that occur at 12 (harder scaling, death affix) would with this change occur at 11 instead.
No-Deplete keys has a cooldown on the keystone, the cooldown is the same length as the timer of the dungeon it was put into. The cooldown resets upon completing the dungeon, or manually degrading the key 1 level at Lindormi.
No-Deplete offers no valorstones or crests, and all gear drops are reduced by one tier (Champ track) and are now warbound. This allows you to gear alts whilst pushing, which is a nice QoL change.
Not sure how I feel about vault, but I think that should remain at myth track still. Since with my changes we’d make all higher keys No-Deplete, it would suck to have to go back to 10s just for vault.
Alternatively to this complex change, we could do it the easy way and give keystones 3 charges before they deplete.
Regardless of what you think of my feedback, I think you should update your OP with any changes you may think of. It’s the first decent “remove keystone depletion” suggestion I’ve read on these forums.
We can already see what the highest level of the dungeon people have completed. Change this to “Level Available” instead, and just like keys, you can +3 a +5 key and your available level would jump from a +5 to a +8. It wouldn’t work much different than it does today, it’s just keeping people from trying to join keys higher than they’ve proven they should have access to.
Imagine also having parameters able to be set alongside the level of dungeon when choosing Mythic+, to set what level, such that groups forming for a +5 would not appear in search lists for players who only have +3 available. It would significantly cut down on applicants from undergeared people looking for a carry.
This can easily be addressed by treating it just as how keys are currently treated the first week of a new season. Players don’t start back with a +2 key, they get a key that’s what, 5 levels lower than the previous season? No difference here.
I can respect disagreement here. Maybe just go the other way, and allow access to the highest available in the party. But add a parameter to require a certain level available, restricted to no higher than the group leader’s level.