So TWW Season 1 is now in full swing, and by this point we’ve had a full week to play around with the revamped M+ system. In this thread I’ll be compiling some pretty extensive feedback about what I think works and doesn’t, and what I believe needs to be improved very quickly.
The Affixes
- Xal’atath’s Bargain: Ascendant is a mostly fine Kiss/Curse affix. The reward feels well worth the resources required to deal with it most of the time. The game needs a better way of telegraphing when this affix is supposed to happen, though; there are times where you’re moving a pack of trash or a boss and the orbs all land where they were, a mile away, rather than where they are. I want to plan my pulls a bit better around this affix, and I want to know when I should be saving my stops/CC for the affix versus using it to deal with the trash in some capacity (oh don’t worry, we’ll get to this).
- I can’t speak to the live versions of the other Xal’atath affixes yet; I remember hating one or two of them on the Beta, though.
- Tyrannical/Fortified are mostly fine for what they are, but I feel like they play too big of a role in contributing to the massive difficulty spikes keys experience at +4 and +10. With a difference of just a single key level, trash packs I could pull very easily on a +9 can become extremely dangerous on a +10; that spike in difficulty is extremely jarring and the game does a poor job easing players into Fortified and Tyrannical coexisting.
- Challenger’s Peril needs to go, immediately. A 15 second penalty per death contributes absolutely nothing positive to the way M+ works and makes full wipes (which could already make or break a key) absurdly punishing now, and even individual deaths can make keys hard to salvage since they add up so quickly. This affix is far and away the unhealthiest element of the current M+ season, in my eyes, and the fact that it activates in keys as low as +7 makes this affix ten times more frustrating than it already is. I don’t know how this affix benefits anyone: high key pushers hate it because even small mistakes become three times more punishing than they ever were, and anyone doing weekly keys for Vault loot (including and especially pug groups) hate it because these groups are punished three times harder for having the same level of consistency or a lack thereof. Hell, even death skips (which were rare but not unheard of in the last couple expansions) are completely out of the question now because they waste absurd amounts of time. I’m not even willing to compromise with a 10 second penalty instead of a 15 second penalty; just leave it at 5 seconds like it always was. This affix, moreso than anything else, is seriously hurting the M+ pug scene. Delete it.
- I can’t speak to it on live servers, but the difficulty spike from a +11 to a +12 is unbelievable on even a conceptual level. I don’t think I like that very much.
The CC Changes
In TWW, the way Crowd Control effects that are not interrupts work against mobs with casts “stopped” by those effects is now different. Mobs will now constantly recast whatever they were trying to cast after a non-Interrupt CC breaks. If you stop, say, an AoE fear in Stonevault with a knockback or a 1-second duration stun, they will IMMEDIATELY start recasting that AoE fear instead of being locked out of it for an extended period of time. This applies to a great many abilities, including anything done by the CCable Gorm mobs in Mists and the necromancers’ and Amarth’s adds (specifically the Skeletal Mages’ Frostbolt Volleys). The intention behind this was to reduce the need for powerful AoE CC effects by reducing the overall power of those effects, but this did not work in the slightest.
I’m not going to mince words here: this change sucks on every level. I understand the intent behind said change, but in practice I’m finding that my groups need more AoE CC effects to deal with the drastically increased amounts of problematic abilities that are now immediately recast upon getting stopped. And that’s to say nothing of getting my own kick or stop whiffed because an Elemental Shaman’s Earthquake wanted to be a little silly and stun something for a second; now there are abilities I cannot trash and that are entirely out of my control that can prevent me from stopping some very important casts. Moreover, in less-coordinated groups this means that someone thinking they’d be helpful by using Psychic Scream on a pack to cancel a bunch of casts will likely just result in everyone else whiffing their kicks, and now the mobs recast whatever they were doing immediately afterwards. This change is a complete and utter failure and needs to go yesterday.
The Dungeons
The Stonevault
The Master Machinists boss fight has a ton of highly questionable design elements that need to be addressed quite urgently. Specifically, I’d like to point out the following issues:
- Ranged interrupts are absolutely non-negotiable here because Speaker Brokk immediately casts Molten Metal after casting Scrap Song and moving to one of the far sides of the room. Melee-heavy comps, particularly ones with Priests, are immensely punished on this fight even in very low keys as a result.
- Blazing Crescendo can and sometimes does overlap with Exhaust Vents, depending on interrupt timings on Speaker Brokk. The safe vent is never well telegraphed until the Exhaust Vents cast itself happens, and as such it’s very possible to have a safe spot that is impossible to reach because a giant instant death cube is busy exploding in the middle of the room, leaving you with extremely tiny safe zones flanked on all sides by instant death. And all the while there’s both high ticking damage from Exhaust Vents going out and a massive initial hit from the Blazing Crescendo cast itself. Overlaps like this feel entirely random, and are absurdly difficult to deal with. I genuinely feel like I have no control over the difficulty of this boss because on some pulls Exhaust Vents will cooperate with your group and on other pulls you’ll have some of the unluckiest placements you’ll ever see overlapping with Blazing Crescendo.
EDIT: This was mostly alleviated as of 9/24/2024. Cool!
- You effectively have a grace period of 1.5 seconds to kill both bosses before whichever boss remains casts Silenced Speaker and starts pulsing unhealable amounts of party-wide damage. The bosses already have mismatched health pools (with Dorlita having significantly more HP than Brokk) so it’s very easy to trigger this mechanic, and it triggers far too quickly for how high the damage is and does far too much damage for how quickly you can trigger it; in a +7 (which is a pug-level key and thus should not expect this level of coordination) you genuinely have under 5 seconds to kill both of these bosses before everyone dies to this damage unless they commit the defensives they probably needed to survive Vents+Crescendo and thus do not have available to them. There needs to be a way more forgiving window before Silenced Speaker activates; there is nothing worse than killing one boss and your group dying
- The trash before Void Speaker Eirich is frustrating on many fronts, including forced knockbacks, party-wipe totems that become harder and harder to burst down for some classes as key levels scale up, and, more importantly, a stacking debuff the Earth Elementals apply that persists out of combat. You cannot double-pull them without committing significant CDs, but if one of them applies this debuff right before it dies you effectively cannot pull the next pack for up to 25 seconds because the next pack has another one that’ll just refresh the debuff and increase its stack count by one, which eventually leads to one-shotty levels of spike damage.
- Skarmorak’s crystals need to do much less damage on death than they do; it’s way, way too easy to kill them with just incidental cleave.
City of Threads
- Izo is still one of the hardest bosses this season. This boss is very much Yazma-esque in terms of how the fight plays out (in other words, it boils down to living enormous spike damage in high keys and it falls apart in uncoordinated keys even at very low key levels) and I think it needs to be made a little more forgiving.
- The rest of this place is fine. There’s a caster mob before Orator that’s absolutely miserable, but the good news is that you pull exactly one of these ever.
Necrotic Wake
- The Zolramus Gatekeeper changes we got recently are extremely good. These might actually be worth pulling for the first time ever!
- The dungeon as a whole needed a pretty drastic rework after the weapons got their upfront damage toned down/after the hammers got removed. It did not get said rework, which leads to…
- …Amarth requires considerably more Crowd Control than what is realistic for most groups. The boss requires constant interrupts to deal with Necrotic Bolt, and the adds spawn too frequently to require so much CC to deal with when the boss is simultaneously casting Necrotic Bolt very often. And, of course, the universal CC change to allow mobs to recast their spells immediately after breaking out of a non-interrupt CC effect amplifies this further; now you need a kick rotation on Amarth himself, and you need CC and kicks to deal with the Skeletal Mages. Better not run with a Priest, friend! If you do, better hope the rest of your group is on the same page regarding Shackle Undead and doesn’t wipe you by breaking your CC! Now, the Anima Orbs can lock a wave of adds down long enough to kill them, but committing Anima Orbs on this boss leads to another problem, and this problem is quite massive…
- …Surgeon Stitchflesh, even after the recent 20% add damage nerf, is still an absurdly difficult boss and is giving me SL S1 Hakkar vibes in the worst possible way. The boss dies extremely quickly if you commit Bloodlust and literally all of your Kyrian Weapons to kill him quickly. However, you really only get one chance to do this: if you wipe for any given reason after you’ve committed Bloodlust and your Kyrian Weapons, your key is bricked. The “intended” way to do Surgeon Stitchflesh, which is to hook him down multiple times and kill the previous add as the new one spawns, is absolutely unsustainable even after the last round of nerfs. The boss takes an extremely long time if done the normal way, and the sheer amount of rot damage going out makes an extremely long pull of this boss unsustainable after about two minutes or so.
- Nalthor the Rimebinder, as a result of blowing every resource you have to kill Stitchflesh in a reasonable time frame of under two minutes, is an extremely long boss fight that historically had massive issues with his HP scaling in high keys thanks to Icebound Aegis and the fact that at least one DPS is out of commission at any point for the entire encounter.
Grim Batol
- Erudax is my personal frontrunner for the title of “hardest dungeon boss this season” and the only bosses that compete with him on this front are Surgeon Stitchflesh, Izo (maybe), Ki’katal, and Master Machinists. The visual clarity on this fight is abysmal; the boss’s model is enormous and frequently obscures tentacles under him, and getting grabbed by a tentacle when Gale of Shadows is closing in will result in an immediate death and possibly even a wipe, and the fight drags on long enough that eventually the room is infested with these tentacles. They can be cleared with immunities, but this is a very, very restrictive requirement to have in even relatively low keys.
Edit: This got adjusted a bit as of 9/24/2024.
- Erudax’s party-wide damage is absurdly high as well, even if handled appropriately. In less-coordinated groups killing the Hatchlings too quickly will also result in an immediate party wipe when Erudax spawns more tentacles.
- The Ascendant trash is absolutely miserable. They do way, way too much party-wide damage when they hit 50% and there being a double Ascendant pull before the 3rd boss is absolutely nuts.
- The beams those mobs cast, as well as Broadside from the Ashvane Cannoneers (both the trash and boss versions) in Siege, often have invisible visuals for about a second so you have MUCH less time to react and see where those lethal frontals are being pointed.
- There are far, far too many Decurses required for this place.
Edit: This has been addressed as of 9/24/2024. Very nice!
- The routing here sucks. You have to pull quite literally the entire dungeon, sans a single pack (and you have very few options on this front), to meet the count requirements.
Ara-Kara
- As per usual, whenever there’s anything that casts Web Bolt in this game it’s paired with the caveat that if you interrupt Web Bolt they immediately recast something else. This is true here.
- The last boss is disproportionately harder than the rest of the dungeon but the dungeon as a whole is extremely fine difficulty-wise.
- Anub’zekt’s charge cannot be avoided by some classes (i.e. Priest) and getting hit by the charge is very lethal. Other classes can either cancel it altogether or can move out of the way with burst mobility (Leap, Blink, etc.).
Mists of Tirna Scithe
- All the changes made to the trash in the maze and Gorm sections of this zone suck. The Expels are very frustrating to deal with as a caster and Acid Nova paired with the Acidgullets’ casts can be very hard to survive as well.
- This dungeon is, however, very reasonably tuned.
The Dawnbreaker
I was terrified of this dungeon based on how it played out on the Beta, so I was very surprised when the dungeon turned out to be one of the easier ones thus far. All of my issues with this place are bug-related. That being said, this place has a LOT of issues:
- The orbs from the Xal’atath’s Bargain: Ascendant affix can spawn on top of the ship’s balloons. Of course, they still give Speaker Shadowcrown a nice juicy 100% Haste buff to ensure that your death will be as quick as it is painful.
- You can clip into, or through, the Nerubian airships as you Skyride into them. This leads to either being stuck inside the airship for a bit or falling for north of 10 seconds before dying, only to be rewarded by a 15 second death penalty, plus all the time needed to run out of the checkpoint, mount up, and fly to the ship. Losing time to bugs like this is beyond infuriating.
- If you push Speaker Shadowcrown to 50% immediately after she casts Burning Shadows you’re probably going to wipe because you can’t heal while flying. These sorts of dumb push times that cause bad overlaps shouldn’t exist anywhere, let alone in M+. I haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder if the Ascendant orbs can also spawn during this…
- You can pre-immune the visual and debuff for Rasha’nan’s Rolling Acid waves. However, the wave will still go out, except nobody in the group will know which way it’s going. Not great!
- Abilities like Harpoon get you killed in P1 of Rasha’nan because they yank you into the center of her hitbox, which is off the edge of the Dawnbreaker.
- After killing Rasha’nan, the forced RP to ferry you back onto the main ship is frustrating as is but is often accompanied by this annoying bug where you get the debuff by not having Lamplighter’s Blessing, likely when you’re in the RP, and you’ll proceed to all die. It’s a mild inconvenience if you already completed the key, but if you still need count after Rasha’nan dies this’ll subtract a minute and fifteen seconds from the clock before factoring in flying to a trash pack. This can and will kill people’s keys.
Siege of Boralus
Oh god. Where to begin…
- The giants after the 2nd boss have an extremely lethal AoE, changed from being a lethal frontal in BFA. This can be avoided with LoS, but this is not made clear whatsoever; I wasn’t very happy to find myself getting one-tapped by what is otherwise an unavoidable, uninterruptible ability. Forced LoS mechanics suck.
Edit: This ability has been nerfed as of 9/24/2024 and is much less lethal in keys below +12. This is a good thing!
- The random grips the Irontide Raiders cast are terrible and are poorly telegraphed. I’ve had many a Void Torrent cancelled by these horrible mobs, and I had someone who got targeted by a Charge get gripped in and dome the entire party in a +10 just now.
- The second boss requires a snare or else she starts obliterating the group. This is an archaic mechanic that, while communicated in the Dungeon Journal, does not need to exist in its current form and makes the fight frustrating with some comps. A guild group I was not involved with had to spam Hamstring to keep the boss from obliterating everyone with Gut Shot.
- Short races (Dwarf, Gnome/Mechagnome, Goblin, and Vulpera) have a bad tendency to go swimming when they’re trying to walk around the pillar at the center of Hadal’s room which can and often will lead to unfortunate deaths. How is this still a thing?
- I hate Viq’goth. I hate, hate, hate this boss. Hate it. These unavoidable knockbacks add literally nothing to this fight, at all, and instead make it exceedingly frustrating to play no matter what class, spec, or role I’m playing. This boss may not be the 8+ minute behemoth he was in BFA, but in some respects this fight is genuinely worse than that now. Please for the love of god remove this knockback and don’t look back.
EDIT: As of 9/24/2024, they have removed this knockback and will not look back.
TL;DR: This season has a LOT of problems. I think the difficulty progression in keys is absolute nonsense and actively makes what was otherwise a promising key level squish much worse. I think many dungeons desperately need fast tuning like what Stitchflesh and Izo got (including those very same bosses’ respective dungeons). And, of course, I think Challenger’s Peril and the changes to how CC effects work are massive design failures that need to be reverted as soon as possible; these two in tandem make the key pugging scene extremely frustrating and will drastically hurt the health of this season within a short while. Ultimately, this is just a series of my own opinions on the season. But in my opinion, this season is rough and needs some serious and swift attention.
