I was not heavy into raiding until ICC pretty much. I relied on dungeon and vendor gear. I ran way more heroics to grind out that gear than I should have. Along with things like ZA, etc.
AS far as I’m aware, Mythics do not scale gear the way Challenge Modes or even Timewalking dungeons do. If you are wearing mythic raid level gear, entering into mythic +1 isn’t going to give you any level of challenge. You’re still going to have to “push” your way to the “challenging” content.
I specifically ignored Challenge Modes because you are against any sorta “go go go” mentality, and those live on in CMs faaar more than any m+.
And that is correct. M+s do not scale to your ilvl. They scale to your skill level. If you are good enough, you get a better one. No “go go go” mentality is required.
I rush around in leveling dungeons far more than most m+ I do, while still regularly doing keys 10 and higher.
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Except they really weren’t with groups almost universally running 3 CC classes for dungeons. You sit here saying people are mis-remembering them as being less difficult, but people also routinely mis-remember them as being some challenging wall when they were an absolute joke when you had 2 or 3 CC classes and every group did.
They have not shown any way to create challenging small group content that isn’t time restricted. If they remove the timers from M+ it just devolves back to TBC era simplicity of CC everything you can (and these days you can CC even more npcs) which is not challenging and that is further cheesed by letting people sit and wait for CDs between pulls.
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Not necessarily. If you have mythic raid experience and gear to support mythic raiding you can probably get into some “for completion” keys and avoid the grind from 1 - X. That would let you start at higher keys. Generally I would think someone raiding consistently at mythic levels would have access to group mates that would push a key from 1 to 10 in at most a couple of hours. This perceived barrier of getting to the more challenging key levels isn’t really the wall it is being made to be.
Sounds like you’re looking for “For completion” runs.
Nothing wrong with either way.
In fact I think the community can use a little more clear definition and standardization for these terms to avoid toxic results.
“Pushing” means you better know what you’re doing, the key holder is trying to complete on time. Going into that group with out the same goal or the ability to do so is like joining as a tank and then refusing to tank.
“For completion” should probably mean things can be a lot more laid back and you should expect a few wipes, to miss on the timer, and running into people that may not know what they’re doing. If you’re not willing to help, teach and stick it out it’s like joining as a tank and then refusing to tank.
Any content where your skills are being tested can be counted as pushing. Pushing raid, pushing m+, pushing pvp rating, without the "pushing mentality the content is trivial.
Back then there weren’t the plethera of CC abilities tossed about all the classes. At most you had a mage that could polymorph, a warlock that could fear (though that was usually reserved for emergencies), and a Hunter that could trap. If you were fighting undead, a priest could imprison. And for most pulls, you needed all the CC because the individual mobs hit like a mac truck. If a patrol was added or someone pulled a CC’d mob, you were up a creek.
Also, not every class could interrupt. Not every class could decurse (and those that could were limited to what magic type they could decurse at all).
There were also positional mechanics, fire dances, healing bursts, enemies that could heal each other.
You get a lot of this with the Mythic+ suffixes, but where do you think this mechanic came from to begin with? These were the normal abilities of many of the mobs in 5 man dungeons, you just didn’t have a convenient key to tell you what you need to expect from the run. You just had to know that that Blackrock Evoker would one shot everyone in the group if they weren’t CC’s or their ability wasn’t interrupted.
I think battleground is a good place. Each BG is a stand alone experience, so it’s like just doing reps of the same thing "pushing’ harder each time. Each BG is an opportunity to prove your mechanic and strategic skill. But after like 15 min it’s over.
And yeah, someone else already said this. But what has been my favorite option for pretty much my entire career has been finding a guild who I enjoy spending time with, and raiding Heroic or Mythic.
But finding a likeable group is pretty essential, as doing difficult raids with people you don’t much care about seems pretty stressful and just turns into a “did I get my drop or not experience”. In order for raiding to be truly fulfilling and worth the time you have to care about more than just if you personally got loot.
Poor rogues getting no love for their sap. People routinely required 2 or 3 CC classes back then to CC trash. That left trash packs being incredibly neutered. CCing the crap out of trash packs does not make for challenging content. That is the point here. Having the timer present dictates the use of CDs, CC targets and pull sizes in a way that creates challenging content. There is no challenge now or in BC when you CC’d 2/3s to 3/5s of a trash pack. BC dungeons were only difficult if you opted to not take at least 2 CC capable classes and if you remember anything about PuGing back then you would remember that groups just didn’t happen without bringing CC classes. It ostracized a lot of non-CC dps classes and resulted in them having really hard times finding groups.
This is no different than now. Different healing specs are restricted on what they can cleanse and decurse itself is restricted to two classes.
Okay. Welcome to almost every single trash pack in BFA.
Err…no? Most of the affixes for M+ have nothing to do with old trash abilities. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
Which is exactly how M+ is now. The affixes ignored you still have to know the basic mechanics for all the trash and bosses. You need to know which mobs have positional requirements to avoid death, you have to know what casts can be ignored and which have to be interrupted. You seem to not understand the M+ system and how it actually relates to dungeons currently or previously.
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@OP from reading the tread I understand what you are asking for and I agree that the “challenging” dungeon experience (outside of M+) is no longer there, well it’s tricky because it is actually still there but it became irrelevant really quick.
I remember the Cata Heroics for example. I was a casual player back then and running the dungeons was my main form end-game content and I really enjoyed it, they were relatively challenging but with no timer. The thing is, I had that exact same experience in BFA during the first 3 weeks of the expac, running M0 dungeons at appropriate item level (around 310-320) was actually quite challenging and a very similar experience from the one I had in older expacs.
The real difference is that in the past a “casual” player (like I was) would not get all the free loot we get now to boost our item level to such high levels that the dungeons become irrelevant. So the whole problem is actually the free-loot, which might seem like it is “casual friendly” but it’s the complete opposite it makes casual content irrelevant for the casual player.
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Except the challenge wasn’t necessarily the dungeons as much as the mindset of the groups going into them from the peak of “pull everything and AoE the crap out of it” to “you’re going to want to use some CC” and people weren’t making the basic shift in game play. For the groups using CC, the Cata dungeons weren’t that difficult and that is a constant across every expansion. Mass pulling entire groups without CC, and without people willing to interrupt trash casts and boss abilities made them difficult and the end result was that Blizzard kowtowed to the crying masses. Blizzard nerfed the crap out of those dungeons so that they could go back to mass pulls and AoE fests because the basic idea of using CC to control and simplify the dungeons was too much for the masses.
The use of CC neuters trash and dungeon difficulty and there has been no small group content that has remained difficult outside of timer based content. That is the entire issue here. Removal of the timer removes the inherent difficulty of this content. CCing your way through trash packs over an extended period of time does not lend itself to the idea of a difficulty progression system unless it had absolutely pathetic rewards, or the removal of rewards as it does not present challenging content or a progression system of challenging content.
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M+ isn’t fun to me.
It’s a joke that they put affixes on dungeons and call it content. I miss actual challenging dugeons that didn’t need a gimmik slapped on them like affixes.
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It does add a requirement for a level of coordination that isn’t seen in the AoE fests. Running with a guild group using voice chat isn’t the same as running a five man in a PuG.
Anything that adds additional complexity to the scenario is going to add challenge. It all depends on how you look at it though.
There isn’t any fundamental difference between 5 man dungeons or 10 man raids. It’s the same kind of game play.
Oh I totally agree with you, but I think you got my point wrong…
I am in no-way advocating for changing M+ or removing the timer, I really like M+ and it’s a great addition for some of us who like a bigger challenge (I’m not exactly “casual” anymore).
And I agree Cata heroics weren’t actually hard if you used CC, but they were an appropriate challenge for the casual player (like I was back then) that’s what my whole post is about, current M0 are not easier than Cata Heroics but they are no longer a viable mean of end-game content for a casual player because the free-loot has made them irrelevant really quickly.
See all the people above asking for “challenging” non M+ type of dungeons, my point is that we have the answer already implemented in game: M0 dungeons, except the free-loot and tianforging boosting players to ridiculous item levels has made it irrelevant so it no longer works.
It takes 3 seconds to assign specific people to specific target markers for CC throughout an entire dungeon typing it in party chat. It takes 3 seconds per trash pack to hit your marker hotkeys to assign those CCs. CC assignments bring zero complexity to a dungeon if you are being at all realistic.
I fail to see where you are going with this attempt at a correlation. Not trying to be snide I am just honestly not sure what point you are trying to make with regards to the topic. If you boil anything PvE in this game down to the fundamentals all PvE content is functionally the same.
The point is that if you are implying that Dungeon content can only be made to be challenging by throwing in a timer, then you are suggesting that is the case for raiding as well. I’m petty sure that there are plenty of raiders that would completely disagree with that assessment of the fundamental game play mechanics for WoW.
Turning WoW into Diablo3 doesn’t make it into a superior game play challenge. It just makes it a different one.
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You fail to see through the eyes of a casual player, so talking with you is pointless. When is the last time you PuGged your way through anything?