With Season 4’s level squish, changes to Crest acquisition, and an update to the Affixes rotation it’s the perfect opportunity to bring some additional QOL changes that make the mode better and not worse for those of us who actually play it.
The problem with many of GD’s hyperbole is that their demands are too extreme and too easily exploited which will make the experience worse in practice.
As a primary M+ player, here are some changes that I am advocating for that I believe helps the top-end and entry-level players.
Allow Keystones to work in two or three dungeons at random.
Blizzard made an official announcement during Shadowlands stating that they are strongly against allowing Keystones to work universally because they don’t want players to farm the same dungeon with one key. Whether you agree or not doesn’t matter, this is their stance, not mine.
By allowing Keystones to work for a random selection of 2 out of the 8 dungeons you are still introducing randomness in where the key will work, but will help entry-level and top-end players have some level of choice.
Allow Keystones to have two or three charges.
Most of the forum discussions revolve around extremes on both ends, never depleting vs the current system. Keys that never deplete would bring additional challenges to the pug community outside of the shortsighted personal gains.
Never depleting would allow someone to get carried, intentionally or not, into a +10 (previous +20) and now they have a non-depletable +10 key for the rest of the season. This means that they will be able to continuously bring in unsuspecting pugs into their key, that they are not ready for, leading to more frustrating experiences than now. It would also negatively impact score inflation worse than it is now with crest/vault farmers.
Allowing Keystones to have two or three charges will allow teams and pugs to benefit from a limited number of retries. Everyone has bad days and some groups just don’t sync well. This will give key holders a opportunity to continue progressing while also still depleting after a 3rd failed attempt. This is a QOL change that helps everyone.
It’s time to either redesign or retire Fortified and Tyrannical
We have been dealing with the same tier 1 affixes since the beginning of time. Either replace it with something new or update how they work. Maybe even making them only affect Trash/Boss Damage and not HP.
Tyrannical was so bad in SL S1 that they had to nerf it by like 40%.
Get rid of Upgrade Tracks, it’s entirely redundant by having to upgrade with differentiated tiers of Crests
It doesn’t make sense for you to have two gatekeeping mechanics doing the same thing.
Crests already prevent you from upgrading gear past a certain point. You don’t need upgrade tracks that force us to farm the same item twice or thrice.
Yes, upgrade discounts are a thing, but that still doesn’t detract from having to obtain the item twice in the first place. At least with Valor upgrades, you were able to upgrade all the way based on the content you cleared.
Allow tracks to be upgraded with enchanted crests
Some people brought up good counter-arguments for removing upgrade tracks with the crest system and I agree. Another option would be to allow upgrading tracks with enchanted crests similarly to craftables.
It would require enough grinding to make it unrealistic to farm +2s and upgrade all 16 slots with enchanted crests, but would allow you to upgrade specific harder to get items such as trinkets and weapons.
Affix Opinion
It would be cool to see an affix with genuine Kiss/Curse mechanics that isn’t lazy or favoring specific specs per week.
Most of you complaining about it don’t actually understand it’s impact and are blowing it out of proportion.
Let’s pretend the top DPS is doing 100 dps without the current TWW affix, meaning they will effectively do 105 dps with it. 105 because the 10% gain is only on either casters or non-casters, not both. Even if the next dps spec is within 5% in class balancing doing 95 dps without the affix, they will only do 99.7 with the affix. Still less than the #1 seed. This means the meta isn’t changing weekly. Now that we got that out of the way.
Blizzard could design an affix that promotes utility utilization.
Over the years, I have seen a dramatic decrease in players using class utilities, interrupts, and defensives because they have gotten so used to brute forcing through the keys.
An idea for an affix that promotes utility usage could be a stacking buff (with a stack cap) every time they successfully interrupt a spell cast or stop an ability cast; however, a non-interrupted spell/ability will remove a stack from everyone. This would promote players to use their interrupts and stops to benefit the entire group.
Maybe another similar idea could be a stacking buff (with a stack cap) for every avoidable frontal or ability that you dodge and a debuff if you get hit.
These affixes would promote class knowledge and reward good gameplay.
It’s clearly evident that GD is more concerned about complaining than actually looking to provide feedback for improvements when threads that are only about hyperbole and doomsaying get hundreds of posts, but threads that discuss how improvements can be made are ignored.
By this you mean essentially making every gear drop be the same as the season 4 bullion items, and higher drops would just start at a higher upgrade level? I could get behind that. I do wonder if it would take any of the fun of getting new drops over the course of the season away, but I’d guess it would be a net positive.
I would be happy to see these go. I do not run high enough content to truly have an opinion here, but I worry the new +4 affixes are going to cause issues on fortified weeks.
I am just curious, what is your take on Sanguine? I personally always hated it to the point where it made me not want to tank. But I’ve had KSH guildies say they think its no big deal or even a free affix. Maybe it depends on how well your class can get mobs out of it.
Yeah, that’s a good comparison. Every M+ drop would be like the Bullion gear in the sense that it’s x/12. A +2 would give you a 1/12 and +10 would give like 8/12 or something like that.
Gear that dropped in Shadowlands was essentially like this, so it would just be reverting back to how it was in this aspect.
I personally dislike Sanguine. It’s not difficult to play around, but it’s more so annoying if you get a Lieutenant mob stuck in the pool that you can’t interrupt or push/pull. This is avoidable, but everyone makes mistakes and I have myself let this happen more than once. The last pull of RLP is a perfect example.
It also messes with some DPS classes more than others, like frost mages if I have to constantly move mobs out the last 5-10% of the pull.
2 different dungeons per key and keys having 2-3 charges could be cool.
Removing tracks and making item 0/12 like bouillon cube gear is a big nope for me because grinding crests from keys is absolutely trivial. Especially how this would expand to getting a LFR/normal raid drop and making it mythic level though some trivial keys.
It also would make gearing way faster than it is, something I think is already too fast, since the vault is basically meaningless and you’re grinding keys to keep up with the crest cap and taking every single key and raid drop to 12/12 in a trivial fashion.
Eh, not against it but don’t really see the point either.
Would probably make them buff the difficulty of keys since then you can have multiple attempts at a key level, justifying a harder key difficulty.
I think they did say they were looking into them.
Upgrade tracks are there to prevent you from farming a +2 and then upgrading it to your BiS. Crests do a similar roll but wouldn’t hard cap gear like a track will, allowing the same degenerate behaviors we saw in S1 of DF.
This would help pugs and teams. For teams, it adds more dungeons in their pool of keys. With only 8 dungeons it’s not unheard of for 3/5 of the group members to have the same dungeon. For pugs, it would help those who push their own key, specifically dps since it is significantly harder for them to get invited. By giving them 2 or 3 options it helps them pick one they might be missing for that key level.
I disagree with this. I don’t think they would have to change the difficulty just by allowing a 2-3 charge system. The difficulty is there as it is and if the group/player isn’t cut out for it then the will still fail. This is more of a protection for the keys where group sync just isn’t there or someone is not ready skill wise.
Yeah Argorwal brought up some good counters against removing the tracks as well. Maybe a way for someone to upgrade the track, but would require like 60 crests of the next tier? Kind of like the enchanted crests for craftables.
As a healer/tank main, I’m mostly fine with everything. About the only thing I’m not fine with are these kiss/curse changes. Like wtf are they doing?
Outside of that, I don’t care if QoL changes are thrown into the system.
I don’t care if gear is easier/more straight forward to get.
I don’t care if fortified or tyrannical stick around.
On the other hand…
I do care if certain classes with certain utility continue to dominate.
I do care if weekly comps change and players obsess about it because Blizzard made it a possibility. Warriors shouldn’t be sitting out 3 out of 5 weeks in a rotation.
Tyrannical and Fortified are good affixes because they make the weeks feel different and give you confidence for the next level up.
Allow Keystones to have two or three charges.
Wouldn’t be opposed to two for a test run, but three sounds excessive.
Allow Keystones to work in two or three dungeons at random.
Not a bad idea because set teams already have the ability to reroll keys. The downside could be extreme scarcity of certain dungeons. Like people will only run X key because the game gave it to them. Not sure how it would pan out for pugging.
Affix Opinion
It would be cool to see an affix with genuine Kiss/Curse mechanics that isn’t lazy or favoring specific specs per week.
I don’t think this fundamentally solves the issue of some weeks being easier than others. And as a byproduct, allows people to ignore stuff and continue on like nothing changed.
These affixes probably need some tuning. But, I think it is good that dungeons come in two flavors.
I really hope they implement this.
Sometimes it is just not possible to kick everything because the mob casts nonstop, or it is a big pull. So, I am not sure how useful this buff would be in reality, especially if you don’t have a DH or a pally tank.
Also, I am not sure if the whole group should get a buff for a single player’s competence. I would perhaps prefer a mini haste buff to the player who kicked.
Getting a buff for dodging sounds a bit odd to me, not to mention getting hit by a frontal is not always a player’s fault unlike missing a kick. A bad tank can point it at the group.
I run a lot of mythics in my opinion,and I like the system the way it is.
I would be okay with multiple charges to retry, but I am also okay with the way it is.
I do like the suggestion I think you made about the buffs. Mythics are suppose to be fun, they should reward player for doing this and punish players for not doing those things.
Like maybe give a stacking buff for every interrupt you have, I don’t know.
But everything about the affixes and the dungeon scream punish, which I agree with it makes them hard, but I think there should be rewards for playing properly.
At the end of the day all of these activities are suppose to be fun. And let’s face it the only really fun experience in mythics is seeing dps meters and seeing you self at the top. If they added things into the game which allows you to increase your dps that would be more fun.
Fortified needs to be retired, as it is…every single affix is exclusively the domain of trash. No affix except tyrannical directly interacts with the bosses. I think there should be a tyrannical tier and a fort tier. Affixes that only affect bosses and affixes that only affect trash. It might not work and there might be really obvious flaws that I’m blind to, but it’s an idea.