I’ve shared these before, but with all of the “remove timers” and “remove x, y, z” hysterics, it’s important to focus on realistic requests for change that won’t hurt the M+ community more than it will help.
Add Charges to Keystones
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 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.
Keys never depleting 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 an opportunity to continue progressing while still depleting after a 2nd or 3rd failed attempt.
This is a QOL change that helps everyone.
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.
This would also make it much less statistically likely that you end up with the same dungeon pool as your friends or going back and forth between two dungeons of your own key.
Upgrade Gear Tracks with Crests
Allow items to be upgraded to the next track with enchanted crests.
It would also allow you to upgrade specific harder to get items such as trinkets and weapons.
They could make it so you have to max out the current track 8/8 before upgrading to the next. This would make it so players are deincentivized from trying to farm low keys to upgrade them right away.
You would still need to run +4-7s for 60 Runed crests to max out Champion Track 8/8 and another 90 Gilded crests to upgrade to Hero.
This would prevent Shadowlands era upgrades from +2 drops all the way up to max tier rewards by only running +2s.
The question then becomes if track upgrades via crests stop at Hero or Myth.
Revert the Change to AOE Stops
AoE stops used to reset casting CDs for trash mobs. The changes made it so they continue casting immediate after the stun or push effect ends.
This makes it so people who use their spell interrupt at the same time as someone who uses an AoE stop waste their interrupt CD and can’t use it again when they immediately start casting.
The Ability/Spell CD not resetting also makes it so every single caster now syncs up and casts all at the same time.
The change also further divides the PuG community because you now have to stack multiple AoE stops to make up for them not resetting ability CDs. Where before you could be fine with 1, now you need multiple or else the run is significantly harder on the tank and healer.
Revamp Challenger’s Peril
What if they changed the Challenger’s Peril to scale up as you increase key levels with a hard cap at 15s?
The standard -5s would apply to M+2-6, but starting from +7 the time reduction increases per death. It would take 2 full wipes to hit the +15s reduction.
Under this change, 2 full wipes would cause a total of 110s of time loss compared to the current 150s.
1 full wipe would cause a total loss of 45s compared to the current 75s.
Edit:
Revert the Change to Crest Drops for Depleted Runs
I’m not sure what the thought was for reducing the Crests from depleted runs to 5 down from 12. It further deincentavizes pugs from completing runs they think are going to be over time.
Interrupt CD Reduction for Overlaps
Give players who overlap on Interrupts a reduction in CD.
The reduction in CD could be done in a number of ways and could even be scaled differently for Melee and Ranged, since overlapped interrupts have a significantly higher impact on casters.
It could give CD Reductions for Interrupts with =< 20s CD by 50% and longer Interrupt CDs by 75%.
Honestly kind of a fan of all of these, not 100% sure how the enchanted crests for track upgrades one plays out though. Sure it’s 90 extra crests to turn a heroic spymasters into a mythic one, but now you’ve got a mythic spymaster’s without ever actually killing silken court and that feels wrong.
Yeah I can see that point too, but there’s room to play around with it. They way I worded it, it would cost 90 to upgrade from Champion to Hero so maybe it would cost two Gilded enchanted crests (180) to go from Heroic to Mythic. Or, they could cap the track upgrades to Hero which would cap the item to 629 ilvl instead of 639.
The death penalty kinda just sucks in general. The only real function it serves is to punish death skips which I haven’t seen used in a while.
I think the aoe stops change is fine but the community hasn’t learned how to play around the change optimally yet.
E.g.
Some spells will cast and then be followed by a channel. Spells like mind sear from grim batol. If you stop them while the cast is happening they just recast but if you stop them as soon as the channel starts the spell goes on cooldown.
So there are specific ways to use stops more effectively than others. Stops are also useful to delay a cast by a few seconds when a kick isn’t available yet.
The interrupt pug problem is real and now worse but other solutions besides revert the change are possible such as making interrupts function like dispels (in pve). Give interrupts a grace period equal to the cast time of the spell to reset if they don’t stop a cast. This has zero impact on well organized groups and makes the pug experience significantly better.
Upgrading your items track with enchanted crests is a great idea imo. If I can get 90 glided crests I should be able to upgrade a hero item to mythic track imo. This would allow raid gear to be upgraded to mythic track if you can get the crests from m+. Blizzard might not like this outcome but I would!
If keys could work on multiple dungeons I would certainly limit it to two. I don’t see blizzard going for this but I don’t think it would be bad.
I would hate charges on a key. I hate it when a group wants to zone out and reset because there was a mistake. And having charges would lead to much more of this.
I think it was more of a lazy way to include an “affix” because people kept complaining about affixes. I think Challenger’s Peril is still much better than Explosive or Bolster.
Yes, I have noticed that and wondered why it put some spells on CD via stops, but wasn’t consistent.
That or even reducing your Interrupt CD by half if it overlapped with someone else.
Enchanted Crests: You need to complete the content on one character and upgrade it to max rank to be able to purchase an Enchanted Crest Upgrade.
Meaning to go from Champion to Hero, your character would have to have timed a +7 or higher. For Raids, you would have to have beaten the Specific Boss on the difficulty for the piece you want to Upgrade.
I.e. You get Spymasters Normal, you have to fully upgrade that, down Council on Heroic, then you can buy the Enchanted Crest to upgrade it to Hero. Same goes for Mythic.
Key Charges: This would be great. You get 3 charges for a key. Life happens, DCs happen, bad groups happen. You get 3 chances to uograde your key before it fully depletes to the lower level.
This can also work this Alts. Your main needs to have completed a +7 or higher, or killed the Specific Heroic/Mythic Raid boss. Then you can purchase a Warbound Enchanted Crest for your alt to upgrade their item to whichever track. This Warbound Crest would be more expensive.
Keystone picking: I somewhat agree with this, however I think it should be a 24 hour CD and you can pick whichever dungeon you want the key for. It would also lower the key by 1 level.
True true.
They could make it in the style of Delve Unlocms.
Each boss for Raid is a Node, replaced by the higher difficulty when beaten.
For M+ there would be 2-3, 4-6, 7-9
The reduced crest for depletion is just a huge slap in the face. I mean I would argue for keeping gear too but Ide settle for just crests.
Theres no incentive to stay in a pug. 5 crests for what could take an hour and only one piece of gear.
The way crests are capped and what lvls they drop from and how difficult is is, I dont know what they think they are preventing cutting the rewards in half and crests to 5.
Like that was the whole point of the hard mythics that lots of us wanted.
Just do that but with any key level by not slashing rewards.
OH and bring back literally any other affix and replace the aids orbs.
I’m pretty sure it’s still two drops. It used to be 1 way early in SL then they changed it to give a 2nd drop at a slightly lower ilvl. Did they change it back to only dropping 1?
Is this your entire contribution? Nothing on the actual points?
In your entire two posts in this thread all you have done was troll and try to make things personal out of nothing. Are you really that incapable of trying discussing the topic?
Does depleting a key really prevent someone from running content above their skill level?
A recent case on the Taiwan server shows otherwise.
An Evoker with an item level of 564, beyond their actual capability, joined PUGs, tricking players into running +8 dungeons to farm gilded crests, and even ended up with a +1 key.
This incident caused an uproar in the Taiwanese community after the player posted about it and then provoke.
The main reason is that it’s uncommon for players on the Taiwan server to leave mid-run; most prefer to finish the dungeon.
The highest level someone like this can complete would be a key level that four people can finish in the current patch.
Whether by spending money or tricking others into carrying him.
The best solution would still be to limit key levels based on item level.
They’ve already implemented this in Heroic dungeons, right?
This could also help prevent RMT carry services from selling gear.
The only reason for depleting keys is that Blizzard wants to slow people down and prevent them from quickly gearing up.
Raids, Delves, and even other games don’t have depleting keys.
Prevent? No, but it does severely hinder them from doing so. The other option of removing depletion only permits failing upwards and while people absolutely do fail upwards now, it would be 100x worse.
How is a 564 Evoker “tricking” pugs? The group leaders can clearly see their ilvl when they apply. In the case of them running their own keys then it’s a matter of you vetting them as much as you would vet players when you create groups.
This sounds like a cultural specific issue and isn’t really relevant for us.
Heroics with ilvl restrictions are queued content. You can walk into a heroic dungeon with zero ilvl restrictions.
I’d be happier with these changes than I am under the current system, and I commend you for thinking about positive changes rather than just repeating over how everything is fine. My only thing about key is that boosters already exist, so the integrity of whatever system you’re looking for is already shot.
Boosting ultimately creates these trap parties you’re talking about in your third bullet point, and I’d rather people be encouraged to get to the level that keys start depleting under their own power by being less punishing. Getting rid of depletion to a certain level would curtail a lot of boosting, and cut down on the number of “repeat customers.”
Obviously there should be rewards above the depletion breakpoint to encourage going up a little further for the mid players who go on a “good run”.