A lot of players are talking about removing M+ key depletion. But why stop there? Not only depletion, but also the whole concept of needing a key to do M+ should be removed.
Keys serve no purpose but artificially limit players’ choice of dungeon and levels. Players shall be able to do any dungeons of any level they unlocked.
M+ urgently and eventually needs a Torghast/delve format. Players unlock each M+ dungeon by dungeon, and level by level. Players can only enter a +(N+1) after they have completed a +N in time.
What is the purpose of a key? Why do we still need it?
That’d make the gameplay much worse at high levels, but if we’re fine with that, then sure. Timer is a hard cutoff, ends on failure, and you pick the level.
There are players who want to buy carries and pay for tokens with real money. It makes no sense to impede their ability to pay to win, especially if it makes Blizzard money. Making it so they can only enter an N+1 key only after they’ve completed an N key just creates unnecessary hurdles.
It is the slimmest, tiniest guardrail checking whether someone is at the skill level of M+ they’re attempting to run. Totally inadequate, but it’s the only thing we have.
Short of normalizing M+ logging and rejecting anyone who has no logs, there needs to be some kind of measuring bar.
So on one hand, key weekly lockout should be a thing. if I do a Boralus 5, that’s the 'boralus slot". I can improve it to 6, but if I do a 6 it shouldn’t count as two dungeons. thats how you address the spread-out of keys.
secondly, players can queue manually to the same key over and over in LFG.
finally, if we compare a M+ to a raid boss, we wipe and do progression on raid bosses. We don’t clear trash after every pull. M+ is not allowing any progression if the key depletes.
Sure but this is entirely unrelated. The RNG factor of which key YOU get keeps you from being able to constantly run your easiest dungeon over and over
Yup. But not always a level they want/need, nor are you guaranteed an invite. The only certainty is your key, which is RNG
Being able to finish and try again later is just another version of progression (at least thats how i see it). Even if the key depletes, i was able to learn from what went sideways since the encounter doesnt just end and force a reset
Something like that would have to be paired with a way to cut off the limitless loot piñata.
I made a thread a few days ago suggesting that, along with a limited number of loot-keys (like delves) could mean fewer homework keys, cutoff the flow of mediocre gear, and be able to give us targetable GOOD gear, but all anyone wanted to focus on was that I said “like delves” and it devolved into semantic based trolling from there.
The key system isn’t perfect, but it does have a purpose. WIthout it, you’d see a vast majority of groups grinding the same 2 dungeons in order to gear up because they are easier. If it’s just to grind upgrades, why do a harder dungeon when an easier dungeon gives the same reward?
Once they’ve grinded enough, they’d likely expand into the other keys for portals. Of course they’d still have to grind their keys up one level at a time while overgearing it, and once that’s done, the easy keys would get grinded for vault slots.
I agree they should get rid of keys but this part probably would need some work. In Delves you just unlock the difficulty level for all of them, not per-delve.
As far as spamming the easiest dungeon for vault credit goes you could say either who cares, let them spam the easiest dungeon if that’s what they want to do OR you could say that you only get vault credit for the highest level of each individual dungeon per-week. People have been spamming things like SMBG or the Maw for vault or quest credit since M+ existed even with keys though, so it’s not really a compelling argument against removing keys anyway.
If Blizzard didn’t want people spamming the same dungeon for end of dungeon rewards, well, they already can do that too, they just have to spam apply to other people’s groups to do so. If you really wanted to stop that for some reason you could just change the end of dungeon loot system in M+ to only let you open a limited number of loot chests at the end of dungeons per week.