Yes there’s a purpose and reason for a key. They stated that they don’t want players to be able to spam run a specific dungeon with their own key for loot or vault.
1) Key Charges / Key Depletion:
It’s clear that key depletion is a major point of contention with the player base; however I have always defended that key depletion serves a vital role systematically even though it have a negative impact on the individual. The frequent argument to remove depletion completely will cause severe consequences especially for the pug community.
Score inflation is already an issue where players are in key ranges they are not ready for. We can all agree that score is a major part of the vetting process when pugging and score inflation as the season goes on makes it less and less reliable. A large reason for this is because of the crest system and higher skilled players dropping down in difficulty and carrying the key holder. At first glance this is mutually beneficial. The keyholder gets score and an upgraded key while the higher skilled player gets crests. The same is true for the max vault keys.
I bring this up because it directly correlates to the foreseeable issue should keys never deplete. If it is already happening now, it will happen ten fold if keys if players are able to hold onto the same key no matter how many times they fail it. This will cause a major disruption to the pug community because there will be more and more keys posted that are going to fail. Players will continuously post their key until a group is able to carry them while wasting time for everyone else.
In addition to score inflation, we would see new exploits and toxic behaviors that once again would mainly effect the pug community in the form of kicking. Currently, the major issue that keeps being discussed are players leaving keys; however, no one is being kicked because there’s zero gains from doing so.
Should keys not deplete, we will see a new meta of players continuing to leave and also keyholders now kicking players after the first few pulls for whatever reason. This is a net-negative for pugs.
The only positive for keys not depleting is that they key holder can try again while all of these additional exploits and issues are introduced.
Solution:
Add 2 or 3 charges to each key.
This allows a limited amount of attempts which benefits the key holder, because things do happen and it values their time trying to progress.
It also puts a hard limit on the potential issues listed above. Players could still be kicked, but much less likely if they only get 2 or 3 attempts.
2) Random Key Generator
Pugs and even groups find themselves with keys they don’t need for progression. Yes, they can just run it anyway to get a new key, but it comes back to valuing the time of the player. This is especially important for DPS and off-meta players because they have a much harder time getting accepted. I also remember back in Shadowlands where Blizzard made it a point to say that key RNG is here to stay because they don’t want players to farm specific dungeons with their own key.
Solution:
Randomly generate 2 or 3 dungeons where the key will work.
This still introduces RNG to the system that Blizzard wanted.
It prevents players from farming the same dungeon with their own key.
It provides DPS and off-meta players a higher probability of getting a key that they need for progression.
It even helps teams so it’s less likely that everyone has the same key or 2.
3) Dinars for Every Season:
It’s clear that the player base loves the Dinar system every time it is introduced late into the expansion. The confusing part is why hold onto a system that is almost universally liked for only a fraction of the expansion. This would provide players access to gear as a form of bad-luck prevention. This doesn’t mean to give every player the top tier BiS item. It all depends on implementation.
Solution: credit to Hpellipsis
Introduce 1 or 2 Dinars every .0.5 patch. This way it is naturally time-gated to allow players to experience the content without Dinars on launch, but allows players to get items who had bad RNG from the Vault or Drops.
The ability to purchase BiS items could have limitations so players can only buy items from content they have already completed or based on obtaining equivalent achievements. i.e. KSM-AoTC; KSH-CE.
4) Catch-up Mechanics:
It’s clear that WoW’s focus this expansion was to provide a better experience with alts by introducing Warbands and the ability to share a bank across the entire account. This was a great thing to focus on; however, the player experience has not been able to gain the intended outcome. Part of that is the excessive amount of Crests needed for crafting. In DF, I believe you only needed 60 crests to craft the top R5 piece which was increased by 50% for TWW for no apparent reason. This has a negative impact on the player’s experience who wants to play alts, but is daunted by the idea of having to farm 60+ dungeons mid-season. That’s also if you time all of them.
Solution:
Increase crests drop for out-of-time runs. Completion runs only awarding 5 crests is not valuing the player’s time. Bring it up to the full amount, or at least 80%.
Similar to the Dinar solution being introduced every .0.5 patch, double Crest drops since it is now mid-way through the season. This would encourage more players to invest time into alts which would also increase metrics of time played.
Remove the crest cap at the .0.5 patch.
Lower the crafted requirements back to 60.
5) Interrupts and Stops:
The change to stops not resetting CDs for casting units made a negative impact for pugs. Teams are still able to lock-down packs by using voice coms and being coordinated so the intended impact was not achieved. Instead it is only making it more difficult for the players who were already struggling. Another issue is wasted interrupts because other players use theirs or other stops at the same time. When two interrupts are used at least they are prevented from re-casting, but when it overlaps with a stop they just re-cast immediately.
Solution:
Reintroduce CD resets for stunning, pulling, pushing, and blinding priority casts.
Provide a CD reduction to overlapped interrupts.
Potentially 25% CDr for interrupts with 12s CDs or less and 50% for longer CDs.
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