So no change is obviously the answer when multiple threads about M+ keep popping up with issues with how it works.
Honestly if stays as is I will keep doing it and enjoying it. But I can also see room for different ways to enjoy the M+ experience.
Nothing with what I’m suggesting would be an insurmountable hurdle. Just spit balling about how you would offer a non-timed alternative. I don’t want to change or remove the mode that people enjoy (myself included).
Being constructive isn’t just telling you what you want to hear.
An untimed M+ is going to be impossible to balance to any sort of degree side by side compared with timed M+.
There isn’t really any way to stop ridiculously unfun strategies like waiting for every cooldowns for every pack, or building your comp in some ridiculous way like 3x Tank, 2x Healer, from becoming dominant, except by keeping the timer.
All the suggestions you’ve offered would only make the M+ experience much, much worse.
A timer. That’s really it. That’s the only way to stop 3 hour Freehold Runs, or a “one wipe and the entire dungeon is over” model.
I’m fine with this. If I can do 8 dungeons in the time it takes you to do 1 am okay with only getting 8 times the loot. Shoot as long as the keystone goes down a level I am okay with completion runs still giving 3 pieces of loot at 15 and below.
That said if a key is going horrible or well over time I am likely to leave my key early if it’s pugs. If I’ma carry you through a dungeon i expect to know ahead of time and be paid for it.
I am curious how I was being insulting?
I am being constructive by showing how the ideas presented would not work.
I don’t feel the need to add additional brainstorming ideas for a mode I personally don’t see how it could work. I have thought about it before. I can’t reach any conclusion I feel is satisfactory.
Its not that speed is necessary. Its that the timer enforces a certain degree of play quality. No timer reduces the amount of quality gameplay needed.
Thats a completely different end of the spectrum I never once stated.
Let’s not forget the potential impact on the PUG scene if Blizzard leaderboards stay available.
We’d be inundated with forum post conversations like:
“I’ve completed +15s and I can’t get invites!”
“Your last 6 dungeons were a combined 10 hours long.”
“So? I completed these dungeons. BAN RAIDERdotIO.”
The best solution I could see, is a “compromise”.
Up to and including +9 the timer only levels the key. Keys can not be deleveled. Failing a key will always, at minimum, change the dungeon. Loot quantity for +9 and below stays the same for timed/untimed.
Only once you reach +10 (or whatever level the final affix would hypothetically be), failing the timer delevels the key and normal m+ loot/timer rules apply.
Or something similar along these lines.
Even then, I am sure there are holes.
So if you want to ignore the timer and just farm +9 loot to your hearts content. Go for it. But if you want the better loot, there are higher risks and rewards.
For reference, right now, +9 gives 455 rewards. 460 weekly chest.
+15 gives 465 reward with 475 end of chest.
That is 10 ilvls for 6 ranks of harder m+.
I like this idea.
it gives people who are just starting out less pressure to time, but incentive to, and imo there’s no reason to delevel a key sub 10.
the numbers would have to be tweaked based on the tier (ie early tiers 10 is max level because wow gear scaling)
No argument with what is or isn’t constructive. An echo chamber isn’t going to produce more than one result.
I guess I would hope that there would be method to balancing a non timed scenario. I do still think that it could be done with mob difficulty and numbers tweaked along with tuning bosses. But maybe it can’t. Maybe Blizzard just says if you’re willing to spend 3-4 hours in a dungeon to cheese it, then so be it.
I’ll just agree to disagree that a non-timed dungeon that is more of a dungeon crawl and less of an e-sport experience would make M+ worse.
It’s too bad that 5 man progression has to revolve around the timed experience. It would be nice to have the alternative to complete a key that didn’t revolve around so much of a go-go-go experience sometimes. Granted I still have a good time with what we have, so if nothing happens I’m fine with it.
The mob count is the anti-cheese. Without it you’d just run 3 rogues who shroud you from boss to boss.
Right, eventually you’re going to hit a key that’s like “Lol, not really possible without spending the next year doing it”. There are going to be higher keys you can push in a reasonable(ish) timeframe.
My point is that in the “good old days” you may attempt a boss and wipe and a CD may have a minute or two and you’d try again. You didn’t always wait on big CDs unless you thought it was absolutely necessary, instead you’d go back and try again and if you wiped again you’d be like “2 minutes on my CD” before going for it.
You’re acting like there isn’t an obvious penalty for doing that. Let’s say you got a cheeky group that brings in a tank, 3 healers and 1 DPS. They’re unkillable because they have three healers. They’re going to spend…how long in the dungeon? Twice as long as it should take? Three times? Four times maybe? Somewhere around there. They will be a walking ball of unkillable for sure, but it’s going to be a really slow ball.
Meanwhile groups that aren’t doing silly cheese things to make sure they can’t be killed no matter what are going to plow through the dungeon and move on to the next one…and the next one…and the next one. Haha, you sure showed them!
Before M+ ever existed that’s the way dungeons always worked. That’s also the way raids have always worked. Kill a boss, get loot, move on to the next one. The whole reason why people are attached to timing dungeons is because that’s the way they were designed from the ground up which is why I’m sure you want to say “The dungeon is the entire boss fight that’s why it’s different than raiding”.
Otherwise are you honestly going to try and tell me that if, when they had announced M+ and they said “You can scale dungeons up for better rewards, but they’re far more challenging” you would have been like “Oh that needs a timer for sure”? Because I don’t believe that. This is, in my opinion, just something we’ve come to accept as a necessity because that’s the way it’s been designed since day one. I understand that timing the dungeon is part of the challenge, but take away the timer and the dungeon is still challenging. The actual dungeon hasn’t gotten easier, the playerbase can just get more creative to get through it, even if that takes them an extra 20-30 minutes to do so.
Ultimately you’re focusing on the wrong thing when you think about loot rewards. You’re still creating difficult content through M+ that not everyone will be abel to do anyone who attempts to do it STILL have to complete it to get the rewards, the penalty for sucking and completing is far less loot acquisition because you spend that much more time doing it. You do 10 dungeons a day because you’re leet and I only get 2 done because I’m teh suxzors and my third group fell apart after we got stuck halfway through the dungeon.
I am all for more challenging content gets better rewards. I am talking about restructuring how that gets done.
This is some next level stupid.
This is my point. Also as I said earlier you could potentially keep the timer, but instead of punishing you with two whole pieces of loot for 5 people you still walk out with X number of bosses loot and a chest with extra loot for timing it. Group A finishes in 2 hours and gets 4 pieces from the 4 bosses. Group B finishes in 30 minutes which was a 2 chest so they got 6 pieces of loot. Oh and also they did like 2-3 other dungeons while group A was still doing their first BUT HEY whatever we can just ignore that aspect.
You don’t get punished for 2 loots for 5 people.
That’s just inane thinking. You currently get rewarded with extra loot for finishing quickly.
If you give a flat death count then you end up waiting for lust for every pull which is far worse.
Vague and inexperienced didn’t feel complementary.
Fair enough.
Blizzard needs to do better with their mega dungeon design. Mechagon was a pretty solid fail.
Like I said they may need to restructure rewards to incentivize higher keys. I am all for more difficult content giving better rewards, it’s also why I dislike the way TF has gone with people doing lesser content and coming out with just as good as rewards. The amount of effort you put into the game should reflect that. It’s my opinion that because M+ is content that scales up and makes the content more difficult by design the timer isn’t actually need to be a core function of it. You set the dungeon to +30 and you’re going to have a helluva time.
You can argue either way but the design is more towards punishment IMO because the timer is in your face and you know you have to beat it for all the loot. “Oh you’re still not done? Well that’s -1 loot. Oooh…you’re also not done -1 loot. Oh no you failed the timer there goes that last piece! Here’s your consolation prize”. Moreover loot quantity isn’t dictated by boss count in a dungeon. If you fail a key you get 2 pieces of loot for 5 people, it doesn’t matter if there was 3 bosses or 6 bosses.
Change it up to not having to time a M+ where a boss just drops loot when you kill it so you get 4 pieces of loot for clearing a 4 boss dungeon. Did you time it? Congratz, here’s an extra piece of loot (or two or three) for being good. Or maybe they reincorporate CM cosmetic rewards into timing it. You tell me which one feels more like it’s punishing and which one is more like rewarding.
The issue isn’t the M+ system, it’s the current reward structure. Have mythic raiding give the best gear relative to where a high key might be harder than the raid (I don’t do that level at all so someone better might decide that) and let us PvP for PvP gear so we don’t feel forced (strongly compelled) to run it.
EDIT: I’ll miss running dungeons but I haven’t really enjoyed instancing since Legion so it’d still be a net gain over the status quo.
This is way worse than currently being able to go in, miss a timer but complete the dungeon and get loot, + a key downgrade that gives you a better chance of timing the next one, and didn’t waste your whole night.
No, you really can’t argue that way. Not sensibly.
If you’re given a task with a bonus for early completion, looking at failing to earn the extra reward as a punishment is a crazy unhealthy world view.
You mean irrelevant after a few weeks?
Raid bosses have always had a timer in the form of an enrage or shrinking floor space etc.
This is literally what already happens…
I agree. That’s why we shouldn’t remove the timer. Glad we see eye to eye.
It’s just the nature of how dungeons work.
In Raids that’s not necessary since every fight sets you back to the zero. You either kill the boss, or you wipe and go again. No matter how many times I wipe on N’zoth, I gotta start from 100% every time.
Dungeons have more granular progression, with more emphasis on trash, and less complicated and less punishing bosses. So you can’t really punish strategies like AFK’ing for cooldowns without a timer, because it’s not just one hard fight like in a raid, it’s lots of easier fights.
Yup, that’s also a feature designed to curb gimmicky strategies from becoming meta.
Having failed my fair share of keys both in Legion or BFA, I can assure you that you would not relish this experience. Already doing some bosses in a 16-18 is a PITA, I would not relish seeing a Shadow of Zul or doing Cragmaw at a 30. That just sounds like an outright awful time.
The outcome would be like a handful of groups spending 3-4 hours to complete a super high key, and 90% of the population simply doing what key gives them the best reward for effort.
Like if we look at the highest non-timed runs, it took one of the best M+ groups in the world over an hour to do a 27 WCM.
The average joe, even if he could complete keys that high, isn’t doing it in less than 3-4 hours. And having done both mythic progression raiding and Gold CM’s for both WoD and MoP, I can tell you that after a particularly bad night, I’ve been lucky there’s an internet connection between us, even if some of them are my best friends IRL as well.
In raids you absolute do that. Before they introduced cooldown resetting, and even after since Blizzard doesn’t like resetting EVERY cooldown, people would just sit there and talk while we waited for cooldowns to come back up.
Sometimes it would be productive and we’d talk strategy. Sometimes we’d just laugh at the sucker who lost 100k on a bad roll and immediately alt-f4’d to come back 30 seconds later in shame.
But you’d still wait for cooldowns. There was no reason not to, and often pulling without them was an even bigger waste of time.
In the system that OP has proposed where the only metrics for ranking up keys is:
People are absolutely going to do that. People would do it in raids if Blizzard didn’t stick a 20 minute enrage timer on some bosses to stop them.