I am utterly tired of having to do Freehold, Underrot and NL for the n+1th time. Also tired of having to avoid obviously outdated dungeons like VP via rerolling my key each time it depletes (I consider VP keys depleted in the 7.1 sense).
We have seen these dungeons quite enough times, especially NL which was already brought back for multiple seasons in SL and the old ones are clearly not getting the kind of rework which would make them worthy to be called current content.
I would like DF keystones to work like they did in SL and only roll dungeons from DF. Imagine if someone just bought this game and only get to play 4 of the DF dungeons because the other 4 are the same as they did during leveling…
I said 9.1.5, because I want them to bring back Timewalking m+ too. Old content has a place in the endgame, but only in an optional form.
They should expand this system with the soon upcoming BFA TW dungeons and make it happen literally each week unlike during SL. So each week we would get 1 DF key and 1 TW key, each with different affixes.
Loot problem can be easily resolved by making all TW dungeons only drop a currency which you can use to buy DF m+ gear or a more simplistic solution might be to make each TW key roll from a selected current season dungeon’s loot table…
There are many ways to handle this with ease, so I do not see this as a major issue.
PS.: And bring back Shadowlands-like actual seasonal affixes like Encrypted/Tormeneted/Shrouded or even Reaping from BFA. They gave soul to the m+ seasons quite literally. Removing them and thinking that old ctrl cv dungeons will make up for it, literally earned the wow dev team a new meta achievement in laziness and carelessness…
On the bringing back of legacy m+, sure, but this time let’s do a grey levels/actual old content version so people can enjoy going back solo and timing like +46 of their favorite old dungeons that they used to struggle with on +30. Or even level locking with their old group and playing old seasons with the old chest or vault gear rewards. Or bringing in a few friends at level 70 when they need help.
On the seasonal affix, if it’s a helpful affix OK. I like SL S3 affix. However a bad seasonal affix can almost kill the game for me for months. I hated thundering for example and am playing 3x as much this season.
The solution to the loot problem is good but to be honest without good gear rewards I think timewalking M+ will not be very popular.
I am totally convinced that it was intentionally made to be that bad, to make the removal of the seasonal affixes feel like a positive change. If it had happened during SL, lets say after S3, it would have provoked a major backlash.
They have ignored all PTR feedback and went forward with it even tho EVERYONE told them not very early. This way the removal felt like a blessing, so in that sense Thundering was a success to them.
Rotating dungeons are good because they give us something new.
On the seasonal affix, if it’s a helpful affix OK. I like SL S3 affix. However a bad seasonal affix can almost kill the game for me for months. I hated thundering for example and am playing 3x as much this season.
I think people are under the false assumption that if X was different, they’ll suddenly succeed where they currently fail. Thundering ranks as one of the best imo.
But what is the new in it? I mean if you meant the old dungeons which they ctrl cved into the season and called them new without barely any actual reworks (like Karazhan vs Return to Karazhan, Uldaman vs Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr), then TW m+ would probably be something you would like.
It would simply give you a choice if you want to do current content or to do old dungeons. Each gives the same loot, just the content and maybe the affixes are different (in SL if you had a tyrannical SL key, then you surely had a fortified Legion key and vice-versa).
I have no issue with sometimes mixing in a few TW m+ runs, but what they do now, to totally cut the current ones and force everyone into the old ones is just wrong and an inferior design to SL’s dual keystone system.
Idk I barely ever met anyone who liked that affix in game. I hated it with passion, not even prideful was this horrendously annoying. Like Thundering was just plainly there to annoy you. Prideful despite being a badly designed affix (because it left to no room to recover even from minor mishaps), it still felt very good to play it when you could execute it well. Thundering did not give even this minor happiness to the players.
I for example would like SL like risk-reward affixes back because I actually enjoyed playing them, not because I am so desperate for some kind of power boost to achieve anything. They were the most fun type of affixes.
You could kinda ignore them and have very marginal gains from it + not wipe.
You could totally ignore them and get deleted by the repercussions of it.
You could try to use them cleverly and get big advantages of it or big disadvantages if something goes bad.
If legacy dungeons were not brought back for seasons 1 and 2 of DF, they likely would have been the worst M+ seasons ever.
There is not a single DF dungeon that I believe could be described as good; Algathar Academy and Brackenhide Hollow are okay, but the others are either bad or actively terrible. I predicted in season 1 that they would bring Freehold back because it would legitimately be the only way to save season 2 with how terrible HoI, Neltharus, and Uldaman are.
I agree seasonal affixes should be brought back; the notion that a seasonal is no longer required due to introducing new dungeons every season honestly feels more like a convenient excuse rather than a legitimate reason.
We had one terrible seasonal after having two good ones in a row and they decided to axe the entire concept. I suspect whoever made Encrytped and Shrouded is no longer with the company and they couldn’t come up with a decent one after Thundering.
Chains doing ~40% of overall in a Neltharus key is simply bad design; of course they just nerfed the chains without any compensatory nerfs to the actual dungeon so the highest Neltharus keys this season have likely already been done. Reminder, this nerf comes after the chains were buffed about 2 months ago.
The bosses are the buggiest of the bunch; if they bosses worked fine, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, but they don’t. No checkpoint at all in the entirety of the dungeon and it is way too big.
Loot part is an opened question. Two core issues to address:
Making the items farmable each week and keeping the season’s loot pool size about the same as per usual
Changing the meta loot per season so we dont just farm the same ones
I have mentioned a few initial ideas to handle these in the OP, which could be iterated on to find the best solution. Overall I do not think this would be such a big issue, because its easy to fix. The point would be the content, not the loot for me.
[Also, is it better to farm the same FH trinket we did for 4 seasons in BFA or the NL one which we did for 4+3 TW seasons in Legion/SL than to just farm the new and current ones from DF?]
Legion TW m+ was 6 dungeons in SL (EoA, BRH, DHT, NL, CoS, VotW). If they bring in the BfA ones too, again with 6 dungeons then it would be 12. But this would expand as they work on this system and we would only face 6 each week. Also just like they did with WoD tw, they could sometimes replace one or two dungeons.
They’re not going to revert anything. Like it or not but mixed seasons are here to stay. You can bet too that come next season, the new mega dungeon will be added to the rotation as 2 halves and we’ll probably see even more mixed dungeon pools. Maybe 2 from DF and 1 from BfA, Legion, WoD, and 1 “new” revamped dungeon giving us 8 total.
You don’t have to like it and I could be wrong. Precedent says I’m likely very close at worst though. Repeating the same dungeons season after season leads to stagnation and frustration especially since we’re often boiled down to chasing the same items again and again (and no way will Blizzard entertain a world where we get to keep and upgrade past season gear since that takes away their biggest tool in keeping us hamsters on the wheel).
It also is in their best interest to repurpose existing content since that is cheaper than creating new. They’ve got so many past dungeons just sitting there unused they can pull from plus whatever they repurpose can then go into the pool for future seasons.
Unfortunately yes, probably. Laziness is the trademark of DF if I look at m+. The fact that CoS made into the opener season’s rotation after being farmed for the ring talks for itself…
But if we have a choice to run either the current ones or the current TW ones then it suddenly becomes much better imo. SL proved this when they introduced Legion TW m+ and let it be active for like 2 months in a row. It felt great to choose from so many dungeons, yet no one was forced into running either of them apart from those who wanted the current meta gear (should have been on spot corrected by blizzard with appropriate nerfs imo, it was their carelessness, nothing else).
Also 8 dungeons + later 2 via the mega dungeon was record low in SL and unacceptably low in DF too. I feel like we are trying to address the wrong issue here. Why did they decrease the dungeon count periodically since Legion? Imo each patch should at very least 1 dungeon like in Legion, but ofc this would require them to actually work and not just pretending to.
Loot pool concerns are real, but I think thats the easiest part to fix.
Repurpose part is fine and they already had the system to achieve this on large scale in SL via the TW m+ framework. Cheaper is what I personally had really enough of. The entire expansion feels like this: CHEAP…
DF not only got rid of all of this, but also got rid of the current content keys in a single patch, then in the next this also got rid of the seasonal affixes…
Every single decision seems to revolve around avoiding work and not around what would benefit the game and players the most…
