It is not a typo. I did not say the players who were struggling in M0 weren’t being carried in heroic raid, most aren’t pulling their weight. Our guild is a friends and family guild that raids, not one where membership and raid attendance is contingent upon performing. So yes, there are players in my guild that will get fully upgraded heroic raid gear that are dragged to boss kills by the better players in my guild (who get KSH on multiple characters every season). It’s far easier for a raid of 25 people to make up for the gap in performance from a few than for a group of 5 to make up a similar gap in performance.
I would setup dungeon groups with these players who weren’t going to be able to enjoy the PUG experience in keys because of their skill level. I usually healed so they didn’t feel overshadowed when looking at details, but that did mean performance checks on bosses could result in us wiping. The goal was for us to enjoy our time with a key where nobody would be flamed for being bad. We all had a good time, even timing some of those keys; keys that are no longer possible.
I don’t get your obsession with this topic? You have probably written over 50000 words on this already, and you keep regurgitating the same word salad over and over again.
M+ was meant to be a challenge, the old system was garbage, and the developers knew this. Those lower keys were just to dang easy to be considered part of the M+ pillar.
It doesn’t matter if you enjoyed them, the fact is, they were not up to the difficulty Blizzard wanted for M+.
I honestly think you are being extremely selfish here, because this change is going to benefit the game a lot, I honestly couldn’t care less that a handful of players that were stuck in low keys lose out. If you have been stuck in keys from 2-8, then you might need to find a new game to play, because that content was trivial for almost anyone that could understand the basics of a dungeon running in WoW.
Like everyone keeps telling, the 23 difficulties were just too much, and it was confusing to new players to boot.
Also, stop trying to present yourself as some kind of spokemans for players here, you have zero idea has this is playing out, other than your anecdotal experiences.
I hope you answer this question too. Did you and your wife even attempt to run the new M0?
Did you even read this paragraph before before you hit send? Players stuck in 2 - 8 should find a new game because other players found it trivial is somehow an improvement for the game?
Do you have any proof it was confusing to new players? Is there any reason to believe the heroic > M0 jump > M+2 jump will be less confusing?
In what way have I presented myself as a spokesman for the players? I have been very clear about the people to whom I am representing.
No, she didn’t play S3 because our daughter was born just before the season began. She’d planned to get back into WoW with S4, but decided not to after reading that the entry point for keys is now what she considered to be a +12, 4 levels above where she felt comfortable before.
Very good. It is going to be following us into the next expansion. Players will run normal, heroic, m0, and then m+, instead of jumping right into m0 like prior expansions. This is good for the game. Progress through each difficulty. We’ll all be in the same boat.
I apologize that you feel it is a “git gud” statement, but it is more of a realistic statement. Plenty of guidance on how to break down these barriers has been provided. At some point the onus is on the individual(s) to do the required work, or don’t. Now those people who can only run a +4 in the past can run heroic and get whatever comes from the vault. The difficulty/experience is most comparable.
Let’s be honest, when m+ was introduced in Legion, it was rather difficult to get into and progress as well. Since then, it’s been watered down to the point where the lower keys were essentially meaningless and proved no real challenge. If people are completely unable to dip their toes in +2 with all of the means available to them, sorry I guess? I don’t know what else to say. The good thing is there IS content available for them to play that aligns with the mode they are most comfortable with. It just won’t be m+.
It’s actually very realistic. If you run dungeons enough you will start to become quite well-versed in what happens when, what to avoid, etc. How is this even being disputed? If you need to run the dungeon for reps, you are not “getting nothing out of”. You are getting knowledge (or in some cases, gear). That is what they may need in order to progress. Why is this difficult to grasp?
The intent is to give players a sense of progression through difficulty modes, to give each step in the ladder some meaning. This was not there previously. There will be walls each gamer will face. Knock them down, or don’t. Call it “weeding out”, or whatever you’d like. The changes put in place are best for the game in the long run.
Normal and heroic having a place for more players is fine. Having a nearly vertical incline between any step in that process while learning is not. And then everyone whose most appropriate difficulty lands somewhere within the space between two consecutive levels is now without a content. Again, when there are small gaps between the levels those players will have to venture a shorter distance toward trivialness or frustrating; a large gap makes it more trivial or frustrating, both for learning and as a primary gameplay experience.
Sure, but I suspect retention from those players to be lower because their gameplay experience will be decidedly worse. And the in-game mechanisms to improve to try to bridge that gap to M0 are also markedly worse.
And that’s really the rub for me. Most of the comments people are leaving to dismiss these concerns revolve around the idea that people can get the same rewards from other content as being a suitable replacement. But I’m more concerned about the experience. M+ for the players whose ideal level was between 2 and 11 is gone; the people close to that 11 can probably push to that 12, but someone who was a few levels from 11 or more, given the neutering of learning avenues as well, is not very promising.
Player like myself and my wife couldn’t care less about the gear we have beyond the power it gives us to put back into the content we enjoy. Blizzard could put max level gear behind pet battles and I wouldn’t do it. The difference is I already skipped the 2 - 11 range most seasons and likely won’t need to run more than a handful of heroics or M0 to get to the point I can complete M+2 even in the next expansion; she cannot.
I’m not disputing this at all. I’m highlighting this as another barrier. Every barrier placed in front of a group is going to reduce the participation among the people willing to push beyond that barrier. We all have limited play time; the number of players that would be willing to run a dungeon solely for the experience of learning is less than the number of players that would willing to run a dungeon for either the experience or gear.
I’d be less concerned if WoW had a positive reputation onboarding new players to the game and within its modes. Are adding new barriers really better? Especially when every identified problem I’ve seen so far has a solution that isn’t chopping off every entry level key up to previous level 11?
So then half the number of keys. Or compress the bottom 11 keys down to 2 levels. I’m not against wanting to make each step feel more relevant, but until very high keys the only even remotely large bump in difficulty is heroic > M0 with the system we have today. Once you get past the M0 hurdle, there are fairly small difficulty jumps when you go up each key level in M+. It seems odd to me that many players will spend more time in heroic to reach M0 than they will in any mythic level from a scaling perspective.
Even as a casual gamer, I run M0 with no healer because it’s so easy. Just gearing with world quests and weekly vaults is plenty to get anyone through M0.
I do agree that the jump into M+ is harder than it needs to be though. Wish they’d just ditched every other key level instead of the first ten levels - then we’d still have some progression.
Or make heroic slightly harder and let it give veteran gear instead of adventurer. OR best yet, make M0 spammable to be able to gear into M+ without weekly lockouts. Considering M0 is “replacing low end keys” - I don’t understand why they can’t be repeated.
There is so many things wrong with this from a social standpoint I don’t even know where to begin.
Your choosing to set an arbitrary threshold of a subjective opinion of skill level that is highly skewed by your own abilities. Because it is easy for you it must be easy for everyone and for the people who it is not, oh well it’s not me.
There is a difference between welfare and job training. This isn’t about the awards. This is about the difficulty of the content in the context of some players skills. It’s not your place or anyone else’s to tell them they don’t belong in the content.
The players that do +20 keys could easily say the same thing… you know what +17 is the cut off if you can’t do it you don’t belong here.
That is the most elitist bull crap I see when people tell other people they don’t belong in something that is part of a game.
I don’t understand how people don’t understand that sort of attitude is what drives people away from games. It’s not the thing that promotes bringing in new people who will keep it thriving.
This was not what I was trying to do, what I’m saying is, if a player doesn’t enjoy challenge, there’s no reason for them to do content designed to challenge them - and there’s plenty of content in WoW for players that don’t want challenge. This change came about as a direct result of more casual players asking for more challenging untimed content without the social/time/performance pressures of an m+, I think it achieved that, I think it’s a good thing, but it’s obviously not for everyone.
Games with multiple difficulty levels usually design those difficulty levels for different sets of players, not for all of them, I’m not choosing to set any barriers, Blizzard sets the difficulty of the content and the players choose if they want to do it or not. Mythic raid is not designed for the same set of players as Normal raid, and there’s no reason we should interpret their dungeon difficulty design any differently. This is not a social issue, it is not an elitist view, it’s a design choice.
Perfect example, this would obviously not be healthy for the game, but I don’t see anything “wrong with this on a social level” like you’re claiming. Regardless - it’s a good thing that players like that, or like me, or like you, don’t have any direct control over how Blizzard sets up their difficulties.
I can see how hitting a jump in scaling like this could be frustrating though, and I can see the problems with designing games like this when the way this was done previously was essentially a very granular difficulty slider.
The whole time I’ve been in this thread I’ve been trying to understand different perspectives and I’ve been advocating for a smoother learning curve to allow people to actually get into m+. New players are awesome and I love encountering them, I’m not here trying to gatekeep anyone.
Specifically, this sucks man, that’s a sad sad story, I bet there are other people out there that have had this happen too. I can see exactly why this change comes across so negatively to you, it’s taking away a part of the game and your social experience that you enjoyed.
Not every change is perfectly inclusive, especially with such a broad playerbase, some changes are gonna be negative, personally I stopped playing over shadowlands because I hated the changes they made for that expansion, it sucked when it happened to me, it sucks that it’s happened to your wife.
With all that said though, I still think it’s overall a good change for the game, the old system was doing damage to the game and the change they made is pretty universally liked, at least as far as I can see in my limited sphere of people I know and youtubers I watch, not claiming to speak for everyone.
Unlike some red hatters in this thread who don’t care there are people who want to just have fun and enjoy WoW or don’t care that disabled/not as good/learning disability or whatever it is have a harder time can’t enjoy progression as much…I’ll come with some advice from my own perspective.
My recommendation might be a bit lame cause some people do want to play certain classes.
But some classes are just easier and better for mythics. I can solo mythic 0 for example on this vengeance DH without relying on anyone, I can solo mythic 0 on my beastmaster hunter too. Same with my prot paladin, and blood DK. Guardian druid too.
Out of those, mostly tank specs have it easiest and they still do a lot of damage (in mythics). If you build for it anyway. But beastmaster is probably the one dps spec that can do mythics super easy and its a very laid back class with minimal buttons. Warlock isn’t too bad either, affliction is slow but still really strong and lots of sustain so doesn’t really die easily.
But there are classes (mostly tanks, and the two pet dps classes) that are slow and sturdy with tons of damage. Guardian druid is probably the slowest of the bunch, and that one still puts out some dps. Blizzard has definitely blurred the lines of tank/dps in recent times.
As for mythics themselves. The way personally play WoW, I mean maybe it doesn’t help that much…but…honestly find taking my time at my own pace, and learning from my failure attempts at (soloing) mythics but still slowly making progress is how I’ve enjoyed WoW for a while. I used to raid and do harder content, but the WoW playerbase became super toxic and got even worse after the red hatter became a leader of a certain country, the toxicity skyrocketed in WoW after that from lack of moderation sadly. So I just do my own thing these days.
I mean, some people might recommend play FFXIV instead…and in a lot of ways maybe its better for you guys (and me), but I like WoW, the lore, the world, the races and all of it. I just wish blizzard made a better community, though partly its the esport nature of the game they’ve pushed onto the crowd. But I’ve managed to find ways around it by just enjoying what I can, slowly, I used to rush and want to hurry to better items, but I make slow progress as I solo mythics and stuff.
Maybe the advice will help or not, dunno. But hopefully it does
There isn’t a massive jump. You gear out in heroic and do the mythic mechanics, which you’ll learn by doing the fights, just like everyone else ever has. Mythic and mythic plus are the end game. They aren’t supposed to be a cake walk.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but capping out at +6s in heroic raid gear to me sounds like wanting an end game path where you can grossly mishandle virtually every single avoidable and non-avoidable damage and ignore it and be fine.
That doesn’t even happen in raids like you are saying the larger size let’s you hard carry them where they are likely dead most of the encounter.
I don’t think Dwellknarr realizes this at all. He keeps saying his wife lost a progression path, but it sounds like they just liked steamrolling over easy dungeons, which is still available.
Heroic dungeons needed love, and they had to start somewhere, hence the reason those extremely easy keys were deleted.
I think Blizzard was just trying to fix the difficulty creep that was introduced over the last few expansions. The entry level key levels were just way too easy when they expanded the keys to +20.
I think it’s important to consider that M+ wasn’t designed with this barrier to entry, it was redesigned with that barrier. You’re right, there will always be content that is designed out of reach of certain demographics of players, like mythic raid. There will be players disappointed they can’t experience content designed that way, but they won’t have built a gameplay loop that involves that mode.
M+ was designed to be accessible by pretty much everyone at least since BFA. Look at all the people insisting in these posts that 2 - 11 keys were all mindless facerolls. Even though I don’t agree with that depiction of those levels, it’s clear that nearly everyone who reaches endgame had a M+ key level that would be challenging but not frustrating. And that’s how the game mode existed for the better part of a decade. This statement is no longer true for anyone whose appropriate difficulty level existed in that 2 - 11 range; there are other ways to get gear that fall below that difficulty range, but nowhere to get that gameplay experience.
But why? This is the big question that I can’t seem to get a straight answer to. And possibly more importantly, why did the changes that result in a positive for those who do benefit require the complete removal of all low level keys to accomplish? It’s not a binary situation where the only choices were to change nothing or make this exact set of changes; there was a middle ground that would have alleviated all of my concerns while still achieving what supporters of the change claim was the goal.
So because someone at some point might lie about having a disability, that means we should discount anyone who highlights how a disability impacts them? Would you take me more seriously if I sent you a picture of my wife’s handicap placard?
Having a disability is not a one-size fits all affair. You simply cannot group all people with a disability together and say that because one person was able to accomplish X that everyone in the group will be able to accomplish X.
My wife has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was 8. Her ability to move her fingers across a keyboard quickly enough to reach multiple abilities in quick succession is greatly diminished. And before you try to “fix” the problem, yes we have remapped her abilities to just the left side of her keyboard. Saying my wife is just making excuses because a person missing a leg has no problems performing in WoW would be ridiculous.
And what would complaining about another poster to someone else be considered if not for whining?
You know what, maybe you’re onto something here. We should apply the same logic to raiders who can’t or choose not to farm M+ for gear. They should be playing another game or stick to casual modes.
That is how this works, yes? Pick a demographic of the game you aren’t a part of who are unhappy with the state of the game and tell them they should find something else to play.
The scaling between heroic and M0 is the largest jump in dungeon content difficulty WoW has ever seen before keys in the 30s.
The problem is that mythic plus had cakewalk difficulty levels 3 weeks ago that no longer does. This discussion would be significantly different if M+ were just released this season with the difficulty it has today.
They were referring to Donald Trump and Trump supporters because the Make America Great Again hates were traditionally red. Apparently Donald Trump’s reach extended into WoW as well for some reason.
For my wife, it was never about doing mechanics. She actually was very good with avoiding unavoidable damage, kicking and performing stops when she needed to, and not pulling extra mobs. Her problem is her performance ceiling to be a contributing member of the group caps out around that level. In some M+ seasons this change may have been okay in terms of us being able to get through the new M0 difficulty level with enough perseverance. But with 6 of 8 dungeons having nearly guaranteed wipes if you don’t meet certain damage checks, and I would contend a 7th dungeon would also be VERY difficulty to beat without meeting its damage check, having good mechanics is just not enough to even complete that content (and that’s even if we ignore any arbitrary time to complete element).
I’ve explained my position multiple times, you just prefer to respond through other people by telling me what my motivation is, as if you could possibly even know that.
You have made over 200 posts on this topic across various threads. I think everyone on these forums is well aware of your motivations and position. The fact is, you guys liked steamrolling easy keys, and now this isn’t an option anymore.
MMOs make changes like this all the time. You either adapt, or quit, it is that simple.
Your feedback isn’t even getting seen by anyone at Blizzard. The developers don’t read this forum, and most of their changes are made based on data collection.
You are honestly wasting your time with all these walls of text. Your best bet, is to vote with your wallet.
The developers don’t even read the CC forums.
I get it, raging about this topic on the forums is your outlet. Hopefully someday you will realize what a colossal waste of time this all was. I even get upset at myself for posting on these forums, I don’t even know why I do it, because it is a complete waste of time.
It most definitely is a social thing, when nearly every post I read supporting or arguing against people bringing their grievances forward lack any minute amount of empathy. That’s a social problem.
This change was the biggest corrupt a wish joke ever.
“Please give us more challenging content without timers.”
“Your wish is granted however all the easier difficulties that existed before have vanished from existence and you are now forced to spend five to six times as long in heroic dungeons before you can even attempt it.”
This is simply not true. It actually was designed with this barrier in Legion. Because you go on to say this:
You appear to understand that the accessibility was dumbed down over the course of time.
You seem to be looking for an answer that fits your unique scenario. Here’s something to think about. You keep speaking to the level of difficulty you and your group were comfortable handling in the past. What about those who were a notch below you? Now they are unable to do heroics, or whatever difficulty they were capped out at. Do you see the issue here? There will always be individuals impacted by decisions. You appear to be up in arms because this one impacts you. Let’s adjust the difficulty modes so you can still feel good about doing keys with your guild and friends. All while forgetting there are others beneath you who may have the same gripes. Should their concerns now be ignored? This is a slippery slope. Let’s just make it so you can break wind and mobs fall over just for the sake of inclusion for everyone.
The reason for the change was for a smoothing progression. Heroic was way too easy compared to M0. As you gear up through heroic the shift over the M+ shouldn’t be so stark