It’s so ridiculously small because they aren’t supposed to be pushing 25+…
I don’t understand what you don’t understand about that. There will always be a cutoff to M+ where 99% of the players fall off and are not able to continue. The reason there are so few there is because it is so incredibly hard to do that you’re not actually supposed to BE doing it.
It’s the design between creating a hard cap and creating a soft cap. A hard cap would make it so that M+ keys stop gaining levels once the arbitrary level Blizzard has decided on is met. A soft cap allows that number to keep increasing with the assumption that players reaching past that cap are not a representation of reality, but the extreme exception of players willing to try and break through the barrier.
If M+ had a hard cap you’d see people complaining. I personally think it’s absolutely fine to have there be no hard cap and only a soft cap. But as will any scaling difficulty system there will always be infinitely smaller amounts of players as you go higher. That is by design and the point.
If you have better data then provide it, but defaulting to anecdotes because the data we have is not optimal or acceptable is not really conducive to the argument either. This is the best data I have access to.
Create more questions with more than one answer. As much as there were problems with last season and a tonne of problematic dispel mechanics, I will always praise the sand dot on the final boss of uldaman as being a good example of how to handle things like that going forward. It was a magic debuff that you had to remove but it was also a slow, meaning freedom effects would also work. Unfortunately the boss immediately before it damn near required mass dispel so it ended up being irrelevant but more mechanics like that would help.
One other thing is just the current mythic+ design disproportionately favours DR based cooldowns over throughput, throughput has a fixed value whereas Dr scales with the key level.
If that choice happens at a high enough level then that’s fine, you had variety all the way to the literal highest keys in season 1, meanwhile things have converged even below title range in the two seasons that followed.
It really cannot be understated just how different queueing for 26-27 keys in season 1 of DF felt to everything after that. One minute I’d be playing with rogue Boomie, the next I’d be with feral arms warrior, the next mage warlock, the next Ret enhance shaman, it truly was refreshing.
It’s also percentage based. Absorbtion doesn’t overheal either, but it doesn’t scale with the level of the content, it scales with the stats of the players. Percentage based damage reduction gets better the higher the incoming damage. Flat values don’t change in effectiveness as damage gets higher.
You cannot heal a one shot, but you can possibly prevent it from being a one shot if you reduce incoming damage enough.
I wish this were always true, but I just recognize opportunity cost is a thing and blizzard has finite resources. I’d rather them spent time on other issue instead of something that only impacts a vast minority of their customer base.
You’re providing data that if you literally hovered your cursor over you could immediately see that it’s incorrect. Raider io’s page last season was bugged and it was well known. Thus why I’m providing you with that info.
You can reference other sources like warcraftlogs and wow.gg.
Also, it’s pretty common knowledge that Holy Paladins were the vast majority of healers last season, and that data can be verified. For every 4 Holy Paladins there was 1 Priest Healer and 10 Priest healers for every Evoker/Resto Shaman to put things into comparison.
Class balance was terrible last season. FAR better this season.
Then essentially what you are saying is that there is a target number for M+ that should be the “soft cap” at which point the players should pool at and past that only the smallest of top tier players using extremely specialized setups and strategies exist. Is this correct?
So the real issue isn’t why are there only a tiny fraction of players at the top, it’s why is the “top” lower than it should be compared to where the rewards and bonuses are?
Because I am particularly frustrated with how hard it was to achieve the rewards for Season 2 in both PVE and PVP, in particular the terrible way rating worked in Season 2 PVP for solo shuffle just ruined the game for me, and pushing for 2500 rating was incredibly stressful and tough to try and get a consumable for a visual. I think they missed the mark. And part of that to me comes from the FOMO and the limited nature of the rewards not being in line with what players can reasonably achieve.
If we want to say that the drop off from hundreds of thousands of players to a handful should happen at a higher M+ level than it did in Season 2, I am all for that.
I’m not sure what else to really say, but classes are balanced around their 0.01% player potential.
Both players and developers use sims to calculate this and classes are tuned around that. However, players aren’t automatons that push buttons in the perfect order, nor is every fight just people standing around on a Patchwerk boss for 5 minutes.
Every spec is balanced around doing +30s, Mythic raiding, and Gladiator level. That’s the top end.
Then you have the player perception part which is out of the developers hands. People rank classes on charts from F to S-tier and people gravitate towards the S-tier classes.
Whatever WoWhead posts is what people follow as well. 90% of the people just copy and paste what WoWhead says for a build.
The top players also control what classes are popular as well because people watch what specs people bring to raid, M+, and arenas and copy that. This is the trickle down effect.
I have 20 tabs open and am doing work related business on 12 of them, and looking up data for this discussion on 8. There are absolutely going to be things I will miss. But this isn’t really providing me with other data, it’s just telling me the data is wrong.
Using the easily accessible options I cannot see the number of parses difference between the percentiles or the levels. In rankings I am getting things based on point values. But not population sizes. It’s just not easy or quick for me personally to pull up. If you DO have it you could quote or link it.
I see no place on this page to see historical data. Again, if there is such a place there would be great if I could see it. But not using these sites often it’s way harder for me to pull from them immediately and on demand.
For which classes? Because it’s definitely not for Shadow Priests.
I kinda wanna go back to this point because it misrepresents something in my opinion. If preventing homogenisation was the goal then we already failed. The best mythic+ specs are simultaneously the tankiest, highest damage, and have the most control. Mythic+ right now is a game of haves and have nots at the top end.
Yea and I disagree with that mentality and it’s why wow keeps losing players. because when you cater your decisions to a competitive environment based only around what the tiniest fraction of players can do without concern about the vast majority of those players you create a disconnect where people are not happy. And the game is no longer fun.
Those are all VASTLY different types of game modes with different requirements. If you balance what a class can do in a 5 man group or what one can do in a scaling raid group, you will inevitably have issues. Not to mention what makes classes strong or viable in those game modes changes drastically based on what the needs are. Raid boss requirements are different than M+ requirements, because one is based on mechanics to complete a fight and the other is based on timers related to clearing trash and bosses. So the needs are not the same. And having so many different types of content all attempting to be competitive in a vacuum creates a major tug of war.
Developers absolutely do not use sims as their exclusive tool. They have access to data that far exceeds what players do, and often use that data when making their assessments. They might use sims when testing certain changes, but they definitely don’t use sims when targeting what to change.
This wasn’t true 5 years ago and I’d be shocked if it’s true now, we’ve even had instances of blizzard making changes around an assumption due to a bug in SimC that once fixed made the change blizzard did completely illogical.
I hate when people bring up class homogenization because most people that use that term don’t understand what it means, and instead of defining their usage of it they just use it as the keyword boogeyman to say that wow is bad.
The most consistently I see it used is when talking about vanilla wow versus later versions of wow. The period of the game with the worst balance objectively.
Then the additional issue is with Blizzard as a company becoming lazy and pushing too much onto the devs. Which, is an entirely separate conversation and I really don’t want to distract from what we currently are discussing for me to rant and rave about how late stage capitalism and completely ruined nearly every industry in the US.