Terrible state of TWW M+ and how to save it

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
121

I can guarantee nobody in this thread are a top 1% player. Not even myself. And they are all complaining about Guile rather than whatever goes on in +11 or below keys.

That’s, unfortunately, going to happen forever since most of the wow players have this thing where they want their level of play to be considered the above-average benchmark and, therefore, the place where maximum rewards are achieved (which is super arbitrary). This for 2 reasons:

  1. So people with a higher skill level cannot have a gear advantage over them for doing harder content. Thus, they can be called “sweaty elitists” to make them feel better about themselves being unable to do the same content as those higher-skilled players.
  2. So that players of lesser skill are unable to become better-geared than them and allows them to insult them to feel superior.

So if young Jimmy can only do +7 keys and can’t do an +8 to save his life because he bricks keys from poor play, he’ll lobby for +7s to drop gilded.

It’s a combo of being harder and much easier to fail. In Dragonflight, you could chain CC packs, people were overgeared (especially in season 2), and deaths literally meant nothing most of the time because of how forgiving the dungeon timers were, so you could afford to do dumb, risky pulls. DF people were more likely to push and get their full vaults on Fort weeks over Tyran weeks during the beginning of seasons of DF because Trash is piss easy compared to bosses especially when you just lust the nasty packs.

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122

You forgot to add:
Shipping full bis to mailbox.

123

After 1 month:
28.4% have KSM
7.1% have KSH

Historically we see 30-35% at the end of the season. This narrative of “omg it’s too hard” doesn’t work anymore now that we have concrete data points.

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124

Most will eventually get into Heroic Raid and lower keys that drop Hero gear. The problem has been Casuals think they are entitled to Mythic track gear and they try but horribly fail.

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That and casuals would rather ask for the game to be reworked over spending 10 minutes on to learn how their class works/tips about the dungeon they are doing.

I mean if they understood that then they’d have the basic understanding needed to do basic mechanics in dungeons and understand the concept that pulling 3 mobs is easier than pull 7 mobs.

126

Good post OP
Bump

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127

Not sure where you’re getting these numbers from. Your data points seem off compared to any I can find. Care to share the source? Maybe I missed something.

The KSM Feat of Strength for TWW S1 is at 4% for account acquisition according to Data For Azeroth and 7% on Wowhead.
Less than 1% acquisition for TWW S1 KSH on Data for Azeroth, and 1% flat on WoW head.

If you’re using RaiderIO your data will be skewed because a vast majority of third-party addon users are the “sweats”, which will have higher completion rates for obvious reasons.

We aren’t done with the season yet so it might get to the 31% KSM from DF S1 like you said, but I doubt it based on the current M+ climate. Which as of right now, is statistically more difficult.

From personal experience, as a tank, my desire to push has decreased to near 0 which has not been the case in previous seasons. This time I will get my portals and vanish from the tank pool, which seems a common sentiment. (At least on the forums :P)

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128

I believe from this data raider. io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-tww-1/us

Also, before the TWW the score was separate for Fort and Tyran weeks, its faster to hit KSM now as they were lumped together by basically doing 7s.

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129

RaiderIO doesn’t pull data from characters below a certain IO, so like I said before, using it doesn’t paint as accurate a picture of the player base as a whole as one might think.
If someone can explain why it would be more accurate than the other sources I’m all ears. Maybe they’ve got that secret data-juice or blizz API wizardry.

The cutoffs, I believe, are their guesses at what it will be, which only blizzard will know beforehand unfortunately.

Also, the dungeon scores being smooshed together doesn’t mean its easier, it just means it takes less time to get the score. You still have to be able to complete the content on that level.

And I think the current argument of the thread is that its “too hard” right now on a mechanical level in comparison to previous seasons.

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Correct, why I made the edit before you replied that its faster to obtain was the better response than saying easier.

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131

I see that now.
I’ve been got.

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132

https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-tww-1/us

I assume you are using dataforazeroth who uses an aggregate of all active accounts including those who never step foot inside M+. It’s highly inaccurate to use in this context.

Yup, read above.

What does this have to do with anything? RIO logs runs directly through Blizzard’s API. It didn’t require you to have the addon.

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133

Disagree. As long as I’m using it as a baseline to judge all the seasons off of, there should be no issue. The ratio’s would remain the same between seasons if there isn’t any issue with the M+ content/run count. Also, if were talking about a playerbase-wide M+ issue (which I’m pretty sure this thread is about), not using a wider base for statistics would be disingenuous.

So they use the API, fair enough. One of my points is moot.

To address the other issue I brought up though, RaiderIO does not count player accounts below a certain IO. Which would mean those taking part in M+ below a certain level have no effect on RaiderIO numbers. This would preclude it from being the best source to use yes? Unless you are making the argument those players don’t count/matter.

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134

What’s mechanically complex? I guess you can make an argument for ara-kara’s last boss, but that’s one of the easier dungeons now.

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DF S3 and S4 were great in terms of effort to reward ratios. They need to get back to that, like now…before the unsubs start piling up to shadowlands levels. fort and tyrannical together was always a bad idea in my opinion but if they are bent on it…they should trade challengers peril to the +10 spot as an additional challenge to getting your portals and throw fort+tyrannical at +7. Gilded crest should start being awarded at +7 with Myth vault pulls beginning at +8. The RNG on vault pulls is enough of a X factor to keep most from ever getting BiS Myth items in every slot without mythic raiding. +10 would begin the trek to portals for everything and be XB, fort, tyr and CP. 2500 rating will still reward the aesthetic item. They should add another rating achieve that awards a token for a myth track tier item at 3K rating. beyond this…blizz could add achieves with equitable rewards beginning at +12 and every even number key beyond for the top 10% to stroke their egos with. they could even start letting myth track items drop in the dungeon at certain keys levels. this format gives a feeling of respect for the time of the average player while incentivizing the “try hards” to keep on trying hard. WoW is a business with players of all types and mindsets and Blizz can cater to most of them by appealing to a wider variety of mentalities towards the game. I dont understand why they havent explored this already. you can’t cater to the top 10% without pissing off the 90% and vice versa so they should be doing their best to appeal to as many players as humanly possible to keep subs up, wow tokens selling and the precious microtransactions in general flowing. thats all they care about at Blizz. bottom line. money. Any argument outside of that fact is irrelevant.

PS: if you are going to hit the forums with inflammatory comments disparaging players voicing opinions about their personal experience with the game they put time and money into, at least have the spine to do so with your main toons profile shown. There are an awful lot of sub 80/no M+ dungeons completed wow armory profiles spewing nonsense here. Those comments are likely being disregarded on sheer principle.

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136

Your commentary is about 8 years out of date. No one cares about raids, it even came in 3rd on Blizzards census list of enjoyable content (behind M+ and PvP).

People don’t tank for many reasons and much of it is how tanks are treated, not because the easiest content this game has to offer (raids) only require 2 tanks. Every raid pug you see in LFG is waiting for tanks.

There are spots for tanks in this game it is just that no one wants to deal with this community.

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137

There is an issue because you are assuming the amount of accounts being tracked and players running M+ is the same. Dataforazeroth’s own website states that their data is inaccurate and to not use it for objective measures.

Data from RIO is much more accurate if you are trying to compare seasons especially early-mid season to end-of season data.

If you run 1 key at +2 it counts.

https://www.dataforazeroth.com/about

How accurate are the leaderboards, rankings, and rarity statistics?

Accuracy primarily depends on whether my dataset can be considered a good representation of the overall World of Warcraft playerbase. That is hard to judge, but I can at least give some background information.

Data for Azeroth attempts to proactively find characters by using guild rosters, Hall of Fame leaderboards, PvP leaderboards, Mythic+ leaderboards, etc. However, Blizzard limits how quickly I can call their APIs, so it is not feasible for me to find every character that exists.

Blizzard has also changed their APIs to only provide data for recently active characters. They do not provide specifics of how long before inactive characters get removed, but the initial change required players to login sometime after Patch 8.2. They also give players privacy settings to turn off data sharing, as well as the ability to hide account-wide achievements.

Therefore, all leaderboards and statistics will be slightly skewed. Rankings may be incorrect due to others’ characters being missing or made private. I provide a Statistics page to help show a database breakdown and possible sampling biases. I apologize that I cannot provide you with 100% accurate information, but I hope that everything is still a good approximation and adds to your enjoyment of World of Warcraft.

How accurate is information on the various collections?

All information about collection items originate from Blizzard’s APIs, including name, faction, zone, daily/weekly, etc. Data for Azeroth attempts to correct any inaccuracies, as well as add basic source information to them, but this usually takes some time.

In my experience, the APIs have a large amount of incorrect data, though it has greatly improved over time. Ideally, inaccuracies would be reported to Blizzard so the APIs can be fixed for everybody. That said, feedback can be submitted on the item’s View Details page, especially for any mistakes I’ve made in adding supplemental information.

138

Another day, another person’s key bricked. This time having plenty of +4’s I thought I should level up Stonevault one number at a time, having it sticking out like a sore point at +2. So I joined a +3 and there was so much carnage that someone simply DCed.

People like to rant about people just wanting to not play strategic and invoke MOP remix etc, but the difficulty squish sucks because there is absolutely no ‘chill’ setting in M+ now. Sometimes people just like to join groups, hang, kill some things, and get and maybe get an upgrade. Problem is, I don’t really see any of that.

It’s understandable that the upper levels of M+ are “use defensives instead of expecting your healer to output enough to counter the damage” but it’s downright awful to have that kind of expectation at +2, partly because that requires people knowing that kind of damage is incoming before it happens. The average player is not going to remember when one guy in the pile of identical trash characters is going to fire off something that needs defensives. A lot of people don’t want to study the game to that extent.

Stop requiring that sort of knowledge at the very lowest of keys. It basically says you must always play sweaty or else get out.

First thing I’d say is bigger focus on dispel as a mechanic, both in that one weekly affix but also in a lot of content in general right now. Even the raid fight people are having trouble with has a lot of dispel-related stuff. Dispel Week might as well be “no DHs, no Locks” week because the former can’t do anything and the latter has to choose between dispel and interrupt and conventional wisdom has always told them to pick the latter.

The second thing I’d say the game doesn’t explain itself very well. A good example is the spears, where there’s nothing clueing in to the player what they’re supposed to do, but the new player will likely just let other people in the party handle it.

The two expacs overrepresented in the ‘retro’ section are the expacs that caused a lot of people to unsub from WoW, boycotting Blizzard, etc. People don’t know hidden tricks of the map because a lot of people did not play WoW at that time. They really should just leave the throwbacks for later seasons when people get bored.

There’s no real way to train for it because I can’t do a follower dungeon run of Shadowlands or BFA.

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139

I’d settle for Gilded dropping at +8 but keys not lowering below +7 unless the user chooses to. Let people slowly work their way up either the key going up or just staying the same, with the option to throw it away for a lower one if they’re not comfortable with how high it’s going. People who can’t succeed will stagnate, but feel motivated to keep trying.

A lesser option is changing which dungeon if it goes down. Particularly obnoxious is that the lower key is the same dungeon. Nobody wants to run that dungeon yet again at a lower level, dealing with the same thing as before, the same atmosphere (and boy is the atmosphere of the themes this season dreary to look at, between the Nerubian shopping mall and all the Shadowlands grime), the same boss voice quotes, Dagran babbling in your ears for half a dungeon, etc. At least say “well that didn’t go well, but how about you do a different one?”

All of this is important to get me to even consider doing my own key instead of just signing up for other people’s.

I don’t aspire to anything dropping Mythic track. My problem is I already have plenty of Hero gear that I want to upgrade. I’m doing Heroic raid and increasingly my party is climbing away from me, so I’m pushed into this even though I think they ruined it with the squish.

140

Key depletion has always been a hot topic, it has positives and negatives. I think in the current state it would be negative and they need to look at other incentives to motivate the players.

I would hate for them to create a dynamic that players expect you to restart. You see this in raid all the time, as players would rather everyone “jump off” vs trying to sub optimally continue a fight.

Just a suggestion about gilded crests. You can trade up to gilded crests. I believe the crest limit cap should now be over what you need to cap heroic gear.