A week into this M+ season I posted this thread detailing the many issues I had with the season from very early on. I’ll admit that a lot of the issues described with the trash and bosses have long since been addressed to some extent, but at the end of the post I said the following:
We are now a little less than halfway into TWW Season 1, as the general consensus is that we aren’t getting 11.1 until March given the Plunderstorm schedule, the TGP schedule, etc., and the general consensus from many players, be they some of the highest key pushers for their respective classes/specs or people just looking do do their 1/4/8 weekly +10s or even just getting into M+ and starting with +7s, is that M+ is in a very bad spot and needs some serious, urgent help on nearly every front. I heavily agree with this sentiment: I think the current M+ season is atrocious, has remained atrocious even after the fixes to much of what I described in my original post, and needs to be addressed well before Season 2 releases yet seems to have been met with complete radio silence on Blizzard’s end. This post is my attempt to provide some detailed feedback on that front, although it’s ultimately one small drop in an ocean of feedback about this awful M+ season.
Gear Progression SUCKS!:
Dragonflight Season 2 introduced an upgrade system that was well-received at the time and that I believe is still inherently good for the game at its core. However, it has some pretty big issues later in an M+ season that were pretty rough in DF S3 and S4 and are ten times worse right now. TWW was intended to be an incredibly alt-friendly expansion, and as far as leveling goes it absolutely is, but the upgrade system has a lot of issues that, especially now, make the expansion feel miserable if you’re trying to play alts. My feedback on this front is as follows:
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Myth track gear as a whole is incredibly frustrating to obtain, particularly if there are pieces of interest in the M+ loot table, and this frustration is a lot more understandable when the difference between Hero track and Myth track is now 13 item levels instead of a mere 6. Anyone who engages with any even remotely challenging content in this game knows some of the best items’ names by heart: Skardyn’s Grace, Ara-Kara Sacbrood, Gale of Shadows, Mark of Khardros, and Skarmorak Shard. Chances are you probably farmed Grim Batol for hours upon hours to get one of the three trinkets on this list that drop from there. While getting specific raid items in a season with no Dinar/Bullion is plenty frustrating as is (Sureki Zealot’s Insignia, Mad Queen’s Mandate, Spymaster’s Web, Seal of the Poisoned Pact), it’s so much worse in M+ because there is only the Great Vault as a means of obtaining these items at a competitive ilvl. You can do everything right, cap out your Vault with eight +10s every week for the entire season, and you’ll probably still never even see a Skardyn’s Grace show up in your Vault; if you clear 7/8M every week, you will certainly have seen at least one Sikran neck drop, might’ve seen one in your Vault, and will absolutely have seen at least one Spymaster’s Web drop for your guild plus some folks pulling it out of their Vaults.
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While Crests are generally fine early in a season, after a month and a half or so their rate of acquisition is unreasonably low for how many you need to really keep up with everyone else. The biggest deterrent for anyone returning to the game or looking to gear up an alt right now is having them log in and realize that they need to do dozens upon dozens upon dozens of +8 or higher keys (this opens up another problem I’ll discuss further later on) to farm out their Gilded Crests, because they would currently be staring down the barrel of a crest cap of 1170 when they’re getting 12 of them per timed +8 or higher key. There needs to be a catchup mechanism in place at this point in the season to make this feel reasonable; simply put, if I have to do 98 timed keys to get my Crest cap, I’m gonna just use my time for something else.
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Valorstones suck, just like Flightstones sucked in DF. They’re the last two expansions’ equivalent of the widely-despised Conduit Energy from pre-9.1.5 Shadowlands in that they’re a part of an exclusive club of WoW features that exist with literally zero upsides from a gameplay perspective. You either don’t notice them at all (which is often true of one’s main) or you notice them because you just don’t have enough of them to upgrade your gear even if you have a ton of Crests (which is often true of one’s alts). Delete them; they contribute nothing, and if they contribute nothing they shouldn’t exist.
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While the other Harbinger Crest milestone achievements (Weathered, Carved, Runed) are quite reasonable to obtain, Harbinger of the Gilded (the closest thing we have to a “catchup” achievement for Crests) has exceedingly unreasonable requirements to obtain. To obtain 639 in every slot on a single character is very time-consuming and even luck-dependent, even if you’re actively clearing Nerub-ar Palace on Mythic. My guild is a Hall of Fame (US 45) guild and we might have one or two people get it next week. If you primarily do M+, you’re at the mercy of your Great Vault slots. You could be doing the hardest keys imaginable and you will still realistically never see this achievement unless you’re actively raiding at the highest level; a CE raider could still realistically get Harbinger of the Gilded in a couple weeks, by comparison, without setting foot in a +10. You’d still absolutely be gimping yourself by doing so, but it’s nothing compared to how hard you’d be throwing by not raiding as a high key pusher.
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To expand on the above, crafting is ridiculously inefficient beyond your two Embellishments (which are already laughably weak). It costs far too many Crests to craft a single 636 piece (why this was increased from 60 Gilded Crests to literally your entire week’s worth of Gilded Crests is beyond me), and even once you’ve finally crafted something you’re faced with the grim reality that the Crafted item is only 636. From a “this item is BiS” perspective it doesn’t matter too much, because every class and spec in the game uses two Crafted items, but you spent 90 Crests to obtain a 636 piece when it takes only 75 Crests to upgrade a 623 piece to 639. And then the Crafted item in question doesn’t even give you credit for your Harbinger of the Gilded achievement, because it isn’t 639, so you have to spend an additional 15 Gilded Crests per Crafted item you’re using on an item you actively won’t use to get credit towards the achievement for that armor/weapon slot. This math doesn’t work out in any sense: you’re actively using up more crests for less. Why on earth is Crafted gear so much more expensive to make this expansion, from a Crest PoV? And why isn’t it 639 to justify that absurd cost to craft said gear? Or why isn’t Harbinger of the Gilded awarded when you’ve equipped a 636 ilvl piece in every slot? This needs to change, ideally urgently, but certainly with 11.1; this makes absolutely no sense.
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Anything below a +8 feels worthless compared to Delves. Arguably a +7 because that at least drops Hero track loot. This is not me advocating for Delves to be nerfed; I dislike them, but they aren’t designed for me and that’s okay. We’ll get to why this is doubly frustrating in the next section.
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Depleting a key gives you a paltry FIVE Crests. Nobody wants to stick around for a depleted key in general now, be it a weekly Vault filler or a high key you’re doing solely for score; in the latter case it makes sense, though.
…oh, and that’s just the gearing part of the season. I haven’t even covered the frustrating dungeons, the annoyance of Challenger’s Peril, or the abysmal difficulty curve in keys at all levels.
Too Many Big Changes All At Once
For starters, I think that TWW S1 set out to do some pretty interesting stuff at its core. I think making a clear difference between lower keys and push keys and making the push keys consistent from week to week by removing affixes while maintaining some level of variety in lower keys with the Xal’atath affixes is a good idea, even if I dislike Oblivion as an affix (I think that’s what the balls you have to soak is called?).
I also think the key squish isn’t inherently a problem. The original +2 to +11 range of keys was an absolute ghost town by the time BFA Season 4 rolled around (seriously; people did not run these keys often, especially in DF) so condensing key levels was something that made perfect sense. And to DF S4’s limited credit, I actually think this worked very well in that context!
Unfortunately, this isn’t all that TWW brought to the table as far as M+ goes. I believe these changes, though good at their core, got heavily overshadowed by a bunch of other changes that I think adversely affected M+ which makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint where this season actually failed.
The universal tank nerfs are ALSO one of those “you either don’t notice them or you notice and hate them” sorts of changes we saw over the last several expansions. The intention was to make tanks less self-sufficient and require healers to focus on healing them more, but to smooth out the damage tanks take so you avoid these huge damage spikes that lead to tanks getting globalled. I feel like, somewhere along the way, internal communications at Blizzard got messed up, because tanks are most certainly less self-sufficient but this season has absolutely no shortage of tankbusters that are incredibly lethal and unfair, including but certainly not limited to:
- Flamerenders in Grim Batol, which have an absurdly hard-hitting tankbuster that leaves a hard-hitting DoT on the tank. These hurt like nobody’s business even in lower Fortified keys, but in higher keys they hit so hard that they require not just a big DR but sometimes a full-blown immunity to survive, and this ability’s CD is under 20 seconds. There are some packs in this dungeon that have two of these mobs.
- Molten Giants in Grim Batol, which have an absurdly hard-hitting tankbuster that does not have a DoT component attached but that does enough upfront damage to one-shot a tank without active mitigation up. This ability’s CD is ~20 seconds or so.
- Twilight Enforcers in Grim Batol, which just hit extremely hard due to a stacking Enrage that increases their attack speed every time they melee a target. These have to be kited for several seconds, Soothed (and not every class has this utility, including this season’s God Comp) or stunned for several seconds and any pack involving an Enforcer is often very problematic because they’re usually paired with other mobs that are very threatening due to interrupts, dispels, etc. Oh, and there’s one pull that can involve doing two of these!
- Twilight Overseers in Grim Batol (noticing a pattern yet?), which have an incredibly hard-hitting tankbuster ability that also increases the tank’s damage taken from all sources. And it stacks, specifically to prevent tanks from pulling two of them. There’s a pack with two of them, but you bomb this one with the Drakes so you ideally don’t really do this pull. And they’re often paired with Twilight Brutes that have ANOTHER tankbuster ability! AND they’re often paired with mobs that require an interrupt rotation! And sometimes it’s multiple of both of these mobs!
- The Mistveil Guardians in Mists of Tirna Scithe got reworked this expansion and gained an absurdly painful tankbuster ability that works similarly to the Flamerenders’ tankbuster. It does less upfront damage and the DoT doesn’t last as long, but the DoT hits much, much harder than the Flamerender’s. They recast this ability about as frequently as the Flamerenders do, maybe a little more often. Because they’re a part of the maze trash, these mobs are frequently accompanied by other mobs, like Stalkers, Shapers, Tenders, and Defenders, and there are some maze routes that give you pulls where you have to deal with two of these, except you cannot CC them or skip them because you have to kill them to progress the maze. There’s even a maze route that gives you two pulls with two Guardians in them. Mists is generally an easy key this season, but these mobs are absolutely miserable to tank and any DH or Monk could tell you that these mobs suck.
- Stonevault has a bunch of these too, I.E. Voidbound Despoilers (hard-hitting magic tankbuster with no DoT component) and Forgehands (non-elites that apply a stacking 5% damage taken increase for 8 seconds; there are MANY of these in multiple pulls in this dungeon).
- Irontide Curseblades in Grim Batol frequently apply a 15% increased damage taken effect on the tank, that debuff is a Curse (so it’s removable by some specific classes, including the best DPS spec in the game), it stacks, and these non-elites are often in close proximity to hard-hitting packs. Somehow, these might be the most terrifying mobs to tank in this entire instance, and they aren’t even elites!
- And then mobs like Patchwerk Soldiers in NW, while not packing tankbuster abilities themselves, just hit for absurd amounts of damage for… reasons.
The end result is that tanking feels absolutely miserable this season. Even the tanks that have the tools to handle many of these tankbusters (Paladin being arguably the best at it) need to be played incredibly well to survive pulls involving these. Often, even pretty good tanks will go into packs with these mobs and will go splat because of a single mistake; a newer, less-experienced tank will go into these keys, get absolutely eviscerated, and instead of trying to figure out the counterplay to it they’ll just quit tanking. And then you get the massive tank shortage that we’re currently experiencing this season that’s leading to LFG being dead.
And to add on to this, the universal changes we saw to non-interrupt CC this expansion are making life very hard for everyone in general, but especially tanks. There are too many interrupts in some of these pulls, and too many problematic abilities that are hard to just eat and pray (Mistveil Bite, any Grim Batol pull, etc.) to have mobs just immediately recast their abilities if they weren’t hard interrupted. Going back to Grim Batol once more, in it’s entirely possible to delay a Flamerender’s Shadowflame Slash enough with CC that the tank’s CDs won’t be up for it anymore; not only is CC not helping the tank in this regard, but it’s actively getting the tank killed in many cases (i.e. syncing up every autoattack, or delaying tankbusters enough that the tank doesn’t have a CD for them anymore).
Plus, with how many casters there are in many packs, it kinda goes without saying that Prot Paladin was going to inevitably become hard meta the instant they were able to survive these pulls. It’s the exact same problem VDH solved in the previous two seasons by pressing Sigil of Silence twice, Sigil of Misery twice, Sigil of Chains twice, Chaos Nova, its own interrupt… you get the picture. Blizzard reigned that in for VDH (and justifiably so), then nerfed non-interrupt CC across the board, but then kept packs with tons of mobs you’d really want to CC in the game anyway and arguably tripled down on them. So what gives?
The end result is that even the small pulls can be extremely dangerous for tanks, and Blizzard seems to have gone out of its way to make big pulls unfeasible. As such, M+ tanking becomes unsatisfying in many cases, outright punishing at worst (since, you know… the tank’s the most important person in the key group), and then nobody wants to tank. And then healers get taxed like crazy on top of this with the amount of unavoidable/rot damage they need to heal through, they’re expected to keep tanks alive through crazy high damage, and then healers, too, don’t want to heal. And all this does is feed into the fact that every group can easily get 3 DPS within a minute or two and have a selection of dozens to choose from, but then will spend 30+ minutes in LFG trying to find even a single tank or healer that can actually do the content. Nobody has any reason to take their chances on someone who’s learning the keys, because an inexperienced tank or healer will kill your key, and if you kill your key enough it drops below a +8. And when that happens…
The Dead LFG “Theory”
I’m gonna keep it a buck: LFG is a wasteland currently, even at prime hours. There’s plenty of keys in the +8 to +11 range, but as soon as you drop below a +8 or go above a +11 you see a small fraction of the listings.
- In a +12 or higher the stakes are so much higher because so much more can go wrong and even a single wipe is a deplete, and depletes are incredibly punishing (and archaic; key levels should not drop by 1 unless you explicitly go to that NPC and have her drop them) because if you have that coveted +17 Ara-Kara and something goes wrong you may not see it again for hours upon hours. The same applies to that +12, or +13, or +14 of that very same dungeon or Mists. The deplete system needs a total overhaul.
- In a key below a +7/+8 the quality of players is drastically reduced. Players who generally know what they’re doing will not be spending time doing a +2 to +6 key; the rewards are not good enough to justify running those keys. If you have a +6 in your bags, 90% of the time it’s gonna rot there for the rest of the week, because, frankly, you do not want half the players queuing for a +6 to be in your +6. I’ve personally tried running keys in the +2 to +6 range on not-so-geared alts that were not at the time linked to my main’s RIO page, and not only was getting invited to ilvl-appropriate keys a nightmare, but when I’d finally get invited or list my own key and invite people the keys would be a miserable experience for everyone involved. I’d spend 40 minutes in a +4 Siege of Boralus before the group would fall apart. Stuff like that. Basically, nobody has any reason to run a +2 to +6 right now.
- There are too many “spikes” in difficulty, and Blizzard seems to agree considering Ion acknowledged this in an interview recently. There’s a massive jump in difficulty from a +6 to a +7 once Challenger’s Peril kicks in since now the mistakes your tank makes result in a huge time penalty (-15 seconds per death, plus time spent running back, plus time spent getting those mobs back down to the HP they were at when you wiped in the first place). If a tank dies in any pull, the pull generally cannot be salvaged, so a tank dying is a 75 second penalty on top of everything else that causes you to lose time. Similarly, there’s a massive jump from a +9 to a +10 where suddenly bosses take much longer or trash hits considerably harder, depending on the week. Bear in mind, this is still the “gear progression” side of keys, where people are doing it for the gear rather than for the challenge.
- Once again, bear in mind that, as far as basically anyone is concerned, there is no +2 to +6 range of keys. You have so many reasons to not waste your time running a low key, since doing so is incredibly inefficient. This means that a lot of folks aren’t starting to dabble with M+ in a +2; they’re doing it in a +7, and getting curbstomped because they aren’t ready for it. This makes what would’ve been a fundamentally good idea with the key level squish from DF S4, which actually worked in DF S4, an objective failure because now keys basically start with the old +17s instead of the old +11s/12s. There is no realistic entry point for coordinated 5-man group content anymore; the +2 to +6 keys with this current system are doomed just as the +2 to +11 keys with the old system were, except it’s the equivalent of the old system’s +2 to +16 keys being doomed. That’s like two key squishes at once!
Anyway, that’s my two cents on M+ this season. Other people, including well-known M+ content creators and extremely high key pushers alike, have expressed their widespread dislike of this season and have articulated their thoughts far better than I could in some stupid WoW forum post. Maybe someone over at Blizzard will see this and add it to that massive pile of feedback. TWW’s an expansion that I thoroughly enjoy, and it objectively isn’t a bad expansion like Shadowlands, BFA, or WoD was. There’s clear ambition here, and I can appreciate said ambition. But at the end of the day, I want M+ to succeed. As it stands right now, this season is abysmal in its current state, desperately needs changes now, and not in 11.1, and is very much not succeeding like DF S3 did.
Blizzard needs to rethink their approach to M+. There are some good changes made this season, but they’re bogged down far too much by a bunch of dumb baggage that’s making people not want to play M+ at all. And it’s not a meta thing, either; if you killed Enhancement Shaman right now, something else (Ele Shaman) would take its place. If you killed Frost DK right now, Unholy or Assassination or Boomkin or Survival would take its place. People just don’t wanna run keys this season if they’re gonna work the way they do, where you have to run and time several dozens of them to get Crests this late in the season and where you’re introducing so many opportunities for a tank or healer player to walk into a key, get trampled, walk out, and never return. There’s just so many issues, and so many reasonable fixes, for there to be this much radio silence on this front.
That’s all. Whoever reads this, thank you for reading.
