Hello,
I just recently watched The Bench’s podcast’s new episode, and it prompted me to think about how the average person feels about the current state of Mythic+.
I understand there are quite a few complaints about the new M+ system, and I wanted to give a quick overview of the pain points I’ve been hearing, potential solutions, and my own ideas. There’s a TLDR for the solutions at the end if you don’t care/want to read the rest.
Are Delves Killing M+?:
Many people have mentioned that a large portion of M+ feels invalidated because of how much gear you can get from doing Delves.
A tier 8 delve is far easier and with the bountiful keys you obtain from world content it gives champion track 603 gear (equivalent to a +5 end of dungeon chest reward). You additionally have a chance from the delves to get maps that at tier 8 give a 610 heroic track piece of gear (equivalent to +7/8s), and this is repeatedly farmable (yet still quite rare). And of course the vault gives 616 loot for doing 2/4/8 delves at level 8, which is right in the middle of heroic track, and the equivalent of a +7 key in the vault.
So have delve’s cannibalized early M+? Definitely. Anything below a +7 is heavily devalued in terms of getting loot compared to the time and effort it would take to do delves instead.
I think it’s actually fine for delves to give good loot like this for the solo player (although I would argue that delves need a form of progression as well so it’s not just spamming 8’s on all your alts.). It also serves as a way for those who start later in the season when people are less likely to want to do lower level keys to be able to gear up faster.
It’s more of an issue with hero track gear. Multiple others have said the same thing and come to the same conclusion. The hero track should have 8 steps, with 2 more hero crest levels before the gilded ones. Right now, you can max out hero gear so quickly with the variety of ways you can obtain it, that heroic crests are fairly meaningless.
The only way to increase your power when you get stuck at the max hero gear of 619 ilvl is to be getting gilded crests, which leads to the next topic.
Increased Difficulty for Rewards and Gilded Crests:
One of the shifts in philosophy in TWW is that the high end of M+ should be equivalent with Mythic raid difficulty.
This is in contrast to keys in the past, where they’ve been easy enough to be completed at the maximum level of rewards, and outgearing would eventually help even the lower skill players get the same rewards.
As I mentioned above, with the abundance of hero track gear and it’s track being quite short, people are reaching the desire for myth track gear and gilded crests faster than before. The best way to get these crests is from timing +9s or +10s. And for M+,
a +10 in your vault is the only way to get non-crafted mythic track gear.
This highly favors mythic raid for loot, and even if thats the intention with the changes, a good amount of people feel that the first few bosses of mythic raid are actually easier to pug than timing +10’s and above. (Not to mention the Mythic BoP farm stuff being the best way to get loot lmao).
The setting of a key is far more intimate and personal responsiblity is far higher. Plenty of people have mentioned that doing keys with friends is perfectly fine, but pugging them feels like chewing nails. So many factors can cause a key to wipe now that we have begun to see an even larger increase of people only accepting the “Meta Comp” in lower keys, where it theoretically shouldn’t matter.
It’s clear to me that the increase of difficulty has just been too much too suddenly, and quickly killed many’s desire to do M+ at all. Nerfing tanks and healers, squishing key levels, making stops less useful, increasing defensive requirements. Even just one of these would have been a sufficient change to test on the M+ playerbase, but all of them?
In my opinion gilded crests should be given at lower key levels, as well as the max vault difficulty should be reduced to a current +9 (More on this later in the key squish section). This would bring it more in line with the first 4 bosses of mythic raid.
And as for those questioning increased rewards at a lower level, the current raid has the stacking buff eventually coming to make it even easier later on. M+ has no equivalent, and as such should be able to be eventually cleared through outgearing.
+7 Timer Death Penalty:
Another issue many people have felt is far too punishing is the new affix on +7’s and above which increases the death penalty massively. It goes from 5 seconds per death to 15. A full wipe takes off 1:15 from the timer, in addition to the time of running back.
On higher key levels this basically means more than 1 or 2 deaths and it’s just over. People just instantly leave after a team wipe, which definitely leaves a sour taste, in addition to lowering the key’s level.
There have been multiple proposals for how to improve this, and in general, most ideas boil down to scaling it based on your key level and giving a free first death.
First off, I do think the first death per person should have no penalty, as everyone can make mistakes. Dying is a punishment alone, so the first death can be a sort of warning shot to make sure you’re paying attention.
As for the affix, it should start at +6’s starting from 6 sec. From there it would increase by 1 second per key level up to a max of 10 seconds in +10’s. Slightly less punishing, and scaling difficulty to get used to it.
Tank and Healer Shortage:
A multitude of factors could be behind the scarcity of tanks and healers, but in my opinion the increased responsibility for both roles is the main culprit.
Tanks already have to know the route to take in the dungeon, memorize which packs and mobs have the abilities that demolish them, pick up slack for DPS that barely interrupt, as well as do good damage to be able to time the key. They are now ADDITIONALLY no longer self-reliant in TWW, as a result of the tank changes. Other than Blood DK, which is the self-sustain king main character spec, tank survivability has gone down a good amount. For the average player, they may not know which defensives to be rolling in and out on cooldown between the now very difficult packs.
Part of this is also due to needing the healer to actually heal the tank now. Guess who’s the most blamed role in the game, that already has a low population and was just given EVEN more responsibility? In addition, because survivability is such an issue in keys now, many people want the healer with the most utility to prevent their key from being bricked. (AKA currently resto shaman). So this makes people even less likely to want to heal and pugs less likely to choose a non FOTM healer.
Making the job harder for the smallest portion of players who are most in demand is unfortunately just not an option. The number of keys run will be far, far, far less as a result of this. It sounds boring, but the best thing to do is have all tanks and healers be slightly OP. It incentivizes people to play those specs on their alts, and decreases the time in LFG for everyone.
Portals and Max Vault at the Same Level:
This is a quick one, but by having +10’s be both the maximum vault reward and giving portals upon timed completion, it killed a lot of incentive for people to push any further than that in M+.
It made the most sense to put portals at +12 to coincide with the lack of affixes and make people feel rewarded by making it to the “High Key Level”. My suspicion is that Blizzard themselves realized that +12’s were unimagineably hard for the majority of players, and so then put it at +10, where you still get tyrannical and fortified together.
My solution for this is later on.
The Key Squish:
This will be controversial, but I think the key squish has been an overall negative.
The key squish that happened at the end of Dragonflight during season 4 is now being tested in a real season for the first time. The reaction when it was introduced was neutral to positive because it meant having to do less keys for the same rewards.
But unfortunately, the data about this is messy. It was tested during a period of time where gearing was extra expedited due to Bullions. People were reaching the point of getting BiS gear 3-4 weeks into the season, and in addition the keys were far easier than current ones.
The main issue is that people are jumping up key levels far too quickly to be prepared for the next. The increase of difficulty between each keystone level ranges from 12-22% additional scaling. But people don’t just go up 1 keystone level at a time, it’s quite common for players to jump 2 levels like from +5 to +7. This is not only adding the death penalty affix, but also increasing the scaling from 46% to 77% more health and damage. There’s a similarly large increase from +9 to +10 because of both Tyrannical and Fortified being active at once.
Because there are so few key levels, there isn’t a lot of room to space out these affixes for people to learn and progress through them, especially while adding additional scaling at the same time. Because 10’s are the endpoint of the rewards in addition to introducing the final affix, its essentially a brick wall.
The main argument for the key squish is that there were too many levels of “useless” keys that people didn’t want to run, and would die off into the season. But as we see the same thing happened here with delves taking place of everything a +5 or below. My solution to this is as below:
A Slightly Less Squished Solution:
I propose that the key squish be slightly reverted, with the rewards track going from +2-15. +2’s would remain the same difficulty, where +15’s would be the equivalent of current +9’s. This means that each key level would have a smaller scaling difficulty increase, roughly half.
I believe this would balance out the difficulty, as well as account for the spike associated with the affixes by giving more key levels for players to get acclimated to them.
Here are the proposed affix placements in this new system:
+2: Xalatath’s Bargain Weekly Affix (Unchanged)
+4: Tyrannical or Fortified weekly (Unchanged)
+6-10: New Death Timer affix increasing from 6 to 10 sec death penalties
+12: Both Tyrannical and Fortified
+16: Xalatath’s Guile (without the damage increase)
For the crest rewards:
+2-5’s: 15-25 Normal Crests
+6-10’s: 12-20 Heroic Crests
+11-15’s: 10-18 Gilded Crests
I put a range, where crests would be given in increasing amounts per key level. So for +6’s to +10’s heroic crests would be given: 12, 15, 17, 20, corresponding to the key level.
As you can see 2-5 rewards quite a bit more crests compared to heroic, which gives more crests compared to mythic. I added this to address the “useless keys” issue that pops up later into seasons, and incentivize lower keys a little bit more when playing alts as an additional faster way to get crests compared to delves. (Still much slower than normal or heroic raid).
Additionally to solve the portals push incentive problem I described above, in this new system, portals would be at +20. This places them above the +15 max vault rewards as well as the +16 removal of the weekly affix. It allows for people to get used to the higher level key meta, as well as gives a reach goal. (Remember each key level would be half the difficulty increase).
The end of dungeon rewards and vault rewards would be proportionally adjusted, but I don’t want to make this any longer than it already is, so I’d leave it to the devs for that.
But as a whole, I believe these changes would greatly improve M+ engagement, as well as giving more time for players to learn and deal with each affix rather than being presented with huge difficulty spikes. Ideally it would make the journey of a player in an M+ season far smoother and better feeling to progress through.
Solutions TLDR:
- Undo Key Squish:
- allows more time to progress each dungeon for individuals
- reduces large difficulty curve of going up 2 levels/adding huge affix
- New system would be +2-15 (equivalent difficulty to current +2-9)
- Reduce max difficulty slightly as inconsistent with even pugging mythic raid fights
- Have +15’s (equivalent to current +9’s) give max vault loot
- Remove weekly affix at +16 (currently removed at +12)
- Portals at +20s, gives incentive to push past max vault
- Crest Changes:
- +2-5 give normal crests, +6-10 give heroic crests, +11-15 give gilded crests
- Crest amount increases slightly for each key level in range
- Give out more of the easier crests to incentivize lower M+ as an alternative to delves
- Misc Changes:
- Increase the hero track by 2 additonal levels (6 to 8), as there is a lack of progression in that range
- Buff Tanks to be self sufficient, and healers to be generally easier in M+, too much responsibility and stress as well as increasing LFG times
- Death timer affix reworked to be progressive from a +6 adding 6 sec per death, to maxing out at +10 adding 10 sec per death (first death per person is free as well)
- Remove increased enemy damage aspect of Xalatath’s Guile (+16 affix), as it increases difficulty far too quickly
- Gilded crests/myth loot given at an overall lower level to help eventually outgear (consider that the current raid has a stacking raid buff weekly)
Conclusion:
Thanks for reading this long post. Just wanted to get my thoughts out and write out some of the struggles people have been feeling in a easy to digest manner. People are rapidly losing interest in M+, and I just wanted to propose some solutions to fix this. Feel free to add anything I missed or disagree with me below.
Just a more general statement that applies to DPS too, but if you are feeling literal anxiety or dread before you enter a key because you feel obligated to, just play or do something else. The game should be fun first, and if it’s not feeling fun, don’t put yourself through that.