i agree on both sides. I pretty much only pug and nearly every pug is just fine.
but an obvious fundamental issue with pugging is that this particular group of players has never played together before, as in ever. even if they are all competent and have a good understanding of the dungeon, they aren’t on comms and haven’t played together before.
consequently, mistakes will be made. and there are dungeons where one wipe bricks the key - im’ looking at you priory.
as a tank, I know my responsibility to know the content. I have been posting m0 runs with “chill learning” in the title and it has been working.
but the key squish is still a problem, in my opinion. I think a lot of those lost m+ runs from previous seasons are from people who played in the pre-squish m0-9 space.
I more or less worked my way up key-by-key and dungeon-by-dungeon. it was a lot of runs to get to pre-squish +12 (today’s +2). maybe that was too many runs, but I got gear and resources along the way and - most importantly- learned the content.
by the time I got the +11-13 range, where things really started to matter, I had a decent idea of what to do.
today, even m0 is punishing for the average player trying to learn the content and, dare I say, just have fun.
there is always a balance in this game between challenge/frustration and ease/fun.
DPS gets to go BOOM! while tanks and healers struggle creating a massive bottleneck in terms of the satisfaction of many average players.
Not quite sure how I forgot about these since I do a minimum of 4 every week. Fair.
I will say for some reason, I do feel that degree of sameness from DF. Maybe it’s beyond skin deep - how the story is told, the continued focus on Dragonflying to navigate everywhere (which I think even they have realized, which was why they pivoted in Undermine).
I will add the Heroic Talents were not a good addition IMHO - since they didn’t really add any element of choice and for the most part, the alterations to the class are not even skin deep for so many (as a Druid main this season, I can’t even tell when I’m Wildstalker vs. Druid of the Claw other than 1 ability procs different).
With exception to Delves, it feels very samey to me.
I had 1 piece of gear average per week from M+ with an average of 20 runs per week. Just doing my 8 for vault now and bailing. Doing 20 runs in a week for 1 piece of loot isn’t worth my time or the effort that goes into doing those keys.
I admit I could have been suuuuper unlucky these last two weeks. That doesn’t change the fact I put in time and effort for basically zero reward. Especially now that I have guildies who did get lucky and are 20 ilvls ahead of me.
Pass on the grind. For reference I was averaging 40 keys per week across three characters in S1. I’d rather put my time into other games or IRL things than waste it doing M+ for nothing.
What’s stopping me from doing M+ (other than real world getting in the way):
How scoring is done.
I can just do the same few delves on repeat and memorize only those delves to reach higher tiers. Only reason for me to do other delves is for achievements.
I can’t do the same for M+. In a PUG scenario, I can’t reliably run just three dungeons, get those mastered and go from +2 to +10. Then, go back down to +2 for another two or three dungeons and repeat until I get them all +10.
I can’t memorize all 8 dungeons for some reason. Delves are easier since they are just easier all around and shorter than dungeons. The length of some Delves is barely the half of the length of a dungeon.
So my score suffers and I don’t get invites, nor do I get people wanting to join my groups. I may want to do a +5, but no one is going to look as someone with a score that lacks the numbers from the dungeons I haven’t done yet.
So either dump my brain to go back and memorize the dungeons I need in sets to get the score up, or I just do Delves.
If I have to brain dump something to make room for something else, I don’t want to have to touch what I dumped ever again.
Bountifuls change daily. To increase your chances of gearing up faster (using a key or a map), youre gonna want to be able go to every delve available
But you can also literally run a mythic 0, familiarize yourself with it, and then run your key of that exact same dungeon with it being fresh in your mind
The focus on “Ever-green systems” is a nice cover for being cheap. Nothing in game matches the investment of something like artifact weapons or torghast. Huge sprawling systems that required a tonne of time and money to implement.