I am in total agreement with you on this as I’ve pugged countless +8-9s where 2k rated people spam kill Crystals on Skamarok, stand in Terrifying Slam and send orbs into walls, healers doing 500k HPS on heavy aoe fights etc.
However, separate from that, I also believe the issue remains where the difficulty and scaling of the dungeons (including affix balancing) is such that in order to complete a +7-9, a typical non sweaty PUG (have to stress that we are talking about non-coordinated PUGs) usually needs to be in M+10 level gear in order beat the timers to compensate for lack of coordination. Of course some dungeons are easier to beat than others on certain affixes, but some outliers like Tyrannical NW, SV is just completely out of reach for most pugs.
But see now they can’t get better 619+ gear, because they can’t beat the 7s-9s and it also takes them forever to get into groups if they get invited at all. Which leads to the OP’s post about these dungeons being designed primarily for players who are either sweaty premades or mythic raiders as they can overcome the intial gear wall via comms and coordinated play.
I think there needs to be a more gradual advancement for people to overcome these barriers, say:
- from 7-9s you get 12 Runed Crests + 3/6/12 Gilded Crests on timing them.
- leaver penalty to include no crests, no drops and rating on their next dungeon (stacking), unless the key holder disbands the group first
- Balance these stupid affixes interacting poorly with boss mechanics
- -15s death penalty to be moved to +12 for the sweaties.