It’s pretty obvious that they design the game for World First raiders and MDI champions… And this fact ruins it for rest of player base. This sucks.
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It clearly isn’t if 22% have achieved KSM in week 3 when we normally see 30-35% at the end of 6-8 months.
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I believe there are more people achieving KSM quicker because at the lower casual tier people are able to gear up faster in Delves, however the issue is at the M7+ mark where most people hit a difficulty and gear wall, which leads to the gap pulling further apart between those who are ‘meta’, have premades, do mythic raids etc.
The issue here are players who never pushed that high in previous Season 1s on week 1, 2, and 3 that somehow feel entitled to get the top rewards. Tons of people on the forums who were never timing +17s or +20s this early in the season are crying and trying to blame tuning instead of learning the mechanics.
A lot of people are trying to compare Season to Season experience. For instance Season 3 to Season 4, when that’s not the same because you start those seasons with the previous season’s bis trinkets, secondary stats, tier sets, embellishments, and season ilvl gap is 26.
Whereas, Season 1 starts off with a 100ilvl gap from the previous expansion, then you have a 37 ilvl gap from pre-season to season cap which is more than the typical raid tier. You start with zero tier sets, zero embellishments, bad trinkets, and terrible secondary stats.
People started the season at ~605 ilvl when the cap is 639 and were complaining on day one that they couldn’t do +5s when they were never doing +15s on day one of a Season 1 in the past.
It’s amazing how people forgot what S1 of SL was like because the tuning in the first couple months were ripping tanks apart which lead to the tank meta issue. Then in DF S1 you had so much unavoidable group damage that healers were quitting. In comparison to those Season 1s, TWW is easier.
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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.
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Imo they should just pug the mythic raid for rewards since keys are too hard for them.
A nice non-sweaty no voice pug similar to what’s expected to stomp keys.
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I just think its ridiculous that we on the forums can’t EVER have this conversation without the contrary maries telling every to “git gud.” Everytime I hear that phrase, I picture that arm-brace overweight middle aged man with chip crumbs on his shirt from South Park’s Wow parody episode. so needless to say, it carries zero weight (pun intended) with me because I just can’t take you seriously if you say something like that.
Locking gilded crests behind 9s is a huge overstep. I’m glad there is a thing for 12’s now as it added two more key levels to try and push for the more “not quite casual/not quite sweaty” types like me later in the season but starting out the season with these stupid missing-step ladders was a bad idea. It makes 4-8 almost pointless.
The game MUST be (from a business perspective, not just a “feels good man” perspective) balanced around average players. Pushing them out of content they were able to do before can ONLY come across as elitism and that’s just not a good look.
10 Likes
I get what you are saying, but I still disagree. Shadowlands Season 1 was definitively more difficult than it is now. The Prideful affix required perfect routing and wiping on multiple bosses without Prideful buff meant a dead key. The most notorious one being De Other Side. That season required pugs to play near perfect and forced everyone to know the mechanics.
The reason this seasons seems more difficult is because too many players became complacent in just brute-forcing their way through. They need to learn the mechanics like you pointed out with Skamarok. People also need to be more self-aware of their capabilities and stop rushing through progression.
In terms of your stance on gearing. If they can’t beat the +7s or +9s, then they need to get better. I have zero sympathy for players who hit a soft wall and give up. Seasons generally last for 6-8 months and for some reason all this crying is happening because they cant max out their vault on week 2. If people need to run +5s multiple times to really learn the mechanics, then that’s what they should be doing.
If it were balanced around the average players, gear progression would cap out at LFR.
Do raids to experience fights once I guess then move on to the next game.
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Its all fragile ego for those people. Just ignore them
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The dungeons are harder because of the keystone squish. You no longer are working towards +20, it’s now working towards +10.
That means the 2-5 keys that people used to consider complete jokes can bite back.
Part of me wishes we could go back to portals at 20, because people just don’t want to do mechanics in these lower keys.
I go to do an Arak +4 and before the group starts, I ask the group to please interrupt the AOE fear that the hanging spider does… no interrupts and I’m just trying to catch up on heals after two fears get off.
I ask why? Answer “it’s just a 4 bro, you don’t need interrupts in a 4.”
It also leads to overgeared people taking spots in these keys and making it that much harder to find a group. But blizzard does not care at all what happens to m+ it seems so I doubt they will fix anything.
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What I’m currently most upset about this season is that after DF I talked 2 of my friends into giving TWW a shot, assuming M+ will remain fun. They can’t find groups if nobody else from our small community is playing, and the dungeon pool and the tuning make them feel inadequate despite being pretty square in the middle as far as the performance goes for +3-5 keys. Like sure they aren’t anything great but they were doing okay. My statics are also running into issues because people just don’t want to do this anymore after locking in the vault for the week, and nobody can really blame them: this season is not fun.
I don’t really care that I was made to look like a masochist for hyping up M+ for them, but I don’t think player retention will be any good at this rate, as neither of my 2 returnee/newbie friends plans to keep their sub going for much longer.
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If they feel inadequate then they should drop down to easier difficulties. Also, what do you consider being square in performance? What’s their overall dps, total interrupts, avoidable damage taken?
No one should ever drop down to easier difficulties. Difficulties should drop down and become easier instead.
So everything needs to be on equal difficulty as heroic dungeons.
Why have multiple difficulties then?
How did you know his other characters ?
By being a stalker.
That isn’t even all my characters names either. I wonder how those links work with the 20 or so alts I deleted once the Warbands became a thing as well. Since each expansion and season I play a diff main. I should check if they are still there.
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I have my ways, but you can double check by comparing their pet/Mount collections.
Being a stalker is strange. Go outside or someting
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