Why M+ is broken and ways we can fix it

Blizzard has listened. But perhaps who they were listening to were the money grabbers and boosting community instead of the core players.

Why do I think this?

  1. The gold boosting community has never been stronger or larger, even though keys are easier than ever.

  2. Some groups in LFG are asking for Tips for each of attempt of their Resil key, leading to a whole mess of problems.

  3. Players are trying to get M+ vault for their mythic raid team. But they get to the last boss of a key and the team calls the run just because it’s a “few seconds off.” Wasting all their time and discouraging them from even doing keys for vault.

Blizzard tried to help, but instead it has made this content even more toxic. Their intentions were good, but the results have only made M+ worse.

And there are other problems. Healing a +15 is easier than healing a +10. The removal of affix’s has only helped key boosting but leaves more challenging mechs for lower keys where mobs aren’t being kicked, people stand in fire while trying to handle the affix. And some pushing higher keys are a little bored because it’s now old school “Hard Mode content,” instead of “Mythic Plus Affix’s” which is what the Plus stood for.

How can we fix this mess? All unique ideas, not sure what ones are best or if any, and I would appreciate feedback.

  1. All current season gear scales to a flat max mythic ilvl after a 10 or higher key. When the key stone starts, even your world quest items from the current expansion scale to the mythic lvl cap, your normal raid gear, etc. This would reduce the power creep issues that force players to keep running content later in the season for achieves and titles, and also create more balanced and fair play. And less shaming those who have weaker gear. Gear from prior seasons would not scale. Only current gear. It would also encourage players to enjoy open world content to farm obscure pieces/trinkets with lower ilvls, that might scale the best into M+ levels after a key starts. World content is in a lot of ways more fun, more interesting and could bring people back into the game that the designers are working hard to make better each tier.

  2. To help control the key cap, and inflation towards EoS, while creating a bigger challenge I suggest we inverse the healing dynamics. How? When you start a M+ run there is a “healing well” for healers to click on. This buff’s all healing in the group by 100%. At keystone lvl 11, this healing buff is reduced by 20%, and every key lvl above this also lowers the healing buff by 20%. Until the healers has zero gains, and perhaps, once they have zero gains, it then deducts 5% healing for each key lvl after a +15. This would help the issues healing lower keys, but also reduce the power creep of healing later in a season.

  3. Instead of resil, after timing a run a player can choose the exact dungeon they want their key to reroll to, and eliminate the RNG. So instead of resil preventing your key to deplete, it instead gives you guaranteed key you want to push, after timing a run. This encourages people working together and helping others time keys they dont need to choose the exact one they want. “Hey, I’ll join that run, we can change my key at the end if we time it to a Work Shop that you might need. Sound good?” Resil was a fun thing, but how its turned WoW in P2P is not good for the game.

  4. Not to mention it’s never been more odd for DPS to get into keys. I struggle to get into +13s that I’ve all timed with 3k+ score. I’m not meta. Thats why. We need some type of rebalancing for AoE when a keystone starts. It could even be different tuning just for keys, vs. raid. It’s wild that some classes do 50m on a pull, and others are hard capped. Its unfair.

  5. Bring back affix’s above a 10, but make them fun, and new. Not toxic. A bit of humor is good for the game.

Thoughts and feedback please. Thanks

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Players like gear progression and this would kill a lot of motivation for it. They removed it from pvp for a good reason.

This seems overly complicated. Why not just balance aoe damage and look at specs they give up so much single target damage to be able to aoe and vice versa.

Affixes actually make the keys easier though. You just need players who will do the mechanics.

No progression = no game. Gear scaling is kind of the extreme end of the balance vs uniqueness. Best avoided.

Just add an actual cap and then let people do time trials. If you mean the inverse relationship between healing difficulty and key level, the only real option is taking away decencies from dps. Give healers more externals instead.

I think this is one of those “you think you do, but you don’t” things. I’m not even really happy with what resil has done to keys.

This is real hard. Either constant and never ending balance (not just numbers, but utility also) or we go through a homogenization pass.

Please, no. This is the best part of this expansion. Having “push weeks” was so bad. I never want to go back.

All this did was move title up to higher key levels. It didn’t change anything really about peoples relative skill level. If you did 16s before now maybe you do 17s and you’re still stuck trying to do 18s like you were trying to do 17s before. I wish boosting would just be outright banned in all forms. Gold? get rid of it. RMT? Ban it. LFG listings? Ban it.

I haven’t seen this as much lately tbh, just report them for advertisement.

I don’t really know but you can list your own key or sign up for “vault” and “completion” and “chill” keys. Or even list yours as one. Just for vault people tend to be chill but you should all be on the same page regarding that.

There’s another thread about this i posted a much more detailed comment on but I will kinda summarize it here

  1. Healer difficulty is multiplied by the skill level of their party, so a hard key can be hard baseline and then 1-4 underperforming players multiply the difficulty for the healer and potentially the entire party, there’s too much pressure on healers to be absolutely perfect to account for this specifically in pugs where failures in prog are so common. If you play with 4 great players then it’s just a fun walk in the park that feels smooth and it’s just you vs the dungeon instead of you vs your party.
  2. You can’t carry as a healer anymore really. You have perform at such an incredible level and you get nothing for it and you can do that and it might smooth over mistakes by other players or it might totally completely hopeless. Blizzard doesn’t want to let healers be OP (unless they’re disc priest ig) and I personally theorize it’s because they don’t know how to distribute the difficulty to the party. Like if healers are OP then they have to do stuff like one shot mechanics to counter or they have find ways to make it way harder (candle king, swamp face) or unfair (coaglamation,) or they have to shift the difficulty somewhere else (dps, tank.) If other people make mistakes healer has to fix it, if healer makes mistakes there’s not many options for fixing it. It’s probably just over. If the healer is amazing but 1 person is dragging the group down, then it can be a waste of time or just prog.

I personally don’t think I’ll ever play TWW classic when it comes in like a decade like what would there even be that’s good to remember? Season 1 was so brutal it drove people away from the game and amped toxicity up 1000000% to the extent where blizzard made big changes (though not what we asked for, ever.) Both seasons are abysmal healer seasons with season 2 only being better thanks to general class balance (though blizzard is content to let pres evoker sit in F tier, or nerf monk into B tier after 3 weeks, but will let disc sit in S tier for 2 entire seasons, maybe even 3!)

And this is just healing there’s other problems like target caps and utility disparities, survivability dispairites, and so on. Like why would I ever want to play a classic version of this? Like WoD classic is intriguing to me because of the prospect maybe they release the cut content or because pvp was interesting back then and I generally don’t have a lot of good opinions about WoD. Shadowlands had some of the best m+ seasons ever so sure i might go do some of that or sepulcher.

But maybe you’re not into classic, so let me put it like this: do you ever want to see tww dungeons ever again? Forget seaforium or sacbrood or any of the trinkets. Like dead ahh, do you ever want to play stonevault or CoT ever again? I think most people would say no and they voted no in the recent poll for s3 dungeons. Like these dungeons aren’t fun and the only thing memorable about them is how much of a PIA they are. For comparison do you remember how much people dreaded ToP when they learned it was coming back this season? There was tons of complaining in advance but ToP is EASY compared to TWW dungeons. it’s even fun by comparison. TWW made people go from hating ToP to loving ToP. Think about that. It’s pretty balanced for dps, healer, and tank responsibilities. There’s cool skip tek anyone can do with any comp. The bosses are well telegraphed except the last but I would argue that’s well telegraphed but there’s just too many overlaps for people to interpret it until they’ve memorized it over the course of 100 runs or whatever.

Blizzard recently came out and blamed addons for the dungeon design but I never used WAs before TWW nor did I use omnicd. I even refused to for so long because I prefer minimal addons but they have only themselves to blame for why I use them now. I made a post at the end of season one like “if these dungeons ever come back they need to be seriously reworked.” And if they’re going to remove addons that make these feel even remotely possible then I feel even more strongly about that statement like all of these dungeons have to be re-tuned/reworked or changed integrally in some way, because they claim the reason they’re like this is because they’re balancing for addons. If that’s true blizz then after addons are gone you have to rebalance like, what, 10 years worth of addon creep? But especially you HAVE to fix it for this expansions dungeons. Like it’s just too much, it’s absurd.

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2700 io and I can’t get into a 10. Let’s start there.

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Season 1 is fun.

You can’t want to carry as a healer then moan when you can carry as a healer.

When healer can outshine others by meeting healer checks you complain (cause that’s S1) and when healers can’t (now.) You complain about no impact.

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its not broken

Make your own keys or understand that there are lots of people signing up for 10’s, 2700 is probably low tbh