Dear Blizzard,
The current Mythic + ecosystem pushes players toward a small number of meta specs, hurting class diversity and making the game less enjoyable for the average player.
In this post I will address these issues and present possible solutions.
I want to start by praising the changes made to the MDI. Seeing teams play a wider variety of classes and specs was refreshing and proved to many that “off-meta” specs are far stronger than the community gives them credit for.
I’ve played World of Warcraft on/off since I was about 9 years old and I especially enjoy the later addition of Mythic +. Throughout the years I’ve played every role, although I primarily played tank until recently, when I switched to DPS.
One of World of Warcraft’s greatest strengths has always been class identity. Every player has a specific class or two that they connect with. When the community feels pressured to abandon that class every season, the game loses a big part of what makes WoW special.
Now, every competitive game develops a meta, and World of Warcraft is no exception. The problem isn’t simply the existence of a meta, but how heavily it influences the Mythic + community. The majority of players aren’t competing for the top 0.1%, yet the perception of what is “required” trickles down through the entire community. As a result, group composition in a +12 often mirrors what players see at the highest levels of the game. For many players, especially those pushing mid- to moderately higher keys, playing an “off-meta” spec can mean spending an hour or more, attempting to either join or assemble a group for a Mythic + run.
Playing an “off-meta” spec, is one of the issue with assembling a team, another is getting all the roles filled. Since 20% of the team consists of a tank, roughly 20% of the Mythic + playerbase should be playing tank, but that is simply not the case. Tanks are widely underrepresented in the Mythic + community due to the gradual loss of feeling durable and self-sufficient. Tanks should absolutely rely on healers in the highest levels of Mythic +, however that level of coordination shouldn’t be required in low and midtier keystone levels.
So what can be done to solve these issues? I have a couple of suggestions.
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Rewrite the title system: Instead of having a 0.1% and a 1% title shared across all classes, consider awarding these two titles within each class. Players would still compete at an extremely high level, but they’d be competing against others playing the same class instead of feeling pressured to reroll to whichever class is the strongest that season. This would encourage players to keep holding onto their favorite classes and invite other classes based on what complements the team, rather than what is the strongest. It would create a reason for players to master the class that they love, in turn naturally improving class diversity across the playerbase.
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Make tanks stronger: Feeling strong and powerful as a tank makes all the difference and would bring more players to this role. Making tanks stronger wouldn’t make them totally independent from healers, it would just push the dependency up to a higher keystone level, making tanking more accessible to the average player and in turn reduce the queue time.
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Reduce the gap in viability between classes by lowering the punishment for unavoidable damage and reduce the amount of mandatory utility required in keys.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post.
Sincerely,
Louca