A simple guide to improving M+

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

Dearest Mr. Blizzard,

It has come to my attention that the direction you pushed mythic plus towards is not entirely satisfactory.

I believe you have severely misjudged the relationship between difficulty and enjoyment.

I have been playing the game since you first introduced M+ in Legion.

Every expansion has introduced increasing difficulty on trash mobs, with more and more interrupts/stops required to manage pulls, as well as the difficulty scaling leading to a lot of bosses (and even some trash) straight up one-shotting people.

Player aversion to being summarily executed by unavoidable mechanics has led to party composition becoming very stale, class/spec choice for high keys often bubbles down to who can survive the damage.

Vengeance DH has been dominant the whole of dragonflight because of the amount of mob control it affords the group.

This is not very fun.

Thankfully, for you, I have fixed all of your problems and am now presenting you with a design document to guide your future decisions about the game and mythic plus in general.

THE DIFFICULTY SHOULD STEM FROM THE TIMER

I cannot stress this enough, if you want more variety in party composition and players to enjoy dungeons more, the challenge must shift from mob control/surviving oneshots to making the damn timer.

Pickle me this (I am not a native english speaker, and I like pickles); imagine a world where a group of 5 players can tailor the dungeon route to their composition, they decide on a route based on the damage profiles of their DPS classes, the capability of their healer/tank to deal with different incoming damage profiles, and tailor their pulls to what they believe they can handle.

Give us meaningful choice in dungeon routing; let us choose to combine pulls based on our composition and our skill as players.

Stop bombarding us with caster mobs that need 2 melee interrupts and occasional divine intervention to keep them under control and keep the party alive.

Stop creating bosses that eventually require the party composition to be tailored around surviving unavoidable mechanics.

As the key level goes up, the timer becomes more tight, and we have to develop routes/pulls that enable us to time the key.

Give us choices of trash packs to pull onto bosses, give us the option to allow our party composition to shine. Give us the freedom to experiment with routes, party comps, individual talent builds in order to overcome the challenge of making the timer.

You are killing several birds with one stone like this.

Players will find keys more enjoyable at all levels, because large pulls are always fun. Remember that a lot of people enjoy this game because of the combat, and you have done an excellent job of making pressing buttons fun, but your M+ design choices are restrictive and lead to very boring results; see the god comp that has dominated DF.

In summary, it’s very shrimple

  1. Dungeon hard because timer tight
  2. Combine pulls to make timer
  3. Leverage damage profiles of classes in your party composition to develop route tailored to your team
  4. More even spec representation
  5. Players enjoy game more

You’re welcome Mr. Blizzard, if you’d like to offer me a job as chief dungeonologist please contact me, I would be happy to provide more invaluable insights into your game.

2

Because tanks having to tailor routes specifically tailored to leverage composition will make m+ a lot more fun! (that was sarcasm)

What a terrible idea. Oh, I’ve not made a route for a surv hunter and boomkin said noone ever.

The only way your ideas will improve m+ is if Blizz add your ideas to a “never do this” list.

3

Thanks for your input Dejarous! I don’t believe it will be necessary to have different routes for each spec in the party, the salient point here is that the timer should dictate the difficulty and not having a priest and augmentation evoker to guarantee surviving the unavoidable damage that would otherwise oneshot players

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4

That’s only for the top keylevels the case, like +16 and up.
In the end you will always have a meta.

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5

You’re basically describing season 1 of DF. Keys were limited by “To go faster we need to do a pull we cannot handle” and not “It is physically impossible to pull any bigger there are no mobs left to pull”.

Scaling content will always eventually cause the problem to be surviving 1 shots, but if other things cause the key level to max out before that then it doesn’t really matter.

6

Couldn’t it be argued that a tighter timer can be the cap before one shots?
From a personal perspective I thought S1 was a lot better for class diversity than anything post-aug / mage rework era.

It’s become so formulaic to the point where if your spec does not provide innate synergy to aug / priest you will be invalidated regardless of damage. Destro is doing notably more damage than mage atm but it will not be brought due to no int buff / no mass barrier to save the priest.

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7

The timer only becomes a limiting factor when the pulls reach their logistical size maximum.

If I can’t time AA in 8 pulls but I could in 6, but 6 pulls is too many stops / too much tank damage and we keep dying. We’re limited by our ability to combine pulls, not the timer. Right now though it is logistically impossible to pull bigger than we already do, because the strength of current classes and DH.

Being limited purely by the timer is a really disheartening thing.

8

Being able to go on a “will it oneshot me calculator” to figure out if it’s worth even attempting a key is disheartening.

The design of the trash and mobs would have to change to accommodate what I said in the main post.

Tormented was conceptually solid, give us the choice to combine pulls and deal with additional mechanics from specific trash mobs/minibosses/lieutenants whatever you want to call them.

Obviously if you remove all the oneshot mechanics from the current iteration of dungeon design you do not fix the problem

9

This is not a thing. Every unavoidable mechanic can be survived by any geared player at +10 key.

You mean Season 4? Maybe even season 3 a little bit. Still, it is a player created problem. All +10 keys can be easily cleared by any tank spec.

100% this. Freehold comes to mind, that I remember running the most variations of. Atal’Dazar too.

Very unique take, I did not expect that. So, healing power, tanking mitigation and player health will no longer scale with item level?

10

This is the TLDR of what you are suggesting : have the liming factor of M+ be DPS instead of mob damage.

What do you get as a result ? Well you get SL. Where healer meta was the one that did the most DPS.

And the ONLY reason to take a healer in the first place was to deal with 1 or 2 mechanics in the whole dungeon. The rest of the time it was AFK.

I remember SL where certain packs were reduced to this : Vesper Totem + elemental + heal elemental to keep him doing damage. Literally that.

That is what you get. A different meta… :slight_smile:

11

If u do +21 new key range [old +31] its more then fine to have a necessary composition in m+ to survive because letq face it only 0.2 % of the wole playerbase does those keys. For the rest there is no certain composition req.

12

I actually prefer when there is more stuff happening at the same time during Mplus.
At least there you as a individual player can have this cool plays.

Someone dies and you are aware of situation and you saved your party from a wipe because you came in a right moment to deal with mechanics and sacrificed your deff or movement ability or being aware of all interupts happening in the dungeon and then when you see someone fails you go in and save it
it’s good feeling.

It’s less of a problem when you are in a dedicated group of friends being on discord
because all of you do it
but playing PUG there you can show how good you are at the game and mplus as individual player.
I personally love when blizzard makes Mplus a little bit complicated and harder.

13

make it so dont wait hour get group also there zero tank and healers like dps plenty but 2 role so hard come along

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