I’m still waiting for the second part of your new design approach to M+. You said that to compensate for the nerfs to tank self sustain and defensive cooldowns, you would also make the incoming damage in M+ smoother and more predictable, and reduce the amounts of cognitive overload. Well, I have yet to see any notable changes in that regard. Most of the damage that kills people are still 1-shots, either from randomly targeted casts going on the same player multiple times in a row, overlapping mechanics, or poor visuals making it very hard to see telegraphed frontals or aoe (seriously, why do you insist on using spell colors that perfectly blend into the ground of the dungeon?).
With a few exceptions, nobody is dying to predictable damage happening over 3-5 seconds. Players are either at full HP or dead within a GCD. Trash mob auto-attacks are still doing absurd amounts of damage, so the only tanks that hasn’t suffered too much is Guardian Druid and Prot Warrior, but I doubt that’s anything more than a happy accident.
We are still left with new dungeons flooded with overlapping mechanics, leading to boring routes with very little choice in terms of what pulls you can do. Want to pull an extra pack? You can’t because you’ll either have too many casts to stop and/or some sort of unavoidable damage that ramps up a debuff on the tank or group, like the Rock Smashers in Stonevault. In dungeons like City of Threads of Ara-Kara you’re given the illusion of route options, but if the packs have more or less the same type and composition of mobs, then it’s not really an interesting or impactful choice, is it?
It’s basically a meme at this point, every time blizzard has stated their goal was to smooth out damage intake the opposite happens.
They increase stamina, reduce healing and say they couple that with reduced hard hitting abilities.
But they always seem to forget that last part, so we just end up weaker on the whole every time.
Because apparently none of the Devs can grasp basic math…
M+ is an infinitely scalable system. Eventually things 1-shot you. No matter the HP, the HPS healers have, whatever…
The ONLY way to truly smooth out damage is to set a cap for each thing a mob casts on you. In other words, there must be some X M+ level where damage dosent scale any longer. Only the HP of mobs. Which would make DPS the limiting factor to how high of a key is achievable.
Or you could go the complex way and have HP of mobs scale faster than damage of mobs. One way they could have achieved that is with the affix at a +12. They could have said : mobs have 20% more HP. Instead of 20% more HP and damage.
I think this idea should have been the baseline for tyrannical and fortified, so only the HP is increased and not damage. It would allow for better tuning, and you won’t have these crazy swings from week to week if you’re doing keys below +10, which I guess is something like 90% of the M+ players at the moment.
Failing a key because your group was lacking a bit of damage doesn’t feel nearly as bad as getting oneshotted a couple of times and adding an extra minute to the death penalty.
This is actually so true at the moment that it’s really sad at the same time.
Dungeons at the moment are full of 500 casts per packs that either 1shot you or leave you low enough to die to the next random unavoidable damage instance.
Overlaps stacked on top of overlaps on top of massive visual clutter, paired with abilities that just delete your HP in a moment leaving you very little room to outplay or get healed in time.
Trash mobs auto attacks hitting for insane amounts is just really bad design, pair that with most melee specs pulling off aggro because they still haven’t buffed tank threat generation.
Having more than one interrupt per individual mob is not a fun design and quite frankly interrupt as a whole is not an exciting or enjoyable mechanic to do. It’s plain boring and it only serves to overload players.
Another problem with current dungeon design is how most trash packs have more mechanics than bosses on average and thus are more difficult to deal with than bosses.
A good example is the 1st boss in Grim Batol, trash packs there are much harder to deal with than that boss which makes no sense to me.
Trash packs should be just trivial fodder that you kill for % and bosses should be where you need to coordinate and deal with mechanics accordingly so as to advance further in the dungeon.
If I want to kill bosses with fancy mechanics for 6 minutes… I would raid.
Trash packs in M+ is what makes the high-octane experience of M+ unique with respect to anything else in WoW. And it should stay that way. If anything, they should nerf bosses such that they become “lieutenants” more than “bosses”.