Dungeon difficulty and roles

Community General Discussion
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Let me preface this by mentioning that I’ve been playing WoW since it’s open beta and I’ve always enjoyed the game. I enjoy Dragonflight as well.

But I do wonder at times if the way Blizzard is evolving the game could be different. And I wonder what the community at large thinks.

Currently I have two things that bother me slightly.

The first one is class roles. As years go by and new expansions are released, I find that WoW becomes mechanically more and more complex while at the same time blurring the lines between class responsibilities in group content. Tanks don’t need to worry about threat, but need to self-heal and maintain a good level of DPS. Healers need to do damage and damage dealers need to maintain a decent level of self-sustainability.
Personally I preferred when classes had their specific roles defined a bit more strictly.

The second thing, that’s somewhat related is dungeon difficulty. Mythic+ is a fine mode, but personally I abhor time limits in games.
I wonder if a different type of difficulty scaling couldn’t be introduced where crowd control would be a necessity with more focus on class specific abilities and careful gameplay.

I know that I could technically play Classic or Wrath, but I like the new systems and the new storylines introduced with each expansion and major patch.

What do you guys think about class roles and how they are utilised in group content?

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First things first… Class mechanics have become more complex? Or has group content become more Complex? Like m+ for example.

M+ is the most commitment less endgame WoW has too offer… Unlike raids. You are free to do m+ whenever you feel like easily.

Its a content endgame for everyone and all… But allot of people are put off by it, Because of the word around the streets being how toxic it is.

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The problem with this is skill just sort of becomes a conversion / function of time, and people are notorious for putting unhealthy amounts of time into things as a substitute for being better. The amount of times I’ve had groups want to wait for lust infront of a boss in Dawn of the Infinite tells me how many times I’d be waiting for lust in a non timed M+ setting.

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You’re right, “complex” probably isn’t the right word. “Layered” might be a better descriptor.
As I’ve said, class roles are less defined. Everyone needs to do a bit of everything.

And I’m not looking for something that requires less commitment, but a different challenge than just fighting a timer (well, predominantly fighting a timer).

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I think part of this is that a lot of what makes mythic+ challenging is derived from the timer. Even in a 28 the trash is not hard, the bosses are sometimes but the difficulty comes from the fact you’re not pulling one pack at a time, you’re forced by the timer to create your own challenge in order to complete your objective.

WoW is not a game where things are individually difficult to execute, it’s a game based on layering obligations / expectations on top of eachother to create difficuly. The timer is the thing that pushes people to layer things, and without it I don’t think it would be possible to make trash hard at all.

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I think timed challenges can be done well, definitely better than how m+ is right now. Not a big fan of the current affixes, i think they should have just kept the seasonal affixes, and maybe rotate them once in a while, and add a few/change them overtime, since the seasonal affixes were actually pretty cool, at least some of them.

As for the deplete, that has frankly no place in the game, either removed, or at the very least a charge system.

I also think that m+ potential is frankly underutilized, but the same goes for raids, you have so much content in wow, but only have access to a very small portion that is actually relevant. That’s frankly sad.

But i don’t think m+ should basically become raids but for 5 people, where the difficulty comes from incredibly intricate mechanics.

We already have raids for that, and honestly part of the difficulty of raids also comes from coordinating more people.

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What about something like this. You can potentially skip almost every trash group in a dungeon, but every group you kill puts a debuff on the bosses (lowering health, lowering damage, disabling certain mechanics). The fewer the debuffs on the bosses, the better the loot.
But I’m sure there are other, better ways of achieving difficulty/skill scaling than this without needing to rely on time limit.

Personally I find timers a very “synthetic” way of increasing difficulty / testing skill in RPGs.

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I do agree they are, but I think it’s difficult in the case of trash specifically to do much else. WoW mobs aren’t hard, they do 1, max 2 things of consequence each and hit the tank. Even a pack of 4 of them is kind of whatever. What makes them difficult is that you don’t pull them one pack at a time, you pull 2, 3, maybe even 4 at a time in some cases and a timer is a very simple way to incentivize that behavior because it rewards efficiency.

So flame Lev? It’s a cool idea but at the end of the day you’re taking the difficulty of the dungeon and putting it entirely into the bosses because that’s where the design space to create complex encounters is. You’re making 5 man raiding at that point.

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Yes and no. Yes in that the complexity would be completely around the boss encounters, but the group would have influence over that complexity.
I find that even with LFR raids are still inaccessible for many players because for the most part you need to know the mechanics of the encounters beforehand. And I don’t think that’s good game design where you need to look for gameplay knowledge from external sources. Not everyone is in a raiding guild to learn the encounters in a friendly environment after all.

But again, it’s just an example without too much thought put into it.

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Thats how mmos work you looks up strats and learn how to execute

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They tried this during Cata. It didn’t work out.

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The dungeon journal has generally been very good for this though I could see an argument that its readability / quality has dipped in recent years. One could also argue that LFR is the preparation for raids moreso than it is a raid difficulty itself, acting as a mostly sanitised environment for people to see mechanics first hand without being a noticeable burden or risking failure.

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You shouldn’t be AFKing when you don’t have anyone to heal. This isn’t really “need to do damage” so much as “Don’t be afk doing nothing”.

I think a large issue comes with most people in Europe and the surrounding regions not being native English speakers. I’ve had people here on this forum read the very same text from the dungeon journal that I’m reading and they can’t understand what it’s saying. English skills vary greatly among the population in Europe.

I know people that can’t even speak more than very basic English in Sweden and can’t understand spoken English and NEED subtitles on shows/movies, they certainly wouldn’t be able to understand the dungeon journal if they had been playing the game.

Now, this isn’t a problem if the game is localized to their language but that’s only a few languages out of all that are spoken in Europe and the surrounding regions.

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I think personally they should go away from class identity and move towards spec identity. I think it’s boring that classes share so many abilities. That’s probably also what causes this button bloat for healers, where they essentially need the rotational abilities of their dps counterpart keybound. Currently I’m easily able to keybind 60+ binds personally thanks to a good system I created for my hand, which works for me, but I also think that it shouldn’t be like this. If using all these “hybrid” abilities is bad due to the amount of binds, I wanna suggest you to bind modifiers to your mouse with your PC, so you can click a mouse button as “ctrl”, and then ctrl+3 for example very easily

Healers doing damage is fine. However, their way to do damage is tasteless and badly designed in my opinion. I’m not a game designer ofc, but I just dislike using “class rotational abilities”. I think it would be better, if healers did dps with their own abilities that got created just for them. An example would be to make resto shamans shoot water bolts, which damage enemies for example and heal allies, similar to living flame. I think living flame is the perfect example of a well designed healer dps ability.

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?

Holy priests pretty much only have sw:p, sw:d(which I haven’t even specced into), shadowfiend and divine star/halo that are shared with shadow priests for damage.

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Idk I have a holy pala woth 41 keybinds. For me it’s easy, but only because I have shift/alt/ctrl on my mouse. I don’t think it’s good though that a game has such a high barrier to entry, if you don’t wanna hurt your hand. Pressing modifiers with pinky finger sounds painful

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Holy priests damage rotation on single target is pretty much Shadowfiend, chastise when ready, holy fire when ready(Use EB on CD), keep sw:p up, spam smite.

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Tanks need to worry about threat, because establishing it quick enough is important when you’re dealing with bursty classes like paladins, DHs, warriors. The faster you are at that as a tank, the more damage they willbe able to pump out, and the less trash mechanics you will be dealing with – hence, the cleaner the run. And if they are instantly dead from a random early melee, your entire pull might be doomed because you won’t be able to finish it with available CDs, which means the key is probably failed as well. Even if that’s not the case, your DPS still won’t feel confident around you and will probably try to hold out, which will cost you time in the end.

This will always be the case. Even if you cut tank and healer maximum DPS in two, even in four or more, the groups will still continue to chase the highest achievable numbers. If you need an example, relatively recently is SL healer DPS output wasn’t high at all, it was actually comically low in comparison to what a proper DPS could do with their eyes closed, but still we had healers in meta with the highest DPS among them. Can you guess what healer spec is considered meta today? I’ll answer it for you: it’s the one that casually ends with 50k DPS overall while still covering for all the healing requirements. Before that, in season one, it was another highest DPS healing spec, even as almost all healer classes could deal with HPS checks. The same goes for tanks. With all equals, highest DPS healer or tank wins.

This won’t change for the exactly same reason until the tuning is so off that survivability no longer matters. If a class dies easily and requires too much attention from other group members, they are a liability and don’t get invited into groups regularly. Case in point, hunters. They can sustain relatively good numbers so they should be invited much more, but they need to be babysitted or they die. That affects group output. But in SL they were as squishy as they are now, but because they were able to deliver DPS that went off the charts, people closed their eyes on that, and you needed to search really far and away to find a group without a hunter in it. But with all equals, most sturdy DPS wins.

All in all, the only way for you to achieve this goal is if you eliminate WoW competitiveness entirely. And that’s not just the timers. We’re talking about no more score, no more prestige, no more DPS tables, no risk of failure, nothing.

Not sure this will be a sustainable PvE model for MMO, man.

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Personally, I haven’t had threat issues for the past 3 expansions. And let me tell you, I’m a pretty lousy tank :smiley: But yours is a fair point. Still, I don’t think threat is generally something you need to track all that much.

With that, I’m afraid I have to disagree. This might be the case since M+ was introduced, but it hasn’t always been the case. Before the gameplay was a lot more focused on spec roles (keeping threat and mitigating damage for tanks, healing and maintaining low thread for healers, dealing damage and maintaining low threat for damage dealer) and managing resources.

But I think you very well describe the main issue I’m having, even though I don’t think that was your intention - you mention meta and maintaining good numbers in order to be competitive. I don’t like the fact that the co-op environment is still competitive in nature.
And M+ is competitive in nature - damage numbers are king (even for tanks and healers, at least in higher keys) and you need to worry about having a good enough rating to even be considered for groups.
And I’ll still maintain that Raiding is not accessible to everyone, even with LFR, so I don’t think it’s a viable alternative.

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