Hey Blizzard.
I’m a healer. Since legion and up untill now i’ve remained a top contender for world highest/first keystones. So my perspective is admittedly from that of a fairly niche group of players. However i truely believe these changes will make M+ universally better, spark interest with more/new players and overall make wow a better game.
Currently my active characters are
Gravïty-Twisting Nether (MW monk) and Gravìty-Twisting Nether (Disc/Spriest).
The changes you made after 8.1 were a good start. Most of them were for the better. However there are still large disparities between dungeon difficulty, completion time and conterplay.
TL;DR
“Fix” random mechanics when kiting.
Make all tanks stronger.
Increase class utility.
Bring back gearswap and more tools.
Acknowledge M+ for the major feature it is, introduce rewards and score system now.
Make sure mechanics have counterplay: telegraphed, avoidable, mitigateable and fair.
Concrete dungeon specific feedback for better balance.
Overall dungeon design
In legion the meta in dungeons was: pull huge and kite all the danger. This was obviously not a healthy playstyle, and multiple features has been changed to offset this in BFA. Threat has been nerfed to the point where you cannot kite for long. This is a fine fix and has played out nicely. The main reason for kiting in Legion was not just avoiding melee attacks on tanks, it was primarily that a lot of the dangerous casts would not occur when the aggro holder (tank) was out of range. In BFA this is not the case anymore, instead when the tank is out of range abilities goes on random nearby players. This is very dissatisfying. It leads to random melee and even ranged deaths. Essentially in high keys your choice is either for the tank to die and the team to subsequently wipe, or for the tank to kite and the rest of the party risking randomly dying off. I do not have a fix to this issue, but it is worth mentioning.
Trash in BFA generally has many more mechanics than it did in legion. This is mostly fine, however a lot of them are badly or not at all telegraphed, overtuned and has no counter play. Examples of these will be mentioned in my dungeon rundown below.
A core issue in a lot of the dungeons, and the reason why rogues are so strong and almost mandatory, is the fact that you cannot clear your way through without heavily overcapping on trash %.
This forces you to either waste time killing unnecessary mobs, death skip and expend a combatress plus death penalties, use invis pots and not have combat pots for 10 min. or bring a rogue for shroud.
The solution is not to introduce stealth detection everywhere, but rather to decrease the amount of mobs or place them further apart so you can pick and choose your pulls.
Role disparity and class balance
Currently there is a large disparity on role impact on the succes of dungeons.
Tanks were weakened a lot from legion till now. They were probably too strong in legion (i guess blood dk and vengenace demon hunter specifically). But they’ve been tuned down too far. This statement is based on the following: Assuming perfect play you can fail a dungeon in 3 ways. 1) You do not have enough DPS to kill the bosses and trash before the timer runs out. 2) You do not have enough HPS to survive bosses or trash. 3) Your tank cannot survive the mobs and/or bosses. Currently 3) occurs significantly earlier than nr. 1) and 2). This leads to a very unsatisfying dynamic of the tanks experiencing way more preassure than anyone else in the group. It also means that DPS/ are often left with the feeling of having little to no impact of the success of a dungeon.
There are a few examples of dungeons i will mention below where the timer or HPS becomes an issue, but this is mostly with regards to the relative possible completion levels of the individual dungeons and also often a result of how conservatively you have to pull trash packs for the tank to be able to survive it. This leads me to my next point: tank balancing. Blood DKs and Brewmaster monks that recently got nerfed were not too strong. In fact they were and are too weak and now even moreso. The problem is that other tanks are weaker and/or offer significantly less utility.
A key thing you seem to underestimate when balancing specs for dungeons is how much your toolkit matter compared to raw DPS/HPS/DTPS performance. BDKs are top tier for their utility, mass grip, grip, stun and slow from DND aswell as combatress, rather than their ability to actually tank stuff. To achieve better tank balance you should strive to find utility niches for the other tank classes that are aimed at M+. As bosses raid are usually immune to CC it should be fairly easy to find niches that will not break the specs in raids.
The same goes for the strength of DPS and healer specs. Lets look at Boomkins, Rogues and Demon Hunters. These classes currently make up the majority of high end pushing as evident on streams, third party rankings and your own leaderboards. This is not because their damage is significantly higher than all other specs, to the contrary actually none of them are the highest output performers in their respective roles. It is again because of their utility. Abilities such as shroud, innervate, treants, sap and stuns, blade dance (the dodge herefrom makes Demon Hunters exceptional at absorbing tank mechanics on bosses) their passive leech and all 3 specs strong deffensive capabilities. So if you truely want better spec balance in dungeons you need to introduce better tools for the other specs rather than just tuning numbers.
Gearswap and engineering
A big change from legion to now was the removal of gearswapping. In the Blizzard Q&A you argue that it makes for a more interesting decission process to decide on one loadout and then go through the dungeon with that. This is not an argument, this is purely an opinion and a claim and from my experience in the high keystone community it is almost universally refuted (obviously a claim aswell, but i assume you’ve recieved simmilar feedback). Here’s my reasoning for why its not better, less interesting and not healthy lomg term. Gearswapping doesn’t mean much for the casual player base. You’re not forced to set up 15 gearsets and swap inbetween each trash pull. As long as you don’t change the tuning of dungeons at reward level (currently +10) to require pull by pull gear optimization it is completely optional. That means, if you don’t want to swap gear that is completely fine. If you however like to min./max. your char, it will allow you to do a keystone level or two higher (this is true whether a +16 or a +21 is currently your limit). Its optional and offers diversity. Furthermore, i believe the apparent failure of Azerite gear is largely because of the disparity in general usefullness. In Legion a lot of legendaries saw no use in raids. You usually had 2-3 BIS and rarely swapped. This however was not the case in M+. As the different bonuses usually served some niche be it deffensive, aoe damage, st damage, healing or amplifying some utility cooldown. Most of this is present in azerite gear aswell, however gets outshone over the course of a dungeon by 1 or 2 BIS traits. The same is the case for trinkets. We simply have fewer outlets to let us play with the otherwise cool toys (trinkets and traits) you design for us. Later on in the expansion some dungeons will require you to run deffensive traits and trinkets solely to survive one boss or trash mechanic. Gimping youself to live 1 single ability over the course of a 30-40 minute dungeon is NOT fun gameplay. On a simmilar note, gear swapping made up for some class weaknesses and arguably brought greater diversity in class viability (as an example WW monks were only viable at the cutting edge of Legion M+ keystone level pushing cause their healer could swap to Ishkars Felshield Emitter or the monk could swap to Prydaz/aggramar tank trinket when needed, running this for an entire dungeon would not be fun). A simmilar argument can be made for failure detection pylons, frag bomb and other items/toys, it offers strategic diversity in dungeons and will increase their longevity as we’ll continue to innovate strategies and pulls. Now we’ll reach the ceeiling way faster now.
Acknowlendgements and rewards
It seems to me that with the success of M+ in Legion, the reward system for BFA M+ is extremely underwhelming. It is the most popular game system introduced in a decade and is a pillar of the game on par with Arena/BG, raiding and collectibles. However there have not been introduced any new reward systems to fit its apparent status, even though there were so many obvious options.
There should be an in game ranking system beyond just a leaderboard on your website. This can be simmilar to PVP rankings or a direct adaptation of the popular score systems from third party websites and addons. On top of these rankings you should add more achievements (world firsts, +15s, +20s, +25s, score brackets, time records…) some of these should grant mounts or titles aking to PVP or cosmetic rewards akin to challenge modes. I am certain that you have thought about these features, and sadly it feels like you thought that the success of Legion M+ would carry through atleast another expansion, and that you could save this as a major feature of the next expansion. By the state of forums, content creators, finacial numbers and my dwindeling online section on my friendslist, i think this assumption has been proven wrong. You need to look into this as a game saving content patch rather im the near future rather than your headline for the next expansion, at which point it might be too late.
Key deletion
Key deletion has obviously been a controvesy recently. Mostly because it was a decent quality of life feature that was allowed to remain for too long. I can see why people miss it, but i personally don’t think it should’ve stayed. I think that being thrown into random keys is healthier in the long term. The desire for keystone deletion is mainly a symptom of the real issues. The real issues are in my opinion 2 things. 1) Disparity in dungeon difficulty. I’ll discuss this in the dungeon specific rundown below. 2) Repeat keys (regardless of whether it is a desireable dungeon or not) An example from recent experience: 2 weeks ago Motherlode was one of the hardest keys to time due to the combination of Bolstering and Fortified. My team managed to get around 22 keystones of level 20/21/22. 14 of these were Motherlodes. This is an extreme case of bad luck, however not the issue i wanna illustrate. The core issue is repeat keys. We sometimes spent 55 minutes in a Motherlode knowing we’d end up with a lower keystone, but slugged through it just because we had nothing else to progress. Lo and behold, another Motherlode was our reward. This happened multiple times and is extremely disheartening. The flipside is obviously that you can get 2 easy keys in a row such as Freehold for example, and suddenly end up at a keystone of a level you would not otherwise be able to reach. If you made the simple change that a completed key would always turn into a NEW dungeon you would alleviate this problem at both ends. You’d need to be able to complete a broader spectrum of keys to push higher, and you’d atleast be rewarded for your efforts of pushing a “bad” (for the week) key.
Dungeon by dungeon rundown
Temple of Sethralis (TOS)
The nerf to 3rd and last boss in Temple of sethralis made it a good an fair dungeon. Currently 3rd boss is still really hard, and stands out as a tough dungeon on tyrannical, but that is fine. Different dungeons are suppose to be easier or harder comparatively on different affixes, and in my opinion TOS is currently in a good place. One note, from playing today (thursday the 10th, cyclone is still bugged as in the visual still follows the target but the cyclones eminate from the original position). Furthermore you take damage from all 5 cyclones even if you only get hit by 1 or 2.
TOS suffers from high overcapping on mob count unless you death/invis skip.
Tol Dagor (TD)
Tol dagor changes were also good. Previously it was pure RNG whether you could kill the last boss, as in whether you got double or even triple stacks of the Azerite powered rounds debuff. The adds on first boss casting their dot rather than auto attacking is a minor change on most weeks, but made it doable on necrotic week aswell so kudos. Canons scaling with dungeon level makes this key extremely easy to complete on almost any level, but this primarily effects high level keystone pushers, as we’re the one doing fancy routes and skips to get utilize it properly. If this dungeon is to be brought in line with other dungeons you need to rethink the canon mechanic. Overall TD is pretty fair, aside from the canons making it too lenient on the timer. However if you nerf the timer it will become too hard for the casual player that plays through it linearly.
Underrot (UR)
At face value adding stealth detection to the Matrons in the beginning of the dungeon seemed like a vindictive move of an offended developer that disliked the fact that we never played with the mobs you surely spent a lot of time developing. This also recieved a lot of negative feedback from the high keystone community. However, the following tuning of said mobs has lead to the beginning being playable and honestly quite fair. UR doesn’t overly favor rogues anymore. The changes to the first boss were brilliant. Before you had 1:15 min. to kill the boss before the 2nd round of adds spawned (at which point you maybe 10-15 seconds more as your team died off to casts one by one) but now it is beatable on any level and requires coordination of kicks. Underrot is now close to equal on tyrannical and fortified weeks alike, and presents different challenges from week to week.
UR is a good example of a not too compact dungeon where you can pick your pulls.
Freehold (FH)
Freehold seems like a good dungeon through and through. The timer is maybe a bit on the lenient side, but it shouldn’t get nerfed much if at all. It presents different challenges on tyrannical and fortified. The visual for the knockback lines on the last boss got changed in 8.1 but could still be better. Changes to the sharkboss with sharks having lower baseline speed and getting stunned by pools was god. One criticism i have of Freehold is that the first boss frontal cone hits too hard. Around the 20/21 dungeon level mark it starts being an unavoidable oneshot unless you run the deffensive trait resounding protection, and even then you can get unlucky being hit by the ground bombardment a moment before thus removing your deffensive shield. The frequency of the cast is fine, but the damage could be tuned down a little bit so this boss doesn’t become a hard wall. Eduora on council o’captains is in a simmilar spot with her shot, but alteast it is telegraphed and you have a chance to use a deffensive ability or line of sight the cast (please dont fix unless you reduce its damage).
Motherlode (ML)
Motherlode is in a strange place. Bosses are fair and mostly well designed. The bosses are challenging in their own right but have clear counterplay. The trash mobs however are not well designed. In the beginning leading up to first boss, you have 5 different mobs you fight regularly. The assasin, this casts a fan of knife channel which is literally a full wipe unless it is interrupted by a stun or incap. The refreshment vedors casts spritz, the damage of this ability is insane high, as much as 2 ticks will kill you on a high key. You have quite a lot of vendors, and unless you pull very moderately you will run out of kicks on a fortified key. The thugs has a random charge that is not telegraphed, unavoidable and the damage is instantanious and stuns. On a high fortified key this STUN deals 70% of your health as damage. This is clearly excessive for something that is unpredicable (unmitigateable), unavoidable and stuns you. The stun is really disruptive as it can mean missing your assigned kick on a vendor or incap on an assasin. Finally you have the mech jocky/mech suit. The mech jockeys will attempt to enter mech suits and gain access to different abilites and give different mob count. This is a really interesting mechanic as it presents you with a choice of what version to get: low health for low mob count or high health for high count. However the mobs in isolation each has their issue. When a mech jockey fails to enter a mech suit it will fight you as is. The mech jokeys main mechanic is grease gun. This ability is completely unfair. From what we can gather, it goes on a random target within a fairly short range (8-10 yards). On a high key this ability deals 80% of your maximum HP as damage. Just like the Thug this ability is completely untelegraphed, it doesn’t happen on a predictable interval and there is really no counterplay aside from staying outside of its range, at which point melee classes can’t damage it which isn’t viable. All of these mobs i just mentioned are present in more or less the same trash packs, and if you intend to make the timer you need to pull multiple packs. All of this put together means that you are left to chance. If any combination of abilities goes at the same player they are just dead. In my opinion the frequency of the refreshment vendors spritz cast should be lowers and the jockeys greasegun/thug charge should have their damage significantly lowered, or turned into avoidable/telegraphed casts so it atleast has counterplay. The trash in the rest of the dungeon is somewhat fair, atleast leading up to 2nd boos. Trash after this point is rarely played as it seems overtuned, though i do not have much knowledge thereof and wont comment on these further. Bosses are overall fine, but the 2nd boss is sort of a boring encounter where nothing really happens after the 4 initial boss mobs are killed. You could lower his health slightly and make his adds spawn more frequently.
Siege of Boralus (SOB)
Overall siege of boralus is a reasonable and fair dungeon aside from last boss. The timer is almosr fair, most trashmobs are fine with good counterplay and all bosses except for last are fine aswell on both tyrannical and fortified. I am not personally a fan of the spotter doing most of the work for you, but that is just preference i suppose, not really a balance issue. The last boss used to be quite easy, (though far too long of an encounter) as you could skip the destructor tentacle completely on the last platform. This was evidently not intended as it has since been fixed to automatically aggro when you start that part of the encounter. That is fine in essence, but the issue is that this tentacle has far too much health. It has something like 3 times the health of any other destructor tentacle that spawns throughout the encounter which seems excessive to say the least. This need to be lowered because currently engaging this tentacle is almost a death sentence on higher keystone level. You either have the dps to nuke down the gripping tentacle before you get overrun by destructors or you do not. There isn’t much counterplay to this fact. In general this boss takes quite a long time and becomes a bit boring, i wouldn’t mind if one destructor tentacle were taken away on each platform (so you’d get a maximum of 4 rather than 5). If not the dungeon timer should be increased slightly. Thats contentious though, but the destructor tentacle on last platform being overtuned is not.
Siege of Boralus suffers from overcapping on mob count unless you invis/death skip.
Waycrest Manor (WM)
Waycrest Manor has some good boss designs. The bosses presents a broad plethora of challenges, and are all fairly well tuned for fortified and tyrannical alike. Overall the trash mobs in waycrest seem pretty fair to me aswell. There aren’t any big outliers that spring to mind. The main issue with WM (and it’s a really big issue) is the large amount of RNG that occurs in the dungeon. By this i mean the randomness of which doors are open, and where the witches spawn. There is a huge disparity in how long it takes to run this dungeon depending on what side you get. Currently if you start a high level Waycrest Manor key and get top/bottom right side you might aswell go out the dungeon and reset. It is a difference of several minutes to run through, and your cooldowns aswell as bloodlust lines up very badly for the rest of the dungeon. As an RPG experience RNG is generally interesting, but to this extend it has no place in a timed mythic plus environment. Leave the RP normal, HC and M0. If you settle on one side and make it completely fixed waycrest will be a great dungeon (if you settle on top/bottom right you will need to make some adjustments to the trashmobs in the fireplace/lodge area, the hunters are harder than any other part and probably increase the timer by a couple of minutes).
Atal Dazar (AD)
Atal Dazar is most peoples dream key. It is fairly straight forward and doesn’t have an over abundance of trash mechanics to deal with. I would say that overall no much has to change in Atal. Bosses and trash are fine. There are however a couple of bugs that needs immediate attention: on teeming week if you go left up the stairs as the dungeon starts that area has a completely random amount of mobs. It changes from dungeon to dungeon with no apparent pattern with regards to active world quests in the area or keystone level. Another issue is that when Rezan targets the tank and does his fixate he will speed up for the last 2 seconds of the ability for no apparent reason. The boss also has a tendancy to reset when you kite too close to the edges of the room which is an issue on a boss designed to be kited away from. A minor thing is a wish for better visual clariy on the last boss Yazmata. Her tank ability has the animation of a small purple explosion on the ground around the tank. If a spider spawns in the same location it is almost impossible to see, and it can be hard for tank/melee to not get hit. This does not occur that often as it is not that likely for a mob to spawn in that exact location at that exact time, but it would be nice with an improved visual for the spiders or the tank ability.
AD has a wide variety of routes you can choose even without stealth skips.
Kings Rest (KR)
Kings rest recieved a lot of nerfs recently, and i am sure these were very welcome in the lower brackets of play. However most of the abilities that got nerfed were avoidable or dispellable damage, and it did not change much for the high keystone community. This dungeon is probably the worst tuned with regards to completion time relative to all other dungeons. Due to its timegated and linear nature there isn’t much creative routing that can make the runs faster. Mob packs spawn individually or are gated behind doors that only open once bosses are dead. The biggest issue with regards to completion time at the moment is the lengt of the 3rd boss, the council of tribes, and the last boss Dazar, the first king. When we’ve done these dungeons on +20/21 keys these encounters have taken upwards of 7 minutes each! This is insanely long in comparison to most other bosses that are 3-4½ minute encounters om tyrannical. To bring the completion time of Kings Rest in line with other dungeons without changing its linear nature you will need to nerf the health of these two bosses significantly. The last boss by 20% or more and the council of tribes by 40% or more. The encounters are simply way too long.
The damage of blade combo (tank ability on last boss) and severing axe (20 second dot on Kula the butcher, concil of tribes) are also quite high. Severing axe should be nerfed by 20-30% or made significantly shorter, 10 seconds duration or so.
Trash is mostly fine, however severing blade (dot from the beserkers) should have their cast time increased so you can react and stun it. Counterplay is healthy.
You overcap quite heavily on mob count in KR unless you invis or death skip.
Shrine of the storm (SOTS)
SOTS was a decently tuned dungeon untill 8.1. Trashmobs were very hard, so the dungeon favored tyrannical, but it was completeable on a decent level on both affixes. The 3rd boss, Lord Stormsong, had his ability Mindrend changed. It used to go on closest target (mostly tank) but sometimes melee as the tank had to kite away from the orbs that follow you. Making the dot go on random completely broke the encounter, on +20 keys it was literally a oneshot. This has been reduced significantly, and from my calculation you will need to do the dungeon on +30 now for it to be a oneshot at current health levels, so we wont have this issue anymore. The last boss was also changed. The healt debuff/damage and healing buff used to go on healer first and subsequently on ranged dps followed by tank/melee (seemingly random which). This buff offered some interesting choices, you could outrange it as a healer and have it go on a ranged DPS first, thus ending the DPS/interrupt phase and generally boss encounter faster. You could also choose to not interrupt the bosses intermission immediately, and use the buff to kill off mobs in the boss room. Now it only goes on healer and nothing else. This takes away the interesting decissions you could make before. However if you do not wish for the buff to go on anyone but the healer, so be it. This however leaves the last boss way overtuned with regards to completion time. The DPS phase adds in the intermission needs to be nerfed by 50% (you can buff the mobs casting speed to compensate and not make it too trivial) and the bosses base health needs to be reduced by another 10-20% on top of the 10% you reduced it today.
The rest of the bosses in the dungeon are fine. Some of the trashmobs are slightly overtuned and generally it takes longer to run through this dungeon that it does others. Health/damage nerfs to a couple of minibosses would alleviate this greatly and alongside further nerfs to last boss (or revert to the buff/debuff mechanic only going on healer) make this a very interesting and fair dungeon.
In SOTS you overcap quite heavily on mob count unless you invis/death skip.
Affixes
Teeming is currently a very overtuned affix in a lot of dungeons. It either needs to be moved to a level 2 affix alongside fortified and tyrannical, or it needs to be nerfed significantly in a lot of dungeons. Kings Rest, Shrine of The storm and Siege of Boralus become particularly hard to time on teeming weeks.
The rest of the affixes are fine balance wise with the exception of bolstering. It is almost universally hated. It arbitrarily limits the size of pulls you can do on the top end of M+ pushing and in the “lower brackets” alike. From pugging level 10-15 keys on my alts a lot of runs become really really long and tedious wipefests on bolstering week.
Epilogue
This post is admittedly very long, but it is based on discussions with some of the most experienced and skilled players in the world, a lot of thinking and hundreds and thusands of hours spent in Legion and BFA dungeons.
Lets make dungeon mechanics fair.
Lets make specs balanced around what they bring.
Lets reduce role disparity.
Lets officially elevate M+ to its proper status alongside raiding, PVP and collecting.
Please blizzard, lets recapture the magic and make this game even better.