Its fair what you say you know? I often find myself in your situation, just on different key levels.
But removing depletes will not solve any of your (and my) issues. For example:
Say you remove depletes and you just select a dungeon/level you want. Will you have signups? I dont think so… I think it will be worse. You will simply reach the same situation you are in now, but faster.
Think about it. The few people that would quew to your +11 right now, some of them are individuals that depleted a +12. Some are individuals that timed a +10. You would get half the applicants in your scenario with no depletes.
Point is: M+ is not perfect. There are things we can change. This is one of those things:
There are more people running 10s than any other key level. If you want to do 9s or 11s its a problem.
Things that can help to male the season more enjoyable:
Spread the rewards across levels.
Expand the rewards to higher key levels.
Prevent stale meta with weekly tuning.
Implement RIO inflation.
Those things can help. As for seasonal M+, YOU are the one that thinks you have to “start over”. You dont. You simply add extra levels on top of the ones you already did. It’s just time-gated.
Yes, this is something I’ve also mentioned in a previous comment of mine.
Essentially the auto system would make things easier for bad DPS players and worse for everybody else.
While this is correct, it’s not the issue I was talking about.
Let me use an analogy, so maybe you get my point a bit better:
Assuming, in order to bake a cake, you need 1 pack of milk, 1 pack of flour and 3 eggs.
Now you start baking cakes and you have 10 packs of milk, 10 packs of flour and 300 eggs in your kitchen. How many cakes will you be able to bake before having to wait for a re-supply of milk and flour?
The answer is: You’ll be able to bake 10 cakes (groups) and be left with 0 packs of milk (tanks), 0 packs of flour (healers) and 270 eggs (DPS).
You won’t be able to bake those remaining 270 eggs into cakes until you bought more milk and flour.
So those 270 eggs will sit in your kitchen until you brought home more milk and flour - just sitting and waiting.
This is where your logic unfortunately falls apart. The “plane” isn’t going to wait for you for 45 minutes. After the tank and the healer boarded, the plane will be fully boarded within seconds because there are so many DPS players available.
Even more so, the plane is most likely already fully boarded before the tank and the healer even boarded to begin with.
No group/plane has to wait 45 minutes for a DPS players.
I guess I should have liked your post or made a reply saying “+1”. Instead (idiot of me) I made a whole bla-bla that essentially wanted to say: “I agree 100%”…
If you are going to wait more than 2 minutes for completing the group then i am for sure out and just take the next, as healer. I am for sure not waiting 45 minutes till you found your arbitrary perfect teammember with tons of other valid sign ups.
Yeah I mean I’ve found myself having this at level 15 and 16 in the past, so yeah. Well, 25-26 at the time, but anyway.
I thought about it, and I concluded that I’m just not going to make a +11 group at all because I will never need to. I just play 10 and I play 12, and everybody else will too, and 11 will be forgotten, and that’s fine because nobody needs 11.
The issue that causes the level 9 and level 11 issues to begin with is that there’s a huge reward at 10, namely vault drops, and a substantial though less significant reward at 12, namely resilient keys, and by some estimates 12 can actually be easier than 11 on certain weeks if you’ve got a nasty affix.
We can fix that maybe by faffing about with the reward structure, as they have done to actually quite a significant degree even though it clearly hasn’t worked and probably never will, and to avoid the dead key phenomenon because it’s a certain dungeon, they balance the dungeons.
This results in repeated nerfs and therefore rating inflation; but I feel like it’s the wrong kind of rating inflation. They just take out the interesting and challenging fights and even it all out instead of actually making keystones easier across the board because that’s not what they’r trying to do - it’s a side effect.
And why would anyone do something harder for a lower reward, let alone the same?
All great ideas, except I think the weekly tuning is… you gotta be careful. They’re already doing it a lot and I know an entire guild that went to Classic over it. They just want to understand how their class plays and they don’t want to deal with waking up every other week and suddenly all the buttons works differently and they have to change spec.
Now obviously that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to balance it, but it can definitely be too much.
Nahh - all my score in fact literally reset to 0 and all my mythic gear became LFR gear (used to be Normal gear, but that obviously wasn’t enough lol). Don’t let yourself be blindsided by growing numbers.
Now, this is normal. It’s been the case in WoW for about 16 years by now and we’re all used to it I suppose - although it wasn’t always the case.
But there just came a point where I got jaded by all that. I just wanna log in, enjoy some combat and some chats, and log out, and I just stopped caring about all these transient rewards. They’re moderately fun to get when you’re into it trying to build up your stats, but as soon as that’s gone it’s just… I can’t bring myself to go to the rest of the way. The amount of effort grows too big and the reward too transient and meaningless - so I get stuck at 3k. It feels like a nice round number and then I’m just done.
So that’s why you never invite me
I mean to be fair I’m not asking anyway. I’m not as good at it as you cause… well, read above.
I don’t remember if it was you or someone else who made this point which was that LFG would be better than my version of SoloQ because they can cherry-pick in LFG.
Inherent in cherry-picking are barriers to entry.
The two most common barriers to entry are:
Your IO score and
To be considered for, let’s say a +12 you have to have done a +12 (and timed it)
Not too many DPS meet this criteria.
You said as a healer you would leave after 2 minutes of waiting for the DPS criteria to be met.
Let’s say your next 4 sign-ups were a similar experience where you waited 3 minutes on the 1st one of the 4 sign-ups, 2 on the 2nd, 5 on the 3rd and 1 on the 4th.
On your 6th sign-up, you got accepted instantly and the dungeon started immediately.
Those other sign-ups still count against you, you still spent 12 minutes waiting.
Oooor ignore all that crap and bring back weekly rotating affixes, remove Tyra and fortified as affixes, instead incorporate them into the passive scalling.
Overall start threating M+ loot on the same par as you threat Raid loot, its so annoying to have your BiS items come from outside the content you are doing.
In my experience it doesn’t even take 1 minute to fill a group in LFG, when i (and a tank) am in. I have never waited 12 minutes, and looking at the crazy amount of dps-sign ups that will never be the case either. When a groupleader isn’t able to make a group in 2 minutes, i am out and just go for another one.
Your soloQ will give me a group also in 1 minute, but it will not have a battleres and the right dispel, so it will be 10-20 minutes lost wiping.
Rewards are now crests. And you can loot as many as you want.
Now you have to upgrade gear from Campion all the way to Myth track.
The higher the key, the more crests you get. The bigger chances to loot something.
Now… you have 2 options. Do many, many, many low level keys. Or do few high keys. But the reward in the end is the same. Regardless of what key level you play.
Doing it a lot? Not even close. The tuning I refer to are %aura buffs. Not to complete reworks. And it has nothing to do with “balance”. It has to do with shaking up the meta.
And by applying aura buffs every week, small ones like 1% or 2%, is essentially applying inflation to the M+ system. Preventing anyone from reaching a “dead-end” in progression. You basically progress for the whole season.
Its like in Raids. Raids get % aura buffs to classes as the season progresses. The goal of that aura buff is to prevent raids getting stuck wiping 500 times on 1 boss the whole season. So they dont quit and give up.
Name 1 expansion/patch in which it was not the case.
In the end, people focus so much on the rewards. Its the journey that matters. Another season is simply more road to travel, nothing else.
I play keys for the sake of playing keys. If they are too easy they become boring. If they are too hard they become boring. They can buff the lower end, they can nerf the higher end… they have to do something.
Turning your gear to LFR level is, in practice, buffing the lower end of the keys.
Yeah that’s not gonna work. Community outcry over “noobs spending all day” or maximally geared botting accounts. I can already see it.
I’m going to have to disagree there. I’ve experiencd huge changes several times a year, and right now frost has gone from one of the best specs in the game to one of the worst, and so I really should respec into arcane, which also changes everything.
It’s actually pretty annoying. Feel free to call it stale - you know what? Sometimes stale is good. Just for a little while.
Vanilla and tBC. Especially vanilla.
Almost all the raids came out at once and the cadence was all over the place, and all tiers were relevant for some player until the end of the expansion.
The seasonal shenanigans started on WotLK release.
I agree - but the problem I think I’m having now is that the class design has become so rotten I’m not actually having much fun with the journey, I’m just hanging out lol
I am also not sure where you are getting the idea that it can take a while to get a dps?
I put up my +12/+13 key on tankadin and I get around 15+ dps applicants in less than 30 seconds.
Why would you wait 45mins for a DPS XD? The group is bassicaly done once you have a tank and a healer since you have like 400 dps sign ups to choose from.
No group is waiting for you specifically to sign up and get invited so they could start. They just choose wjat looks like the best from the sign ups (with some criteria like BL or CR, which again is not a major issue).
No the barrier for getting into a +10 is having a +10 or getting invited for one. Yes, the “barriers” you mentioned might apply for getting invited to a +10, but they arent accurate.
As for owning a +10, is pretty much a given, if you don’t have one (key), you dont belong there.
Almost this, except the DPS is the air in the cabin, which we always have and even if we lack/ want to replace, which just need to queue up in order to get 10 new air into the cabin. The tank is the captain and the healer is the fuel.
Those are the ones that decide when the group is ready and goes, not the air in the cabin.
If all DPS were created equal, then sure, I would concede your point.
I will repeat this because it addresses your point(s).
Barriers to entry are inherently baked into cherry-picking the group (LFG).
The 2 most common barriers to entry are:
Your IO score and…
Having timed the dungeon before, so to do a, let’s say, a +12, you have to have done a +12
The pool of players you can draw from is now minimal.
The problem is that LFG does not take into account your barriers to entry when applicants list their names for your key. You have to suss it out yourself.
Most won’t meet the criteria, so you then have to wait.
Yeah, but you’re not taking random DPS off the street to push your +13 key, are you?
Really?
I just came from doing this:
I spent 12 minutes watching group finder.
There were like 35 keys listed, (2) +18s, a +17, (3) +16s, don’t think I saw any +15s, but the rest of the keys listed were between +10 and +14.
One of the +18s had a tank, a healer, and 2 DPS. After 12 minutes, they still hadn’t found the 3rd DPS.
The second +18 had just the tank; he had a 3k IO score, and he timed the 18 before. 12 minutes passed, and no one was added to his group.
I think like 2 of the +10s, the group got filled out quickly.
Most keys that were listed between +10 and +14 had 2-3 players, most of whom were DPS. They delisted after waiting 6-10 minutes.
So yeah,
Again, this implies that all DPS are created equal.
