Ion Hazzikostas on Mythic+'s Problems in The War Within - PC Gamer Interview

There is no particular problem about M+ in TWW. M+ is just as dead is has always been.

Nothing changed and nothing new.

1 Like

I think a lot of people hate the current class design, and it makes it pretty much impossible for new players to get into the game.

People are afraid of admitting that the current class design is terrible because they will be called bad at the game or whatever, but it truly is atrocious.

I rememeber my Hkilli thread, everyone yelling at me and I have only been proven correct.

I had a random dungeon with a undergeared character and as a tank I did more damage than the rest of the grp combined. Skill disparity should never be this massive. Most ppl clearly have no idea how to play the game, and don´t even try given the complexity of 80 % of specs.

At least artifact power passives had 2 purposes:

  1. Power progression
  2. Bridges gap between good and bad players

There is literally no purpose for all these WA clown class passives. Atrocious design. Can not stand it.

And then they scare off the people who stayed because the new target audience is the new one, not the old one and then what happens is they barely draw in new people and the old people Arent happy with changes that either do not feel important to them or worse actively makes their experience worse and now you have a game that doesnt appeal to new players because available new players not already invested in another life service are rare and you scare off

So many games that tried to appeal to appeal to a broader audience with later changes in their IP that only did not appeal to the broader audience but didnt appeal to the old one either and now some of the biggest IPs in gaming are struggling to hit 100k mark where historically they’ve sold multi millions

Life service market is over saturated which also means many people already have a life service they commit too and are unlikely to drop their invested time in one to reinvest from scratch in another.

If I have to be honest, I love healing… All specs… But I don’t like pugging… Why? Because everything gets blamed on me. DPS dies to frontal? “UhM hEaL?”

Tank does giga pull while I’m drinking and we wipe? “LoL nO hEaL i GuEsS?”

Same goes for PVP… DPS will LoS me all game, and then flame me for not keeping them up.

:joy: :joy:

Yoooooooooo hahahaahahah

Could other factors also be contributing to the decline in Mythic+ participation? For instance:

  • Delves: The introduction of solo content for gearing may have diverted some players.
  • End-of-Season Fatigue: Many players might be waiting for the new season to start before jumping back in.
  • Declining Player Base: WoW’s population has been decreasing in recent years. Shadowlands could be seen as the catalyst for this (though, personally, I quite liked Shadowlands). Dragonflight and The War Within, while not bad, haven’t been great either—just kind of “meh.” They haven’t done enough to pull players back in. Additionally, the player base is now split between Retail and Classic.

I would argue that difficulty isn’t as significant a factor as people might think. It’s not the “be-all and end-all.” If content is FUN, players will participate regularly. If content is NOT fun, then players are only incentivized by rewards. But once the carrot has been caught, what’s the motivation to keep going if you’re not enjoying the content?!

1 Like

Low RnG is fun.

Why do you think people do those dumb parleys on betting websites, even though they give by far the best odds at throwing your money away.

WoW has the biggest ´´You think you do´´ playerbase in the world.

We have the biggest gambling epidemic of all time, that will only get worse, and yet ppl are like, nono ppl hate RnG. Not to mention that Diablo 2 was basically just a casino game. The gameplay was run in kill Meph for hours and gamba, that was the entire endgame, and ppl loved it.

Ppl think Legion was a great expansion that was pulled down by RnG. I can tell you that is far from the truth. The RnG made the expansion good. People love that crap. Just look at D3 (which provided inspiration for Legion), it was a great casino game too.

Participation above +10 is terrible though. There is a small and extremely vocal tryhard M+ playerbase, but even if they all quit the game immediately it honestly would not matter.

In fact it would improve the game because Blizz would no longer have to cater to them.

Worked in S4 of BFA, where they actually increased the amount of active players 18 weeks in, even though everyone tells me not losing players is magic.

M+ was most popular when it was the free gear activity. Legion and BFA.

No one really raids Mythic anymore, so we don´t rly have to care about these ppl anymore.

The only thing ppl have been talking about in my TW dungeons this week is how much they miss Pandaria remix.

LFR was a complete waste of time in that game mode, yet queue was super quick months into the event. Now with a new expansion I tried to queue with a fresh max level, and queue was like 1 hour plus. I do not recall Legion LFR queue ever getting close to this, even in the wait until BFA.

How are people even in denial about the game being easy is popular anymore?

Game has been out for 20 years. Classic the himbo version of WoW is by far the most popular version of the game ever released. How many versions of Classic have we even had by now? Six? And yet it is still popular.

The SoD devs even admitted that every time they increased difficulty the playerbase just massively dropped off, and that all their data showed this.

The reason Ion does not care is he makes up for the falling playerbase with his Brontosaur 80 Euro mount, not to mention the 5 different versions of WoW currently available that keeps people addicted.

It always make me laugh that the minority of people here are so vocal about defending the difficulty in the game.

You can literally swipe your credit card, pay 15 euros and get the best gear in the game, completely legal. In fact Blizzard encourages this, by forcing everyone into the sell M+ runs chats on new characters. This game has no integrity, and thus there is no reason to gatekeep anything.

3 Likes
  • Nope M+ is vast superior than the delves . 2nd week of the season 1 i had 1 item mythic quality from the vault +2 636 ilvl ( I have 177 delves complete with this alt and i still have 12 gilded crest ) Also 1 hc weekly quality item from delves vault vs daily farm on hc gear from m+
  • Here i agree and not only that but the model of m+ is not appealing anymore since doesn’t provide fun at all .
  • Fast dungeon …aoe feast …meta classes make people consider there are better alternatives .
  • This is true over the year players don’t submit to the game anymore and another factor is that the game or the company to say , doesn’t bring new players for the game .

Ending like i’m always going to write …the game has become seasonal where there is no more progress to your character (each season hard reset on geat )…there is no more grind or anything that remind the golden era of wow like tbc~wotlk .

2 Likes

That is because of stupid scaling which doesn’t belong in a rpg game.

3 Likes

Yes, scaling causing more issues than it solves in my opinion.

2 Likes

It’s necessary evil. Game is huge, with many maps and quests. Without scaling it would take eons to reach max level.

The only solution for pretty much every WoW’s problem is WoW2.

Oh yes, happens to me all the time.

I don’t care however many times they call me bad - maybe I’d be less bad if I spent more time playing because I enjoyed it.

There’s no decisionmaking in having to cast 4 frostfire bolts before starting the rotation proper and things like that. Like I just don’t care about these things. I don’t want to have 11 weakauras to play frost alone. I’m just done with this trash.

AP was mishandled because it was mandatory in end-game content.

AP can be a good open world XP mechanism, but what they were doing was ridiculous.

Anyway, I want different spells for different occasions, and I want those occasions to appear in combat as a result of enemy actions. All these self-interactions are embarrassing.

All Ian sais is pure and simple bull…

The #1 problem M+ has is the fact that they wait MONTHS or SEASONS to do the required changes.

Ian had the balls to said this…

- We also need to ensure that our dungeon pool feels roughly consistent in terms of difficulty.

DONT YOU SAY !!! Like you dont need TB of data and rocket science to see from the TWW beta that MotS is nowhere near the difficulty of SV. And here we are… NO CHANGES !!! YET !!!

That is literally the problem. Why the hell did they take 6 months to see this. And WHY in gods name havent they hotfixed this yet !!! Even in S3 of DF, best of the best we had to wait 4 crummy months for them to fix Rise …

People would still be playing if they knew that Blizzard would do something soon. But they have this bad habit taking months or years to change things. People know that, so they quit. Its not rocket science !

He also said:

- “However, when you realize that pugging a +10 is absolutely not an easy feat—especially if you’re not one of the very few meta specs—it is pretty demoralizing.”

How many more seasons do we need to wait for them to realize that the meta “problem” is Aug’s fault 100% !!! JESUS !!! They took 4 seasons to realize that buffing healers/tanks was a problem. A problem known by players since 10.1.7 beta. But guess what, they will need 4 more seasons to realize that Aug is a bane on the M+ scene and they should delete it. Delete Aug, and ALL other support spells like PI. Right NOW.

And then they dont have the balls to do proper class tuning. They are always afraid of ruining their pampered babies (Mythic Raiders) classes and always leave M+ in the dust to rot. Divorce us already YISH ! And make the weekly class changes we need. Screw the raiders and their crummy wipes.

FFS !!! Why are we waiting for so long for hotfixes here ? THAT is the issue.

Or does any of you think that S2 will roll out just perfect ? It wont. Devs are humans as well. But if they dont fix this issue, all they do is fester resentment and frustration. And unless they put the time (and balls) to do weekly changes that ACTUALLY have an impact, S2 will fail regardless of how many fixes they do at launch.

Also PS: Guys ! Where is the DPriest whining? When RShaman was meta there was 4 post a day asking to nerf us. What is up with DPriest? They special or what?

They need to make 10s the baseline and widly achievable to the average and below player, have mythic raids be something that can be done by all. M+ is infinity scaling, if people want hard m+ then they can do that by going to +30s for fun, they could also add a new raid difficulty that gives no loot and is a 30% buff on normal mythic that rewards s title for finishing so the sweats can have stuff to do as well. All this catering to the high end players has made the people below them quit, noone is doing m+, less and less curve guilds are achieving curve and just disbanding before the tier is even over. The game is bleeding players because they decided that casuals (who are the biggest portion of this playerbase and always have been) don’t matter and are told they should just quit on a daily basis by the players they keep catering to.

I argue the contrary. The made M+ harder to cater to players that want challange. They made Mythic Raid bosses super difficult and hard. While simultaniously adding kiss affixes and Delves + making Heroic Raid a joke.

IMO what happened is that they tried to cater to both super casuals, and super hard-core players.

But they forgot that most of us sit in the middle. Most of M+ enjoyers like the challange, but never reach title range. They just do it for fun. And most Mythic Raiders never got CE, but enjoyed the challange regardless.

However. If you make all +12 keys for title range players, and all Mythic bosses for CE Raiders, what do you have left for the majority of people?

And same thing applies for the other end of the spectrum. For those M+ enjoyers that enjoyed a “chill” M+ experience, what do they have left? Spamming M0 untill they get bored ? Raiding Heroic and clearing the raid 3 weeks into the season ?

That is the problem at its base. Blizzard simply did not cater to the average player. By “average” I mean the gausian curve and the 50% percentiles above and bellow the mean.

They catered just to the extremes. And by doing so, managed to create the worst possible outcome ever: Divide their players into “casuals” and “hard-cores” with nothing inbetween.

1 Like

I more expected you called the difference between something like Ara kara and City of threads or Grim batol, but your argument stays.

I still do not see Aug as a problem I am also still not playing with one. To me it is a hidden spec that plays at the pro-level and otherwise it is just a burden. For that mentioned +10 Aug is for sure not a problem.

To me one of the biggest problems with M+ is you now know you are done when you reach +11’s. +9 to +10 is already a relatively big wall, but +11 to +12 is just insane. It is demoralising big time.

When we talk about the amount of tanks and healers; tanks seems to fall over often out of nothing. On pull or on a fast/hidden tankbuster. There are too many tankbusters anway. And this makes the healers needing to focus the tank full time, so healing is frustrating stressfull now too. We had a lot of damage in DF too, but at least your tank didnt fall over randomly when you weren’t paying attention to his healthbar for 1 global.

Like i have started tanking in the last weeks, and often you do not even know a tankbuster is coming, or just happened. How are we able to press an on the global cooldown defensive when we have no time to prepare?

Then you’re blind. They tuned down some mechanics in SV.

Also, when looking at the data…Mists is actually not a positive exception and SV isn’t a negative one. Mists, Ara Kara, Dawnbreaker are all on a similar level. This while only one is suffering negatively in timed completion rate (GB) and one in participation rate (CoT).

In fact, the balance in difficulty is actually quite decent. If you compare this data to other seasons…it currently really doesn’t differ a lot between dungeons…

Also…stop screaming like a toddler. Using capital letters doesn’t make a point, never has, never will.

You are right. But you also ignore an important point.

Top end players get an Aug, and THEN build the optimal comp that fits with Aug. It dosent work backwards. You dont get “the best tank, healer, and DPS” and THEN add an Aug for extra survivability.

And lets be realistic here. Its one of the few things Ian said that I agree with: Its a matter of perception.

People will log into Raider IO, see that all groups are composed of the same specs and conclude that “PPaly is the best tank under ALL circumstances”. Including a +10.

Ideally, there should be 2 metas atleast. Top end title meta comp. And the best performer comp at lower levels. But there is not. Becuse we dont get to choose or change how people see things. And I am tired of pretending otherwise.

So yeah… its IS important that there is always an Aug in top keys.

And then there is the discussion of the power of the meta itself. Sure. You can do a +10 with any comp. But what would happen if you did it with the meta comp?

Would you 3 chest the same +10 you would only +1 otherwise? Because if THAT is the case, its is 100% normal people want the meta. Because in a Pug environment when things go wrong… a 3 chest with a meta comp would turn into timing the key. HOEVER, a +1 with a non-meta comp would turn into a deplete.

For your statment to be true you would need to do a +10 and 3 chest it with ANY comp. Coordinated or Pugged. And you know that is not the case.

It’s what happened in S2 with Exodia by the way. And why THAT meta specifically was so toxic, while other metas in other seasons were not. And this is something Pug players know. They dont just copy what they see in Raider IO.

Sure… but I dont blame that dungeons are overtuned. Nor do I think tank-busters themselves are a problem.

I blame that we are 7 months into the season and we got a grand total of 2… yes TWO dungeon tunings… Its pathetic.

1 Like

i am not so sure about that . the general trend in gaming industry these days is to give rewards and bonuses to people at higher post and layoff low level staff who only got made scapegoat because of bad decisions of higher level staff

1 Like

Amen brother amen.Every single thing you said is exactly what kills M+ participation.
Dpriest killed not only healer participation in M+ but also in all PvP brackets and Blizzard have done absolutely nothing.Rsham got nerfs on Acid raid,Earthshield and even if those nerfs werent done Dpriest would of still be by far the best healer.Imagine keeping PI spell in the game and expecting this healer not to be broken,together with best dmg from all healers and best healing.NOTHING has been done to nerf this monstrosity.
The same thing apply to Prot pala and ofc Blizzards favorite Aug.
Aug killed M+,since its inception every season we got Exodia comp and either you play one of the Exodia comp specs or you are never invited for a key.
So every player that is not fotm reroller and would like you play the class/spec they have fun with just stop playing M+/PvP because Blizzard are by far the worst at balacing their games.

1 Like