Let me preface this by saying I like M+, but I used to love it. The concept of repeatable content that presents different challenge is awesome! I do think theres a lot of room to improve it…
Using MMO Champ’s cliff notes of the dev Q&A as something to base the discussion around -
Deleting Mythic+ Keys
* This was a quick change that wasn't fully thought out on the team's part. It was hotfixed in at the start of the season.
* Deleting keystones caused some bugs and led to emerging social issues, where players would cherry pick what seemed like the easier dungeons.
* Some Affixes will make some dungeons easier than others, but the goal is for most dungeons to be similarly difficult.
You should allow people to delete keys. It was a welcome change, it wasn’t one you planned for but roll with it. If there are “emergent social issues” then address the underlying issues. Lets be honest here, the underlying issue that the tuning of the instances is poor if your stated intention is to have most dungeons be similarly difficult.
Kings Rest, TOS, SOTS are hopelessly overtuned compared to the others. Atal and Freehold are probably a little too easy. The others feel about right but certain affix combos break them. More on that later because its important.
Mythic+ Changes
The team made many changes over the months to make dungeons less punishing.
Hopefully at the start of next week, another large set of changes is coming focusing on trash packs and abilities.
It feels like now there are a lot more pulls that offer challenges than in Legion. The team wanted to get away from AoE stun, cleave, and move on being the solution to all trash pulls.
In the past few days, the team got some more logs and analytics for dungeons. They had lots of good analytics on boss encounters, but not as much visibility on what was going on between bosses.
The team can see the most lethal trash mobs, which stretches of dungeons take the longest to get through, what areas are deadly, where difficulty changes too much with Teeming. Removing Infested from lieutenant mobs and some trash mobs are some of the changes coming.
A lot of the changes that go into a patch were made months ago, sometimes before the team has seen much gameplay in the Mythic+ dungeons.
The team balances hotfixing the live game and working on the next patch.
A major patch just dropped and you are promising “big changes” soon™? I honestly think you dropped the ball here.
It’s been known by all and sundry that trash is achingly hard in BfA. I guesstimate trash takes 65-75% of the dungeon time, and you’re just getting good data on it now? (to paraphrase) We’re 4 months into BfA. You should have had this data before release. It should have been fixed before release. Go to any mid level persons page and see they’ve done a +13 Freehold on time and its taken them double that to complete a KR of 3 levels lower. The balance is poor. Fix it more aggressively.
Mythic+ PuG Experience
High end Mythic Keystones are meant for coordinated groups.
Theres an elephant in the room that people leaving keystones is a problem. You can’t really stop people leaving because their cat may really be on fire. What you can do is give us more data to make informed decisions about who we group with.
Consider stats on “first leavers” in a keystone. I’ve said it before “Dejarous left after 3 hours with 7% of the trash complete and 97 deaths” and “Dejarous left after 7 minutes with 18% of the trash complete and one death” tell different stories.
On top of this you should develop methods to encourage people to see things through. I don’t know what these are but you do employ bright people and I think you should make this, and other “emergent social issues” higher priority. This game does far too little to encourage the correct behaviour from people.
**Raider[.]io **Talking about another “emergent social issue”. Your API should show all runs. You have this ludicrous state where people can do a +10 at the end of the week so they don’t appear on leaderboards, they don’t get score so they get “excluded” from content. This isn’t a fix but a step in the right direction.
Affixes
I get it, they are meant to present different challenges on different weeks for variety. Theres a fine line between “this is a challenge, cool!” and “This sucks”. Too many of your affixes are leaning towards, or firmly in the “This sucks category”
Grievious. The premise for this affix is flawed. Why do I have a papercut at 90,1% health but a shotgun wound at 89,% health? It’s unfun and grossly punishing. Bosses with ticking damage, the witches in Waycrest and the pylon boss in SOTS become unplayable for classes that can’t HOT multiple people. When its 90% ‘the affix’ and 10% ‘the boss’ you tuned it wrong. Years ago you wrote a blog about how the healing philosophy shouldn’t be about keeping people topped all the time, here you are making it mandatory. Lower the threshold to 75%, make it tick harder the lower the people get. Seems like a better option, no?
Explosive. Needs rework to change what spells do and do not hit it. The fact that a paladins shield of the righteous or avengers shield doesn’t hit them is broken. I’m sure other classes have the same issues.
Teeming Dungeons already make us wade through too much trash. Some dungeons are out of control. Just so theres no misunderstanding, this much trash isn’t fun. I know your metrics showed people spent an average of 7 hours in every MOTHERLOAD teeming dungeon, that wasn’t because they loved it so much they decided to savour it, its because its broken.
Sanguine “We designed dungons with M+ in mind” - Remember that tipping point where it goes from being a challenge to sucking? Any indoor dungeon with sanguine sucks hard. Tol dagor gets the prestigious double suck award because the trash runs off feared at low health to dump sanguine in inconvenient places. It’s just frustrating because theres no realistic mechanic to outplay it. We’ve already used our cc just to stay alive, we can’t afford to use it to stop random trashmob #17 dumping bad stuff in a bad spot.
This isn't controversial at all!
I believe the emphasis is too much on a good tank and healer to make a timer. There needs to be more stuff to engage damage dealers, to let the good ones shine. Generally bigger numbers are better so find ways to ‘occasionally’ punish their output if they fail mechanics. Take the first boss in Temple, the one with the lightning shield. Last time I did it the dps took 1,2 million damage from hitting the lightning shield. I, the healer carried that boss. Why not make them do less damage each time they hit it? That way they can slowly learn that goofing mechanics makes them look bad compared to their other dps buddies. It makes making the timer less likely and theres less “y u no heal me?” moments to contend with. Don’t get me wrong, stuff should still kill you as well but how about a little creativity?
I’d love to hear what others think.