in my opinion, there should not be any timer penalty for deaths. the formula should simply be : if you finish this in 30 minutes, you succeed. if you don’t. you failed.
A death already penalizes the run plenty enough.
-run-back
-loss of flow/vibe
-tilting
-loss of dps
-costs a combat res or time to wait for a res
-causes people to waste time typing/flaming.
-etc, etc.
BUT, if people are incentivsed to just get up from it, stay the course, be disciplined and continue without making deaths set the tone for the rest of the run (which the death-timer only exaggerates) then i think pugging can become a more friendly and enjoyable environment.
I’m not asking for high keys to become a cakewalk. only for it to take social dynamics into more consideration.
There is an 5 second penalty since legion and it never before meant any problem (except in dungeons where the timer was anyway too short on release, but thats a different issue).
The current +7 affix is a TWW invention, but apparently even blizzard agrees that its a failed experiment and already applied a 90 second bonus as a bandaid for this season.
I would be surprised to see this affix return in S2, considering its almost universally hated among the player base.
My belief is that this is just to stop skips that involve the group dying except one that then reses them. They didn’t like that on mdi or something and now we all got this. The problem is that it punishes the average player more than it punishes the pro gamers.
It was indeed implemented due to this, but once again the implementation was done in favour of pro groups as you said. Instead of allowing skips by allowing a player to die, they should instead either enforce every single trash pack to be cleared for 100%, like a proper dungeon run, or tether “mandatory” groups to the bosses so that even if skipped they auto-aggro when the relevant is engaged.
the fact that it has been in the game since the beginning of m+ is irrelevant to my point.
i know it has been, but it still creates social issues. even if if the results would be the same timewise, it still has a negative psychological effect on the players. and it becomes especially clear in pug environments where people are moreso playing for their own gain and goals. in those cases people get more tilted at each other because it not only costs the natural time of a death, but also visably cuts at the timer we are at the mercy of. it unreasonably shakes the player’s nerves and psychy more than is needed. it makes M+ a more stressful environment than necisary. making it less and less likely for avarage players to dare return to it.
for alot of people, M+ is a very stressful environment. and i think cutting the roughest edges that relate to that problem is only gonna be healthy for the game.
I mean I sort of agree because I prefer the longer timer approaches (like Ara-Kara or Sanguine Depths), but I doubt they will remove the -5 seconds, considering they just tried to increase it to -15 secs.
The -5 seconds penalty does not really have a notable impact on the timer, its more of a symbolic thing.
You need to have 12 deaths just to lose a single minute. 24 times to lose 2 minutes, but usually if you die so many times on a key, that +1 or 2 minutes will rarely make any difference.
With the +7 affix that would be 3 minutes for 12 deaths and 6 min for 24, which is where the issue lies. It scaled way too fast and actually alone bricked a lot of runs which could have nearly called clean yet.
With the 90 sec hotfix, the first 10 deaths only cost as much time as it would had without an affix. This nearly fixes the issue of its fast scaling killing the keys too soon, but the affix still plainly sucks at its job imo.
It made m+ overall a worse experience.
So I can see it being removed, but the base -5 seconds is unlikely. At least not without consequences (shorter base timers).
Indeed this is why, I would much prefer to keep the -5 seconds as it was, get rid of the +7 affix and tune the timers to be less grave on start (looking at necrotic wake), more like how Ara-Kara/Dawnbreaker and Mists are designed (the timer only becomes a real issue, if you make multiple very serious mistakes and/or progress really slowly).