I see there’s some nerfs to Halls of Valor and also Nokhud got some nerfs again. Every week since beginning of this month we’ve had things dialled down…
Why were these dungeons not tuned properly on launch? Does this happen every season? If it happens every season then what’s the point in bashing your head against over tuned dungeons in the first few weeks of a season knowing that by the second month they’ll be nerfed.
Doesn’t this game go through months of beta testing to sort this kind of thing out?
Majority of things usually get tuned or nerfed down after a couple of time, so the players with abit less skills are able to complete them, and get rewards. It’s not that it’s needed (although its welcome), but it’s abit psychological.
I don’t consider myself a top tier player, and I easily achieved KSM on week 3, so everything was perfectly doable (yes, HOV and AV are abit tight timers). Nerfed content, allows for more players to go for it (since nerfs encourage people), aka people are subbed for a longer time, which results in you know what
If you think this season dungeons were unbalanced I can’t wait to see your reaction on S2 where unbalance dungeons gonna be played AKA Nath & Bricket hide
It’s more a new expansion thing …
The vast majority of M+ testing on beta and PTR are done by your echo teams ect… Rank 1 players …
And the simple truth is, that in lower key levels, i doubt they can tell the difference at times.
I’m no rank 1 player, but i certainly can’t tell if something is a bit overtuned in a 15 for example … it just feels to easy most of the time…
This time around there was almost no “formal” Mythic+ testing. Most of development was focused on iterating talent trees and Mythic+ came onto the test realms super late and ludicrously overtuned to the point where 15s felt like 22-23s do now.
There was barely any data to go on at all, which is no excuse but I’m kinda fed up of the narrative that they tuned Mythic+ “around” high key players. They just didn’t tune it at all and at most did very broad strokes until release.
Blizzard strategy seems to be tuning encounters hard, then nerfing them rather than making them easy the buffing them. The reason is obvious, if players can’t kill a +15 boss because it’s too hard, then they nerf, players will be happy about the nerf and blame Blizzard for incompetence. However, if they miss the mark in the opposite direction and make a boss too easy then buff it, player will be angry about the buff and there would be a backlash because players can no longer kill a boss they killed last week.
The average PUG player doesn’t usually do PTR/beta testing. When they get a beta invite, they mostly login play around a bit with talents, hit the target dummy for a bit, then logout. They are not willing to spend hours testing M+ dungeons, deal with lag, bugs, disconnects, instability when the loot, progress or achievement won’t last or transfer to live. The people who test on beta and PTR are the world first/MDI type/High skilled/High key pusher type of players. Blizzard employees who do internal testing are actually hired from the top guilds, so they fall into the same category.
So the TLDR:
Because it’s better to nerf encounters than buff them and lack of testing by average skilled players.
They tune the dungeons for the top of the top players so they have something to work towards and clear, once they start to hit brick walls they start implementing the nerfs to help them move forward. These nerfs then trickle down throughout the lower levels.
I honestly enjoy the challenge at the start of the expansion. But admittedly I have plateaued now, and I just waiting on nerfs and gear upgrades to get me through last 270 rating.
There have certainly been things that haven’t felt right this season in regards to tuning. But most challenges can be over come.
Perhaps i wasn’t quite clear in what i said, but the only data they had from beta was from high key players. So they wouldnt have the data to tune the dungeons perfectly.
Add to that, that it’s better from a PR perspective for them to be overtuned and then nerfed, than undertuned and then buffed.
Imagine the outcry from certain players if SBG was buffed (which it clearly needs)
I absolutely agree that the game isnt tuned around the top players ect.
That is when those high players were rewarded by giving out keys to the sheeple watching their streams.
M+ was also tested without affixes untill the last 2 week off the beta, god knows why that was a thing…
Me and my group off friends received beta one week before DF launch.
Not worth it too log in and try it as all the balancing and testing was already set in stone.
Their key distribution system is garbage, but they won’t change that
The playerbase can be divided into two groups; streamers and just the others. They need to satisfy the desires/needs of sponsored streamers that play 16h a day year round because they are implicitly part of Blizz’s marketing campaign to sell this game.
Angry streamer = less sales because their army of simps won’t spend as much of their money on the game = angry shareholders (This very sentence is most likely written somewhere on a whiteboard in a Blizz HQ meeting room)
I believe, devs apply geometrical progression of hp and damage increase instead of matching each key to a respective required ilvl. So higher key levels are out of balance with gear players have and respective key drops.
That’s why people leave the run. Out of frustration.
From my perspective doing mostly M+ content having archived ksm in al expansions and been running +20 the last couple expansions as well. ONLY Pugging
Never have I depleted so many keys as in this season… I think im around 1/3 of runs being timed, currently at 2100 rio score. Either I turned really bad, or a lot of new players have joined (who doesn’t know that you need to do the mechanics, kicks and just dont stand in puuuh) Or the Dung just got a tad harder… Haven’t tried healing yet, but from what i can understand this is really hard for them compared to previous expansions
