My review of season 4 (m+)

Community General Discussion
1

This is all from a healer’s perspective. Feel free to disagree or agree. Most of these are subjective anyway.

Difficulty:
The first week felt too punishing. When I stepped into a +3 (a+13 in my head still) with 485 ilvl I honestly thought this would be the season I wouldn’t be able to push as high.
Granted s3 was very forgiving but starting the season off with all DF dungeons after a big revamp on a tyran week wasn’t fun.

After the second week I felt different and I’m able to heal and time +10’s now on Tyra but by switching to a 10 instead of 20 keys they basically nuked ‘easy m+’. 1-10 used to be a tuturial for m+ for people who were still insecure or just not ambitious enough.

Dungeons:
I’m not a fan of the DF dungeons. Some of them are decent enough but others are atrocious. Bosses/trash have a lot of mechanics that will oneshot you. This is fine but if a boss has 3 of those mechanics you’re basically saying ‘do this perfect or not do it at all’.
Screwing up a mechanic should be punished by making it harder throughout the fight like in ToT last boss with the ooze.
As a healer I’m also not a fan of unavoidable damage that will bring the whole party down to 10% hp.

Meta:
Always going to be a thing obviously but when you tune stuff the way you did now you’re going to shift the meta towards certain classes. Sure you can do every key with most classes but when a certain tank can just invalidate mechanics on trash you bet most groups are taking that tank.

Affixes:
Weirdly nerfed by giving us only 10 reward keys. Second affix (apart from tyra/fort) coming in at 10 feels weird but when finally doing a 10 is like being in the big leagues again.
Also sad that incorp/afflicted are still included but maybe that’s just me.

2 Likes
2

Rating s4 is really rating DF dungeons.

They are generally a miss from me. Mechanical overload on the trash. Generally quite little agency in pulls, too long, crappy little corridors and the list goes on.

How to improve:

  1. 25-30 min is my sweet spot, longer timers become a slog, esp with the mechanical overload in dungeons these days.
  2. Can we have more dungeons with simple “fun” pulls? The first pull in AA is a great example. People get to go “brrrr” without having to kick and stun 86 abilities. Theres pretty much one, easy to see and impactful.
  3. Dungeons should have more varied routes. BH / Freehold are decent examples of this.

I’m sure theres a lot more, but they feel more like a chore atm than a quick and fun way to pass the time.

7 Likes
3

generally the dungeons are just too long.
tyrannical is really terrible and some trash (NO & nel) is awful on fortified

dont like the df dungeons very much either

4

Same. 35-40 min is just too much.

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Yes, the dungeons are too long for M+. The longest should be 30:00, not the shortest. It sounds a bit silly when I think back to how long we’d be in vanilla dungeons like Maraudon, but then again, those weren’t timed and they didn’t require peak focus the whole time.

It doesn’t help that the comparatively short RLP is also pretty challenging. Earlier today I did a AA and RLP, both +8, back to back, with the same tank and the same dps (plus two random dps that performed about the same). AA was so much easier to heal than RLP.

These dungeons are still new to me (didn’t play in S1 and S2), so there’s lots to learn, but RLP just felt several key levels higher than AA.

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M0 seriously need to be spammable, no weekly lockout, so that it can be that tutorial.

Putting champion gear in your vault and drake crests in your inventory does not need to be strictly gated to 8 runs/week. This difficulty level should be endlessly farmable.

4 Likes
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The difficulty of keys 1 to 10 makes absolutely no difference to those of us that were already doing +20 keys and above in season 3.

Simply because its a question of inflation, nothing else.

That is where the change is. 1 to 10 “tutorial” was changed to heroic and M0. And for those that legit were in the 1-10 range in S3, this new change was a total fail.

And there are those that used to be in 1-10 range, and now still believe somehow that the “new 1-10” should be equivalent to the old “1-10”. And they show up to a +5 and get wrecked. Those should re-read the patch notes.

What? Yazma in S3 did not have a mechanic that almost 1-shots you?

ToT last boss? What about the 1st one with the chain lightning AND the big huke on a player? Those did not leave people at 1%? Or god forbid, the boss with the dispels. That one did not nuke players?

Or the trash packs in ToT… SO not full of spamming casts that WILL 1-shot you. Or EB… bosses in EB. So fun. Or the flowers and the on-death affixes… super fun… Yeeeey…

Complaining about bosses in DF dungeons… coming from S3 where we spent the WHOLE season complaining about 1-shot mechanics…

Its hypocritical at best.

The new DF pulls are like this : You cant interrupt everything. Accept that fact. Therefore, you have to choose what things to interrupt, and what things not to.

Gone are the days where if you interrupt everything you received ZERO damage. You ALWAYS receive damage. But things are tuned not to 1-shot you… unless… you dont choose correctly.

Example : Pulls from nokud spirit zone. You got a bunch of “shadow bolt” casts that don’t do anything (unlike ToT trash where it 1-shots you). You got a AoE “bolt” cast on everyone. People hold their interrupt for that. But it does no damage at all (unlike MANY trash in S3).

What does do damage are the birds. Those need to be interrupted. Hold interrupts for that.

Also, the meta. People WANT to deliberately run with (A) dudus (B) mages (C) SP (D) warlocks… and healers? Druids. So many druids.

Guess what… ALL of them have long CD interrupts. Dont complain. Play with a RShaman, with a Warrior, with a Rogue, Ret… those have the interrupts…

If anything, this season is the difference between running a pro-player pre-made comp and a regular “pug” is much larger. If PuGs attempt to copy the “meta” the pros are running, you will get 1-shot everywhere. And people will eventually learn.

I can agree with this. I am baffled that they have not done significant tuning in about 7 months. Since the MDI began.

Blizzard should be more bold with tuning. And should do it weekly by default. That will instantly eliminate “metas”. Because you cannot reliably push IO with toons that cant be reliably OP every single week.

Agree. Im not sure why they did not change this yet…

8

yet…people still die on that pull…

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Worse… people complain that there are too many swirlies.

Also… what kills you in that pull are not the swirlies or anything else. Its the wasps that can potentially 1-shot you.

And you CANT interrupt that.

I find it funny that of ALL pulls in DF dungeon, people have to put that one as an example of a “cool pull”. Its not cool. There is no counter play AT ALL.

You get by chance targeted by 2 wasps at once… you die… period. Nothing you can do about it.

Where is the fun in that?

I prefer a million times more the packs from NO. Those atleast damage is predictable. You got time to pop a deff CD, pre-cast a heal… interrupt… something…

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Tbh I never had problem with the wasps. People always died to swirlies on my groups even on +9.

1 Like
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You can soothe them or focus them before they get too many stacks of agitation.

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Yeah but who does that?

Soothe does not have enough CD to deal with 6 wasps. And the tank cannot survive that long with 100000 adds pounding him.

Also… DDs go brrr… Bladestorm away and see the big numbers. Who is going to do prio damage and stay at 400k DPS while you got a Lock spamming Rain of Fire doing 3M?

:smiley:

That is why THAT pull is not fun for me. Its a pull that requires BOTH prio damage, AND massive AoE. And unless you are in a pre-made coordinated group where 1 guy’s job is to prio the wasps, while the other DDs AoE the small adds…

But who coordinates like that in a PuG?

PLUS you MUST have a druid or a hunter for the soothe…

Crappy pull IMO.

1 Like
13

You are doing 9 now. 3 weeks into the season.

When you are fully geared you will be doing 13s/14s.

Then it starts to hurt.

14

there is no reason to do anything more than a +10.

3 Likes
15

Most ppl don’t pull all 6 on fort week for starters…

Anyhow, done here, you just want a moan.

1 Like
17

Well sure but a +20 in s3 felt easier to heal than a +10 now.

I’ve timed 3 dungeons on 10 so far as a Hpriest at 515 ilvl. Those being RLP, HoI and AV. All done this week. Have not tried others on 10.
All 3 were good runs, obviously bc they were timed, but if I compare them to the 20’s I was healing the third week in S3 I can feel a difference.

You obv know the m+ stuff a lot more than me but aside from Dawn I feel the bosses in S3 had less oneshot mechanics or at least just one. Meanwhile a lot of bosses in s4 have multiple. Not to mention the ‘instant unavoidable big party damage’ that is always fun as a healer.

18

Yeah there is. You choose not to, which is a different story.

But now that you have taken that decision, you have to admit that a +10 is a joke. Maybe not now, but it will be later. Like what happened in S3 with +20s.

So there are a ton of stuff that simply don’t hit hard enough to be of concern. In fact, besides the obvious swirlies and tank-busters nothing kills you in a +10. Assuming 522 gear of course.

19

That has been my experiance as a healer too. It’s not 1 or even 2 wasps. It is the swirly that one shots you.

The only mechanics in DF I do not enjoy is that all of the dungeons have these type of mechanics and it does make for a depressing experience to have constant mechanics that just make you go from hero to zero.

20

People don’t move out of swirlies unless they 1 shot, and at some point in scaling content all avoidable damage is going to 1 shot you.

21

thet boss horrbol whit out voice com like pug so bad at it thx got fest marker want stack on boss move when tank move u get mark shadow move out group cleave them pray u healer good eugh cen u up