My thoughts about M+ changes

Community General Discussion
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So as some of you may know, on summit blizzard discussed changes they’re thinking about regards the M+.
ill quote them and share my opinions about it.
Source: https://www.wowhead.com/news=291155/mythic-changes-coming-in-rise-of-azshara-highlights-from-sloot-stream

Blizzard feels that you don’t kill enough trash on most dungeons. There will be a fairly large trash % rebalance coming in 8.2 to address this.

this sounds like a joke to me. most dungeons are completely good trash% wise, and amount of skips is minimal. unless blizzard wants us to fully clear dungeons, I cant seem to see a reasoning behind it.
most dungeons you can get 100% without a single skip/shroud - by simply walking to bosses, and avoiding extra adds that arent in the way.
In KR you get to skip 4-5 adds, in ToS you get wayyyy above 100% if you dont skip a thing with shroud/invis, atal’dazar you’re forced to pull extra adds to get to 100%, freehold, completely doable without skips and you need to pull more extra adds. etc. most dungeons are fine so I cant see how increasing of % would work without changing timers and reworking dungeons majorly.

    • Possibly giving mini-bosses give a lot of %, because now they are mostly skipped because they are not efficient to kill.

I agree with this however, mini bosses arent worth the effort right now, considering what % they give, increase on that could be a good move, and let groups choose if they want to take a big baddie who gives a lot of % or bunch of small adds.

  • Blizzard is really excited to add more rewards to M+ Seasons, like titles and mounts. They said that at the latest in 9.0, MAAAAAAAYBE something in Season 3.

great news. I said this few days ago as well, and though some people do get jealous that they wont get new shinys, I think overall its a great move from blizzard, really makes it more motivational to push keys and give each dungeon a good taste.
Im hoping we see this in season 3, and I hope there’ll be different rewards for 10s, 15s, and possibly 20s.

  • No new base affixes until 9.0

can partly understand this. they want to be more open to dungeon designs in 9.0, and possibly design affixes based on that. that’s my thought. other than that, im excited to see new affixes, and possibly see some old ones go/reworked, considering how hard they affect the dungeon designs. (ex. sanguine)

  • Blizzard is looking into balance for the affix combos. You shouldn’t struggle to complete a +12 if you can complete a +15 with a different combo.

talked about this earlier.
I do think whats more problematic than affixes, is affix combos.
certain affixes on its own are fine - for example teeming (an affix that’s a peak of imagination - MORE ADDS!!) is fine on its own, but when matched with fortified its a major issue.

other examples being - grevious/tyranical and Necrotic/tyranical.

to keep it short - i think combos are something that should be looked at, and im glad blizzard agrees with me here as well. hopefully we see those changes soon. (8.2 hopefully?)

Blizzard is considering having something like a Raider.io score in-game, but nothing planned right now.

  • Blizzard’s plan about a scoring system is to fix some issues from community-driven ones, like having affixes matter and other contextual information added to it.

this has been talked about A LOT.
I call it great news to even consider the idea, and I do understand that some people wont like it, but personally I think, having official score system is a great way to go.
technically - it will make things update faster, and easier to access without too much hassle (i hope).
aside from that, Im glad it will take week combos into consideration - but considering upper statement that blizzard wants to “balance” combos", I cant see the reason why certain weeks should provide more score than others.
sadly - I think nothing will happen at least until 9.0 about this, but whenever it does - its a great news.
I understand that it might make it harder for some people to do things they want (like getting in groups for 10 for example) and I dont mind helping out people do keys. I manage a community that’s based around the idea of helping others and i take my time to help out people - but when it comes to me wanting to push keys, I want clear and transparent information about people who want to join my group.
this might get some backlash from part of community, but I hope blizzard implements this asap.

  • Balance between ranged and melee isn’t good right now, there isn’t enough danger to melee, making their contribution to the group more relevant.

I disagree - I do think some melee specs are really beyond broken but overall I dont think melee > range. melees do have to deal with issues (affix wise, quaking much harder in melee) (mechanic wise - not doing DPS while moving away from the boss, for example 1st boss of KR, 3rd boss of FH, last boss of UR).
hopefully blizzard wont do something too crazy.

  • No plans about rerolling keys. It is frustrating to a top x% of players, but not a problem to the majority of players.

I do think this is an issue for everyone. my casual friends dislike not being able to re-roll, my hardcore friends dislike not being able to re-roll. sad to see its not being implemented yet, but im glad its a subject of discussion.
there’re multiple ways how it could work and hopefully at some point we’ll get it at least to a degree.

  • Blizzard is aware of the problem of having only DH give magic damage and Monks give physical damage . They want to fix it by giving other classes other interesting buffs, but not the same for multiple classes.

great news! and hopefully we get a decent utility balance in game - unlike its current state.

that’s it for quotes

now my own thoughts - overall I think blizzard has some good ideas in mind and they see certain issues with the game/M+ and Im glad.

only thing that I can think of that is worth discussing and wasnt fully mentioned is a class diversity - yes we get it that every class can do 5 or 10 keys, and that 1 guy out of million did 20 key with underdog spec but overall we all know class diversity is an issue - regardless of at what level of keys it kicks in, its an issue, and hopefully blizzard will work on fixing it asap.

the other thing Im not particulary happy about is, the amount of time required to fix/implement certain problems/futures - I thinks its not enjoyable for us, and its bad for blizzard because they lose players - so hopefully we get more hotfixes and quicker implementation of things :slight_smile:

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This is disturbing because imho there is far to much trash already.
I don’t mind trash per say, but the trash is more engaging than the boss fights at present.

as to a raider io like score…it’s pretty simple, it’s more a case of do they want to do it.

So does this mean I’ll get Blessing of Might back? I mean they are the ones that removed it…and only now think it’s a problem…

I read something from the PTR and it made me chuckle a bit, they are adding essences similar in function to glyphs of old, and now they are considering adding back in other things they removed…because they apparently lack the foresight to see the damage they do when they remove things.

Just the other day on Stormwall blockade every class with a pet had their pet removed from combat and our healers all ended up mounted on yakks while in combat and couldn’t dismount or heal.

Blizzard is giving Indie companies a bad name right now they are that crap at their jobs.

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I think the thing about trash is just a bad decision. Why penalize players and groups because they have figured out a route that works for them?

Do we really want to spend even longer in dungeons and raids at the mythic level? If this is going to be the case then they might as well make it so you have to kill everything in the dungeon and raid, before you have it marked complete.

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  1. I disagree with Blizz here, some dungeons have TONS of trash, hi ML and Shrine.
    A lot of people lust at the start of ML and have it back for the first boss. Thats too little trash? I was trying to be nice but meh, the dev’s are so comically out of touch with some things, the mind actually boggles.

  2. Yay, long overdue. They should have stuff all the way up to 30 imo. Even if people never manage to earn it, its always cool to have a goal. Even if the +30 thing is a toy that follows you around with a flag saying “get a life nerd!”
    …

  3. Disagree. Do you think ranged can cast while being chased by sharks of do anything other than instants on the last boss of UR? As a general statement melee are in a far better spot than ranged atm regardless of the fact that some mechanics force melee out of range.

  4. This was popular, dunno why we can’t have popular stuff in the game that doesn’t hurt it. It’s the fun detected fun deleted meme if I’m honest. And it does affect everyone. If some people get a crap key they just sit the week out. Much fun.

  5. Utility rebalance is a good thing, they can really let their hair down and do some cool stuff but I just think it will end up being uninspired garbage because thats their stock in trade these days sadly.

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  1. I completely agree. They’ve made dungeons heavily focused on adds already, so having to clear even more out would slow the runs down a lot more and would cause more people to not enjoy doing M+'s.
    I also agree with the mini-bosses giving more. As was said, most people skip them because they’re just not worth the time % wise.

  2. I think it’s a great move as well. I know a lot of people that complete 1 +10 a week and then leave it at that, because there isn’t really much of a reward to carry on, except “bragging rights” xD. If they added more rewards, I feel more people would be doing them.

  3. Hopefully they work it around the dungeons, because as you said, some affixes makes certain dungeons 10x harder (Just from that affix alone) and it should never work like this. Yes, it should be made harder, but not a hell of a lot harder.

  4. Yeah, most affixes by themselves are doable easily, but some of the combined affixes just make me go “well, no M+ this week, can’t be bothered to deal with that”.

  5. I don’t know how I feel about adding this to the game itself. I’m not against Rio, I completely understand it’s uses, but, at the same time, I also know that it get’s abused by a minority of people (which happens), but this affects a majority, and it shouldn’t be like this.
    If they made it so it was a “solo score”, then that would be fine, have it be based off of YOUR performance, not the dungeon time itself. So, how much you interrupt, how many deaths you had, basically it adds/subtracts score whenever you do something right/wrong (Starting at a fixed number depending on the key and having a min/max amount). That way, it would be a much better system than what Rio is at the moment, since that’s technically based off of how fast the group did a dungeon.

  6. I have to disagree with you here Buka. Yes, there are things that are seen as more difficult for melee’s, but it’s NOTHING compared to what ranged have to deal with. You talk about “not doing DPS”, this affects ranged a good amount as well. And, since most ranged classes are below melee DPS specs, it’s much easier getting into M+'s as a melee than a ranged.
    Proof of that is MDI, barely any ranged was played (Usually it was 2 rogues xD).

  7. I can see both sides to this. On the one hand, some people hate doing specific dungeons (Most of my guild don’t enjoy Motherlode, so we avoid those keys) and so if they get that key, they avoid doing it. But, with Blizzards side of things, they want ALL dungeons to feel like they “should” be done. If you could delete keys, then I’m better only 3-4 dungeons would be constantly done by the vast majority of players due to specific mechanics/affixes.

  8. I think this is awesome as well, it would give more incentives to bring different specs and different classes. It would be amazing if all specs brought it’s own special skill, but, on the downside, this will just cause more “fotm” style gameplay, as a few of these special skills will probably be a lot better than the rest (Like Rogues in MDI or Nelfs in MDI).

This is something that would be very difficult to fix though, as it’s “kinda” a player problem. There’s loads of players that watch MDI, and then “follow” these specific playstyles because they work. It wouldn’t matter how balanced classes are, there will always be that specific 5 man group that is better than the rest, and thus will continue to cause players to follow this.

I get that they spend a long time fixing things, but, I’d much prefer that they took all the time in the world and it comes out right, then them rushing it and it comes out wrong.
Look at BFA, it was rushed out and littered with bugs. I feel they should have longer periods of testing, and not do what they did with azerite armor (Where it was only added near the end of testing, and so didn’t get “proper” feedback.

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Key reforger.
Usable once a day.
Insert your key, get it reforged for a different dungeon of either same level or -1.

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Well they kinda did in the form of other classes getting debuffs similar to Monk/DH. Until we see it in action, we’ve no idea what impact that would have: what the debuffs are, what classes get them, how potent they are, what classes benefit from it (and how much), etc. Until we have an idea of what they go with, we can’t really guess too much.

A lot of the core fundamentals won’t change. Druid has Corpse Res and thus will remain a popular healer regardless. Rogues having shroud might drop a little if they go ahead with this ‘more trash needed’ spiel, more-so if Monks + PhysDam debuff aspect gets applied to more classes as well. Too little info and too many assumptions either way until we get an actual idea of how they want to approach it. It’s situations like this which can tip the scales towards alternatives like Warlocks and DH’s again, be it melee becoming ‘harder to contribute to’ and/or classes getting X or Y debuff mechanics and/or the meta in general just changing once again.

I get what you’re saying, though. I just healed my first Guardian Druid in BFA after seeing a wealth of DH’s, Palas and Warriors and DK’s - and I’m doing so as a Resto Shaman who is supposedly in around the top-50 Realm/Region of Resto Shamans doing M+, which doesn’t mean I’m good at it - just that there’s so few of them.

As for the notes in general:

Not keen on time-sink trash becoming more prevalent, though I understand it. Watching MDI and seeing whole sections of dungeons being skipped with single or double shroud no doubt put them on this train of thought.

Same applies to the debuffs (Monk Phys Debuff), as seen in pretty much every. Single. MDI match. Good to have other classes be given options along those lines as well.

Don’t care about Key Reforger. I barely ever remember doing my own keys - usually just specific ones. My main issue is that I can’t TRASH them - stuck with it in my bag until reset every time and can’t destroy it when I have no interest or desire in doing my own.

Nice to see they’re considering the affix-combos. That Grievous+Sanguine combo last week was a good example of a combo that makes me want to skip doing M+ on my Healers for a week (and that’s not even the worst), whereas this week it is far more manageable (thus more enjoyable) in general.

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Open your eye Blizzard, add Bukachu to the dev team.

It would be an upgrade.

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I am the same opinion. If they want to force us into killing more trash they need to change some spawns as well as the timers. One thing I can think of is Motherlode right when it was released, before the nerf of the trash required to kill. You had to pull nearly every single mob. If we have to do that again… what is even the point? There is no challenge in that.

Oh yes, that would be actually nice to do rather than just killing some dull trash for the same amount of %. In general I think perhaps there should be some reward in form of higher completion % for tackling harder trash packs that are usually skipped, as an alternative to a “safe and boring” route.

Another issue I can point out is that affixes rarely affect bosses much (except tyrannical and to some extent necrotic/explosive), but it feels like every single affix makes trash more and more annoying on the fortified weeks. Maybe they should look for a way of having a balanced load of the affixes, so that the trash isn’t getting buffed to infinity? Usually it is not even about difficulty, just making the whole dungeon trip a crawl, because things take so long to kill. There are some dungeons that are MUCH easier to clear in time during tyrannical weeks for that reason.

Having official tools will make things more transparent. Hopefully it will also update better, for example currently if I do some key in time on tuesday it might not get reflected anywhere, because the leaderboards are filled for the week already with higher keys. My actual keys done are usually higher what Raider.io or Wowprogress were showing, but I am lazy these days, I don’t push extreme keys and usually do them super late in the week. It was never important to me to get a high score as I usually do keys withing guild, sometimes just getting a pug or two to fill the group.

The problem is that there are a lot of mechanics that favour ranged, not necessarily melee being in too good. Typical scenario is that you have a group with 2 melee, 1 ranged and 1 healer that counts as a melee (monk or paladin). The poor ranged will keep getting mechanics dumped on them while the melee and healer will be free to do anything most of the time. Prime example is the first boss in Siege of Boralus. Instead of nerfing melee the solution would be to rework how the mechanics work. Perhaps introduce some form of protection from the mechanic to happen on the same person again for X amount of time, so that the load is distributed more evenly? Getting screwed by mechanics choosing the same target multiple time in a row is also a frequent issue in raids as well.

Bleh. I consider myself a casual (in terms of m+) these days and I still think the rerolling would be neat to have. There are some weeks (especially amplified by the bad affix combos) that some dungeons are a NOPE → for example Waycrest Manor with Sanguine, the narrow halls full of deadly puddles are just a pain in the rear to deal with. Doable? Yes. But nobody wants to do it. I just end up using someone else’s key. If it rolls a bad dungeon after and we plan to do more, we look for another key. And so on.

I don’t really get why they made it possible to get a pauperised version of most of the buffs from AH and not give anything to replace the monk/DH ones. Like a scroll that gives you a buff to inflict a debuff causing the target to take 3% more dmg from magic (to imitate the DH debuff). At some point my guild had only one DH and our casters would cry a river whenever he would miss a raid or prefer to bench.

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Dungeon trash are sort of a variable that depends on which dungeon tbh. some of them you already kill plenty of trash mobs. In other dungeons you sort of kill very few trash mobs. I rather want to hear which dungeons whould be affected before I say “yay” or “nay” tbh.

I whould acctually not mind having to kill more trash as long as they look over the recast timers on enemies, so dungeons whould allow classes with long CD on interupts to be more welcome into the fold. I mean the reason why you don’t bring classes like warlocks are the lack of a interupt(unless they sacrifice dps), so the only time they whould ever see sensible play are in double melee dps setups which are baseline anyways due to the interupt issues.

I’d love more mythic+ rewards. But then they also have to do something about the class balance issues since I whould not be able to stand by a reward system that by design flaws, keep some classes/specs out of the oppertunity to take part.

Sure every class can compete up to a certain level. But that don’t remove the fact that some classes are way behind the top choices, which already without any extra rewards affects the enjoyment of the game for many people. Adding the rewards probably only whould ensure more “FotM” rerolling, if the game are left in it’s current state.

This is not a surprise. When I saw nothing new coming into season two except the seasonal affix, I kinda understood that they whould make no changes.

Well some combos are a real nut-cracker. So any form of consistency improvements whould be nice.

A proper in game system whould be better then rio scores by far. Since rio, requires outside support and that ain’t a ship everyone wants to set sail on. If I could choose I’d also choose to not use rio, but since that is an impossibility these days it simply have become a neccessary evil.

In this expansion the balance are out of bounds, but mostly only in dungeons. Melee have it way easier in 9/10 scenarios, I don’t say playing ranged are hard at all. But when it comes to pure uptimes and ease of use, melee all day of the week.

I don’t understand why we have random dungeons anymore. If they went trought with the mythic+ rewards they spoke of, players whould still want to do the “harder” or “more painfull” dungeons anyways.

So why not just make everyone carry “seasonal stones” and make it possible for people to choose difficulty for their own dungeons… Have you cleared +5 ToS, Gz just go and start a +6 if you want. A system like this whould also make it slightly easier to climb aswell as it whould remove alot of the “leaver frustration” that shows up so often on the forums. Not to mention It whould kill the “dead key due to affixes” frustrations for good.

To be honest this just means that priest, mages and warriors won’t get anything and they are already the classes possible to replicate by buff scrolls. But sure anything whould help at this point.

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Im glad people agree with me about dungeon trash % changes.

it cant even be implemented without major changes to dungeon balance/time.

I think it targets a healer/ranged, but regardless I still do feel like ranged and melee have its own pluses and minuses.
if you look at leader boards right now, there’re quite a lot of ranged specs in highest timed dungeons.
yes I do agree that certain specs are an issue right now, but i think it has more to do with spec balance than it being melee/ranged.

I’d like to become CM, once I gather more sympathy ill try to sign up for it. :smiley:

true but lets put it this way.

  1. we have dungeons where you kill almost everything - examples:
    a. KR - where you get to skip only 4-5 adds at most
    b. ToS - where you get to skip 2-3 packs - not counting the cross road. and the thing on ToS is - you need to skip at least a bit otherwise you get 110%+ - so yes, if they really want to add more time to dungeon and increase % required, it’s alright. bad decision imo, but can be executed.
    TD - basically same thing as ToS, you gotta skip a lil bit so you dont get to 110%+
    again, can be executed by adding more time and increasing %
    etc.

  2. then you have dungeons that have toooooooo much trash% in it
    a. freehold
    b. Motherlode - probably 300%+ if you take it all lol
    c. atal’dazar
    b. UR
    etc.

the thing i like about those dungeons is the fact that you get to choose what type of trash you want to kill.

  1. you have dungeons that are simply messy
    a. WM - different route each time I do it, causing me to take different packs, and in the past, some weeks I couldnt even get to 100% while killing all bosses, and had to search for trash %. and some weeks I get way above 100% considering i didnt skip, even tho all I did was go to bosses.
    b. Shrine - again, too much trash but also in a messy way, where you gotta skip a lot or you’ll end up with 140%+. you get mini bosses that dont give good % but take aaaages to kill. you can really do really big pulls either, because trash is actually tough. etc
    and siege which is pretty messy % Wise, and pretty sure if you take intended alliance route, you get really big %, so everyone’s taking horde route, then you have spotters to use to add up damage, and overall the dungeon feels reaaaally long and chory with weird timings and time requirements.

from above list, only dungeons that would work alright with % AND time increase are ToS and TD. which would lead to skips being efficient but not mandatory, and yes I think that’s not too bad of a decision, but in every other dungeon stealth currently isnt really mandatory and just gives efficiency. so all in all blizz saying >most> dungeons need a rework % wise, is kinda odd, and imo would require A LOT of rework for dungeons.

yeah utility is in an odd spot right now.
some specs got unique utility abilities (DH/monk)
some professions bring unique utility (CR from engi)

then you get specs whos utility’s for sale on AH, and professions whos utility is for sale on AH.

so overall balancing it properly would be nice imo

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MW monk and holy paladin are considered melee and have “ranged immunity” on most mechanics targeting ranged players. This particular boss will only pick a random melee (not necessarily the healer) if all the ranged in the party are dead.

I am aware that the leaderboards have ranged classes, e.g. a mage offers a good mix of utility, dps and survival and is often present in the runs. I was just commenting about Blizzard thinking the balance is not good, when it is them designing the mechanics in dungeons and raids. Certain bosses in dungeons or raids have pretty bad ranged hate. Other ones have melee hate (looking at the pre-nerf Mythrax, hnnng). It’s something that certainly tips the scale at the extreme top level, be it MDI or world first race. Then you see certain setups/tricks used and then you get Ion condemning players. :roll_eyes:

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I agree with all your points apart from that .

Ranged in Mythic+ have it alot harder as in casters (MM and BM hunters have it a little bit easier)

Were as if you said the same about mythic raids i would agree Melee in raids have it worse.

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yeah I agree to a degree, Im not quite sure how I feel about it tho.
for example I feel like, on quite a lot of bosses in raids, melees get to move a looot more, hence lose damage due to it - oppulance, grong, rasta, mekka, 8th elemental boss and jaina, ranged get much better time. on some of those bosses, its recommended u have majority ranged.

was kinda same in uldir on certain bosses, I hated doing them as frost DK.

in dungeons I feel like main downside of ranged is, losing damage while moving and long interupt CDs but they make up for it in damage or utility, that’s my opinion ofc.

rogue is in EVERY run tho, druid healers are in 90% runs, and tanks are an issue.
BDK that was considered the best tank in 8.0 is pretty weaker right now, leader boards confirm that too, while bears and dh tanks are none-existent.

I feel like, blizz has to do something about diversity asap.
meta will always exist but what we have right now is a very extreme form of meta.

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Don’t count on it. Too little too late I fear - at least for this expansion.

I doubt the planned 8.2 changes (although it can change ofc) for guardian and vengeance are enough.

But hey, at least an Unstoppable Force nerf may be incoming. Not sure if this will throw the warriors back much, but it sure was overtuned.

Heck, some changes are so minor they may as well have been hotfixes :no_mouth:

Gotta say I agree on most of the points made in your openings post though. Although I don’t mind a little trash-% rework myself, apart from sots and ml. However, I am not sure this would give the desired effect they are after. Feels like they try to make rogues less important, but mhm…there are other ways to do so.

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The changes for bear will hardly make a difference to little to late .
I used to tank up to 20 in legion now i struggle (admit due to real life illness hands and wrists) aswell doing anything above 10 as its harsh on me.
Ive seen druids do 15s easy enough but above people frown on them.

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I mean, we gotta see what are the changes first. (unless i missed it)

warriors were bottom tier and DKs were primal N1s in 8.0, and now its a complete opposite picture, so I do think with enough work we could see issue fixed in 8.2.

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Changes are already up on wowhead and bluepost tracker.

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There are some notes from PTR. Basically some pity offerings; making the ironfur cost slightly less rage and slightly improving rage gain. For DHs they gave them more baseline DR, which is maybe going to change them from paper to cardboard.

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