Where are we heading?
Foreword: This isn’t targeted at any devs or anyone in particular. The main goal here, the reason I spent the time on this, is purely to make the game I like so much and spend too much time on better.
Would you be so kind to allow a few questions Blizzard? While there is no expectations these questions will be considered, let alone answered, I feel like I would do a disservice to myself and maybe a number of other players. There is a looming, earie feeling in the community, and while there were some conspiracies regarding a recent fog, I am oh-so certain this is tad bit more than one. There’s always gonna be naysayers and those who ravel in the hatred of others, and maybe there’s a world where I just joined that crowd. In fact there’s gonna be people here who’ll be happy to throw stones at these ideas contained herein. While, or if reading this, consider how this was rewritten a few times, and it did get an angrier tone, which comes from my climb to the ladder, which could be a result of the lack of my skills, but it is real nonetheless for myself at least, and I have felt it echoed in others along the way.
I am mid-skilled casual-ish player who did some raiding a while back with 2 flukes? of CE, and usually AotC. For the past few years I’ve been enjoying M+, it provides flexibility and requires a decent skill, in fact it requires matching skill, somewhat offset by one’s available time. It also provides a fair amount of progression, while different than raid, the core of the feeling is there and there is a sense of fulfillment when progressing the ever scaling key levels. This is a very important factor of the M+, eventually there’s gonna be a mathematical limit somewhere. Where the unavoidable damage is too much, where the mobs have to much HP, or both ideally. The level where that happens is arbitrary, it’s just a number, whether it’s 10, 20, 30 or a 100, it hardly matters, as it’s an aspiration for some, and a challenge to push for others. If there is any doubt, just look at Diablo 3 or Diablo 4. Greater Rifts / Pit (I think it’s called, didn’t play much D4 after pre-season) scale to a higher number and when that was reached the new challenge was the time. Yet no one said, “Oh, look, it’s a 150, this is a failure” or “I wish it was only 1 to 10” or “these numbers are confusing”, no one said anything about M+s 30 levels or 35, whatever the highest was, as it doesn’t matter, that number for me, a casual it’s just something I look at some players who have more knowledge and definitely more time and skill, will achieve trough a lot of mastery. And here’s comes my 2nd question (series of at least):
Why the shrink of levels? What was meant to actually achieve? To condense the player base into less keys? But why? Let me approach this thing from a different angle. Gonna go back to when keys were up 30ish and portals were at 20. The step between each key level was smaller, and the learning curve was steadier, which meant I could technically jump a key, at higher keys ofc, I could go, from a 22-24 if I had some 23s timed, my keys were slightly spread, had some 22-23 timed and some 26s as well, I wasn’t surprised by an ability that I could take without a personal in a 23, and likely still live in a 25, this got a bit less true in S3 of DF but it was more or less on point, it also provided me, with the above mentioned learning curve, where I knew, and I observed that “This ability does some damage, so I better start paying attention to it”. In S3 it got to the point where a new webpage was born, you likely heard about it: Not even close. While it’s an amazing resource I feel like it’s the start of an atrocity war like weak auras, and I don’t think this is healthy for the game. I have heard you that you wanna ease that feeling of being pressured by a timer to players who would enjoy that but still want more than the Heroic, and you wanna make those meaningful, to make Normal dungeons meaningful. We don’t need to conduct a thorough investigation to realized this goal failed. If there was underlying goal to give heroics the nostalgic feeling from WotLK, I think it was futile. Dungeons have evolved since then, and they are a much greater source of enjoyment to a bigger percentage of the player base, and you probably should be more grateful for it, M+ is a huge retaining angle to WoW.
This merging of the difficulties, it only created friction. When I do my 8-9-10s, I do no want to join 11-12, nor did I wanted to join 21-22s when I was doing 16-17-18s. At least not in pugs, coordinated groups are always different. I will also not want people who are that much lower then the keys I’m doing. They may actually be good, I encountered good players who were way above there score, but it’s a gamble, a gamble that was risky before and it’s much worse now. If before there were players in M+ levels, where they have no business being, now it’s a prevalent issue thanks to this squish and to gearing via delves. While this might iron out, it did add to the numerous atrocities this season has committed, and that ironing out might take more than one season, who know, maybe I’m just a naysayer, and by next one people will not wanna join 12s when they only have 9s completed or 8s.
Now I may have come of as a rude elitist, but please understand this is entirely not the case, I just been grief a few too many times, by the pug world and how people deplete keys as this learning curve got way too steep.
Why these tank changes? How do you get your statistics in such a way that this is something that the great majority of the players would enjoy? And if that’s not the case then what metric is used? Again, there was a goal here, clearly stated in a blue-post, which for the sake of the argument let’s consider would have been good, or to the very least an improvement over what was in DF. There’s most certainly a scenario, where these changes, they way they were implemented were considered a success, maybe, likely there are people around who agree to these changes, but the echo I hear and even more importantly what I experienced says a completely different story.
Was it so that tanks won’t pull a quarter of a dungeon at a time? Was this based on MDI? I really wanna understand this mindset. In S1 SL when tanks were running around in circles it was universally disliked, why go back to something similar, but worse, now there’s no kiting, tanks are just deleted within 1-2 sec, and of course one can argue, tanks can play better, but given all the changes and how a tank death have a huge impact on the timing of the key, it means that if that one person does a mistake a whole group is punished. And before someone here pipes up, as why not take better tanks, the 3k tanks died just as often as less experienced ones in 12s.
The pulls are very much limited by distance and group survivability not the tank’s. This change added a volatility that brought nothing. At least not in this form. Maybe I was just unlucky, but roughly 30% of my keys ended because of a tank’s death, and as a DPS player I have 0 agency over that. I can resurrect, but that is usually too late. In fact let me do a better over that 0 agency, I actually have a chance to negatively impact tank survivability, which ties into my next question.
Are the interrupt-CC changes a success? Going off simply by the fact the reasoning given was that it should be brought in line with PVP to achieve consistency among game-modes, but may I just dissect this thought for a second? In more than one way in fact.
Firstly there is very little overlap between the PVE and PVP, and if one ventures into the other for the sake of a season, it’s brief and for some rewards, but usually most players don’t. If you watch any videos of the more notorious players when they read patch notes or analyze various aspects of the game, when they get to the PVP changes they just tap out and don’t bother with them. Also PVP gear is not that useful in PVE, so if those players want to PVE, they do have to acquire PVE gear, they do have to learn or read up on new trinkets, new abilities and a bunch of new things, because it’s a different game mode, vastly different in fact. In PVE you try to group mobs up and kill them as a pack, they will not purposefully walk out of ground AoE effects or save for a few mobs, like the Spotter in Siege of Boralus, run away. In PVP you try CC a single player for as long as possible to kill the same or a different player, and that’s usually when the game ends (Non BGs).
Secondly, how many casts does an average player have to interrupt in a PVP game? How many of those mean the end of the game? How long does and average PVP game lasts? How many casts are being done at any single moment in a PVP game? Now do the same questions for PVE. How similar are the answers? If we would analyze other aspects of these game modes as well likely we would find even bigger differences. If I as a PVE player wanna go and try PVP, there are so many things that I’d have to learn that it’s baffling. In fact I gonna tell you I did try PVP a few times, one of those was for the infamous Blood of the Enemy, one other, for an Azerite piece in BFA, maybe once in WoD when I had too much time and here or there on an occasion, funnily enough I never realized this is a difference between CC behaviour until now.
Lastly it can have adverse effects likely not intended, but fatal to a key. In a pug where voice if often not included, interrupts can be wasted on mobs that just have been CCd. Can I just wait out if it’s gonna be interrupted by someone else? It’s gamble, and with 3 casters in a pack, how to guess which one is being interrupted? What if the other two players do the same one? then my stun might come too late, but what if there are more casters, like in GB? and they are spam casting, and other AoE is going on, and ground effects are happening, and enrages are on, curses, stuns you pick, all of those can kill and/or wipe everyone/someone. So I use my AoE CC, and then I likely did one of the following 2 things: I either denied someone a proper interrupt or delayed some bolts while the player had mitigation up for it, potentially a both. Alternatively I never use my CCs, but that’s probably just worse. Tracking interrupts, coordinating them, was always a fine dance, with this it just became needlessly punishing.
By the time I was nearly done writing this post, I’ve had a listen to Quazii’s podcast with Banshers, where the latter mentioned that these changes had to do with how Vengeance DHs were able to perma CC entire pulls and essentially trivialize parts of the dungeon. If this is indeed the case, then we would have to look at some other aspects of this as well. Vengeance is no longer Meta, thus a lot less people play that, more importantly I think it lost the double sigils talent. Furthermore, even when Vengeance DH was considered the best tank in M+ pugs only some of them were able to maintain this highly sought after perma CC.
While the above are I would think are unanimously wrong and should be reverted entirely or partially, there’s another aspect that has drastically changed since the start of DF. The difficulty, and not everyone is on the same page of where it should actually be. I’m also in the camp that complexity and depth are good, in fact the removal of old affixes allowed or invited some difficulty ramp. But did you go too far? What is too much? If a boss in an M+ key has more mechanics then a raid boss then maybe we should rethink our approach. Since DF defensives have become abundant, but so did increase the need of them. There are bosses even in the 12-13 range where a player just have to guess whether the healer or some other player will use a group defensive or not as there is simply not enough defensives for every AoE ability. I’m thinking here of 2nd boss of Dawnbreaker, or last boss of City of Threads, then there are some bosses where defensives are useless at that level until a few keylevels higher, where a player needs one every 15-45 seconds (3rd boss of SoB, 1st boss of GB). The pugs will have a very hard time reaching to that level, and maybe it’s just fair that there is voice communication required at a certain point, where coordination is paramount.
But where are we heading with this? Reading up on the new 1st boss of Workshop it feels like it has more abilities then a whole raid in Classic (didn’t do the math, maybe not). All I know it could be a fun boss if balanced properly, loads of abilities doesn’t make a boss bad. One of my favourites this season is the 2nd boss of CoT, it has deadly, less deadly and all kinds of abilities, it is visually fair and top it off it has a nice intro. Then there is the 3rd boss of GB. I wish I could say good things about this boss, but to be manageable it has to be cheesed, and this after some visual adjustments and nerfs. You spoke about and acknowledged how fire swirlies on lava are not fair and not fun in a recent interview, yet there comes this boss and we get shadow tornadoes on purple floor, slightly transparent ones at that. It got corrected, and it’s better, but I would say for the damage it does it’s still bad, but then I gonna ask you does a boss need to have so many oneshots as that one? It has a frontal, which is cheesed, so it becomes irrelevant, it has adds spawning in a swirly (which I would guess it’s deadly? didn’t check) the adds are almost certainly a wipe if they reach you and the tornadoes are oneshot or very close to that depending on your HP. It does feel like a single misstep and best case scenario you and only you died. In fact this is to some extent is the very theme of this season. Last boss of Ara Kara, is anything on that boss that is not a oneshot? Well the there’s no info on Not even close, but I think w/o a personal the poison does kill you on a 12. In a sense it does feel like we’re back where we were in DF, we have too few personals for too many oneshots.
Then there’s trash, which in some cases like GB almost every pack has at least one group wiping spell. Why? I do agree, that nobody really wants white boring mobs to target practice a whole dungeon, but there should be a middle ground somewhere. The upper ring of Ruby Life Pools was too much, and then you made a whole expansion like that. Is that fun in some metric? Is this a fight against the increasing power of addons? If so, probably the biggest loser of this is the pug world, as much like with the rest, coordinated groups will be fine, the ones who are in LFG will most definitely take biggest punishment.
As I prefaced this isn’t a clearcut though. As most of this difficulty is amplified by the tank changes, by the interrupt changes, to some extent by the level squish of condensing the players and them not having a proper difficulty curve, and of course by the challenger’s peril, which I’ll come to in a second. If I could have a wish, maybe just tone down on these before you change the difficulty, who knows maybe it will be fine without the ones above.
Right, Challenger’s peril! How much do you think a death is worth in time in an M+ 5 sec? 15 sec? 30 sec? 1 min? I’d say it can be any of those or more, plus whatever penalty the affix adds to it. If you die on the two Lavabenders in GB it’s probably 90-120 sec/player just the runback, then the Challenger’s Peril. If you die on the 2nd pull of the same dungeon, the pull that most groups will lust? It could be similar, while the runback is only like 10-15 seconds, the fact that you died during lust and during offensive cooldowns, is worth very similar to that of the runback. The thing is that 15 seconds (10 actually, as it was 5 originally) is likely the least bad among these changes. Does that mean that it’s good? I don’t think it was a good change. Nor do most people. One thing I do like about it, that it killed death runs, which was degenerate gameplay and it’s good that’s gone. My suggestion would be, rather than changing back peril, to normalize runback times. While the respawn points after each boss work in some dungeons, they merely make it playable in others. In some cases like Stonevault it would actually be detrimental.
I would suggest a more surgical approach tailored to each dungeon, something that’s already a thing in a way (flybacks, teleports, etc), just something to make the play more fluid. It could also be contained to M+ to keep the flavour. E.G. The flying in City of Threads/Ara-Kara could stay in an M0, but in a timed instance these things shouldn’t exist. You could add interactable objects like in Mists or marks on the floor to walk over to activate. A single party member could activate it, much like in Mists. In most dungeons it would be fine when a boss dies, in the long run ones like GB, King’s Rest you could do it after a certain distance or after great events, junctions etc. You could link it to mini-bosses, making them more of an incentive. Death carries so many drawbacks, running shouldn’t be one of them, nor flying, teleporting or even going down weird aqueducts like in Halls on Infusion.
There’s one last thing here. Delves. Delves are good, and I do enjoy them, I think most people are, just as well most people will be of the opinion that they are a welcome addition to the game. The real question is, why do mobs in delves whiteswing for various and crazy amounts? It feels like they were implemented with tanks in mind and never changed. But that’s not my real issue with delves, and frankly delves were the main instigator for this post, and to be specific, the item rewards. The item rewards from delves make it so that people won’t have to do the entry level keys and everyone just starts at 7. That would have been a great place before the shrink. If the next step after a level 7 delve is a 8 M+ key for loot, then it’s not hard to conclude, that there’s a difficulty gap, and this create all sorts of issues. Chief among them is the skipping of the learning curve in M+ which has a trickle down effect, especially in combination with my 1st point on the key level squish. The idea that 2-7 would be like a good place for newbies was butchered by delves, well the item rewards off of them did. I just went ingame, there was no 2-5 keys at all, and 1 of each 6 to 8, and also no 9, of course we’re on the tail end of the patch, but this just show how much the squish failed at what it wanted to achieve.
I do hope delves were considered a success, but I also hope, that much like many others suggested, the whiteswing situation gets changed into something similar to the Plunderstorm style incoming damage to give even playing field to all specs or to the very least make it less of a pain and somewhat normalized. I did an 11 where sometimes randomly died in 2-3 hits (as a mail wearer) while I did another and I could face-tank several more hits (similar grade mobs). Furthermore, please change the rewards in proportion to the difficulty, maybe leave Hero track rewards to delves 11, and cap delves 8 at champion. I understand that delves were in the spotlight now, but maybe now we could go back to be more in line with other similar difficulty content. I would like people to get into M+, because right now there’s a fair number who try and die on every pack, get flamed and never try again, also puts the players who start M+ into the wrong bracket, which makes an abysmal pugging experience. Which brings me to final point.
Pugging this season was the worst it has ever been and it’s not even close. I am so certain that the above points were responsible in large for this. Starting off with the delves ilvl boost and ending with the gap at +12s, anything in between is the opposite of fun. There’s too many players for too few key levels, people who don’t belong there as they still need to earn knowledge, just as well people doing too low keys for crests (Admittedly this is likely fixed by the crest changes). As a consequence wait times are the longest they’ve ever been, unless you’re a meta spec. Then after a “queue simulator” for 15 minutes to 5 hours you get into a key, and they key ends on the 1st boss or one of the 1st packs as some people don’t belong in that key level, or someone made a mistake and we have a Challengers peril, then someone leaves. I am only half happy for the deserter bans, mainly because we don’t really know what it means, and honestly around 12s no one wants to stay if they key isn’t timed, even if we’re on the last boss. Most people are in for the score, and it doesn’t matter why it failed, if it did, might as well leave in peace, no need to waste more time. Maybe add a Forfeit button, as some suggested. Banshers actually had a decent take on it. To circle back to my thought, this queueing simulator and failed keys go on for hours, and days and basically never stops. As a non-meta class/spec it was never an instant thing, but now it became a slog. Lucky for me, in the back I was learning some course between the queues as otherwise I would’ve never got to my goal. I set myself the goal of 3k, and around 2.8 I was sure I’m done, I think I had 1 timed key in like 15, most of those were some variation of the tank ran in, died, got ressed, died again, or maybe it did live, but die on the next boss and bamm, over. Some ended as people didn’t know how to use personals, as there is a gap between 11 and 12 where on the former you’re casually alive with loads of HP neat and on the next you barely live with a personal. How should they know? Well they will on the next key maybe. Why do I say that? I actually had a warlock die on the last boss of an Ara-Kara 3 times costing us the key. Next day completely different pug, same Lock is invited, guess what, he/she now lived. Too bad the tank and another melee killed each other with instant dispel, but at least the lock lived. The point is, there was a learning curve, and it was so steep that created an endless misery of a pug experience. Some is getting fixed with the new 11 to 12 gap, but most of them remain and I get shivers down my spine if I think of pugging again the S2 if this trend continues, which it looks like it does by the datamined patch notes. Why? Who are these changes for? What is this incentive? Is there some secret M+ pushing community that no one has ever heard of? Is this a bit like RWF raiding but unlike raids this doesn’t get brought back in line for the non MDI teams can also enjoy the game? Or is the only option to enjoy M+ if I have a pushing group? Why? This season I even tried that around 12s. It didn’t work out. I do add people to my friends list, and I do play them here and there again. But my schedule will hardly allow consistency, some weeks I’ll have several days when I have many hours and there are weeks when I have barely enough for 1 key and some dailies. I know I should play as much as I have time for, which I do, and with the same schedule I was able to do 23-27s in most seasons, why the change?
P.S. Before any of the more famous players come and criticize aspects of this post or the whole of it. These are my problems and they maybe not as real to you, but they are very real to me. And when I listen to the Bench both Tettles and Growl yap about their own real problems, like how 4500 versatility made them not play for the rest of the season, or how Silken Court is the bane of their existence, the fact that I haven’t got those problems don’t make them less real. I will admit, I may not be a very good player and may be wrong in some points here, and may not have the correct solution to all of these issues, but it does feel like that the angle M+ has taken is one that very hostile to pugging, which wasn’t needed.
Thanks for reading trough my letter.