It feels like when they removed the affixes, they tried to make the dungeons harder to balance this, and got it a bit wrong. Perhaps season 2 will fix this.
It kinda feels like they want M+ to be static-only and delves for the casual players.
It’s almost the same mistakes made in ff14, where realistically if you want to progress savage raids in the timely fashion, you need a static and Party Finder (pugs) is there just to keep you subbed and waste your time.
The only positive about M+ is that you can push and gives you something to do. Savage on 14 has a shelf life and is dead quickly after release.
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And this is exactly what raiders (not all obviously) have been asking for, for years. Basically since the introduction of M+.
They felt like they needed to spam M+ because it resulted in “better” gear. Now they can still spam it, but for the majority of the players this won’t be a meaningful way to get the best of what they can get. So raiders have it easier now, exactly what was asked for.
The problem is, everyone complained they hated the affixes before, so we kind of got what we asked for, and guess what, they’re worse.
They crank up difficulty and then add a death penalty affix which pretty much insta kills keys on a failed boss fight/fort mob wipe. No one cares how many deaths there are on a key, and no one celebrates less deaths at the end.
Perhaps I’ve missed a bunch of stuff on the forums, but I raid, and also love m+, in fact in earlier seasons, I’ve had more gear from m+ than from the raid.
Who on earth was asking for m+ to be more punishing, most raiders do both.
Not more punishing, but less favorable / required to spam for gear. And that happened. So as with many things; I blame the [redacted] feedback we give to Blizzard.
We didn’t really get no affixes, they just changed the affixes to affect the rules of the game, rather than what we see in the dungeon.
This isn’t really what people were asking for. I advocated for a true affix free dungeon, where the dungeon getting harder per key level was the affix.
None of this fortified and tyrannical stuff.
But they weren’t ever going to remove all affixes. Cause they’re why M+ is unique.
I’d argue the endless scaling, and the fact they can be older dungeons, and the no lockout, is what makes them unique, but the affixes certainly played their part (Whether that was good or bad, is the reader’s opinion).
The new affixes are not any better than the old ones however, regardless of the base dungeon key difficulty.
They are not. Worse in what way ?
They are totally trivial AND give buffs. And all those complaints about affixes appearing in the worst possible moment…
How about Afflicted when there was some dispell mechanic in a boss. How about quacking + thundering in AA bird boss ? Swirlies upon swirlies upon swirlies… untill you cover the whole room.
How about Bolstering + Fortified. Literally not even the pros could complete the key level they acheived the previous week.
You are all complaining for NOTHING. These affixes are fine. PERIOD.
I wouldn’t say people are complaining for nothing, we have a massive problem where people are unhappy with the end game pillar.
The key balance needs to change regardless of the affixes.
Ok, calm down.
Actually the only real annoying affixes were bolstering and bursting. The rest felt pretty smooth last season. And at least we didn’t have one that took time off the timer every time someone died.
This seems the most unfair of the changes, it comes in at a level where deaths are more likely, and encourages an increased in abandoned keys.
Meanwhile the reward for struggling through is lower.
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Yup, and for a static group it’s probably a non issue, so it’s most punishing for pugs and makes timing a key more of a lottery.
It’s strange, if Blizzard kills m+ in return for an increase in raiding attendance, even assuming that 100% of people put off start raiding, and assuming that none of them were raiding before, we still have 2 or 3 days a week when those players are doing nothing, as they are locked out from the raid.
This seems weird given MAU is the hot topic at gaming companies.
I thought raid participation was dropping? For heroic and mythic, it can’t be holding a huge proportion of the population?
So would have thought it would be in their interest to keep people on the M+ treadmill cause it’s fast and accessible, unlike mythic raid.
I’m not convinced in the long term that delves will remain popular.
It is dropping, but even if we make the assumption that 100% of people who are put off by the m+ changes start raiding, and are new to raiding, we still have a massive drop in DAUs (daily active users) for the game, as they’ll only raid once, or perhaps twice a week.
This doesn’t make sense given daily active users is a huge part of measuring success in a game.
An MMO needs daily things to do, and when you are 620 ilevel, delves, and WQs won’t cut it.
In DF, M+ high keys filled this void, it doesn’t seem this will happen in TWW.
I guess either they
- nerf dungeons heavily this season
- players just out gear the content and it becomes easy
- people get bored with delves and repopulate M+ and increase the chances of upgrading keys
We can only hope Seaaon 2 will be better.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the S1 dungeons suck. At least in DF S4 we had Algathar and Azure Vault
I believe that s1 should of contained all the new dungeons, regardless of whether you like them or not, it’s new product and it should be showing new features.
S2 should have a megadungeon, and perhaps include old dungeons.
S3 and S4 are fine to include old dungeons.
I always liked them mixing up the dungeon pool with older dungeons. They will probably do entire TWW dungeons last, like they did with DF. Maybe they’re not all in an m+ ready state yet.