DUNGEON DIFFICULTIES
We currently have 3-4 dungeon difficulties [NM, HM, MM, MM+].
- At the beginning of an expansion, you usually do NM while leveling until you reach max level and get enough item levels to enter the heroic difficulty.
- Then you proceed to get gear in HM and each week do your serie of MM
- As soon as the dungeon keys are available, you can jump into MM+ but this is also the point where heroic dungeons cease to matter
Simply put, heroic dungeons are only interesting for the first month of an expansion.
What I envisioned for future expansions is to have those difficulties looked at the following way :
- flex : adapting to the level of the player, you can be grouped with characters of any level that have access to this dungeon. The rewards also progress slightly according to your item level.
- MM : weekly lock-out difficulty, only accessible to max-level characters
- MM+ : key-affix system
“The rewards also progress slightly according to your item level.”, this means that once you reached max level, then you will get better rewards if you have a higher item level gear.
EXAMPLE :
- 300 ilvl -> 315 (flex) while 345 (MM)
- 305 ilvl -> 320 (flex) while 345 (MM)
- 315 ilvl -> 330 (flex) while 345 (MM)
- 375 ilvl -> 330 (flex) while 345 (MM)
A few questions would remain to be answered in order for this solution to be implemented well though.
- Flex isn’t a great name for this difficulty, what would be a name that works well for it?
– Well, hum hum… I don’t know ^^’ The name is important because the game needs to stay consistent between its different game modes. Therefore I would actually be cool with it being named NORMAL MODE or QUEUE MODE or LFG. - Does it mean less colour variation for dungeon gear? Or do MM0 and MM+ should drop different tints?
– My solution would be to have random tints for our armors to drop in MM+. But… this might not be OK with every collector out there
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- Because I’m getting stronger going from 300 to 330 ilvl does the dungeon get harder as well? How is that handled vis-à-vis my mates ?
– According to me, no. Those are not linked, you get better rewards while the runs are getting easier and it’s completely OK.
I know that the current difficulty paradygm works well for raid difficulties and I’m convinced it enables player to have a sense of progression whatever their investment and gaming skill. But I cannot see this as true concerning the dungeon difficulties and I think it could be good to tweak it.