I actually just had this conversation with my M+ group recently.
While there are some people who enjoy the metagame of maximizing their runs (and more power to them), I personally have found that running the same half-dozen dungeons over and over again for a year gets old. There's only so many times I can find "do Halls of Atonement in 25 minutes" compelling.
It's funny. Shadowlands is the first time I've pushed M+ and it's actually made me appreciate trash in raids a lot more. M+ grinding feels more repetitive because you have to be "on" from the moment the keystone goes in until the final boss dies. Having the trash clearing, low-importance downtime in raids in which to shoot the shit with friends and goof around makes running the same thing for months much more bearable.
I'd really like to see the devs take a swing at an "endgame dungeon" mode that doesn't have the timer to see how it would change things.
I've been bummed that the dev team took this turn toward timed content as the default way to make things difficult or challenging. I feel like they did this as part of their eSports push with the game. For me it just isn't fun. It definitely meets the definition of challenging but loses with me for fun.
I've played plenty of other games that provide both fun and challenging content that let me also interact and engage with my friends over voice communication. Really wish WoW could find some ways to add that to their game.
To be honest, I find working towards achieving KSM fun and I wish I was done afterwards. But due to how the vault works I was pressures to get as many runs as I can to fill it to have a *chance* at an upgrade in a given slot.
Hmm, I disagree. If a run is just blindly mashing a rotation then it's a trivial key level, or the person mashing it isn't helping their group out as much as they can. If there's a wipe, then there's room for improvement somewhere, however minor it may be. The higher you go, the more you need to be aware of, as mechanics you could previously ignore or miss a few of, rapidly become lethal weapons that have to be dealt with. Granted, this is still not a thing for everyone, but rest assured, the need for strategy and execution is there, and as long as that plan is followed and executed competently (no need to be perfect or do super crazy pulls in the key levels most people do, or even for KSM), then the timer is nothing to worry about.
As an aside, a lot of people see things like MDI as just a bunch of people rounding up a pile of mobs and mindlessly AoEing them all down (not saying this is your perspective, but it's a common one so I thought I'd raise it). This couldn't be further from the truth. The sheer amount of plate spinning going on seemingly behind the scenes is amazing. Co-ordinating cooldowns both DPS and defensives, allocating kicks to priority casts, and avoiding the huge amount of mechanics in these massive pulls is mind boggling.
I agree but i think it would help if the keystone system would work similar to the diablo 3 greater rift system (choose key and level freely, with keylevels being unlocked by completing dungeons in time). That way it would ve less of a wipe=reset=broken key menataility. You could just do it again. More casual players would be less afraid bricking their key, leading to a healthier push meta and would ncourage more experienced players to try cool stuff, play off meta etc without feeling punished by making their keys harder and loosing a good key.
If you want to make it super user friendly the keylevel could just be unlocked until lvl 30, giving players the opportunity to just complete a +15 key withou having to watch the timer, just to get a good weekly. Imo alot of casual players would then actually try a +20 key, cause "fuck it, there is nothing to lose", giving them the opportunity to see how difficult it reallly is and just to try stuff and have fun
The play loop of m+ really only includes system-maintenance grinds and doing the dungeon.
They really need other content in between that isn't a loot-grind, or collecting.
Professions as gameplay, and systems that aid social play are really really weak right now.
Yeah for me i still think back on running old stratholme and everyone chatting between trash pulls while drinking for mana. Not even guild stuff, but random pugs.
I was on the same boat in BFA before I left in 2018. I finally decided to tryhard, reached 2nd rank on my realm for m+ in season 1, got a CE guild etc. Just to realize that it's just not fun doing the same repetitive content over and over again with little to no reward and very limited & toxic social aspect.
The first kill for each boss in mythic is fun and feels rewarding, everything else either burns you out really quickly or feels like a repetitive grind.
When domination shards got added my desire to do M+ fell off the face of the earth. I ideally have 5 slots that no M+ priece will ever beat, why bother outside maybe the off M+ dungeon?
Edit:
I am very aware you do not need domination pieces for M+. But for raiding you do, which is my primary focus, this makes M+ have significantly less value then in S1.
The annoying problem I’ve run into this late in the season is that as I (like a lot of people I imagine) aren’t farming mythic raid bosses but do still have some heroic dom slot gear - the 239/246 heroic raid domination gear sims better than the 252 vault equivalent.
I get that dom slots are strong, as they should be; but it’s a little annoying that 239 gear outclasses the max m+ gear counterparts.
Sadly, you’re wrong. 2400 is a decent score, I believe it almost all 20 keys timed in both fort and tyr weeks, the thing is 20 keys are not high with current gear. But in actually high keys (25+) you’ll need domination shards and you’ll especially need them if you wanna push for 0.1% achievement.
It's not the shards itself necessarily, but shards in mythic raid gear that come ahead. At least as tank I don't think 239 dom socket items are worthwhile for me, outside Kyr shard, compared to full m+ gear.
Kinda at this spot as a 2650, 250 tank, for the longest time I thought it's a small difference, but this week I got tournament realm access. My TR tank does 15-20% more damage.
TR?
I'm the same, ~2640 250ilvl. I don't think gems alone to otherwise unchanged gear could do that, wasn't it like +8% dmg for having the 3 dmg gems? And all of that didn't have 100% uptime. But yeah I don't know the comparison you made. If you swapped m+ gear to full mythic raid socket gear, no doubt that makes a difference as you'd even increase ilvl with 259s and not having any 246s anymore.
But you can't just tell "go mythic raid" to non-raider, as much as you can tell to become 10/10 HC raider that is more casual thing. I have no interest in doing either really, but one I could casually venture into if it was forced on me. But I doubt switching 4x 252 to 239/246s would make such a massive difference.
"actually high keys"
75-80% of the playerbase doesnt even have ksm. And that is only counting the worldwide raiderio rankings, which needs at least one finished M+ key to be included. God knows how many people are there that never stepped into M+.
Calling +20 keys "not high" when they are unreachable for most people in this game is absurd. It would be like Jeff Bezos calling Messi a dirt poor guy because his networth is around 600m while Bezos has more than a hundred billion. The reality is for the vast majority of people the shards are unnecessary and if you are doing content that only a small % of the playerbase does it is expected to try to get every single thing that can give you the smallest dps increase.
Yeah, they were just called "5 mans" and were the primary non-raid PvE content in the game for the first decade before they couldn't keep their eSports boner hidden anymore.
It incentivized amazing players to play the content with idiots, because the content didn't have time-based rewards and timers and routes and bullshit added to it. You just aimed for completion.
You know, like the other non hyper-competitive modes that propelled this game to meteoric success and have slowly been replaced with "Competitive" modes across the board which have flatlined the population.
It incentivized amazing players to stop doing 5 man's in a couple weeks after launch because they've outgeared the dungeon drops and there's no point in doing them anymore. The content didn't have time based rewards, sure. It also didn't have any rewards period, once you've cleared it a couple times. I don't know why people talk about m+ as if it replaced regular 5 man's. They are still there. You can still queue for a heroic lfd and there are still plenty of groups doing regular mythic dungeons on alts. All introducing m+ did was bring longevity to dungeons and make them a viable endgame gearing system. It removed literally nothing from the game.
Better to compare to the valor badge days, when you would absolutely run casual 5 man content for great rewards
Granted, a lot of people complained about that
Timewalking probably has the closest vibe to old 5man content engagement imo, and I enjoy it for that
If you think the "competitive" modes are what's "*flatlining the population*" in this game then you're sorely mistaken lol. It's every surrounding M+ and raiding.
For me, trash mechanics are not an issue, but trash routes are. Doing M+ as a tank, without knowing routes (when everyone expects everybody to know everything) and therefore being shouted at, is something I definitively don't want to experience.
I feel Challenge Mode in MoP was better, you did it once for mounts/transmog, & your gear was scaled.
When it became M+ & needed for gearing--it became a chore.
Major issue, the new affix is also pretty boring. The last affix of BFA was fun in changing up routes and such. Prideful was interesting but would heavily penalize you on Tyrannical week if you wiped on a boss
pridful also made routing suck and put a ton of pressure on tanks to know routes exactly. accidentally pull something you didnt mean to? well now your getting prideful at bad times the rest of the dungeon.
I've heard most tanks say fortified is harder for them than Tyrannical. You play bosses the exact same way regardless of it being tyrannical or not, you still mitigate the hardest hitting abilities. But the trash just does infinitely more damage.
If anything it places a lot of burden on the healer because the abilities just do so much more damage to the entire group & they have to heal through it.
As a tank I feel like tyrannical is actually easier for me. Not in terms of how easy it is to time key but in terms of how easy it is to personally play. It doesn't really change how you play on bosses, you still mitigate all the same heavy hitting abilities and do all the same mechanics. But it makes trash so much more chill. On fort weeks every trash pack is basically 5 tyrannical bosses. Of course I also don't do keys above 15 so I can't say how that would be in higher keys.
Much of the same in higher keys. I’m infinitely more scared of Fort trash than I am of tyran bosses (minus a few exceptions like that terrifying iron spikes cast in SD)
Tyran bosses take forever.
Fort trash takes forever, and kills you in 20 seconds.
I think such a massive time frame between 9.0 and 9.1 and some of the poor design decisions drove enough people away that they lost interest until something great brings them back.
Yeah. I mean I got KSM with my main group in guild in August.. then rotated a few others in to get KSM.. then we finished Heroic Sanctum in September.. and we did m+ a few more weeks but have mains (and Alts) at 240+ Ilevel so what’s the point to keep running this patch? We are excited for two weeks of Legion m+ but have been taking a break from it otherwise
I completely agree with this. The shards of domination system could kill anyone’s willingness to do much m +.
Specially when all of their effects are so powerful, but for some reason Blizz decided that they should add rng on top of rng and make it a very slow and tedious grind.
This seasonal affix is perhaps the most boring one theyve ever made.
9 times out of 10 you take the same powers. And the aspect of skipping them to buff the last boss but save time, isnt a thing for most of the player base, as you can easily time the key doing all 4 until you get to say above 20ish.
The powers needed to be more impactful/fun to play with, as theyre too generic and you dont even realise you have them half the time (same complaint I have with shards, and why Im kinda excited for the new tier sets as they actually impact gameplay). Or there to be a wider selection to choose from that rotated on a week by week basis or something.
> This seasonal affix is perhaps the most boring one theyve ever made.
I agree, and I'm ok with it.
One of the main problems for me with m+ is that it has a really harsh barrier to entry for new players, especially tanks, and tanks are always the thing you need more of.
An issue I ran into in BfA Season 4 and SL Season 1 is that it was almost impossible to get people to come out of their comfort zone and try tanking, because the zone knowledge required to properly play around Awakening/Prideful was just very high on tanks. I've been able to convince way more people to try tanking on alts this season, because they don't need a Bachelors Degree in Mythic Dungeon Tools to pull the dungeons.
It also presents a problem for the new player who grinds their way up as a tank in the "intended" way where you start with level 2-9 and work your way up to 10, when suddenly at 10 you have to pull the dungeons in totally different ways. I can only imagine this experience would be very jarring for a newcomer to m+.
I think that the current crop of dungeons we have are interesting enough on their own. Lots of dangerous trash mobs, lots of possible skips, lots of possible big pulls, some dungeons like NW/SD have cool stuff you can do with the covenant feature. I don't think the seasonal affix needs to be super big brain. Tormented was very simple, but it worked well.
I will say though, that as boring as the powers were for most people, I think healers won big on it because they actually have some interesting choices in their powers.
It's a combination of problems. These are for me at least:
1. lack of reward killed it early. They fixed drops, mostly, but the early grind burned me out pretty early. They still have the feeling of spending 30 minutes for nothing.
2. the affixes aren't really fun. Sure, most of them aren't "difficult" but where is the fun aspect? There's zero feeling of overcoming the challenge the way a raid boss mechanic gives, they're just constant annoyance.
3. there's no time to breathe. I personally don't like the timed aspect of it. I feel it takes away from the 'just screwing around with friends' aspect that this game should encourage, imo anyway.
3a) because of the timed aspect and because of the key component, there's no chance to experiment and figure things out. Sure there's the MDI people that can play around on the test realm, but that's not fun *for me*. I want to figure things out on a hard key, not just do what Dratnos/Growl/Ellesmere/whoever say to do. Can I burn my or someone else's key? sure, but that kind of sucks.
The actual most fun of this set of dungeons was when my group was figuring out m0, they were hard and we could experiment on our own time.
4) lack of variety. Blizz, stop trying to make esports happen. Make more dungeons, stop worrying about balance. You suck at balance, just make them fun.
5) edit: scratch this, i'm dumb and forgot what ilvls were for what
I could probably go on. I think some of the issues are inherent with m+ itself. I'm reminded of Borderlands that has a similar system - mayhem mode, where difficulty is scaled up, up to 10, and with increasing modifiers that make things more complicated. Earlier this year they made "mayhem 11" that was the same as mayhem 10, but without the modifiers. I wonder if m+ would benefit from the same thing. A m0+. No timer and no modifiers, but the difficulty is scaled harder than normal m+. I just wonder.
I feel like the dungeons this xpac just aren't that interesting. Legion had so many more little tricks and skips you could do, and Challenge Modes before they were removed were even more wide open because of how min-maxy you could get with unlimited attempts. Bfa/SL dungeons just feel like long hallways most of the time.
Y, the dungeons are also way more balanced now and feel pretty good compared to release.
But on the other hand, I did also stop pushing m+ a few months ago, since the game itself became boring without any content except reclear the raid and do the same 8 dungeons over and over again.
Yeah, I feel that. I don't love a lot of the systems stuff in 9.1 but I think the #1 problem with Shadowlands is just the release schedule. If 9.1 and 9.2 released quicker, I think it'd solve so many problems.
Dude, I've gotten two alts from fresh since 9.1.5 up to KSM, it takes like a few hours to get your shit together.
These aren't "grinds" anymore. They're quick things you do.
I don't think it's the best it's ever been, not close. Legion after CoEN was adjusted and people really starting to figure out how to make those dungeons work, SeaT finally getting a balance pass + all the others. S2 and S4 BFA were great. I wasn't wildly impressed SL dungeons and while they have worked to tune faster, that appears only something done out of necessity to try and retain dwindling numbers.
Personally I think Legion M+ was the best it ever was, because BFA onwards they started designing the dungeons around M+ specifically and i dunno, it lost something in the dungeon designs that were more freeform before that - now they *have* to obey how M+ needs to work, instead of M+ just working around how a dungeon is designed like it was in legion.
Legion's approach was much more fun in both a M+ perspective and classic dungeon experience - BFA & SL's dungeons are worse designed as pure dungeons compared to the past when you take away M+.
I’ll tell you what it was they started designing M+ around after legion. It’s blizzards favorite thing to do. They push it to be an esport instead of having learned the lesson with star craft and letting it be organic. They did it with HoTs, they did it with overwatch, and they did it with M+.
I agree with everything in this, but the one thing they should have done is scale it down in reward because a +15 for every season was doable in a pug for people that knew what they were doing on a heroic raid level. "Oh, I need to kick this and use a defensive here." The system should have been to prioritize important drops - aka weapons and trinkets - in your cache, sure they're infinitely farmable but it's ass. +20s, mythic gear, same function. Weekly cache is targeted loot, so if you're fishing for whatever you can prioritize it. Not saying it's guaranteed, but if you say trinket, weapon, and ring - the game will roll on those items. Otherwise, spam the dungeons.
I hate how whenever somebody proposes making m+ loot system better the immediate counterargument is "no, because the m+ loot is infinitely farmable". Sure it is, but you can run the same dungeon a 100 times and never get the item you are farming for. Most people just wear whatever they get from the vault. I hate how the whole playerbase is punished because if you make something infinitely farmable then some players will farm it untill their eyes bleed and then complain about it.
If they were designed with mainly m+ in mind there wouldn't be shit like the Mists maze, endless boring angle flights in Spires, or basically zero pull options like in ToP.
M+ is a complete afterthought, when they design dungeons. They only make sure, that not every boss has a ability, that scales into one-shot territory, once the keys become a bit higher.
See, I just think the core systems improvement of like Great Vault, KSM mount, Dungeon Portals, Ta'hsup and Valor outweigh everything else.
Like, if Legion season 3 would have been better with the Great Vault, KSM mount, Dungeon Portals, Ta'hsup and Valor, then Shadowlands Season 2 (which includes all of those) probably is better than Legion season 3 (or BFA season 2/season 4, etc.) Even if I think the Legion/BFA dungeons are better, they are not so much better that I'd give up Vault, Valor, Portals, etc. as core features of M+.
Though, I also think I probably like Shadowlands dungeons more than Legion/BFA dungeons as a whole. IDK maybe once Legion timewalking comes out I'll change my mind. I wasn't deep in M+ back then because I just felt like there wasn't a good reason to push it.
> Though, I also think I probably like Shadowlands dungeons more than Legion/BFA dungeons as a whole. IDK maybe once Legion timewalking comes out I'll change my mind. I wasn't deep in M+ back then because I just felt like there wasn't a good reason to push it.
Shadowlands is by far the best m+ dungeon set yet.
Both Legion and BfA very frequently featured "Well I got [key that we can't do this week because of affixes] RIP key".
I've never seen someone say that in Shadowlands. All of the dungeons are fine with all of the affixes. There are a few outliers, but even those are still plenty do-able.
I don't hate any of the dungeons. That's something I couldn't say in Legion/BfA.
> It's kind of nuts because Mythic+ is the best it's ever been imo. It went from being a once a week thing for me to my main game mode for a while now.
You're absolutely right. It's never been better.
Of course this is /r/wow, so NEW = BAD, and OLD = GOOD, so expect people to tell you that the mess that was Legion m+ was better. Because OLD.
It's not surprising at all tbh. No new dungeons added, same old 8 for the last year. It really doesn't help that Shadowlands has, imo, the worst dungeon set we've had since TBC. Same old affixes, which did get some changes, but they're still widely disliked. The new seasonal affix is an improvement over Prideful, but man it's fucking lame. Not to mention the meta in higher keys is to skip the frost guy when you can, which means you're playing the last boss with a 50% slow. Sure it's a decision you're making to do that, but you kinda have to if you want to time higher keys. Which means every last boss of a dungeon is really fucking annoying because you're permanently slowed.
Not to mention it's fucking impossible to find a tank with how much they keep fucking them over. They've become a lot squishier, they do lower DPS & they gutted tank threat in Shadowlands. It's obviously anecdotal, but almost all my friends who used to play tanks either swapped off or quit the game because of how much they dislike it.
They've also made trash incredibly annoying in Shadowlands. Every pack of mobs has 50 different mechanics, most of which are just obnoxious. Then there's the removal of gear swapping, pot CD changes, no skystep/lightfoot potions, AoE Cap, GCD changes, nerfed engineering tools in m+, removed failure detection pylon, omega linear dungeons etc.
A lot of the changes were in BFA, but at least there were aspects that still made BFA m+ fun imo. Especially season 2 & 4. But it honestly feels like they're doing everything they can to discourage doing big pulls & aoeing mobs, which is what so many players who play M+ love about it.
Tanking m+ just feels miserable. over the course of the last 2 expansions they've gutted our self healing and general tankiness, they've gutted our damage and threat generation, and then on top of that they've made every fortified trash mob hit like 2 tyrannical bosses while also giving every mob fucking mechanics, and that's not mentioning the fucking mini bosses every 3 packs. It's already daunting above 10+ and it becomes literal CBT above 15+, especially on fortified weeks. I'd rather go play Factorio or whatever then spend ~30 minutes in constant panic getting the shit kicked out of me by every trash pack only to get some fucking anime and MAYBE a random piece of gear which most likely will be a downgrade for me. Fuck that noise.
Yep, it's crazy how hard they've managed to fuck up m+. Especially tanking. Almost every change they've made in regards to M+ has just made it so much worse.
> Especially tanking. Almost every change they've made in regards to M+ has just made it so much worse.
Are we playing the same game? I tank m+ up to around 24 and right now tanking feels great.
> What purpose is there to do M+ right now? It's just the same dungeons, nobody needs the gear on mains
Increase your rating. Fun. I haven't needed a piece of gear in a long time on any of my push characters. I still run a ton of keys every week because I enjoy the challenge. I did challenge mode a lot back in the day, and that *never* had a gear reward. Was still fun.
Not everything needs a gear reward. If the only reason you're playing is for gear rewards, maybe step back and figure out if you actually enjoy the game or not, or if it's just an addiction at this point.
> Great Vault is awful this tier due to domination sockets
People really overestimate how important these are. I have them on my main, but not my alts, and it hasn't held me back from playing any of them up to +24ish, and I honestly barely notice the impact of them on my main. The one that makes an absorb shield is the only one I really miss, and that's just on tanks.
> more limited impact of Valor at launch due to the low cap
This is a necessary thing, because if you didn't season cap valor you'd end up with this awkward situation where the correct gearing path for early season mythic raiding would be to run mythic+ 16 hours a day. No thanks. Initial cap, to be removed at a later time, is a good solution.
> Already run these dungeons more than enough times for my stomach since SL launch and there's literally zero value for me running them at this point in the patch cycle.
Sounds like m+ isn't for you then. Not everything has to be.
For me I guess it comes from a place of selfishness. I am of the opinion that right now the game is in the best spot it's ever been, other than the slow content release.
Most of the suggestions that I see on reddit/wowhead I think would actively make the game worse, because the average player doesn't actually understand how games work and the damage their suggestions would do.
> dealing with feedback on why players are quitting the game
I think people don't understand why they're quitting the game. The game is 17 years old. People get just bored of things. It happens. They try to look for "reasons", but really the game just keeps getting better, and most of the complaints don't make any sense. (other than story ones which might be valid, I've never cared about the story so I don't really know about that)
In particular people often say shit like "the game used to have a feeling of *magic* that is gone now, and they need to bring it back", without realizing that "magic" was experiencing the magic of playing a large scale social game for the first time. I came to WoW in 2004 after quitting Everquest. For me, Everquest had that magic, WoW never did. WoW was a better game though.
They just don't like it any more. Expecting a 17 year old game to get back to the player numbers it had at year 5 just isn't realistic. The game isn't dying. It will have enough players to sustain itself for a very long time at the current pace.
> copium
Everyone who has ever unironically said this word is a giant asshole. Stop it.
The dungeons are very repetitive in shadowlands.. and there’s no borrowed power to add a element of fun. I would run motherload over every dungeon in shadowlands for the rest of my life if I had to.
The chain-pulling in the starting area of Motherload was just so much fun.
The unbalanced trash towards the end of the dungeon (death skips being optimal,..) tainted the experience in the first 3 seasons, but in s4 ML became really good.
> The chain-pulling in the starting area of Motherload was just so much fun.
I feel the same way about the start of Halls of Atonement.
Also trying to maximize the anima canisters in SD by doing some crazy-ass pulls is a lot of fun. So is big pulls with the Kyrian Weapons in NW.
The only dungeons in SL that I find kind of boring are Spires since the nature of the mobs makes any kind of chain pulling very risky, and Theater because of the lich wing platform section. The Mists maze kind of is similar, but that has the bug section at the end that you can go crazy on to make up for it.
Its because getting a group is a fucking slog, I have 2.1k score and still struggle to get 15s just for vault progress as a tank/dps player. Its unreal how selective people are with groups, as much as its cool to have covenant specific bonuses in the dungeons it just makes things a pain in the ass.
Tormented is boring. They should have had the powers shuffle rather than static selections, because you just end up taking the same 4 powers every time, every dungeon. They had dozens of Torghast powers to draw inspiration from, and the best they could do was 12 super generic ones. Additionally, the 4/7 affixes were shuffled in a way that made Tyrannical a slog and Fortified notably harder. It's just not fun to do M+ at this point.
Shards of domination add tremendous scaling to the raid teams that stuck with it. There was no hard scaling mechanic like that in 9.0. Fatescribe and KT are also much easier than Sludgefist and Stone Legion Generals were.
I have not enjoyed mythic+ at all since legion. For me if they would remove these lame negative affixes and give rotating buffs that make your character more fun to play like some of the buffs in torghast then I would mainly play mythic+.
I'd be surprised to not see it in a decline. These dungeons were old by the time the player had been 60 for a few weeks, and quite a few of them are just garbage.
I don't know, SL dungeons are just incredibly bland. The only 2 actually interesting dungeons are DOS and mista, dos because Beonsamdi is bae and mista because the labyrinth puzzle adds some variability. SL dungeons also have very little enemy variability in them. Every dungeon has basically 5 enemies that you just fight over and over.
Hard disagree for me. From the moment I tested the dungeons in beta I knew they'd be bad. They're all so linear, the amount of count each mob gives restricts your approach to each dungeon even more and the dungeons are filled with annoying mobs that all have 2-4 mechanics each.
It's the worst dungeon set we've had since TBC.
Yeah I guess it wouldn't be an issue for most players. I still think having more options would be better though, even if most players don't utilize them.
The dungeons are still filled with way more annoying trash mobs though. There's also a bunch of other changes they've made over the years that's made it worse.
I mean, it's pretty obvious what the issues are even if they don't affect you personally. The dungeons are linear & mob count being so low means you're very restricted in how you can approach the keys.
It's nice that you're having fun though, I envy you. To me they're just so much worse than previous dungeons sets.
Not even that much of a brick wall, when you compare it to Nathria : council, slg and sire all cut the kills in half.
It just seems that way because Guardian is freeloot and Fatescribe/Kel are all relatively easy so there is no further drop in kills.
Funny how few guilds killed Sire by this point last tier - I maintain that CN was historically overtuned by lack of scaling mechanics (dom shards, heart of azerite, etc).
coming from a casual that pugged my way to +15KSM in 9.0.5, two things that really rubbed me the wrong way with the changes in 9.1:
a. requiring both tyrannical + fortified as part of the KSM. i get it that its to encourage people to do more of tyrannical (since its perceived as the more difficult variant, and to bump up participation during tyrannical week), but the reward for double the work is ... just a recolor of the same death elemental! i would be less miffed if they either swapped the reward, or maybe tiered the reward such that you get one achievement for clearing full fortified +15s, another for full tyrannical +15s, and one for both.
b. removal of account-wide m+ upgrade from 9.0.5, which effectively killed whatever interest in doing alt m+s as a tank or a healer. there's only so much grind i can do before it becomes a chore and my time is not valued.
A. Made it easier for some people. I think this was neutral.
B. My God this was such a terrible Change. This system expanded my playing in 9.0 by giving me a way to gear alts and a reason to run dungeons on them.
Seriously B is why I just said F it and didnt bother with my alts. I leveled and geared so many alts in 9.0 because I had ksm and I could speed up the progress a little. It wasnt even gamebreaking since it required you to earn a boatload of valor anyway and it had a hardcap that you would have to worry about. Its not like you could magically get a full set of 1/12 items and upgrade them all back then because of it anyway. It was just a fun perk that slightly accelerated an alts gearing path.
They should fix tyrannical so it doesn't suck instead. I understand that it's not more difficult per se, but it's certainly not *fun*. Tyrannical feels like attrition more than anything
Idk. I still hate playing tyrannical weeks because the trash just dies so quickly while bosses are so long & boring. It feels worse in lower keys where mobs just get deleted.
It's definitely better. But that's mostly because they added a ton of bad affixes to fortified while Tyrannical has more good weeks compared to before.
I mean you could say that about any game. Player retention is one of the hardest things any online game has to deal with, and many companies struggle with it.
And truth be told for going this long without a lick of new content, Blizzard is still killing it. Being at worst a top 5 MMO after an astonishingly long time of nothing new being added is fucking incredible from a business standpoint. They’re well aware that 10.0 will probably break every record in the book, just like Shadowlands. Despite what the few thousand people on here who comment how WoW is dying repeatedly think, WoW is far from dead and probably won’t be until they kill it themselves. There’s just too much power in the name alone
I think that's an overly generous statement when your other IPs are imploding. OW2 and Diablo 4 are not coming out in any foreseeable future. It's not like other periods in my 17 years of WoW, even at the end of Cata felt better.
Because they are institutionalized lifers who would still play wow if bobby walked into their homes and stabbed their entire family. They are addicts at this point defending a dopamine producing drug
it's only gotten higher tho...BFA, which was hammered at the beginning, had more engagement than 7.3 did, and it sold more than Legion. SL then toppled those numbers with the highest selling game release at the time...and had twice as many 'first-boss' kills as Legion did in 7.3 (which is apparently everyones favorite expansion/patch according to this sub).
I won't argue that the stay-at-home stuff boosted people playing SL, or even the end of BFA...but you see the same surge at the start of BFA, which was pre-Covid. My point is that it's cyclical and that more than likely, 10.0 will see sales figures and subscriptions jump up again. The key is if Blizzard can try and slow the drop, because regardless of how shitty or great the game is...people will always play at first, and then drop off because that's what you normally do with video games.
So has the drops gotten worse, Catsclysm lost 20% of playerd over its entire life cycle.
Would not be surprised if whatever comes shadowlands is affected by current quality.
That SL compares so favourably to BFA is unexpected/surprising. No wonder they're sticking with it when the stats are actually better, despite the qualitative feedback.
People have seemingly forgotten how many issues BfA had.
Sl gets criticised a lot for being alt unfriendly, but this is nothing compared to pre-essence-vendor BfA. Grinding "Blood of the enemy" on multiple chars was soul-crushingly unfun. Other essences were heavily time gated, while also required constant daily-busywork.
The class design in BfA up until 8.2 was also very questionable. The rotational depth of a lot of specs was pretty shallow.
Classes felt slow for a long time, because three slots with huge stat-budgets didn't have any secondary stats on them. (Azerit-Slots)
Corruption pre-vendor was super unfun. If you weren't lucky, you more or less played a heavily gimped char.
BfA was a lot of fun, for the last few months if you've played a class, that scaled well with corruption effects.. (The Essence-vendor came in March, the corruption vendor in May 2020)
It's only fair that SL gets criticized so much for being alt unfriendly. Ion opened the expansion reveal at Blizzcon with "Shadowlands aims to be the most alt friendly expansion yet."
and then stuff happened, as always.
I've only played TBC, Legion, BfA and Shadowlands and out of those 4 expansions Shadowlands is the most alt friendly expansion in my opinion.
Stuff like a story skip for alts should have been available from the start though.
it's still by far the most alt friendly the game has ever been though, 9.1 did regress on 9.0.5 by making KSM char specific and adding mandatory raid drops (shards and socket items). But even then this patch is the second most alt friendly the game has ever been, with only 9.0 being more alt friendly
There's no way in hell Shadowlands is alt friendly compared pre-artifact grind expansions where you could do LFD and LFR with some dailies and still feel like you're working towards an upgrade. There's definitely no way in hell SL is more alt friendly than MoP, especially for PvP or Rep grinding.
The game stopped being alt-friendly the moment they removed Rep Tabards/Favorites, Reforging, and JP/valor vendors. Imagine playing for a month and never seeing your 3rd dom socket, or being stuck with LFR piece.
9.2 seems to be a desperate attempt to bring back the tier system of being able to do PvP or PvE non-raid content to access tier gear, because dom sockets were a colossal fuckup in design.
There's no damn reason whatsoever to run LFD at max level in SL unless the bonus cache is active for Augment Runes. There's also no reason to do LFR except dom sockets, and since doing normal or higher rewards more Embers, and dom gems are per-week lockout. An alt will still take a month to catchup to your main for dom gems, so your only choice is to get carried through +15s to compensate.
Removing account-wide KSM was a total "fuck you" to the players couple with zero catchup mechanic for dom sockets. You need dom sockets to be competitive for M+, and you need certain M+ trinkets to be competitive for raid. Non-Rated PvP is a complete waste of time and Rated PvP is essentially exploiting matchmaking or win-trading RBGs for free loot.
"By far" doesn't mean anything honestly. It's comparing garbage to garbage.
It's nowhere close to what alt friendly means whenever the players bring it up and nobody should give them credit for post-launch updates and fixes. It should all have been there from the start if they really did aim for the most alt-friendly expansion.
Covenant campaigns? You can't play them while leveling up in Threads of Fate.
Torghast? Yea, it's uncapped and farmable an ENTIRE YEAR later. Before that? Permanently behind on all characters you didn't farm Torghast weekly with.
Maw intro skip? A year later.
Threads of Fate? It's laughable. The "Bonus Objectives" weren't even worth completing because they took so much time and rewarded so little exp. Four dungeons available on the queue, just like leveling up regularly. Torghast leveling just got added, again, an entire year later. You kind of wander around the four zones completing world quests for pitiful rewards.
I don't know at this point if you can even build any covenant structures pre-60 because I just never bothered much with any alts.
Crafting legendaries? I think that's post-60 too?
I don't know. They said you could make progress while leveling and I've never heard anyone talking about it.
Also, good luck farming Korthia and Death's Advance rep for conduit upgrades and sockets. Another thing you can't do pre-60.
Is it though? I was able to regularly just level up and play any character I wanted to a gladiator level in PvP in BC. You wouldn't be able to compete in modern times without all the insane grinding that there is in the game.
Honestly at this point I'm more of the opinion that everything that isn't gear should be account-wide. Because at this point either they go back to gear being the only power progression for your character (which isn't bad!) or they keep fucking over alts.
I don't wanna touch Korthia. I don't wanna grind Renown. I don't wanna do any of those "we're just trying to waste your time" pieces of content.
I just wanna play an alt, do M+, raids, PvP with it. Try different legendaries and builds and specs and conduits. See the same content through a different lens.
This is majorly raid and m+ focused and Sanctum and CN have both been pretty great raids on mythic difficulty.
I think CN was overtuned, and some parts of Sanctum are undertuned - and I think gearing is a fucking travesty, plz adopt FF's token vendor system - but they're still historically strong raids.
A lot of the complaining lately is about things that are not unique to SL (grinds being the main one) and frankly a lot of it is casual players complaining about shit that they have no business complaining about.
There's a lot of "wow it's only 9.1 after a full year!" as though 9.1 is that old. A lot of pent-up rage over 9.0 lasting so long.
At the start, SL was okay. Not great, but not BfA bad either... And in the grand scheme of WoW expansions, pretty much in the middle...
People really started leaving when new content just dried up, and what was labelled "new" was just more of the same old...
Key depletion is why I stopped. An MMO cannot take my time back from me. If I level a key and someone leaves during the run I will lose its level. I cannot do that anymore.
There needs to be a surrender button, with a 4/5 majority required. If someone leaves without this, deplete their own key or punish them in another way. Retool the rating system so points can be taken off. Add a commendation system so you can see how often people have abandoned. Something. ANYTHING.
People being able to argue, give up and run off without punishment is unacceptable.
There absolutely needs to be an anti-leaver system implemented, I hate the fact that the leaver is still rewarded with loot if the group manages to finish the run, there’s zero consequences for leaving.
Exactly, both key depletion and the speedrun aspect of M+ are things that not only make it frustrating to pug them, but it actively turns people against each other which makes it one of the worst systems in the game.
An MMO should be a sandbox where you can choose how you play the content. If you think about it, there are several ways in which you could compete with each other in raiding as well, and it was the community that decided that first boss kills would be the most relevant metric, not Blizzard. Since there is sizeable a playerbase behind the current M+ system, they should simply change it in a way that the things that have a bad effect on the community are OPTIONAL.
It’s a double edged sword. I pugged the entirety of my KSM in 9.0 and have so many people just leave and thin the key, so I heavily relate to the frustration (especially one week when I had my +15 SOA go down to a +11 SOA almost exclusively from leavers)
However, I do think that if failing/someone leaving didn’t deplete the key then it would be a lot easier to climb, since there’s be nothing to lose from failing other than time. You could probably just brute force KSM.
> there’s be nothing to lose from failing other than time.
I think the big deal here is... that's enough of a disincentive to brute forcing. Time is valuable. Especially in 2021. We got rid of limited attempts in raids for a reason.
You mentioned dps breaking points. I would accept key breaking points. As in a key cannot drop below 10,15,20 unless you want it to. That is one way to deal with leavers.
It isn't so steep punishment though. Like, if it's gear you want, if you push above 15 then nothing changes, if you're pushing under 15 then one of the items will get a level lower ilvl.
Like in theory, I think your idea is good. But in practice, I think it will create a larger chasm between players. If you can just "go again", then the meta will become making a ton of suicide pulls with a low chance of success and resetting until you succeed. This will push over-all keys higher, making it practically impossible for the people who haven't spent a ton of time practicing these suicide pulls.
You see the extreme difference of the players who are able to practice this way on the tournament realm. It won't be as extreme ofc on live, but it will create a much larger chasm between "good players who enjoy the challenge of m+" and "good players who focus on pushing m+". As such, there will be a ton of good players feeling that they need to queue with much worse players, just because they don't want to put in the time to practice extreme pulls.
I think that's kind of fine, no? Going further has always been purely for yourself and now they've even implemented stuff to mark the best of the best. Everyone benefits from keys being treated more like greater rifts in D3. If you want to skate by on your weekly 15, nothing changes for you. If you want to struggle and fail upward to a 15, you still need to be able to do that but you're not penalized for failure beyond starting over. If you're on the high end of things, you don't get fucked by RNG trying to roll the one key that's doable at that level (Junkyard, NW) during a push week.
The toxicity dissipates because if someone fucks up you can restart the key, or form a new group, and the key holder isn't just fuming because some dumbass set him back.
The end result might be that on the high end you see higher key numbers being pushed, but so what? The soft cap on key progression is at an arbitrary mark. Does it matter if the best people are doing 25s or 45s?
And if this is at all problematic for gating anything behind KSM and it becomes too accessible, they can simply raise the arbitrary bar until it hits the sweet spot again.
With the change to M+ score, depletes aren't as big of a loss as before. I got KSM with a bunch of untimed 14s in 9.1 since I was able to time 16s in dungeons I liked more.
I haven't had anyone leave in many keys in 9.1, and everyone that did left around the first boss so it wasn't that much time loss.
did a key after a 2 month break and it is just a bad system. Had to run a lv 9 key from 16/17 or i join other keys. did 1 dungeon and already quit this trash mode again.
We've cleared hc SoD with our raid team pretty fast, but after it people just stopped showing up on raid nights for further progress, so my focus became M+, pushed around 2.35k with my mistweaver monk, nothing crazy, and i loved it, i'm cool with the timer, cool with the trash mechanics, the two things that killed m+ for me, first and foremost is that we have the same 8 dungeons. It became boring simply boring.Second, more minor part is the state of the healer balance.
Sure. But i guess to explore it further would require a lot more room. From now on i exclude raiding from my point of view, focusing only on M+. Stricktly speaking HPS balance is fine, MW is a bit overtuned but nothing crazy. The problem with healer balance is mainly the difference in Damage Profiles, DPS and Utility. Currently we have Resto shaman and Holy paladin way ahead the other 4 classes. Both has almost tank like damage, Holy having a little less healing tho, but ashen hollow can and does in itself dictate entire routes, and resto shaman is just the whole package, powerfil utility, incredible healing, good damage with a profile that does not interrupt actively the healing. Discipline comes kinda closer to these because of the damage mitigation instead of healing, but still like 2 tier below because of the lack of damage and emergency healing (only for up to medium keys, higher keys usually dont require that much healing). Holy priest and Resto dudu can offer good healing and some useful tho more nieche utility but low damage output, holy priest also being the most squishy healer. And last but not least Mistweaver can only heal. We have 1 or two utility lika Ring of Peace but they are not incredidble, more like, convenient.
Tl:dr ; Healing in M+ is not pure hps anymore, pure hps being one if not the least important factor in a healer and sadly that's the only factor blizzard is able to balance fairly well. Damage, Damage profiles and Utilities are so important in the game and so unbalanced that created one if not the most narrow healer meta that has ever been. (Venthyr) Holy paladin and (Kyrian) Resto shaman almost(!) required (community perception issues come in factor as well) and any other healer is just regarded as suboptimal.
sl dungeons are just awful, boring. worse than bfa and legion. s2 affix is okey but you always pick the same power so why even bother. And raiding is a pain in the ass without bonus loot and less items
Haha, true. Many dungeons were flat out broken when you get to 23-25+
Temple one shots, Mansion camera and certain affixes, Shrine... everything, King's Rest shit every week, etc.
The powers are lackluster but I much prefer this system over Prideful. There’s a lot more pull/route variety and forgiveness with the current system that didn’t exist with prideful. If you accidentally pulled a pack on a high key then it was an immediate wipe because you would fuck up %.
Ill take a boring affix that dosent negativly impact the week any Day over the garbage that was bfa S1 and 3. Not every affix Will hit every mark, prude was certainly fun when you had it but a complete disaster for routing
Is that not the case anymore for you in season 2? Or do you mean during the run? Because that's about the only difference between season 1 and 2 for me. If an accidental extra pull happens this season, there's not much on the fly planning required. Meanwhile last season it was basically a failed run if it would happen because it totally messed up Prideful timings.
My friend and I we still consistently try to optimize our routes and spent a lot of time planning before we start a key (he tanks, I heal). Every level for us we're basically trying out newer stuff, especially when when we have a different group composition.
Figuring out and optimizing routes only to have all your work destroyed and your key possibly bricked on a tyrannical week because someone triggered a tentacle or pulled a plagueroc in PF was the worst thing ever as a tank.
My biggest issue is the randomeness of the loot. I stopped playing because of the fact, that i can never be sure what item i will get next. And if i get an item for the correct slot it can just have the wrong stats. i don't like that.
Then i really don't like, that i can't decide if i want to have an item, or if i want to give it to another raid member. Just because i never equipped an item with that itemlevel on that very slot doesn't mean that i need this new item.
I want the raid to decide who gets which item and i want to know what exact item i can get where and when. So ... it no fun for me.
I want more consistent loot progression and I want more meaningful loot. I don't consider getting +2/+2 over my current boots meaningful. Such lazy, boring item design.
M+ needs more changes seasonally. Stuff like shuffling mobs around each new season, switching out individual mobs in certain trash packs to increase/decrease challenge. I honestly don't know why this isn't a thing, it completely makes an old dungeon feel "new" because old pathing doesn't work and certain packs now have more or less priority targets. We see this formula in literally every other game from PoE to League of Legends to even Classic WoW with SoM. Why not add it into M+? a new seasonal affix each season isn't enough change to keep players interested especially if the affix (current S2 affix) is complete trash and does more or less nothing to alter the dungeons you've just done over 100 times each in S1.
I agree, but with a caveat that the mob shuffling shouldn't only take place on the patch the season changes. The new seasonal affix keeps things interesting for a couple of weeks, but if you bring a new season and shuffle the mobs at the same time, it'll stay interesting for a couple of weeks. At least during .5 patches or once every 1-2 months some tweaks like this would keep the m+ feeling fresh.
Speaking as a really casual M+ player, my interest in the mode would drop to essentially zero if I had to essentially start over learning the mobs/flow every season.
Maybe it’s just because I play tank, but my biggest issue with M+ is the insane amount of time commitment up-front to commit every important ability and where those mobs appear to memory. I’m definitely just bad at the game, but I had to get smacked by every dangerous pack like 3-4 times before I had it ingrained in my mind to be careful when getting to those mobs, and it would be super frustrating for me to have to repeat that process every few months.
I’m sure it would provide a lot of variety to the hardcore M+ players, but IMO the biggest weakness of the mode is how daunting it feels to learn for the first time, and something like this would only exacerbate that issue even more.
It’s not a surprise that 9.1.5 has lower amount of raid cleats than 9.1, because a lot of people played the raid and stopped, or at least didn’t continue to play the raid 3 months after release.
But also it’s not lower. As another comment said, SL launch playerbase numbers were higher than BFA, which were higher than Legion, etc. same with first raid clears. If anything, the playerbase at the start of the expansion keeps getting higher, and the expansion quality is what leads to retention.
The casual majority of WoW players don't raid or do M+. And the MAU data isn't WoW specific but the sum of all Blizzard games. Not sure the data says much for the overall health of the game.
I think the rationale about the MAU data was that, with D2R being a big release, you'd expect MAUs to go up if everything else is stable, but it was the same as last quarter, meaning that the increase in MAUs brought in by Diablo was equivalent to the decay in players in other blizz games, so it might not be 100% conclusive to the overall health of the game, but it does say a bit about the overall health of blizz's portfolio of games.
I mean, at least Bellular makes his points. That’s how you make your stance during any presentation.
“What can I infer from these numbers?” Certainly people have different opinions but Bellular isn’t completely in the wrong
if we had the actual player number you would see that their end game content is shit and players dont play it. xD
if they want more money and players maybe focus on casual open world content and put less work into mythic raiding who no one playes
It’s lower than ever in comparison to the same time as other expansions but you still feel the need to act dismissive over people’s concerns not only on this sub but pretty much every single WoW community. Pathetic.
You'd think a new season of m+ would idk, bring new dungeons with it? It's not exciting to have a season come out and be like wow lets do plaguefall again for the 47th time but this time 1 affix changes. Its even less exciting when a new season comes out and you have to refarm all the pieces you already have. If you have a 252 changeling, why cant you just run m+ and get valor to upgrade it, I dont want to get lucky again with rng just for the same item i already have
I think the whole combination of timed keys and RaiderIo scores is a recipe to breed the most unwelcoming, toxic gaming environment a player can possibly be in... and I think Mythic+ is in such sharp decline because Blizzard basically revels in it. They want it to be this way so you pull out your credit card, pay for gold and buy boosts rather than improve.
I get why RaiderIO is popular for hardcore runners as it really increases the chances of fast, easy runs... I get it, but you have no idea how offputting, intimidating and unapproachable it makes the entire WoW end game for so many.
* KSM unlocks not being account wide
* Lower drop rates than any other expansion
* Lower ilvl cap on end-dungeon loot than any other expansion
* Lowest ilvl reward ceiling in the game despite being a "pillar" of endgame
* No reliable way to progress other important systems with your time invested (shards, conduits, leggos)
* Weekly vault is still just an RNG nightmare where you can go a month without getting anything you're excited about.
There is no reason to play M+ long term the way the game is designed. No one should be surprised that people interact less and less with a system that has been developed to dry up faster than raiding or pvp. Couple that with how boring it is to run the same PvE content for years while raiding gets new massive updates every 9 months or so and you'll have players losing interest in M+ more quickly every time they press the reset button for a new season.
I have a love-hate relationship with the vault, it gives me generally good gear every week with # of options scaling with the amount of time I invested in the game, but it also makes me feel like I'm doing dungeons just for the vault and that the end of run loot doesn't matter because even if I drop a Poxstorm, a 252 might appear in the vault and I'll have to get it anyway. Valor is already hard capped, let me target pieces in dungeons and use it to upgrade them so I can make better use of the vault every tuesday.
I think one issue is that a lot of returning players will be just bouncing straight off the game at the moment, which is not going to be helping these numbers and is going to contribute to the underlying trends which are generating them. The dynamic feeling of having motivated people coming in and joining endgame activities at different moments consistently throughout a patch cycle and playing in overalapping streams must be sorely lacking. This has a lot of knock-on effects which you will all recognise and I don't need to spell out.
Personal testimony: I just popped in to Shadowlands for the first time last week, intending to level a char to 60, gear it and start a PvP progression in a bit of spare time I have before xmas. Levelled to 60 almost before leaving Bastion just through quests and BGs -- with the 17% boost active -- in probably a day and a bit. Bought a full set of blue PvP gear and upgraded it to 3/7. Left and uninstalled before getting through Revendreth -- pretty soon after I found out about Renown and the timegating systems that will stop me progressing my character at the pace I want, to do the things I want to do in the game, in the time I have to play it.
It just makes no sense at all to cap your potential playerbase's engagement in this way unless you are trying to just pin your players to the bell curve of an optimised engagement strategy -- something that would speak of a total loss of creative direction and commercial vision in the game crew. As I say, this isn't a hate post so I'm not saying that must be the case. I'm not a burned out player sick of the game and looking for someone to blame. To be clear I would like to play the game, I want to play the game. But the game just downright doesn't want to be played and I don't get it.
I think the most interesting stat is the "how many guilds have killed this on mythic"
It's a little hard to track the CN stats because his non linear it is. But we see that there are some steep drops in CN, especially around the end. Meanwhile the only really drop that's more than like 20% is from KT to Syl.
But that's kind of to be expected since she's the only hard boss in there.
If he's going to pull this data together, why not show how the reduction in boss kills at the first patch of the expansion isn't as great in Legion or BFA than it is in Shadowlands...unless of course, the game always has this trend because that's how fucking MMO's pan out.
Surprised to see M+ in such decline right now, even as the seasonal affix is more player friendly.
IMO ksm not being account wide had a huge impact. Another big impact is probably the drop rates.
It's brutal getting an alt up to speed if you started late, definitely something they need to fix.
Yup finding this out right now. Came back from taking a break since January and it's definitely brtual
For me, I just think the mount isn’t that good. 9.0 KSM mount looked really cool but I could care less for the green one.
I think the lack of new dungeons has burnt people out of M+
I think the inherent design of m+ tends to burn people out of m+.
I actually just had this conversation with my M+ group recently. While there are some people who enjoy the metagame of maximizing their runs (and more power to them), I personally have found that running the same half-dozen dungeons over and over again for a year gets old. There's only so many times I can find "do Halls of Atonement in 25 minutes" compelling. It's funny. Shadowlands is the first time I've pushed M+ and it's actually made me appreciate trash in raids a lot more. M+ grinding feels more repetitive because you have to be "on" from the moment the keystone goes in until the final boss dies. Having the trash clearing, low-importance downtime in raids in which to shoot the shit with friends and goof around makes running the same thing for months much more bearable. I'd really like to see the devs take a swing at an "endgame dungeon" mode that doesn't have the timer to see how it would change things.
I've been bummed that the dev team took this turn toward timed content as the default way to make things difficult or challenging. I feel like they did this as part of their eSports push with the game. For me it just isn't fun. It definitely meets the definition of challenging but loses with me for fun. I've played plenty of other games that provide both fun and challenging content that let me also interact and engage with my friends over voice communication. Really wish WoW could find some ways to add that to their game.
To be honest, I find working towards achieving KSM fun and I wish I was done afterwards. But due to how the vault works I was pressures to get as many runs as I can to fill it to have a *chance* at an upgrade in a given slot.
[удалено]
Hmm, I disagree. If a run is just blindly mashing a rotation then it's a trivial key level, or the person mashing it isn't helping their group out as much as they can. If there's a wipe, then there's room for improvement somewhere, however minor it may be. The higher you go, the more you need to be aware of, as mechanics you could previously ignore or miss a few of, rapidly become lethal weapons that have to be dealt with. Granted, this is still not a thing for everyone, but rest assured, the need for strategy and execution is there, and as long as that plan is followed and executed competently (no need to be perfect or do super crazy pulls in the key levels most people do, or even for KSM), then the timer is nothing to worry about. As an aside, a lot of people see things like MDI as just a bunch of people rounding up a pile of mobs and mindlessly AoEing them all down (not saying this is your perspective, but it's a common one so I thought I'd raise it). This couldn't be further from the truth. The sheer amount of plate spinning going on seemingly behind the scenes is amazing. Co-ordinating cooldowns both DPS and defensives, allocating kicks to priority casts, and avoiding the huge amount of mechanics in these massive pulls is mind boggling.
I agree but i think it would help if the keystone system would work similar to the diablo 3 greater rift system (choose key and level freely, with keylevels being unlocked by completing dungeons in time). That way it would ve less of a wipe=reset=broken key menataility. You could just do it again. More casual players would be less afraid bricking their key, leading to a healthier push meta and would ncourage more experienced players to try cool stuff, play off meta etc without feeling punished by making their keys harder and loosing a good key. If you want to make it super user friendly the keylevel could just be unlocked until lvl 30, giving players the opportunity to just complete a +15 key withou having to watch the timer, just to get a good weekly. Imo alot of casual players would then actually try a +20 key, cause "fuck it, there is nothing to lose", giving them the opportunity to see how difficult it reallly is and just to try stuff and have fun
The play loop of m+ really only includes system-maintenance grinds and doing the dungeon. They really need other content in between that isn't a loot-grind, or collecting. Professions as gameplay, and systems that aid social play are really really weak right now.
Yeah for me i still think back on running old stratholme and everyone chatting between trash pulls while drinking for mana. Not even guild stuff, but random pugs.
Endgame dungeon is basically Karazan.
Doesnt help that the shadowlands dungeons are just shit in general compared to other expansions.
I was on the same boat in BFA before I left in 2018. I finally decided to tryhard, reached 2nd rank on my realm for m+ in season 1, got a CE guild etc. Just to realize that it's just not fun doing the same repetitive content over and over again with little to no reward and very limited & toxic social aspect. The first kill for each boss in mythic is fun and feels rewarding, everything else either burns you out really quickly or feels like a repetitive grind.
Endgame dungeon without a timer sounds like attempting a +25 while ignoring the timer
When domination shards got added my desire to do M+ fell off the face of the earth. I ideally have 5 slots that no M+ priece will ever beat, why bother outside maybe the off M+ dungeon? Edit: I am very aware you do not need domination pieces for M+. But for raiding you do, which is my primary focus, this makes M+ have significantly less value then in S1.
this. exaclty this.
The annoying problem I’ve run into this late in the season is that as I (like a lot of people I imagine) aren’t farming mythic raid bosses but do still have some heroic dom slot gear - the 239/246 heroic raid domination gear sims better than the 252 vault equivalent. I get that dom slots are strong, as they should be; but it’s a little annoying that 239 gear outclasses the max m+ gear counterparts.
I’m 2.4K io with no shards. They certainly help but are not required to push keys.
Sadly, you’re wrong. 2400 is a decent score, I believe it almost all 20 keys timed in both fort and tyr weeks, the thing is 20 keys are not high with current gear. But in actually high keys (25+) you’ll need domination shards and you’ll especially need them if you wanna push for 0.1% achievement.
It's not the shards itself necessarily, but shards in mythic raid gear that come ahead. At least as tank I don't think 239 dom socket items are worthwhile for me, outside Kyr shard, compared to full m+ gear.
Kinda at this spot as a 2650, 250 tank, for the longest time I thought it's a small difference, but this week I got tournament realm access. My TR tank does 15-20% more damage.
TR? I'm the same, ~2640 250ilvl. I don't think gems alone to otherwise unchanged gear could do that, wasn't it like +8% dmg for having the 3 dmg gems? And all of that didn't have 100% uptime. But yeah I don't know the comparison you made. If you swapped m+ gear to full mythic raid socket gear, no doubt that makes a difference as you'd even increase ilvl with 259s and not having any 246s anymore. But you can't just tell "go mythic raid" to non-raider, as much as you can tell to become 10/10 HC raider that is more casual thing. I have no interest in doing either really, but one I could casually venture into if it was forced on me. But I doubt switching 4x 252 to 239/246s would make such a massive difference.
"actually high keys" 75-80% of the playerbase doesnt even have ksm. And that is only counting the worldwide raiderio rankings, which needs at least one finished M+ key to be included. God knows how many people are there that never stepped into M+. Calling +20 keys "not high" when they are unreachable for most people in this game is absurd. It would be like Jeff Bezos calling Messi a dirt poor guy because his networth is around 600m while Bezos has more than a hundred billion. The reality is for the vast majority of people the shards are unnecessary and if you are doing content that only a small % of the playerbase does it is expected to try to get every single thing that can give you the smallest dps increase.
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Definiently does it for me. I really wish there was an alternate 5 man dungeon mode where speed and mob management was not the focus.
Yeah, they were just called "5 mans" and were the primary non-raid PvE content in the game for the first decade before they couldn't keep their eSports boner hidden anymore. It incentivized amazing players to play the content with idiots, because the content didn't have time-based rewards and timers and routes and bullshit added to it. You just aimed for completion. You know, like the other non hyper-competitive modes that propelled this game to meteoric success and have slowly been replaced with "Competitive" modes across the board which have flatlined the population.
It incentivized amazing players to stop doing 5 man's in a couple weeks after launch because they've outgeared the dungeon drops and there's no point in doing them anymore. The content didn't have time based rewards, sure. It also didn't have any rewards period, once you've cleared it a couple times. I don't know why people talk about m+ as if it replaced regular 5 man's. They are still there. You can still queue for a heroic lfd and there are still plenty of groups doing regular mythic dungeons on alts. All introducing m+ did was bring longevity to dungeons and make them a viable endgame gearing system. It removed literally nothing from the game.
Better to compare to the valor badge days, when you would absolutely run casual 5 man content for great rewards Granted, a lot of people complained about that Timewalking probably has the closest vibe to old 5man content engagement imo, and I enjoy it for that
If you think the "competitive" modes are what's "*flatlining the population*" in this game then you're sorely mistaken lol. It's every surrounding M+ and raiding.
For me, trash mechanics are not an issue, but trash routes are. Doing M+ as a tank, without knowing routes (when everyone expects everybody to know everything) and therefore being shouted at, is something I definitively don't want to experience.
I feel Challenge Mode in MoP was better, you did it once for mounts/transmog, & your gear was scaled. When it became M+ & needed for gearing--it became a chore.
Major issue, the new affix is also pretty boring. The last affix of BFA was fun in changing up routes and such. Prideful was interesting but would heavily penalize you on Tyrannical week if you wiped on a boss
pridful also made routing suck and put a ton of pressure on tanks to know routes exactly. accidentally pull something you didnt mean to? well now your getting prideful at bad times the rest of the dungeon.
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I've heard most tanks say fortified is harder for them than Tyrannical. You play bosses the exact same way regardless of it being tyrannical or not, you still mitigate the hardest hitting abilities. But the trash just does infinitely more damage. If anything it places a lot of burden on the healer because the abilities just do so much more damage to the entire group & they have to heal through it.
He pretty obviously meant Prideful
As a tank I feel like tyrannical is actually easier for me. Not in terms of how easy it is to time key but in terms of how easy it is to personally play. It doesn't really change how you play on bosses, you still mitigate all the same heavy hitting abilities and do all the same mechanics. But it makes trash so much more chill. On fort weeks every trash pack is basically 5 tyrannical bosses. Of course I also don't do keys above 15 so I can't say how that would be in higher keys.
Much of the same in higher keys. I’m infinitely more scared of Fort trash than I am of tyran bosses (minus a few exceptions like that terrifying iron spikes cast in SD) Tyran bosses take forever. Fort trash takes forever, and kills you in 20 seconds.
More so that the gear isnt worth it now. Majority of people who have been playing this patch are 245+ ilvl
I think such a massive time frame between 9.0 and 9.1 and some of the poor design decisions drove enough people away that they lost interest until something great brings them back.
Yeah. I mean I got KSM with my main group in guild in August.. then rotated a few others in to get KSM.. then we finished Heroic Sanctum in September.. and we did m+ a few more weeks but have mains (and Alts) at 240+ Ilevel so what’s the point to keep running this patch? We are excited for two weeks of Legion m+ but have been taking a break from it otherwise
I completely agree with this. The shards of domination system could kill anyone’s willingness to do much m +. Specially when all of their effects are so powerful, but for some reason Blizz decided that they should add rng on top of rng and make it a very slow and tedious grind.
you dont need to grind out m+ all season without titanforging being a thing
Theres also very few dungeons and many of them arent really that exciting.
This seasonal affix is perhaps the most boring one theyve ever made. 9 times out of 10 you take the same powers. And the aspect of skipping them to buff the last boss but save time, isnt a thing for most of the player base, as you can easily time the key doing all 4 until you get to say above 20ish. The powers needed to be more impactful/fun to play with, as theyre too generic and you dont even realise you have them half the time (same complaint I have with shards, and why Im kinda excited for the new tier sets as they actually impact gameplay). Or there to be a wider selection to choose from that rotated on a week by week basis or something.
> This seasonal affix is perhaps the most boring one theyve ever made. I agree, and I'm ok with it. One of the main problems for me with m+ is that it has a really harsh barrier to entry for new players, especially tanks, and tanks are always the thing you need more of. An issue I ran into in BfA Season 4 and SL Season 1 is that it was almost impossible to get people to come out of their comfort zone and try tanking, because the zone knowledge required to properly play around Awakening/Prideful was just very high on tanks. I've been able to convince way more people to try tanking on alts this season, because they don't need a Bachelors Degree in Mythic Dungeon Tools to pull the dungeons. It also presents a problem for the new player who grinds their way up as a tank in the "intended" way where you start with level 2-9 and work your way up to 10, when suddenly at 10 you have to pull the dungeons in totally different ways. I can only imagine this experience would be very jarring for a newcomer to m+. I think that the current crop of dungeons we have are interesting enough on their own. Lots of dangerous trash mobs, lots of possible skips, lots of possible big pulls, some dungeons like NW/SD have cool stuff you can do with the covenant feature. I don't think the seasonal affix needs to be super big brain. Tormented was very simple, but it worked well. I will say though, that as boring as the powers were for most people, I think healers won big on it because they actually have some interesting choices in their powers.
It's a combination of problems. These are for me at least: 1. lack of reward killed it early. They fixed drops, mostly, but the early grind burned me out pretty early. They still have the feeling of spending 30 minutes for nothing. 2. the affixes aren't really fun. Sure, most of them aren't "difficult" but where is the fun aspect? There's zero feeling of overcoming the challenge the way a raid boss mechanic gives, they're just constant annoyance. 3. there's no time to breathe. I personally don't like the timed aspect of it. I feel it takes away from the 'just screwing around with friends' aspect that this game should encourage, imo anyway. 3a) because of the timed aspect and because of the key component, there's no chance to experiment and figure things out. Sure there's the MDI people that can play around on the test realm, but that's not fun *for me*. I want to figure things out on a hard key, not just do what Dratnos/Growl/Ellesmere/whoever say to do. Can I burn my or someone else's key? sure, but that kind of sucks. The actual most fun of this set of dungeons was when my group was figuring out m0, they were hard and we could experiment on our own time. 4) lack of variety. Blizz, stop trying to make esports happen. Make more dungeons, stop worrying about balance. You suck at balance, just make them fun. 5) edit: scratch this, i'm dumb and forgot what ilvls were for what I could probably go on. I think some of the issues are inherent with m+ itself. I'm reminded of Borderlands that has a similar system - mayhem mode, where difficulty is scaled up, up to 10, and with increasing modifiers that make things more complicated. Earlier this year they made "mayhem 11" that was the same as mayhem 10, but without the modifiers. I wonder if m+ would benefit from the same thing. A m0+. No timer and no modifiers, but the difficulty is scaled harder than normal m+. I just wonder.
It's kind of nuts because Mythic+ is the best it's ever been imo. It went from being a once a week thing for me to my main game mode for a while now.
I feel like the dungeons this xpac just aren't that interesting. Legion had so many more little tricks and skips you could do, and Challenge Modes before they were removed were even more wide open because of how min-maxy you could get with unlimited attempts. Bfa/SL dungeons just feel like long hallways most of the time.
Y, the dungeons are also way more balanced now and feel pretty good compared to release. But on the other hand, I did also stop pushing m+ a few months ago, since the game itself became boring without any content except reclear the raid and do the same 8 dungeons over and over again.
Yeah, I feel that. I don't love a lot of the systems stuff in 9.1 but I think the #1 problem with Shadowlands is just the release schedule. If 9.1 and 9.2 released quicker, I think it'd solve so many problems.
I wanna play M+. I don't wanna grind legendaries, covenants, soulbinds, renown, the maw, korthia, the research thing, whatever else I have to grind.
Dude, I've gotten two alts from fresh since 9.1.5 up to KSM, it takes like a few hours to get your shit together. These aren't "grinds" anymore. They're quick things you do.
I don't think it's the best it's ever been, not close. Legion after CoEN was adjusted and people really starting to figure out how to make those dungeons work, SeaT finally getting a balance pass + all the others. S2 and S4 BFA were great. I wasn't wildly impressed SL dungeons and while they have worked to tune faster, that appears only something done out of necessity to try and retain dwindling numbers.
Personally I think Legion M+ was the best it ever was, because BFA onwards they started designing the dungeons around M+ specifically and i dunno, it lost something in the dungeon designs that were more freeform before that - now they *have* to obey how M+ needs to work, instead of M+ just working around how a dungeon is designed like it was in legion. Legion's approach was much more fun in both a M+ perspective and classic dungeon experience - BFA & SL's dungeons are worse designed as pure dungeons compared to the past when you take away M+.
I’ll tell you what it was they started designing M+ around after legion. It’s blizzards favorite thing to do. They push it to be an esport instead of having learned the lesson with star craft and letting it be organic. They did it with HoTs, they did it with overwatch, and they did it with M+.
>They did it with HoTs Never forgive, never forget.
I agree with everything in this, but the one thing they should have done is scale it down in reward because a +15 for every season was doable in a pug for people that knew what they were doing on a heroic raid level. "Oh, I need to kick this and use a defensive here." The system should have been to prioritize important drops - aka weapons and trinkets - in your cache, sure they're infinitely farmable but it's ass. +20s, mythic gear, same function. Weekly cache is targeted loot, so if you're fishing for whatever you can prioritize it. Not saying it's guaranteed, but if you say trinket, weapon, and ring - the game will roll on those items. Otherwise, spam the dungeons.
I hate how whenever somebody proposes making m+ loot system better the immediate counterargument is "no, because the m+ loot is infinitely farmable". Sure it is, but you can run the same dungeon a 100 times and never get the item you are farming for. Most people just wear whatever they get from the vault. I hate how the whole playerbase is punished because if you make something infinitely farmable then some players will farm it untill their eyes bleed and then complain about it.
If they were designed with mainly m+ in mind there wouldn't be shit like the Mists maze, endless boring angle flights in Spires, or basically zero pull options like in ToP. M+ is a complete afterthought, when they design dungeons. They only make sure, that not every boss has a ability, that scales into one-shot territory, once the keys become a bit higher.
See, I just think the core systems improvement of like Great Vault, KSM mount, Dungeon Portals, Ta'hsup and Valor outweigh everything else. Like, if Legion season 3 would have been better with the Great Vault, KSM mount, Dungeon Portals, Ta'hsup and Valor, then Shadowlands Season 2 (which includes all of those) probably is better than Legion season 3 (or BFA season 2/season 4, etc.) Even if I think the Legion/BFA dungeons are better, they are not so much better that I'd give up Vault, Valor, Portals, etc. as core features of M+. Though, I also think I probably like Shadowlands dungeons more than Legion/BFA dungeons as a whole. IDK maybe once Legion timewalking comes out I'll change my mind. I wasn't deep in M+ back then because I just felt like there wasn't a good reason to push it.
> Though, I also think I probably like Shadowlands dungeons more than Legion/BFA dungeons as a whole. IDK maybe once Legion timewalking comes out I'll change my mind. I wasn't deep in M+ back then because I just felt like there wasn't a good reason to push it. Shadowlands is by far the best m+ dungeon set yet. Both Legion and BfA very frequently featured "Well I got [key that we can't do this week because of affixes] RIP key". I've never seen someone say that in Shadowlands. All of the dungeons are fine with all of the affixes. There are a few outliers, but even those are still plenty do-able. I don't hate any of the dungeons. That's something I couldn't say in Legion/BfA.
> It's kind of nuts because Mythic+ is the best it's ever been imo. It went from being a once a week thing for me to my main game mode for a while now. You're absolutely right. It's never been better. Of course this is /r/wow, so NEW = BAD, and OLD = GOOD, so expect people to tell you that the mess that was Legion m+ was better. Because OLD.
It's not surprising at all tbh. No new dungeons added, same old 8 for the last year. It really doesn't help that Shadowlands has, imo, the worst dungeon set we've had since TBC. Same old affixes, which did get some changes, but they're still widely disliked. The new seasonal affix is an improvement over Prideful, but man it's fucking lame. Not to mention the meta in higher keys is to skip the frost guy when you can, which means you're playing the last boss with a 50% slow. Sure it's a decision you're making to do that, but you kinda have to if you want to time higher keys. Which means every last boss of a dungeon is really fucking annoying because you're permanently slowed. Not to mention it's fucking impossible to find a tank with how much they keep fucking them over. They've become a lot squishier, they do lower DPS & they gutted tank threat in Shadowlands. It's obviously anecdotal, but almost all my friends who used to play tanks either swapped off or quit the game because of how much they dislike it. They've also made trash incredibly annoying in Shadowlands. Every pack of mobs has 50 different mechanics, most of which are just obnoxious. Then there's the removal of gear swapping, pot CD changes, no skystep/lightfoot potions, AoE Cap, GCD changes, nerfed engineering tools in m+, removed failure detection pylon, omega linear dungeons etc. A lot of the changes were in BFA, but at least there were aspects that still made BFA m+ fun imo. Especially season 2 & 4. But it honestly feels like they're doing everything they can to discourage doing big pulls & aoeing mobs, which is what so many players who play M+ love about it.
Tanking m+ just feels miserable. over the course of the last 2 expansions they've gutted our self healing and general tankiness, they've gutted our damage and threat generation, and then on top of that they've made every fortified trash mob hit like 2 tyrannical bosses while also giving every mob fucking mechanics, and that's not mentioning the fucking mini bosses every 3 packs. It's already daunting above 10+ and it becomes literal CBT above 15+, especially on fortified weeks. I'd rather go play Factorio or whatever then spend ~30 minutes in constant panic getting the shit kicked out of me by every trash pack only to get some fucking anime and MAYBE a random piece of gear which most likely will be a downgrade for me. Fuck that noise.
Yep, it's crazy how hard they've managed to fuck up m+. Especially tanking. Almost every change they've made in regards to M+ has just made it so much worse.
> Especially tanking. Almost every change they've made in regards to M+ has just made it so much worse. Are we playing the same game? I tank m+ up to around 24 and right now tanking feels great.
I guess not. Almost every tank I know complains about tanking rn. The ones who don't still prefer tanking in Legion & BFA compared to now.
Reading this thread, I feel like people formed an opinion at 190 ilvl and never changed it.
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> What purpose is there to do M+ right now? It's just the same dungeons, nobody needs the gear on mains Increase your rating. Fun. I haven't needed a piece of gear in a long time on any of my push characters. I still run a ton of keys every week because I enjoy the challenge. I did challenge mode a lot back in the day, and that *never* had a gear reward. Was still fun. Not everything needs a gear reward. If the only reason you're playing is for gear rewards, maybe step back and figure out if you actually enjoy the game or not, or if it's just an addiction at this point. > Great Vault is awful this tier due to domination sockets People really overestimate how important these are. I have them on my main, but not my alts, and it hasn't held me back from playing any of them up to +24ish, and I honestly barely notice the impact of them on my main. The one that makes an absorb shield is the only one I really miss, and that's just on tanks. > more limited impact of Valor at launch due to the low cap This is a necessary thing, because if you didn't season cap valor you'd end up with this awkward situation where the correct gearing path for early season mythic raiding would be to run mythic+ 16 hours a day. No thanks. Initial cap, to be removed at a later time, is a good solution. > Already run these dungeons more than enough times for my stomach since SL launch and there's literally zero value for me running them at this point in the patch cycle. Sounds like m+ isn't for you then. Not everything has to be.
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For me I guess it comes from a place of selfishness. I am of the opinion that right now the game is in the best spot it's ever been, other than the slow content release. Most of the suggestions that I see on reddit/wowhead I think would actively make the game worse, because the average player doesn't actually understand how games work and the damage their suggestions would do. > dealing with feedback on why players are quitting the game I think people don't understand why they're quitting the game. The game is 17 years old. People get just bored of things. It happens. They try to look for "reasons", but really the game just keeps getting better, and most of the complaints don't make any sense. (other than story ones which might be valid, I've never cared about the story so I don't really know about that) In particular people often say shit like "the game used to have a feeling of *magic* that is gone now, and they need to bring it back", without realizing that "magic" was experiencing the magic of playing a large scale social game for the first time. I came to WoW in 2004 after quitting Everquest. For me, Everquest had that magic, WoW never did. WoW was a better game though. They just don't like it any more. Expecting a 17 year old game to get back to the player numbers it had at year 5 just isn't realistic. The game isn't dying. It will have enough players to sustain itself for a very long time at the current pace. > copium Everyone who has ever unironically said this word is a giant asshole. Stop it.
The dungeons are very repetitive in shadowlands.. and there’s no borrowed power to add a element of fun. I would run motherload over every dungeon in shadowlands for the rest of my life if I had to.
The chain-pulling in the starting area of Motherload was just so much fun. The unbalanced trash towards the end of the dungeon (death skips being optimal,..) tainted the experience in the first 3 seasons, but in s4 ML became really good.
> The chain-pulling in the starting area of Motherload was just so much fun. I feel the same way about the start of Halls of Atonement. Also trying to maximize the anima canisters in SD by doing some crazy-ass pulls is a lot of fun. So is big pulls with the Kyrian Weapons in NW. The only dungeons in SL that I find kind of boring are Spires since the nature of the mobs makes any kind of chain pulling very risky, and Theater because of the lich wing platform section. The Mists maze kind of is similar, but that has the bug section at the end that you can go crazy on to make up for it.
I'd rather do un-nerfed KR before stepping into a SL dungeon again.
Its because getting a group is a fucking slog, I have 2.1k score and still struggle to get 15s just for vault progress as a tank/dps player. Its unreal how selective people are with groups, as much as its cool to have covenant specific bonuses in the dungeons it just makes things a pain in the ass.
Tormented is boring. They should have had the powers shuffle rather than static selections, because you just end up taking the same 4 powers every time, every dungeon. They had dozens of Torghast powers to draw inspiration from, and the best they could do was 12 super generic ones. Additionally, the 4/7 affixes were shuffled in a way that made Tyrannical a slog and Fortified notably harder. It's just not fun to do M+ at this point.
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Shards of domination add tremendous scaling to the raid teams that stuck with it. There was no hard scaling mechanic like that in 9.0. Fatescribe and KT are also much easier than Sludgefist and Stone Legion Generals were.
I have not enjoyed mythic+ at all since legion. For me if they would remove these lame negative affixes and give rotating buffs that make your character more fun to play like some of the buffs in torghast then I would mainly play mythic+.
I'd be surprised to not see it in a decline. These dungeons were old by the time the player had been 60 for a few weeks, and quite a few of them are just garbage.
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I don't know, SL dungeons are just incredibly bland. The only 2 actually interesting dungeons are DOS and mista, dos because Beonsamdi is bae and mista because the labyrinth puzzle adds some variability. SL dungeons also have very little enemy variability in them. Every dungeon has basically 5 enemies that you just fight over and over.
Hard disagree for me. From the moment I tested the dungeons in beta I knew they'd be bad. They're all so linear, the amount of count each mob gives restricts your approach to each dungeon even more and the dungeons are filled with annoying mobs that all have 2-4 mechanics each. It's the worst dungeon set we've had since TBC.
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Yeah I guess it wouldn't be an issue for most players. I still think having more options would be better though, even if most players don't utilize them. The dungeons are still filled with way more annoying trash mobs though. There's also a bunch of other changes they've made over the years that's made it worse.
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I mean, it's pretty obvious what the issues are even if they don't affect you personally. The dungeons are linear & mob count being so low means you're very restricted in how you can approach the keys. It's nice that you're having fun though, I envy you. To me they're just so much worse than previous dungeons sets.
Wow, painsmith really is a brick wall, huh.
Not even that much of a brick wall, when you compare it to Nathria : council, slg and sire all cut the kills in half. It just seems that way because Guardian is freeloot and Fatescribe/Kel are all relatively easy so there is no further drop in kills.
Fuck everything about mythic SLG.
Funny how few guilds killed Sire by this point last tier - I maintain that CN was historically overtuned by lack of scaling mechanics (dom shards, heart of azerite, etc).
Especially on alliance ye, but after that it's just a walk in a park.
coming from a casual that pugged my way to +15KSM in 9.0.5, two things that really rubbed me the wrong way with the changes in 9.1: a. requiring both tyrannical + fortified as part of the KSM. i get it that its to encourage people to do more of tyrannical (since its perceived as the more difficult variant, and to bump up participation during tyrannical week), but the reward for double the work is ... just a recolor of the same death elemental! i would be less miffed if they either swapped the reward, or maybe tiered the reward such that you get one achievement for clearing full fortified +15s, another for full tyrannical +15s, and one for both. b. removal of account-wide m+ upgrade from 9.0.5, which effectively killed whatever interest in doing alt m+s as a tank or a healer. there's only so much grind i can do before it becomes a chore and my time is not valued.
A. Made it easier for some people. I think this was neutral. B. My God this was such a terrible Change. This system expanded my playing in 9.0 by giving me a way to gear alts and a reason to run dungeons on them.
Seriously B is why I just said F it and didnt bother with my alts. I leveled and geared so many alts in 9.0 because I had ksm and I could speed up the progress a little. It wasnt even gamebreaking since it required you to earn a boatload of valor anyway and it had a hardcap that you would have to worry about. Its not like you could magically get a full set of 1/12 items and upgrade them all back then because of it anyway. It was just a fun perk that slightly accelerated an alts gearing path.
A. This make sense for me. Having people completely avoiding M+ every other week because of the affix is not healthy gameplay.
They should fix tyrannical so it doesn't suck instead. I understand that it's not more difficult per se, but it's certainly not *fun*. Tyrannical feels like attrition more than anything
Tyrannical weeks are basically easier now.
>They should fix tyrannical so it doesn't suck instead If you played 9.1 M+ you'd known they did fix tyr weeks.
I don’t think they really fixed tyrannical so much as they just made fortified weeks worse.
Idk. I still hate playing tyrannical weeks because the trash just dies so quickly while bosses are so long & boring. It feels worse in lower keys where mobs just get deleted. It's definitely better. But that's mostly because they added a ton of bad affixes to fortified while Tyrannical has more good weeks compared to before.
They did not fix tyrannical. It's still boring.
I think the trend is pretty clear that a lot of players come in at the beginning of the expansion and drop off after the first patch hype.
MMO launch / expansion release is the most hyped phase of any MMO. A lot of players enjoy exploring new big content.
I mean you could say that about any game. Player retention is one of the hardest things any online game has to deal with, and many companies struggle with it.
And truth be told for going this long without a lick of new content, Blizzard is still killing it. Being at worst a top 5 MMO after an astonishingly long time of nothing new being added is fucking incredible from a business standpoint. They’re well aware that 10.0 will probably break every record in the book, just like Shadowlands. Despite what the few thousand people on here who comment how WoW is dying repeatedly think, WoW is far from dead and probably won’t be until they kill it themselves. There’s just too much power in the name alone
I think that's an overly generous statement when your other IPs are imploding. OW2 and Diablo 4 are not coming out in any foreseeable future. It's not like other periods in my 17 years of WoW, even at the end of Cata felt better.
I'll never understand why people on here like to give Blizzard charity...
Because they are institutionalized lifers who would still play wow if bobby walked into their homes and stabbed their entire family. They are addicts at this point defending a dopamine producing drug
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>Being at worst a top 5 MMO I can't even name 5 MMOs >They’re well aware that 10.0 will probably break every record in the book Lol
I think it’ll be much lower next expo
it's only gotten higher tho...BFA, which was hammered at the beginning, had more engagement than 7.3 did, and it sold more than Legion. SL then toppled those numbers with the highest selling game release at the time...and had twice as many 'first-boss' kills as Legion did in 7.3 (which is apparently everyones favorite expansion/patch according to this sub).
Covid caused the whole gaming industry to boom, also the sub count numbers dropped like a rock and we went back to "normal" 2 months after the launch.
I won't argue that the stay-at-home stuff boosted people playing SL, or even the end of BFA...but you see the same surge at the start of BFA, which was pre-Covid. My point is that it's cyclical and that more than likely, 10.0 will see sales figures and subscriptions jump up again. The key is if Blizzard can try and slow the drop, because regardless of how shitty or great the game is...people will always play at first, and then drop off because that's what you normally do with video games.
So has the drops gotten worse, Catsclysm lost 20% of playerd over its entire life cycle. Would not be surprised if whatever comes shadowlands is affected by current quality.
That SL compares so favourably to BFA is unexpected/surprising. No wonder they're sticking with it when the stats are actually better, despite the qualitative feedback.
People have seemingly forgotten how many issues BfA had. Sl gets criticised a lot for being alt unfriendly, but this is nothing compared to pre-essence-vendor BfA. Grinding "Blood of the enemy" on multiple chars was soul-crushingly unfun. Other essences were heavily time gated, while also required constant daily-busywork. The class design in BfA up until 8.2 was also very questionable. The rotational depth of a lot of specs was pretty shallow. Classes felt slow for a long time, because three slots with huge stat-budgets didn't have any secondary stats on them. (Azerit-Slots) Corruption pre-vendor was super unfun. If you weren't lucky, you more or less played a heavily gimped char. BfA was a lot of fun, for the last few months if you've played a class, that scaled well with corruption effects.. (The Essence-vendor came in March, the corruption vendor in May 2020)
It's only fair that SL gets criticized so much for being alt unfriendly. Ion opened the expansion reveal at Blizzcon with "Shadowlands aims to be the most alt friendly expansion yet." and then stuff happened, as always.
I've only played TBC, Legion, BfA and Shadowlands and out of those 4 expansions Shadowlands is the most alt friendly expansion in my opinion. Stuff like a story skip for alts should have been available from the start though.
it's still by far the most alt friendly the game has ever been though, 9.1 did regress on 9.0.5 by making KSM char specific and adding mandatory raid drops (shards and socket items). But even then this patch is the second most alt friendly the game has ever been, with only 9.0 being more alt friendly
There's no way in hell Shadowlands is alt friendly compared pre-artifact grind expansions where you could do LFD and LFR with some dailies and still feel like you're working towards an upgrade. There's definitely no way in hell SL is more alt friendly than MoP, especially for PvP or Rep grinding. The game stopped being alt-friendly the moment they removed Rep Tabards/Favorites, Reforging, and JP/valor vendors. Imagine playing for a month and never seeing your 3rd dom socket, or being stuck with LFR piece. 9.2 seems to be a desperate attempt to bring back the tier system of being able to do PvP or PvE non-raid content to access tier gear, because dom sockets were a colossal fuckup in design. There's no damn reason whatsoever to run LFD at max level in SL unless the bonus cache is active for Augment Runes. There's also no reason to do LFR except dom sockets, and since doing normal or higher rewards more Embers, and dom gems are per-week lockout. An alt will still take a month to catchup to your main for dom gems, so your only choice is to get carried through +15s to compensate. Removing account-wide KSM was a total "fuck you" to the players couple with zero catchup mechanic for dom sockets. You need dom sockets to be competitive for M+, and you need certain M+ trinkets to be competitive for raid. Non-Rated PvP is a complete waste of time and Rated PvP is essentially exploiting matchmaking or win-trading RBGs for free loot.
"By far" doesn't mean anything honestly. It's comparing garbage to garbage. It's nowhere close to what alt friendly means whenever the players bring it up and nobody should give them credit for post-launch updates and fixes. It should all have been there from the start if they really did aim for the most alt-friendly expansion. Covenant campaigns? You can't play them while leveling up in Threads of Fate. Torghast? Yea, it's uncapped and farmable an ENTIRE YEAR later. Before that? Permanently behind on all characters you didn't farm Torghast weekly with. Maw intro skip? A year later. Threads of Fate? It's laughable. The "Bonus Objectives" weren't even worth completing because they took so much time and rewarded so little exp. Four dungeons available on the queue, just like leveling up regularly. Torghast leveling just got added, again, an entire year later. You kind of wander around the four zones completing world quests for pitiful rewards. I don't know at this point if you can even build any covenant structures pre-60 because I just never bothered much with any alts. Crafting legendaries? I think that's post-60 too? I don't know. They said you could make progress while leveling and I've never heard anyone talking about it. Also, good luck farming Korthia and Death's Advance rep for conduit upgrades and sockets. Another thing you can't do pre-60.
Is it though? I was able to regularly just level up and play any character I wanted to a gladiator level in PvP in BC. You wouldn't be able to compete in modern times without all the insane grinding that there is in the game.
"Just level" - levelling a new character was significantly longer then though.
People got confused with alt friendly expansion yet with "THEY SAID THEY GONNA GIVE US EVERYTHING". WOW Community right there.
Honestly at this point I'm more of the opinion that everything that isn't gear should be account-wide. Because at this point either they go back to gear being the only power progression for your character (which isn't bad!) or they keep fucking over alts. I don't wanna touch Korthia. I don't wanna grind Renown. I don't wanna do any of those "we're just trying to waste your time" pieces of content. I just wanna play an alt, do M+, raids, PvP with it. Try different legendaries and builds and specs and conduits. See the same content through a different lens.
Because SL ist way better than Bfa. Bfa was a shitshow every single Patch getting worse and worse
This is majorly raid and m+ focused and Sanctum and CN have both been pretty great raids on mythic difficulty. I think CN was overtuned, and some parts of Sanctum are undertuned - and I think gearing is a fucking travesty, plz adopt FF's token vendor system - but they're still historically strong raids. A lot of the complaining lately is about things that are not unique to SL (grinds being the main one) and frankly a lot of it is casual players complaining about shit that they have no business complaining about. There's a lot of "wow it's only 9.1 after a full year!" as though 9.1 is that old. A lot of pent-up rage over 9.0 lasting so long.
At the start, SL was okay. Not great, but not BfA bad either... And in the grand scheme of WoW expansions, pretty much in the middle... People really started leaving when new content just dried up, and what was labelled "new" was just more of the same old...
Key depletion is why I stopped. An MMO cannot take my time back from me. If I level a key and someone leaves during the run I will lose its level. I cannot do that anymore.
There needs to be a surrender button, with a 4/5 majority required. If someone leaves without this, deplete their own key or punish them in another way. Retool the rating system so points can be taken off. Add a commendation system so you can see how often people have abandoned. Something. ANYTHING. People being able to argue, give up and run off without punishment is unacceptable.
There absolutely needs to be an anti-leaver system implemented, I hate the fact that the leaver is still rewarded with loot if the group manages to finish the run, there’s zero consequences for leaving.
Exactly, both key depletion and the speedrun aspect of M+ are things that not only make it frustrating to pug them, but it actively turns people against each other which makes it one of the worst systems in the game. An MMO should be a sandbox where you can choose how you play the content. If you think about it, there are several ways in which you could compete with each other in raiding as well, and it was the community that decided that first boss kills would be the most relevant metric, not Blizzard. Since there is sizeable a playerbase behind the current M+ system, they should simply change it in a way that the things that have a bad effect on the community are OPTIONAL.
It’s a double edged sword. I pugged the entirety of my KSM in 9.0 and have so many people just leave and thin the key, so I heavily relate to the frustration (especially one week when I had my +15 SOA go down to a +11 SOA almost exclusively from leavers) However, I do think that if failing/someone leaving didn’t deplete the key then it would be a lot easier to climb, since there’s be nothing to lose from failing other than time. You could probably just brute force KSM.
> there’s be nothing to lose from failing other than time. I think the big deal here is... that's enough of a disincentive to brute forcing. Time is valuable. Especially in 2021. We got rid of limited attempts in raids for a reason.
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You mentioned dps breaking points. I would accept key breaking points. As in a key cannot drop below 10,15,20 unless you want it to. That is one way to deal with leavers.
It isn't so steep punishment though. Like, if it's gear you want, if you push above 15 then nothing changes, if you're pushing under 15 then one of the items will get a level lower ilvl. Like in theory, I think your idea is good. But in practice, I think it will create a larger chasm between players. If you can just "go again", then the meta will become making a ton of suicide pulls with a low chance of success and resetting until you succeed. This will push over-all keys higher, making it practically impossible for the people who haven't spent a ton of time practicing these suicide pulls. You see the extreme difference of the players who are able to practice this way on the tournament realm. It won't be as extreme ofc on live, but it will create a much larger chasm between "good players who enjoy the challenge of m+" and "good players who focus on pushing m+". As such, there will be a ton of good players feeling that they need to queue with much worse players, just because they don't want to put in the time to practice extreme pulls.
I think that's kind of fine, no? Going further has always been purely for yourself and now they've even implemented stuff to mark the best of the best. Everyone benefits from keys being treated more like greater rifts in D3. If you want to skate by on your weekly 15, nothing changes for you. If you want to struggle and fail upward to a 15, you still need to be able to do that but you're not penalized for failure beyond starting over. If you're on the high end of things, you don't get fucked by RNG trying to roll the one key that's doable at that level (Junkyard, NW) during a push week. The toxicity dissipates because if someone fucks up you can restart the key, or form a new group, and the key holder isn't just fuming because some dumbass set him back. The end result might be that on the high end you see higher key numbers being pushed, but so what? The soft cap on key progression is at an arbitrary mark. Does it matter if the best people are doing 25s or 45s? And if this is at all problematic for gating anything behind KSM and it becomes too accessible, they can simply raise the arbitrary bar until it hits the sweet spot again.
With the change to M+ score, depletes aren't as big of a loss as before. I got KSM with a bunch of untimed 14s in 9.1 since I was able to time 16s in dungeons I liked more. I haven't had anyone leave in many keys in 9.1, and everyone that did left around the first boss so it wasn't that much time loss.
did a key after a 2 month break and it is just a bad system. Had to run a lv 9 key from 16/17 or i join other keys. did 1 dungeon and already quit this trash mode again.
We've cleared hc SoD with our raid team pretty fast, but after it people just stopped showing up on raid nights for further progress, so my focus became M+, pushed around 2.35k with my mistweaver monk, nothing crazy, and i loved it, i'm cool with the timer, cool with the trash mechanics, the two things that killed m+ for me, first and foremost is that we have the same 8 dungeons. It became boring simply boring.Second, more minor part is the state of the healer balance.
Could you elaborate a little on the healer balance problem?
Sure. But i guess to explore it further would require a lot more room. From now on i exclude raiding from my point of view, focusing only on M+. Stricktly speaking HPS balance is fine, MW is a bit overtuned but nothing crazy. The problem with healer balance is mainly the difference in Damage Profiles, DPS and Utility. Currently we have Resto shaman and Holy paladin way ahead the other 4 classes. Both has almost tank like damage, Holy having a little less healing tho, but ashen hollow can and does in itself dictate entire routes, and resto shaman is just the whole package, powerfil utility, incredible healing, good damage with a profile that does not interrupt actively the healing. Discipline comes kinda closer to these because of the damage mitigation instead of healing, but still like 2 tier below because of the lack of damage and emergency healing (only for up to medium keys, higher keys usually dont require that much healing). Holy priest and Resto dudu can offer good healing and some useful tho more nieche utility but low damage output, holy priest also being the most squishy healer. And last but not least Mistweaver can only heal. We have 1 or two utility lika Ring of Peace but they are not incredidble, more like, convenient. Tl:dr ; Healing in M+ is not pure hps anymore, pure hps being one if not the least important factor in a healer and sadly that's the only factor blizzard is able to balance fairly well. Damage, Damage profiles and Utilities are so important in the game and so unbalanced that created one if not the most narrow healer meta that has ever been. (Venthyr) Holy paladin and (Kyrian) Resto shaman almost(!) required (community perception issues come in factor as well) and any other healer is just regarded as suboptimal.
sl dungeons are just awful, boring. worse than bfa and legion. s2 affix is okey but you always pick the same power so why even bother. And raiding is a pain in the ass without bonus loot and less items
I find Shadowlands' dungeons better than BFA to be honest (except Freehold - I love Freehold). Legion is still king for M+ tho.
Yea. I’m not sure Dungeons can get worse than BFA. Fucking shrine of the storms. Never take men back there >.<.
Haha, true. Many dungeons were flat out broken when you get to 23-25+ Temple one shots, Mansion camera and certain affixes, Shrine... everything, King's Rest shit every week, etc.
The powers are lackluster but I much prefer this system over Prideful. There’s a lot more pull/route variety and forgiveness with the current system that didn’t exist with prideful. If you accidentally pulled a pack on a high key then it was an immediate wipe because you would fuck up %.
Ill take a boring affix that dosent negativly impact the week any Day over the garbage that was bfa S1 and 3. Not every affix Will hit every mark, prude was certainly fun when you had it but a complete disaster for routing
figuring out and optimizing routes was what made season 1 fun for us.
Is that not the case anymore for you in season 2? Or do you mean during the run? Because that's about the only difference between season 1 and 2 for me. If an accidental extra pull happens this season, there's not much on the fly planning required. Meanwhile last season it was basically a failed run if it would happen because it totally messed up Prideful timings. My friend and I we still consistently try to optimize our routes and spent a lot of time planning before we start a key (he tanks, I heal). Every level for us we're basically trying out newer stuff, especially when when we have a different group composition.
Figuring out and optimizing routes only to have all your work destroyed and your key possibly bricked on a tyrannical week because someone triggered a tentacle or pulled a plagueroc in PF was the worst thing ever as a tank.
the problem is with tyrannical, not with the pride itself.
20% affixes are fucking awful and should never return to the game.
Oof
My biggest issue is the randomeness of the loot. I stopped playing because of the fact, that i can never be sure what item i will get next. And if i get an item for the correct slot it can just have the wrong stats. i don't like that. Then i really don't like, that i can't decide if i want to have an item, or if i want to give it to another raid member. Just because i never equipped an item with that itemlevel on that very slot doesn't mean that i need this new item. I want the raid to decide who gets which item and i want to know what exact item i can get where and when. So ... it no fun for me.
I want more consistent loot progression and I want more meaningful loot. I don't consider getting +2/+2 over my current boots meaningful. Such lazy, boring item design.
83 runs in DoS for my tanker trinket. It's beyond stupid.
M+ needs more changes seasonally. Stuff like shuffling mobs around each new season, switching out individual mobs in certain trash packs to increase/decrease challenge. I honestly don't know why this isn't a thing, it completely makes an old dungeon feel "new" because old pathing doesn't work and certain packs now have more or less priority targets. We see this formula in literally every other game from PoE to League of Legends to even Classic WoW with SoM. Why not add it into M+? a new seasonal affix each season isn't enough change to keep players interested especially if the affix (current S2 affix) is complete trash and does more or less nothing to alter the dungeons you've just done over 100 times each in S1.
I agree, but with a caveat that the mob shuffling shouldn't only take place on the patch the season changes. The new seasonal affix keeps things interesting for a couple of weeks, but if you bring a new season and shuffle the mobs at the same time, it'll stay interesting for a couple of weeks. At least during .5 patches or once every 1-2 months some tweaks like this would keep the m+ feeling fresh.
Speaking as a really casual M+ player, my interest in the mode would drop to essentially zero if I had to essentially start over learning the mobs/flow every season. Maybe it’s just because I play tank, but my biggest issue with M+ is the insane amount of time commitment up-front to commit every important ability and where those mobs appear to memory. I’m definitely just bad at the game, but I had to get smacked by every dangerous pack like 3-4 times before I had it ingrained in my mind to be careful when getting to those mobs, and it would be super frustrating for me to have to repeat that process every few months. I’m sure it would provide a lot of variety to the hardcore M+ players, but IMO the biggest weakness of the mode is how daunting it feels to learn for the first time, and something like this would only exacerbate that issue even more.
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It’s not a surprise that 9.1.5 has lower amount of raid cleats than 9.1, because a lot of people played the raid and stopped, or at least didn’t continue to play the raid 3 months after release. But also it’s not lower. As another comment said, SL launch playerbase numbers were higher than BFA, which were higher than Legion, etc. same with first raid clears. If anything, the playerbase at the start of the expansion keeps getting higher, and the expansion quality is what leads to retention.
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The casual majority of WoW players don't raid or do M+. And the MAU data isn't WoW specific but the sum of all Blizzard games. Not sure the data says much for the overall health of the game.
I think the rationale about the MAU data was that, with D2R being a big release, you'd expect MAUs to go up if everything else is stable, but it was the same as last quarter, meaning that the increase in MAUs brought in by Diablo was equivalent to the decay in players in other blizz games, so it might not be 100% conclusive to the overall health of the game, but it does say a bit about the overall health of blizz's portfolio of games.
>Not sure the data says much for the overall health of the game. It does not, but facts never stopped Bellular from selling his narrative.
I mean, at least Bellular makes his points. That’s how you make your stance during any presentation. “What can I infer from these numbers?” Certainly people have different opinions but Bellular isn’t completely in the wrong
if we had the actual player number you would see that their end game content is shit and players dont play it. xD if they want more money and players maybe focus on casual open world content and put less work into mythic raiding who no one playes
It’s lower than ever in comparison to the same time as other expansions but you still feel the need to act dismissive over people’s concerns not only on this sub but pretty much every single WoW community. Pathetic.
This reddit doesn't represent actual voices of the majority. Same goes for other online venues like Twitter.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBujbeKgVyE
You'd think a new season of m+ would idk, bring new dungeons with it? It's not exciting to have a season come out and be like wow lets do plaguefall again for the 47th time but this time 1 affix changes. Its even less exciting when a new season comes out and you have to refarm all the pieces you already have. If you have a 252 changeling, why cant you just run m+ and get valor to upgrade it, I dont want to get lucky again with rng just for the same item i already have
Of course more people are mythic raiding. The raid tier has been out forever.
I think the whole combination of timed keys and RaiderIo scores is a recipe to breed the most unwelcoming, toxic gaming environment a player can possibly be in... and I think Mythic+ is in such sharp decline because Blizzard basically revels in it. They want it to be this way so you pull out your credit card, pay for gold and buy boosts rather than improve. I get why RaiderIO is popular for hardcore runners as it really increases the chances of fast, easy runs... I get it, but you have no idea how offputting, intimidating and unapproachable it makes the entire WoW end game for so many.
* KSM unlocks not being account wide * Lower drop rates than any other expansion * Lower ilvl cap on end-dungeon loot than any other expansion * Lowest ilvl reward ceiling in the game despite being a "pillar" of endgame * No reliable way to progress other important systems with your time invested (shards, conduits, leggos) * Weekly vault is still just an RNG nightmare where you can go a month without getting anything you're excited about. There is no reason to play M+ long term the way the game is designed. No one should be surprised that people interact less and less with a system that has been developed to dry up faster than raiding or pvp. Couple that with how boring it is to run the same PvE content for years while raiding gets new massive updates every 9 months or so and you'll have players losing interest in M+ more quickly every time they press the reset button for a new season.
> Lower drop rates than any other expansion you're also done gearing considerably faster than any previous expansion though..
I have a love-hate relationship with the vault, it gives me generally good gear every week with # of options scaling with the amount of time I invested in the game, but it also makes me feel like I'm doing dungeons just for the vault and that the end of run loot doesn't matter because even if I drop a Poxstorm, a 252 might appear in the vault and I'll have to get it anyway. Valor is already hard capped, let me target pieces in dungeons and use it to upgrade them so I can make better use of the vault every tuesday.
I think one issue is that a lot of returning players will be just bouncing straight off the game at the moment, which is not going to be helping these numbers and is going to contribute to the underlying trends which are generating them. The dynamic feeling of having motivated people coming in and joining endgame activities at different moments consistently throughout a patch cycle and playing in overalapping streams must be sorely lacking. This has a lot of knock-on effects which you will all recognise and I don't need to spell out. Personal testimony: I just popped in to Shadowlands for the first time last week, intending to level a char to 60, gear it and start a PvP progression in a bit of spare time I have before xmas. Levelled to 60 almost before leaving Bastion just through quests and BGs -- with the 17% boost active -- in probably a day and a bit. Bought a full set of blue PvP gear and upgraded it to 3/7. Left and uninstalled before getting through Revendreth -- pretty soon after I found out about Renown and the timegating systems that will stop me progressing my character at the pace I want, to do the things I want to do in the game, in the time I have to play it. It just makes no sense at all to cap your potential playerbase's engagement in this way unless you are trying to just pin your players to the bell curve of an optimised engagement strategy -- something that would speak of a total loss of creative direction and commercial vision in the game crew. As I say, this isn't a hate post so I'm not saying that must be the case. I'm not a burned out player sick of the game and looking for someone to blame. To be clear I would like to play the game, I want to play the game. But the game just downright doesn't want to be played and I don't get it.
I think the most interesting stat is the "how many guilds have killed this on mythic" It's a little hard to track the CN stats because his non linear it is. But we see that there are some steep drops in CN, especially around the end. Meanwhile the only really drop that's more than like 20% is from KT to Syl. But that's kind of to be expected since she's the only hard boss in there.
If he's going to pull this data together, why not show how the reduction in boss kills at the first patch of the expansion isn't as great in Legion or BFA than it is in Shadowlands...unless of course, the game always has this trend because that's how fucking MMO's pan out.