I worry that M+ will be a victim of it's own success, design-wise.

[Eurhetemec]

First off: If you hate M+ and want to see it DIAF, that's ok, but please find another thread for discussing that.



So according to Blizzard, they see M+ as a huge success:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman.../#7e3212c67007

Great, cool, and so on. I like the system, I think a lot of other people do too.

I'm worried, because Blizzard's designers, when they're confident and happy, often walk directly into design traps that other games with similar systems have suffered from, and other games do have similar systems, most of which suck pretty hard (unlike M+).

Two primary examples of such "bad" (imho) systems - WAR's "Ward" system for dungeons, and GW2's Fractals.

With WAR, progression through endgame dungeons was utterly reliant on getting pieces of gear with "Wards" on them. If you didn't have these, you took huge extra damage which made the dungeons into wipefests. This obviously subjected you to a ton of RNG and grind, and made things incredibly linear and alt-unfriendly. They later changed the system so certain achievements granted Wards, and you didn't have to grind the armour (and could get the Wards from non-dungeon sources), but it was a pretty massive, tedious grind, and it was entirely arbitrary - instead of letting you go as far as you could by your skill and gear and coordination and so on, you had just got cock-blocked by Wards.

GW2's Fractals have a ton of issues, and to be fair, Anet have tried to improve the system, but it is a similar concept - you have some boss abilities which do "Agony" damage, which, as you progress through Fractals, goes from "meh" to "one-shot". To counter this, you have to wear gear with with slots that allow you to equip "Agony Resistance", and to get that gear, you have to grind pretty hard. That resistance serves no purpose whatsoever in the rest of the game and the Agony damage is entirely arbitrary and has at most a tenuous connection to lore (unlike in GW1). There are also enough Agony-based abilities that relying on dodging to avoid them eventually becomes non-viable. On top of this, your progression through Fractals is limited in quite a fiddly way by yet another system not even worth discussing. So again instead of progressing on skill and so on, it's mostly a giant arbitrary grind - once you get to higher ranks, loot is plentiful (including loot you'd have to have ground hard for before), and the level of Agony resist you have means it's actually easier than the middle levels. Whilst I don't think WoW will copy this, or at least pray it won't, they also have a system where instead of full dungeons, each "Fractal" consists of various semi-random dungeon-fragments (imagine if you did one boss in BRH, then one in Eye, then one in CoEN and so on), which makes the system somehow seem more repetitive and dull, rather than less. They also have an affix-style system, which is part of why I worry that Blizzard will look to this for inspiration.

So TLDR: I'm worried that M+ will get ruined by some sort of "clever" addition from Blizzard, which really amounts to arbitrary extra grind specifically for M+ and for no other purpose.

If you are worried about this or other potential M+ changes, I'd be interested to hear it - also if Blizzard would never do this, that'd be nice to hear!

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

I can't see them adding special gear but I am worried with their ideas about battle rezes and other utility. We already lost huge amounts of utility like dark sim from wod CMs and group wide buffs so I assume more will come. Ultimately the biggest problem will be balancing if they want to continue pushing mdi style competition, and this may hurt the rest of the game.

Overall, the real success of mythic plus is because of titanforge and ap though. Without those there would be no reason for most people to do them so we should be more worried about those systems being removed than mythic plus itself.

Good shit though, didn't know about those other game concepts. They are interesting and w all know blizzard watches it's competition heavily.

[SirCowdog]

Two primary examples of such "bad" (imho) systems - WAR's "Ward" system for dungeons, and GW2's Fractals.

With WAR, progression through endgame dungeons was utterly reliant on getting pieces of gear with "Wards" on them.

GW2's Fractals and Agony.

So TLDR: I'm worried that M+ will get ruined by some sort of "clever" addition from Blizzard, which really amounts to arbitrary extra grind specifically for M+ and for no other purpose.

If you are worried about this or other potential M+ changes, I'd be interested to hear it - also if Blizzard would never do this, that'd be nice to hear!

I think that Blizzard wouldn't have any need to add arbitrary mechanics like Wards and Agony. The dungeon prefix and suffixes already add challenge, and as long as that challenges stays in line with the gear available through other parts of the game(raids, WQs, rep rewards, etc), then it shouldn't be necessary to artificially control the difficulty by other means.

[Onikaroshi]

Overall, the real success of mythic plus is because of titanforge and ap though. Without those there would be no reason for most people to do them so we should be more worried about those systems being removed than mythic plus itself.

That's one good reason to believe TF and some form of AP style progression are here to stay (not that I mind, I like both). If they remove them they kill off their new toy, cause, let's be real, 99% of people who do M+ don't do it for the challenge.

[HuxNeva]

That's one good reason to believe TF and some form of AP style progression are here to stay (not that I mind, I like both). If they remove them they kill off their new toy, cause, let's be real, 99% of people who do M+ don't do it for the challenge.

Well, of all the ways to get gear and AP outside of raids, M+ is by far the most fun content in the current game.

[Onikaroshi]

Well, of all the ways to get gear and AP outside of raids, M+ is by far the most fun content in the current game.

Oh, I'm not denying that, minus a few affixes that irk me M+ is very fun, but it won't be sustained on fun alone. For any content to exist in the game and be successful it also has to be rewarding, see micro-holidays. They can be fun, but they have no reward so I can't really call them successful because you barely see anyone partaking in them (minus the huge experience from AQ remembrance)

[Eurhetemec]

I can't see them adding special gear but I am worried with their ideas about battle rezes and other utility. We already lost huge amounts of utility like dark sim from wod CMs and group wide buffs so I assume more will come. Ultimately the biggest problem will be balancing if they want to continue pushing mdi style competition, and this may hurt the rest of the game.

I feel like they have a tricky issue with "bring the player not the class" conflicting with the desire to give classes cool unique stuff so most successful teams don't just have the same few classes in them.

Re: battle-rezes, I'm sure they'll do something - hopefully the only result is to make it so teams with only one battle-rezer have access to the same (or even just a similar number) of total number of b-rezes over time as teams with several/all members having them. I mean, my wife was saying, part-way through the MDI, "There's a heavy reliance on battle-rezes, I bet Blizzard changes something about that", and then a few sessions later the hosts are mentioning it, then Blizzard do in the interview, so I think that's unavoidable.

I mean, one thing they could do was make it like you have a system where you have 5 shared "charges" of battle-rez, each on it's own cooldown (which would probably need to be increased from 10 minutes - I'd need to think about that), accessible by all party members who have a b-rez. Maybe each member after the first with a b-rez adds a charge, but that would mean a full party of b-rezers had 9 charges, where one with only one had 5, which would be much closer in terms of real-game effectiveness without making extra b-rezers seem as nerfed.

Re: balance impacting the game, it is a concern, but perhaps they'll go the opposite way and give more classes more stuff? They seemed open to that idea.

Overall, the real success of mythic plus is because of titanforge and ap though. Without those there would be no reason for most people to do them so we should be more worried about those systems being removed than mythic plus itself.

I really doubt either of those is going away. People complain about them, but they together give great reasons to keep doing content and keep people playing the game (something some people seem to object to lol - no surprise I guess when 30% of the forum isn't even sub'd that they'd object to stuff that makes you play the game!).

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That's one good reason to believe TF and some form of AP style progression are here to stay (not that I mind, I like both). If they remove them they kill off their new toy, cause, let's be real, 99% of people who do M+ don't do it for the challenge.

Yeah, to be real people aren't doing it solely for the challenge, but the fact that it feels like "actually playing WoW" is a major bonus for me. Like, I like the rewards and so on, and I'm not pretending I'm trying to push for M21 or whatever, but the fact that it actually involves having to use your abilities, think from time to time, keep up the pace without mindlessly pulling everything in sight and so on (unlike, say, Heroics now) is really a huge part of the draw. It feel like many of the good times I had in dungeons in the Vanilla-Cata era (yeah I had some good times with Cata dungeons, I'm not going to lie - but they were not a good design overall).

[Deleted]

First line: Don't post unless you agree with me.

Well... i don't think that is how discussion boards work.

I think fractals in GW2 are much better than Mythic+ so... live with it. Nothing against mythic +, but i don't get the craze. It wasn't nearly as fun to me to watch an invitational as to watch a fighting game or heroes of the storm.

And honestly, if a system like agony would make mythic+ a viable end-game content with its own set pieces, i think the game would be better off from it.

[Erolian]

The thing I'm most afraid of for M+ is when/if they address the fact that raiding gear (sets/trinkets) is often simply much better for the high level dungeons than the high level dungeon gear. Personally I do feel like there should be some kind of set that you're striving for and which also drops from the dungeon if you're looking to really push dungeon progression but I'm worried that they'll screw it up somehow as its a tricky situation since you don't want to have a full split between dungeon and raid gearing akin to PvP/PvE gear when they used resilience and you also don't want to make it feel like you need to be 9/9m to do your +22 or go grind out insane dungeon sets to progress during raids.

I do feel like mythic plus at this point attracts people who don't wish to raid in larger teams as well as people who wish to raid, has a lot of attention, and has a large enough player base to deserve the dev investment to make it its own progression path rather than one that mostly feeds into gearing people for raids. How they can accomplish that I don't really know but it could go amazingly well or very very poorly depending on what happens

[Onikaroshi]

The thing I'm most afraid of for M+ is when/if they address the fact that raiding gear (sets/trinkets) is simply often much better for the high level dungeons than the high level dungeon gear. Personally I do feel like there should be some kind of set that you're striving for and which also drops from the dungeon if you're looking to really push dungeon progression but I'm worried that they'll screw it up somehow as its a tricky situation since you don't want to have a full split between dungeon and raid gearing akin to PvP/PvE gear when they used resilience and you also don't want to make it feel like you need to be 9/9m to do your +22 or go grind out insane dungeon sets to progress during raids.

Most classes already have separate stats for dungeons and raids, there's zero reason they couldn't disable Raid tier in M+ and maybe add a M+ set, though I don't know how they'd do that over multiple dungeons, may just be better to disable tier. It's trinkets that get iffy, do you disable raid trinkets to be fair? What about dungeon trinkets in raids, god its a huge mess at that point.

[Erolian]

Most classes already have separate stats for dungeons and raids, there's zero reason they couldn't disable Raid tier in M+ and maybe add a M+ set, though I don't know how they'd do that over multiple dungeons, may just be better to disable tier. It's trinkets that get iffy, do you disable raid trinkets to be fair? What about dungeon trinkets in raids, god its a huge mess at that point.

You would probably have to have parts of the sets be a potential drop from any dungeon rather than saying "Okay time to go to DHT to hopefully get my dungeon set helm" because you might not even see a key for a specific dungeon all week

[Onikaroshi]

You would probably have to have parts of the sets be a potential drop from any dungeon rather than saying "Okay time to go to DHT to hopefully get my dungeon set helm"

But then do they take away from gear you were shooting for from that dungeon specifically, like you get the helm 5 dungeons in a row. I guess the system would need quite a bit a testing and flushing out, like... an expansion beta or something :P

[Deleted]

why would m+ be a victim of its success when everything is right with them?

[Eurhetemec]

First line: Don't post unless you agree with me.

I'm not saying that, I'm saying, if you want M+ to DIAF, please create your own thread, the point here is to discuss threats to M+, not to just shit on it. If you think changes would improve it, I'm interested, but that's different.

I think fractals in GW2 are much better than Mythic+ so... live with it. Nothing against mythic +, but i don't get the craze. It wasn't nearly as fun to me to watch an invitational as to watch a fighting game or heroes of the storm.

And honestly, if a system like agony would make mythic+ a viable end-game content with its own set pieces, i think the game would be better off from it.

You haven't offered any reasoning, so, er, I guess that's your opinion, which is lovely, but without even a hint as to why you think that is just opinion. I've explained why I don't think the systems are good, but honestly, I'm not up for a lengthy argument on Fractals as they're part of why I became bored with GW2 and it's community. I think that without Agony Resist and without the arbitrary progression cap, they'd be a decent system (still inferior due to the dungeon-fragment) design.

Basically Agony Resist is a similar design to WoW's Resilience, except even worse, because it's not actually designed to mitigate a real problem (which in PvP, was people being burst down), but designed to mitigate an entirely artificial and extremely boring problem (Agony damage). I don't think anyone misses Resilience, and the only people who would miss Agony Resistance are those who use it as an exclusionary tool to boost their own egos.

why would m+ be a victim of its success when everything is right with them?

Because Blizzard have said they want to expand and improve it, and their history of "expanding and improving" systems that work pretty well is not a glorious one, historically.

[Deleted]

You know what's coming in 8 surely?

Mythic+ pet battles
Mythic+ selfies
Mythic+ tw dungeons
Mythic+ tw raids
Mythic+ professions

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

You know what's coming in 8 surely?

Mythic+ pet battles
Mythic+ selfies
Mythic+ tw dungeons
Mythic+ tw raids
Mythic+ professions

To be fair, mythic plus is the best thing the game has ever seen. I'm hoping for mythic plus leveling, by the rest is nonsense and you know it.

[Eurhetemec]

You know what's coming in 8 surely?

Mythic+ pet battles
Mythic+ selfies
Mythic+ tw dungeons
Mythic+ tw raids
Mythic+ professions

M+ professions would probably be an improvement on the current system, however it worked... Really not loving professions in Legion, but that's another thread.

[Monkeymoo]

You should worry

[Deleted]

To be fair, mythic plus is the best thing the game has ever seen. I'm hoping for mythic plus leveling, by the rest is nonsense and you know it.

Tbh I almost agree with you.

I was more commenting on bliz's risk aversion

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M+ professions would probably be an improvement on the current system, however it worked... Really not loving professions in Legion, but that's another thread.

Yeah profs are shit in legion.

[Jyggalag]

My only gripe with the spiraling success of M+ is that it didn't happen 5+ years ago when I didn't have a mortgage and could have aspired to be one of the players who will ultimately end up making a living out of playing their favourite game.

Ion's comments recently about CR balance shouldn't really concern anyone as they could easily fix this by limiting the number of CRs in 5 mans against time spent in the instance etc. without impacting the rest of the game, in the same way they already behave in raids.
If arena comp participation over the years is anything to go by, you'll still see the same classes time and time again at the top despite their best attempts to balance.

WoW as a spectator sport still has a long way to go in terms of appealing visually to a larger audience. The camera angles from the invitational were poor and I imagine that someone on the outside looking in wouldn't have been able to make much sense of what was going on. Would like an interactive option where I can select a player to watch and see their UI.

I think they need to be especially careful with new affixes in the future. Too many crazy random abilities will just over-complicate things for the worse.