Upcoming Mythic Keystone Changes

[chaud]

Upcoming Mythic Keystone Changes

We’ve been thrilled to see how positively players have responded to Mythic Keystone dungeons since Legion’s release. However, there are a couple areas in which our original design for the system hasn’t quite matched up with how things have worked out in practice. In an upcoming 7.2.5 PTR build, we’re going to try out a couple of changes to how Keystone runs work.

The first big change is that we’re getting rid of the depletion mechanic. We’d originally imagined that getting ahold of a Keystone would be more of a barrier than it is, but in reality, there are so many players participating that it’s generally not too difficult to find someone with a Keystone you’d like to run. In that environment, depleting a Keystone is more of an annoyance than anything else – especially when it happens for reasons outside of your control (such as a player disconnecting).

Instead, we’re going to try the following:

• Completing the run on time will have the same results it currently does in 7.2: you’ll get a new Keystone for a random dungeon that’s 1-3 levels higher than the one you just completed, based on how quickly you finished.
• If you complete the dungeon but don’t make the timer, you’ll get a Keystone for a random dungeon that’s 1 level lower than the one you just used.
• If you don’t complete the dungeon at all, you’ll have a Keystone for the same dungeon that’s one level lower than the one you just used.

The other thing we’re looking to change is the way that rewards are given at the end of a run. Currently, when you complete a run that upgrades your Keystone by 2 or 3 levels, you’re also given a 2nd or 3rd chest. This is because, when we believed that Keystones would be rare, we didn’t want you to miss out on any of the loot you might have collected from the runs you were “skipping.”

However, because of this, players tend to look for lower-level Keystones that they can easily stomp through, instead of higher-level Keystones that are appropriately challenging for their gear and skill. That, in turn, affects who they’re willing to invite. AOE damage output is preferred over everything else, because the only concern is how quickly you can clear through easy trash packs. And gear requirements tend to outpace what actually drops: if you could find upgrades in a Mythic 6, you’ll have a hard time finding a group, because the Mythic 6 groups are full of players who are capable of clearing 10+ and are just looking for an easy 3-chest.

With that in mind, here’s the changes we’re planning to test:

• You no longer receive additional chests at the end of a run for completing it quickly.
• When you finish a Mythic+ dungeon, the chest at the end will contain two items and an appropriate amount of Artifact Power.
• If you beat the timer, regardless of how quickly, there will be a third item in the chest.
• Keystones can still upgrade by 2 or 3 steps, so you can quickly get to a difficulty level appropriate for you.

Our overall goal with these changes is to incentivize groups to take on dungeons where they know they’re likely to see upgrades, instead of preferring keys that are far too easy for them. Once the Tomb of Sargeras raid is available on Mythic difficulty, we’ll also increase the maximum rewards from Mythic Keystone runs to level 15.

[morph4037]

E: First. o.O

E 2.0: After reading up on this situation more and reading the "clarification", I can only ask "WTF are you thinking Blizzard?"

[cuafpr]

i like this, esp if lowers the constant GO GO GO GO . i personally don't liek the timer system but at least no more 3 chest helps with that.

[Onikaroshi]

Old way of doing mythic + "Ok guys, lets 3 chest this! WoHOO"

New way of doing mythic + "Ok.... well, we did the dungeon too fast, we still have 7 min on a +2 keystone upgrade so.... i guess go to the bathroom or something? No, don't pull the boss, we want a +1 upgrade for more loot"

Seriously one of the more retarded choices lately if it goes through....

stupid shit right there

[ralilioth]

So for putting in more effort AKA getting 3 chests you now get less loot, so the incentive is to just take it slooooww and 1 chest every key now to get max amount of loot? brilliant designing right here.

[Emerald Archer]

Old way of doing mythic + "Ok guys, lets 3 chest this! WoHOO"

New way of doing mythic + "Ok.... well, we did the dungeon too fast, we still have 7 min on a +2 keystone upgrade so.... i guess go to the bathroom or something? No, don't pull the boss, we want a +1 upgrade for more loot"

Seriously one of the more retarded choices lately if it goes through....

stupid shit right there

What lol. Because you can't deplete the key anymore your entire issue doesn't exist. You do the +2, go in, do that run, get the loot from that, get higher? k do that, fail? well it's 1 key lower, try that.

You'll always have runs to do, you won't "Lose out on loot"

- - - Updated - - -

So for putting in more effort AKA getting 3 chests you now get less loot, so the incentive is to just take it slooooww and 1 chest every key now to get max amount of loot? brilliant designing right here.

Doing keys fast won't get you less loot, you aren't losing loot. Time is the currency in this situation, not your key, because your key can't deplete now.

[Lucetia]

Old way of doing mythic + "Ok guys, lets 3 chest this! WoHOO"

New way of doing mythic + "Ok.... well, we did the dungeon too fast, we still have 7 min on a +2 keystone upgrade so.... i guess go to the bathroom or something? No, don't pull the boss, we want a +1 upgrade for more loot"

Seriously one of the more retarded choices lately if it goes through....

stupid shit right there

Do what? I don't see anything in there saying you can't finish it fast still. Just that if you finish it fast you don't get extra loot because you over geared it basically. If anything it'll encourage people to run Mythic +'s on par with their gear level. Also, if you finish a keystone fast you are rewarded with the extra time to do another one or get on with something else.

[Zeek Daniels]

Its like they dont think people will game their system.

[Onikaroshi]

Do what? I don't see anything in there saying you can't finish it fast still. Just that if you finish it fast you don't get extra loot because you over geared it basically. If anything it'll encourage people to run Mythic +'s on par with their gear level. Also, if you finish a keystone fast you are rewarded with the extra time to do another one or get on with something else.

To maximize loot though you'll want to do a +2 (3 pieces), +3 (6 pieces), +4 (9 Pieces), +5 (12 pieces)

If you go fast you'll get +2(3 pieces), +5(6 pieces) and on top of that you miss out on chests for legendaries and BLP

+2-+5 slow is 4 chests

+2-+5 fast is 2 chests

+2-+5 in 7.2 fast is 6 chests, unless they up the drop rate significantly for legendaries from M+ is a loss that way too.

[jambert97]

Depleted key changes seem good, seems like only positive changes.

For the loot, I don't see how this would change people running lower keys? CoS/Upper Kara get farmed because you can do up to +9 in under 15 mins quite easily. Unless there is a serious upgrade in AP drops I still see lower keys being used by higher geared players, just because people are more interested in their ap/hour than the difficulty really, and also there tends to be an abundance of 4-9 keys, once you get above 10 you start to lose people who can't be bothered with the extra affix.

Also, is it just me or was the whole point of m+ to challenge yourself to go as quick as possible with your lower keys? Thats certainly how I thought it was supposed to work. Maybe it wasn't their design ideas but feels like they are fixing something that doesn't need fixing.

[hasslehoof]

if the loot is per person, great. if it's 2 across the whole group this change is shit.

[Emerald Archer]

To maximize loot though you'll want to do a +2 (3 pieces), +3 (6 pieces), +4 (9 Pieces), +5 (12 pieces)

If you go fast you'll get +2(3 pieces), +5(6 pieces) and on top of that you miss out on chests for legendaries and BLP

+2-+5 slow is 4 chests

+2-+5 fast is 2 chests

+2-+5 in 7.2 fast is 6 chests, unless they up the drop rate significantly for legendaries from M+ is a loss that way too.

Wtf are you talking about. People don't have unlimitted time.

If you have time, to do 9 dungeons in a sitting, do those 8 dungeons, so if you do a 2, then a 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 12, 11, 12 (including if you failed a few there) you get loot from all those dungeons in your time, and skipped keys to get up to better loot, you lost nothing, because you did what you had time to do.

Keys are not limitted anymore, time is, so time is the thing of value here, not keys. Understand?

[Doomchicken]

Interesting changes. Definitely a positive no longer having depleted keystones. It felt really shit losing out on your keystone because of a power outage or internet outage, which while rare has happened to me a few times.

Not so sure on the loot thing though. I can see it being a positive on the higher keystone levels where you're going to be boosting your keystone by 1 as it's basically free loot. It does kind of suck for those who are currently able to triple chest 10-15s though as that equals 3 less pieces of loot total.

[Deleted]

there is no point in doing a key higher than 10 now... the bonusap is a joke anyways
+13? deplete 3 times - you just got a easier key for the same loot
????

[darkwarrior42]

To maximize loot though you'll want to do a +2 (3 pieces), +3 (6 pieces), +4 (9 Pieces), +5 (12 pieces)

If you go fast you'll get +2(3 pieces), +5(6 pieces) and on top of that you miss out on chests for legendaries and BLP

+2-+5 slow is 4 chests

+2-+5 fast is 2 chests

+2-+5 in 7.2 fast is 6 chests, unless they up the drop rate significantly for legendaries from M+ is a loss that way too.

If you're only looking at the number of chests for a given range of difficulties, you are correct.

However, the reality would be more akin to the following:

Player A does +2 slowly, +3 slowly, +4 slowly, +5 slowly, gets 12 pieces of lower level gear.
Player B does +2 quickly, does +5 quickly, moves on to +8 or higher while Player A is still working his way through lower level dungeons, gets higher level loot.

And say Player B gets to +8 and fails to beat the timer... he gets 2 pieces of +8 gear (more valuable than 3 pieces of +5 gear), and now has a +7 keystone to do. Either he beats that and gets 3 pieces of gear and a +8 keystone, or he fails that one and gets 2 pieces of +7 gear (still more valuable than 3 pieces of +5 gear) and drops down to a +6 keystone.

Your model is only more lucrative if both of the following hold true:
-More pieces of loot are better than higher level loot (possible with lucky titanforges, but unlikely)
-Nobody cares about time spent (impossible given how WoW players approach the game)

[Bon3zz1001]

If the community wasn't so stingy this expansion they wouldn't have had to do this. It's pretty clear Blizzard doesn't like players asking for 30 ilvl higher than what drops from the dungeons.

I don't think that this will even lower M+ participation either but rather increase it now that keys can't be depleted and you can just run as many you want per week without having to find other peoples keys. This means people can actually just make groups instead of getting 24/7 declined from every group.

[Deleted]

So they're making it even better to do Mythic+ over raids to get gear.

Now, with these changes, if you deplete a key you still get TWO pieces of gear. If you get it in time which isn't very hard to do you get three pieces.

Let's say you were gearing up now, you could deplete a +10, get two pieces of gear. Run the +9 that you get given for depleting and get 3 pieces of gear then run the +10/11/12 key you get and deplete it for 2 pieces of gear.

[Onikaroshi]

Wtf are you talking about. People don't have unlimitted time.

If you have time, to do 9 dungeons in a sitting, do those 8 dungeons, so if you do a 2, then a 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 12, 11, 12 (including if you failed a few there) you get loot from all those dungeons in your time, and skipped keys to get up to better loot, you lost nothing, because you did what you had time to do.

Keys are not limitted anymore, time is, so time is the thing of value here, not keys. Understand?

if you have time to do 9 dungeons now you get 27 chests at 2 items a piece, so 52 items.

if you do 9 dungeons in 7.2.5 with the changes thats 9 chests with 3 items a piece so 27 items total.

plus thats 18 chests less for legendaries so they would need to up the drop rate from M+

the new way is way less items total, no ifs ands or buts.

Very few people do these things to push, they do them to three chest and be done with it, the people who push, will still push in the new system, but this hurts people who do M+ for gear.

They can keep the no depletion, that's cool, but the 1 chest thing is retarded and needs to go.

[Emerald Archer]

there is no point in doing a key higher than 10 now... the bonusap is a joke anyways
+13? deplete 3 times - you just got a easier key for the same loot
????

The AP is definitely nice, but you're right in that if "depleting" a key works the same as it does now, if I do an Arcway+10, and get a BRH+13, I can go into BRH, quickly deplete it 3 times, and have a +10 ready in like 2minutes, for my group to continue farming gear.

[crashandburn]

So for putting in more effort AKA getting 3 chests you now get less loot, so the incentive is to just take it slooooww and 1 chest every key now to get max amount of loot? brilliant designing right here.

How do you get less loot? Are you thinking straight? Do you get more than 1 piece of loot from 3 chests?