You will no longer be able to delete keystones in 8.1

[Kyr]

taking bets on when this "feature" comes back as a gold sink

[judgementofantonidas]

I expect it will give people another reason to do fewer or no mythic+'s for that reset. Maybe if they got rid of the reason why people are deleting them as well as removing the ability to delete them...

you are wise beyond your years.

[Logwyn]

Mythic+ is poor game design content brought over from Diablo. Blizzard should just scale all instanced content from 7 up to 25. At the minimum you need 2 healers, 2 tanks, and 3 dps.

Split appearance from stat section of the gear. Appearance can stay as drops, vendor, and/or crafted.
Add in something like sangucil for buying tokens that will upgrade you gear +5 ilvl to a max level plus roll crafting into making items that can up the rarity from green to epic. Then you could add in sangucil dropping from world quests, expeditions, warfronts, etc.

Maybe I've been drinking too early or too much... meh.

[Tziva]

To everyone typing out “balance the dungeons,” exactly how would Blizz do that? Short of populating them with the exact same mobs and exact same amounts with the exact same boss mechanics and the exact same floor plan. Do you see my point? There is no balancing between dungeons and affixes.

There is no way to balance affixes themselves so every week is a similar level difficulty, especially since who shoulders most of the burden each each affix is different for each (personally I don't mind there being some hard weeks and easy weeks; the latter gives a break from the former). But they can balance the dungeons themselves a little better. Some, like Shrine and Temple, are some of the lowest completed every week and some like Atal and Freehold are some of the highest completed every week. They could adjust the timers by a minutes or two in order to better fit the difficulty of each dungeon. I also think some of the mobs themselves need tweaked. Shrine, for example (which I will continue to pick on because I hate it), has less leniency with boss mechanics than most others and has multiple really obnoxious trash packs on top of it. It's not that crazy to make some abilities hit a little less hard (or slightly harder) or add or subtract a mob or ability from particular packs. Blizzard has done some tweaking on m+ in prior patches, so it's obviously a thing they can do, but so far it hasn't really been enough. Ultimately, I yield to their knowledge and wisdom with the best way to actually balance things because they have over a decade of doing it and I'm just an armchair video game nerd, but the main thing is that they have to give enough of a shit to do it rather than doing half-assed band-aide fixes for problems instead.

Although there are people out there complaining about the variation in affix difficulty, dungeon balance is largely what people are talking about when they are trashing keys and in the context of this thread. I'm not deleting my Shrine 12 key because I don't like the affixes most of the time, I'm doing it because Shrine is fucking miserable and I want literally anything else.

[Khallid]

Yes it was very common for +11 and up keys. If you are doing a +11 key and have like a crappy key like +9 SotS, why would you not delete it get a guaranteed +10 key for (hopefully) a better dungeon? Push groups also tend to delete keys that are 2 or more levels below the current key so that they can hopefully have a decent backup plan if they get stuck with a dead key.

It makes sense, but I didn't know that's how it worked. I thought you would get a lower key in your next dungeon if you deleted it.

Most of my guild doesn't really like mythic+ so we only do one 10 key per week and leave it there. Getting a better key afterwards doesn't matter for us once the weekly key is over.

[Eapoe]

There is no way to balance affixes themselves so every week is a similar level difficulty, especially since who shoulders most of the burden each each affix is different for each (personally I don't mind there being some hard weeks and easy weeks; the latter gives a break from the former). But they can balance the dungeons themselves a little better. Some, like Shrine and Temple, are some of the lowest completed every week and some like Atal and Freehold are some of the highest completed every week. They could adjust the timers by a minutes or two in order to better fit the difficulty of each dungeon. I also think some of the mobs themselves need tweaked. Shrine, for example (which I will continue to pick on because I hate it), has less leniency with boss mechanics than most others and has multiple really obnoxious trash packs on top of it. It's not that crazy to make some abilities hit a little less hard (or slightly harder) or add or subtract a mob or ability from particular packs. Blizzard has done some tweaking on m+ in prior patches, so it's obviously a thing they can do, but so far it hasn't really been enough. Ultimately, I yield to their knowledge and wisdom with the best way to actually balance things because they have over a decade of doing it and I'm just an armchair video game nerd, but the main thing is that they have to give enough of a shit to do it rather than doing half-assed band-aide fixes for problems instead.

Although there are people out there complaining about the variation in affix difficulty, dungeon balance is largely what people are talking about when they are trashing keys and in the context of this thread. I'm not deleting my Shrine 12 key because I don't like the affixes most of the time, I'm doing it because Shrine is fucking miserable and I want literally anything else.

That’s just it though, balance can not exist just in the issue of game design. The only way to do that is complete homogenization. Adjusting timers to be more or less lenient won’t bring balance to m+ dungeons. There will still be dead keys simply from a time to run ratio.
Look at Legion for example. There were dungeons avoided almost the entirety of the xpac for the same reason, and had less complaining than we have now. There will never be balancing of m+ to make them all appealing.
There can be balancing in making them all easier, but that won’t change the fact that certain weeks you will just have dead keys. Waycrest Manor, for instance, will always be a shit storm on weeks with quaking or sanguine simply because of multiple mobs with tight corridors. On other weeks, it’s a cake walk. Regardless, it doesn’t make that place any more appealing to run vs somewhere like Atal Dazar.

[Tziva]

That’s just it though, balance can not exist just in the issue of game design. The only way to do that is complete homogenization. Adjusting timers to be more or less lenient won’t bring balance to m+ dungeons. Look at Legion for example. There were dungeons avoided almost the entirety of the xpac for the same reason, and had less complaining than we have now. There will never be balancing of m+ to make them all appealing.

You're defining "balance" a lot more strictly than the people asking for M+ balance are. No one reasonable is expecting dungeons to be identical or similar every week, or consistent between weeks despite affixes. People are asking for the difference gap between dungeons to be less severe. It's a problem when there are some dungeons that are almost universally disliked or avoided, regardless of affixes, while some are almost universally sought after, regardless of affixes. Whether that is tightening or loosening the timers to be more appropriate to the volume of trash, or changing how troublesome or facerolly a particular pack or boss is, there are absolutely reasonable changes that can be made. The fact Blizzard has already done a small bit of tuning just attests to this.

That a similar situation existing in Legion doesn't really make it okay; where improvements can be made, they should - not dismissed because they failed in the past as well.

Adjusting some of the reasons that the easy ones are considered easy and the disliked dungeons are hated will really help alleviate the problem. It doesn't mean people want or expect them to be the same. Shrine is always going to be sucky during Bursting, Waycrest to Sanguine, etc. But Shrine doesn't have to be the worst every week. Atal doesn't need to be the best every week. The fact that they practically are (there's maybe 1 or 2 exceptions where they might be second place for either) is clear evidence that there is too much disparity between keys. The fact that people avoid certain dungeons even on easy weeks is also evidence of this.

There can be balancing in making them all easier, but that won’t change the fact that certain weeks you will just have dead keys.

(no, you can also balance to make some harder)

Again, not one is asking for it to make all keys identically appealing every week. Each will always have strengths and weaknesses and be affected to a different degree by different affixes, and people will always have personal preferences. You're looking at this way too much from a very strict/perfectionist angle that reasonable people acknowledge isn't possible. Obviously some weeks there will be unwanted keys whether because a particular dungeon isn't as appealing that week or the affixes as a whole are annoying. But you can always try to lessen the gap between what is desired and what is undesired and make it more consistent between each dungeon and between each week so that doesn't happen to as huge of a degree as it does now. You can do that by adjusting the timers that are considered overly lenient or overly tight and adjusting some of the bosses or trash packs that are either too much of a faceroll or too much of a pain in the ass.

If your argument is "it's impossible to make it perfect so they shouldn't even try to improve the situation at all" then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

[Deleted]

easy, remove the feature so people are stuck and cant push high so easily anymore = less currcency to buy = more grind

[xpose]

taking bets on when this "feature" comes back as a gold sink

I mean, it wouldn't be a bad feature.

Imagine doing a +11 two chest but you have no intention of doing a +13. Go to the vendor and reset it to a random dungeon and a level of your choosing 2-11. So if you want another random +11 then you can choose it.

[Marrilaife]

Shoutout to people who run their key. I haven't ran my own key in forever. I just get a group for something better than the shit I get.

If you have a premade group, what do you do? Going back to early legion "Lf 5th with MAW key, boosting for free"? Or going back to late legion "what keys do you guys have?" "seat, seat, brh, seat"

I'm not sure what the issue is, so we are back to the mechanics of Legion. There you could delete you key, but after doing any content awarding a new keystone you would get the very same keystone.

If you want to do a lower level you are still free to put it in the socket and leave the instance. You just won't get another dungeon, but the same dungeon -1.

That's how it worked for all Legion,

That was the better half of legion. The worse (early) half was you ran your keys until they all reached deplete ceiling and then were forced to carry pugs because you ran out of keys. We all probably want to forgot that fiasco.

[Liarparadox]

Thoroughly unsurprising. Instead of fixing the problem, they just remove the workaround.

hahahah this made me laugh out loud. So f'n true.

[ydraw]

There is no way to balance affixes themselves so every week is a similar level difficulty, especially since who shoulders most of the burden each each affix is different for each (personally I don't mind there being some hard weeks and easy weeks; the latter gives a break from the former). But they can balance the dungeons themselves a little better. Some, like Shrine and Temple, are some of the lowest completed every week and some like Atal and Freehold are some of the highest completed every week. They could adjust the timers by a minutes or two in order to better fit the difficulty of each dungeon. I also think some of the mobs themselves need tweaked. Shrine, for example (which I will continue to pick on because I hate it), has less leniency with boss mechanics than most others and has multiple really obnoxious trash packs on top of it. It's not that crazy to make some abilities hit a little less hard (or slightly harder) or add or subtract a mob or ability from particular packs. Blizzard has done some tweaking on m+ in prior patches, so it's obviously a thing they can do, but so far it hasn't really been enough. Ultimately, I yield to their knowledge and wisdom with the best way to actually balance things because they have over a decade of doing it and I'm just an armchair video game nerd, but the main thing is that they have to give enough of a shit to do it rather than doing half-assed band-aide fixes for problems instead.

Although there are people out there complaining about the variation in affix difficulty, dungeon balance is largely what people are talking about when they are trashing keys and in the context of this thread. I'm not deleting my Shrine 12 key because I don't like the affixes most of the time, I'm doing it because Shrine is fucking miserable and I want literally anything else.

Just getting rid of the Volatile Droplets and the Shrine Templars would make the dungeon as a whole much less annoying. The droplets are seemingly just there to ensure that any affix is 10 times worse in Shrine than it is elsewhere. They serve no other purpose.

[Swalload]

If you have a premade group, what do you do? Going back to early legion "Lf 5th with MAW key, boosting for free"? Or going back to late legion "what keys do you guys have?" "seat, seat, brh, seat"

Then we have 4-5 keys to choose from so it's not that bad, the chances that everyone has a cancer key is not really high.

[davesurfer]

I fell really stupid, I never knew this was a thing

[Video Games]

I still havent even done a mythic+ of kr and shrine on any level. Seems scary

[slime]

I fell really stupid, I never knew this was a thing

Probably because if you did this in Legion - you lost your key period - you never got a new one after deleting it. So, they added this for 8.0 and now it's gone? These guys are pros at foresight!

I still don't understand how one of my favorite features of Legion was absolutely destroyed and horrible in BfA.

[Marrilaife]

Then we have 4-5 keys to choose from so it's not that bad, the chances that everyone has a cancer key is not really high.

It is if you run a lot of keys per week until everyone has a dead-end one. If you run just the weekly, then yeah, usually there is enough choice. But regular runners / pushers can end up with unpushable key on every member.

[Swalload]

It is if you run a lot of keys per week until everyone has a dead-end one. If you run just the weekly, then yeah, usually there is enough choice. But regular runners / pushers can end up with unpushable key on every member.

Well this raises the question of what is a dead-end? Is it because the dungeon is badly designed or because the group is just not good enough? Because at some point everybody will reach a dungeon they just mathematically can't finish even when played properly, that's just the nature of infinitely incremental stats.

[Marrilaife]

Well this raises the question of what is a dead-end? Is it because the dungeon is badly designed or because the group is just not good enough? Because at some point everybody will reach a dungeon they just mathematically can't finish even when played properly, that's just the nature of infinitely incremental stats.

The issue is the same level of keystone on the same affixes is often doable in 1 dungeon but not so in a different one. There's a reason why top pushes are done on Atal'dazar, Freehold, Siege and Motherlode mostly, and not on Waycrest and Shrine. Affects mostly pushers anyway, not the "1 for weekly" guys, so I guess majority of playerbase should be ok.

However the imbalance between dungeons affects players of most skills thresholds, if a top tier has easier time doing +20 Atal over +20 King's Rest, the same rule will apply to average skilled team on a +10 in these 2 dungeons.

[Jastall]

You're defining "balance" a lot more strictly than the people asking for M+ balance are. No one reasonable is expecting dungeons to be identical or similar every week, or consistent between weeks despite affixes. People are asking for the difference gap between dungeons to be less severe. It's a problem when there are some dungeons that are almost universally disliked or avoided, regardless of affixes, while some are almost universally sought after, regardless of affixes. Whether that is tightening or loosening the timers to be more appropriate to the volume of trash, or changing how troublesome or facerolly a particular pack or boss is, there are absolutely reasonable changes that can be made. The fact Blizzard has already done a small bit of tuning just attests to this.

That a similar situation existing in Legion doesn't really make it okay; where improvements can be made, they should - not dismissed because they failed in the past as well.

Adjusting some of the reasons that the easy ones are considered easy and the disliked dungeons are hated will really help alleviate the problem. It doesn't mean people want or expect them to be the same. Shrine is always going to be sucky during Bursting, Waycrest to Sanguine, etc. But Shrine doesn't have to be the worst every week. Atal doesn't need to be the best every week. The fact that they practically are (there's maybe 1 or 2 exceptions where they might be second place for either) is clear evidence that there is too much disparity between keys. The fact that people avoid certain dungeons even on easy weeks is also evidence of this.


(no, you can also balance to make some harder)

Again, not one is asking for it to make all keys identically appealing every week. Each will always have strengths and weaknesses and be affected to a different degree by different affixes, and people will always have personal preferences. You're looking at this way too much from a very strict/perfectionist angle that reasonable people acknowledge isn't possible. Obviously some weeks there will be unwanted keys whether because a particular dungeon isn't as appealing that week or the affixes as a whole are annoying. But you can always try to lessen the gap between what is desired and what is undesired and make it more consistent between each dungeon and between each week so that doesn't happen to as huge of a degree as it does now. You can do that by adjusting the timers that are considered overly lenient or overly tight and adjusting some of the bosses or trash packs that are either too much of a faceroll or too much of a pain in the ass.

If your argument is "it's impossible to make it perfect so they shouldn't even try to improve the situation at all" then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Yes, I agree. Making dungeons 100% balanced can't be done, but there's a vast difference between not 100% balanced and shit like Shrine, King's Rest or Tyra!Temple being far, far harder than any Atal'dazar key. They've tried to fix some of that, by nerfing Temple bosses for example, but it's not been enough, and literally no one I know wants to ever run Shrine or Tyra!KR if they can help it.

Doesn't help that a lot of dungeons are also just not enjoyable. Motherlode isn't hard but I don't want to slog through 40 minutes of trash, especially not during Teeming weeks. Tol Dagor is a huge camera screw, and Sanguine or Necrotic make the place completely unbearable. People like Atal'dazar because it's short, doesn't have a metric assload of trash, doesn't become ten times harder because of one affix and the bosses are fairly easy with predictable mechanics. Only thing I dislike about it is the gate skip to Vol'kal.

IMO Freehold is a good baseline for dungeons. Its trash can be punishing but remains fair, apart from maybe the final pack before Sweete. Its bosses can be hard if you mess up but, until you hit the keys that make the Captains blatantly bullshit, are all manageable. It's not too long, and while some classes can be advantageous (IE stealth classes to get the dog this week), you don't have anything like the first hall in Underrot that all but has to be skipped or Tol Dagor which might as well be renamed Rogue Dagor. Blizzard should balance difficulty with that dungeon as the target. Siege of Boralus would also be there if the final boss wasn't so incredibly annoying.