Can we just geek out over "the era of TO?"

[Omedon]

Starting with patch 8.3, and going into the likely 2 year run of shadowlands, there will be a consistent, supported and intentionally important avenue of progression content for not one, not five, but one TO five players! Role agnostic, scaling to size, this could redefine how we look at this particular MMO!

The people I play with formed a pretty tight circle of friends that enjoyed steamrolling LFD in WOTLK for badges and profit back in the day. As the years rolled on and we got all adult and busy, it's become almost impossible to line us all up for a 5-man run. If M+ had hit in WOTLK, we likely would have gravitated toward it, but in this time of heightened accessibility we've basically replaced dungeons with World Quests because we just never line up. We get in the occasional island, and we really appreciate that it's 3-man content... but with the idea of one TO five of us having something to do together, we haven't been this excited since our brief return to city of villains (which has always had level and group-size scaling content) when it came back with quasi-official servers!

Honestly, I have nothing in common any more with the core dungeon running community, because to do that content I have to deal with people I don't know and, to be honest, I don't play this game to do that. It's not a social "meet people" setting, it's a place I play alone or with friends, and oh boy are we ever excited to have an avenue of content that fits the exact number of people we can line up on any given day: One TO five!

We can't be the only ones looking forward to this, and I know we'll be leaning hard on this content to do our best to "vote with our time" and tell the devs "more of this please!"

[The Butt Witch]

It's an MMO. If you play it as a single player, it will get boring.

I would know, I'm an actual shut-in.

[Calfredd]

If you're talking about that pve tower thing, I thought they said 1-4 players.

[perkocet]

I definitely agree, it is nice to have some stuff scale to your group so you can play with a more intimate group of friends if you want, instead of being forced to pick up randoms. It's not like we're asking to be able to solo current raids now. People will freak out about anything.

[Zyky]

Starting with patch 8.3, and going into the likely 2 year run of shadowlands, there will be a consistent, supported and intentionally important avenue of progression content for not one, not five, but one TO five players! Role agnostic, scaling to size, this could redefine how we look at this particular MMO!

The people I play with formed a pretty tight circle of friends that enjoyed steamrolling LFD in WOTLK for badges and profit back in the day. As the years rolled on and we got all adult and busy, it's become almost impossible to line us all up for a 5-man run. If M+ had hit in WOTLK, we likely would have gravitated toward it, but in this time of heightened accessibility we've basically replaced dungeons with World Quests because we just never line up. We get in the occasional island, and we really appreciate that it's 3-man content... but with the idea of one TO five of us having something to do together, we haven't been this excited since our brief return to city of villains (which has always had level and group-size scaling content) when it came back with quasi-official servers!

Honestly, I have nothing in common any more with the core dungeon running community, because to do that content I have to deal with people I don't know and, to be honest, I don't play this game to do that. It's not a social "meet people" setting, it's a place I play alone or with friends, and oh boy are we ever excited to have an avenue of content that fits the exact number of people we can line up on any given day: One TO five!

We can't be the only ones looking forward to this, and I know we'll be leaning hard on this content to do our best to "vote with our time" and tell the devs "more of this please!"

I do like the idea, but I'm skeptical, there was a tweet(might have been from one of the dev interviews at Blizzcon) where they said they're still trying to decide how often you can do the One to Five dungeon, the time gating is what throws me off as this becoming a big time feature.

[Cosmic Janitor]

If you're talking about that pve tower thing, I thought they said 1-4 players.

They said alone or with up to 4 friends.

Also limiting the feature is already killing it before it was even implemented.

[McCrazy]

If you're talking about that pve tower thing, I thought they said 1-4 players.

They said 'with up to 4 players' As far as I understand, that means 5.

Quote from wowhead:
Inside the Maw, an endgame zone in the Shadowlands expansion, is the Tower named Torghast. It's a scalable dungeon from 1-5 players. When you ascend, both you and your enemies grow in power. The lower levels are a standard dungeon crawl, but as you ascend you start seeing traps.

[Twdft]

If you're talking about that pve tower thing, I thought they said 1-4 players.

They said "bring 4 friends", so if you go too it's up to 5

Btw, make sure you go with actual friends. DDO doesn't have tank/heal/dd paradigm and dungeons there suck because everyone is doing their own thing and wonder why they die.

[derpkitteh]

i love the rise of "1 to X" content.

i only have one friend i do things with, and they're the only person i don't lock up and feel embarrassed to talk and enjoy myself around. me and him do a bunch of stuff together, so having a dungeon we can 2man is awesome.

[How dare you]

Starting with patch 8.3, and going into the likely 2 year run of shadowlands, there will be a consistent, supported and intentionally important avenue of progression content for not one, not five, but one TO five players! Role agnostic, scaling to size

The problem here is, it has to be easy enough so a guy can solo it, and so any group of players, no matter what roles they are can do it. 3 dps, no tank, no healer will need to be able to complete it just as well as 1 dps 1 tank 1 healer. What does that tell you about how challenging and interesting the content will most likely be?

[Nevcairiel]

The problem here is, it has to be easy enough so a guy can solo it, and so any group of players, no matter what roles they are can do it. 3 dps, no tank, no healer will need to be able to complete it just as well as 1 dps 1 tank 1 healer. What does that tell you about how challenging and interesting the content will most likely be?

There are various methods to deal with that. Ideal will likely be a typical dungeon group at 5m, at least if you want to progress towards the higher tiers of the tower.

But depending on scaling of the damage of the mobs and HP, a 5 DPS group would pull a bit smaller but kill them decently faster, while a group with tank and/or heal might pull a lot and AoE more. Maybe those in-run upgrades you get will also allow one of your DPSers to get more tankyness to compensate.

I don't expect a 5dps group to be the best idea for pushing higher levels of the tower, and if it is then thats a tuning failure, but it should be capable of doing a decent job.

[How dare you]

There are various methods to deal with that. Ideal will likely be a typical dungeon group at 5m, at least if you want to progress towards the higher tiers of the tower.

But depending on scaling of the damage of the mobs and HP, a 5 DPS group would pull a bit smaller but kill them decently faster, while a group with tank and/or heal might pull a lot and AoE more. Maybe those in-run upgrades you get will also allow one of your DPSers to get more tankyness to compensate.

I don't expect a 5dps group to be the best idea for pushing higher levels of the tower, and if it is then thats a tuning failure, but it should be capable of doing a decent job.

What about bosses?

Also they said that a group of 3 dps will be able to do it just as well as a group made up of dps, tank and healer. So if a group of 3 dps need to pull more carefully, then they won't be able to do it just as well.

[Tipton]

I'm assuming from what I saw that the 'Anima buffs' should help scale for lower number of players.

e.g. Assuming the same number of mobs, mob health scaled to numbers and distribution of buffs: One player should be able to stack up buffs x5 faster than 5 players. Making up for the lack of heals, additional CC and rezzing.

[Echeyakee]

If raid scaling is anything to judge by, there will be the best amount of players to run with and there will probably be instances where having more or less people will make the fight much harder. Also the whole "role does not matter" kinda stinks of "don't be a healer".

[bloodmoth13]

id like to see dungeons scale up to about 7 players before mythic+, having 2 extra dps shouldnt impact things all too much imo.

[Biske]

Almost every MMO I play, I basically just play single-player, and for dungeons and such, I pretty much view my group as a bunch of random dudes that I need to tag along with to accomplish the thing I want. This is true even for MMOs or random games I play that don't have a "looking for group" feature. My interactions are limited strictly to what I need to acquire the group, and then to finish the dungeon or task if they seem like they have no idea what they're doing. I don't hate other people or anything. I'm just largely indifferent to other people, or at least interacting with them on a deeper level. I do like seeing other players running around and such interacting with each other, which is why I don't just stick to single-player games.

All that preamble is just to say that I appreciate actual content that can be done solo. I do like having some form of progression and whatever. I used to be a hardcore raider back in the day, and I still enjoy the feeling of my character becoming more powerful and all that (that's a preemptive answer to people who would be like "but why do you want more paths progression if you're not going to do X content?").

[d00dles]

I'm excited to see how it turns out. I really do hope they don't end up limiting it to one time a week or anything like that.

The tower sounds like the perfect type of content for an Iron Man challenge. Wear only green gear (or blue gear) and see how far down you can go type of stuff. If Blizzard supports an official Iron Man challenge with Leaderboards and rules then it could be HUGE.

[Nevcairiel]

So if a group of 3 dps need to pull more carefully, then they won't be able to do it just as well.

Why not? There is no time aspect to it.

Obviously, as with all content ever in any game, there will be ideal combos, there will be better combos, and there will be worse combos. The only key is how wide the gap between those is, and if those random upgrades perhaps offer tools to compensate for shortcomings in your group.

If you have a healer for example, you are not likely going to pick a self-heal centric bonus, but if you don't have a healer, you might want to get that.

[Jazzhands]

It's an MMO. If you play it as a single player, it will get boring.

I would know, I'm an actual shut-in.

Or you can, you know, do both. Lots of people do that.

I absolutely love soloing in MMOs, because when it's doable and not just cockblocked by mechanics it's a wonderful challenge. In Legion I loved soloing M+ as a DH, or before the big class change at the end of WoD I had a lot of fun soloing MoP raids on my monk as I didn't play MoP so they were more or less completely fresh, and doing that was a lot more fun than an overleveled raid would have been. Most of the bosses were pretty easy, but a few were really fun and took a lot of effort to get down, Durumu comes to mind as one of my favorites, you still had to do mechanics and such so it was hectic but manageable.

The mage tower is also another great example. It was almost universally loved from what I've seen, a perfect example of good solo content in an MMO. Soloing can bring a challenge that group play simply cannot, because in a group you pretty much always have to rely on others to some degree, and if there's a weak link you can only do so much to cover it. When you're soloing everything is under your control, fixing mistakes and making improvements is entirely up to you and how far you want to go.

I plan on spending a lot of time in Torghast solo, because I like to see how far I can push myself in both strategy and execution, and it's an activity I can do anytime because I don't need to wait for others to log in and I hate pugging.

[Beastiel]

To make it viable to play solo while not making it mandatory it would have to be very tedious and suboptimal. certain classes will always be vastly more efficient at it than others. it cannot actually give good rewards or it will be held to a far higher degree of balance scrutiny and blow up in blizzards face.

something like this is incredibly challenging to pull off from a game design standpoint and I really don't have a whole lot of faith in their ability to pull it off.The way they were talking about it made it seem like they haven't even thought that hard about the bigger design hurdles yet.

also when blizzard says "randomly generated, endlessly replayable content" I just hear "meaningless, forgettable content devoid of charm"

Like island expeditions.