Blizzard designed themselves into a corner with M+

[rohoz]

Raiders feel that it's mandatory to do rewarding content, and you think this is Blizzard designing themselves into a corner?

Nah mate, what is drying in a corner is those players' brains. The game is currently very well balanced, and there's content for different parts of the playerbase - the opposite of the dreaded Warlords of Draenor's Raid or Die.



Sir. Sir. We don't do this here.

Having content for everyone was pretty much not a thing until legion, for what it's worth. Every expansion pre legion was raid or languish.

[Th3Scourge]

Blizzard wanted M+ and raiding to be alternative paths of progression. Unfortunately they ran into the same problem as they did when they introduced arenas in TBC.

They can't balance the classes around raiding because it will affect M+. They can't balance the classes around M+ because it will affect raiding.
There are sizeable raiding-exclusive and m+-exclusive populations. They can't prioritize one over the other because it will cause subscriber losses in the long run.

Raiding can't award powerful items because it will make raiding mandatory for M+ players. M+ can't award powerful items because it will make M+ mandatory for raiders. This is also why tier sets don't fit into the current design paradigm. When they tried to have unique and powerful rewards from different forms of content, Shadowmourne in WotLK arenas happened.

There is an answer to this but no one wants to hear it. Templates for M+ and raiding. But since WoW's carrot on a stick is gear progression, most people won't stick around if you remove tangible gear rewards. If people don't feel their characters get stronger they'll start asking, what's the point of doing this? This is especially true in modern WoW's gear-centric RNGforged / corrupted design.

Once the momentum from Legion wears off and more and more people realize that the current design is boring and unbalanced, participation will plummet. This is exactly what happened with arenas and rated PvP in general. Once people realized that Blizzard would never sacrifice raid balance in favor of PvP balance, they left. The initial hype from TBC sustained it into MoP but in WoD participation just got destroyed and never recovered. And back during the TBC-WoD period there was a much higher population to sustain continued arena participation.

Remember when Arena World Championship was Blizzard's big event? Nobody gives a shit about that anymore. It's all about the Mythic Dungeon Invitational now. But it can only last so long until bad balance starts to drive people away. The writing is already on the wall with some meta classes (looking at you, rogues) being almost mandatory.

This is a classic example of "try to please everyone and you won't please anyone". Except, well, people who play casually. Now is a great time to play casually. You have tons of different content to try and the problems don't become apparent until you reach the very top level. But the parallels between arena's decline and M+ are definitely there. M+ has already become more exclusionary and elitist compared to its Legion iteration.

Tl;dr: Ion, you can't have both tight tuning and different forms of endgame content. Pick one. Super-competitive e-sports with tight tuning or casual gameplay with a variety of game modes. Can't have both.

There is no issue. They balance around raid. pvp tuning is done through pvp talents and traits tuning in pvp scenarios.

[Kralljin]

So do you have a better statistic then or...?

Yeah, better use statistics with a huge blind spot, right?

you claim M+10s are easier to knock out than the raid, yet the statistic shows otherwise.

Funny you say that.
Despite that fact i wrote an entire paragraph on "this is not about the difficulty".

If they were as simple as you said, people would be banging out the achievement for completing all of them.

Again, your statistic simply leaves out the fact that players might not do dungeon because they hate it.
Let alone if they deplete the key.

Because this a requirement for the achievement that you are using as proof.

And there is the high chance someone will join, see you're terribly geared, and just leave. Because they don't want to just carry you.

Then you look for other people.
You can even achieve Ilvl 400 within days of playing without even entering a single M+, which suffices for M+10.

And yet there's a ton of terrible rings in M+ too. More variety doesn't inherently make it better.

Then you don't go into the dungeon where the terrible rings drop and go where the good ones are...?

But you still ignore that if you want an azerite piece fast, the raid is the best way to go about it.

I don't think the crowd that doesn't raid mythic seriously cares whether they get those Azerite pieces within week one or two.
It's just one of those things like AP, where the most efficient thing is to simply use those super efficient weekly rewards than just playing the game.

Try more like, 45-50k. And 3.3% is still a decent chunk for that extra edge.

That even assumes that you play with Font correctly, whereas most M+ trinkets are pretty straightforward.

The "absolute" gain is irrelevant because guess what, you're not comparing rings to your gloves. You're comparing rings to rings.

The absolute gain is your dps result.
I would say that matters.

So yeah, i stand by it, sockets on rings are at the end of day not more valueable, because the value of a socket is not dependant on the slot it is on.

If you're not doing them in time, you're only getting 2 pieces of gear at the end, which is less than what drops from 10 man raid kills on average.

Two items on five people...so you got still a 40% on an item, sounds pretty good to me.

Then don't do it? There are people who genuinely enjoy it and that doesn't mean it should have to change just because you don't enjoy it.

Too bad that WoW is a progression based RPG where gear / power is the core of the reward system.

I wouldn't give a hoot about M+ if it wasn't the most efficient one and one of the primary reasons why you ditch your entire gear within days whenever a new patch comes out.
Gear as a progression system is absolutely broken, M+ is one of the major culprits on that front, both in design and in terms of rewards.

And in the light of recent class changes, they're also balancing classes around M+, so yeah, "good" for those people who want to play Resto Druid outside of M+.
The fact that they even design future systems such as the Covenant racial abilities primarily towards M+ doesn't make me exactly happy either.

As you've said, you don't consider 2k DPS a "huge" difference, so why do you need to hunt the same azerite pieces, just use the raid ones.

Considering we're talking about people who are below mythic, they don't look at 2k dps the same way a mythic raider does.

Ease to organize doesn't exactly translate into "getting gear".

Organization is most certainly a factor.

Which again, can be done through raid too where each boss will drop more gear than the average M+ run.

But raiding requires more people and are far harder to carry someone through that due to that.

I never said to compare the difficulty itself, I took issue with your claim that it's easy to get through M+10s for gear.

Yeah, because they're far easier to organize and on top of that even if you deplete key you're rewarded with End of Dungeon + Weekly reward, whereas in a raid, if you do not kill a boss, you are not getting anything.
The lack of a lockout makes it easy enough for anyone that can clear M+10 to complete their progression within days unless they also have the intention to also enter Mythic raids.
Blizzard obviously doesn't want that people complete their progression that fast, so they implemented systems like Titanforging and the weekly chest so people could still get technically an upgrade.

And especially Titanforging is not good for the game, yet M+ basically requires it to function.

[Grimbold21]

I mean, are there major differences in group setups? The classes you see topping meters in raids are essentially the ones doing it m+. Perhaps you don't see locks or hunters up high, but DHs, rogues and mages are essentially the ones pulling the weight.

[Kokolums]

I'll play prot paladin / brewmaster / holy priest so we can get glad at 1500 rating.

Its not sorted by spec. Just by class.

[Relapses]

Ah yes, the latest solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Your entire analogy falls flat on its face the second you consider the amount of overlap there is between M+ and raiding. If anything, shit was actually worse in MoP and WoD when CModes were a thing because then raiding trinkets actually DID have a huge impact on balance.

[Craaazyyy]

I'm repeating myself by saying that Arena both precedes Wotlk and existed beyond that point of time.



Which has no basis.
Factually, those changes have been more impactful in PvP and had barely any impact in PvE, yet you want to tell they happened because of PvE.
I'm not buying that explanation and as it sounds like the usual scapegoating of the "other mode".



You're free to post a source on this one.
Because ironically, Blizzard is currently the only one who still hosts PvP tournaments.

and i said that arenas past wrath had more problems than in wrath.. but it was still pretty good in cata and mop

you're being daft, you said that they made changes because of pvp and your only explanation is that it has to be because of pvp because if affected pvp more, but it doesn't matter which part of the game was affected because blizzard almost never make major changes to the game because of pvp.. also it had a lot of impact on pve.. all healers having dispel is a major pve change because now you can bring every healer to the raid and you don't need to bring a certain class simply for dispel, same with kicks and almost every single other change. Just because at the end of the day it affected pvp more doesn't matter.. also these changes actually made pvp worse more often than not(yes, giving every healer dispel, making dispel have a cd, giving rets kick and all the other changes they've made to the game since wrath made pvp much worse)

also source for what? that they dropped WoW? well you answered it yourself cuz now only Blizzard are hosting tournaments

[therealstegblob]

Again, no one is getting into M+10 after just hitting 120 unless you have a group willing to carry you. Hell, you're not getting into M+ in general until you gear up yourself. Unless you have a group willing to carry you.

Which is literally no different than a guild carrying you through Heroic.

Getting a carry in a M+ is significantly easier than getting carried in a raid. All you have to do is list yourself as MY KEY YOUR CARRY and you can easily run 10+ keys. I did it on an alt of mine and while you do have to work through a few low level keys at first, if you're willing to put the 'effort' into making your own group then it's very easy to get carried.

In a raid, the only thing you can really try to offer is a specific boss lockout, which doesn't give you nearly as much bargaining power.

[Nfinitii]

Blizzard wanted M+ and raiding to be alternative paths of progression. Unfortunately they ran into the same problem as they did when they introduced arenas in TBC.

They can't balance the classes around raiding because it will affect M+. They can't balance the classes around M+ because it will affect raiding.
There are sizeable raiding-exclusive and m+-exclusive populations. They can't prioritize one over the other because it will cause subscriber losses in the long run.

Raiding can't award powerful items because it will make raiding mandatory for M+ players. M+ can't award powerful items because it will make M+ mandatory for raiders. This is also why tier sets don't fit into the current design paradigm. When they tried to have unique and powerful rewards from different forms of content, Shadowmourne in WotLK arenas happened.

There is an answer to this but no one wants to hear it. Templates for M+ and raiding. But since WoW's carrot on a stick is gear progression, most people won't stick around if you remove tangible gear rewards. If people don't feel their characters get stronger they'll start asking, what's the point of doing this? This is especially true in modern WoW's gear-centric RNGforged / corrupted design.

Once the momentum from Legion wears off and more and more people realize that the current design is boring and unbalanced, participation will plummet. This is exactly what happened with arenas and rated PvP in general. Once people realized that Blizzard would never sacrifice raid balance in favor of PvP balance, they left. The initial hype from TBC sustained it into MoP but in WoD participation just got destroyed and never recovered. And back during the TBC-WoD period there was a much higher population to sustain continued arena participation.

Remember when Arena World Championship was Blizzard's big event? Nobody gives a shit about that anymore. It's all about the Mythic Dungeon Invitational now. But it can only last so long until bad balance starts to drive people away. The writing is already on the wall with some meta classes (looking at you, rogues) being almost mandatory.

This is a classic example of "try to please everyone and you won't please anyone". Except, well, people who play casually. Now is a great time to play casually. You have tons of different content to try and the problems don't become apparent until you reach the very top level. But the parallels between arena's decline and M+ are definitely there. M+ has already become more exclusionary and elitist compared to its Legion iteration.

Tl;dr: Ion, you can't have both tight tuning and different forms of endgame content. Pick one. Super-competitive e-sports with tight tuning or casual gameplay with a variety of game modes. Can't have both.

The problem with raiding, m+ and pvp is they don’t have separate paths of progression. The gear is exactly the same for all 3 forms of content.

The need to make the gear progression separate and specialized for each type of content.

This can be done with resilience returning for pvp.

M+ can get set items and legendaries specialized for 5 man content. Imagine if hunters and shamans got a 2 piece set that gave them something similar to the rogues shroud. This would remove the “requirement” of needing a rogue and give other classes a different option in gearing that could be interesting. This could easily be expanded on to give make m+ gearing interesting and unique compared to pvp and raiding.

If blizzard expanded on gearing to give unique rewards based on content they could fix a lot of these problems. This could also be used to give casual or collectors gearing options for them. Like speed sets for running older content.

[Relapses]

The problem with raiding, m+ and pvp is they don’t have separate paths of progression. The gear is exactly the same for all 3 forms of content.

The need to make the gear progression separate and specialized for each type of content.

This can be done with resilience returning for pvp.

M+ can get set items and legendaries specialized for 5 man content. Imagine if hunters and shamans got a 2 piece set that gave them something similar to the rogues shroud. This would remove the “requirement” of needing a rogue and give other classes a different option in gearing that could be interesting. This could easily be expanded on to give make m+ gearing interesting and unique compared to pvp and raiding.

If blizzard expanded on gearing to give unique rewards based on content they could fix a lot of these problems. This could also be used to give casual or collectors gearing options for them. Like speed sets for running older content.

Ew. The problem with activity-specific gear is that it very incorrectly assumes that certain players only ever engage in certain types on content. I'm pretty sure that's the precise reason Resilience was removed in the first place. Yeah, it'd be great for the players who only ever do that single type of content but part of the beauty of the current system is that M+ and raiding are symbiotic. Putting back things like Resilience then adding another set of gear for M+ would serve only to further fracture the playerbase and engagement in all three activities would almost surely plummet.

[Super Kami Dende]

I'm just going to take a random guess and say:
Not everybody liked killing 10 Wolves / Boars / Bears / Zombies / whatever you had to kill during your first quest.
Yet every WoW player still did that, did all of them enjoy killing those 10 npc's? Probably not, but they probably liked getting XP and the reward from the quest.

Progression is a source of fun in games such as WoW, it's that simple, if the most efficient progression however comes from sources you don't enjoy, that's a problem.

That's your own problem though, not the games, since you are forcing yourself to do content you don't like. If progression required me to play 10 Pet Battles Trainer battles a day, I simply just wouldn't do it. As I said if you feel a videogame is forcing you to do something you likely are weak willed or in many People's cases an idiot.

Neither is mutually exclusive though.

[Seuchentiffy]

League of Legends is a thing. It illustrates that you can base everything around templates and people will play it for years if the content is engaging. It would just take a design philosophy shift.

You do realise that there where Templates in PvP right in Legion for example and most people didnt like it. BFA is what? ILvL scaling in PvP atm? Still shit....

And im sorry but do you really want Templates for everything? I mostly wont, having Blizz dictate Stats is the stupidest thing that could happen. People are still shitting on them because of the removal of Reforging because their itemization is abysmal and that did happen when? WoD right? so around 5-6 Years ago . Now imagine what will happen when Gear is even less important because it does shit all, more people would prob quit then anything else.

It´s an MMO with loot, so to get rid of one problem and make a change to Templates you prob have to remove the whole loot thingy in terms of Gear and i dont know if a Player would really like that. How will you determine if you got Stronger? Some minor number chance in a UI would prob not be satisfying compared to getting that nice Weapon which has 30 more Ilvl then your current one after Weeks and Weeks of lets say M+.

It´s a 15 Year Old Game, change is good yes but i think that changing this "fundamental" system of WoW ,that existed from the very beginning, would do more damage then good.

[exochaft]

Ew. The problem with activity-specific gear is that it very incorrectly assumes that certain players only ever engage in certain types on content. I'm pretty sure that's the precise reason Resilience was removed in the first place. Yeah, it'd be great for the players who only ever do that single type of content but part of the beauty of the current system is that M+ and raiding are symbiotic. Putting back things like Resilience then adding another set of gear for M+ would serve only to further fracture the playerbase and engagement in all three activities would almost surely plummet.

Resilience was removed because Blizz could never figure out what to do with it, as it went through I think 3-4 changes in BC alone, let alone its other changes over time. It was actually an amazing bear tank stat at one point, because it would allow bears to reach crit cap without having to stack defense rating. In reality, we still have resilience on our gear in BfA in the form of Versatility, which basically accomplishes what most versions of resilience/PvP power did: flat damage gains and damage reduction.

As I mentioned in a previous post, having stuff drop in different types of content isn't necessarily a bad thing, even if it is semi-tailored to the content. We already have this in BfA with Essences, where even mythic raiders are using essences only obtainable in M+ and PvP. You don't have to obtain these necessarily, but the bar is usually set low enough that you don't have to constantly do the activity to get what you need (rank 4 is the exception, but it's purely cosmetic). Even then, you'll do pretty well with generic Essences.

[Relapses]

Resilience was removed because Blizz could never figure out what to do with it, as it went through I think 3-4 changes in BC alone, let alone its other changes over time. It was actually an amazing bear tank stat at one point, because it would allow bears to reach crit cap without having to stack defense rating. In reality, we still have resilience on our gear in BfA in the form of Versatility, which basically accomplishes what most versions of resilience/PvP power did: flat damage gains and damage reduction.

As I mentioned in a previous post, having stuff drop in different types of content isn't necessarily a bad thing, even if it is semi-tailored to the content. We already have this in BfA with Essences, where even mythic raiders are using essences only obtainable in M+ and PvP. You don't have to obtain these necessarily, but the bar is usually set low enough that you don't have to constantly do the activity to get what you need (rank 4 is the exception, but it's purely cosmetic). Even then, you'll do pretty well with generic Essences.

Some distinction is fine but the guy I quoted seemed to envision a version of WoW with raid specific gear, PvP specific gear and M+ specific gear. And while there are obvious benefits for players who only engage in one of those activities, unless the bar is set so low it doesn't really matter... all you effectively do is force players to carry even more gear in their bags and isolate/segregate the playerbase even further. I just can't see something like that panning out very well in practice.

[Chromell]

Raiding can't award powerful items because it will make raiding mandatory for M+ players. M+ can't award powerful items because it will make M+ mandatory for raiders.

This is already happening though.

[Nfinitii]

Ew. The problem with activity-specific gear is that it very incorrectly assumes that certain players only ever engage in certain types on content. I'm pretty sure that's the precise reason Resilience was removed in the first place. Yeah, it'd be great for the players who only ever do that single type of content but part of the beauty of the current system is that M+ and raiding are symbiotic. Putting back things like Resilience then adding another set of gear for M+ would serve only to further fracture the playerbase and engagement in all three activities would almost surely plummet.

That’s not true, even when there was resilience u were required to raid if u wanted to min-max your character. U can have content specific gear that overlaps for the min-maxers. While giving those players who only want to do one type of content unique and rewarding items.

Gear is boring now, it’s all the same. You don’t get excited seeing geared out characters anymore. The game has become completely soulless. It’s part of the reason I was against blizzard removing the dh powerleveling thing. It was something unique and cool, and players put a lot of time and effort into building their character for. It would have solved itself on the long run anyways, should have just let players enjoy their fun.

When resilience was around wow was at its best. A lot of people raided and did pvp. Just because resilience was removed doesn’t mean it was a good idea.

[Seuchentiffy]

should have just let players enjoy their fun.

Since when does Blizzard give a flying F**** about player having fun?

Getting Gold trough old Raids? Nah cant be, People could think its mandatory so get rid of it

Quick level trough the Game esp. WoD with the MoP Exp Flask? Cant have that get rid of it

Classes being fun? But there are to many Buttons!! Get rid of it

10 Man raiding? So hard to Balance! Get rid of it (fun fact Flex works just fine so there never was a need to remove 10 man raiding in my opinion)

Gear thats means something and you can work towards a goal and customize it so it plays into the strengths of your Class/Specc? Get rid of....wait nah just remove the Customization and throw it at the Players like it is for free!

So many things over the Years i prob only remember a tiny portion of it.

Good thing is different People enjoy different things, but things that we enjoy and Blizz thinks they are not good for the Game will always be removed or well should we call it "reworked"? (someone remember the " we dont want you to play Demonology atm" Quote from Ion?^^)

[Kralljin]

you're being daft, you said that they made changes because of pvp and your only explanation is that it has to be because of pvp because if affected pvp more, but it doesn't matter which part of the game was affected because blizzard almost never make major changes to the game because of pvp.. also it had a lot of impact on pve.. all healers having dispel is a major pve change because now you can bring every healer to the raid and you don't need to bring a certain class simply for dispel, same with kicks and almost every single other change.

And yet in Wotlk, you still had 10man encounters that required dispels and Interrupt and people could still do them.

PvE would've been just fine without these changes, because even in Wotlk that wasn't an issue for people.
In Wotlk, enough Classes had interrupts that you had at least 2-3 of them, a raid without interrupts would have consisted out of:
Paladin
Hunter
Priest
Non Feral Druids

Doesn't sound like a common setup.

Same goes for dispels, if you just had a single priest, paladin or warlock you were absolutely fine, that wasn't a problem.

You can keep pointing at "muh PvE" but that doesn't change the fact that these were non issues even in 10man raids, but were a big deal in PvP.
Your explanation that it was a big deal for PvE is just flat out wrong, because they removed the dispels from non healing classes.

Previously, if an encounter had a magic debuff, any Paladin, Priest or Warlock could dispel it, you didn't have to bring a "specific" healer, just one of three specific classes.
Because let's be clear on that, the removal of the regular magic dispel from Priest / Paladin wasn't a PvE specific change either, unless you want to tell me that SP and Prot / Ret were super OP in PvE because they had magic dispel, which they weren't.

also source for what? that they dropped WoW? well you answered it yourself cuz now only Blizzard are hosting tournaments

That would mean they wanted the monopoly on WoW E-sports, not they're ditching it.
If they ditched it, they wouldn't host tournaments themselves.

These two things are very different.

If progression required me to play 10 Pet Battles Trainer battles a day

Or the video game is just poorly designed and puts its rewards into the wrong place.

[Nfinitii]

Some distinction is fine but the guy I quoted seemed to envision a version of WoW with raid specific gear, PvP specific gear and M+ specific gear. And while there are obvious benefits for players who only engage in one of those activities, unless the bar is set so low it doesn't really matter... all you effectively do is force players to carry even more gear in their bags and isolate/segregate the playerbase even further. I just can't see something like that panning out very well in practice.

Yeah I would like to c gear tailored to the content you do. And there will most likely be some overlap like there was in the past. Currently it doesn’t matter where u get ur gear, b/c it’s all the same bland old shit.

It’s not like carrying multiple sets is a problem. I used to carry multiple sets back in the day, a tanking set, pvp set, raiding set. Healing, dps and pvp sets on alts. I’m sure most players carry a lot of gear with them now b/c of how the azerite system works. And the new corruption mechanic is going to force players to hold onto gear, b/c u don’t want ur corruption to get to high so u will want some none corrupted gear to replace ur corrupted gear when u get new pieces.

Ur not going to segregate the player base with specialized gear for content, if someone doesn’t want to raid they won’t raid. And the min/maxers will still do all the content as long as there is some overlap between gear sets. I’m ok with someone’s bis being a mix between m+ and raid gear.

Gear is not exciting to me in its current iteration.

[Craaazyyy]

And yet in Wotlk, you still had 10man encounters that required dispels and Interrupt and people could still do them.

PvE would've been just fine without these changes, because even in Wotlk that wasn't an issue for people.
In Wotlk, enough Classes had interrupts that you had at least 2-3 of them, a raid without interrupts would have consisted out of:
Paladin
Hunter
Priest
Non Feral Druids

Doesn't sound like a common setup.

Same goes for dispels, if you just had a single priest, paladin or warlock you were absolutely fine, that wasn't a problem.

You can keep pointing at "muh PvE" but that doesn't change the fact that these were non issues even in 10man raids, but were a big deal in PvP.
Your explanation that it was a big deal for PvE is just flat out wrong, because they removed the dispels from non healing classes.

Previously, if an encounter had a magic debuff, any Paladin, Priest or Warlock could dispel it, you didn't have to bring a "specific" healer, just one of three specific classes.
Because let's be clear on that, the removal of the regular magic dispel from Priest / Paladin wasn't a PvE specific change either, unless you want to tell me that SP and Prot / Ret were super OP in PvE because they had magic dispel, which they weren't.



That would mean they wanted the monopoly on WoW E-sports, not they're ditching it.
If they ditched it, they wouldn't host tournaments themselves.

These two things are very different.

it's like you cant even read.. first of all blizzard said that in 2010, secondly it's other organizations that dropped it because of it, Blizzard never said that there will be no blizzcon tournament, they do tournaments for every single game they have besides primarily pve games like diablo. Yeah they started to care about WoW eSports a bit more as of late, but that's too little to late, because they've already ruined the game and pvp participation is shit

also you keep saying that what matters the most is how things were before and what was affected by change the most and the thing that was affected the most must be the reason why things were changed, but its not the case.. it's just not