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  1. #1

    M+ Rewards in Season 1 of Dragonflight now scale to +20s

    **Updated 10/7 with a massive Blue post from Blizzard, rewards now scale to +20; can't change the title tho sry**

    https://www.wowhead.com/news/mythic-...-to-18s-329211

    Additionally, end of dungeon rewards are capped at 402 (lowest Tier of Heroic gear) and moving forward vault rewards are only scaling to 418 which is right in between the lowest and a mid-tier Mythic boss.

    Hope you guys like raiding. :-)


    edit: It appears that there are quite a few separate changes happening with M+ in S1 of DF and these datamined changes were a bit premature and just the tip of the iceberg. Full blue post is here but I'm also going to include it below my analysis on the new changes.

    tl,dr:
    • Rewards scaling to +20, both in end of dungeon reward and box rewards
      • This puts the maximum end-of-dungeon rewards at the equivalent item level of of a mid-tier Heroic boss (405) and the maximum Vault reward is the same as a mid-tier Mythic boss (421)
      • VP is also confirmed to be back and there is another tier of upgrading (up to item level 415) available at KSH rating (2400)
    • Seasonal affixes too OP in SL, they want scale them back
    • Scaling is increasing from +11s and higher so it feels more rewarding to go from one keystone level to the next
    • Affix rotation going from 12 weeks to 10 to help eliminate the feeling "good" vs "bad" push weeks

    I'm kinda middle-of-the-road on these changes. I do like that they're going to be rewards M+ even more than we originally thought. I like the addition of rewards up through +20 and the KSH upgrade tier is something we've been asking for since S1 of SL. These were the main concern I had and I'm glad to see them being addressed.

    However, it's not all good -- Both the elimination of two weeks from the rotation and the increased scaling kind of scare the shit out of me. This has the potential to make M+ feel very oppressive in the middling levels and the more constrained affix rotation likely will have the side effect of making all push weeks feel equally shitty. The lack of power from the Seasonal affix is also pretty concerning as this has traditionally been a boon for players to play around complex "mathematically impossible" situations in M+. This will likely make the meta in DF M+ even more rigid than it is currently.

    Here's the Blue post (slightly redacted because formatting on this forum is a nightmare):

    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Hello, and thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts here! Feedback like this is valuable, and helps inform discussion within the team as we continue to iterate on systems like Mythic+.

    While I don’t have information to share about this specific suggestion today, I do want to take this opportunity to offer some insight into changes coming to Mythic+ in Dragonflight and our thought process behind them, as well as open up a discussion around elements that are still being worked on or could change in the future.

    First up, we’d like to provide some more context for a change you may have already heard about.

    Seasonal Dungeon Rotation

    If you’ve done Mythic+ over multiple seasons, you may have had the experience of running a particular dungeon over and over chasing a prized item, only to be faced with chasing that same item in that same dungeon the following season as well. That’s not great, and we want to do something about it.

    Perhaps the biggest change coming in Dragonflight is that we’ll be rotating the entire set of Mythic+ dungeons every season. We believe this will result in a better overall experience by:

    • Providing primary Mythic+ players with more of the sense of exploration and progression each season that Raiders get to enjoy with new raids.

    Much of the fun of Mythic+ comes from seeing yourself get better and better at playing a dungeon through experience, but opportunities to learn and improve become more scarce the longer a dungeon stays active in the pool.

    • Keeping the level of effort required to get the best rewards consistent season over season.

    Learning a new raid can be fun and challenging, but the relative ease of completing Mythic+ dungeons that everyone mastered last season can create heavy social pressure to spend time in Mythic+ gearing up even if it’s not your preferred activity.

    • Creating space for returning players to jump into Mythic+ even if they missed the previous season.

    Imagine taking a break during Season 1 and coming back in Season 2, only to join a Mythic+ group and feel like you’re holding them back because everyone else just “knows” a strategy you never had the chance to learn. With dungeons rotating every season, everyone gets to start on a relatively even playing field and figure out new strategies together.

    Seasonal Affixes

    These have been a staple of Mythic+ for years now, but what purpose do they serve and why do we keep making them?

    Seasonal affixes:

    • Play a key role in shaking up gameplay. We’re asking you to play the same dungeons for well over a year, and adding new twists helps keep them feeling fresh.
    • Give us an opportunity to add thematic flavor and give each season a sense of identity. It’s cool to have N’Zoth or Denathrius influencing Mythic+ dungeons at the same time they’re featured in the raid.
    • Are a great place to experiment and try new ideas. We can keep things that work well for future seasons, while safely leaving behind things that didn’t work as well.

    But as great as Seasonal affixes have been, they also have limitations. With their relatively high complexity and strong seasonal ties, they’re mostly lost to history once a season is over. While they do have experimental value, they don’t contribute as much long-term benefit to Mythic+ as we’d like.

    A side-effect of the Dungeon Rotation change above is that it takes pressure off the Seasonal affix to be the “big thing” that transforms your gameplay in a new season, and this has given us space to really think about what a Seasonal affix might look like going forward. Should we try to make Seasonals that can become regular affixes in future seasons? Should we stop doing them in favor of something else entirely? There are lots of interesting questions to consider as we move forward.

    On Beta realms you’ll soon be seeing an experimental version of a Season affix named “Thundering”. We’re still iterating heavily and it’s likely the functionality will change, but it should give a sense of the level of complexity we’d like Seasonal affixes to occupy in Dragonflight. Since you’ll already be learning a whole new set of dungeons, the Seasonal affix can be less complicated and focus more on being about thematic flavor (as well as giving us space to try new things).

    Another shift that you’ll likely notice is a reduction in the amount of “borrowed power” provided by Seasonal affixes. While feedback on beneficial affix effects has been positive and it’s a space we definitely want to continue exploring, we hit a level of power in Shadowlands that felt extreme and contributed heavily to the short-circuiting effect described above.

    We’ll be keeping a close eye both on how this feels in playtests and on player feedback, and may try other directions if it doesn’t work out as well as we’d like. For example, there’s a world where we have beneficial effects closer to Shadowlands, but also make enemies more powerful to offset that extra power. The key takeaway here is that we want to continue experimenting with Mythic+, and we hope you’ll appreciate seeing a bigger difference in your experience with each season in Dragonflight.

    Rewarding Dedicated Mythic+ Players

    Throughout Shadowlands, we’ve observed a trend where players who’ve mastered a set of Mythic+ dungeons are seeing their sense of progression short-circuited in subsequent seasons.

    This is a complex problem that intersects with several of the topics outlined above, but the bottom line is that something valuable is lost when the best gear you can get from Mythic+ isn’t necessarily something you earn by investing time and effort into getting really good at Mythic+.

    To be extremely clear, this does not mean we want to make Mythic+ less rewarding. It’s a major pillar of the endgame for World of Warcraft and players who want to focus on it should have access to competitive rewards.

    What it does mean is that we want Mythic+ to have more of a sense of progression as you push higher and higher keys, and we want the gear you get to feel like a reflection of that. To achieve this goal, we’re making two big changes:

    • First, starting with Keystone level 11, we’re increasing the rate at which enemies gain health and damage with each subsequent key level from 8% to 10%.

    The impact from this change isn’t dramatic at any given key level, but it should contribute to giving each step up more of a sense of progression and make it easier for us to step up rewards accordingly.

    • Second, we’re adjusting the item level of gear rewards both from end of run chests and from the great vault, and scaling their item level growth up to Keystone level 20.

    We’re also introducing an additional Valor upgrade tier, which will increase the maximum item level of Valor upgrades that players can unlock with higher Mythic+ ratings.

    [charts omitted, please see the original blue post]

    Shorter Affix Rotation

    The last experimental change we’d like to talk about today is placing a couple of our regular affixes on hiatus and reducing the number of weeks in the affix rotation.

    In Dragonflight Season 1, the Inspiring and Necrotic affixes will be taking a break, and the affix rotation will be reduced from 12 weeks to 10 weeks. Our thought process here is that:

    • Inspiring is a good affix for changing up your gameplay when you have thorough knowledge of a dungeon, but it can feel especially punishing while you’re still learning. This didn’t feel like a good fit with the increased emphasis on learning dungeons each season going forward.
    • Necrotic was originally intended to be an affix that challenges tanks, but it’s become increasingly apparent that routing responsibilities already place tremendous pressure on tank players in Mythic+, so we’d like to try giving this affix a vacation.
    • With a shorter affix rotation overall, we’re hopeful that we can reduce the perceived disparity in difficulty between weeks and allow players to more regularly feel like they can make meaningful progress toward increasing their Mythic+ rating.

    We’re excited to see how this plays out, and looking forward to trying out further changes in Season 2 and beyond. While it’s too early to make promises, this may include things like swapping out more affixes, changing the level at which different affix types become active, or perhaps even trying out a new affix category entirely.

    Thank you again for taking the time to share your feedback, and I hope the information shared here is able to provide good context for further discussion! =)
    Last edited by Relapses; 2022-10-08 at 12:56 AM.

  2. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    https://www.wowhead.com/news/mythic-...-to-18s-329211

    Additionally, end of dungeon rewards are capped at 402 (lowest Tier of Heroic gear) and moving forward vault rewards are only scaling to 418 which is right in between the lowest and a mid-tier Mythic boss.

    Hope you guys like raiding. :-)
    I like it. It's like it should be.
    You're gonna be slightly ahead of the heroic raiders and guilds who kill 1-3 mythic bosses.
    You'll be just slightly weaker than the mid tier guilds and noticeable weaker than CE players.
    Also a much bigger reward from the vault itself with 16 ilvls, will feel great to get one.

    I applaud them for it. Not sure it could even be done better than this.
    Not gimping heroic as a format without making it obsolete.
    Incentive and more prestige to actual CE raiders.
    And all in all a pretty decent gap without making either feel mandatory.

  3. #3
    Heroic raiding wasn't obsolete to begin with, normal was.

    This is just a silly change.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    https://www.wowhead.com/news/mythic-...-to-18s-329211

    Additionally, end of dungeon rewards are capped at 402 (lowest Tier of Heroic gear) and moving forward vault rewards are only scaling to 418 which is right in between the lowest and a mid-tier Mythic boss.

    Hope you guys like raiding. :-)
    The unwillingness to just do something to let people play the content they want without necessarily screwing up a progression path is really annoying
    Last edited by Ashana Darkmoon; 2022-10-06 at 06:30 AM.

  5. #5
    Yikes. Pretty glad I didn't preorder honestly

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by bmjclark View Post
    Yikes. Pretty glad I didn't preorder honestly
    Why? Because you can't get the best gear for the least amount of effort? Isn't that how it should be, honestly?

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Jester Joe View Post
    Heroic raiding wasn't obsolete to begin with, normal was.

    This is just a silly change.
    Normal is just LFR without the queueable option.
    Care to explain why its silly?
    I'm only a heroic raider(curve and occasionally some mythic bosses) and having it be completely irrelevant in s4, and lets be honest, previous season too really, really sucked. It made motivation drop for the entire guild and i'm really happy they're not repeating that same mistake.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by tomten View Post
    And all in all a pretty decent gap without making either feel mandatory.
    Between this and the Creation Catalyst being locked at 6 weeks it seems at least some level of Heroic raiding will be necessary to keep yourself ahead of the curve even for moderate push groups. This mindset didn't go over well with players in WoD, it's interesting to see them push it again.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by tomten View Post
    Why? Because you can't get the best gear for the least amount of effort? Isn't that how it should be, honestly?
    I don't want to have to raid heroic to find upgrades to do mythic+ particularly. This expansion honestly just seems like a downgrade from shadowlands if mythic+ is what you enjoy in the game. Raiding is a miserable and any expansion that tries hard to push it at the expense of mythic+, i'll just skip. It's really as simple as that

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Ashana Darkmoon View Post
    The unwillingness to just do something to let people play the content they want without necessarily screwing up with a profession paths is really annoying
    Gotta pump up the Heroic participation numbers somehow, I guess.

  10. #10
    I guess it was to be expected. People preferred M+ over raiding, and so the sledge hammer has to come out to REALLY make sure you go do it. Fair enough.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by tomten View Post
    Normal is just LFR without the queueable option.
    Care to explain why its silly?
    I'm only a heroic raider(curve and occasionally some mythic bosses) and having it be completely irrelevant in s4, and lets be honest, previous season too really, really sucked. It made motivation drop for the entire guild and i'm really happy they're not repeating that same mistake.
    How are you saying raiding is irrelevant while almost everyone and their alt is rocking stuff like Gavel of the First Arbiter, Old Warrior's Soul, The First Sigil, Scars of Fraternal Strife, and so on?

    Even since S1, like tanks needing Kael's trinket, the raid has always had a reason to go into it for mostly trinkets and weapons but the incentive was still there. But normal is nearly pointless since the ilvl is so low anyway and heroic is puggable.

  12. #12
    Herald of the Titans enigma77's Avatar
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    They will have a blue post about Mythic + rewards soon. There was talk some time ago about enabling high level M+ players to get the highest ilvl loot in the game.

    So don't worry too much.

  13. #13
    Nothing that looks terrible here? You can't get 311 gear from your vault this season either.
    15s are a Joke, 18s are also a joke, slightly less jokey though.
    Lets see what they announce with the m+ announcement.
    The only thing looking a bit crappy is the 6 week catalyst at the start, but that will be fine as well, I'm sure the second week will be quicker and so on.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Sialina View Post
    Nothing that looks terrible here? You can't get 311 gear from your vault this season either.
    15s are a Joke, 18s are also a joke, slightly less jokey though.
    Lets see what they announce with the m+ announcement.
    The only thing looking a bit crappy is the 6 week catalyst at the start, but that will be fine as well, I'm sure the second week will be quicker and so on.
    15s and 18s are a joke now because this season is a joke. M+ is typically pretty difficult at the beginning of a season so compounding this change with the Creation Catalyst change and it seems like the devs are making a deliberate push for players to engage with raiding content.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by enigma77 View Post
    They will have a blue post about Mythic + rewards soon. There was talk some time ago about enabling high level M+ players to get the highest ilvl loot in the game.

    So don't worry too much.
    I hope you're right. I'll edit the OP if there's any additional information.

  15. #15
    Herald of the Titans enigma77's Avatar
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    What I really want is to be able to get decent gear from actually doing dungeons. The Weekly Vault shouldn't be the only way to get a fat upgrade.

    Let me play the game, for crying out loud.

  16. #16
    As an added little kick in the nuts to mythic+ players, keystone master gives one of the most underwhelming mounts I've seen in a long time and im sure the following 3 seasons will have recolors of it

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by enigma77 View Post
    What I really want is to be able to get decent gear from actually doing dungeons. The Weekly Vault shouldn't be the only way to get a fat upgrade.

    Let me play the game, for crying out loud.
    Not possible. They would have to introduce a weekly/bi-weekly loot cap if that was the case. Would you prefer that?
    Having thought about it for a while, I think I would actually be in favour of that. Put a loot cap on mythic+ and raise the ilvl.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Jester Joe View Post
    How are you saying raiding is irrelevant while almost everyone and their alt is rocking stuff like Gavel of the First Arbiter, Old Warrior's Soul, The First Sigil, Scars of Fraternal Strife, and so on?
    Because heroic drops 291 ilvl with a few dropping 298?
    12/12 mythic+ gear is 298, farmable so you can get perfect itemization
    The reason for alts and influx in gear are dinars, which is great getting those rare items but everything else is obsolete.
    Didn't get a single upgrade from the raiding in s4 except a LFR gavel that I upgraded to 298..

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by bmjclark View Post
    I don't want to have to raid heroic to find upgrades to do mythic+ particularly. This expansion honestly just seems like a downgrade from shadowlands if mythic+ is what you enjoy in the game. Raiding is a miserable and any expansion that tries hard to push it at the expense of mythic+, i'll just skip. It's really as simple as that
    But that's how its always been and it goes both ways. Some m+ trinkets were bis even for raids. You also dont need that, like at all? Thats if you're pushing for cutoff titles that less than 1% gets and if you do? You're gonna get every single advantage you can, including raiding, which you're probably doing anyhow at those levels, 99% do.
    Its really not at the expense of mythic+ though? If anything, for you to be "satisfied" you'd have to literally sacrifice 2/3 raid formats.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by tomten View Post
    Because heroic drops 291 ilvl with a few dropping 298?
    12/12 mythic+ gear is 298, farmable so you can get perfect itemization
    The reason for alts and influx in gear are dinars, which is great getting those rare items but everything else is obsolete.
    Didn't get a single upgrade from the raiding in s4 except a LFR gavel that I upgraded to 298.
    It doesn't matter that it's a lower ilvl when the effect is so strong though. Yes it's inflated this season but you're saying this as if BDK didn't dominate last season because of Gavel.

    And again, there's been tons of reasons to go into the raid for a trinket or weapon in the past, like Kael's trinket, or the trinket from The Nine for tanking. Just a few examples.

  19. #19
    Herald of the Titans enigma77's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomten View Post
    Not possible. They would have to introduce a weekly/bi-weekly loot cap if that was the case. Would you prefer that?
    Having thought about it for a while, I think I would actually be in favour of that. Put a loot cap on mythic+ and raise the ilvl.
    Sure it's possible. Just make the items drop rarely. Say dungeon X drops item Y (ring of awesome power) it's pretty damn rare, but has a higher ilvl than the other loot. Very high keys increase your odds of getting it. Boom.

    It'd be the exact same as with Titanforging, just without extreme rng on every item.

    That is btw exactly what they're doing with raid loot, but since M+ is spammable, the items would be even rarer. If you're a M+ gamer and you're spamming keys all week long, good for you. Go hunt down those rare op items.
    Last edited by enigma77; 2022-10-06 at 03:39 AM.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    it seems like the devs are making a deliberate push for players to engage with raiding content.
    Correction: the devs are making a deliberate push to reduce gearing options out of the gate to try and make the race for world first more competitive hoping to milk more time out of it in order to get more views and engagement.

    This will mean *nothing* to be people who don't raid because they don't care for raiding, and I would be willing to bet money that the venn diagram of "people obsessed with having their character geared to the maximum ilevel possible within the game" and "people who would be willing to raid but currently don't only because of a lack of a difference in ilevel rewards" is incredibly small.

    This is 100% some bullshit they're doing to hype race for world first and nothing else, which is annoying but also means it should only be relevant for about 2 months or so.
    Their love of power creep will inevitably, and I'd wager by the time S2 starts, make it so that everything equalizes out in short order.
    Last edited by Malkiah; 2022-10-06 at 04:35 AM.

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