Puzzling Cartel Chip Update

[LordVargK]

Pretty much everyone in title range currently (~17's atm) wouldn't have very much difficulty clearing the raid.
Gatekeeping trinkets and gear from players that are participating in objectively harder content doesn't make much sense.

Nobody has time to wait for little Timmy to learn and adapt to the fight. In general this happens in practically every guild or run (including the very top/Liquid to varying degrees).

Most players in this position will begrudgingly bite the bullet and either join a guild or group for the specific boss(es) they need, but it doesn't excuse the poor implementation and logic behind the gatekeeping.

And getting those trinkets on mythic is the reward for doing so. It's not "gatekeeping" it's the last true advantage having to actually socialize in an MMO has.

And I would disagree: Mechanically a +17 isn't different than a +12. Mythic raids on the other hand are different than their heroic counterparts. And raid fights are mechanically much harder than m+. So just throwing 20 players that can clear a +17 together would not be enough to clear mythic Gallywix.

[Nymrohd]

And I would disagree: Mechanically a +17 isn't different than a +12.

That's not true. Past a point because of scaling the tactics become much different. Heck past a point your chance of clearing the dungeon in time without using meta comps is tiny. You need to completely change your tactics with defensives and damage cooldowns, especially with tyrannical bosses.

[Biomega]

And I would disagree: Mechanically a +17 isn't different than a +12. Mythic raids on the other hand are different than their heroic counterparts. And raid fights are mechanically much harder than m+. So just throwing 20 players that can clear a +17 together would not be enough to clear mythic Gallywix.

That depends on your definition of "mechanically". It has the same mechanics, to be sure; however, the added scaling changes your strategy. Often considerably. There's fights where you can do things in a +12 you simply can't do in a +17 or whatever. Some fights will have mechanics that start doing such crazy damage at high levels you need to come up with entirely new ways of dealing with them that you never need and that would not be good to use at lower levels. So in that sense, while the ability is the same, the way it mechanically handles can in fact be very different at a high enough key level.

It's difficult to directly compare things, of course, but there's generally WAY fewer people that clear the highest key levels than there are people who clear the highest raid difficulty. There's so many factors to consider once you get to truly high M+ most people don't even realize just how demanding it becomes. And while sure Mythic Raiding is far from a cakewalk either, it has a cap on its demands, especially since it's a nonlinear metric that changes over time. If anything, super high M+ is probably more comparable to RWF-style mythic raiding: at the edge of the possible, requiring extreme commitment and attention to succeed at. And less like end-of-season-let's-just-get-CE-style mythic raiding, which while still very reasonably challenging to many people people is just a whole different ballgame.

There's a lot of logistic differences between raiding and M+ though that need to be considered. To many people, one of the most attractive things about M+ is, for example, that you don't need to schedule it. You just find a group and go, even on quite high levels. Mythic raiding generally doesn't work like that, and even if it does, it's an exception rather than the rule - whereas it's the opposite for M+ kinda. And of course getting 5 skilled players together is easier than getting 20 skilled players together, even at comparable skill levels. That's just... a simple numerical fact

[Arkura]

Blizz continues with 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Wjy create a problem when its this late into the season? Just have everybody enjoy having the dinars at mythic track level. In 3 months from now its not gonna matter at all, instead blizzard makes us feel like were getting fucked over which is gonna stick way longer then 3 months...

Saying you listen to our feedback in a blue post and then proceeding to do the exact opposite is just frustrating af. Unless you take feedback from a select group of people and then just say its all of us... its like you refuse to learn.

[Asrialol]

What a joke.

So normal players get a bump up to heroic gear but heroic is stuck with heroic? Meanwhile now the gap between Mythic+ players and Mythic raiders is even larger (3 items instead of 2). They legit made it worse.

Hopefully this shit storm continues and they walk it back completely to S4 of Shadowlands type implementation.

Why do you feel entitled to myth gear as a heroic raider? Why do you even need myth gear?

[Lolites]

It happened during Vanilla, BC and Wrath no problem. Why is 20 people so difficult to get?

are you seriously comparing vanila-bc-wrath raiding with current mythic raids?
have you ever entered a raid without being carried?

[Osmeric]

They appear to be wanting to get more people into Mythic raiding as the gear inflates, rather than just stopping at Heroic. Understandable, as this extends the lifespan of the raid content, but it's bad for smaller guilds who can't field 20 raiders.

[Googles]

Any idea what they're doing for PvP gear?

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Would be really interesting to be a fly on the wall with their live team sometimes. I wonder if the team leader is really stubborn if they generally don't have a normal player perspective in there sometimes.

In any event, they really just need to take the L here. I think the argument that will convince them the easiest is probably the boosting one. Even though in reality a relatively small number of extra people will do it, this perception of encouraging it is probably something they want to avoid.

[LordVargK]

That's not true. Past a point because of scaling the tactics become much different. Heck past a point your chance of clearing the dungeon in time without using meta comps is tiny. You need to completely change your tactics with defensives and damage cooldowns, especially with tyrannical bosses.

Every boss is always tyrannical once you hit +12, so I don't know what you mean by that.

That depends on your definition of "mechanically". It has the same mechanics, to be sure; however, the added scaling changes your strategy. Often considerably. There's fights where you can do things in a +12 you simply can't do in a +17 or whatever. Some fights will have mechanics that start doing such crazy damage at high levels you need to come up with entirely new ways of dealing with them that you never need and that would not be good to use at lower levels. So in that sense, while the ability is the same, the way it mechanically handles can in fact be very different at a high enough key level.

I specifically used the word mechanically. I'm of course aware that you have to adjust to enemies scaling much higher than before and that certain mechanics become deadly if not avoided at some point. But this is purely a scaling numbers issue. You could achieve the same thing by doing a +12 at ~15-20 item levels lower. A mythic raid is not just a harder heroic raid.

It's difficult to directly compare things, of course, but there's generally WAY fewer people that clear the highest key levels than there are people who clear the highest raid difficulty. There's so many factors to consider once you get to truly high M+ most people don't even realize just how demanding it becomes. And while sure Mythic Raiding is far from a cakewalk either, it has a cap on its demands, especially since it's a nonlinear metric that changes over time. If anything, super high M+ is probably more comparable to RWF-style mythic raiding: at the edge of the possible, requiring extreme commitment and attention to succeed at. And less like end-of-season-let's-just-get-CE-style mythic raiding, which while still very reasonably challenging to many people people is just a whole different ballgame.

The problem with this analogy is of course, that it's purely up to player skill and gear what "highest keys levels" are. If there were a hypothetical higher than mythic raid difficulty, there would also only be a handful of players able to beat that. From an achievement point of view I would argue that Blizzard sees 3000 m+ score as similar to a mythic raid clear. Both give a special mount as a reward. If we use that as a reference, way less people clear mythic raid than get the m+ mount. I'm not saying that both are equally difficult, just that Blizzard decided to reward both the same.

There's a lot of logistic differences between raiding and M+ though that need to be considered. To many people, one of the most attractive things about M+ is, for example, that you don't need to schedule it. You just find a group and go, even on quite high levels. Mythic raiding generally doesn't work like that, and even if it does, it's an exception rather than the rule - whereas it's the opposite for M+ kinda. And of course getting 5 skilled players together is easier than getting 20 skilled players together, even at comparable skill levels. That's just... a simple numerical fact

Which is why I find it fair to reward the people that take on the logistical challenge with something more than simple cosmetics. And if the reward is just a few million gold for boosting a m+ player that just needs the reward, then I'm fine with that. For 99% of m+ players getting a heroic version is good enough.

[fwc577]

The Puzzling Cartel Chips system will still allow someone who only does Normal mode of Liberation of Undermine to earn, for example, a House of Cards trinket at Item Level 672 once it is fully upgraded.

I don't understand this. I thought they could only get the one from the content they're doing. So if someone is only doing Normal Liberation of Undermine should only be able to get a Champion Track one and as a result, get it to 658

Even if they're allowing Normal to purchase Heroic version, it would still only be 665 max upgraded.

Isn't 672 somewhere on the Myth track?

[Joshuaj]

I mean, W update, but that quest should honestly just be daily, not weekly.

By the time folks get enough gear to do Mythic Liberation of Undermine, 11.2 would likely already be on the PTR.

[Biomega]

I specifically used the word mechanically. I'm of course aware that you have to adjust to enemies scaling much higher than before and that certain mechanics become deadly if not avoided at some point. But this is purely a scaling numbers issue. You could achieve the same thing by doing a +12 at ~15-20 item levels lower. A mythic raid is not just a harder heroic raid.

No, but it's not like that erases difficulty. It's all well and good to say "enemies use the same mechanics", but that glosses over how substantially more difficult things get despite it just being "purely a scaling numbers issue". Those numbers matter. If heroic raiding had sufficient numbers scaling, you could make it more difficult than mythic despite being simpler "mechanically".

That's really the point here - mechanical complexity isn't the only difficulty metric. Numbers also matter. Potentially a lot.

The problem with this analogy is of course, that it's purely up to player skill and gear what "highest keys levels" are.

In the abstract, sure, but in practical terms in this context, there is a key level number that's roughly equal in difficulty - in as much as those things can be compared - to mythic raiding. That's really the point to consider. So while sure, it may be mechanically the same as a lower key and sure there's open scaling, what really matters here is that absolutely you can say at least to some approximation that certain key levels are about as difficult as mythic raiding. Whether that's "just" due to numbers and whether there's the same mechanics or not.

If we use that as a reference, way less people clear mythic raid than get the m+ mount. I'm not saying that both are equally difficult, just that Blizzard decided to reward both the same.

That's not really a good way to look at it, though, because many things reward mounts. Are you saying other things that reward mounts are comparable to those two things as well, then? Probably not. You just picked an arbitrary reward that happens to be the same, but that reward is not power-based and thus has no claims to being commensurate with effort - as evidenced by the fact that similar rewards (i.e. mounts) are rewarded by all sorts of activities all over the difficulty spectrum, meaning they have no ties to those metrics at all. Whereas gear of a certain power level absolutely has ties to certain metrics and absolutely has a measure of commensurate effort. Largely because at a certain level of effort people expect commensurate rewards, and the clearest line between performance-based effort and a commensurate reward is it being a performance-based reward, too.

That's the entire argument here: people are saying look, certain levels of M+ are damn hard too, there's no reason not to reward those people even if it's not raiding they're doing. And that's exactly how it used to work so it's not like this is some kind of wild demand out of nowhere.

Yeah there's differences in effort and yeah it's never going to be 100% equal, but that's okay, it doesn't have to be. It's close enough. In fact, as I pointed out, you can find key levels where the reverse is true, and you find way fewer people who can do those keys than who can clear mythic raids. Like, WAY way less. So clearly there is a scale at work here that at least allows for an approximation of comparison, even if it's not direct and 1:1.

[UndeadPriest]

I don't understand this. I thought they could only get the one from the content they're doing. So if someone is only doing Normal Liberation of Undermine should only be able to get a Champion Track one and as a result, get it to 658

Even if they're allowing Normal to purchase Heroic version, it would still only be 665 max upgraded.

Isn't 672 somewhere on the Myth track?

Part of the dinar update adds two additional upgrades to Hero and Myth track gear. So Hero will cap at 672 and Myth 684. Crafted gear cap is also increasing +6 ilvls to 681 but needs to be recrafted after the update.

[fwc577]

Part of the dinar update adds two additional upgrades to Hero and Myth track gear. So Hero will cap at 672 and Myth 684. Crafted gear cap is also increasing +6 ilvls to 681 but needs to be recrafted after the update.

Thanks, I didn't see that so I was confused on the upgrade levels! haha.

[Ereb]

What a joke.

So normal players get a bump up to heroic gear but heroic is stuck with heroic? Meanwhile now the gap between Mythic+ players and Mythic raiders is even larger (3 items instead of 2). They legit made it worse.

Hopefully this shit storm continues and they walk it back completely to S4 of Shadowlands type implementation.

If you aren't mythic raiding why do you care exactly? You are already stomping the content you are choosing to do with the gear available

- - - Updated - - -

They appear to be wanting to get more people into Mythic raiding as the gear inflates, rather than just stopping at Heroic. Understandable, as this extends the lifespan of the raid content, but it's bad for smaller guilds who can't field 20 raiders.

Sure would hate if they had to recruit a lil bit

[Tehalbino]

And getting those trinkets on mythic is the reward for doing so. It's not "gatekeeping" it's the last true advantage having to actually socialize in an MMO has.

Yeah this 'advantage' is one of the many reasons myself and other world first raiders no longer do it. That is about the most classic andy take I've heard in awhile.

And I would disagree: Mechanically a +17 isn't different than a +12. Mythic raids on the other hand are different than their heroic counterparts. And raid fights are mechanically much harder than m+. So just throwing 20 players that can clear a +17 together would not be enough to clear mythic Gallywix.

I was going to ask you to link your main but after typing that there isn't much need.
We're all waiting for the 30 minute raid fight without perfectly telegraphed timers with more than a drop in the bucker of all the permutation sequences from dynamic targeting.

I don't know what type of rosy tinted goggles you have for mythic raiding but as someone that has probably done more in that department than you ever will I'll just say that your perception is borderline delusional. Don't believe me? Click on some random HoF guilds/players and look at their logs and the keys that they've failed, you don't have to search very long. Yet doing the same for top M+ runs you actually have to search diligently to find logs that aren't pristine.



People want to play the game, having some artificial 'social' dynamic as a barrier (that funnily enough can still easily be bypassed) is as asinine as your take.
The system in it's current form shouldn't even exist because it has no correlational outcome impact on the casual player, and needlessly restricts the majority of players not in that category. This isn't some 500 iq play to get more people into raiding, it will always be a bleeding mode.

[LordVargK]

That's really the point here - mechanical complexity isn't the only difficulty metric. Numbers also matter. Potentially a lot.

Of course, yes. But my point is, that mythic raiding is numerically as well as mechanically more difficult. Before m+ gets more difficult, the numbers have to go WAY higher. Also you get more options in how to deal with this difficulty. A raid fight is pretty scripted. Sure, there is room for some variation, but essentially you have to learn how to fight a boss a certain way. In m+ you can choose certain routes, use mindcontrol and hard CC, skips, etc to gain an advantage. Sure, that does not work on bosses, but they become comparatively less important the higher the key gets. Also meta classes are a thing in m+. Much less so in mythic raids, because they are tuned with a wider variety of classes (and their buffs/abilites) in mind. So for example just picking a DH tank gives you an advantage in m+, something that is less pronounced in mythic raids.

In the abstract, sure, but in practical terms in this context, there is a key level number that's roughly equal in difficulty - in as much as those things can be compared - to mythic raiding.

I agree. But imo that level is very hard to find for reasons explained above. The smaller the group size, the more variation you get by mixing different classes. In the raid specs are balanced so that the difference between best and worst is about 15%. In m+ this is harder to calculate, but even at levels 12 and above, the participation of VDH and Disc is triple that of the next tank/heal. And for DPS this is similar.

That's not really a good way to look at it, though, because many things reward mounts. Are you saying other things that reward mounts are comparable to those two things as well, then? Probably not. You just picked an arbitrary reward that happens to be the same

No, I picked the highest reward Blizzard offers for the given activity. There is one higher of course: The 0.1% achievement and the hall of fame achievement. But one is a guild achievement, the other is region-specific so it's hard to compare. But, if we were to entertain that thought, then at most 4000 players would earn the HoF (200 guilds times 20 players). In season 1 about 3300 players worldwide got the 0.1% achievement with at least 3450 rating. So, if you were to compare mythic raiding to m+, that could be a starting point. About 3400 rating at season end.

That's the entire argument here: people are saying look, certain levels of M+ are damn hard too, there's no reason not to reward those people even if it's not raiding they're doing. And that's exactly how it used to work so it's not like this is some kind of wild demand out of nowhere.

Until now this was an end-of-expansion handout mechanic. And m+ players got a new mount and achievement this season for reaching 3000 difficulty. I can get behind m+ players getting some form of extra(gear) rewards, but why exactly should you get items exclusive to raids? Raiders don't get m+ items, they also only get raid stuff.

Yeah there's differences in effort and yeah it's never going to be 100% equal, but that's okay, it doesn't have to be. It's close enough. In fact, as I pointed out, you can find key levels where the reverse is true, and you find way fewer people who can do those keys than who can clear mythic raids. Like, WAY way less. So clearly there is a scale at work here that at least allows for an approximation of comparison, even if it's not direct and 1:1.

If you give rewards to those people, there will be even more of an outcry than there currently is. As I pointed out using statistics from raider.io the level at which less players are able to do a m+ dungeon than the mythic raid is absurdly high. Just to give you another metric: Warcraft logs displays 582 mythic Gallywix kills in the last 7 days. Raider.io counts 2200 timed runs at 16+ in the last 3 days alone. Nearly 10000 runs were completed last reset. Okay, some Trinkets are from other bosses, let's look at the one armed bandit: 2325 logged kills in the last 7 days. Sadly I've not found a source that tracks player numbers, only kills and runs, which are not quite comparable.

So, if completion were a metric for comparing difficulty like you suggested, then a +16 would be about equal to a mythic raid bandit kill. or a +17 akin to a gallywix kill.

If that's the cutoff point, then I would be completely fine with it. But it would probably generate even more envy in the m+ community than there currently is.

- - - Updated - - -

Click on some random HoF guilds/players and look at their logs and the keys that they've failed, you don't have to search very long. Yet doing the same for top M+ runs you actually have to search diligently to find logs that aren't pristine.

Just looking randomly at the top rated players on raider.io I find nearly none that have 8/8 undermine. Because that's the comparison you make here.

And yes, I agree that mythic raiding is behind an unnecessarily hard barrier. But that's not the point of dinars.

[Biomega]

Of course, yes. But my point is, that mythic raiding is numerically as well as mechanically more difficult. Before m+ gets more difficult, the numbers have to go WAY higher.

I don't know how you can justify this. For the highest key levels in pretty much any season, there's significantly fewer people who have completed those than have killed the final boss in a mythic raid. Up to orders of magnitude less, depending on the season. So by the only universal and objective metric we have (number of people who've done it) there are unquestioningly levels of M+ that in fact more difficult than mythic raiding. Given that this is true, all that's left to argue about is how to adjust the slider in terms of rewards; the scale and how high up it goes is not in question, empirically.

And part of the reason is that "mythic raiding" is not a monolithic difficulty because of the rolling changes and adjustments made to it over the course of a tier, which doesn't happen to anywhere near that extent in M+. However, rewards are given out irrespective of that in this context, and are fixed to a particular span of time (whenever the currency comes out) so that's not really of much relevance.

Also you get more options in how to deal with this difficulty. A raid fight is pretty scripted. Sure, there is room for some variation, but essentially you have to learn how to fight a boss a certain way. In m+ you can choose certain routes, use mindcontrol and hard CC, skips, etc to gain an advantage. Sure, that does not work on bosses, but they become comparatively less important the higher the key gets. Also meta classes are a thing in m+. Much less so in mythic raids, because they are tuned with a wider variety of classes (and their buffs/abilites) in mind. So for example just picking a DH tank gives you an advantage in m+, something that is less pronounced in mythic raids.

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. At a sufficiently high key level, these things all point towards M+ being more difficult rather than less. I hope you realize that.

Have you ever done real high M+? It's almost incomparable to low/medium keys. And at the highest levels, the degree of individual performance required easily dwarfs your average CE-near-the-end-of-the-season mythic raiding guild by a considerable margin. Clearing the raid on mythic is almost a joke compared to getting within 3 levels or so of the top keys (easily even more, depending on a given season's scaling). I'm not sure you realize just how hard these keys get.

I agree. But imo that level is very hard to find for reasons explained above. The smaller the group size, the more variation you get by mixing different classes. In the raid specs are balanced so that the difference between best and worst is about 15%. In m+ this is harder to calculate, but even at levels 12 and above, the participation of VDH and Disc is triple that of the next tank/heal. And for DPS this is similar.

Again not entirely sure what your position is. "It's hard, therefore let's not do it"? "Class balance gets wonky, so let's not give them any extra gear"? I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this just some big Nirvana fallacy where you're going well we can't find a way to match difficulties perfectly so better to just not do it at all?

No, I picked the highest reward Blizzard offers for the given activity.

How you define "highest" here is arbitrary, though, and I can easily point to other activities of laughable difficulty that reward mounts at 0.1% or whatever (Love is in the Air, say). You picked a particular reward and a particular metric - and your comparison only works because you picked reward and metric in a way that makes it work. And none of those rewards have any bearing on the context at hand or are part of the system in question.

This is a non-sequitur to put it mildly.

Until now this was an end-of-expansion handout mechanic. And m+ players got a new mount and achievement this season for reaching 3000 difficulty. I can get behind m+ players getting some form of extra(gear) rewards, but why exactly should you get items exclusive to raids? Raiders don't get m+ items, they also only get raid stuff.

Historical arguments don't usually go well, least of all when you frame them with an inherent bias (what does "handout mechanic" mean and why is it different, in any relevant way, if it's the last season vs. any other?).

All that aside, it's easy to explain why it's more important that M+ gets access to raid gear than the other way round: it's usually a downgrade. It's like saying why is it more important that poor people get food stamps than that rich people get them? Well, because one group is in a worse position to start with. And even when there is a situation where an M+ drop is preferable to a raid drop (which isn't even that common to begin with) it's much easier for a raider to do M+ than it is for an M+ player to do raids because raiders already have an infrastructure in place. These are not equitable starting positions, and therefore the rewards don't need to be equitable, either.

It was the same situation with tier sets. Raiders didn't get anything when M+ players got access to tier sets - because they were already better off to start with. The items that people are most complaining about here are raid items - raiders already have access to these. The other way round, while not nonexistent, is MUCH less common.

This kind of flawed thinking around some kind of abstract "fairness" is exactly what Blizzard gets wrong, too, a lot of the time. Fairness doesn't just mean give everyone the same - it means give everyone as much as they need to get to the same level (set by being commensurate to the effort), and some people will need more and others will need less. Sometimes the most fair thing you can do is to give some people more than other people: if I have 10 cookies and you have 1 cookie, what's more fair - giving me 0 cookies and you 9 cookies so we both have 10, or giving both of us 9 cookies so you have 10 but I now have 19 and still nearly twice as much as you?

If you give rewards to those people, there will be even more of an outcry than there currently is.

Based on what? When we had this system before and it did in fact give "those people" these rewards, there... wasn't any outcry. In fact many people loved it.

Your counterargument seems to amount to "yeah but that was a final season, that doesn't count!" which I find, shall we say, less than convincing.

As I pointed out using statistics from raider.io the level at which less players are able to do a m+ dungeon than the mythic raid is absurdly high. Just to give you another metric: Warcraft logs displays 582 mythic Gallywix kills in the last 7 days. Raider.io counts 2200 timed runs at 16+ in the last 3 days alone.

And I'm sure you've done the math and figured out that

1. 582 Gallywix kills means 11,640 people
2. 2,200 timed runs means 11,000 people
3. Raid kills are limited to x1/week while M+ keys are not

Like, come on. Don't just pull random numbers and pit them against each other willy-nilly. Think about how these work. Geez.

[Nymrohd]

I don't understand why we are talking about anything above a +12? The game rewards clearing 10 and somewhat rewards further for 11 and 12. Game achievements similarly rewards up to a specific score with Keystone legend requiring mostly +12s with a few +13s. So comparing Mythic clears with 16+ . . . (and no, season title would not count, that would be comparing with Hall of Fame, not with Cutting Edge).

Everything above that is vanity. Running M14 and above is like trying to speedrun Mythic Raiding or doing it with some handicap. It has no value within the system and it is only recorded because one mode of gameplay has a ranking leaderboard for this type of activity while the other treats it like a binary. Raiding absolutely could be on a leaderboard with ratings like M+ if Blizzard wanted it to be (e.g. ESO does it for trials, account for time to clear and number of wipes so very similar to M+)