Thoughts on M+ after a few weeks?

Just to start off, I'm a 3k IO warlock main. Not exactly meta, but after the buffs we're relatively middle of the pack, potentially slightly better than middle. My history has been around the top 1% to top .5% IO, I've never had season title, highest IO was 3375 feral druid back in S3 DF. I do not have a push group to push with and I do not push up my own key. I always just apply to groups in LFG.

Recently with the discussions on the PoddyC with Megasett about keys, I think it resonates a lot with me for certain concerns that were brought up at the beginning of the season versus now.

Xal'atath's Guile

  • In a perfect world, it'll only be the HP % portion and not have the damage portion attached to it, but it's sort of fine as it is right now. I don't know if I'm out of touch though since I'm past the +12s wall and it's not exactly "hard" for me to join and complete a +12 right now. This past week, I filled my entire vault with only +12s/13s.

  • I heavily, heavily agree with Megasett in that I dislike weekly affixes but I absolutely love the option for people like me to not have to deal with them. I can very easily agree with Dratnos that these Xal'atath affixes are a thousand times better than incorporeal, bursting, bolstering, etc, it's just they often spawn and create an unfair situation and makes us either deal with the affixes or deal with the dungeon mechanic; either of which could wipe us. Again, because we don't have to deal with it if we do a +12 or higher, I this this has been a massively good change.

  • In an ideal world, I think +11 and +12 should just not have bargain and move guile to +13 so that there's 2 key levels where we don't have the "buffs" from bargain and people getting used to the steadily harder keys.

Tyrannical and Fortified at +10

  • I actually really, really like having both at the +10. A lot of those posts I saw were people were complaining about +10s being too hard just seems like they expected to blast through +10s like how folks were blasting through +8s at max ilvl in S4 DF. I don't think I'm out of touch here because I don't have a push group to go with and I don't push up my own key.

Tank Nerfs

  • I overall think this has been terrible for the pug scene. Based specifically on Blizzard's original blue post, I haven't seen these tank nerfs resulting in any of the stated goals. Tank damage is massively more spiky, tanks die all the time to random white hits, healers do have to focus heal tanks a lot, and tanks kite all the time from what I can tell. It's absolutely asinine when it's a "bad idea" to use an AOE CC like incap roar because it'll sync up the mobs' white hits and 1-shot the tank.

  • Another "nerf" that I feel like isn't being reported on is that every single tank trinket sucks absolute donkey dick. I want a good defensive trinket like a good on-use shield or DR, but instead every tank trinket seems to be "press this to do more damage". Worse off, they're not even as good as just standard DPS trinkets like Sacbrood or Ovinaxm. The "best" tank trinket right now is Swarmlord's Authority and it's relatively difficult to get. Most high level tanks focus more on DPS than they do survivability because they optimize their rotation to survive, but for the run of the mill tanks like me, having a good defensive tank option is paramount for us to be able to tank.

Crest Accrual

  • It's ass and I don't think people are talking about it enough, mostly cause it only affects alts.

  • An easy solution would be if you cap out on whatever crest on your main, your warband gets double the accrual rate per dungeon or something for the week because my god, no one wants to run over 60 dungeons on an alt. I know you get rune cost reduction by 33% but that's only if you get the harbinger's achievement for the specific crest level... which doesn't help anyone at the gilded crest level because imagine farming 810 gilded crests.

  • Valorstones are ass and only matter when you don't have them. I need a blizzard dev to properly explain what they think valor stones do and if they think they're successful.

  • Edit: if alt gearing was easier, it would incentivize players to actually play alts and keep the m+ population healthy. As it stands now, I foresee a massive drop in m+ participation when ppl get absolutely burned out.

Personally I'm a huge fan of these m+ discussions because I feel like m+ is the most approachable, high-end content content. I wish people that actually push high-end content such as Megasett would join these podcasts more because on the bench, they're so widely out of touch with the pug scene at the 1% level it's crazy hard to describe. Like even in that very podcast when Max said he pugs... with viewers who joins his stream. I don't think these people understand what that means. I saw Quazii do an 11 on his pally alt, which at the time was only like 2600 io. He put up a key for +11 Siege or something and said he's going to push to 13/14. I applied to his key even though I was 2737 or something at the time and had already done all 11s. On his stream, of the 20 or 30 DPSers who signed up, a good 15 or 20 were 3k IO or higher signing up for an 11.

Edit:

Forgot to talk about…

Challenger’s Peril

  • I think overall this affix just exposes bad dungeon design more. Like if the dungeon has bad graveyards, it exacerbates the problem and makes it a shitton worse. I remember my first +10 Dawn this season we had like 22 deaths and timed it still.

  • Tettle’s take of you shouldn’t be able to wipe multiple times and still time the key seems extremely arbitrary.

Stops Change

  • I don’t have a doubt in my mind that this’ll go the way of the GCD change and be reverted next expac. It’s so wholly stupid and bad and restricts dungeon design.

  • Some of the worst parts of any dungeon is only bad because we don’t have any good way to interrupt mobs like all the mobs up to the first boss of CoT.

Gold Economy

  • To me the worst thing about this season is how expensive everything is. The hardcore raiders/m+ people I know have had to either turn to boosting for gold or just buy more tokens.

Season Title

  • I’m a massive proponent of making season title .1% per spec or whatever instead of .1% overall. Some folks have that weird take that it’ll just shift player behavior into having 1 offspec + 4 meta spec for keys. This is already happening, do you think making season title more fair is somehow going to make LFG worse?

  • It would actually make the meta less important

Crafting

  • Ties into crest accrual but crafted items costing 90 crests is so wholly restrictive. It makes ppl not play offspecs as much and as a direct results shrinks the m+ player pool. Got a great druid player that mains boomy in raid? Well asking him to stagnate his gear progression for two weeks just so he can get a mythic agil staff is like a kick in the nuts.

  • Embellishments seem to be a massive failure. They should just change it to an item enchantment at this point because it seems like a dead corpse of a system that is only alive because blizzard is forcing us to weekend at bernie’s it.

Dungeon Pool

  • I think some of the other issues with the game design has been exacerbated the dungeon pool. Bad graveyards has made challenger’s peril an instant disband for example. The poison/curse dispel requirements have made having specific healers so massively more important and fortifies the meta like never before for healers.

  • I fear next season will be massively, massively worse with dark flame cleft and I need Blizz to drop that stupid gimmick or else a lot of ppl will just quit.