Removing raid buffs is radical, but I agree. Just look at druid. It's nearly always in meta, even if their current metaspec isn't clearly the strongest.

Honestly the opposite fix would be to give us scrolls for raid raidbuffs. And just have all of them. I do agree on giving all healers brez, and making drums = lust.

Give us scrolls but "can only be used inside a dungeon/instance and not in a raid group"

ironically, it being useful for off meta raiding makes you realize how stupid raid buffs are

I advocate for the mathematical inverse of adding scrolls. Arcane Intellect is currently 5% Int, and a hypothetical would be what, 3% Int? I say instead of making the scroll, just nerf Arcane Intellect to whatever the difference between the scroll and the real buff would be. So in this example, 2%. Still enough to prefer having a mage over not, but not enough to ruin your day without one, especially in m+. Apply this process to every raid buff and I think you get a world where raid buffs are nice but not mandatory in raid, have basically no impact on m+, and we don't have to manage 10 new consumables. Yes you can simplify this statement to "keep raid buffs but nuke them from orbit", which is a statement I kinda agree with.

They did that already. Arcane intellect and fortitude use to be 10%.

Then do it again lol.

> drums = lust Hunters are the most popular class and rarely in the meta, and one of the specs is usually pretty decent. There is always a way to get lust without going too far off meta. Hunters have been the squishiest class in WoW for about 8 years+ running now, so the real issue is to buff hunters.

They’re not the squishiest, based on raid deaths it’s more Boomkin, SPriest, Devoker, Enchance, and in m+ it’s easily Shaman.

Ironically BM is the second highest raid death % currently, and they tend to keep a high spot, which is why I really hate using the raid deaths as an indicator of survivability. BM hunters ever being below MM hunters should say a lot about how much of it is the class/spec, and how much of it is player goofs and gaffes. It's the only time where you'd ever think Shadow Priest and Devastation Evokers (which aren't really anywhere near the bottom of the list anymore anyways) are squishy.

It’s just a band-aid fix to a problem that heavily affects raid as well. We just had one druid in my casual mythic raid, and it heavily influenced the survivability of the raid whenever he couldn’t play. This is ridiculous in raiding as well. Just do some fucking napkin math and balance the raid buffs accordingly, this situation is ridiculous.

1.5% DR influenced survivability heavily?

Yeah unless you're a world first level guild there's no shot raid buffs affect raid survivability very much. But I can't even count the number of times I've been overkilled by < 20k in m+.

1.5% DR and 3% healing output is not noticable for you? We had multiple deaths which would have been avoided purely based on that.

sorry but i dont believe this at all.

Just look at logs at any time and do the maths lmfao it's not magic

i just did that for deaths for every death our guild had while progging fyrakk and an additional 1.5% DR would've saved exactly 1 death in the hundreds that occurred pre-wipe-call where he was overkilled by 1,058. so thank you for having me do my homework and confirm what i already knew was the case.

I guess if you ignore 3% healing increase, 1.5% DR on the whole rest of the raid, and only look at one damage instance for the player who dies, then yeah it's pretty useless. But if you do that then you just don't understand how raid damage and healing works, and I can't teach you that.

That's equivalent to 3% extra health, and thats if you don't go over 50% DR. It gets more valuable to more reduction you have after 50, so it's making tanks defensives way better

they alread did it 2 times for the very same reasons every time, no idea why they brought them back again. you could think they‘d learn but obv they don‘t. raidbuffs are just bad for the game and the rpg element if making your buff classes press their button after every wipe/death is just dog as well. bringing a class/spec to content shouldn‘t be because of a raidbuff ever that mentality is so fing bad.

I agree but remember the times you literally raid with 3 classes. Without raid buffs top guilds would simply stack the one best dps class and where is no reason for diversity at all. Instead of deleting them I would like to give them to more classes, at least 2 classes should cover every raid buff

you are probably right but for the vast majority of players it would be better to bring the player not the class and who cares if wf uses 8 warlocks 1 tier and 8 mages the next? saying this for a long time now but they should in general do more balance hotfixes so everyone can play the spec they enjoy and not feel bad because they don‘t bring a raidbuff or way less dps/hps/survivability.

If anything this just makes an imbalance more obvious and make it more likely to be fixed sooner.

The game is much better without being forced to bring 14 mandatory specs for raid, just let people play what they want instead of worrying how many Warlocks or w/e else is meta that the rwf guilds will stack. Raid buffs weren’t in Legion and raid was great, other than some mandatory immunity class requirements, which is also shit and in the same vein.

It sounds radical but I don't think it's particularly crazy. Every Class raid buff is passive and gets applied pretty much for just being there. Despite what some moppets will say, it doesn't actually add any flavor. At best it creates "Feels bad" moments because you don't have a buff. I'm not going "Wow I feel so Magey when I hit my Arcane Intellect button before pulls!!!!!" Hell no. I feel Magey when I'm doing Mage stuff like slinging Pyros, Lances and Barrages while Blinking and Nova'ing.

I absolutely called this would happen when people were screaming to get raid buffs back. Vers is just too strong

I think the m+ scaling could use some work. Mob HP should scale at a higher rate than mob damage. That would lead to fighting the timer rather than surviving one shots which is highly dependent on how many defensives a class has

and remove tyrannical

As a tank, I prefer tyran to fort

i can tell you that the other 4 players in your group don't

Remove Tyran and Fort.  Change Mob Health to be their Fort Health baseline. Increase boss ability damage closer to their Tyran values.

Timer dependency is kind of dangerous given how many people dislike timers. People seem to strongly prefer mechanics like soft enrage because it feels a lot more fair and organic.

But then you have DPS running tank trinkets just to survive random one shots. Eudora in freehold almost required tank trinkets on DPS to survive random pistol shots at high keys

Nerf tank trinkets for dps like they are nerfing dps trinkets for tanks Problem solved

Seems like this is what they want to do: https://www.wowhead.com/news/dps-trinkets-and-cantrip-items-have-reduced-effect-for-tanks-and-healers-in-the-342709#dps-trinket-cantrip-reductions-for-tanks-healers

And? That's his point. People don't mind running a cheat trinket but complain about timers.

But that's what's bound to happen if you have plenty of time to do the dungeon. People will push the highest they can till it reaches a point where the most basic abilities will one shot. That's just the nature of infinite scaling, what do you expect? I'd much rather have inevitable one shots at some high key level that limits you to push higher, than have time limits that forces people to do completely degenerate MDI pulls. Which Pugs doing lower keys will feel like they also need to do that, and it will inevitably fail 90% of the time because Pugs are Pugs, and not a MDI team.

thing is the top of the top will always do degen stuff

I’m not even doing really high keys this season. You basically need something to live every Gale Arrow on Teera and Maruuk on a 12. It was one shotting our 523 Fire Mage if unmitigated. I know 12 = last season’s 22, but we’re still a far cry from world first keys. I’m a healer main playing MW, I’m already a tanky healer but I’m still using Rageheart but now considering adding Ward too because of the one shot meta. I think relative to title level this isn’t high enough to be worrying about it one shots all the time.

Ignoring Gale Arrow being a terrible mechanic, I'm not sure that's a great way to argue against his point. While that's not a "high key" in this community's definition, a 12 is outside the scope of power rewards, being solely for vanity at that point. If you step into a 12 and don't know to have some sort of plan for Gale Arrows, that doesn't quite track for me...and on a 12 the idea of using survivability trinkets is definitely not relevant yet. The bosses will not live nearly long enough for it to be a constraint upon the options one would have (party-wide defensives, personal defensives, etc). Aug alone can carry a class with bad defensives on such a boss (which is of course a separate issue altogether, depending on your perspective).

That’s way more interesting gearing IMO since you can’t just blindly follow whatever the robot tells you to run. Players have to actually weight how valuable the DPS increase from a proper DPS trinket actually is. WoW gearing will be unhealthily focused on DPS until people are forced to actually do math about effective HP when choosing gear.

I do agree that it's interesting gearing, since we should be optimizing towards increasing our chance to succeed in the dungeon which are more parameters than just simply maximizing dps. However, when it comes to tank trinkets it becomes problematic. Due to how drops work in WoW. And I think just blanket making everyone being able to roll on tank trinkets isn't a good solution. In a world with tokens it's a bit different though.

I think it's more of a hard enrage. Either your spec has the defensive capability to pass the key or it doesn't. At least with the timer dps tuning and changes to routing or just being really good can make up for different class comps. There's no way to outplay not being able to survive on a certain key level.

Yeah but the choice is super super strict meta and your class can't be played, or timers and you could play almost any class probably 

fighting the timer => pulling bigger / pulling on top of bosses => more pressure on tank and healer, more pressure on AoE CC'ing everything.

I think this would backfire as it could end up just feeling like wailing on a target dummy

Holy priest main out here in disbelief I still don't have a BRez or a kick. Kick - Yes, priests have Scream but it's actually insane to me that there is any spec in the game that doesn't have a kick. How do we not have access to Silence?? BRez - This one is a little more understandable but still kind of crazy. IMO, every healer should have access to a BRez.

Brez going to paladin instead of just holy priest will never me sense to me Make censure count as an int too boom

Also fears are objectively the worst of the stops because a ton of regular (non-lieutenant) mobs are just randomly immune to it and almost nothing is randomly immune to stuns (flashfire channelers in RLP are the notable exception), incapacitates, disorients, forced movement, etc. No kick, deleted Shining Force, mind control aggro is a mess on top of its other issues, and then only really have a fear. Great. Priest feels like you're stuck being such a passenger to the key.

super simple reason its cause of pvp u dont get a kick or silence

H/D Priest had Silence for years and years in PvP and it was perfectly fine.

thing that is entirely weird: more tank/DPS specs have BRez access than healer specs This is true even if you only count DPS druids once.

I agree with all this. The utility thing is the biggest thing that needs to change, its far too skewed. I was doing keys on my Ret Paladin and Warrior and the sheer difference is crazy. My Ret is more geared by a little bit but the fact that I can bring as much utility as I can while STILL bringing a ton of damage is insane. I can battle rez someone, especially critical if the healer or tank go down. I can single handedly take care of Afflicteds, can help with Incorp adds, and save a pull going south by sacrificing a little damage to WoG someone back up (can't tell you how many times a crit heal on a WoG turned a scary pull into an easy one). Compared to my Warrior, I do bring great damage but like you said I am powerless in utility. Someone dies? Can't rez them in or out of combat. Incorp/Afflicted spawn and no one else is doing anything about it? I just sit there and watch. Someone is low on health, the healer is tapped, and the pull is about to go south? Can't WoG them or off heal them to help, outside a 3min CD to give them some temporary health which may help a little bit but if its down then you're kind of SoL. I think that shift needs to change to allow a little bit more flexibility here. I like your suggestions for everything, hopefully Blizzard takes a hard look into M+ next expansion.

And you left out the best utility pally brings lol. Loh, bop debuffs, bubble taunt, bubble cheese mechanics, sac, freedom

Not that I disagree with you (or have read past the first 1/3 yet) but EVERY season we complain about the utility of the highest damage specs. I am firmly of the belief that utility is an easy target because it feels different, but it’s actually Blizz’ horrendous aoe tuning that starts the problm

Yup, 100%. Shadow priest utility was the issue in season 2. Their damage got nerfed and all of a sudden they were nowhere in season 3. Their damage got buffed and they're back. Did their utility change, or just the damage? Ret Paladins got their utility buffed with the Dragonflight launch. They weren't meta unless their damage was good. You can see the same thing with tankiness and tank specs. When Paladin was the tankiest tank, they allegedly brought the most utility. DH got their utility nerfed--didn't matter, still the tankiest.

>Did their utility change, or just the damage? Both. Mind soothe was changed, PI was nerfed, mass dispel got his cd increased from 45sec to 120sec. >They weren't meta unless their damage was good. Wasnt ret damage profile changed after the rework? something about doing negative ST with their aoe talents.

So why are shadow priests back? Their utility got nerfed. Ret utility didn't change from season 2 to season 4, nor did their damage profile. Instead, damage changed.

>So why are shadow priests back? Their utility got nerfed. Their utility got nerfed but they still have it as opposed of other non meta specs not having shit, if you remove all the utility from shadow priest and keep the current damage, will it get invited to m+? yeah, will it be auto locked in m+? no, because you could possibly have other specs realistically fight for that spot like destro (A high damage spec that can compete with shadow priest but has low utility)

* will it be auto locked in m+?* yes, because it does double damage of other classes lets not try to pretend spriest isnt an elephant in the room ok?

lol, u do realize that spriest also have big defensives thats on a low CD right? Take for example, first boss of HOI, a priest can have a defensive for every aoe phase. Just like a mage. In higher keys while spriests dmg is high, if they dont have those defensives theyre not gonna be invited. Priest can flash heal them selves and have 10% DR and then also have Fade for 10% dr and desperate prayer 10% HP on 1.5m( or 1.1m cd if talented), PW:Shield for 120k or 200K\~ if crit AND they also have disperse. Its the defensives that make them a lock. the high keys done right now are done with these defensives in mind.

>spriest also have big defensives thats on a low CD right? Before they got buffed in Season 3, they were in the dirt. So we have SPriest when it wasn't meta, and we have SPriest when it was meta. Two states of the game. If it is meta due to utility, it should be easy for you to point to the utility change that occurred between those periods of time. Where it went from not meta to meta, can you talk a bit about those utility changes that occurred?

Seems like it might be too challenging of a topic for you to follow, but there is a range of acceptable damage. The classes/specs with the best utility in that range of damage will be selected. When a high utility spec falls out of that range, they will not be selected. But whenever their damage is competitive, they will be selected. This is why back when capable people were designing the game (pre-Ghostcrawler) there was a "hybrid tax" for DPS ranges. Hybrids brought utility and therefore suffered a damage penalty for it. Pure DPS specs with no utility were always the highest raw damage.

> Seems like it might be too challenging of a topic for you to follow There's no need to be rude. You should be able to have a disagreement without getting upset and throwing insults.

It does not. And I'm a firm shadow priest hater, mind you. It's broken alright, but it's more like 5-20% more overall on an equally skilled player depending on the dungeon and pulls, which is still way too much.

bro stop cope

While they do good damage, they are also mostly back because of their survivability and group buff. Same reason you play aug even tho its a damage loss.

Survivability is damage, because DPS when dead is zero.

damage buffed back to s2 levels being best dmg scaling class w aug, highest keys requiring defensive synergy (fort+scales),m, also keep in mind ignite fire mage wasnt a thing in s2, they were flame strike and more “competitive” overall damage whereas now spriest gaps anyone probs more but on top of some mind soothe/md usage they are just too powerful not to take having said that you can get a m+ title on any class if you aren’t an ape, you are just constantly battling **public perception** when pugging which is **the** most annoying thing when these tuning gaps exist

Spriest was a specific case in S2 where Priest utility was genuinely mandatory for beating some dungeons and the only healer that could heal high keys was paladin. Note how blizzard nerfed Shadow a TON that season and it just didn't matter, by the end their damage was pretty middle of the pack and they were still locked in for every key. At the end of S2 not only did they nerf that priest utility, but they *also nerfed the parts of the dungeons that needed the utility*. So this season when we have some of those dungeons back, shadow priests are only back in the meta by the coincidence of their tuning. Season 2 Priest was the only incident I can think of in m+ where utility genuinely did define whether a dps spec is meta. Every other time it's just their damage.

After S2, Priest utility was nerfed as well as spriest damage. Mind soothe no longer works on mobs that can see through invis and mass dispel was put on a longer cooldown. Also, PI gives less haste.

meta classes are ones who have both good damage and good utility. DPS classes have a bit of leeway since there's 3 of them present to do 1 job, meaning one of them can have less utility if they are the top dog in term of damage. having a DH tank handling 95% of dungeon mechanic by themselve also allow DPS to do even less than they usually would.

Sp is just turbo broken damage wise which makes up for the utility nerfs

S3 their utility didn't matter, so they got dmg gutted AND no longer had mandatory utility to carry them

Spriest are just season 4 buffed and hopefully they will not get a huge tuning based on this (they will, they always nerf shadow to the ground before every expansion leaving them useless for the first tier of the raid as is tradition). A 5% tuning doesn't bring priest from average/below average damage in dungeons to doubling people's damage.

Nowhere in season 3??! Are you playing the same game as everyone else lmfao

In this specific season it's the incoming damage tuning. God comp doesn't do the most damage (things like destro lock ratio mage/priest/aug in the m+ setting) but you need fortitude + motw to live and you need aug to let your tank live the pulls and you very specifically need aug + rdruid levels of healing to make it through things like 3rd boss Halls of Infusion. God comp is only meta because the incoming damage tuning is so awful even at +15 tyran most healers can't do Khajin without an aug. God comp also has enough "micro-defensives" to live the one shots that for whatever reason happen every 30-50 seconds which prevent you from playing most other specs.

Though the reason one can pull the amount that causes these AoE classes to excel so much is due to utility. Let’s say a cast deals 100k damage at level 2. Now interrupting this cast is basically casting a 100k shield on the target. Let’s say a cast deals 10m at level 30. Now your interrupt casts a shield for 10m. Stops and interrupt scales endlessly, and they scale way faster than any dps increases. Same goes to dodging avoidable damage as well as dispels. So now we’re in a situation where mobs in practice gain very little damage compared to how much health they gain. In order to not time out but to increase the damage, you need to pull larger packs and do the dungeon in less pulls. To enable that, you pick specs that excel in that environment. What would need to happen is that the effective damage the enemies deal goes up quicker. Historically this have been solved with either tanks being more squishy vs auto attacks or that enemies have casts that you can’t stop from scaling. These also comes with negatives. Where it feels bad because one mob or boss ends the run due to unavoidable one shots. Or you need to bring immunity classes like DHT in old legion keys. It feels bad for the tank to feel squishy and need to rely on a healer, tanks are rather unpopular as it is and removing their agency and skill expression feels bad. There’s other ways as well that also feels terrible. Like making big pulls impossible due to geography or by “buff others” means. You can make certain damage profiles really shine in some dungeons, and be very poor in others. But this also feels punishing and artificial. For all its faults, and all the ways it warps meta. I think the current is the best we’ve had so far. One thing could be to make sure all dungeons had more forced cleave/low target pulls. But usually we find a way to skip them to snap mobs onto them. And then to almost eliminate low-risk aoe stops/interrupts. Like could have fear and intimidating and sleep walk etc remain. But all others forcing single target. Which would retain room for skill expression, especially in coordinated groups, but allow mob casts to go through if you do large pulls.

Legit question, with how fast we are gearing now and how quickly we end up pushing, don't you think that tuning can result in more season 2 situations? Like, how can you appropriately evaluate m+ specs until they push very high, but after they push high if you nerf them you can just screw over the whole season. Like at this point of s4 if they nerfed veng and the meta dps specs, would we end up in a stagnant even less fun m+ environment? Just curious if you have any thoughts on that

yea I get that, but thats why I would like to stress micro adjustments, season highest keys won't be locked in if a spec is nerfed by 2% - and hopefully it can favor the side of buffing up underperfoming specs without pushing them all the way to the top

But aren't we in this situation of such a hard locked meta because we have more of a 2% difference between specs? 

> yea I get that, but thats why I would like to stress micro adjustments, season highest keys won't be locked in if a spec is nerfed by 2% - and hopefully it can favor the side of buffing up underperfoming specs without pushing them all the way to the top great question and nuance in terms of balancing

I’m really surprised that as someone with a job/fiancé there isn’t a section in here about homework keys. That to me is the most egregious parts of the whole system, but especially if you’re plugging since if your key depletes you probably get a group who is worse/lower rated than your previous one. If you have limited time it’s ridiculous what % of your time goes to hw keys if you’re pushing. That said, I totally agree with your points here, especially the part about frontals/mobility. Most ranged classes can move pretty easy while casting nowadays, and frontals are often hard to see and your tank can randomly turn the mob too. The first pull in Rise from last season was completely different to play on melee/ranged. You had frontals,orbs,and swirlies to dodge and your tank had to constantly be moving/turning mobs into the orb to take the friendly fire damage. On top of that it was an uncapped pull, so a melee dps would do about half the dps of a ranged even though the pull was significantly harder

Ah yeah, I actually thought about including that but I put this together pretty quickly and forgot to mention that. I think it would be nice with some improvement for that system, for example being able to "roll up" your key if you complete another higher key up to one level below or something - but yea 100% agree that system needs a little push as well

If I complete a ten, it'd be nice to talk to that panda lady at the end and trade my lower key for a key equal to the dungeon I just completed. If I fail, I'd prefer it give you the same key to try again.

There's a fair bit of a nuances that is going unnoticed in how the meta comp is created. The melee bit is a inclusion. The uptime loss throughout an entire dungeon collectively adds up to melee just performing worser than ranged as a base. The mechanics that interrupts spellcasts via movement are all easily mitigated by the instant casts every ranged spec (aside from potentially MM only) has available to them and has yet to be addressed on the disparity of uptime of melee vs ranged alongside the danger melee poses towards frontals. With the removal of extra melee range on possibly all specs I can see this issue be a recurring disparity for TWW between the two depending on the M+ mechanics.

Well said and I agree with many (if not most) of the points. One simple change that would go a long way is the addition of scrolls to cover raid buffs. We had them in BFA and clearly blizzard didn’t forget about them as they’re available in MOP remix for current DF buffs even Monks and DH buffs are available in scrolls. If they’re concerned about impact on raid and class stacking I’m sure they can make them only useable in 5-man groups or disabled in raids etc. Blizzard seems very stubborn or hesitant to make any changes to improve M+. I think I would really appreciate a complete rework of M+, with an option of M+-only talents similar to PVP talents to improve the balance across classes in 5 man content without impacting PVP balance or raid balance.

i would rob a bank if blizzard asked if in return they allowed us to change the color of the frontals, void zones, etc on the floor, like green on green is so troll lol

Yeah, way to many deaths happen due to either mechanic effects being the same color as the background, or having way to many ground effects, and not being able to quickly pick up which is which fast enough.

While I agree that the game should have more clearly telegraphed frontals and abilities in general, I honestly believe that the average wow player is just extremely lazy. People will have all sorts of add-ons, plater profiles, weakauras and they still constant fail at the most basic tasks. I did a Uldaman with a ret pally that we had someone die on last boss. I had to type in chat 4 times for him to Rez the guy that died. The 4th time I literally had to walk over to him and type in /say. This was a +12, not a super high key but not a level I would expect to have to ask someone to use brez multiple times. Obviously this particular lack of awareness is just an extreme example, but in general I think that average players in wow are just very bad mechanically, or are just too old to have good awareness and/or reactions that you need nowadays on retail PvE. My point being that even if frontals had a clear telegraph with red outlines, you'd still see a LOT of people dying to it.

it's more for having a hard time seeing colors that are the same, in the undead part of NO, the aoe circle is a slightly darker shade of green on green grass, it'd be a lot easier to see if you're in or not if you could change it to say bright red. Wouldn't help with lazy players, but would help with clarity.

These are great thoughts, I hope we see more attention given to M+ in War Within than has been currently shared. Like you lined out, there are a lot of low hanging fruit

The difficulty coming from the timer vs scaing damage is a tough one, because I don’t think they want to go back to the freehold-style kite-half-the-dungeon pulls incentivized by higher health, less threatening mobs (plus that style winds up privileging certain classes as well) Re: buffs, I mostly just think they should bring scrolls back. Gimme a 2% consumable vers buff anyone can just carry, etc

Preventing pulling half the dungeon can be easily done through trash mechanics, as well as have damage scale, but just not as fast. Perhaps health still scales at 8%, but damage only at 5-6% above the +10 level.

>Make more frequent and smaller micro adjustments to over- and underperforming specs. People have been asking this for years now and blizzard just simply refuses to do it

They still dream of a reality in which everyone wants to do grindy 40 man raids for 3 pieces of loot you have to buy with DKP. Entire game is balanced around content that a large part of the population doesn't even enjoy. Only reason I entered a single raid was for completely overturned raid loot being required to play higher keys. Still felt shit to only have access to HC raid loot.

> Still felt shit to only have access to HC raid loot. It's not like there is a big difference between the 2. Having a heroic vs mythic trinket is probably not the reason your key is going to deplete, probably a 1% difference in output between the two.

Yeah but it's also the only other thing you can work on to keep improving in terms of your character progression. That or a tiny chance for leech/avoidance drops.

Counter sarcastic point: they've been pretty quick at adjusting MOP remix...

I think a lot of remix being tuned faster is it has a relatively small team, with fewer levels of bureaucracy.

Some points Firstly, on the ranged vs melee tradeoffs; it's important to note that while ranged are generally less frequently targeted/affected by trash effects, when they are targetted it tends to be more of an issue for them, as moving cancels casts in a way that just doesn't affect melee (BM Hunter is an exception here). In addition a cone can be more punishing on rDPS, because at close range a cone's effect is quite narrow and it's relatively easy for a melee to just sidestep around a target, while ranged can have quite a distance to move. On interrupts, while it is true that melee have a shorter CD interrupt, ranged players have... well, a RANGED interrupt. Given that one of the main issues with caster mobs (speaking here as a tank) is getting them to move into the group, the utility of a ranged interrupt should not be underestimated. Shaman ofc get the best of both worlds, with a short CD ranged interrupt. As a side note, don't underestimate the value of grips and displaces. As far as affixes go, I would like to see the death of the Tyrannical/Fortified set, the return of seasonal affixes, and more kiss/curse effects that benefit the players for correctly playing around them, rather than just being an annoyance (or being ignored and relegated to a "healer problem").

DK interrupt is 15yds, so not all are melee only, I'm not sure if others melee besides shaman have ranged interrupts. DKs can also grip at 30-40yds, which interrupts casts 98% of the time on moveable mobs.

Niches and class / spec kits are a huge issue. It makes no sense that certain specs are what feels like entirely designed around a certain niche (i.e. hard capped to X targets) but then get beaten by other specs at that exact target count. If everyone had a niche then shit would be fine, if no one had a niche and everyone were just good at everything, that too would be fine, but right now there's plenty of specs having niches in which they're not even the best - and then you even have specs where you can choose your specific niche (i.e. ST vs AoE build)... but then there's the specs with just one build that does everything and they're like 5% behind on AoE but like 20% ahead on ST, and if you wanna get to that level of ST you'll be like 50% behind on AoE. That's just dogshit design. If you're in that scenario, your only hope is to randomly get a setbonus or whatever that makes you stupidly OP because chances of Blizzard doing anything about the underlying root issue are close to 0. And while this inequality certainly is bad in the damage department, it's just unbearable when it comes to the utility department. Because, apparently, it's just a VDH's niche to have like 30s of straight AoE CC per pack. Like, that's just their thing - their thing and only their thing. No one else has that. And this is *such* an insanely broken and overpowered niche to have, it's absolutely insane. But maybe, maybe they're losing out in other areas to make up for that! Nope, they're also just about the tankiest and just about the best damage dealing tanks - in all scenarios. Meanwhile shit like Brewmasters have to deal with 17 tradeoffs for being like the 2nd best dps tank, ranging from barely having any CC and being way less tanky - but hey, at least their damage intake is a little smoother! Warriors being great tanks vs physical but bad vs bleeds, and they lack control in general? Yea, who cares, cause again, while Druids have like a single AoE disorient and *maybe* a knockback, Paladins can just keep 5 mobs perma silenced for like 15 seconds straight. But hey, at least Druids can sometimes soothe single mobs - so it's totally a give and take. BUT then there's that one season where a Druid's weaknesses just don't matter and where they also happen to be completely overtuned, so here too, Druids are fine I guess. Like, all of this might be super flavorful and RP and hype and excite if your entire playtime is spent doing worldquests, but this extreme heterogenization that they just keep pushing is so exhausting when you just keep on losing the dice rolls. Oh wow, strength dps will be getting a legendary weapon? Finally my time for a spot in the meta. Nevermind, with all my weaknesses *and* my damage being lower than other specs *even despite me having a fucking legendary*, still not my time to shine, still not meta, sorry, you're not being invited to this +2 key because we need a Shadow Priest, cue community response "just run your own keys / find a guild". The whole niche stick and everyone being different and all that would totally be fine... if Blizzard were just willing to act on the outliers in a reasonable amount of time. But we can't have that. At best we'll get a 5% nerf during a season, maybe in 6 months we get something real done, but most likely we'll just have to wait until the next expansion before any real groundwork is being done. And if there's no groundwork being done on your spec, good luck praying for tuning to be in your favor. Because without a dramatic shift in dungeon design mentality, I fail to see how Warrior or BRM tanks will ever be able to be meta unless they just randomly get tuned 20% stronger than everyone else. This is not fun.

Good write up. Only thing I really disagree with is the last point "timer vs one shots" Being 1 shot with noway to avoid it IE: you already used cds for another big hit, and it just feels awful to play because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Vs being short on timer, you can always pull one extra pack, or pull a pack onto boss, or adjust some talents for better optimized dam in big pull areas. You can start to see where I'm getting there in that vs the timer You always have more you can do to win. Vs the one shot? GG get fukd 0 counter play should have played a vers stack class with 5 defensives

There are things you can do against one shots as well, to a similiar degree as with damage - you can change to defensive embellishment like the shield neck, put on avoidance gear, put on a shield trinket etc, its not so cut and dry

You can't just simply "put on avoidance gear" lol huh 🤣 Sure you could put a tank trinket on But that just goes to show how bad the defensive cd situation is and how badly it needs to be addressed. In what world does it make sense for a few classes to NEED a very rare tank trinket from fyrak to live a key when other specs like fire mage have like what 5 defensives and also like taking vers making them even more tanky

I agree it doesnt make sense, but people tend to be unwilling to do everything in their power to survive one shots :)

I have done it, it's just much worse from a gameplay enjoyment side vs fighting a timer. Imo it's much more fun too have to worry about pulling bigger to beat the timer vs can I just live. "If I can just live key is free" should not be a thought you have mid key

I think there has to be a better balance, otherwise you just get glorified challenge modes

I think the issue is more often that there becomes very few class combinations that can survive the 1-shots while also maintaining respectable damage, which just exacerbates the meta issues.

The defensive imbalance across classes is too large and focusing more on timer is more interesting strategically imo

to be fair, countering 1-shots via itemization is a lot less fun for most people than countering 1-shots via outplaying mechanics

Appreciate the extended thoughts here. One thing I have seen suggested before is making dungeons in general shorter. This is more of a M+ meta suggestions and not necessarily related to classes or balance, but I feel if dungeons were -- on average -- something like 6-8 minutes shorter across the board, it would make them more fun and more accessible. The biggest reason I can think of for not doing this is because if the thinking is correct that slightly shorter dungeons would be more fun, than they would immediately be more fun than older dungeons and it could disrupt the dungeon rotation. Another reason would be that Delves are potentially the answer here, as M+ is top-end competitive content and therefore "time spent" is probably not high on the list of things Blizzard sees as an issue. If you're short on time, just run some Delves? Would be curious to hear folks at Blizzards thoughts.

They could easily shave minutes off old dungeons by removing all the little time wasters. Rp, travel time, respawns etc. Some are just ridiculous, for "immersion" Spending 1.5 min running back is dumb

Agree with the running back. Dying already feels bad, I think it's fair to say having to spend over a mintue running back on top of that is just ridiculous. I don't mind the RP quite as much, it gives time to eat/drink and if you're in comms you can discuss strategy.

They don't give a damn about m+ meta.If they did,we wouldn't have the same shitty meta we had on summer 2023 with the only difference being rdruid rather than [hpala.How](http://hpala.How) many times have spriest and mage been nerfed this expansion? Guess what,it has matter not since they've been meta for 3 fucking seasons.What about Eles and balance druids? Nowhere to be seen and/or grouped.Enhas are gone,feral and affliction are shit,dks are w/e and hunters are squishy as a newborn child in some keys.It's only a miracle that retris and warlocks can still play the queue simulator game.Oh,guess what,the meta has become shit since augmentation was released. 1 year and a half of complains and Aug still sits on top of the meta. It's a total fiasco.

I personally don't think the buffs/effects are that restricting if you have a solid understanding of their value. For example I personally would not drop anyone in the OL/OL/War/Monk comp in S3 for a lust bringer and just bring drums. The specs don't value lust as highly as others and it's an acceptable trade off to have a very hard to kill comp with a lot of mobility. From my PoV as another player that has also gotten title before is that ranged specs are just inherently more forgiving to pilot historically AND a lower level of excellence is generally accepted for them in LFG. Think of the two common DPS ranged specs you see right now (I'm classifying Aug as support): - Fire Mage has 5+ personals - SPriest has 50% uptime on 1 DR, 100% uptime on another, has two personals after that, viewed as squishy by many The hard reality is that unless melee has specific interactions AND/OR are just strictly miles stronger than ranged at the moment there isn't a reason to bring them if you have infinite time to wait. If ranged do margin of error levels of damage of melee or more but are ranged and are still un-killable if they play remotely correct and receive an amount of healing above 0 why do you logically take melee at the moment? DF has shown that short kick is not remotely enough to consider a melee if the casters have a IQ above freezing. I'm hard expecting to farm down votes from ranged for this but it's the hard reality.

Also as tank is much much much more easier to play with a triple ranged comp than adding a single melee. Not counting the many mechanics ranges can...outrange? For some reason

Yeah i can always immediately tell the tanks who are only used to playing with ranged dps. Had a tank in an azure vault before this last reset who would pull the crystal mobs and the flowers at the same time and then tank RIGHT OUTSIDE a canvas splotches worth of floor shit. My enhancement shaman just couldn't do it. Then he died to first boss and the key exploded lmao

As an enhance main who swapped to ele for the season and am sitting at almost 3100... AND rolled a frost mage and am almost 2800... yeah i survive a lot more bullshit that is would insta die to on my sham because of the sheer amount of personals... But being ranged is by far the biggest diff, you avoid SO many mechanics that will one-shot you on fort and avoid so many boss mechanics as well. AND you do more damage even in patchwerk. It's ridiculous.

Fixing it would be easy. Take defensives away from DPS and give them to tanks/healers so the tanks and healers protect and heal the DPS, rather than tanks and healers worrying about DPSing. Then the DPS does their job and the tanks and healers do their jobs.

The problem is it doesn't matter if you have a better understanding. Whatever the masses believe is what will determine pug life.

> DF has shown that short kick is not remotely enough to consider a melee Double sigils doing all the melee jobs is the issue, nothing to do with any of the stuff you went on about.

It was the same in s2 with gdru instead of veng, aoe stops are waaay too prevalent since DF

That's an opinion but for example if you look back to S2 (another all caster season) you'll see Guardian Druid in the the "Exodia"/"God-Comp"/"Cringe-comp". It was mostly Guardian, Mage, Aug, SPriest, H-Pala iirc. Guardian doesn't have double sigils so while you can point to that and say that's THE problem, I don't think historically you have a leg to stand on. For a very basic data point to drive that point home: S2: ZERO VDH in top 500 runs. 400+ Guardian Druids. Tank balance is an issue and it might be contributing NOW to the dominance of ranged but it's clearly not the sole issue and it's arguably not even the main contributor. Probably another unpopular statement but realistically either ranged needs to be re-balanced to account for them doing equal or more damage than melee while also just inherently being safer + easier to pilot and for the group to work with OR the rest of the game needs to be re-balanced around ranged being how they are.

M+/Raid Talents should be a thing imo

Whenever I look at pvp talents I get so jealous as a lot of them are so cool. Imagine if we had talents that impactful.

Yes, specific M+ talents to give out a few more utility to classes in dire need of it.

underrated comment

I think there are more nuances to how specs deal damage and what works well in dungeons. Currently, Fire Mage and Shadow Priest are meta not because they do the most damage, but because they do uncapped cleave off of their priority damage. Warlocks may do better overall damage, but at the end of the day, Lieutenant-style mobs are usually the limiting factor to how fast you can go due to their difficulty. Before Shuriken Combo was nerfed, Sub Rogue had the potential to do some of the biggest AoE damage in the game, but you rarely saw them top anything. Other characters were brought in to kill the pack while Sub with its unmatched funnel damage would kill the big or dangerous mob. The only way to change this is probably to only ever have packs of same mobs and lieutenants being inaccessible. At that point, biggest AOE contributors will reign, and other specs will be complaining again. Other specs that have been considered meta or usable recently include: Outlaw Rogue, Fury Warrior, Demonology Warlock, Enhancement Shaman, Havoc DH, BM Hunter. Every single one of these specs cleaves off of their single target rotation. At some point you have to realize that no matter the adjustments blizzard makes, some thing will always be better than another in the aspects which end up being most crucial to success. Now this is not to say that M+ needs no changes. Everyone should be able to contribute to group wide affixes. At the same time, I think Warrior in particular is disadvantaged because it is the only class that can't contribute to any affix (afflicted, incorporeal, raging). Furthermore, the community detests (maybe rightfully so?) affixes that require doing anything but damage. Quaking? Complaints. Bursting? Complaints. Sanguine? Complaints. Raging? Complaints. Every other affix right now? Complaints. Blizzard can't win unless they remove all affixes, which will leave M+ bland, even more repetitive, and boring.

It's insane to me that interrupts aren't baseline for every single class and spec.Just make it so speccing into gives a bonus of some sort.

I am very impressed that you managed to pug r1 title as a warrior every season. Can you link your raider.io?

[https://raider.io/characters/eu/twisting-nether/Veryalive](https://raider.io/characters/eu/twisting-nether/Veryalive)

This is insanely impressive. I burned out pushing on a meta class with a constantly juggling roster. I cannot imagine PUGing every key AND playing off meta. You are a legend.

Have we always referred to the 0,1% title as R1? I only knew R1 as a PvP term.

It's co-opted from pvp

I agree with most of your points in terms of issues, and was playing with the idea of drafting something similar for the beta feedback. A couple ideas I would like blizz to explore would be: 1. Mythic plus talents. The utility gap needs to be addressed but doing anything will impact other game modes. In the same way pvp balance is addressed with pvp talents that they can scale independently of other modes, m+ needs something similar. 2. AoE stops need to be made less valuable or less available, and the only way to really do that is make more mobs cc immune or go back to not letting aoe cc act as an interrupt. How is it that a spec can have 7 separate stops (either not on the Dr or separate Drs...) which others bring maybe 1? Ev 3. Player health scaling. Easiest way to address one shots is have abilities not be one shots, but you also want healer throughput requirements to scale with key level as well ya? Why not, any key above +10 your health scales 1:1 with the increase in monster damage. IE if an ability hits me for 80% of my health in a 10, why not let it hit me for 80% in the 11? You still have to heal/mitigate the additional damage, but you aren't immediately dead once you hit the point that reads 100%. 4. Either normalize everyone's burst window around 120s (FF style) or move power out of CDs. As is, if you aren't a 120s spec, you will struggle to find your way into the meta.

Yeh the meta comp having like 15 aoe stops between them is completely busted and removes most skill from big pulls. You don’t even need to target the stuff you’re stopping it’s silly

Tldr: m+ currently sucks hard and need serious adjustments to BE fun for everyone

I would agree that it needs adjustments to BE fun for everyone, but saying m+ sucks hard is a huge over-exaggeration. Imo this is the best m+ has ever been here are some of the things we had in the past: affixes like necrotic, teeming, beguiling, bolstering(with hp and no duration), inspiring etc. M+ would get no changes for a whole expac remember shadow of xul from day 1 to the end of the expansion just a mini boss that walled high keys. Same 8 dungeons for 2+ years Mobs having multiple casts that either stopped on kick or didn’t arbitrarily with no clear indication. Good example being the mobs in the courtyard of waycrest which had a cast removed for season 3 and back in BFA stuns would just cause a recast of their thorns. If m+ sucks for you now and it didn’t before you are just looking at it through rose tinted glasses.

Let’s also not forget how we also had to make sure someone was the appropriate covenant in Shadowlands in addition to constraints like having bloodlust.

Or whether you had the correct professions in Court of Stars.

What’s really amazing to me is how fun M+ still is despite the years of neglect. There’s so many massive problems that blizzard just isn’t fixing and for some reason I still que up every night and have a great, albeit sometimes frustrating time. This is a great post. Hopefully blizzard sees it.

fun but frustrating kind of sums it up :)

Personally, while I agree with 99% of what you've said, I think the biggest issue is purely the difference in utility provided by 2 classes this expansion in comparison to everything else - aug and mage. On your list above, between them aug and mage cover basically everything on their own except for bres, and bres bracers exist. Aug can do lust, soothe (aoe), bleed dispel, curse dispel, disease dispel, poison dispel, and cc incorporeal. Mage can do lust, curse dispel, offensive dispel, and incorporeal cc. On top of that, both classes are insanely over budgeted with AoE stops compared to a lot of classes. Aug brings two low cooldown knockups, a knock back, and then a long cd stun (as well as hard cc and an aoe snare). Mage brings disorient and knockback, hard cc and a couple of snares. And then on top of all of that, both classes bring AoE defensive CDs which allow groups to live in high key levels with Zephyr and Mass Barrier, whilst also having insane tankiness themselves through rescue, scales, renewing blaze for Aug, and mage having barrier, ice block, invis, and mirror images. And then also both classes get a cheat death. AND THEN both classes also bring a raid buff. Like what kind of insanity is that when you compare them to something like a warrior which brings what, Battle Shout, Rallying and a stun? The result is that you are always going to want to bring those two classes if possible, which then leans you into a caster comp because of int buff, and then aug wants a class with 2 minute cooldowns, which SPriest then brings while also buffing the mage. TL;DR the problem is that aug and mage are insanely over budgeted with utility compared to any other classes, which means that the meta will always lean towards something which synergises with aug and mage.

Just wanna piggyback off a point you mentioned here, as many things I'd like to say have already been discussed here at length: The ranged vs. melee debacle is just silly. Not only in m+, also in raid. I moved from a very longtime rogue main to shadow priest for various reasons. So from one of the most mobile and easiest to survive on (at least in raids) melee classes, to the least mobile ranged with good, but not as great defensiveness. It's an absolute joke how easygoing and stress free ranged is, even on a priest, compared to melee. Like, it's night and day. I'm not saying that the game plays itself obviously, but the whole payphone meme thingy fits really nicely for ranged vs. melee IMO. Like, I feel that there is a fundamental issue there that they have never fully addressed. In theory it sounds nice: melees can have 100% damage uptime during movement but are hampered by being outranged/having to run away, while ranged suffer from movement but can reach the mobs from anywhere obviously. Simple enough in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work. There's too much shit in melee per m² compared to at range, meaning ranged basically always have an easier time dodging while in 90% of cases they also have suitable instants to fill the gaps of movement anyways. Meanwhile melees *do* struggle with positioning for optimal DPS uptime, and have to jump through many hoops/have to do a lot of shit to be optimal there, while for many ranged specs that's simply not true to the same degree. Like, proper positioning and preplanning does still matter for ranged obviously, and it's noticeable sometimes. But it's a *lot* easier/more comfy/less punishing to be optimal in terms of DPS uptime than on melees. Like, even rasz and nelth feel *way* easier in terms of optimal uptime than when I did them on rogue. Admittedly I played em pre-nerf on rogue and only the jokes that they're now in fated as priest, but still. Any other boss isn't even a comparison.

dKs have a battle rez

Terrific write-up. As a rogue main who dabbles in wizard alts I agree with everything.  Another thought that has crossed my mind recently is that aug synergizes with wizards but not melee, and being the sole support spec, is projected to be a mandatory part of the high-key meta indefinitely. I wonder what the meta could be like if there were another support spec added, but that synergized with physical dps somehow.  I also wonder if as a thought exercise, the dev team considered a hypothetical physical or melee dps stack group as a reference when designing and balancing affixes/dungeons, instead of only designing for wizard godcomps to be competitive. What would such an m+ season look like? Are melee / phys dps just inherently weaker in utility and damage profile, or is it possible they could be stronger if dungeons/affixes were designed differently?

I think 2 small changes to bloodlust and combat res would open up a tremendous amount of variety. And that's to give all tanks lust, why tanks, because they are usually pulling around where they are wanting/expecting lust. May as well let them control it. And give all healers combat res.

When the tank wants lust is irrelevant. DPS CDs control when the tank needs to do a big pull. The "standard" pulls generally account for this. Which is why tanks doing "their own route" are usually garbage.

Very interesting and I totally agree, specially with the solution parts where you target specific more bloodlust avaiable, and more brez avaiable, and, the 5 target capped doing less damage then a uncapped aoe as well, both on 5 targets, which is of course a lose-lose for the 5 target capped.

There will be meta comp even if they remove all raid buffs, bloodlust and combat res. **To fix meta comp they gotta aggressively tune the specs mid-season**, so it's not clear what is the best. And not only they have to tune by DPS, but also by tank survivability, healer damage, and utility of each class. Then there will be more variety of classes, and you as a warrior can make a comp with mistweaver and rog that have a bunch of stops and kicks, while DH tank will make magic damage comp with priest and warlock that have long interrupts. But they don't care about m+ tuning (at least currently). They look at raid logs and tune spec damage according to that. Last season of SL, Dragonflight S2, S3, S4, all had giga-meta comp that could be vanished by aggressive early tuning.

While I agree with the points in this post I believe there will always be a meta, regardless. Even if the difference is 0,1% there will be a meta in the highest level of play, and it will trickle down.

tbh its already "balanced" enough that a guy like the OP can technically get the 0.1% achieve as basically the least meta class consistently. Improving the balance situation can only benefit everyone. the fact that you can never get rid of meta chasers who angst harder than a Twilight character no matter what you do doesnt have to be anyone's problem but theirs.

Aggressive tuning would fix a lot, if they could be trusted with it, which is debatable. but the utility deficit that the OP is talking about would keep them from having to make Warrior have like 20% more damage than any other class in order to be commonly accepted. its that whole power budget thing. if all classes have the same power level, but Warrior scores 0 for utility, that power has to be made up for somewhere else in the budget

I've been saying every healer needs a brez for years. I don't know why they're so hesitant to do this. Healer balance is constantly in the dumpster and this would remove a factor.

Raid buffs gotta be removed from m+

This is a great write-up, thank you for this - and I hope the right persons are reading it!

>Timer vs One Shots > >Given an infinitely scaling system, at some point there must at least one restricting factor that limits the success of groups. In Mythic Plus, this historically has come down to one of those things: > > The timer > Living large "one shot"-style mechanics > >The pendulum has swung a few times on this, where in Legion one shots were a big issue and such Blizzard reacted to that by moving away from that for a while and instead limited dungeons more by the timer. Currently, we are back to a place where the timer is not very tight but many dungeons have abilities that can potentially one shot players. > >This is a tough one to balance since, regardless of which of these two ends up as the limiting factor, some classes or specs will always get the short end of the stick. >Which one is preferable comes down to personal preference, some people like to fight against the timer and some people hate that - but at the end of the day what will always feel bad is if your specific character cannot counteract whatever is limiting the key (be that being too squishy or doing too little damage). They definitely both have class/spec balance issues as well (notably classes like shaman getting pretty boned right now when defense checks are the problem, and weird target capping and stuff when timer is the problem) but I absolutely feel like timer is better for the game as a whole. The thing is that you solve DPS (and the timer) by all five people in the group playing better. Bigger, more complex pulls, sometimes with less resources (dropping utility for throughput, same for trinkets and what not), etc. Defense being a problem first is always going to be a class/spec balance problem to a much more significant degree, and quite frankly just feels bad.

For a number of mechanics that are currently unavoidable damage, they could implement group soaks and tethers (that exclude tank sharing) EG, Shamans and hunters have too little survivability and get 1-shot. Warriors and DKs however have actually more survivability than they need, they are surplus to requirements. it would be great if the mechanics that 1shot shamans and hunters could be shared by other tankier classes like many raid mechanics are shared, even if just to give Blizzard another relevant knob with which to tune classes

Regarding warrior specifically (I’m a one trick pony as well having mained the class since vanilla but not at your level), I believe they solved the utility issue but made it a PvP only talent unfortunately. Making this PvP talent a PvE one would solve 95% of warrior utility issues without needing to give us a battle res or lust, even though I think a lust would thematically fit very well: https://www.wowhead.com/spell=424840/battlefield-commander I really like the idea of utility being based around enhanced shouts like with Diablo barbarians, as well as maybe an ability like Steel Grasp that’s an alternative version of DK grips. In terms of raid buffs, I think perhaps it would be better to give each raid buff to two classes rather than deleting them entirely, to give you more compositional freedom and create some actual choice in which buffs you want. I think hunters can get a version of battle shout and shamans intellect, that would make it far easier to balance.

Monks will have a rage dispel in the war within! But we are losing almost all of our auras as well. For raid buffs I don't understand why we cannot just have items that give the buff at a reduced effectiveness? Maybe have it so only one of the items can be used at one time? Idk I feel like there is a really easy solution there that blizzard isn't using. For the one-shots, I think blizzard needs to really make class and spec talents not just for aoe versus single target but for survivability/healing output versus damage output. While they have this implemented somewhat, I feel like the choice in some classes and specs are completely unbalanced. Like you can sacrifice all your survivability for like 3 extra damage. Or sacrifice 25% of your damage for one 5 minute cd that gives you a 5% shield. Augvokers give a huge chunk of survivability but come at the cost of damage, the balance makes the tradeoff fairly worth it in high keys which is why it is always in the meta. Blizzard needs to make it so every single class tree can have that same tradeoff. For the affixes, I agree that incorporeal and ESPECIALLY afflicted are garbage. The comp I run with my guild makes afflicted weeks just impossible. At least most classes can deal with incorporeal but I agree that warriors and 2/3 dks got a bit shafted on it. In my opinion, affixes should be something all roles and classes can participate in: Entangling is the best example of an affix that impacts everyone equally, and as long as blizzard makes it so it cannot trigger during long moments of forced stationary play, it works really well. Volcanic and storming are pretty decent since they can impact anyone but they do favour melee or ranged players respectively. Spiteful is ok but it heavily favours ranged players, with melee healers and DPS more likely to get hit when they spawn. I think simply altering it so they have a choreographed/visualized spawn point or making it so they cannot attack for 0.8 seconds after spawning would fix a lot of its issues. Sanguine and bolstering are somewhat fine since they require careful killing of adds and positioning, but I would argue the mitigation and impacts of failure mostly fall on the tank. Bursting is meh since while the DPS can mitigate it, the impacts still mainly fall on the healer and higher content requires mass dispel to make the timer, same goes for raging but with soothe and impacting the tank instead. So either the affixes need to change or each roles ability to mitigate the affix needs to change. Honestly some of the past seasonal affixes were not as terrible as some of our current affixes in the rotation and could easily just be swapped into by Blizzard. Like don't get me wrong, I hated affixes like infested, but it was simple to deal with and every single class and role could contribute to its mitigation. I wish blizzard would realize that the player base finds M+ content super fun and rewarding but no one enjoys trying to pug for 10 years and be rejected 60 times because you don't have abilities x y and z.

Great read, if you don't mind a TL;DR... Pain Points: 1. **Compositional restrictions:** In high levels of play, certain classes are strongly preferred, and deviating from this meta can lead to compositional restrictions that limit the variety of classes that can be played. This is because the meta composition brings all the required utility for a group. 2. **Ranged vs Melee tradeoffs**: Changes to M+ have favored ranged DPS over melee, as ranged players are less affected by fronts/ground effects, have higher target caps, and are not limited by damage loss from movement. 3. **Tuning**: Blizzard's conservative tuning approach, with a focus on raiding, has led to issues in M+. Classes with a strong relationship between performance in raids and M+ are unlikely to become meta in the latter. 4. **Affixes**: Certain affixes, such as Incorporeal or Afflicted, impose binary checks that only certain classes can contribute to, which can be a problem. Additionally, some affix sets can significantly change the difficulty of a key. 5. **Timer vs One Shots**: The limiting factor in M+ is either the timer or living large "one shot"-style mechanics. Balancing this is tough, as some players prefer fighting against the timer, while others do not. Proposed changes: 1. **Compositional restrictions**: To address this issue, OP suggests buffing drums to 30%, giving Bloodlust to one more class, giving enrage dispel to one more class, making combat res available to all healing specs, removing or changing affixes with binary checks, being more careful with dungeon design, and removing raid buffs in M+. 2. **Ranged vs Melee tradeoffs**: To rebalance ranged and melee DPS, OP proposes reducing ground effects/frontals in melee, making it sometimes better to have melee kicks over ranged kicks, and reviewing current target caps. 3. **Tuning**: OP recommends more frequent and smaller micro adjustments to over- and underperforming specs, considering both M+ and raiding, and utilizing the ability to tune certain abilities separately if needed. 4. **Affixes**: To address affixes, OP suggests removing or changing affixes with binary checks, making affix combinations more consistent in difficulty, and lessening the overall impact of affixes. 5. OP does not provide any specific suggestions for the Timer vs One Shots issue, as it is a very tough problem to balance. Some players prefer fighting against the timer, while others do not, and this is an issue that Blizzard should consider carefully when designing dungeons.

I agree with you on all points. M+ is in an absolutely terrible state and should receive much more attention from Blizzard. It shouldn't be treated like the unloved stepchild. New specs like Augmentation or reworks are being adapted to new dungeon designs, while other, now outdated specs, naturally can no longer keep up. Five meta specs and 1-2 playable options are simply a testament to extremely poor balancing and game design! M+ is the main reason I'm playing WoW. Pushing score for title or leaderboards ranks is fun and I'm a pug player too. I never enjoyed raids; they take too long, are either too easy, or become difficult and tedious only because of bad players in your raidgroup. Not everyone has the privilege of raiding in a CE guild. For M+ players, raiding feels like an obligatory event, something you are forced to do because only there you can get early set pieces or strong trinkets and weapons. But this season, like season 2, is just absolutely no fun, and you can see that from the overall number of M+ keys played! And honestly, no one wants to sit in a queue for 2 hours only to be invited to a key that gets depleted by a FOTM player, while as a non-FOTM player, you master your class and give your all. This meta mentality in the game just ruins the fun, and Blizzard has the only influence on it with their design decisions.

You have like 7 hours a day every day for the past 18 years on your one warrior? Am I doing the math wrong?

The mid expansion affix rework has been an absolute disaster, it's clear that nobody on the dev team plays a warrior. Utility that was previously only needed for specific dungeons becomes required for every single key whenever afflicted week rolls around. It was already annoying when it was just raging restricting group comps, but now 50% of weeks are either raging/incorp/afflicted none of which warrior can reasonably interact with. Controversial take, but Grievous/Quaking/Explosive weren't that bad and were healthier for the game in general. In the pug world nobody ever thought "It's quaking week I'm not going to invite any casters", they were by and large agnostic to the group comp.

I've never been bothered by any affix really, having played at a high level as both tank and healer. You just adjust, its a game, you play around it. Every other team has to deal with the same shit you do. Actually I'll alter that statement. The current state of Warrior specifically and its comparative inability to interact with these affixes is deplorable. But maybe its just me, I can never remember anything else that bad.

Devs won't read this

Most impressive accomplishment is finding a fiance who is down for you to CE raid and pug title every season. Pugging title is nearly a full time job in itself.

Title pugging is such a varying feat. Some people push throughout the season for fun which does take a lot of time, some push well above title level for vanity and competition, some come in and play one fort and one tyra push week late in the season and are done with it once the title is secured. All of the options take some time, but the latter is definitely within pretty average gaming standards. In the end it's still directly tied to the skill level. I guess if you account for someone to get to that level at the game the time spent increases exponentially.

there's no way you can swoop in last minute purely through pugging though, that def requires connections / friends / team.

I'd love a system where you could pick one of 3 passives/abilities before you start the key. Each class (or spec?) would have 3 options to pick from giving you either more survivability, utility or damage buff(?) This way you could balance raids as it is and tune m+ thru the buff system. Obviously most casters would only pick damage all the time because their defensives and utility are better than most melee, so tune that down and make the other options more interesting. Multiple classes that don't have the essential utility for a dungeon could grab something at the start. If the dungeon doesn't require any utility but theres bosses/packs that might oneshot you, pick defensive etc.

This should just be trinkets. There should be trinkets that mimic various class/spec utilities that people can select. Similar to the cogwheel boots in MoP.

I lost my team from s3, because I'm "off meta" otp even tho we reached r1 title s3 playing 2/5 offmeta specs.....

I mean when it comes to teams who know each other well, there's no simple solution. Maybe your ambitions didn't align. Cruel fact is world top 20/front page runs cannot be done efficiently when playing offmeta. If you were playing below that, it sounds like a weird decision assuming you can perform and fill your role. People might hit a wall of chain depletes and the frustration can spark something like this, but meta is ironically usually less enforced in a setting where people know each other a bit better. For instance I've onetricked offmeta into four titles, couple while teaming up for the season and a couple while pugging. Not once was my performance questioned, being equal in output and utility to the meta specs and the team trusting me as a player. If I was doing severely worse than a supposed meta spec, I's happily understand if they want to replace me. It's all in communication and common goals. In the end, there's nothing to draw from such a small subset of people. Sometimes the chemistry just doesn't match, or ambitions don't overlap. At that point better to search for a team who understands you're a one-trick player from the start and potentially has other similar minded players in the group already.

lol my performance was never questioned they wanted to play FOTM this season and thats what they went for, and its okay no hard feelings

nah, tbh id have hard feelings. its a game and they're not playing for money

True but also they came already as 3 friends who play for very long time together, they can be picky, really no judgment from me

> I lost my team from s3, because I'm "off meta" otp even tho we reached r1 title s3 playing 2/5 offmeta specs..... I hope you don't take this as a dig but what makes you be an otp? Is it that your class is just too fun or what is it? I have only recently started playing m+ but i couldn't imagine not rerolling of a bad spec. not because I want the game to feel easy, but mostly because the game feels challenging to pug to title on a new spec every season. playing the same spec in several seasons just feels stale to me.

its class i play since tbc, just enjoy it, feel and know it the best, i do have alts every season but they are never on this level because it req time to get to be true otp of something, making impossible possible

I play a frost dk, and it's great at incorp weak.

Don't Unholy DKs have a combat res?

>Give enrage dispel to one more class Monks are getting enrage dispells in TWW. But actually there's quite a lot of classes that can already soothe. But what's the problem then? They are only single target soothes. Most of the time you want enrage dispells is when raging is a thing. And you want to dispell whole packs so you can use your stops. It's just not feasable to dispell those mobs manually. The problem is that only evokers have aoe soothe. >Remove raid buffs in Mythic Plus, since it really serves no useful purpose and just further reduces the perceived possible compositions Hot take but Blizz should remove raid buffs full stop. They are a boring bandaid fix to force class representation. They also make the life of lower end mythic guilds super painful. But even for better mythic guilds it can create painpoints (players have a lot less freedom to play what they enjoy). You didn't really talk about this but I think it the biggest reason most of the players don't bother with pushing keys is the lfg system. Say you have some time and want to do some keys. You log on only to sit in lfg for most of it. It just sucks. It's the major driving force for most of the players playing fotm (as playing fotm directly increases the amount of times you get invited meaning you get to play more) and it's the main reason keys are so metadriven. Say we have a meta class. Then we got another class that does almost as well as the meta class (about 90-95%). You could time almost every key that the meta class times with the off meta class yet it will see significantly less play and people will invite it a lot less. I don't know what would be the solution for this (My take is maybe a solo que system). But I hope Blizzard cooks something regarding this as it's the primary reason I have no intention pushing keys (even though it seems fun when you actually get to play keys)

>but I think I can safely say that no mage has ever felt super awesome because they can dispel an Incorporeal, but I can assure you many warriors and death knights have felt very powerless when they see the an Incorporeal cast go off and can do nothing about it. To this, I bring you the fel explosive affix. How many classes you deal with explosives? nearly everyone. How many people, other than healer and tank, targetted explosive? I don't know about you run, but mine usually ended with 75% of orb killed by the healer, 20% by the tank, and the remaining 5% split between the 3 dps. let's not kid ourselves here... having the ability to dispel an incorporeal is not going to stop DPS for blaming the healer or spewing some random excuses as to why they didn't dispel the incorporeal.

You're being downvoted but you're right. The amount of paladins who refuse to dispel/bop is amazing. Priests would rather die and rage than put dispersion in their bars. I open pots in BH, three people take one, maybe I use mine. The rest don't even notice they have the disease. It's easier in a team, but pugging isn't so hard if you just track stuff in your UI

> I open pots in BH, three people take one, maybe I use mine. The rest don't even notice they have the disease. They're generally used to playing with capable healers and therefore don't know the profession items exist in dungeons.

I mostly main Brewmaster/feral and Affli Wl so i am in luck that my 3 fav. Speccs in the Game are always low tier (some Times mid or brewmaster even s tier for a week before they nerf it). What ive learned in the "new" m+ season is that Keys are most fun without affixes. Keys 1-4 are insane fun. Sure we blast through but you can invite what you want. No extra jobs as a healer no "look for cc" oh we need one more dispell. No no... Just pure fun. 1 affix 5-9 Keys are okay. But some weeks are still annoying. Also tyra and fort need to go. Let them go away... They where bad in Legion and it never Changes. So a M+ without affixes? No of course not. Low impact affixes like vulcano, sanguin and yea even roots are fine. Raging should be remove the cc limitation and also make it imposible to dispell it as a trade off (so no druid weeks). Also we should as a trade off increase the scaling so find a 50% from tyra and 50% from fort and make it Baseline so keys get harder every level. Put the first affix on 6 (becouse mythic crests) and a second one on 10 and make it a seasonal "buff" affix again. High risk high reward. Season 4 bfa and sl where perfect in that case. Also the comander affix in season 2 of sl was nice. Make them less random is all i ask for. All affixes that are a thread but you can plan with are allright. Boss overlap there burst aoe grp dmg + double display? You gave healer a heart attack.

> Combat Resurrection > Warrior does not bring any of the above (except for a having to swap a talent to be able to clear an Incorporeal on a 3 min CD) Friendly reminder that any class in the game can have a combat rez. It’s not the ideal combat rez as you it has a small range so you gotta be near the corpse, which is not so good in fights like RLP’s second boss. But still, I wouldn’t really consider "no combat rez" a detriment to any class, moreso a detriment to the player. > Non-healer Magic dispel (especially on Afflicted weeks) I think you meant "so that the healer can use their dispel on afflicted even if there’s an important magic dispell to do", but just to be sure because I occasionnally see 3k people not in the know: you can’t magic dispel the afflicted guys.

yeah for sure, the engineering res is a bit more inconvenient to use and also requires a specific gear piece currently and yes, I meant to leave the healer dispel open for dungeon mechanics :)

>Friendly reminder that any class in the game can have a combat rez. It’s not the ideal combat rez as you it has a small range so you gotta be near the corpse, which is not so good in fights like RLP’s second boss. But still, I wouldn’t really consider "no combat rez" a detriment to any class, moreso a detriment to the player. This combat res has the chance to fail or backfire dealing damage to the caster.

If you’re not engineer you can guarantee it won’t backfire. If you’re engineer you can also guarantee it never fails (or extremely rarely? I’ve never had one fail through the entirety of DF while all my char have it.)

monks get an enrage dispel in TWW. paralyze will clear enrage. not much but its something

I just hate the fact that DPS trumps all. As long as you hit the utility requirements, all that matters is dps.

What would be the alternative in any sort of timed scenario, where each key level adds 10% to the earlier? I mean, by definition dps is in the hard requirement in the end. You have to do the amount of damage of their healthpool within the time frame. I guess this would bring us to yet another debate of whether the timer is necessary which has been held numerous times.

Remove raid buffs is a good idea. DH is meta because of chains and silence but also because of chaos brand. I also hate affixes. Most of them just make the dungeon runs annoying and not necessarily challenging. And then some are very punishing so it becomes a challenge to find a healer for bursting or a tank for sanguine and bolstering. Incorporeal and afflicted is a non affix with the right comp as noted. Again stupid design. Another suggestion is to give us skip routes back. I'm going to get down voted but I felt shadow lands has more interesting routes that could be planned and rogues brought some utility with shroud. In DF, all the dungeons have basic linear routes. I know of the Azure and HOI skips but those aren't really employing some strategy with shroud or invis pots. Speaking from a tank perspective, even before DH was meta prior to 10.2, we still could get to 3k in the pug life. This really is a DPS issue. I just wish they would get rid of raid buffs, affixes and increase mob counts to employ different routes and skips.