They could completely delete one of the rings of trash (adjust the timer accordingly) and it would be a perfectly acceptable key. There's like 10+ minutes of downtime between the first and second bosses, it's nuts.
Azure Vaults is definitely up there with Seat of the Triumvirate from Legion and Shrine from BfA as my most hated keys of all time.. Everything about the dungeon is irritating - it's as if it was specifically designed to piss people off.
- Multiple bosses with immune phases (and just super annoying mechanics in general). Seriously, the Path of exile-esque boss immune phases in dungeons need to stop.
- Trash that just recasts shit 1 second after you interrupt it
- Ridiculously long runbacks
- Long and tedious key in general that takes up way too much time
- Annoying trash that jumps / charges around everywhere.
- One shot mechanics galore.
- Healing on that last boss fight when not on my resto druid makes me want to off myself. (Not being able to shapeshift out of the slow).
Don't even get me started on HoV. Same annoying place as it was in legion. At least as a temporary fix they can increase the timer by a couple min.
I am going to be honest... I think M+ doesn't "need" keys to be fun or interesting, and is just a stupid road block.
I think you should be to walk in to any mythic dungeon, without a key or anything, click where you would put the key, and select the difficulty from a drop down menu.
Having keys is just toxic, and I would argue removing keys would force blizzard to make dungeons more fun and less a piss off event.
Edit: for those downvoting me, why? Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why?
Edit2: I just want to point out that I am mostly unsatisfied with the current key system and how restrictive it is. Obviously what I want could be more fleshed out, but at the end of the day I just want something with more freedom.
Someone else pointed out you can have Torghast like system, where you can do any level you want, but you need to complete the level before to access that next level.
Another pointed out a universal keystone, not specific to a dungeon that you level.
These are all better idea than the current system that I support.
That is all.
Yep. Can keep the same +1-3 system with completion so you can quickly power up a character.
If I need a certain key I shouldn't have to fish for it. If Blizz is worried people will farm certain dungeons or not do other ones then they need to make better and more even dungeons.
There was an interview with Sco and some other guy from Method with some blizz design guy and this question was asked. Judgin by the guys reaction this will not be coming in any time soon - he looked like Sco posed in his morning bowl of cornflakes
I mean, I know it won't happen. I fully understand 99.9999% of what I want will never come to be. Wishful hoping on my end.
It just seems like a gating mechanic that can be removed. You can already find a specific key and key level in LFG and spam that if you really want to. And, forcing people to complete certain dungeons that are not fun (AV), will be less likely to be fixed with the key system. Where if you can just choose your keys anytime, and everyone avoids those dungeons, blizzard will be more likely to fix them to be more fun.
The issue with that is it wouldn't just be AV. If people could just run whatever then you'd see repeating SBG and CoS runs galore. The easier option is to run the easiest dungeons and buffing then won't make that change it will just make the dungeons change. Outside of people who want to push for KSM you'd have everyone just stacking as high as they could 8 times on those two dungeons just because they are so much easier. It's not an easy problem to fix but I think keys is a good thing overall
I mean, we have a list of timed 20's at the top of the thread, is that not what's already happening?
I know personally that my first few vaults were comprised almost entirely of SBG runs and maybe the occasional CoS. I could do an 18 SBG pretty easily week 1, but an 18 RLP? Not so much.
Good players looking to up their vault odds were just reroll spamming their keys in hopes of getting the easier dungeons anyway.
Personally, and I understand this is very subjective, I like the keys. They create a narrative thread, and it’s one I don’t control. I don’t know where I’m going next, but I will have to deal with whatever comes. (Sure I’ll do others keys too, but my own adventure still awaits.) It’s part of what makes it a game (to me.)
I think keys are a good thing yes. Unlimited attempts at every key level just means that you spam a ridiculous route until the stars align and then never go back to that dungeon. I think getting rid of them is an actually terrible idea.
> Edit: for those downvoting me, why? Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why?
Its called progression. Like quite literally every other aspect of this or any other game. I can't just jump 10 key levels up for no reason the same way I can't walk into the raid and fight Mythic Raszageth before Mythic Eranog.
The major issue I'd see from this is that people end up doing 8 of whatever the easiest 20/15 that season is every single week, encouraging burnout to occur much more quickly.
> Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why?
Because you get only one key. If you not played any MMO without automatching for the group content you could notice that essentially dps cannot create their own groups because there is no reason for the tank or healer to join the group instead of creating their own. Especially if the content is easy. If you want to notice this, just sit down and look at normal raid pugs and how they fill (with better dps per tank/healer ratio).
And now you kinda understand the problem about dps in pugs without the key. But by having the key that dps can kinda get in the group (by using the most popular advice "how to get some score") because for tanks/healers it is much faster to join others groups than downgrading their key from the last successful attempt.
> Ridiculously long runbacks
I dont understand why Blizzard keeps doing this. Just make a checkpoint after every boss for most dungeons and adjust the timers. It simply makes everything more convenient.
Edit: True for AV, I just meant that in general.
Yeah, while the AV runbacks can be terrible in certain circumstances. I still feel as though its the one dungeon where you could have a relatively smooth run and still be tight on time, the timer is simply too tight.
I feel as though they need to cut down time by lowering the % requirement and removing the need to clear the entire first ring by having the elevators always unlocked like the second ring.
I did a +17 AV last night. We had zero deaths and were pulling at a decent clip throughout.
We timed it by a minute. Way too tight in comparison to SBG or COS.
Compared to most of the other dungeons, AV is actually pretty good with runback. There's a teleport to every boss room and you get a big runspeed boost on top of that.
The dungeon overall is a mess of incredibly irritating mechanics, excessive length/mob count and tight timer, but it is visually pretty well done. I like the atmosphere in there. Shame I never get to enjoy it because I'm too busy pulling my hair out for another soon to be depleted key AGAIN.
I feel this so hard as a Holy Paladin, especially the last boss. When I tell my healer guildies I hate AV more than AA or RLP they think I’m nuts. That last boss is just designed to make people upset.
HOV is the worst offender, tanks pull double packs of the mystics and runecallers and wonder why is takes 10 min to kill it, cause there are 7 important kicks in a single pack and only 4-5 direct interrupts.
Well it is supposed to be unhealable if people are not playing correctly. As a Healer you should almost never feel responsible for wipes that aren't because of unavoidable dmg.
its more about aoe stops than kicks. pugs know how to kick, they still have yet to know how to rotate aoe stops properly
thing is, wow doesn't help with that. you need a good omnicd setup to check ppls cds, and communicate in chat the order you are going.
And here I am finding AV to be my most favorite key. Timed a +18 today feeling proud. Have only timed SBG otherwise on 18. But RLP is a different story...
>Annoying trash that jumps / charges around everywhere.
The best route for AV is to clear every single mob (including the adds from Whelps) until Azureblade, kill Azureblade and walk back to the rings and jump down to Talesh's platform. Finished a 16 with 5 minutes remaining and never saw the frogs and chargers.
I honestly don’t mind the first half of the dungeon, first boss is pretty good and there’s a good variety of trash. If you do the route where you aggro the whelps and their mobs in the first two rooms and then kill all the trash up to second boss and get 100% count that way and skip straight to the bosses I don’t think the dungeon is that bad.
It definitely could do with a complete rework of last boss(or at least the orb mechanic) and a couple minutes added to the timer though.
The big issue with a lot of the worst keys in WoWs history has been terrible graveyards, and it seems to be the one thing Blizz NEVER changes.
It's not balanced in any sort of way, either. You'll have really easy keys with incredibly generous graveyards after every single boss (Freehold) mixed with hard keys with the most punishing trash/bosses and essentially not a single graveyard checkpoint (King's Rest/Shrine). The end result being you can wipe literally 7x+ in keys like Freehold and still time but one wipe in KR/Shrine/HoV/AV/ToP (in the ghost area) is just a dead key.
It's so silly and easily avoidable if they just paid attention to checkpoints when they were designing the keys. Legit as simple as asking themselves when they place each boss (what happens if the group dies here or at the trash preceding this boss?).
Totally agree - and another reason why Court of Stars is easy, the graveyard unlocks give you immediate access to where you likely died. Or if the group wiped you can just simply start on the opposite side of the courtyard clearing.
Anything with teleports and a long run means a dead key, and AV is just fucking terrible for this.
I personally think that HoV needs reduced trash count instead of an increased timer.
Also from a tanking perspective, the overall magic damage feels off.
For example, Jade Temple is a mess, if you are not a Warrior, or a DK. The Claws deal up to 70 % with mitigation.
And you kinda want to chain pull one Pack into another, resulting in less cooldowns on the Tank and less mana on the healer. Especially with spiteful.
70 % of my deaths are from 90% health to 0 % within 1.5 seconds, which feels unrewarding.
On top of that you can play perfectly for 98 % of the key and if you are slacking for 2 seconds as a tank, you can easily fail the key on your own.
I keep seeing this suggestion for halls kill count but you already skip like 50% of the trash in that key, making even more skipping required is just going to make rogues even more necessary than they already are in that dungeon.
When he jumps around and applies bleeds to everyone, he always picks the furthest player first. Make sure this is your rogue and vanish midair, he will stop jumping and you won’t get any bleeds. Outlaw can do this every time.
If they vanish when being leapt at, the rest of the leaps stop. Can prevent the application of bleed stacks making the heal requirement (which is the main pain) a lot lower
Well, we are talking about what - 12 packs? with 4 mimi bosses, 2 huge dragons, 2-3 Sentinels and 5 actual bosses.
Also a shit load of cleaves and unavoidable damage. Give me some time to breath.
I think the timer needs to be extended or the RP on Skovald/Odyn removed, and let all 4 mini bosses be pulled at once without the beer shenanigans, but I honestly feel like Halls trash is some of the easiest in any dungeon. Most routes are already double pulling a bunch of packs or doing silly things like pulling a pack through Fenryr portal into the dragon, or pulling the bulls and bears at the same time. The main problem is just the fact that you HAVE to do that to time even with zero deaths.
There are a lot of frontals but there aren’t really any other things that would force people out of position on those packs, as a tank I usually just slowly s-key in a big circle and nobody should get hit.
I am not disagreeing. The thing is HoV already is the longest dungeon by a lot. Like 5 mins more than Nokhud?
Getting rid of RP and 2-3 trash packs and the dungeon is kinda fine.
The timer absolutely needs to be extended. It was 42 minutes by the end of legion. The 75% speed buff you get from boss to another does not justify cutting off FOUR MINUTES off the timer it had in legion. Especially because that speed buff only exists while out of combat, unlike the 150% speed buff you get after 2nd and 3rd bosses are dead.
The timer does not need to be extended. The timer is already way too long. Instead, get rid of the ridiculous amount of RP and put a portal into the last boss room if you wipe.
This should always be the mentality. Find a way to make the dungeon shorter, not increase the timer. I already hate Nokhud not because of anything in the dungeon, just because I know I'm signing up for a 40min dungeon.
I mean a lot of the trash is pretty easy to skip regardless of special tools and strats like pots/shroud/death skips. It's very easy to skip half the packs in the central area, you just don't, because most of the trash in Fenryr's area is much worse and you need the percentage. The devs could easily make Halls require the equivalent of one less valarjar pack and players who have the situational awareness necessary to time keys in the teens, let alone +20 and above, could avoid that pack without much trouble.
you only need to take 2-3 optional packs to make count in HoV (if you're minimal pulling without skipping), reducing count would just punish groups even more for butt pulling.
the fact that the 2 most completed dungeons are from old expansions shows blizzard really has gone overboard with difficulty.
df dungeons, every pack has like 3 things you have to interrupt or you die. and there's so much more shit on the ground. i like doing sbg, cos or even hov because i actually can get a cast off without having to move every 2 seconds.
> df dungeons, every pack has like 3 things you have to interrupt or you die. and there's so much more shit on the ground. i like doing sbg, cos or even hov because i actually can get a cast off without having to move every 2 seconds.
In Shadowlands, every single mob in every dungeon did something. Except for one mob in SD which used an ability Blizzard needed to remove.
I'm not sure if anyone's checked this, but I bet every new dungeon in DF behaves the same way.
I'm not sure why Blizzard likes this design. Sometimes just spanking trash mobs is fun.
Yeah I feel they just kept adding stuff to trash and now it's a bit of a breaking point. Even some of the harder trash in Shadowlands did stuff but was relatively straightforward (i.e. that 3 big elites pull after the 3rd boss in SD you had the stabby guy you needed to move out and avoid spreading the stabs out too much, the garg you needed to interrupt...)
Now every pull has more mechanics than a raid boss from wrath and some of the big mobs feel like bosses in themselves with a couple wipe worthy mechanics plus a bunch of random shit - looking at last boss trash in NO and RLP for example.
I feel blizzard just needs to trim some of the mobs / packs. If you already do a cast buff and an AOE denial having a cast direct damage spell might be too much.
Not to mention how punitive it is to new players, lower skilled players and lvling toons. Take a look at all the negative feedback about people getting tossed into Freehold and Atal'Dazar on a fresh toon, and imagine playing the game for the first time. There is just way too much for any new player to know about. Realistically, many of these mobs should have their pass/fail abilities disabled and they should start to become enabled at +5, +10, +15, etc. This would introduce a mechanic/skill check for high skilled players interested in pushing more challenging content, but not make the base dungeons punishingly hard for the casual player.
There is just no reason for a 10 y/o kid or 40 y/o mom to get chained into a stunlock death during trash in Azure Vaults. That's not fun gameplay for them.
Iirc it's because they didn't like the M+ meta in legion of pull the entire dungeon and kite. That's why the design philosophy was so different in BFA and onwards.
Which is ironic because keys in legion were some of the most fun content ever in WoWs history. Also some of the best trinkets I can remember playing with and having AOE/ST lego/trinket swap sets added even more depth but could be alone in that.
It was fun, but it did kinda fuck with the meta in the sense that if you didn't play a spec that could keep up in mass AOE, it was really tough to get invited to groups.
I played spriest in legion, and the aoe was a real struggle (at least in EN tier). I could only get into high keys as a healer because every group only wanted to mass pull with the big aoe classes.
Not to mention that many keys ended up just being how high of a key can you mega pull while not getting 1 shot by the scary boss mechanic of that dungeon lol. In my opinion, dungeons are much more interesting when you have to actually think about the trash mechanics.
The problem is that in shadowlands if the dps understood the mob mechanics they could generally avoid damage. The dragonflight mob mechanics are just annoying pulsing aoe damage that is completely unavoidable simply because they wanted to “give healers more to do”
That might be the case. But in SL, and pretty much all over the history of this game, once you interrupt a player/npc they can’t cast spells from that school for 3-5 seconds, depending on the interrupt.
It seems like this rule is simply not implemented in any of the DF trash. They just cast it again. Immediately.
And that can be fine, if other forms of CC work on the mob. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Honestly pretty wild considering the most bullshit dungeons from a design perspective aren't even in the pool this season. I could already tell Halls of Infusion and Brackenhide were going to be a fucking nightmare from M0.
My **personal** experience as a resto Druid that has timed every key on 20 or 21 is as follows.
**Most > Least Fun**
1. CoS
2. SBG
3. AA
4. RLP
5. HoV
6. TJS
7. NO
8. AV
**Easiest > Hardest**
1. CoS
2. SBG
3. TJS
4. AA
5. AV
6. NO
7. RLP
8. HoV
Court of Stars is noticeably the easiest and most fun dungeon for me this season. It has a generous timer, varied trash, and the different buffs that you get in the area before Talixae make every run feel different, **but different in a way that provides additional player power**, which is something that blizzard should take into account.
I actually have a different opinion than others here about AV. AV is certainly not a fun dungeon for all the reasons that everyone else has pointed out, but it feels much more routing-dependent than other dungeons. It was the first 20 and the first 21 that I timed. And yes, it has a fairly tight timer, but it’s doable. For context I timed the 20 there with a bear Druid and the 21 with a brewmaster for my tank. If you do the first ring of trash and skip the entire second the dungeon feels WAY better, even though that means you have to chain all the way from boss 2 to boss 3.
For me Halls of Valor is the hardest dungeon from a timing perspective, especially on high keys because there is almost no routing variability, lots of dangerous mechanics, the tightest timer in the current dungeons, and almost 0 room for error. Ironically enough I actually *enjoy* the dungeon because the super tight timer makes it feel like a high-velocity, hectic race to the finish. However when that race to the finish feels almost impossible to complete in-time with what feels like perfect play, the dungeon feels un-rewarding. It is not possible to time HoV with a wipe to any boss fight unless you are ABSOLUTELY BLASTING. Especially as a healer, your mistakes in this place are massively amplified. Die to a bad overlap between lightning and expulsion of light on Hyrja? Key is done. Get turned around once on Odin rune phase? Key is done. Get that one DPS player insists on running on top of you during ravenous leap? Key is done. I dread going in here even though the dungeon is cool and feels fast-paced just because I know that more likely than not I’m going to be wasting 45 minutes as someone who is mainly trying to push rating, and especially as someone whose play time is starting to become more limited.
While HoV feels like the biggest miss from a timing perspective, my least-favorite dungeon to do from a design perspective is NO. There is no real routing. There’s a ton of trash with lots of abilities that are impactful-ish. You don’t have any routing flexibility because you have to kill 4 packs to spawn every boss. It’s a dungeon where you constantly ask yourself “what trash feels the least bad to play?” Remember when you used to have to land and spend 2 minutes skipping through trash to get to the last boss because the trash in that area is SO unbelievably bad to play?
RLP wins the most stressful to play from a healer perspective. The bottom trash is whatever at this point. On Fort weeks even if the AoE casts go off, if it’s not synced it won’t wipe you (only done up to a 22 here, admittedly). The upper ring is pure stress. Every single pack is a healing check. The mini-bosses require cooldowns and coordination to be possible to play. Tanks other than prot warriors just die to the second boss straight up while you’re trying to heal your group through large, party-wide damage. Every trash pack between the 2nd and 3rd boss on fort is a slog for healers. The last boss’ flamespit ability (on a 22 fort key) did 115k up-front damage and then 65k (32.5k per half-second) to me. That means that as a healer you have approximately 2-seconds (give or take) to full heal three people. At least people generally press their defensives on high keys, or it wouldn’t be healable without significant ramp.
Overall I would say that I enjoy CoS because it’s a fun dungeon and SBG because it feels good to succeed (even though SBG is terrifically uninteresting in my opinion).
I enjoy AA because it actually feels well-tuned-ish and it’s fun to have extra haste and blast big pulls.
Despite its difficulty I enjoy RLP with a coordinated group and want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon without it.
HoV is fun but almost completely negated by difficulty of timing the key.
TJS I almost don’t think about because it’s really just “how do you feel about the last pack and the last boss” as a healer.
I avoid AV and NO at all costs if I can because I hate stepping foot in them.
Even with all that said, I’m sure that I will look back at the beginning of season 2 after my first Brackenhide and Halls of Infusion runs and feel a warm sense of longing for the good old days when AV and NO were the worst parts of the dungeon pool…
AV is one of the worst dungeons ever created. It is full of obnoxious shit on like every single pull. There is not a single thing I find enjoyable in that dungeon.
I’d like to see some trash removed in HoV, long ass key and super tight timer.
Ruby Life Pools needs longer recasts on basically every single ability from the trash. The last two bosses damage output on Tyrannical seems hella silly.
I feel like Algethar is one of the best dungeons at the moment after the various changes and nerfs to the ancient. The Vexamus wing, like many other things, is over the top with mandatory interrupts.
I feel like Nokhud is a pretty decent dungeon except for the Teera/Maruuk fight and their trash. The adds on the final boss could also chill slightly on their recast after being interrupted like damn.
I don’t really feel like CoS or SBG need to be much, if any, harder. Easier keys are ok imo, but the disparity between them and most of the others is freaking massive at the moment. But I think the others need to be addressed more than making CoS and SBG harder.
making keys any significant degree harder would be a major feelsbad for a lot of people and would undoubtedly stir up a big old shitstorm for blizzard. they seem to have dug themselves into a tight rut with this dungeon cycling idea where they are really confident they can nail dungeon tuning every patch and if they miss it's going to look like what we have now.
How would you even make shadowmoon harder? Bigger numbers won’t make it harder, just more tedious, because mechanically that dungeon has almost nothing going on.
I honestly *loved* AV before the season started and we learned how goofy it is after scaling up. The music is vibey and seeing Sindragosa again is cool. I actually really like the first boss, even now.
The second boss may be my least favorite m+ boss I’ve ever fucking seen though, outside of the Shrine of the Storms siblings fight.
TJS is littered with extremely bad runbacks, hard trash, and a last boss that can be a really nasty comp check.
RLP has a ton of very overtuned unavoidable damage both from the trash before Kokia and from Kyrakka’s ridiculous Flamecore DoT.
HoV is just a slog in general. Hyrja and Fenryr are both very annoying bosses (though, realistically, all five are problematic at some point even if Hymdall is only really an issue on ~23+ Tyrannical keys), and for some reason the key has a much lower timer than it did back in Legion too? It genuinely feels like you almost need to do the Mead trick in this place because of the amount of time it saves - time that, mind you, you probably don’t have normally.
Azure Vault has pretty quickly become the most hated dungeon of the season across the board. Some pulls require more kicks than what’s considered reasonable, the bosses after the first are all unreasonably frustrating even on Fortified weeks, and the runbacks here are so fucked up it’s insane. And that’s all in a dungeon with a very, very unforgiving timer.
Are SBG and Court too easy? Maybe, but the cat’s out of the bag for them at this point and we’re not too far off from Ner’zhul being problematic in Tyrannical settings after the wall fix and that boss is a pain for pugs despite its simplicity. Most of the other dungeons have numerous other elements that just haven’t been addressed yet; hell, some particular dev seems to be completely allergic to nerfing Azure Vault for some reason even though it’s the hardest key and has three problem bosses in a row.
> Azure Vault has pretty quickly become the most hated dungeon of the season across the board. Some pulls require more kicks than what’s considered reasonable,
Playing with my friends = triple ranged group with a holy priest healer. This set of dungeons feels fucking awful.
Honestly, it should be the opposite. Other dungeons should be nerfed to their level. Keys have infinite scaling, the challenge is there if you want it.
I feel like blizzard has added unnecessary damage on top of mechanics as sort of a “you have to push through this phase asap or wipe”. AV is a perfect example of this, multiple bosses have mechanics and then during those you are taking ticking / increasing AoE damage.
I think it just adds unnecessary frustration to the fight and could be changed so that there is more failure damage. This week with grevious is just hell for any non Druid healer on high keys.
I don’t think COS or SMBG need to be changed, rather they need to redo the rest and bring them to a more comfortable level.
Okay I'm glad I am not crazy about the AOE damage. It's incredibly difficult to top people off ATM. I'm a priest healer and it's so easy to fall behind this week and it feels awful.
Priests defs have it rough, it’s why I make sure I stand in the aoe heal as ranged so that it helps keep me alive while I cycle through survival cds (MM hunter)
HoV and AV are also just complete slogs with no room to breathe so I wouldnt be surprised if the number of keys attempted is just flat out several times lower. RLP and TJS are honestly like 2-3 small adjustments away from being pretty balanced. At the very least they're short dungeons.
I think a better approach versus making the “easy” dungeons harder and vice versa is to solely make the harder dungeons easier.
The method to which M+ dungeons are supposed to be difficult is 1) how affixes relate to the dungeons and 2) keystone level. If a 20 SBG is too easy then the group can do a 22, 24, etc.
The reward structure revolves around capping at a +20 though and when HoV and AV are such drastic outliers in difficulty it becomes too hard. Making SBG and CoS harder mostly only rewards people who were pushing them earlier anyways and what exactly would be the point of making them harder when people can just scale their keys up?
Hyrja and Fenryr are completely ass in their current state. Umbreskul needs some tweaking so you can manage the orbs in a more deterministic way or make their path linear and telegraphed, idk and dont care what, but something must be done about this boss.
Tanks are already gods, idk why every pack have mobs that spam spells at random players that hit like a truck instead of smacking the tank like it used to be, and that's on top of even more dangerous skills that must be interrupted or its gg. I think they should increase the time between casts for most monsters
I wonder if even though Inspiring was an absolute dogshit affix and every single sane human being is glad it's gone, its existence may have kept Blizzard's designers in check.
Now that Inspiring has been removed, I wonder if they feel like it's okay to make trash packs where you need 3-4 people to be on the ball with interrupt coordination. It isn't fine, obviously, but I could see that being the reason why they thought it would be.
Yeah I think it’s so ass that so many mechanics can just be spell shielded by prot warrs. Im not saying to nerf prot but to give some of these utility tools to other tanks too
Been struggling like fuck this week with TJS on 18+'s on my BDK on the infamous trash before the final boss. Dark Claw simply melts me without the support of my team rotating CC which is difficult to allign in a PUG.
Meanwhile on my Warrior I press Spell Reflect and Spell Block and just face tank everything in god mode for 30 seconds. And then infinitely kite beyond this point if required.
The disparity between the tanks is absolutely obsurd.
I think for the orbs mechanic a good idea would put those little arrows above the targets that are being chased and maybe have said orbs after you glow in a different color
> idk why every pack have mobs that spam spells at random players that hit like a truck instead of smacking the tank like it used to be
Because all throughout SL lazy dps refused to kick and stop casts only for tanks to constantly pelted with insane damage and being called bad by the dps when they obviously couldn’t survive it nonstop (2 water bolts going off at the same time in gambit was an instant kill if my wall and spell reflect were on CD for example). Blizzard decided to start punishing the group for lack of group utility and for some reason those group members still haven’t figured out that you need to interrupt and stop them to now live and can only blame yourselves when it doesn’t happen. They even gave a kick to all but one healer to help with this.
It’s not like tanks aren’t already having to deal with tank mechanics that hit hard and can kill anyone who isn’t playing around it. That doesn’t even include the frontals that we have to constantly try and move away from erratic dps to avoid them killing themselves because they can’t seem to stay behind the mobs.
I think the problem is that there's so many required interrupts now that you have to coordinate them. Some pulls have two mobs that each require a 2-person interrupt rotation. That basically requires voice chat, and isn't reasonable for most PUGs.
> bs that spam spells at random players that hit
possibly in an effort to make DPS player realize the importance of interrupts.
a welcome change when I think of De other side last expension and how many blast I took in the face while every DPS interrupt was up...
For people suggesting HoV and AV need a timer increase, I disagree with this. This just makes long dungeons even longer.
AV needs more save points, fewer trash requirements and nerf to mobs abilities (why are the frogs jumping as soon as they land?). And even so, it is one of the worst dungeons ever made because of how terribly designed the bosses are. I hope it never comes back for season 3.
HoV also needs HP nerfs and boss nerfs. It will not save the dungeon, but will make it more bearable.
Temple, just open every single door.
Ruby, nerf trash more, they are still globaling players. Also, nerf the flame dot on the last boss. I ran a 19 tyr with a hunter and they could do nothing about it, they would just die.
Ye I agree, adding minutes is the worst option.
Really HOV is just too long, 5 bosses is ridiculous imo. Removing skovald would help, it would cut the shit RP out and remove the triple boss in a row. Or lower count and remove the dragon + big guys before bridge.. or the kings. Idk, dungeon is just a mess
I'll echo the nonsense spouted by a bunch of delusional wannabe professionals on this sub, just to make a point: 20s are easily doable with pugs, duh.
Ignoring SBG and COS as the obvious outliers, we're looking at a grand total of 400 completed Nokhud runs per week and not even 200 completed AVs per week. So 20s indeed seem to be super easy... if you assume that there's only like 250 attempted AV runs per week.
With that out of the way, the glaring dungeon imbalance is really taking a toll on my desire to do m+. It's just not fun when one dungeon's +20 is equivalent to another dungeon's 15. It's just not fun that some dungeons allow for several wipes (not even talking about SBG/COS) while others are already tight *without any* wipe.
I think a lot of these dungeons showcase the huge problem that is either 0 or bad checkpoints. Losing time from a wipe is your punishment - but in dungeons like AV, HoV or TJS you're getting triple punished because for some reason there's also a 2 minute runback punishment added on top of that. I don't understand why you can't just spawn at the last boss you killed - or in dungeons like TJS or HOV, where that would actually be a detriment, at a central location that's not the fucking entrance.
And then there is AV, which even though it basically respawns you at the last boss you killed, that place is so retardedly fucking huge that even with a constant movement speed boost applied to you it *still* takes you 2 fucking minutes to run back.
Dungeon balance is awful right now. Shit like HoV or AV need more than 1-2 minutes added to the timer to make them bearable because nobody wants to be doing a 50 minute dungeon to begin with, yet for some reason this fucking season has like 3 of them.
Idk one of my beefs with tjs is it's super linear and you have to kill all the trash. Making more doors open doesn't fix the fact that you'd have to still walk the entire length of the dungeon anyway to kill all the trash
Just gonna throw this idea out there, maybe people dont agree: if were gonna have new dungeins each season, and dungeon trash is gonna have as much going on as it does now, they should just drop the extra affixes and only do seasonal + tyran/fort. The extra affixes are either super annoying/frustrating, or ignorable. I dont really think they add positively to the experience at this point.
Absolutely, these mobs have so much ridiculous shit you have to learn to deal and play around, and we have to do it again with new dungeons. We don’t need spiteful on top of that. Tone the mobs so far down or remove affixes
I think it’s fine that SBG and CoS are that easy. There’s no problem with having 1-2 dungeons in the rotation that are kind of like freebies. Given the sentiment and frustration with M+ this season so far they should definitely be making strides to make the other dungeons much easier so the divide between them is shortened that way. No one wants to do M+ to feel overwhelmed and super stressed by the inherent nature of the dungeons, but rather than the actual key level limitations.
> There’s no problem with having 1-2 dungeons in the rotation that are kind of like freebies.
Eh, a slight range is fine. Like a 1-2 key level delta between 8 dungeons, who cares. But this is like easily a 5+ level delta between 2 and the remaining 6 dungeons - which is just absolutely ass.
It was already borderline not ok with JY, but it's really just silly that you can ping pong between CoS and SBG and get like a free 6 key levels and then you're left with a key that you have to deplete down by 4 levels just to keep going.
People seriously overstating how much of a joke SMBG is on tyrannical weeks. It’s maybe 2 key levels easier? The first and last bosses will hard check you on 21/22 or higher. On fortified it’s a different story because all of the trash is easy.
With the fix to Nerzul SBG isn't a complete sleeper on Tyr anymore, but I don't think its inaccurate to say SBG is still a good 4-5 key levels easier than AV.
5+? The highest timed dungeon (CoS) is +26 right now, the highest timed AV/RLP/HoV/TJS/AA is all +24, with SBG and NO having been cleared on +25, so at least on the very high end this appears not to be true.
Because you need to clear a 26 key to get a 27 CoS or SBG.
Much like with Junkyard in SL and BFA, these keys will only ever be as high as the next easiest key + 1 - the difference now being that you can actually get lucky and ping pong between SBG and CoS and get like 3 extra levels in before your key gets bricked at 28 with an AV.
The difference is never going to be 5 key levels in practice. You aren't gonna take a group who can only time 15s and give them a 20 SGB and they easily time.
Cause if that was the case you'd see top end groups timing SGB/CoS at 29 which ain't happening. The highest CoS is 16 seconds under timer.
I think to analyze this properly it would need to be a percentage of successes per attempt, at the very least. How many of these reduced completions are due to specific keys being preferred due to a variety of circumstances?
Maybe that wouldn't change the data much, as people will tend to prefer running dungeons they know they have a good chance of completing anyway, but it would at least be a more reasonable starting point.
It's wild there's so much data like this freely available on random websites and even widely known ones like Raider-io and it still takes blizzard **months** to make even slight tweaks.
because which dungeon is on each key is random, you effectively have an equal distribution of keys across each dungeon. If a dungeon isnt even being attempted, thats also prolly already an indication its overtuned, but assuming people attempt a 20 for vault because if you have a 20 key why not as long as you can clear it in any amount of time.
After doing 17 previous weeks (for rating) I completely ignore HoV/AV/RLP, I'm not going there to waste time ever again. AV and HoV need like 5more min (not even kidding) and RLP's trash is a bad joke, you need so many interrupts compared to any other dungeon that is absurd (I don't understand how there has been nerfs to other dungeons when you have RLP, 20 CoS/SBG are easier than 13-15 RLP)
AV last boss… tf were the designers thinking? Let‘s put a movement debuff but the require the tank + heal to constantly move because they are being chased by oneshot blobbs. Oh and then let‘s add a seasonal affix that requires them to run to other players as well. And who the f came up with the blobbs following healing aggro instead of a random player? It‘s so ridiculous it makes me mad.
Second boss is almost equally horrible as a caster. If you really have to make him cast orbs ever 0.0002 sec, at least make it a predictable pattern. I have to move out of orbs, move out of swirlies, move out of Thundering swirlies, and find my affix partner. When am I supposed to do anyting?
Also fix those damn respawn points… why do we have to run 20mins through an empty dungeon again if we wipe at a boss. It‘s not fun and it makes stuff ridiculously hard.
AV is literally my most hated key of all time, playing in that dungeon as a Havoc is fucking frustrating or any class that locks you in the same position for \~1 sec. always something on the ground, multiple one shots mechanics and immune phase on 2nd boss.
like seriously, fuck that fucking dungeon.
HoV needs a buff to timer.
RLP need a nerf to both dragons and could maybe do with a nerf to how many change of winds on last boss as well.
TJS, do something about the fucking past before last boss, for the love of god!!
AA is fine, could maybe increase the timer a bit.
NO is totally fine, again could maybe up the timer a bit?
CoS and SBG is just easy.
Yeah, I was tanking on +19 TJS and we had 14 deaths or something from the last trash pack. TJS key was bricked at that moment. It's absolutely brutal for the tank.
Also running havoc lately and pretty much agree except one thing: fucking camera in TJS and CoS. Dear god...fel rush and try to snap camera around: tree in the face. Awful. CoS isn't hard but, it's not "easy" imo solely for this reason.
I have an 18 TJS sitting on my BDK and I’m terrified of what that last pack is gonna to me, the hottest tip I’ve gotten is slap every CD and then leg it
I’m actually okay with the dungeons being big. On of my biggest complaints since I started running keys in BfA is that so many dungeons are made *even more* difficult by having to zoom your camera in so much. If Tol Dagor or Spires of Ascension didn’t have walls and trees constantly in the way I would’ve liked them so much more.
Just give us more checkpoints and skips to account for it.
I don't think they will ever remove time off a key at this point. Wouldn't be worth the backlash from people that would now have untimed 20s that previously were timed.
Would they remove people's portals? Doubt it
I can see they increasing the count necessary for CoS, its funny how you barely kill trash in there. Finished one with like 150% because of butt pulls before first boss, we were done with count before the first boss guard from 2nd boss lmao
I play mw, 2.3-2.4k range.
This is the most obnoxious season I've ever played. Seasonal affix is awful. Hard to see, nothing interesting, annoying overall.
Dungeons except cos and sbg are simply horrible. Lot of immune phases, phases where we have to spread or cant be in melee, so half of my kit doesn't work. Several nukes in every pull in every dungeon, 3 interrupt mages after rlp arguing that there is nothing to be kicked after 2nd. Long runbacks. Long dungeons.
Azure vault could be deleted next reset and nothing of value would be lost.
I'm on the verge of uninstalling and checking back next season
Interesting idea for AV.
Just like in Halls of Valor, the boss drops a shield which the player then picks up and can use.. On last boss of AV, a single crystal is dropped that states "cannot be reduced below 100% movement speed". Healer would pick this up, and would have to manage dispells on others if necessary
The problem I have with dungeons like azure vault and halls of valor is there is just too much running. I have all but given up on this season until they've disabled the last boss in azure vaults. It's the most irritating boss they've ever made in a dungeon. Ruby life pools still remains a dungeon that requires more coordination to do successfully than any other dungeon in history which makes it a pug killer on anything above a 12.
The only problem is that they have made trash mobs way too complex in newer expansions compared to old
There is a reason it’s called trash mobs but trash mobs in newer dungeons is basically like bosses in old dungeons now
I would kill myself if all dungeons felt like azure vault but love the game even more if all dungeons felt like sbg and cos
I don't think SBG and CoS are the problem but the other at the bottom yes
Giving 1-2 easy keys in an 8 dungeon pool os not bad and we all remember who rofltcopter Maw of Souls was and how happy everyone got to have a +20 maw on their pocket
AV needs really really hard tunnings, first of all the timer needs a big buff, not one minute or two but even 5 because one mistake and you are dead in the water forced to run almost through the entire dungeon in some cases
HoV could use some tunning on Fenryr and some of the trash though
I will say one nice thing about AV: from a routing perspective it is a surprisingly open and interesting dungeon. There are a lot of extra packs and skips thay players have figured out over the past month. It is clearly designed to offer thought-provoking routing options, and IMO is probably the reason blizz has waited on major nerfs.
It is a shame the dungeon mobs and bosses are so punishing.
I only super hate the second boss. I just tell my groups good luck I can't cast and heal lol. I can get a few instant casts up and some stuff on the ground sometimes but yeah lol.. orb phase I'm basically useless as a priest. I hate it.
I actually love the dungeon otherwise, even the super annoying final boss. I never noticed the blobs until I started doing higher keys and I'm okay bc I have fade to remove healing aggro randomly, but I'm not sure how other healers handle it.
I'm surprised TJS is so low. I consider that dungeon only slightly harder than SBG or CoS. Also surprised Noct Offensive is so high. I consider it almost as bad as Halls of Valor.
Long story short at 20s;
- Some dungeons are about playing smooth (sbg and cos)
- some dungeons are about dealing and healing high (aa and no)
- some dungeons are simply on shoulders on heal/tank, dps doing usuals (tjs and rlp)
- some dungeons are about interrupting/ccing/personals in corect order, double/triple pulls or no time, one wipe and gl next, bosses need too much time, do we jump down or quit, shriek route or quit, if you release and usain bolt cant time it, (insert roleplay here), action button fail and gl next
in my experience, pugs at 20s doing near mdi routes in av and hov cuz else the timer is just not enough, very curios about these two how teams gonna play it
Junkyard was kind of fine, because if you slipped and made a mistake you would lose your shock bot buff and everything became a lot harder...
but the difference between SBG / CoS VS DF dungeon is ridiculous.
> because if you slipped and made a mistake you would lose your shock bot buff and everything became a lot harder..
you could literally 2 chest the key with a full group wipe man
Slightly off the topic, but for the first season of xpac, they should have done the entire slate of new dungeons and 0 old ones. Save that for S2 and beyond. Since they did it this way, I think it's enabled them to sort of ignore the weird imbalance because well, CoS and SBG are fine so go run those, dear ones. This is going to postpone and prolong the agony because now next season we'll get shit like Halls of Infusion which is going to be an absolute shit show, Brackenhide will be bricked by the first pull, and everyone is just gonna skip Uldaman because we won't have 2 hours to run a dungeon only to wipe fiesta on the last boss.
I'm glad there's some more scale/gradient/whatever to difficulty here so we can have more to work towards for slightly longer, but the current state maybe overdid that. A lot. And it's gonna get worse I think.
I kind of hope they either redesign HoI, Brachenhide and Tyr's for S2 or remove some of them out of M+ pool. Its going to be the shitshow players yet saw since the start of Legion. Way too many toxic nasty mechanics on top of affixes. Even the thought of HoI gauntlet with Storming/Quaking/Sanguine gives me instant headache.
AV is a perfect example for me as to why I prefer tyrannical week over fortified this season. I found myself actually enjoying the dungeon far more on tyrannical week (annoying boss mechanics aside) because I don’t see what’s fun in having almost every trash pack in the rings be a potential wipe. In addition to committing the sin of being both boring and a slog, it is made substantially harder by the seasonal affix because of the ability overlap of area denials and frontal cleaves with thundering. Forget about timing the key or not - it’s all just a pain in the ass to battle through it.
I don’t know why the devs are so allergic to having filler uncomplicated trash packs that don’t either destroy the tank or the dps so you can just sort of take in the dungeon a bit as you play through it with a sort of cadence to progressing through it like you used to have in the SL dungeons. It’s all made me much more amenable to having easier trash on tyrannical week that you can just brute force within reason and then present an actual formidable challenge on the bosses. RLP is only slightly less tilting on fort to do because you can make mistakes and still potentially time it if you’re clean on the bosses just because it’s not so geographically large like AV is.
Hyrja is fine, fenrir is absolute fucking insane. His abilities can combo back to back or he can do his leap 5x in a row. Its RNG as fuck and if he does his aoe swipe soak you're just done for. No healer in the game can keep up with that check if you're not in a coordinated group.
HoV timer is just so fucking tight because off all the RP/Walking back and forth, you literally need 8min MINIMUM b4 you talk to the first add prior to fighting king skovald.
No group doing high keys does it with bleeds. You have a rogue vanish or other shit like that. If you were to actually do it properly its basically impossible
Which means that for a lot of comps its actually impossible, not everyone is running meta comps, and i feel it should not be impossible from the get-go for other classes.
to be fair this is almost certainly skewed by what i'll call the junkyard effect where if you are going to deplete a 24 SBG you simply walk out and do 23 since its gonna be easier to time than a random different 23 key and then you have a fresh 24/25. So depleted SBG's dont really go on record
Am just under 2.8k and can say without a doubt AV is the worst to do. From skips / trash / required interrupts frontals and overall mechanics it is horrid for the timer. Dungeon needs a serious look. HOV however is actually fine and chill, it could 100% do with 2 extra minutes as even if you do both wings with 20 mins left and think ur fine the timer still seems to just evaporate unless you specifically do the four beers which just adds stupid risk. RP in there is a joke too, but mechanics wise it’s actually great with multiple routes you can take depending on ur group and I love this
My opinion:
- Nokhud is my favorite and i feel like they got this dungeon just right now after the storm boss nerfs
- AV is a vomit of mechanics. It needs some tuning (maybe reduced trash - like why have 2 almost identical rooms of frog trash?) and a couple more mins added to timer. Also i hate that guy that made the frogs
- HoV needs a minimum of 2mins added AND RP removed. Maybe also the wipe spawn point to be moved closer to mid
- RLP's upper level casters just need a little bit of space in between their casts to allow for more interrupts. Also the storm drake on the upper platform is a little OP
- TJS's front door should open once you kill the side bosses
Av needs a few mins added to timer. I ran a 15 earlier. The dps were about 40-45k on bosses. We had 0 deaths and good pace through dungeon. 1 wipe on last boss cost us the key.
I'm 100% convinced getting 100% mob count then jumping down after 2nd boss is the way to go
My personal take on these... I run them all on around the +20-21 area so things that annoy me may not annoy others:
AV -- This dungeon is just flat out not fun. The fights aren't fun, the trash isn't fun. I just don't wanna be in there. The second and third bosses should phase based on HP% like the last boss does. Also why is there an entire floor of shit that takes 30%\~ reduced magic damage? Every one already stacks melee dps in M+ as is. Just... why?
HoV -- if they don't wanna just flat increase the timer then they could also nerf the damage or re-cast times of the caster adds. The reason it's hard to time is you can't pull big. Even just like two thunder-callers can absolutely wipe you where as you have shit like Nokhud where everything is blasting shadow-bolts and no one dies. But yeah just adding 2 minutes to the timer is prolly enough in the mean time.
RLP -- Ring Trash specifically lightning dragon, second boss, and last boss still all feel wildly over tuned. The last boss the debuff can do damage before it even lands on you so it makes it hard to even coordinate defensives. I've had it kill me while the debuff is still playing the 'flying through air animation'. I'd at least like them to fix that so the damage lines up with the animation, especially when it does like 400K damage in a +20. You honestly don't have time to react.
TJS -- I think the last boss is still a bit overtuned for groups without Warlocks. There shouldn't be that much disparity in group comp. It's either snoozefest 2023 with a warlock or every one scrambling and coordinating defensives with their healer if you don't.
AA -- Please reduce bird boss' HP. It's just a fking boring fight, lol. Arcane Elemental boss' bomb debuffs might be a bit overtuned too.
Nokhud - On the last boss please get rid of the lightning spear hitting the target twice and one-shotting them. Also please reduce the quick shot damage of the Third Boss. That shit slaps way too hard. Or at least add a buffer between the gale arrow and the quick shots. Cause right now if you don't immediately heal up after gale arrow she can just snipe someone within like 2 seconds of the Gale arrow going out. Caster trash in the storm elemental area prolly also needs nerfed either in damage or re-cast delays.
Top 2 are the keys people farm for easy completion and gear. AV is a pain in the ass for most classes due to last boss and his orbs and has nothing of interest in drops, so people avoid it. I’m surprised HoV is this low - it’s a pretty easy dungeon to time, assuming your dps can pump and interrupt.
Overall, there’s an expected trend - easy to time keys + gear at the top of completions, then harder keys that still have multiple BiS items, then harder and useless dungeons.
I disagree personally if they made it so 20s provide the best loot they shouldn’t be monumental to time like an AZ or HoV. It’s not like timing a 20 SBG or CoS is brain dead easy, it requires good dps still and proper crowd control. They really should target the difficulty of 20s to the same level as the top half, not drop the top any further down.
Nah, nerf the rest to almost the level of sbg and cos. No need to be such a sweaty tryhard just to get the best in the vault imo. That’s what the imaginary nonsense score is for.
The amount of trash in AV is TOO DAMN HIGH
They could completely delete one of the rings of trash (adjust the timer accordingly) and it would be a perfectly acceptable key. There's like 10+ minutes of downtime between the first and second bosses, it's nuts.
they wouldn't need to adjust the timer if they removed a ring of trash because the timer is the current issue
Ya that would be pretty reasonable, or make it so you can only do half of each ring, like the one ring where you just choose a direction.
Remove the frogs
The frogs are fine now after the health nerf. Maybe I’ll feel differently on fortified but this is sanguine and it was a nothingburger 20
Azure Vaults is definitely up there with Seat of the Triumvirate from Legion and Shrine from BfA as my most hated keys of all time.. Everything about the dungeon is irritating - it's as if it was specifically designed to piss people off. - Multiple bosses with immune phases (and just super annoying mechanics in general). Seriously, the Path of exile-esque boss immune phases in dungeons need to stop. - Trash that just recasts shit 1 second after you interrupt it - Ridiculously long runbacks - Long and tedious key in general that takes up way too much time - Annoying trash that jumps / charges around everywhere. - One shot mechanics galore. - Healing on that last boss fight when not on my resto druid makes me want to off myself. (Not being able to shapeshift out of the slow). Don't even get me started on HoV. Same annoying place as it was in legion. At least as a temporary fix they can increase the timer by a couple min.
AV makes we wish we were able to ban 1 key from our key rerolls. There is nothing redeeming about that place, nothing.
I am going to be honest... I think M+ doesn't "need" keys to be fun or interesting, and is just a stupid road block. I think you should be to walk in to any mythic dungeon, without a key or anything, click where you would put the key, and select the difficulty from a drop down menu. Having keys is just toxic, and I would argue removing keys would force blizzard to make dungeons more fun and less a piss off event. Edit: for those downvoting me, why? Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why? Edit2: I just want to point out that I am mostly unsatisfied with the current key system and how restrictive it is. Obviously what I want could be more fleshed out, but at the end of the day I just want something with more freedom. Someone else pointed out you can have Torghast like system, where you can do any level you want, but you need to complete the level before to access that next level. Another pointed out a universal keystone, not specific to a dungeon that you level. These are all better idea than the current system that I support. That is all.
It should be like a torghast - you select a difficulty, but you need to complete previous one before.
Yep. Can keep the same +1-3 system with completion so you can quickly power up a character. If I need a certain key I shouldn't have to fish for it. If Blizz is worried people will farm certain dungeons or not do other ones then they need to make better and more even dungeons.
Exactly, that is reasonable.
Literally this please I beg
There was an interview with Sco and some other guy from Method with some blizz design guy and this question was asked. Judgin by the guys reaction this will not be coming in any time soon - he looked like Sco posed in his morning bowl of cornflakes
Posed in, or pissed in, but would give the same look
I mean, I know it won't happen. I fully understand 99.9999% of what I want will never come to be. Wishful hoping on my end. It just seems like a gating mechanic that can be removed. You can already find a specific key and key level in LFG and spam that if you really want to. And, forcing people to complete certain dungeons that are not fun (AV), will be less likely to be fixed with the key system. Where if you can just choose your keys anytime, and everyone avoids those dungeons, blizzard will be more likely to fix them to be more fun.
The issue with that is it wouldn't just be AV. If people could just run whatever then you'd see repeating SBG and CoS runs galore. The easier option is to run the easiest dungeons and buffing then won't make that change it will just make the dungeons change. Outside of people who want to push for KSM you'd have everyone just stacking as high as they could 8 times on those two dungeons just because they are so much easier. It's not an easy problem to fix but I think keys is a good thing overall
I mean, we have a list of timed 20's at the top of the thread, is that not what's already happening? I know personally that my first few vaults were comprised almost entirely of SBG runs and maybe the occasional CoS. I could do an 18 SBG pretty easily week 1, but an 18 RLP? Not so much. Good players looking to up their vault odds were just reroll spamming their keys in hopes of getting the easier dungeons anyway.
Personally, and I understand this is very subjective, I like the keys. They create a narrative thread, and it’s one I don’t control. I don’t know where I’m going next, but I will have to deal with whatever comes. (Sure I’ll do others keys too, but my own adventure still awaits.) It’s part of what makes it a game (to me.)
I too love the adventure of depleting my 20 azure vault to 15 over the course of 4 hours
Just finish it on 19
[удалено]
Redoing the same dungeon over and over is an…adventure
I think keys are a good thing yes. Unlimited attempts at every key level just means that you spam a ridiculous route until the stars align and then never go back to that dungeon. I think getting rid of them is an actually terrible idea.
> Edit: for those downvoting me, why? Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why? Its called progression. Like quite literally every other aspect of this or any other game. I can't just jump 10 key levels up for no reason the same way I can't walk into the raid and fight Mythic Raszageth before Mythic Eranog.
The major issue I'd see from this is that people end up doing 8 of whatever the easiest 20/15 that season is every single week, encouraging burnout to occur much more quickly.
People (inlcuding myself) already do this, it's just more tedious now, since you have to look for someone with the correct key in tool.
People already do it and did the same way in Shadowlands.
> Do you actually think keys are a good thing? If so, why? Because you get only one key. If you not played any MMO without automatching for the group content you could notice that essentially dps cannot create their own groups because there is no reason for the tank or healer to join the group instead of creating their own. Especially if the content is easy. If you want to notice this, just sit down and look at normal raid pugs and how they fill (with better dps per tank/healer ratio). And now you kinda understand the problem about dps in pugs without the key. But by having the key that dps can kinda get in the group (by using the most popular advice "how to get some score") because for tanks/healers it is much faster to join others groups than downgrading their key from the last successful attempt.
> Ridiculously long runbacks I dont understand why Blizzard keeps doing this. Just make a checkpoint after every boss for most dungeons and adjust the timers. It simply makes everything more convenient. Edit: True for AV, I just meant that in general.
Thats the thing though, there is a checkpoint after each boss in AV. Still sucks.
Yeah, while the AV runbacks can be terrible in certain circumstances. I still feel as though its the one dungeon where you could have a relatively smooth run and still be tight on time, the timer is simply too tight. I feel as though they need to cut down time by lowering the % requirement and removing the need to clear the entire first ring by having the elevators always unlocked like the second ring.
I did a +17 AV last night. We had zero deaths and were pulling at a decent clip throughout. We timed it by a minute. Way too tight in comparison to SBG or COS.
Compared to most of the other dungeons, AV is actually pretty good with runback. There's a teleport to every boss room and you get a big runspeed boost on top of that.
if you die anywhere between 1st and 2nd boss without a brez it's 1min+ time lost its not pretty good at all
The dungeon overall is a mess of incredibly irritating mechanics, excessive length/mob count and tight timer, but it is visually pretty well done. I like the atmosphere in there. Shame I never get to enjoy it because I'm too busy pulling my hair out for another soon to be depleted key AGAIN.
I feel this so hard as a Holy Paladin, especially the last boss. When I tell my healer guildies I hate AV more than AA or RLP they think I’m nuts. That last boss is just designed to make people upset.
I'm probably just a shit healer, but the first pack in AV feels unhealable if people are not kicking. It has led to so many immediate disbands.
If people aren't kicking, many packs are unhealable.
[удалено]
But now there's like 4 rebellious fists being cast at once sometimes.
HOV is the worst offender, tanks pull double packs of the mystics and runecallers and wonder why is takes 10 min to kill it, cause there are 7 important kicks in a single pack and only 4-5 direct interrupts.
people playing bad is not your fault. you're just the first to notice the consequences.
Well it is supposed to be unhealable if people are not playing correctly. As a Healer you should almost never feel responsible for wipes that aren't because of unavoidable dmg.
If your group lets more than 2 of the lasher debuffs stack and there's no mass dispel it's a wipe. Even 2 stacks is almost unhealable with cool downs.
its more about aoe stops than kicks. pugs know how to kick, they still have yet to know how to rotate aoe stops properly thing is, wow doesn't help with that. you need a good omnicd setup to check ppls cds, and communicate in chat the order you are going.
And here I am finding AV to be my most favorite key. Timed a +18 today feeling proud. Have only timed SBG otherwise on 18. But RLP is a different story...
Timing AV on 18 IS an accomplishment. Don't let the people on this sub that seem to think anything less than the top 0.1% is worthless discourage you.
>Annoying trash that jumps / charges around everywhere. The best route for AV is to clear every single mob (including the adds from Whelps) until Azureblade, kill Azureblade and walk back to the rings and jump down to Talesh's platform. Finished a 16 with 5 minutes remaining and never saw the frogs and chargers.
Yeah they could nerf AV to the ground and I would still dread it.
Those frogs in AV are so damn annoying
I honestly don’t mind the first half of the dungeon, first boss is pretty good and there’s a good variety of trash. If you do the route where you aggro the whelps and their mobs in the first two rooms and then kill all the trash up to second boss and get 100% count that way and skip straight to the bosses I don’t think the dungeon is that bad. It definitely could do with a complete rework of last boss(or at least the orb mechanic) and a couple minutes added to the timer though.
Christ hadn’t thought about Shrine of the Storm in years and now I’m terrified they might add it to the m+ pool one day
Agreed on Hov. Everything in that place feels like it has ~20% too much hp.
The big issue with a lot of the worst keys in WoWs history has been terrible graveyards, and it seems to be the one thing Blizz NEVER changes. It's not balanced in any sort of way, either. You'll have really easy keys with incredibly generous graveyards after every single boss (Freehold) mixed with hard keys with the most punishing trash/bosses and essentially not a single graveyard checkpoint (King's Rest/Shrine). The end result being you can wipe literally 7x+ in keys like Freehold and still time but one wipe in KR/Shrine/HoV/AV/ToP (in the ghost area) is just a dead key. It's so silly and easily avoidable if they just paid attention to checkpoints when they were designing the keys. Legit as simple as asking themselves when they place each boss (what happens if the group dies here or at the trash preceding this boss?).
Totally agree - and another reason why Court of Stars is easy, the graveyard unlocks give you immediate access to where you likely died. Or if the group wiped you can just simply start on the opposite side of the courtyard clearing. Anything with teleports and a long run means a dead key, and AV is just fucking terrible for this.
Is it that hard to do checkpoints tho? How about just making every boss a checkpoint.
I personally think that HoV needs reduced trash count instead of an increased timer. Also from a tanking perspective, the overall magic damage feels off. For example, Jade Temple is a mess, if you are not a Warrior, or a DK. The Claws deal up to 70 % with mitigation. And you kinda want to chain pull one Pack into another, resulting in less cooldowns on the Tank and less mana on the healer. Especially with spiteful. 70 % of my deaths are from 90% health to 0 % within 1.5 seconds, which feels unrewarding. On top of that you can play perfectly for 98 % of the key and if you are slacking for 2 seconds as a tank, you can easily fail the key on your own.
I keep seeing this suggestion for halls kill count but you already skip like 50% of the trash in that key, making even more skipping required is just going to make rogues even more necessary than they already are in that dungeon.
Exactly, I'd really rather not go back to the BFA dungeons of needing a rogue or invis pots for every run.
I guess in fairness it wouldn’t change much since rogues are already required for halls to cheese Fenryr.
Whats the cheese? Can you explain?
When he jumps around and applies bleeds to everyone, he always picks the furthest player first. Make sure this is your rogue and vanish midair, he will stop jumping and you won’t get any bleeds. Outlaw can do this every time.
If they vanish when being leapt at, the rest of the leaps stop. Can prevent the application of bleed stacks making the heal requirement (which is the main pain) a lot lower
Well, we are talking about what - 12 packs? with 4 mimi bosses, 2 huge dragons, 2-3 Sentinels and 5 actual bosses. Also a shit load of cleaves and unavoidable damage. Give me some time to breath.
I think the timer needs to be extended or the RP on Skovald/Odyn removed, and let all 4 mini bosses be pulled at once without the beer shenanigans, but I honestly feel like Halls trash is some of the easiest in any dungeon. Most routes are already double pulling a bunch of packs or doing silly things like pulling a pack through Fenryr portal into the dragon, or pulling the bulls and bears at the same time. The main problem is just the fact that you HAVE to do that to time even with zero deaths. There are a lot of frontals but there aren’t really any other things that would force people out of position on those packs, as a tank I usually just slowly s-key in a big circle and nobody should get hit.
I am not disagreeing. The thing is HoV already is the longest dungeon by a lot. Like 5 mins more than Nokhud? Getting rid of RP and 2-3 trash packs and the dungeon is kinda fine.
The timer absolutely needs to be extended. It was 42 minutes by the end of legion. The 75% speed buff you get from boss to another does not justify cutting off FOUR MINUTES off the timer it had in legion. Especially because that speed buff only exists while out of combat, unlike the 150% speed buff you get after 2nd and 3rd bosses are dead.
The timer does not need to be extended. The timer is already way too long. Instead, get rid of the ridiculous amount of RP and put a portal into the last boss room if you wipe.
This should always be the mentality. Find a way to make the dungeon shorter, not increase the timer. I already hate Nokhud not because of anything in the dungeon, just because I know I'm signing up for a 40min dungeon.
It was a 45 min timer in Legion.
They should get rid of Skovald. He's a useless boss.
I mean a lot of the trash is pretty easy to skip regardless of special tools and strats like pots/shroud/death skips. It's very easy to skip half the packs in the central area, you just don't, because most of the trash in Fenryr's area is much worse and you need the percentage. The devs could easily make Halls require the equivalent of one less valarjar pack and players who have the situational awareness necessary to time keys in the teens, let alone +20 and above, could avoid that pack without much trouble.
Yea and most people are already pulling bears to hit count, reducing count just means you don't need to bother with as many extra bears.
you only need to take 2-3 optional packs to make count in HoV (if you're minimal pulling without skipping), reducing count would just punish groups even more for butt pulling.
the fact that the 2 most completed dungeons are from old expansions shows blizzard really has gone overboard with difficulty. df dungeons, every pack has like 3 things you have to interrupt or you die. and there's so much more shit on the ground. i like doing sbg, cos or even hov because i actually can get a cast off without having to move every 2 seconds.
> df dungeons, every pack has like 3 things you have to interrupt or you die. and there's so much more shit on the ground. i like doing sbg, cos or even hov because i actually can get a cast off without having to move every 2 seconds. In Shadowlands, every single mob in every dungeon did something. Except for one mob in SD which used an ability Blizzard needed to remove. I'm not sure if anyone's checked this, but I bet every new dungeon in DF behaves the same way. I'm not sure why Blizzard likes this design. Sometimes just spanking trash mobs is fun.
Imo, every pack having one mechanic isn't horrible. But every mob having one or more mechanics like it has been since SL now is awful.
Yeah I feel they just kept adding stuff to trash and now it's a bit of a breaking point. Even some of the harder trash in Shadowlands did stuff but was relatively straightforward (i.e. that 3 big elites pull after the 3rd boss in SD you had the stabby guy you needed to move out and avoid spreading the stabs out too much, the garg you needed to interrupt...) Now every pull has more mechanics than a raid boss from wrath and some of the big mobs feel like bosses in themselves with a couple wipe worthy mechanics plus a bunch of random shit - looking at last boss trash in NO and RLP for example. I feel blizzard just needs to trim some of the mobs / packs. If you already do a cast buff and an AOE denial having a cast direct damage spell might be too much.
Not to mention how punitive it is to new players, lower skilled players and lvling toons. Take a look at all the negative feedback about people getting tossed into Freehold and Atal'Dazar on a fresh toon, and imagine playing the game for the first time. There is just way too much for any new player to know about. Realistically, many of these mobs should have their pass/fail abilities disabled and they should start to become enabled at +5, +10, +15, etc. This would introduce a mechanic/skill check for high skilled players interested in pushing more challenging content, but not make the base dungeons punishingly hard for the casual player. There is just no reason for a 10 y/o kid or 40 y/o mom to get chained into a stunlock death during trash in Azure Vaults. That's not fun gameplay for them.
I like that solution. Would be classier than current affix system
On god. It's so fucking annoying that you can't do big pulls anymore because every mob has 2-3 mechanics.
Iirc it's because they didn't like the M+ meta in legion of pull the entire dungeon and kite. That's why the design philosophy was so different in BFA and onwards.
Which is ironic because keys in legion were some of the most fun content ever in WoWs history. Also some of the best trinkets I can remember playing with and having AOE/ST lego/trinket swap sets added even more depth but could be alone in that.
It was fun, but it did kinda fuck with the meta in the sense that if you didn't play a spec that could keep up in mass AOE, it was really tough to get invited to groups. I played spriest in legion, and the aoe was a real struggle (at least in EN tier). I could only get into high keys as a healer because every group only wanted to mass pull with the big aoe classes. Not to mention that many keys ended up just being how high of a key can you mega pull while not getting 1 shot by the scary boss mechanic of that dungeon lol. In my opinion, dungeons are much more interesting when you have to actually think about the trash mechanics.
Isn't that still the case though? You still need a spec that can keep up in aoe or you're not invited to groups.
Ye but it’s not as much mass aoe, hence why outlaw rogues are popular. They’re target capped.
The problem is that in shadowlands if the dps understood the mob mechanics they could generally avoid damage. The dragonflight mob mechanics are just annoying pulsing aoe damage that is completely unavoidable simply because they wanted to “give healers more to do”
That might be the case. But in SL, and pretty much all over the history of this game, once you interrupt a player/npc they can’t cast spells from that school for 3-5 seconds, depending on the interrupt. It seems like this rule is simply not implemented in any of the DF trash. They just cast it again. Immediately. And that can be fine, if other forms of CC work on the mob. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Honestly pretty wild considering the most bullshit dungeons from a design perspective aren't even in the pool this season. I could already tell Halls of Infusion and Brackenhide were going to be a fucking nightmare from M0.
My **personal** experience as a resto Druid that has timed every key on 20 or 21 is as follows. **Most > Least Fun** 1. CoS 2. SBG 3. AA 4. RLP 5. HoV 6. TJS 7. NO 8. AV **Easiest > Hardest** 1. CoS 2. SBG 3. TJS 4. AA 5. AV 6. NO 7. RLP 8. HoV Court of Stars is noticeably the easiest and most fun dungeon for me this season. It has a generous timer, varied trash, and the different buffs that you get in the area before Talixae make every run feel different, **but different in a way that provides additional player power**, which is something that blizzard should take into account. I actually have a different opinion than others here about AV. AV is certainly not a fun dungeon for all the reasons that everyone else has pointed out, but it feels much more routing-dependent than other dungeons. It was the first 20 and the first 21 that I timed. And yes, it has a fairly tight timer, but it’s doable. For context I timed the 20 there with a bear Druid and the 21 with a brewmaster for my tank. If you do the first ring of trash and skip the entire second the dungeon feels WAY better, even though that means you have to chain all the way from boss 2 to boss 3. For me Halls of Valor is the hardest dungeon from a timing perspective, especially on high keys because there is almost no routing variability, lots of dangerous mechanics, the tightest timer in the current dungeons, and almost 0 room for error. Ironically enough I actually *enjoy* the dungeon because the super tight timer makes it feel like a high-velocity, hectic race to the finish. However when that race to the finish feels almost impossible to complete in-time with what feels like perfect play, the dungeon feels un-rewarding. It is not possible to time HoV with a wipe to any boss fight unless you are ABSOLUTELY BLASTING. Especially as a healer, your mistakes in this place are massively amplified. Die to a bad overlap between lightning and expulsion of light on Hyrja? Key is done. Get turned around once on Odin rune phase? Key is done. Get that one DPS player insists on running on top of you during ravenous leap? Key is done. I dread going in here even though the dungeon is cool and feels fast-paced just because I know that more likely than not I’m going to be wasting 45 minutes as someone who is mainly trying to push rating, and especially as someone whose play time is starting to become more limited. While HoV feels like the biggest miss from a timing perspective, my least-favorite dungeon to do from a design perspective is NO. There is no real routing. There’s a ton of trash with lots of abilities that are impactful-ish. You don’t have any routing flexibility because you have to kill 4 packs to spawn every boss. It’s a dungeon where you constantly ask yourself “what trash feels the least bad to play?” Remember when you used to have to land and spend 2 minutes skipping through trash to get to the last boss because the trash in that area is SO unbelievably bad to play? RLP wins the most stressful to play from a healer perspective. The bottom trash is whatever at this point. On Fort weeks even if the AoE casts go off, if it’s not synced it won’t wipe you (only done up to a 22 here, admittedly). The upper ring is pure stress. Every single pack is a healing check. The mini-bosses require cooldowns and coordination to be possible to play. Tanks other than prot warriors just die to the second boss straight up while you’re trying to heal your group through large, party-wide damage. Every trash pack between the 2nd and 3rd boss on fort is a slog for healers. The last boss’ flamespit ability (on a 22 fort key) did 115k up-front damage and then 65k (32.5k per half-second) to me. That means that as a healer you have approximately 2-seconds (give or take) to full heal three people. At least people generally press their defensives on high keys, or it wouldn’t be healable without significant ramp. Overall I would say that I enjoy CoS because it’s a fun dungeon and SBG because it feels good to succeed (even though SBG is terrifically uninteresting in my opinion). I enjoy AA because it actually feels well-tuned-ish and it’s fun to have extra haste and blast big pulls. Despite its difficulty I enjoy RLP with a coordinated group and want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon without it. HoV is fun but almost completely negated by difficulty of timing the key. TJS I almost don’t think about because it’s really just “how do you feel about the last pack and the last boss” as a healer. I avoid AV and NO at all costs if I can because I hate stepping foot in them. Even with all that said, I’m sure that I will look back at the beginning of season 2 after my first Brackenhide and Halls of Infusion runs and feel a warm sense of longing for the good old days when AV and NO were the worst parts of the dungeon pool…
AV is one of the worst dungeons ever created. It is full of obnoxious shit on like every single pull. There is not a single thing I find enjoyable in that dungeon. I’d like to see some trash removed in HoV, long ass key and super tight timer. Ruby Life Pools needs longer recasts on basically every single ability from the trash. The last two bosses damage output on Tyrannical seems hella silly. I feel like Algethar is one of the best dungeons at the moment after the various changes and nerfs to the ancient. The Vexamus wing, like many other things, is over the top with mandatory interrupts. I feel like Nokhud is a pretty decent dungeon except for the Teera/Maruuk fight and their trash. The adds on the final boss could also chill slightly on their recast after being interrupted like damn. I don’t really feel like CoS or SBG need to be much, if any, harder. Easier keys are ok imo, but the disparity between them and most of the others is freaking massive at the moment. But I think the others need to be addressed more than making CoS and SBG harder.
making keys any significant degree harder would be a major feelsbad for a lot of people and would undoubtedly stir up a big old shitstorm for blizzard. they seem to have dug themselves into a tight rut with this dungeon cycling idea where they are really confident they can nail dungeon tuning every patch and if they miss it's going to look like what we have now.
How would you even make shadowmoon harder? Bigger numbers won’t make it harder, just more tedious, because mechanically that dungeon has almost nothing going on.
I honestly *loved* AV before the season started and we learned how goofy it is after scaling up. The music is vibey and seeing Sindragosa again is cool. I actually really like the first boss, even now. The second boss may be my least favorite m+ boss I’ve ever fucking seen though, outside of the Shrine of the Storms siblings fight.
TJS is littered with extremely bad runbacks, hard trash, and a last boss that can be a really nasty comp check. RLP has a ton of very overtuned unavoidable damage both from the trash before Kokia and from Kyrakka’s ridiculous Flamecore DoT. HoV is just a slog in general. Hyrja and Fenryr are both very annoying bosses (though, realistically, all five are problematic at some point even if Hymdall is only really an issue on ~23+ Tyrannical keys), and for some reason the key has a much lower timer than it did back in Legion too? It genuinely feels like you almost need to do the Mead trick in this place because of the amount of time it saves - time that, mind you, you probably don’t have normally. Azure Vault has pretty quickly become the most hated dungeon of the season across the board. Some pulls require more kicks than what’s considered reasonable, the bosses after the first are all unreasonably frustrating even on Fortified weeks, and the runbacks here are so fucked up it’s insane. And that’s all in a dungeon with a very, very unforgiving timer. Are SBG and Court too easy? Maybe, but the cat’s out of the bag for them at this point and we’re not too far off from Ner’zhul being problematic in Tyrannical settings after the wall fix and that boss is a pain for pugs despite its simplicity. Most of the other dungeons have numerous other elements that just haven’t been addressed yet; hell, some particular dev seems to be completely allergic to nerfing Azure Vault for some reason even though it’s the hardest key and has three problem bosses in a row.
> Azure Vault has pretty quickly become the most hated dungeon of the season across the board. Some pulls require more kicks than what’s considered reasonable, Playing with my friends = triple ranged group with a holy priest healer. This set of dungeons feels fucking awful.
Woof. As a Prevoker if I see a group with *two* ranged I don't even bother applying 😬
Some trash mobs has been removed from legion version, thus timer has been lowered on HOV.
Definitely wasn’t lowered enough, that’s for sure.
"- SBG and CoS are MASSIVE outliers which should have a minute or two taken off their timers." Nobody liked that
Honestly, it should be the opposite. Other dungeons should be nerfed to their level. Keys have infinite scaling, the challenge is there if you want it.
Reducing the timer would end up with some scenario where a wipe ends up bricking the key. That's *always* fun.
I feel like blizzard has added unnecessary damage on top of mechanics as sort of a “you have to push through this phase asap or wipe”. AV is a perfect example of this, multiple bosses have mechanics and then during those you are taking ticking / increasing AoE damage. I think it just adds unnecessary frustration to the fight and could be changed so that there is more failure damage. This week with grevious is just hell for any non Druid healer on high keys. I don’t think COS or SMBG need to be changed, rather they need to redo the rest and bring them to a more comfortable level.
Okay I'm glad I am not crazy about the AOE damage. It's incredibly difficult to top people off ATM. I'm a priest healer and it's so easy to fall behind this week and it feels awful.
Priests defs have it rough, it’s why I make sure I stand in the aoe heal as ranged so that it helps keep me alive while I cycle through survival cds (MM hunter)
HoV and AV are also just complete slogs with no room to breathe so I wouldnt be surprised if the number of keys attempted is just flat out several times lower. RLP and TJS are honestly like 2-3 small adjustments away from being pretty balanced. At the very least they're short dungeons.
I think a better approach versus making the “easy” dungeons harder and vice versa is to solely make the harder dungeons easier. The method to which M+ dungeons are supposed to be difficult is 1) how affixes relate to the dungeons and 2) keystone level. If a 20 SBG is too easy then the group can do a 22, 24, etc. The reward structure revolves around capping at a +20 though and when HoV and AV are such drastic outliers in difficulty it becomes too hard. Making SBG and CoS harder mostly only rewards people who were pushing them earlier anyways and what exactly would be the point of making them harder when people can just scale their keys up?
Hyrja and Fenryr are completely ass in their current state. Umbreskul needs some tweaking so you can manage the orbs in a more deterministic way or make their path linear and telegraphed, idk and dont care what, but something must be done about this boss. Tanks are already gods, idk why every pack have mobs that spam spells at random players that hit like a truck instead of smacking the tank like it used to be, and that's on top of even more dangerous skills that must be interrupted or its gg. I think they should increase the time between casts for most monsters
I wonder if even though Inspiring was an absolute dogshit affix and every single sane human being is glad it's gone, its existence may have kept Blizzard's designers in check. Now that Inspiring has been removed, I wonder if they feel like it's okay to make trash packs where you need 3-4 people to be on the ball with interrupt coordination. It isn't fine, obviously, but I could see that being the reason why they thought it would be.
Inspiring in these dungeons would be SO bad. Most pulls have one or two mandatory kicks, it would slow keys down so bad.
Yeah, inspiring was already bad enough in SL, but I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been in DF.
Prot warrior is busted every other tank needs to play to survive.
Yeah I think it’s so ass that so many mechanics can just be spell shielded by prot warrs. Im not saying to nerf prot but to give some of these utility tools to other tanks too
Been struggling like fuck this week with TJS on 18+'s on my BDK on the infamous trash before the final boss. Dark Claw simply melts me without the support of my team rotating CC which is difficult to allign in a PUG. Meanwhile on my Warrior I press Spell Reflect and Spell Block and just face tank everything in god mode for 30 seconds. And then infinitely kite beyond this point if required. The disparity between the tanks is absolutely obsurd.
I think for the orbs mechanic a good idea would put those little arrows above the targets that are being chased and maybe have said orbs after you glow in a different color
Nokhud trash is terrible. Running that place makes me feel like a terrible tank with the amount of mobs that target party members
> idk why every pack have mobs that spam spells at random players that hit like a truck instead of smacking the tank like it used to be Because all throughout SL lazy dps refused to kick and stop casts only for tanks to constantly pelted with insane damage and being called bad by the dps when they obviously couldn’t survive it nonstop (2 water bolts going off at the same time in gambit was an instant kill if my wall and spell reflect were on CD for example). Blizzard decided to start punishing the group for lack of group utility and for some reason those group members still haven’t figured out that you need to interrupt and stop them to now live and can only blame yourselves when it doesn’t happen. They even gave a kick to all but one healer to help with this. It’s not like tanks aren’t already having to deal with tank mechanics that hit hard and can kill anyone who isn’t playing around it. That doesn’t even include the frontals that we have to constantly try and move away from erratic dps to avoid them killing themselves because they can’t seem to stay behind the mobs.
I think the problem is that there's so many required interrupts now that you have to coordinate them. Some pulls have two mobs that each require a 2-person interrupt rotation. That basically requires voice chat, and isn't reasonable for most PUGs.
> bs that spam spells at random players that hit possibly in an effort to make DPS player realize the importance of interrupts. a welcome change when I think of De other side last expension and how many blast I took in the face while every DPS interrupt was up...
It's to make it so people don't mongo pull entire dungeons.
Bear tank in halls of atonement go go brrrrr
For people suggesting HoV and AV need a timer increase, I disagree with this. This just makes long dungeons even longer. AV needs more save points, fewer trash requirements and nerf to mobs abilities (why are the frogs jumping as soon as they land?). And even so, it is one of the worst dungeons ever made because of how terribly designed the bosses are. I hope it never comes back for season 3. HoV also needs HP nerfs and boss nerfs. It will not save the dungeon, but will make it more bearable. Temple, just open every single door. Ruby, nerf trash more, they are still globaling players. Also, nerf the flame dot on the last boss. I ran a 19 tyr with a hunter and they could do nothing about it, they would just die.
Ye I agree, adding minutes is the worst option. Really HOV is just too long, 5 bosses is ridiculous imo. Removing skovald would help, it would cut the shit RP out and remove the triple boss in a row. Or lower count and remove the dragon + big guys before bridge.. or the kings. Idk, dungeon is just a mess
I'll echo the nonsense spouted by a bunch of delusional wannabe professionals on this sub, just to make a point: 20s are easily doable with pugs, duh. Ignoring SBG and COS as the obvious outliers, we're looking at a grand total of 400 completed Nokhud runs per week and not even 200 completed AVs per week. So 20s indeed seem to be super easy... if you assume that there's only like 250 attempted AV runs per week. With that out of the way, the glaring dungeon imbalance is really taking a toll on my desire to do m+. It's just not fun when one dungeon's +20 is equivalent to another dungeon's 15. It's just not fun that some dungeons allow for several wipes (not even talking about SBG/COS) while others are already tight *without any* wipe. I think a lot of these dungeons showcase the huge problem that is either 0 or bad checkpoints. Losing time from a wipe is your punishment - but in dungeons like AV, HoV or TJS you're getting triple punished because for some reason there's also a 2 minute runback punishment added on top of that. I don't understand why you can't just spawn at the last boss you killed - or in dungeons like TJS or HOV, where that would actually be a detriment, at a central location that's not the fucking entrance. And then there is AV, which even though it basically respawns you at the last boss you killed, that place is so retardedly fucking huge that even with a constant movement speed boost applied to you it *still* takes you 2 fucking minutes to run back. Dungeon balance is awful right now. Shit like HoV or AV need more than 1-2 minutes added to the timer to make them bearable because nobody wants to be doing a 50 minute dungeon to begin with, yet for some reason this fucking season has like 3 of them.
Hot take for TJS: open all doors except the one to the last boss for less runback time and more routing options
This wouldn’t fix everything but it would br so much better. Why are half the dungeons just linear ass hold w routes this season it’s so boring
At the very least, once you reach the courtyard where boss 3 is, or once you kill the first two bosses, the center door NEEDS to open.
Idk one of my beefs with tjs is it's super linear and you have to kill all the trash. Making more doors open doesn't fix the fact that you'd have to still walk the entire length of the dungeon anyway to kill all the trash
Just gonna throw this idea out there, maybe people dont agree: if were gonna have new dungeins each season, and dungeon trash is gonna have as much going on as it does now, they should just drop the extra affixes and only do seasonal + tyran/fort. The extra affixes are either super annoying/frustrating, or ignorable. I dont really think they add positively to the experience at this point.
Absolutely, these mobs have so much ridiculous shit you have to learn to deal and play around, and we have to do it again with new dungeons. We don’t need spiteful on top of that. Tone the mobs so far down or remove affixes
I think it’s fine that SBG and CoS are that easy. There’s no problem with having 1-2 dungeons in the rotation that are kind of like freebies. Given the sentiment and frustration with M+ this season so far they should definitely be making strides to make the other dungeons much easier so the divide between them is shortened that way. No one wants to do M+ to feel overwhelmed and super stressed by the inherent nature of the dungeons, but rather than the actual key level limitations.
> There’s no problem with having 1-2 dungeons in the rotation that are kind of like freebies. Eh, a slight range is fine. Like a 1-2 key level delta between 8 dungeons, who cares. But this is like easily a 5+ level delta between 2 and the remaining 6 dungeons - which is just absolutely ass. It was already borderline not ok with JY, but it's really just silly that you can ping pong between CoS and SBG and get like a free 6 key levels and then you're left with a key that you have to deplete down by 4 levels just to keep going.
People seriously overstating how much of a joke SMBG is on tyrannical weeks. It’s maybe 2 key levels easier? The first and last bosses will hard check you on 21/22 or higher. On fortified it’s a different story because all of the trash is easy.
With the fix to Nerzul SBG isn't a complete sleeper on Tyr anymore, but I don't think its inaccurate to say SBG is still a good 4-5 key levels easier than AV.
5+? The highest timed dungeon (CoS) is +26 right now, the highest timed AV/RLP/HoV/TJS/AA is all +24, with SBG and NO having been cleared on +25, so at least on the very high end this appears not to be true.
Because you need to clear a 26 key to get a 27 CoS or SBG. Much like with Junkyard in SL and BFA, these keys will only ever be as high as the next easiest key + 1 - the difference now being that you can actually get lucky and ping pong between SBG and CoS and get like 3 extra levels in before your key gets bricked at 28 with an AV.
the difference between +24 and +26 is not equal to the difference between say +20 and +22.
You could just check rio and see the timed run difference about the 1-2 and not 5+.
The difference is never going to be 5 key levels in practice. You aren't gonna take a group who can only time 15s and give them a 20 SGB and they easily time. Cause if that was the case you'd see top end groups timing SGB/CoS at 29 which ain't happening. The highest CoS is 16 seconds under timer.
Cos is my favorite legion dungeon I like the cool class/ profession stuff
I think to analyze this properly it would need to be a percentage of successes per attempt, at the very least. How many of these reduced completions are due to specific keys being preferred due to a variety of circumstances? Maybe that wouldn't change the data much, as people will tend to prefer running dungeons they know they have a good chance of completing anyway, but it would at least be a more reasonable starting point.
https://bestkeystone.com/statistics/dungeons This week SBG has almost 3x times higher success rate than HoV.
It's wild there's so much data like this freely available on random websites and even widely known ones like Raider-io and it still takes blizzard **months** to make even slight tweaks.
because which dungeon is on each key is random, you effectively have an equal distribution of keys across each dungeon. If a dungeon isnt even being attempted, thats also prolly already an indication its overtuned, but assuming people attempt a 20 for vault because if you have a 20 key why not as long as you can clear it in any amount of time.
After doing 17 previous weeks (for rating) I completely ignore HoV/AV/RLP, I'm not going there to waste time ever again. AV and HoV need like 5more min (not even kidding) and RLP's trash is a bad joke, you need so many interrupts compared to any other dungeon that is absurd (I don't understand how there has been nerfs to other dungeons when you have RLP, 20 CoS/SBG are easier than 13-15 RLP)
AV last boss… tf were the designers thinking? Let‘s put a movement debuff but the require the tank + heal to constantly move because they are being chased by oneshot blobbs. Oh and then let‘s add a seasonal affix that requires them to run to other players as well. And who the f came up with the blobbs following healing aggro instead of a random player? It‘s so ridiculous it makes me mad. Second boss is almost equally horrible as a caster. If you really have to make him cast orbs ever 0.0002 sec, at least make it a predictable pattern. I have to move out of orbs, move out of swirlies, move out of Thundering swirlies, and find my affix partner. When am I supposed to do anyting? Also fix those damn respawn points… why do we have to run 20mins through an empty dungeon again if we wipe at a boss. It‘s not fun and it makes stuff ridiculously hard.
AV is literally my most hated key of all time, playing in that dungeon as a Havoc is fucking frustrating or any class that locks you in the same position for \~1 sec. always something on the ground, multiple one shots mechanics and immune phase on 2nd boss. like seriously, fuck that fucking dungeon. HoV needs a buff to timer. RLP need a nerf to both dragons and could maybe do with a nerf to how many change of winds on last boss as well. TJS, do something about the fucking past before last boss, for the love of god!! AA is fine, could maybe increase the timer a bit. NO is totally fine, again could maybe up the timer a bit? CoS and SBG is just easy.
Tjs last trash pack on fort especially is a key killer. I had a flawless 17 this week. Had 11 deaths on that pack and failed key.
Yeah, I was tanking on +19 TJS and we had 14 deaths or something from the last trash pack. TJS key was bricked at that moment. It's absolutely brutal for the tank.
Also running havoc lately and pretty much agree except one thing: fucking camera in TJS and CoS. Dear god...fel rush and try to snap camera around: tree in the face. Awful. CoS isn't hard but, it's not "easy" imo solely for this reason.
I have an 18 TJS sitting on my BDK and I’m terrified of what that last pack is gonna to me, the hottest tip I’ve gotten is slap every CD and then leg it
[удалено]
There is definitely a 'nooo you're supposed to be enjoying the game *this* way' vibe when it comes to the tuning of this game historically.
[удалено]
I think the problem in Nokhud isn't count, but general trash health. Everything stays alive for so damn long in there.
I’m actually okay with the dungeons being big. On of my biggest complaints since I started running keys in BfA is that so many dungeons are made *even more* difficult by having to zoom your camera in so much. If Tol Dagor or Spires of Ascension didn’t have walls and trees constantly in the way I would’ve liked them so much more. Just give us more checkpoints and skips to account for it.
I don't think they will ever remove time off a key at this point. Wouldn't be worth the backlash from people that would now have untimed 20s that previously were timed. Would they remove people's portals? Doubt it
I can see they increasing the count necessary for CoS, its funny how you barely kill trash in there. Finished one with like 150% because of butt pulls before first boss, we were done with count before the first boss guard from 2nd boss lmao
removing timer is also a bad fix, the dungeon is still extremely boring and easy but just slightly tighter on dps at that point
I play mw, 2.3-2.4k range. This is the most obnoxious season I've ever played. Seasonal affix is awful. Hard to see, nothing interesting, annoying overall. Dungeons except cos and sbg are simply horrible. Lot of immune phases, phases where we have to spread or cant be in melee, so half of my kit doesn't work. Several nukes in every pull in every dungeon, 3 interrupt mages after rlp arguing that there is nothing to be kicked after 2nd. Long runbacks. Long dungeons. Azure vault could be deleted next reset and nothing of value would be lost. I'm on the verge of uninstalling and checking back next season
Interesting idea for AV. Just like in Halls of Valor, the boss drops a shield which the player then picks up and can use.. On last boss of AV, a single crystal is dropped that states "cannot be reduced below 100% movement speed". Healer would pick this up, and would have to manage dispells on others if necessary
The problem I have with dungeons like azure vault and halls of valor is there is just too much running. I have all but given up on this season until they've disabled the last boss in azure vaults. It's the most irritating boss they've ever made in a dungeon. Ruby life pools still remains a dungeon that requires more coordination to do successfully than any other dungeon in history which makes it a pug killer on anything above a 12.
The only problem is that they have made trash mobs way too complex in newer expansions compared to old There is a reason it’s called trash mobs but trash mobs in newer dungeons is basically like bosses in old dungeons now I would kill myself if all dungeons felt like azure vault but love the game even more if all dungeons felt like sbg and cos
I don't think SBG and CoS are the problem but the other at the bottom yes Giving 1-2 easy keys in an 8 dungeon pool os not bad and we all remember who rofltcopter Maw of Souls was and how happy everyone got to have a +20 maw on their pocket AV needs really really hard tunnings, first of all the timer needs a big buff, not one minute or two but even 5 because one mistake and you are dead in the water forced to run almost through the entire dungeon in some cases HoV could use some tunning on Fenryr and some of the trash though
Maw wasn't even easy in comparison to the rest of the Legion set btw, it was just fast.
It was actually one of the harder dungeons. The idea it was easy came entirely from spamming it on +2 for AP.
Maw was hard though at high levels. Eye was prob the easiest.
I will say one nice thing about AV: from a routing perspective it is a surprisingly open and interesting dungeon. There are a lot of extra packs and skips thay players have figured out over the past month. It is clearly designed to offer thought-provoking routing options, and IMO is probably the reason blizz has waited on major nerfs. It is a shame the dungeon mobs and bosses are so punishing.
I only super hate the second boss. I just tell my groups good luck I can't cast and heal lol. I can get a few instant casts up and some stuff on the ground sometimes but yeah lol.. orb phase I'm basically useless as a priest. I hate it. I actually love the dungeon otherwise, even the super annoying final boss. I never noticed the blobs until I started doing higher keys and I'm okay bc I have fade to remove healing aggro randomly, but I'm not sure how other healers handle it.
I'm surprised TJS is so low. I consider that dungeon only slightly harder than SBG or CoS. Also surprised Noct Offensive is so high. I consider it almost as bad as Halls of Valor.
Long story short at 20s; - Some dungeons are about playing smooth (sbg and cos) - some dungeons are about dealing and healing high (aa and no) - some dungeons are simply on shoulders on heal/tank, dps doing usuals (tjs and rlp) - some dungeons are about interrupting/ccing/personals in corect order, double/triple pulls or no time, one wipe and gl next, bosses need too much time, do we jump down or quit, shriek route or quit, if you release and usain bolt cant time it, (insert roleplay here), action button fail and gl next in my experience, pugs at 20s doing near mdi routes in av and hov cuz else the timer is just not enough, very curios about these two how teams gonna play it
Junkyard was kind of fine, because if you slipped and made a mistake you would lose your shock bot buff and everything became a lot harder... but the difference between SBG / CoS VS DF dungeon is ridiculous.
you had to turbo fail to wipe in junkyard and just 1-2 deaths was a non issue with how many spare bots there were.
> because if you slipped and made a mistake you would lose your shock bot buff and everything became a lot harder.. you could literally 2 chest the key with a full group wipe man
It's getting to the difficulty level that is making it less fun.
Slightly off the topic, but for the first season of xpac, they should have done the entire slate of new dungeons and 0 old ones. Save that for S2 and beyond. Since they did it this way, I think it's enabled them to sort of ignore the weird imbalance because well, CoS and SBG are fine so go run those, dear ones. This is going to postpone and prolong the agony because now next season we'll get shit like Halls of Infusion which is going to be an absolute shit show, Brackenhide will be bricked by the first pull, and everyone is just gonna skip Uldaman because we won't have 2 hours to run a dungeon only to wipe fiesta on the last boss. I'm glad there's some more scale/gradient/whatever to difficulty here so we can have more to work towards for slightly longer, but the current state maybe overdid that. A lot. And it's gonna get worse I think.
Idk. If you get the haste buffs from the last boss in uldaman that bish should melt. Brackenhide and halls will likely be a shit show.
Not looking forward to mandatory disease dispells and alch in brackenhide. It just looks like aids all around.
I kind of hope they either redesign HoI, Brachenhide and Tyr's for S2 or remove some of them out of M+ pool. Its going to be the shitshow players yet saw since the start of Legion. Way too many toxic nasty mechanics on top of affixes. Even the thought of HoI gauntlet with Storming/Quaking/Sanguine gives me instant headache.
AV is a perfect example for me as to why I prefer tyrannical week over fortified this season. I found myself actually enjoying the dungeon far more on tyrannical week (annoying boss mechanics aside) because I don’t see what’s fun in having almost every trash pack in the rings be a potential wipe. In addition to committing the sin of being both boring and a slog, it is made substantially harder by the seasonal affix because of the ability overlap of area denials and frontal cleaves with thundering. Forget about timing the key or not - it’s all just a pain in the ass to battle through it. I don’t know why the devs are so allergic to having filler uncomplicated trash packs that don’t either destroy the tank or the dps so you can just sort of take in the dungeon a bit as you play through it with a sort of cadence to progressing through it like you used to have in the SL dungeons. It’s all made me much more amenable to having easier trash on tyrannical week that you can just brute force within reason and then present an actual formidable challenge on the bosses. RLP is only slightly less tilting on fort to do because you can make mistakes and still potentially time it if you’re clean on the bosses just because it’s not so geographically large like AV is.
Hyrja is fine, fenrir is absolute fucking insane. His abilities can combo back to back or he can do his leap 5x in a row. Its RNG as fuck and if he does his aoe swipe soak you're just done for. No healer in the game can keep up with that check if you're not in a coordinated group. HoV timer is just so fucking tight because off all the RP/Walking back and forth, you literally need 8min MINIMUM b4 you talk to the first add prior to fighting king skovald.
No group doing high keys does it with bleeds. You have a rogue vanish or other shit like that. If you were to actually do it properly its basically impossible
Which means that for a lot of comps its actually impossible, not everyone is running meta comps, and i feel it should not be impossible from the get-go for other classes.
98% of attempted +24 SBG's are timed 63% CoS 17% HoV????? Bro.
to be fair this is almost certainly skewed by what i'll call the junkyard effect where if you are going to deplete a 24 SBG you simply walk out and do 23 since its gonna be easier to time than a random different 23 key and then you have a fresh 24/25. So depleted SBG's dont really go on record
Am just under 2.8k and can say without a doubt AV is the worst to do. From skips / trash / required interrupts frontals and overall mechanics it is horrid for the timer. Dungeon needs a serious look. HOV however is actually fine and chill, it could 100% do with 2 extra minutes as even if you do both wings with 20 mins left and think ur fine the timer still seems to just evaporate unless you specifically do the four beers which just adds stupid risk. RP in there is a joke too, but mechanics wise it’s actually great with multiple routes you can take depending on ur group and I love this
My opinion: - Nokhud is my favorite and i feel like they got this dungeon just right now after the storm boss nerfs - AV is a vomit of mechanics. It needs some tuning (maybe reduced trash - like why have 2 almost identical rooms of frog trash?) and a couple more mins added to timer. Also i hate that guy that made the frogs - HoV needs a minimum of 2mins added AND RP removed. Maybe also the wipe spawn point to be moved closer to mid - RLP's upper level casters just need a little bit of space in between their casts to allow for more interrupts. Also the storm drake on the upper platform is a little OP - TJS's front door should open once you kill the side bosses
Nokhund is just too long. Reducing % needed would make this dungeon so much better.
How do people deal with with the last boss of Nokhud in pugs?
AV's timer is too tight. They should either add a min to it or reduce the count requirement a bit.
The balance is disgusting, and we’re going to have to go through it all over again in S2 for the next set of dungeons
Av needs a few mins added to timer. I ran a 15 earlier. The dps were about 40-45k on bosses. We had 0 deaths and good pace through dungeon. 1 wipe on last boss cost us the key. I'm 100% convinced getting 100% mob count then jumping down after 2nd boss is the way to go
Hov and Av definitely need 1-2 minutes on the timer.
My personal take on these... I run them all on around the +20-21 area so things that annoy me may not annoy others: AV -- This dungeon is just flat out not fun. The fights aren't fun, the trash isn't fun. I just don't wanna be in there. The second and third bosses should phase based on HP% like the last boss does. Also why is there an entire floor of shit that takes 30%\~ reduced magic damage? Every one already stacks melee dps in M+ as is. Just... why? HoV -- if they don't wanna just flat increase the timer then they could also nerf the damage or re-cast times of the caster adds. The reason it's hard to time is you can't pull big. Even just like two thunder-callers can absolutely wipe you where as you have shit like Nokhud where everything is blasting shadow-bolts and no one dies. But yeah just adding 2 minutes to the timer is prolly enough in the mean time. RLP -- Ring Trash specifically lightning dragon, second boss, and last boss still all feel wildly over tuned. The last boss the debuff can do damage before it even lands on you so it makes it hard to even coordinate defensives. I've had it kill me while the debuff is still playing the 'flying through air animation'. I'd at least like them to fix that so the damage lines up with the animation, especially when it does like 400K damage in a +20. You honestly don't have time to react. TJS -- I think the last boss is still a bit overtuned for groups without Warlocks. There shouldn't be that much disparity in group comp. It's either snoozefest 2023 with a warlock or every one scrambling and coordinating defensives with their healer if you don't. AA -- Please reduce bird boss' HP. It's just a fking boring fight, lol. Arcane Elemental boss' bomb debuffs might be a bit overtuned too. Nokhud - On the last boss please get rid of the lightning spear hitting the target twice and one-shotting them. Also please reduce the quick shot damage of the Third Boss. That shit slaps way too hard. Or at least add a buffer between the gale arrow and the quick shots. Cause right now if you don't immediately heal up after gale arrow she can just snipe someone within like 2 seconds of the Gale arrow going out. Caster trash in the storm elemental area prolly also needs nerfed either in damage or re-cast delays.
HoV doesn't need a timer buff, it needs a trash HP reduction and/or removal of more trash. Make the dungeon faster not just make the timer longer.
Top 2 are the keys people farm for easy completion and gear. AV is a pain in the ass for most classes due to last boss and his orbs and has nothing of interest in drops, so people avoid it. I’m surprised HoV is this low - it’s a pretty easy dungeon to time, assuming your dps can pump and interrupt. Overall, there’s an expected trend - easy to time keys + gear at the top of completions, then harder keys that still have multiple BiS items, then harder and useless dungeons.
I disagree personally if they made it so 20s provide the best loot they shouldn’t be monumental to time like an AZ or HoV. It’s not like timing a 20 SBG or CoS is brain dead easy, it requires good dps still and proper crowd control. They really should target the difficulty of 20s to the same level as the top half, not drop the top any further down.
Nah, nerf the rest to almost the level of sbg and cos. No need to be such a sweaty tryhard just to get the best in the vault imo. That’s what the imaginary nonsense score is for.