Jdotb BFA Q&A #14 - 8.1 Dungeon Changes, Keystone Deletion

You know the old saying, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?” Sometimes that saying is garbage. Key deletion was around for a brief amount of time (roughly three months), and the community only realized the full power of deletion for maybe a month, but once we’d gotten a taste of the freedom afforded by deletion there was no going back. You might think that since deletion didn’t exist at all for the two years of M+ in Legion that the community would have become used to the idea of being stuck with “dead” keys, but the short interlude we enjoyed with deletion opened our eyes to the possibilities of rerolling your key.

The original system with permanent keys is problematic in a few ways that were detectable even before deletion was introduced but became glaringly obvious afterwards. To illustrate, let’s walk through a typical week of M+. On Tuesday (or Wednesday if you live on the wrong continent), you open your weekly M+ cache and are award a shiny new key that is one level lower than the highest key you completed last week meaning it’s likely to be a relatively high key by your standards. Because of this weekly shakeup of keys, the key pushing community gets a fresh start, so you start running the “good” keys that your group has. You experience some success, some failure, but regardless of whether you chest or fail the dungeon, you will eventually get a “bad” key. Some dungeons are inherently bad, like King’s Rest, but most dungeons are situationally bad based on the affixes. Some weeks Temple of Sethraliss is ok, but if you step in there on Tyrannical Grievous week you might as well start the key and hearth out.

Now that you’ve bricked one of your keys, you move on to one of your other (probably less good) keys. The process repeats itself until this key also becomes bad. If you’re lucky, you can stretch your key luck out until Friday, maybe Saturday. But by the time Sunday and Monday roll around, your group will all be holding King’s Rest keys. And no matter your feelings on King’s Rest or the state of dungeon balance generally, there is no escaping the fact that it is empirically harder to chest King’s Rest on a +20 than any other dungeon. So you’re left with a scenario where, on a given week, you might be able to do 21s and 22s of some dungeons, but if you get a King’s Rest you have to drop the key to at most a +20 but more likely a +19 or +18. Now even if you chest it, you’re left with a +19 or +20 key (which you’re praying isn’t King’s Rest again), and you now have to work it back up to a +21 or +22 before you can even begin trying to get new personal bests.

When you chest a +22 and get a +23 King’s Rest that you have to drop to a +19 to attempt, that feels like being punished. Knowing that you’re going to have to successfully complete three consecutive (and probably difficult) dungeons just to get back to where you started is agonizing. And as the week wears on, you stop inviting people because they’re good or fun to play with and starting inviting people based on what key they have, aka “bring the keystone, not the player.” No one enjoys it, and people start actively avoiding M+ once the keystone well runs dry for the week.

But the WoW community is no stranger to unpopular changes and has even become jaded to them in BFA, so why the visceral reaction to keystone deletion specifically? A lot of that can be explained by the presentation of the change. Keystone deletion has always been tenuous; it was implemented the first week of M+ in BFA as a stopgap measure because people were getting keys out of their cache the first week based on the last key they’d run in Legion (which was often a key in the +20 to +30 range) and were now faced with the daunting task of having to drop the key a dozen or more times. But after that first week, the need for keystone deletion was gone and yet it remained in the game. Blizzard never officially blessed deletion, but as the weeks rolled by it seemed more and more evident that deletion was tacitly the new way of the world. Groups started experimenting with it and figuring out how best to utilize it, and the M+ scene was thriving because it was rare to get stuck with a full group of keys that no one wanted to do.

So when Blizzard removed it with no forewarning or explanation with a simple “Mythic Keystones can no longer be deleted” in the 8.1 patch notes, the community was stunned. How could something this useful and well-received get axed so summarily? We eventually found out via last week’s Developer Q&A that keystone deletion was problematic for tech reasons and couldn’t continue to exist in its current state, but we were left for days to assume our own reasons, and the community is rarely kind with its assumptions. Most speculated that the devs simply wanted players to be forced to run all of the dungeons because some hard-working employee at Blizz spent time on them.

The removal of a popular feature combined with poor communication about why it was being removed (not to mention the current mood of the WoW community vis a vis BFA) was a powder keg waiting to explode.

On Dec 14, Blizzard applied a numerous amount of hotfixes to mythic level dungeons. Which of those changes are we most likely to notice?

This week Blizzard rolled out several hotfixes to dungeons. A handful came with the patch on Tuesday and were undocumented, but several more were introduced with patch notes on Friday. The changes were extensive enough that it will take a while to be able to fully appreciate how they’ll impact dungeons, but some of the changes had effects that will be immediately apparent.

Overseer Korgus's Incendiary Rounds no longer stacks.

This is a huge change to the final boss of Tol Dagor because it eliminates the only lethal mechanic of the fight. Korgus has a few abilities he’ll use, but the only one that consistently killed people was Explosive Burst; more specifically, it was when Explosive Burst cast twice in a row. The reason this was dangerous was because you received damage from two Explosive Bursts in rapid succession, which hurt, but also because each Explosive Burst would apply a stack of Incendiary Rounds. The Incendiary Rounds DoT was also punishing, and if you got two stacks of it combined with the initial damage of Explosive Burst, it was very hard to keep someone alive. So far as I’m aware, the tendency of Explosive Burst to happen consecutively is completely RNG, so this fight was very frustrating because you always felt at the mercy of good luck. Now that it’s not possible to get multiple stacks of Incendiary Rounds, the RNG has been scaled back considerably and the fight is much more manageable.

Heavy Cannon's Cannon Blast damage should now scale with the Keystone Level of the dungeon.

Another enormous change for Tol Dagor. The cannons around the ramparts of upper Tol Dagor previously did not scale with the level of the keystone, meaning the cannons got consistently weaker as the key level went higher and higher. At high levels, it was never worth pulling the trash near the cannons because the mob health is excessively high (since it’s intended to be killed with the aid of the cannons) and the cannons were ineffectual. Now that the cannons deal the same relative damage across all key levels, the trash around the cannons becomes trivially easy again and can be killed in half a dozen or less shots. Expect to see the more adventurous groups try to find ways to drag all sorts of mobs from inside the prison out to the cannons for speed clears.

Elder Leaxa will now only spawn one Blood Mirror clone.

Leaxa is a boss that has frustrated the M+ community since her inception. Her abilities are fairly straightforward and easy to deal with, but she had a fatal flaw: she would begin spawning an increasing number of clones as the fight went on. She would spawn one clone the first time, then two, and presumably eventually three although I’m not sure anyone ever made it to that point. The problem with more clones was that they all cast Blood Bolt, a spell that did enough damage at higher levels to one shot anyone in the group (including the tank). When only Leaxa is present, it’s simple to interrupt Blood Bolt, and when one clone is out you get squeezed a bit depending on the number of interrupts in your party, but when two clones were out you simply never had enough interrupts to stop Blood Bolts from going off for more than about 10 seconds. This meant Leaxa had to be dead no matter what shortly after spawning the second set of clones or else your group was going to wipe quickly and painfully. This usually wasn’t an issue on Fortified, but the increased health values of bosses on Tyrannical meant that groups had to resort to having their healer start the dungeon in a DPS spec to have any chance at meeting the DPS check, and anything +20 above was mathematically impossible currently. So this change now makes Underrot possible on Tyrannical week which has been a long time coming.

War Matrons now have true sight.

It had become almost universally accepted that you skipped the trash in Underrot up to the first boss with Shroud of Concealment because you wanted to use Bloodlust on Leaxa and because the trash was so awful to fight. Blizzard nipped that strategy in the bud by giving the War Matrons (who patrol up and down both bridges at the start of Underrot) true sight meaning they can detect players who are stealthed, invisible, using invis pots, etc. It is still possible to utilize a death skip, but that will usually mean burning a battle res instantly at the start of the dungeon. On the bright side, Blizzard nerfed several of the mobs at the start of Underrot, so the trash may be worth doing now.

Vol’zith now only casts Whispers of Power on healers.

A common strategy on last boss of Shrine was to have the healer outrange the Whispers of Power debuff, forcing the boss to cast it on DPS (who could do much more damage with it). This sped the fight up considerably and also encouraged groups to pull the trash around Vol’zith during the boss encounter to make use of the damage buff. Now Vol’zith will only cast Whispers on the healer, and once the healer has the debuff he will cease trying to cast it. This slows down the fight, and Shrine is already a lengthy dungeon, so potentially expect more changes to this boss to account for the marked loss in kill speed.

Avatar of Sethraliss now has two healing checkpoints: 70% and 100%.

Avatar was one of the longest fights in M+ thanks to several intermissions which were immediately proceeded by new add spawns. This made the fight incredibly mana intensive on Tyrannical weeks, as the healer not only had to contend with constant group damage from Pulse but also had to do a lot of single target healing on the Avatar itself. Single target heals tend not to be super mana efficient, so most healers had to resort to spamming mana hungry heals if they wanted to be quick. The removal of one of the healing checkpoints (it used to be 40%, 70% and 100%) means one less add phase which will make the fight much less of a struggle.

There were several abilities that were nerfed by at least 25% which you can read about in the patch notes. Some of those are important, but they don’t need much explanation -- you just get dunked on less forcefully now.

All in all, I agreed with most of the changes made this past week barring a couple (like the War Matron true sight change). Almost all of the changes made the dungeons easier, which is usually a good thing, although I think we’ll end up seeing Tol Dagor’s timer get reduced dramatically at some point. That dungeon (which got a 3 minute increase on its timer recently from 33 to 36 minutes) can now be cleared very quickly with the new cannon changes and nerf to the final boss. Not only does it likely need the 3 minute increase reverted, it might even need to go in the other direction now.

Comments on Week of December 18 AffixesDungeons Most Affected by Tyrannical

Temple of Sethraliss - Aspix and Adderis will be rough. Aspix’s Static Shock will drop the entire party’s health fairly low on Tyrannical weeks, and Conduction is going to leave someone at low health right before Static Shock goes off. Galvazzt will ramp in difficulty the longer the fight goes on, and if his Consume Charge goes off it will probably kill at least a few people. Avatar of Sethraliss is already a marathon fight, and now Pulse will squeeze healer mana that much more.

Freehold - The Azerite Powdershot from Skycap’n will deal mega damage on Tyrannical, so make sure everyone is topped off before he casts it. Council of Captains has three bosses, one of which will be friendly depending on the week (it rotates each week). If Eudora is one of the two enemy bosses, this fight becomes very dangerous. Eudora’s Grapeshot will heavily punish bad positioning, and the RNG nature of Powdershot means it will inevitably pick the same person two or three times in a row and kill them if they aren’t healed up very quickly. Shark Puncher’s sharks start dealing ridiculous damage on higher keys, and standing next to them for one or two ticks will get you killed. Once both sharks are out, you need to be very diligent about kiting them.

Waycrest Manor - The Triad gets infinitely more dangerous when it’s allowed to use its abilities multiple times, which is almost assured on Tyrannical. Immunities will be a big help on this boss. Goliath will hit the tank extremely hard, and resetting your stacks will do quite a bit of group damage. Lord and Lady Waycrest will also rough up the tank, and Lady Waycrest’s Wracking Chord will do an annoying amount of party damage. Gorak Tul’s adds start to become an issue the longer he lives, so your party will need to stay on top of using the Alchemical Fires at appropriate times throughout the fight.

Dungeons Most Affected by Raging

Shrine of the Storm - Shrine has several notable mini bosses that hurt and have a lot of health, so you’ll be spending a fair bit of time with them while they’re Raged. You’ll also want to be careful with the Abyss Dweller packs as their Lash ability stacks so they’ll be doing the most damage at the end of the pull which is precisely when you don’t want to be taking damage during Raging week. Same story with Abyssal Eels: they apply a stacking DoT so be sure to start kiting them as they get close to dying.

The Motherlode - The trash in Motherlode is scary enough without damage modifiers, so adding in the 100% Raging damage onto some of the abilities in here can instantly kill people. Notable mobs to watch out for: Addled Thugs with their Clothesline (especially if they’ve cast Inhale Vapor on themselves for 50% more damage); Mech Jockey’s Grease Gun which will target random nearby players if the tank starts to kite; Mine Rats and their Throw Rock on random players; and Venture Co. Earthshapers who cast Rock Lance on random players. Melee players will be punished heavily in Motherlode on Raging week, and it can be a big help to try to stack as many ranged DPS in your group as possible.

Waycrest Manor - Waycrest trash has a tendency to slap the tank no matter what, but there are a few mobs that you’ll especially want to be careful around this week. Devouring Maggot’s Spit hurts a ton already, and a single player can easily end up with 3+ stacks of it on a big pull -- Raging will mean instant death. Coven Thornshaper’s Infected Thorn can get very nasty, especially if combined with Soul Fetish from other Coven witches. Gloom Horrors will need to be managed very carefully as they always jump to the furthest target, and if several of them Rage and jump simultaneously it will kill someone.

Dungeons Most Affected by Necrotic

Waycrest Manor - Waycrest gives minimal room to kite and has several large trash pulls, so it’s hard for tanks to avoid racking up stacks and harder still to get rid of them. Waycrest also has some notoriously heavy hitters for bosses (Goliath and Lord Waycrest), and tanks will feel the burn if they get unlucky with stack resets.

Tol Dagor - Sand Queen was hotfied last week, and her adds now cast Itchy Bite instead of meleeing -- hopefully this will make Necrotic stacks much easier to manage for the tank. Once inside the prison, tanks have very little room to maneuver so it’s hard to reset Necrotic. The Jes Howlis encounter can get tricky if you don’t open the cell doors on his floor before engaging him as he will unlock all of them when he runs around at 50% HP, which means a lot of adds will be beating on the tank.

Temple of Sethraliss - Galvazzt is already a painful fight that spreads the healer’s attention thin keeping the group up, and if the tank requires extra healing from Necrotic it can easily be the last straw that forces a healer out of mana. Avatar’s Heart Guardians put a nasty debuff on the tank that increases damage taken, so if the Guardians are left up for very long Necrotic can become an issue.

Dungeons Most Affected by This Week’s Affixes

Waycrest Manor - Waycrest’s cramped interior often makes it hard to kite out your Necrotic stacks without running into even more mobs, so be mindful of your positioning and consider pulling trash out into the courtyard for more space. Raging will be very dangerous on several mobs, especially if Necrotic stacks are already high, so tanks should be prepared to run frequently. Tyrannical Triad is always a challenge, and Necrotic will make Soulbound Goliath and Lord Waycrest (who already hit the tank hard) a lot more annoying.

Temple of Sethraliss - There are a few mobs in Temple that you’ll want to watch out for on Raging, such as the Static-charged Dervishes and Agitated Nimbuses, but mainly this is about Tyrannical. Aspix’s Static Shock will deal heavy unavoidable damage to the party; it’s easy for the room to get covered in venom on Merektha; Galvazzt is still a marathon HPS check even after nerfs; at least Avatar is now healed to full in two phases instead of three which should make the mana requirements of that fight less intense.

The Motherlode - Big pulls in Motherlode mean Necrotic will always be somewhat of an issue, but at least there’s room to move around. The big problem this week will be Raging as so many of the Motherlode mobs have abilities that can instantly kill someone when the damage is doubled. Melee should tread very carefully, and even then they can probably expect to pick up a handful of “cheap” deaths throughout the dungeon.

Dungeons Least Affected by This Week’s Affixes

The Underrot - Now that Leaxa has been hotfixed, Tyrannical doesn’t present a hard ceiling in this dungeon anymore. There’s usually plenty of room to kite to drop Necrotic, and the only really scary Raging mobs are the Bloodswarmers and Headhunters.

Siege of Boralus - You’ll need to be careful with Raging Powdershots, Marksman, Wavetenders and Snipers, but this affix can actually help in Siege if you’re using the Spotters to kill trash -- let the Spotter Rage and gain 100% more damage. Hadal’s Break Water got nerfed, so he isn’t quite as threatening on Tyrannical. Viq’Goth represents the only truly challenging boss in this dungeon.

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