FEEDBACK: Mythic/Mythic+ Dungeons

Shortly after this post goes up, Mythic Halls of Valor will be open for testing. You can access it by setting dungeon difficulty to Mythic, speaking to the venerable Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade Sr., and taking him up on his offer to teleport you to the Halls of Valor. If you do that, you'll find a version of the dungeon that's tougher than Heroic, will have a weekly lockout, and will drop better loot once the loot is hooked up. Pretty similar to Mythics in Draenor today.

Nothing to get too excited about, really. Except, hmm... what's this odd Challenger's Pedestal sitting there near the start of the zone? And wait, was that a vendor list on Mr. Rade?

If you purchase a Keystone Container from Donjon Rade, you can create one of three tiers of Challenger's Keystones, which will allow you to tackle more challenging versions of Mythic Halls of Valor, including additional modifiers at higher levels.

When you place a Challenger's Keystone in the pedestal, you'll see the modifiers that it will apply to your dungeon run. If you then click Start Challenge, a countdown will begin, and you'll have 45 minutes to complete Halls of Valor (including a reasonable amount of the non-boss enemy forces present). If you succeed, your Keystone will be upgraded to the next power level (or by multiple steps, if you really crush the timer!). If you're using a fresh keystone (i.e. one that hasn't already been used to start a failed run at that power level), you'll also find a loot chest waiting for you at the end. It'll be empty, but just imagine that it's brimming with delicious loot.

At power level 3, you will see your first affix modifier on the keystone. At level 6, you will see a second.

The two affixes that are active are global and will be the same for everyone on Alpha. Every 12 hours, however, they will cycle to new values; old keystones will likely vanish at that time, and any newly-generated keystones will have the new affixes.

Items will be normalized to item level 845 for the purposes of this test (note: the aura tooltip may not be accurate, but if you check your equipped gear, you'll see it's actually 845).

Which are the most fun affixes? Least fun? Which are the hardest? Easiest? Who will complete the highest Halls of Valor at the highest keystone level?

Some additional information: There are two "buckets" of affixes.

Available at power level 3+:

• Tyrannical - Bosses have significantly more health and damage.
• Bolstering - Non-boss enemies will buff nearby allies' health and damage when defeated.
• Raging - Non-boss enemies will enrage at low health, dealing double damage until killed.
• Teeming - Additional non-boss enemies are present throughout the dungeon; kill count requirement increased.

Available at power level 6+:

• Necrotic - Enemy melee attacks apply a stacking debuff that deals damage and reduces healing received.
• Volcanic - Enemies cause eruptions of flame beneath the feet of distant players.
• Skittish - Tanks generate much less threat.
• Decay - All players suffer damage over time while the challenge is active.

There are currently 8 valid affix pairs, with a sequence that will advance every 12 hours (for testing purposes - will advance with weekly reset in the live game):

• Teeming/Skittish
• Raging/Necrotic
• Bolstering/Decay
• Tyrannical/Volcanic
• Teeming/Necrotic
• Raging/Volcanic
• Bolstering/Skittish
• Tyrannical/Decay

04/06/2016 09:41 PMPosted by Qwertii

CMs renamed Mythic+?

Final naming is still TBD. Challenge is no longer a selectable difficulty from the drop-down - instead you begin the keystone runs from within Mythic. The old concept of "Challenge Mode" had some core features like gear normalization, multiple timed cutoffs, and no loot awarded, that are no longer applicable. This is really more letting you scale Mythic difficulty up to suit your capabilities, while adding new modifiers along the way to keep the experience fresh. A looser timer exists because there has to be some measure of success and some definition of failure, but the timer isn't the driving purpose behind the entire mode like it was for Challenge.

04/06/2016 09:57 PMPosted by Omegal

With mythic + being within mythic, will there still be a way to check difficulty of dungeon within api to include plus level and all that so a mod can distinguish between mythic regular and mythic plus?

Yeah, technically it's still difficultyID 8 when the run is in progress.

BTW, unrelated, as some brave souls are noticing, keystone level 6 is very, very hard at this gear level. Looks like the first affix combo up is Tyrannical+Decay, which is a particularly difficult combo to try to brute-force while undergeared.

04/07/2016 05:06 AMPosted by Animosis

One of the aspects of this new Mythic+ design is the replayability. If your "Keystone" gets upgraded, do you then have to do the same dungeon again on a higher difficulty? What is the window of time to complete this upgraded dungeon?

If Blizzard is concerned about dungeon burnout among players (which it seems that you are judging by the WoD comments), isn't this new process going to simply accelerate that process?

There are a ton of aspects to the system that aren't really exposed in this focused test. Right now, we're looking for bugs, and major issues with the affixes themselves, and the core system. Loot, lockouts, and how the feature fits into the larger scheme of endgame content will all be addressed, likely in a future blog post.

To answer your specific concern, when your keystone upgrades, it will randomize to point to a new dungeon (there's a chance it could point to the same dungeon you just ran, but it's just a random roll). Part of the aim there is to vary player experience, but also to ensure that the system values a well-rounded group rather than one that is tailored to a specific instance.

04/07/2016 12:54 PMPosted by Drazlin

So, once per week lockout? I thought this was supposed to provide something to do - like grifts in diablo.

Regular Mythic dungeons will have a loot-based weekly lockout, just like on live. But the keystone runs are different, and are only limited by the availability of keystones. No inherent lockout otherwise. We'll have a bunch more info to share in the near future, but the philosophical goals here consist of keeping dungeons relevant, rewarding, and replayable throughout the expansion, offering a level of difficulty that will scale to players' capabilities.

04/07/2016 06:42 PMPosted by Dreyen

Will there be a way to prevent 4x tanks 1 healer group setups?

You think that group composition can put out enough damage to beat the timer? If that group composition ends up being consistently optimal, then I'd agree we have a problem. If it ends up being viable in some niche circumstances, then is that a huge issue?

Right now, the system is circumventing some of the built-in progression, for testing purposes, by letting you buy a level 6 keystone off a vendor. But you don't get a level N keystone without being able to beat the timer in a level [N-1] dungeon. Getting thrust into a situation for which you are massively undergeared, and feeling like the goal is just being able to claw your way to the finish line by any means necessary and no matter how long it takes, is not a situation a normal player will experience in the live game.

Thanks for the great feedback so far, and lots of useful data. I haven't heard much about the Volcanic affix - any thoughts on how that one played out when it was active?

In the next build, Necrotic should stack a bit more slowly, but now also reduces absorbs taken as well as heals. Decay seems like it's probably more of a nuisance than an engaging challenge right now, yes? We're still thinking through possible changes with that one. Otherwise, the other affixes seem to have played out largely as envisioned, in terms of modifying gameplay.

We're keeping an eye on melee-unfriendliness concerns. We specifically avoided making any affixes that felt particularly punitive to melee players; it may be an issue with some specific Halls of Valor mechanics. It's fine if some bosses, or even some dungeons, are less favorable for certain specs or classes; it's not acceptable if the same specs are at a disadvantage in most or all of them, though.

Not much is likely to change in the next alpha build, but the next steps after that will be porting this system to the other 8 dungeons (Violet Hold will not be part of the keystone system - wave events and timers don't really play well together in a satisfying way).

04/11/2016 07:31 PMPosted by Siory

Bolster in its current state where it effects boss encounter adds is a little bit more situational but leads to the same problem in fights where there is no way to avoid killing the adds to progress/survive the encounter. The most obvious examples of this are Helya and Cordana.

The fact that it affected things like Flames of Woe and Stormforged Obliterators was actually a bug. They should be considered part of the boss encounter and be exempt. While it was possible to handle Bolster on them, as you note, there are other encounters where it would be entirely broken.

In the next build after the current one, Decay will be replaced with a new affix: Overflowing. The new affix causes all overhealing done (by healer-spec players) to trigger a heal absorb on the target, proportional to the amount of overhealing.

For example, if someone is missing 100k health, and you heal them for 200k, they would receive a 150k heal absorb debuff (currently using a 3:2 conversion ratio, but that's of course subject to tuning). Healing that goes towards removing heal absorbs doesn't count as overhealing, so for example the affix would have minimum impact on a HoT on a max-health target, largely alternating between applying and removing a small absorb.

The intent is to make healers focus on healing efficiency, while still leaving some flexibility to top someone off completely if a big spike is incoming (with the understanding that there's a future cost in doing so).

There's a level restriction that's being hotfixed off, but Mythic Black Rook Hold (with Challenge support) should be available shortly in the current build.

What was your total clear time?

Necrotic is indeed currently not working as intended, and BRH Challenge scaling is busted. Both were fixed internally, but didn't quite make it into the current build - working on getting those changes hotfixed so that proper testing can occur.

The BRH timer is actually probably too tight in light of those facts.

04/21/2016 10:41 PMPosted by Watcher

Necrotic is indeed currently not working as intended, and BRH Challenge scaling is busted. Both were fixed internally, but didn't quite make it into the current build - working on getting those changes hotfixed so that proper testing can occur.

The BRH timer is actually probably too tight in light of those facts.

This should all be fixed now.

Bolstering triggering from adds on a boss encounter is unintended, and will be fixed next build.

The swarms of small enemies, or gauntlet-style waves, will take a bit more thinking and review. We'll probably see how the affixes play out across a few more dungeons before making any changes (whether to the affix itself, or just in the form of blacklisting certain types of creatures).

We'll reopen Black Rook Mythic shortly, but it won't be significantly changed from what you saw last week.

Next build, there should be a lot more Mythic dungeons to check out.

Ok, so in today's build, all dungeons except Assault on Violet Hold are open on Mythic difficulty. When you create a keystone, either using the purchased item or by beating a higher-level Mythic dungeon within the timer, it should randomly point to any of them.

There's a bug with the placement of the Challenge Pedestal in Court of Stars (it's, uh, not subtle) which we'll try to fix shortly.

Tuning may be a bit scattershot on this - I'm definitely interested in hearing which dungeons seem easiest, which seem hardest, which have the most or least strict timers, etc.

05/06/2016 12:50 AMPosted by Siory

Pretty comfortably beat the timer (6-8 minutes remaining I forget, logs are weird) on a GR6 Raging/Necrotic Neltharion's Lair. Challenge at i845 is probably too high for the i840 loot at the end but the instance at GR6 felt pretty well tuned for that ilevel (would be a different story with Tyrannical of course).

The loot levels you're seeing aren't final - you're currently seeing the same base ilvl regardless of completion level. I'd expect more like 855+ from the chest at the end of a level 6.

In general, I'd say you're doing these quite undergeared if you're pushing levels 6 and 7. The dirty secret of these tests is that we're using great players as guinea pigs to get a sense of how far beyond a given numerical threshold skill can take you. Some affixes (e.g. Volcanic) are more skill checks that you can play around. Others (Tyrannical most notably) have less finesse and don't let you compensate for lacking gear with skill in the same way.

In terms of tuning, for the gear level (845) to which we're scaling you, I'd say "par" would probably be around a level 2, in terms of a point where it feels about like what a base Mythic dungeon would feel when you're doing it in Heroic dungeon gear.

05/06/2016 12:36 PMPosted by Grafarion

new affixes are bolster & overflowing currently, as a random aside the trash contribution requirements to most of the dungeons we have completed thus far seem really low which is going to result in a lot of skipping even w/o using invis pots or a full stealth group to get by trash

Would love to hear more examples. Squishei's linked videos above seemed pretty close to the mark, with the bar filling up during the bit of trash before the final boss in each dungeon. Eye of Azshara is a really tricky one because of how wide-open the layout is, and how much you can avoid without having to use stealth/invis shenanigans. In general, the Enemy Forces step is tuned around killing the vast majority of the unavoidable enemies on your way to the boss. If you can slip past patrols naturally, then you're rewarded for that (but of course if you wipe you have to deal with doing so a second time). Stealth and invis may let you selectively skip a couple of packs to earn your contribution requirement on easier ones, but that feels like an acceptable level of benefit from utility as opposed to a gamebreaking one.

05/09/2016 06:41 PMPosted by Squishei

Will Donjon give us the ability to teleport to the Mythic Dungeons again after this build?

Edit: Will Mythic Dungeons be re-enabled after this build?

Yes. They should be open again.

A couple of other things:

First off, as of this build, the scaling Mythic Dungeons feature finally has a name. We're going to call them... Mythic Dungeons. Crazy, I know. As part of this, Keystones now start at a minimum of Level 2. "Level 1" is effectively and implicitly just the base Mythic difficulty that drops loot normally and has a weekly lockout. New affixes now unlock at level 4 and level 7. Donjon Rade in the Alpha will now sell level 2, 4, and 7 keystones, but those are no different than the 1, 3, and 6 that you've been testing with for the past weeks.

Second, I'd like to share a proposed set of changes we're discussing. As has been pointed out numerous times, Tyrannical is a pretty mean affix, and it seems almost impossible to balance against more nebulous modifiers like Raging. As such, we're considering a couple of changes:

• Remove Tyrannical from the Level 4 affix pool. Replace it with a new affix, Sanguine: Shortly after death, non-boss enemies will leave a pool of blood on the ground, which grows to a ~5yd radius over 2 seconds. This pool heals enemies and damages players for a % of their max health.
• Add a new pool of affixes that unlocks at Level 10. This will only contain two possibilities: Tyrannical, and a new affix called Fortified, which increases the health and damage of non-boss enemies.

Tyrannical and Fortified should be two modifiers that we can effectively balance against each other, and would serve to make Level 10 a meaningful threshold to cross, while minimizing the amount of variation in difficulty from week to week.

05/09/2016 08:06 PMPosted by Squishei

The scaling aura is not in these Mythic Dungeon currently, making it... rather hard to complete.

Working on that now.

Sorry, it's looking like the scaling aura may not be something we can address right now.

Separately:

05/09/2016 08:27 PMPosted by Sensations

Question about loot. Let's say 5 people in my group have a level 1 keystone, and we each put in our keystone to complete the level 1s. Do we get loot from each level one, or is loot weekly locked to the level of the keystone(So you can only get loot from level 1, once per week) or is there more clarification on the loot distribution?

Also does that mean level 10 unlocks a 3rd set of affixes that's only tyrannical/fortified? So 10+ is basically pool1/pool1/pool2(Tyrannical/fortified) or is it just added to the 2 affix pool(Tyrannical/X Fortified/X).. Currently debating on the wording ;c.

Loot: The only lockout is tied to having a non-depleted keystone available to start the run. So everyone would be able to open 5 loot chests if the group finished 5 separate runs using each member's fresh keystone.

Affixes: There would be a third affix on Level 10+ Keystones. So you might see a Raging/Necrotic/Fortified stone, or a Bolstering/Skittish/Tyrannical one.

Current thinking on that front:
If you have no Mythic Keystone history on a given character, the first Mythic dungeon endboss you kill in a given week (after Keystones become available alongside raids and the PvP season) will give you a Level 2 Keystone when killed.

If you do have a history, when you open your weekly reward chest in your Order Hall, you'll receive a higher-level Keystone based on your previous best level completed. The new Keystone's level would probably be around 70% of that mark. The idea is to start people off at a point that's relevant in terms of reward and difficulty, but not so high that someone might find the Keystone impossible.

And yes, you can jump up to +3 levels at once (getting all loot you would have collected along the way) if you beat the target time by enough. The overall goal here is to minimize the amount of time anyone has to spend doing content that doesn't feel relevant.

06/13/2016 01:51 PMPosted by Ningjing

Does completing higher difficulty mythic+ actually guarantee better loot or is it just you have a higher chance of getting high level titanforged?

(Or in other words, is the current beta version of loot intended to be like live or is everything placeholder essentially?)

The details of the loot progression are still pending, and are/were waiting on a bit of code support to handle the final implementation. Completing higher-level Mythic dungeons should gradually raise the base item level of the rewards from the end-of-dungeon chests, with a more significant effect on the weekly reward chest for highest tier cleared.

An update that may be of interest: In an upcoming build (next build? if not, the one after), any player deaths will incur a -5sec penalty to the timer, per death. Cheat Death and other mechanics that actually prevent the death from occurring will not incur the penalty, but dying and Reincarnating, for example, will.

This change is aimed at trying to rein in the incentives for reckless play and shift a cost/reward calculus that could reward intentional deaths for various reasons.

There have been a few other tweaks as well: Vault of the Wardens time limit increased a bit, some pesky/fragile adds no longer trigger Bolstering or Sanguine, and dual-wielding mobs only proc Necrotic with their main-hand attacks.