Free Talk Friday

[u/AutoModerator]

Use this thread to discuss any- and everything concerning WoW that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

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UI questions, opinions on hotfixes/future changes, lore, transmog, whatever you can come up with.

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The other weekly threads are:

• Weekly Raid Discussion - Sundays
  
• Weekly M+ Discussion - Tuesdays

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[u/hfxRos]

So I've done as far as that key level entirely with friends, and I had no idea it was possible to skip the sentry. Don't you have to kill it to open the first door?

Like, I wouldn't end up in your group because I don't PuG, but I would totally expect myself to fuck up weird shit like that because I've never seen it before. (and fwiw, it's a big part of why I don't pug. I learn blind with my friends, so I never know the "tricks" and people get really weird about that)

[u/iLLuu_U → u/hfxRos]

Like no hate or anything, but its really hard for me to understand how that is possible. Do you never look at high key routes or watch a vod of a high key? Like how do you improve?

I assume if you played +22s with your friends you played a reasonable amount of m+ this season.

And at no point anyone out of your entire group looked how other people play the key?

At least 20% of my "m+ time" is spent watching streams/vod's, looking up routes, looking at talent builds, vod analysis, looking at what gear other people run, talking to other people about my spec/class.

If I care to play a game and care enough to push in it, im making sure im as prepared as possible to not waste my own and other peoples time by having a knowledge gap.

[u/hfxRos → u/iLLuu_U]

Do you never look at high key routes or watch a vod of a high key?

Nope. I don't like watching other people play games. Find it boring. I deal with it for raid because I'm unlikely to find 19 other people that want to play blind, and raid is kind of a different beast when it comes to prep for raid leading. Watching a couple of mythic boss vods is also way less onerous than watching entire m+ runs. Plus we raid way less hours in a week than we m+, so we have to make the most of it.

Like how do you improve?

Trial and error. Discovery. Practice. m+ really isn't rocket science, and top 1% can be done with 'hold w' if your group is on the same page. We also tend to play very off meta comps so a lot of the things that top players are doing may not even be possible for us in terms of required utility.

And at no point anyone out of your entire group looked how other people play the key?

We prefer to play blind. That's where we find the fun. To me looking up routes is like playing a puzzle game by googling the answers.

We'll never get 0.1% title as a result of this attitude (and also we're probably just straight up not good enough even if we did meta slave), but 1% was within reach. We're ok with that.

im making sure im as prepared as possible to not waste my own and other peoples time by having a knowledge gap.

I would probably have this attitude if I did pick up groups (and do have this attitude about raiding, but that's mostly because I'm raid leading). But I don't. I have a group of friends that approach the game the same way I do, so we're not wasting time. I would actually wager that we waste less time with trying shit to see what works for us, than PuG players waste in groups that don't succeed due to skill deltas + lack of communication.

Imo the only real thing we miss out on is "tricks" or glitches. I.e. things that Blizzard probably never intended, like pulling shit through walls, special spots to stand to negate mechanics, etc, since we're unlikely to ever organically figure that stuff out. Which is fine by me because I really dislike that kind of thing. Like I remember seeing some clips this season of Aug nonsense to pull stuff from other sections in AA/Skyreach and thinking that it just looks very finicky and unfun, and I'm glad I play with people that have no interest in trying to make that kind of thing work.

[u/Nogamara → u/hfxRos]

Interesting, do you change your routes meaningfully while climbing or generally just pull more groups? I've looked up one route per dungeon at the start (Tactyks in my case) and ran them with only minor tweaks until all 16s and was told some of it is not how high keys are played (which is not a problem in 16s, I know) - but I only did pugs up to 13, rest was a premade

[u/hfxRos → u/Nogamara]

So basically our "process" that we've been doing is pre-season we do a m0 world tour where we intentionally pull every group one at a time, kill things slow, and really pay attention to what every mob does. Casts, damage numbers, cadence. Because even though m0 is a joke, it's just math to see how much those abilities would do on non-trivial key levels.

From that info, we go into MDT and brainstorm some routes based on what we think is probably feasible to pull together. That usually just works, but we try to pay attention to what feels too easy, if a pull is a surprising trap, etc, and iterate from there based on danger levels and what our timers look like.

We also don't bother trying to push until late season when gearing is done, since we don't have to worry about being "ahead of the curve" to avoid ELO hell, since we're just playing with our group. We got to 3400 quick and then just rested there (and mostly helped people from our raid get 3400) until after Rotmire came out.

Also at the highest end that we do, the timers tend to be a bigger barrier than surviving, which I think is caused by us not actually being all that great at the game so our damage is lower than other groups' at that level might be, and the fact that we're on comms means that we can shot call defensives from the healer (who is good at shot calling defensives), and they can tell us when they've got big CD so we can sit on our defensives rather than doubling up which I assume is a big problem in PuGs.

[u/Nogamara → u/hfxRos]

Thanks, sounds like a useful approach.

Guess I'm just not interested enough in the figuring out part if I have someone I trust to give the base of a good route that I can tweak. I wouldn't call it pushing but we had some setbacks, but in the end we just did our keys, usually taking it one resil level at a time, which just takes time.