Tanks and Healer Population in LFG
In a group interview with Ion Hazzikostas, Blizzard was asked about the current lack of DPS in the group finder and if there any plans to incentivize players to play non-DPS roles. As most people want to play DPS, this creates a giant role imbalance and affects queue times significantly. Tanks and Healers also have more responsibilities to their role which pushes people away from playing them.
Ion HazzikostasAre there any planned class or reward designed goals to try to get more players playing non-DPS roles in order to facilitate pickup group queues?
That's a great question. It's something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I think that specifically for Mythic Plus, the burden of information on Tanks is not lost on us. It's not just about your ability to play your spec well and to push your buttons; it's about knowing the route and having memorized the skips that the community prefers and what other people are expecting to see, how you maximize your enemy forces and so forth, and that can feel very daunting. The amount of information we're giving players in Mythic+ and how we can ease that burden logistically; that's something that we talk a lot about. We don't have a silver bullet that we're ready to roll out right at launch at Midnight, but we know that I think for Tanks in particular, that's a major concern. And I think for healers, part of it, I think part of the goals of our general approachability improvements when it comes to how much information you have to manage, honestly, a lot of the, a lot of the time right now, there is so much thrown at you to multitask that add-ons feel necessary to manage and to surface the most pressing things that you need to react to, particularly if you're a healer trying to watch out for the entire group. You need to be aware of when every mechanic is coming up that might cause burst damage, you might need to pre-shield, pre-hot, all of that stuff. we think that by disarming what add-ons are capable of doing and adjusting some of our encounter tuning to suit, I think again, as I said, we want to keep the same overall level of difficulty, but I think that can make the experience more approachable, just in terms of a couple of fewer things going on at the same time, that hopefully, for those who just get stressed out at the pressure that comes with having the survival of a group depending on you, it can make it just more manageable and create a smoother on-ramp there. But we understand, for as long as the game has existed there has been an imbalance between roles. It's something we want to chip away at. It's also something that is a major problem seen across nearly all games. More people want to blast than want to want to tank or want to play support, but continuing to work on what we can do.
Abandon System
Icy Veins has reported that in another group interview, Blizzard talks about the abandon system that was recently added in Patch 11.2. Many players have criticized the feature, speculating that it lead to an increase in leavers or hurt the game, but Blizzard seems to like the system.
Blizzard via Icy VeinsThe team is overall happy with the abandon system in Mythic+. Toxic cases make up under 1% of runs. Reporting categories have been improved.
