Thoughts on Dxun Master Mode and NiMs in General

Nature of Progress (or Dxun for short) was released with the Onslaught expansion in 2019 and received a master mode with patch 6.1.2 in June 2020. I really liked this operation when it came out, barring some minor criticisms such as story mode still being a bit overtuned at launch in my opinion. Veteran mode was also good fun, even if a lot of community guide-writing had died out during the "Knights of" years and we essentially had to go in blind at first. I just found the last boss to be a bit of a drag.

When master mode came out however, my attitude was mostly one of "no, thank you", as I figured it was going to be way too hard for me and my team to make much progress. (Worth noting that some people in my guild felt differently, did go in and did manage to kill a few bosses.)

Recently the subject of visiting the place came up again though, and it seemed like maybe the time was right for it now, considering that patch 7.1 applied heavy nerfs to all difficulties of Dxun last year.

I'm happy to say that I've seen some success! On 8-man my team managed to kill the first boss so far, and during our most recent 16-man week we made it up to the Mutant Trandoshans on master mode.

And honestly, it's been pretty fun so far! I may be biased because a lot of the challenge of these fights lies in the tanking, meaning that I haven't been too stressed as a healer so far (for a change), but I've generally been pretty impressed by the inventiveness of some of the new mechanics introduced for the higher difficulty.

Stare at Red long enough between wipes and she'll start to look cute...

What kind of came as a shock to me though was how little documentation there is of Dxun master mode. When we first decided to go there, I thought I'd start by googling a guide to the first boss to get a basic breakdown of the mechanical differences and was shocked to find that there were no results on any of the well-known fan sites. Literally the only thing I could find was this reddit post linking to a YouTube playlist of the author killing all the bosses on master mode with her team and providing a bit of narration about what was happening. I left a grateful comment on her video about Red, while also expressing astonishment that a three-year-old YouTube video appears to literally be the only guide to this content on the entire internet.

I then found myself wondering whether there were any guides for Gods from the Machine master mode, which is even older, having been added to the game in patch 5.10 in November 2018 almost five years ago now, and which - with current tuning - is considered to be the hardest operation in the entire game. And what do you know, there are no written guides for this one either. Just like with Dxun I found exactly one reddit post with a narrated YouTube playlist of the kills and that's it.

It just blows my mind that in all that time nobody bothered to create a proper guide for these. As mentioned earlier, there was definitely a period of time during the "Knights of" expansions when operations were considered officially abandoned and this was reflected in fewer active players dedicating themselves to that content. While progressing Gods and Dxun veteran mode, my guild had to rely a lot on word of mouth from more experienced players because there just weren't any publicly available guides when they first came out. But things got better again! I may not have been too pleased with R-4 Anomaly personally, but multiple sites had guides for both difficulties up within weeks, so the current lack of interest just seems to be limited to master modes.

I suppose you could argue that a difficulty mode designed for only a small number of players will always have fewer people talking about it, which is of course true, but I honestly thought there was still more interest in it than this. Especially as there was a bit of a storm in a teacup a few months ago when it was confirmed that a master mode for R-4 was no longer on the dev team's road map. From how much wailing and gnashing of teeth I saw on that subject I thought that clearly there was still a community that cared a lot about this content, even if there weren't that many of them. However, the lack of positive or explanatory content about NiMs released in the last five years seems to serve as evidence to the contrary, which honestly strikes me as a bit of a shame.