Just throwing my feedback in here - the ‘affixes’ of the nightmare dungeons are just bad design. The idea is good - but it is one of those things that theory dies when it meets reality.
Why do they exist? To give variety to highly repetitive infinitely grinding content - think WoW Mythic+ dungeons.
Why does it fail - players end up playing against the affixes not the core game - thus the ‘scaling’ becomes irrelevant, and players are left avoiding certain affixes, trying to target others, and generally playing the ‘affix’ not the game.
This happened in wow - thus the reason the latest xpac has strongly rolled back the affixes to 2 max instead of 3 at higher tiers - AND - the ones that are left are pretty much softballs that can be ignored/handled so easily they are trivial…
Now - D4 - When I am trying to push my dungeons up - I find that I don’t care about the dungeon/monster level. I have a solid build and I can do well vs stuff > 15 levels above me. BUT, insert ‘drifting shade’, ‘storm wrath’, or any other ‘fail mechanic take fatal damage’ affix and that’s it… I now spend the entire time focusing on the affix, ignoring the actual monsters/farm, and it is boring. Also - when you moving so fast the little ‘shield bubble’ pops up off screen and you can’t reach it … that’s just bad design honestly…
Regardless - all of this context to say - please REMOVE the affix garbage. No one wants to play against those. We want to challenge our builds to push higher and higher against the game itself. Let me hit a natural wall - not an artificial wall due to random one shot mechanic that triggers every 5-15 seconds.
I am not a Hardcore player - but if I were, I would not do any of these dungeons above tier 25 honestly so that I can farm for some uniques but not get rando-one-shot by poorly design mechanics.
Agreed. I see that little lightning crystal and notice how frequently it moves away from you before it creates the bubble.
-60% crit damage. I tried this yesterday. Holy crap everything took forever to kill. -40 close/distant damage just as bad.
Love the “everything has cold imbuement” ones too.
Drifting Shade. I’ve seen 2 of these out at once. Just a real nuisance. It’s even more dreadful when you get stun locked and have to slow walk out of it assuming you survive.
Thing is i’m not sure if it’s the affixes that greatly reduces my drive to complete these things, or its the constant widget hunting/animus collecting for the pedestals that aggravates me more.
Every game mechanic is designed to really get in the player’s way and intentionally slow them down. At every step. Constant obstacles. Let me just go into a dungeon that has a reasonable density and kill a bunch of regular enemies mixed with elite/champion packs. No widgets, no affixes, no stunlocks, no butcher.
I agree they need to be iterated on. Im fine with stuff being hard, but loot or exp needs to scale based on affix. Im sure we can all agree some of the affixes are just straight up dumb. Its feel all theory crafted in a spreadsheet vs actually playing them. NM dungeons suck since the risk vs reward is totally off.
Blizzard you can make it hard, but you guys really missed the mark on making it worth it to do this content. Like the bonus affix should be based on the sum of the negative affixes. Like really hard negatives could yield 2000% to gold, or some massive exp boost. Instead its like… 15% to lightning damage lol.
Some of them (like drifting shade and storm wraith) just feel oppressive. They’re not fun, and don’t provide any extra reward.
I’d much rather see things like “has extra shrines”, “has 3 goblins”, “has 3 butchers”, “has extra elite packs”, etc where the difficulty is increased, but there’s also a possibility of more loot or more power as well.
Like 95% of affixes are the most lazy, stupid, boring, thoughtlessly designed mechanic I’ve ever seen. Basically added for the sake of adding something. What were they words, nightmare dungeons should add endless replayability or something like that? Fat chance there when there isn’t a single affix which actually adds something fun…
My “favorite” sigil roll was one that said “+15% lightning damage” for the player, only to have the first negative affix be “Monsters take -40% lightning damage”. The bonus affix should never get cancelled out by the negative affix. That’s just dumb. Into the scrap bin it went.
The worst one is resource burn lol. Nothing like trying to use my level 1 lightning strike or w.e against elites with 7 zillion hp.
The games “resistances” need a fix or something. I get 1 shot by so much random crap little dog or pig charging from off my screen …its pretty outrageous…and im pretty much permanently at 80% damage reduction just on aspects and paragon alone.
As it stands, anything with gathering lightning fksyou, resource burn, armor break, resistance break, close damage reduction, crit damage reduction, physical damage reduction…gets salvaged.
The resource burn atleast makes sense as far as affixes go. Why is ‘‘enemies take 60% less crit damage’’ a thing when pretty much everything except thorns barb relies on crits.
the thing is, poe did it right. affix is much more interesting AND, its rewarded. affixe in diablo4 so far is just annoying stuff on top of annoying stuff or something that break your dmg completly or make monster 1 shot you. there nothing fun around them, at all.
Affixes are an interesting idea - and again I would acknowledge that they have a strong basis for working in theory… But I also think the game is ‘new enough’ and there are enough aRPG elements to ‘randomize’ the repeatable content (swapping mob density, layout randomization, etc…) that adding extra ‘environmentals’ is not a good fit…
Unless we are going to introduce some harsh areas that environmentals make sense to the gameplay loop.
That being said - my personal preference would be ‘let the game be the game’ and let’s just get rid of the affixes. Maybe bring them in as a seasonal theme (after some serious rework!) or give these affixes a place in the normal game loop before stuffing them into the end-game context abruptly (as the most lethal stuff that you haven’t had to deal with until ‘all of a sudden’).
I love the concepts of affixes, just not how it’s made here currently (quick side note : -60% damage from crit or ressource burn aren’t a problem if you don’t rely on ressources or crit. Personally, i flee from -60% to shadow, but i don’t care for crit or ressources :p)
We just get penalities without rewards. When it makes us weaker (minus damage, ressource burn…), we skip it. When it’s boring (Drifting “you’ll see nothing” Shade, Lightning “backtrack to the thing or die” Storm) we also skip it.
I’m all for a system where hard affixes are rewarded by bonus to rarity or drops, or even better, the danger of the affix is inherently a reward, like “you bleed gold”, “the Butcher will join the fight on the boss”, “there will be two bosses”, “you will only encounter elites”. The possibilities are infinite. It doesn’t even have to be a negative affix, “more golden chests” or “this map is a Helltide” would be nice too to break the monotony.
Can someone clip this please! 