If the people in the group who are supposed to deal with it can’t (or don’t) you are POWERLESS to help.
If you don’t have a dispel or heals, you are useless on this affix. You bring nothing to the table to help.
So you just get a giant haste debuff and sit there like:
welp, guess I’ll just not have haste now gg
Can we at least cc or kick them? What if the cc/kick didn’t even despawn the spirits but merely delayed their cast? That would allow the people with dispels more time to get to them, and allow all dps to help in a small way
Afflicted sucks because no one wants to deal with it. There’s always that one dps that would rather risk a wipe because dispelling means they aren’t jamming away at their rotation.
Everyone should have a way to deal with this affix, or the affix needs to be reworked or removed.
If the intent of this affix was to get more dispel classes into a group, it’s not working because in most groups it’s the healer and 1 dps doing all the dispels.
Disagree. I heal 99% of my keys (sometimes do low level keys for friends as ret or prot just for fun) and there is lots you can do on afflicted weeks even if you can’t directly heal them. As a healer, I do appreciate other people contributing to cleanse or heal the afflicted adds, but the truth is that any healer in the game is fully capable of dealing with two afflicted adds every time… on the condition they don’t have to do other things as well.
If you don’t have any heals or cleanses, it can still be a massive benefit to keep an eye on when those afflicted adds spawn, and during those spawn times take special care to avoid/interrupt whatever other mechanics are going on in the dungeon, maybe save some good hard CC or AOE CC for those times to cripple whatever packs of mobs you’re fighting, lowering damage and debuff casts on the party and making it very easy for the healer to focus entirely on the afflicted adds. If you see two adds pop up, that’s a great time for a shadowfury to clear the way for the healer to not have to worry about anything but the afflicted.
M+ has been hiding behind ease of access to loot for the last two expansions.
Used to enjoy it in BfA but they’ve been moving the goal posts for vault credit beyond the points where it’s fun for me and most of my guild.
And it’s in a weird place now with extremely lax timers. Still just as hard and annoying, but you really have to work to fail one now. Would have preferred tighter timers but toned down mechanics, dance dance, and getting rid of these damn affixes.
Healer can technically dispel both if they’re super on-the-ball with timing / healing. Dispel’s cooldown is like 1 second less than the afflicted cast time, or something like that.
But that’s also assuming there are no other debuffs that need to be dispelled. There are some nasty magic dots in BRH and Fall where no dispel may cause someone to die, or else require a lot of special attention (please don’t run your circles on top of the healer lol).
It can be a pretty nasty affix without the proper group coordination.
I think a lot of people (not saying you, but it seems like many) get so hung up on the cleanse being available that they forget you can just spam a few fast heals into the afflicted, and get rid of them in just a couple extra GCD’s, using regular healing magic that is always available.
Probably because raging could be at least contributed to by every spec either by using CDs to kill it faster, or using defensives to negate damage while they took the mobs down.
Afflicted is just completely on whoever has heals or dispels. Everyone else just has to continue doing regular dps and mechanics like the ghosts aren’t even there.
It was bad but we had a bigger fish to fry. Necrotic, old Bolstering, Inspiring and Explosive were much worse than Raging, they all had 0 counterplays. When we were in DF S1, there was too many mobs that random target, a lot of unavoidable AoE damage and more. They changed the dungeon design in DF dungeons. At the point, we all complained about Raging affix because it forced 2-3 soothe classes and one shot everyone with zero to little counterplays.
Now, Afflicted is on our list for M+ affixes that need to be deleted or reiterations. However, Afflicted isn’t on “need to be deleted”, Bolstering and Sanguine is on that list. Afflicted need a reiterations because it’s not executed well and forced to have 3 cleansers for most dungeons.
That is the key. Depending on the dungeon, key level, healer class and gear level, all healers can take care of both, but some not as efficiently as others. On my resto shaman, Poison Cleansing Totem takes care of both, and when its on cooldown, Purify Spirit and one or two Healing Surges handle both. On my resto druid, Nature’s Cure will handle one but the other takes usually 3 sometimes 4 regrowths. Big difference. Also, positioning. If I can’t see them (behind the boss, as an example) then I have to run around to target them and by then chances are the last one is about to get off. That’s why during Afflicted weeks I won’t run with a group that doesn’t have at least two others that can help with them. Also, the higher the key, the less issue they are because the players just know it has to be done.
The “Healer’s Problem” nonsense fortunately is relegated to those in the lower keys. Better players know when the healer is under pressure (keeping the party alive) and take care of the Afflicted letting the healer take care of business.
Raging could be kited and group wide/random target casts that couldn’t be stopped could be LoSed (since it was only trash) or were so few throughout the dungeon could be defensived through. Having a soothe was nice, but wasn’t mandatory.
The problem with afflicted is several factors that independently wouldn’t be too bad combine together to create far too much of an outcome spread based solely on group composition:
When the group reaches the time when afflicted can spawn, it’s random between 0 and 2 how many will spawn. This makes it impossible to plan any CDs around whether you will actually need it.
If you are in a situation where you can’t LoS or outrange them, the only counterplay is commit a limited group resource to handle them. Since they can spawn during bosses, there is not always an opportunity to LoS or outrange them depending on the boss arena, so groups cannot rely on that counterplay for all of them.
There are group comps that brought everything a group would want going all the way back to the beginning of M+ that force afflicted to be solely a healer responsibility, which only 1 healer has a good kit for handling this solo in all situations. The challenge of this affix boils down almost exclusively to your group comp. Yes if you are forming a PUG you can always ensure the affix is ezmode, but for someone who doesn’t think about it, puts more faith in a fewer number of people to handle it, or especially premades of people who want to play certain classes that combine to be not great with afflicted, the affix can create big problems due to “failing” the character select screen.
Take any of these away and the affix wouldn’t be much worse than many others we can think of. Many groups will have enough dispels already (or form knowing they want more dispels than usual) and the affix becomes easy. But any group that doesn’t is in for a rough time. Should an affix really have this wide of a spread between essentially non-existent and major hurdle for the entire group that only one player can interact with in any way solely determined exclusively based on the character select screen?
Sure, but the reason cleanse gets mentioned so much is that it’s the only practical way to handle them at times when any non-resto shaman healer needs their GCDs to heal. Too many people want to treat individual aspects of afflicted in a vacuum independent of anything else going on.
Yes, if we are on the last mob of a pack that deals no group-wide damage and the tank’s mitigation/self-healing will keep him alive, having the free globals to heal one or even two afflicted mobs to full is easy. But the group also wouldn’t be threatened if two casts of afflicted went off then, either. This is the least likely that a cast would get off but also the least impactful if it does.
But when you’re neck deep in a pull that poses a challenge for your healer, especially if it’s during an intended major healing check, even “a couple extra GCDs” is not something they can necessarily spare. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that healing off an afflicted isn’t merely a couple GCDs for all healers; some healers are genuinely looking at 3-4 GCDs to heal a single afflicted inside of the 10 seconds you have to beat the cast.
To make matters worse, this is also the time when an afflicted cast is most threatening to the group. If a healer is already needing most of their GCDs to output enough healing to keep the group alive, eating a significant haste buff is going to make it very hard for the group to survive. The time when an afflicted is most likely to go off is also the time when it’s most likely to cause a wipe.
So yes, even when a healer’s dispel is committed to some mechanic of the pull itself, they will have spells available to them to handle an afflicted. But the most important resource for a healer in keys is time, and in DF where more of the responsibility for group success has been shifted to the healer, time is already at a premium many times. It’s just not realistic for healers that are running key levels that challenge their abilities to have the added time required to be able to heal off an afflicted, making having spare cleanses on hand that much more important.
Sometimes I like hiding from my responsibilities by just LoS’ing the ghosts. Some could argue that LoS can make it slightly less-annoying such as during Mindbender where the healer is pretty much full-time dispelling flame shocks so if the tank/DPS can’t dispel them, well, lots of things that can be used for LoS there.
welp, guess I’ll just not have haste now gg