Blizzard please just remove Mythic+ affixes until you can figure them out

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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I don’t post often, but as someone who has played Mythic plus since the first day it was implemented and almost exclusively PUG (multiple titles, every role, most classes, etc.), Blizzard continues to confuse me with the way they approach mythic plus and affixes and I believe others are experiencing some of the similar frustration that I am with this system and in particular these most recent changes: War Within Affix Updates

Let’s just get the first thing out of the way… no one likes a single affix that currently exists in mythic plus and in fact all but 1-2 combos are avoided at all costs if you are looking to push content (strangely they just chose to get rid of those combos we greatly prefer). Not to say some aren’t better than others, but generally speaking, they all make the game and mythic plus less fun. This includes fortified and tyranical (tyran being especially brutal on higher keys and even lower geared casual content) and especially on-death / low HP affixes like bolstering, sanguine, enraging, and bursting. No one wants to play bolstering or fight a mythic plus boss for the same amount of time you fight the last boss in mythic raid during prog.

The affixes in place (and the newly proposed affixes) will continue to alienate certain classes (is a warrior useful for any affix under any circumstances or is it even possible to play keys on enraging without an evoker?) while the mechanics of the dungeons and group synergies further exacerbate this issue. Dungeons are and should be fun and challenging, but your inability to manage the affix system makes them not-fun and takes the challenge away from the dungeon and into the affix. War Within would be a fantastic opportunity to scrap affixes and go back to the drawing board, capture some real feedback from your players, and build a system that actually works. What I’m seeing (and hearing from players that do keys every single day) is that you are choosing to ignore feedback (tyranical is bad) and continue to force this system on us that we do not want as players.

A simple fix would be to get rid of affixes for a season, make it a priority, and roll it out after the patch is live and you have some time to fix it. A worse fix, but still acceptable, would be to immediately get rid of tyran and fort or at the very least make it impact damage and not HP and switch the affixes you chose to keep for season 1 with the ones you chose to get rid of (keep volcanic / spite / storming and axe bolstering / sang / enraging / burst) . These new affixes are demonstrative of some awareness that the strict “curse” nature of affixes isn’t fun, but a reluctance to really commit to fixing the problem. If you had no affixes, you would lose exactly zero players (everyone will still do keys bc the dungeons are fun and the progression of doing harder content is enjoyable). If you continue to have terrible affixes, you will continue to lose players like myself that just do not wish to torture themselves 90% of the weeks and then wear a diaper the other 10% of the time trying to get title or push a little score.

TLDR: All current / new affixes = bad (especially tryan / fort / on death), scrap the current system while you figure it out or take a similar approach to D3 and try something new each season with positive / empowering affixes only to fix them.

Like if you want this to get some traction… maybe Blizz will hear us if we unite.

8 Likes
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i can appreciate that they’re adding more passive affixes…but why couldn’t they have just improved some of the interactive ones we have now…what was the point of adding them as new, without tweaking them to be enjoyable by more players/roles? some of these affixes are brand new, and they’re already giving up on them…meanwhile we have had some for going on a decade, that just feel so outdated and disliked.

for example: making afflicted removable by any baseline dispel would have made it feel a lot better imo…volcanic and storming weren’t too bad either.

sanguine and bolstering are pretty massively disliked across all skill levels, from the bottom to the tippity top…i don’t think they even care what we think at this point…it’s like some random intern is going to do what they want without actually play testing the systems they add, or responding to what we think about them. (See: Thundering in DF S1)

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From an initial glance the benefits do not seem to outweight the risks.

Take focused for example, giving mana oriented mobs 30 percent haste seems extremely dangerous depending on the type of spells and abilities they have. Already have problems during Fort Week of mobs one shotting people fairly regularly especially if you misplay even once.

Considering that Grim Batol is in that rotation also for season 1…Hahaha.

Take also reckless…BDK’s might cry at high enough key levels. I do like they’re trying to bring more variety in what class you bring.

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My biggest issue with affixes now, they’re adding stuff that only certain classes can survive or dispel, and that makes it difficult.

But, an affix should never tick for more than 100% of your player health. Making it harder, sure. But, the amount of insta-death mechanics just doesn’t sit right iwth me. Especially when things are as high that even the tank can get an insta-death

1 Like
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While I’m very impressed by your multi-season titles, I think there’s an important perspective that you are ignoring or glancing over. Blizzard has always tuned things for +15s back when it gave the top rewards, then +20s, and now +10s. I would argue that for these key levels, and even ~40% higher difficulty than the highest rewards, the affixes are playable regardless of the week. When it comes to infinitely scaling content, it’s going to break sooner or later and there’s always going to be an easier week than the rest.

Don’t get me wrong, I loathe sanguine and bolster, but again for the content levels they scaled for it’s not that bad which accounts for 99% of their players (not as an hyperbole).

As for the kiss/curse, it’s for the most part a 10% buff for specific mobs only. Either being casters or non-casters in a given week and buffing two damage types. This effectively equates to a 5% gain, but class balancing won’t be tight enough for the 5% to matter. There’s still going to be the same seasonal meta and I really don’t believe it’s going to change week to week. If all classes were within 5% of each other, then maybe, but we all know Blizzard can’t tune classes that well.

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I’d actually be a lot happier if they changed the affixes they intend on retiring and the ones they want to keep. Retiring Sanguine, Bolstering and Raging would immediately make the game better, whereas keeping them and removing Spiteful just makes it worse by increasing the amount of weeks we’ll have to deal with the awful ones. Retiring Storming, Incorporeal and Afflicted is fine, but the other ones were pretty easy, so there was no need to get rid of them.

It’s good that they are finally open to the idea of including positive affixes again, but I think the way they want to go about it is wrong. I’d much prefer some more generic secondary stat buffs instead of increasing specific types of damage, or even some form of cooldown reduction like we had with Encrypted, which was the best seasonal affix we’ve ever had.

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Let’s just get the first thing out of the way… no one likes a single affix that currently exists in mythic plus

I happen to like the ones that they’re keeping - Bolstering, Sanguine, Bursting. (Raging, not so much.)

A simple fix would be to get rid of affixes for a season ,

This sounds incredibly boring, but I think it’s part of their master plan.

Step 1: make affixes unpopular with the new ones.
Step 2: Remove them for expac after TWW
Step 3: Add affixes back due to plummeting subs.

Just like how Thundering allowed them to remove Seasonals.

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Really? At least Raging has some counter player with soothe. Bursting too with mass dispell. Bolstering can get hairy real fast even if you try to aoe them down evenly, especially if there’s a lieutenant mob in the mix. Sanguine is less bad than bolster, but it still heals way too much. I think it wouldn’t suck as much if they reduced the heal, delayed when the healing starts by a couple seconds, or made the heal ramp the longer it sits.

1 Like
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Supposed to change how the dungeons feels to play, and those do quite a bit.

The downside is the variable time loss. They aren’t remotely equal.

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Blech why do sanguine and bolstering still exist?

Also these new affixes make no sense why do they take more damage from a specific type of damage seems like it will just lead to inviting x classes only on certain weeks.

Ughhhhhh its like all affix feedback is just responded to with lalala I cant hear you

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There is definitely some tweaking they could do, I like the idea of sanguine ramping in healing the longer they are in it.

If the current tick is 10% hp per second (made up, I don’t know the real value), they could have it be 2% the first second, then 4% the second second, then 6%, 8%, and cap at 10%. Makes minor touching in it less impactful but sitting in it still bad. Or maybe 3/6/10 if that’s too slow.

Bolstering maybe something similar, first stack is a lower %, second stack a little higher, etc.

2 Likes
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My idea of bolstering is to buff it to 40% but have it scale off health remaining.

So if something is at 10% hp with 20 bolster stacks, it won’t one shot you (probably.)

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There were some really fun ideas you could play around with since they’ve gone down the kiss/curse route but this is just… pathetic.

People on the forums / streamers / reddit users have had far better ideas than this.

Affixes didn’t need to passive, they needed to be fun and rewarding to play against. This is not it. Buffing certain specs each week is utterly stupid and this proves that the developers really have no actual idea what to do with affixes.

1 Like
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I’d be happy to get rid of fort and tyran. The next affixes actually look fun imo. I don’t think the damage amps is prohibitive for who I invite to the dungeon. The forms are making the damage amp a bigger deal than it really is.

The +7 bucket is awful though.

If you can’t play around an affix then it’s a bad affix. If an affix is too mentally demanding than it’s a bad affix.

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+7 is good. They kept three that I liked.

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I think affixes played a key role in early M+. Fast forward to today, and the level of difficulty naturally baked into dungeons, and it’s just become overwhelming and functionally unenjoyable to play. The pendulum has gone too far.

If I had the reins, I’d keep tyrannical and fortified and remove the health aspect, so only damage between trash and bosses was manipulated. This way, you would still see flavor change week to week but it wouldn’t be as jarring nor would you have 4 min tyrannical bosses or min-bosses on fort that may as well be bosses.

I’d reduce the affixes to 2 total, tyrannical/fort +1 other, and make large changes to affixes. At this point, the community has done it’s job voicing it’s feedback on affixes in general as well as specific affixes. I don’t think adding bonus damage based on damage type is exactly what the community advocated for… I’d aim for something like the following:

Bolstering: Cap it it 3 stacks per mob, and have them take additional damage per stack. So each stack makes mob’s do more damage and take more damage.

Sanguine: Puddles heal for a max amount and shrink as they are absorbed - so things don’t get out of control. Make mobs who absorbed sanguine get sick and explode for damage based on how many they absorbed. This would introduce strategy to allow a mob to heal via sanguine to take it into another pack and blow it up.

Bursting: Leave it how it is and give bonus damage/healing based on how many stacks you recently survived. Say, 1% per stack - survive 10 stacks? Enjoy 10% increased damage for x seconds after.

Raging: Mobs that enrage become reckless, increasing damage done and damage taken.

Entangled should have stayed, it was overall fine but I do think there was room to reduce the occurrence.

Afflicted/Incorporeal should have stayed, the count should have been reduced to 1 mob, and whichever class dealt with the mechanic gained a temporary benefit (resource regen, CDR, bonus damage, etc) - and you couldn’t get the benefit twice in a row but you could deal with the affix.

Storming: Reduce occurrence, have it do it’s effect to mobs.

Volcanic: It was fine, buff damage it does so it matters and have it work against mobs

I guess the takeaway is reduce impact and incentivize group members to participate.

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I kind of like the idea, but I could imagine that dying would feel even worse than normal. Not only did you die, but you lost your buff so the whole thing was a net loss.

Also, if they add that kind of thing it has to be tuned around, which just makes the dungeon easier for good players and harder for less coordinate groups.

I think the kiss/curse angle has more potential to disrupt M+ than stuff like Sanguine or Bolstering. A lot of groups struggle to control Bursting as it is. Attaching the buff seems like license for dummies to dummy. You won’t be able to tell who rolled Bursting and it will devolve into a witch hunt for a scapegoat. Highest key done would be the comp that could survive the most stacks. Each week might have totally different ceilings with some cursed combos that let specific comps clear way higher than any other combo.

All speculation, but something that concerns me.

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Thankfully, you’re not in charge. All your suggestions incentivize playing affixes poorly.

Or just making it easier.

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I don’t see why people make this out as such a problem when you have infinitely scaling keys. If affixes do make the game easier, then players will utilise affixes to push the ceiling of achievable keys even higher.

So what? Why does this bother you?

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Fortified bolstering with new affixes is the perfect affixes that make tanks not want to play the game for a week. If you are okay with this, I am cool with that because I won’t play tank that week.