I really do not like it. As a healer on tyrannical bosses its a pain in the butt.
I’ve been in 3-4 NWs over +10 this week, and almost every one of them failed because of this boss.
I don’t suppose either of us have a way of proving the point, but it seems like you’re taking the criticisms at face value and I tend to see them as rationalizations.
Is this less clear than others? Without consulting outside sources, was there some way to know just by looking exactly how Prideful worked? Could people just intuit the optimum path on their first time seeing it, or did it need to be worked out by trial and error? Same with Tormented. Was there some way to simply infer the consequences of killing or skipping the mini bosses? Ultimately, none of the affixes have any sort of prep in game. There are buffs and debuffs, just like this one. If you don’t want to look it up for some reason, you can pretty quickly learn how it works by doing it.
Sure, but when they list all of the “unfun” affixes, it is generally pretty clear what criteria they are using. Volcanic may not be “fun”, but it is almost never included in a list of “unfun” affixes.
Most of the quaking complaints I’ve seen object to the fact that it happens out of combat and can interrupt healers drinking. The in combat effect is fine, but the out of combat affect is “annoying” and NOT fun. What is the difference? Stopping a drinking healer slows down the group, but slightly spreading in combat doesn’t. Granted, I’m making an inference, but this seems like a pretty straight line cause and effect, especially in the context of other affix complaints.
So they want something easier, not just something that forces them to play differently.
So they want something easier, not just something that forces them to play differently.
And what I read from this is they don’t like it because it slows them down. They want Tyrannical trash and Fortified bosses. Do you actually think it’s because the boss is legitimately too long? Or are you seeing the commonality in disliking the things that add time in a timed encounter?
This is an interesting hypothetical, and as much as people hate vehicles, I’m not sure the result would be what you expect. I think people would race each other to man the vehicle for their damage parses and would be thrilled to push keys into the 40s.
There would be some who actually like playing the game that would call it trash, but the people that do this because of the gear outlet would probably call it the best seasonal affix yet.
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I’ll steelman this pov. At a certain point (22/23) tyrannical is essentially a short raid. The exception being that the boss fight is far too formulaic. The 17 spires I ran this week had a 5.5m last boss, no real danger, just super long sponge. I’m not bent out of shape about the failed timer, but it feels pretty arbitrary.
I’m also not one that usually agrees with darielle on anything. I’ve found myself telling my friends during particularly long boss fights, “I guess everything becomes raiding at some point.”
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I’m speaking in general though about the majority of complaints. If I understand correctly, you’re a pretty single minded, hard core M+ player. You’re not doing it to fill a vault, you’re doing it because you like it. I don’t believe people like you are representative of the majority of affix complaints. I may be wrong, but do you think the majority of Tyrannical complaints are in line with your POV, or are they because a lot of the Vault crew thinks it takes too long?
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I would suggest reworking it so the runes have explosive-level HP so any ability will one-shot them. Killing one despawns the other two and spawns the big mob.
Fair.
Idk that I’ve seen the complaint from anyone outside the 20+ crowd. From what I’ve seen, it’s about it being too hard in some way. Too much damage or w/e for the specific boss. I struggle not seeing myself as a bread and butter player (you can ask any of my friends). I do think there is some legitimacy to the complaint, but based on my years on this forum, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone lay out their complaint as it being boring.
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As someone who is primarily a vault M+ person to support my raid habit, I’ve definitely run into the perception from similar players that Tyrannical is hard. That doesn’t always manifest as a claim that it’s too hard, but it certainly does sometimes.
I’d have to try to dig up posts to be sure, but I feel like I remember reading higher end players saying that Tyrannical isn’t hard it’s just boring. I’m not 100% certain, though, that may be something I incorrectly inferred.
Either way, to both you and Darielle, I can’t state absolutely that my perception is accurate. I may be misinterpreting the complaints through my personal bias against people asking for constant nerfs. My patience has been thoroughly expended over the years with people trying to tear challenges down, so I will confess that I might leap to that inference even when it’s not there. In fairness to me, though, the judgment is often warranted, and in light of what I see as the common thread between many complaints, I’m not sure I’m wrong about the vast majority of affix complaints.
It’s obvious to me that someone pushing high keys in every combination complaining about Tyrannical as not being fun is very different than someone who does 15s during easy weeks making the same complaint, but maybe it’s worth stating outright just to make it clear.
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I think the fort/tyr split in 15s is fairly even. They really don’t feel too different. That said, I could interpret a good amount of tyrannical complaints as being boring. Anything that says anything about a lack of mechanics on bosses, at the very least.
Even if someone’s “rationalising”, if they have a valid criticism, it’s still valid criticism. Their motives don’t really matter.
I’d say there’s a clear argument for yes. I didn’t really take screenshots during prior seasons so I can’t offhand pull down the UI or tooltips that were all available (plus I wasn’t using base UI anyway), but Prideful and Tormented weren’t super complex to understand. Tormented told you there were lieutenants to fight, they show up on the minimap, pretty sure there was a tooltip telling you any left up would affect the final boss, you got anima powers, the same anima powers from the same boss every time. Even after literally beating the first boss, a player could have a good idea how it worked. That’s even what it was like on the PTR, before guides or anything could be writted. Even the lieutenants themselves have fairly obvious names and abilities to hint at what kind of stuff they do - Incinerator does Fire stuff, big Maw Construct called Breaker pulls you in to do an aoe, etc.
In Encrypted, you have three adds with arbitrary names and shapes, none of which are obvious until you actually know what they do. Maybe the most intuitive one is Vy, because it gives the adds a Haste buff*, you get a teleporty speedy add, and killing it gives you a Haste buff. Although you could argue the move speed and stealth is more in theme with it too. Urh pulses AoE damage, then becomes a tankbuster, then gives you a cooldown buff with heals and mana regen, not the DR buff, which instead is on the same one that gives you stealth. You don’t have lots of spare time to be reading buff tooltips while in the middle of combat, what you actually get goes down the decision tree of 2-3 different actions, so all of that is obscured to start off, and whether the buffs provide meaningful benefit is hard to compute. Tack on bugs, nameplates, explosives, it’s a mess. It was a mess on the PTR as well, in a way that Tormented was not, and that’s the closest to a “pick it up and learn by doing” environment, since no one in Live is going to extend someone the patience to “learn” by messing it up. Just about everyone in this thread who wasn’t on PTR (and even some who where) probably just looked everything up, so the idea that “you can just pretty quickly learn how it works by doing it” doesn’t quite ring really well to capture whether or not it IS actually quick or intuitive to do just that.
It seems pretty obviously less clear to just “pick up and learn it” than any previous seasonal affixes I can think of. And I mean, most of us probably have ideal UIs set up for us to facilitate easy information, and years of experience to quickly make decisions within 5 seconds of looking at a mob. I can look at a mob I’ve never seen before and probably have a good idea what it’s going to do. How does that translate to a Flying Square? How much harder is that proposition for someone with base UI, or less experience than me?
*Actually I should quickly check next time if it’s super obvious which add gives which buff to the mobs, I already new so I wasn’t exactly trying to notice that aspect
I mean, I think you’re inserting a lot of your bias, and you’re very much twisting things to try and say what you want right here. There’s a huge gulf between contending that people cite the easy affixes as fun, and contending that people don’t cite them in the un-fun affixes. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. People need to actually find an affix to be fun for it to be said that they find it fun to play, not just that they don’t include it in complains about affixes they find problematic.
It’s not really. Stopping a drinking healer doesn’t just slow down the group, it’s straight up frustrating. It was also considered un-fun back when drinking was a static mana regen, and a healer could just immediately re-drink to keep on going (for near no “slow down”). It’s not the slowing down part, it’s the actual mechanical aspect. The same if/when it interrupts a res. It genuinely feels annoying to have to sit there with a long cast time, have to cancel it, then re-do it, even if it doesn’t slow you down or affect whether or not your group will time.
I mean, that’s just a completely dishonest way to read people’s complaints about affixes like Necrotic or Grievous. People were annoyed because Grievous was something they had to not just play differently, but still get booty-blasted by because their class was imabalanced for dealing with it. Necrotic literally made tank classes not tank, you can’t just act that like that means they want something easy or don’t want to play differently. If Necrotic was an affix that actually enabled or required alternative tanking strategies, tanks might actually enjoy it. That’s very different from making them not play the game and run away and stand there while mobs stay stunned/slowed in place.
Again, you’re not being honest with how you’re parsing what you read, or what the feedback was. If Tyrannical meant adding something new to a fight, like a new phase at the end of the fight, or a harder fight since it added an extra mechanic, it wouldn’t receive nearly as much negative feedback as it did. Doing an 8 min Vol’zith fight isn’t just frustrating because it’s too long, it’s frustrating because you’ve already solved the strat, beaten the mechanic, you’re just doing it longer. It’s no different to long and boring raid encounters. Illidari Council was never well received. You figured it out and probably had it on lock within the first 3 min. You just then had to be bored for the next 10 or so minutes before it dies. Same principle applies. It’s not “adding time” that’s the problem, it’s “adding boredom”, or “more time of nothing new”.
Do you really? To what end? You’re not doing anything by clicking 2 to hit 40’s keys. You’re not getting more gear or whatever, especially if you’re capped by waiting on the Vault/Valor cap. There isn’t even bragging rights because no one’s doing anything different, there’s near-no skill expression, it’s running around on a vehicle spamming 2. You’re fundamentally no longer playing World of Warcraft, you’re not playing the class or the character you wanted to be (and presumably enjoy) playing. Who cares if you’re in the 40’s when everyone else is also into the 40’s because they’re spamming a vehicle button?
It wouldn’t just be “some” who call it trash. It would be a near-universal opinion. At best, people MIGHT entertain themselves for one or two runs just to see how ridiculous it is before stopping to care, and probably finding another game to play.
IDK if you just want to think that people would enjoy it because it would suit a pre-built narrative that you seem to want to impose on everything (that everyone is always trying to want easy/free stuff), but yeah, any dev who thought people would find such an idea entertaining would have to be a moron.
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The most annoying bossfight with this affix is Surgeon Stitchflesh bossfight in necrotic wake. So many times the Stitchflesh Creation’s meat hook would hit the relic mob instead of the boss.
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I haven’t seen that happen, but that is just hilariously bad. I’d probably crack up laughing if it happened, especially if Vy teleported into it lol.
This really clunky and not fun affix combined with an undocumented buff to all keystones, has made this probably the most miserable week of M+ I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty sure all of us even said in PTR this affix felt clunky and incredibly unfun. Who okayed this?
Hard disagree. Someone who says Tyrannical isn’t fun because they time most of their 15 fortified keys and don’t time most of their 15 Tyrannical keys isn’t providing valid criticism, they just want it changed to suit the result they’re looking for. Someone who does 25s expressing that Tyrannical isn’t fun because they find it boring and the boss fights go on and on with no meaningful change to the gameplay is providing valid criticism. Motive really does matter. It’s one important tool in assessing whether or not the criticism is valid in the first place. Someone who is trying to fix the result is different than someone who is trying to fix the experience.
And this is why I don’t really recognize this as anything more than a rationalization. Anyone who actually cares enough to complain is absolutely looking it up ahead of time. So who cares if it’s not practical to learn it without a 3rd party when we’re all using a 3rd party regardless?
I’ve acknowledged that I may be showing a bias, but my point isn’t that people find Volcanic fun because they don’t complain about it. It’s more that the ones they complain about being unfun are the ones that are harder, which is why volcanic is rarely ever on those lists. When the unfun affixes are nearly always the harder ones, I suspect that it’s more about the difficulty than the fun. I may be wrong in that supposition, but I may not be.
This sounds like more of a class balance issue to me than an affix issue, although if you’re just talking about a class being particularly weak to Grievous while having irrelevant strengths in other circumstances, then I could see that being a legitimate issue beyond just looking for an easier way.
This is a bit exaggerated. You just needed to kite long enough to reset the stack and kiting is an alternative tank strategy. I will acknowledge that my experience is mostly limited to Paladin and DH tanking, classes that I think unarguably have an easier time with Necrotic, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a stack reset not a full out running around kiting everything for 40 minutes straight.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think you’re being overly optimistic. I wish there was a way to test this because I think you would be surprised at how shallow the majority of the WoW community is when it comes to rewards vs. quality experience. Maybe I’m just too jaded from the flood of crap I’ve waded through on the forums though; maybe I would be the one pleasantly shocked at the result.
I genuinely don’t know if you just don’t understand what valid criticism means.
Let’s say for example someone just wants to get their 15 keys in for KSM or Vault or whatever, and they raise the idea that Tazavesh is too hard compared to other 15’s, or that Tyrannical is too hard compared to Fortified. Is Tazavesh significantly harder than other dungeons at the +15 mark? Is Tyrannical actually harder than Fortified? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, regardless of motivation, that criticism is valid. Their motive might be selfish, altruistic, biased, memeing, or whatever the hell motivations people can have. It doesn’t matter.
If the substance of their criticism/feedback is correct, it’s valid, and it’s on a developer or whoever to apply the tiniest bit of common sense to parse that out, and maybe consider why, or what they can/should do. If someone can’t do that, and they want to dismiss it purely because of that person’s motivation, then that’s just spite. And it’s pretty stupid to ignore criticism, or prevent looking at a possible flaw, because you want to stick it to a random stranger.
There’s a few falsities here, but I’ll move on to the core point. It absolutely matters whether a part of your game is practical to be learned without relying on 3rd parties. For one, new players don’t know about 3rd parties, and a game such as WoW desperately needs to make sure it’s staying attractive to new players. Even in a competitive space, the game needs to make sure it’s appropriately targeting people who play the game with base UI and don’t look things up.
This doesn’t just apply to game mechanics, but also stuff like lore, or whatever.
I mean, for one, you started off saying that players cite the easy affixes as “fun”, so whether they actually find those things fun is a prettty important thing in the context of this discussion. Secondly, I specifically made the point that both easy and hard affixes are lumped into the unfun criteria. And finally, whether something is actually “hard” and whether something is “fun” are two separate things that are not mutually exclusive. It’s entirely plausible that Blizzard happened to make all the “hard” things also “not fun”, and (to a much lesser degree) it’s even just as possible that not being as “fun” is a contributing factor to what makes certain affixes perceived as “hard”. I can elaborate on that last point in more detail if you want, but it’s a bit of a psychological essay to really delve into it.
It was both. Grievous received a lot of complains because it was designed in such a way that it had to ensure certain healing specs had to struggle. The very nature of specs having different strengths ensured that. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if your spec has a “strength” that kicks in a month later. If you’re playing the game now, and being told you have to get shafted this week, you’re not having fun this week.
I doubt you saw many complains about Grievous from Resto Druids, whereas Disc Priests? Yep. Things have changed through Shadowlands though, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t really see people complaining about it on the regular in the last year or so.
Necrotic has changed significantly now that the duration has been reduced to 5 seconds (down from its previous reduced duration to 6). I haven’t seen many complaints about it nowadays, have you?
Prior to that, and given how fast it can stack on certain pulls, a tank spent a significant amount of time kiting. No, they didn’t kite for 40 minutes straight, or even for 100% of the time on every pull. But that’s not really the bar for kiting to be “less than fun”. Necrotic was non-optional, as you said much more frustrating for certain classes, and had a lot more annoyance factor. It even got bundled it with Inspiring on certain weeks to make a truly lame experience.
That’s a very big difference between having 3 mobs in a dungeon that need to be kited, or having 1 raid boss having a straight that needs some kiting for a portion of it. People didn’t exactly enjoy being a Frost DK and running around in circles spamming Howling Blast on Magmaw either. It should be prettttttty damn obvious why an affix that makes people kite regularly is not considered fun for reasons other than difficulty. No one rolls a Paladin or Bear or whatever with the idea that they’re going to spend some time every pull sprinting away from mobs in 6-second bursts. It should be no surprise that Necrotic weeks had drastically lower participation. If raid tanking went like that, tanks would quit in droves.
I don’t necessarily know that you’re less or more jaded, but I do get the impression you put far too much weight on who’s complaining in these forums. It doesn’t really matter if there’s 3 threads, or a few hundred people, off in General Discussion being edgelords and calling everything a slap in the face. If you’re going into a thread reading a title, and salivating about slamming someone into telling them to stop whining and play better, or whatever, you’re setting yourself up as just another forum troll.
Note: I’m not saying you are one, I’m just making the point that having a bias before even reading someone’s post is going to colour HOW you read someone’s post, and has the potential to make one no different to every other shallow majority in the “WoW community”. As far as the vehicle hypothetical though, I’m pretty damn confident I had that right. I’m sure several people who read it just winced upon reading the word “vehicle”.
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I’d agree with you if the forums weren’t all bandwagon fallacies.
Whether Tazavesh is out of tune with other dungeons has nothing to do with forum bandwagons though. It’s the sort of thing any player (or dev) should be able to collect their own data or experience on. It’s not like anyone’s reading 4 threads and running in to tinker with code/databases to push out a hotfix.
At least in terms of last week, it probably didn’t help that there were tons of bugs, AND it looked out of tune. I don’t know if they’ve overnerfed it, but that’s a different story.
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This Affix has made several of my mythic key pushers quit. It is not interesting or that useful. Half the time wrong orb dies to cleave, I try to single pull depending on situation. Does almost nothing for route, except maybe stealthing. Still other options (Pots and Rogue). The Haste and CDR seems lack luster. Overall just boring mess almost dont care what the orb does kill it and keep going.
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What didn’t help was comparing a new dungeon to a dungeon people ran 30 times. I’m not going to say it wasn’t out of tune, but many of the complaints were absurd.
But this is kind of the point. Using your example, Tyrannical is not harder than fortified at 15, and if anything, it’s easier. So people that struggle with executing mechanics on longer boss fights have more trouble and see complaints from actual high end mythic + players complain about it being boring and use that to rationalize their torch and pitchfork call for a change. That’s not valid criticism, even if they’re able to parrot valid criticism. And I don’t think it’s especially spiteful to think that they just need to play better if they’re having a problem with something that is already balanced.
Just because this is true doesn’t mean that it doesn’t ring hollow when someone who always uses a 3rd party resource to prepare is criticizing the affix based on the necessity of using that 3rd party resource.
Yeah, that was definitely a misspeak on my part, and didn’t accurately represent what I was trying to say.
Right, and I did concede that Grievous may have been a good example of legitimate criticism.
I’ve been out of the M+ loop for a couple of months, so if a one second reduction was enough to make the vast majority stop calling Necrotic a dead week, then this may be another example where people honestly just needed a bit of help and not a wholesale rewrite. And again, my experience is for sure skewed by my tank classes managing necrotic pretty easily.
I may be misunderstanding you, but this isn’t me at all. The only time I bother checking qualifications at all is when people use them to support a point. Otherwise, I always assess what I’m reading based on its content.
That’s not really me either. I take a very different tone with people who ask questions or express well thought out, well supported ideas than I do with people who post reactionary, demanding, or inflammatory diatribes. If someone posts a thread on grievous, for example, and outlines the exact issues they’re experiencing and why they think that a change might be warranted, I have a very different response than I do to someone complaining that their PUG couldn’t kill Anduin week 1 so it must be overtuned.
As much as people hate vehicles, so many of them love instant success and instant rewards. I think it’s an interesting question of which would people choose when confronted with needing something they hate to get something they badly want. I’m also pretty confident I’m right, but unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way for either of us to meaningfully put this to the test.