Heroic+ affixes are a mistake

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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First, I do agree that heroic dungeons should be buffed every tier to keep them relevant and interesting. However, the affixes (ie mirror images) don’t belong in wotlk.

I also argue mythic+ shouldn’t exist. These are arpg game design mechanics, not MMO RPG mechanics.

In wotlk, affixes, particularly mirror images, are simply just annoying. They don’t add anything to the game, other than player frustration.

Everyone knows Wotlk is a dad/boomer game. Generally considered easy, including ulduar outside of a few hard modes, and that’s what the players want.

The intent of Heroic+, as stated in an AMA, was ensure that players still can interact with boss mechanics rather than just stomp it. That’s cool. Add health and damage.

Keep mythic+ affixes out of wotlk!

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M+ was one of the best things to happen to the game.

Though H+ and M+ aren’t really comparable at all

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Why? It de-humanized loot, you chase item level upgrades of the same item. In fact, most of the time you don’t care about the name/etc, you just import pawn strings and sim. That’s an arpg, not a rpg mmo.

Classic wow has reminded us that tier matters. Loot names matter. You remember getting dying curse or jet’ze’s bell dropping. Since M+ was added, does anyone actually even read the name of the piece that dropped? Outside of a few instances, nope. Just chasing ilevel.

It’s straight up a loot grind. No story-telling, no content, just affixes and more health/damage.

Adding H+ to classic is the canary down the coal mine. Buffed health/damage, with an affix. It’s a simple M+, just 1 difficulty level.

You can definitely see in WoW’s history when the D3 designers came in.

To repeat myself, M+ design is an ARPG. Specifically designed to provide content with relatively little added development/design work.

I’ll go further, adding M+ as a 3rd pillar of end game progression broke WoW, and is now effectively stopping people from coming back/staying. It’s a boring treadmill that you have to do in order to raid. And adds significant additional time commitments.

Most players don’t have 30+ hours/week to play.

Back to wotlk. Take the average casual player. Heroic+ HoS is taking pugs 45 minutes, possibly even an hour. A number of groups didn’t finish it!
H+/week: 7-10 hours (1 hour/dungeon, 30 mins+ to find a group)
Raiding/week: 7-9 hours
Dailies/AH/etc: 4 hours (say 30 mins/day)

That’s 20-23 hours/week for your main character. Add an alt, now you are at 40-50 hours /week. (and people loved wotlk for it’s alt-friendliness, which H+ is going to kill).

In OG wotlk a daily dungeon was 15 minutes, and you could sit in queue with the RFD while doing your dailies. So now you are at 10-15 hours/week/toon total. 25%-50% reduction in time/character.

(btw can’t do your dailies while pugging H+ right now, all the tanks are gone. Tanks have disappeared with Phase 2. So you have to form, spam LFG/trade/guild/discord, etc).

Plus, I can confidently say that almost no one is running H+ right now, and there is significant community dislike. Despite it being an incredibly fast way to grind conquest badges (5/run, 35/week). And yet no one is doing it.

Blizzard has the data and know that H+ so far is not seeing the expected engagement.

Classic should be building the game that the players want, and loved back in the day. Which isn’t retail.

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I pugged heroic HoS 2 days ago, took maybe 20 minutes

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I actually liked the H+ as they were on day 1. They presented a challenge, even to good players.
Now, with the nerfs, they are as facerolling easy as the whole of P1.

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These are arpg game design mechanics, not MMO RPG mechanics.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure the Diablo 3 team who developed its current systems got moved to WoW several years ago, after they stopped D3 development, and that’s who developed Mythic+ for WoW.

I won’t opine on whether this type of design is better left in an ARPG, but it does, in fact, have the effect of making the perceived meta even tighter (fewer specs are deemed optimal), and it does crank up the sweatiness of groups.

Certainly, if you asked MMO gamers at large what WotLK was well known for, a common response would be that it was a pretty chill expansion. The Classic Devs have to know that adding + versions of difficulty reduces the level of chill.

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HoS is one of the easier affixes. So is CoS with a disease remover.

Do a Gundrak…

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Making trash into sponges=boring waste of time

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Why not?

How exactly are “affixes” intrinsically specific to ARPGs and not MMORPGs? And what makes you the authority who says so?

What would you do instead? We’ve already seen that a flat numbers adjustment isn’t more difficult until it’s pushed to an extreme, at which point it becomes RNG-heavy and therefore, not interesting or rewarding.

First of all, you don’t speak for what ‘the players’ want. I’m one of the players and I happen to enjoy Heroic+. Secondly, how exactly is an optional harder difficulty bad for the game?

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I know they’re a little harder but you just have to get good and keep pushing through it. Don’t come up with a bunch of nonsense justification for why they “don’t belong” just because you can’t finish the dungeon. This is the most engaging 5 man content classic has ever had.

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I did

it wasn’t that hard.

The leveling BFA dungeons in retail are way harder than Heroic +

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Honestly I don’t care for the affixes in retail mythic+ either.

I know the community is in love with them, but for me, it makes things very unfun.
Want to heal? How about we spawn a bunch of non /target able adds you have to kill quickly or the group wipes. We’ll have you pop those while healing, that’ll be fun right? Oh are you enjoying grouping up enemies and AOE’ing them down? Here are 3 different affixes to discourage that. Did you want to use your AOE that requires the mobs stay put? Here are affixes that require you to move them constantly.

For the record, I think mythic+ is a great idea. Scaling up the content to keep both the challenge AND the loot relevant is a fantastic idea that should in theory keep players engaged in the dungeons. I just strongly feel things went wrong when some people came up with the idea, “What if we added frustrating mechanics that constantly had to be performed to every dungeon?” Then somebody else thought, “What if we then stacked multiple of these frustrating mechanics together, making certain combinations absolutely miserable?” (See week 2 of dragonflight mythic+)

Because the thing is…No matter what the devs do…The “I want a REAL challenge. Everything is easy” crowd will NEVER be challenged enough, they are masochists. The more they are catered to, the more unfun the game becomes for the majority of players.

So yeah…I think mythic+ could have been fun for WOTLK(Though I’d rather have #nochanges, meaning RAF and RDF) but they should have kept the heroic loot table, but used the mythic+ key system to gradually increase the ilvl of the loot they drop, along with scaling mob health/damage. Cap the ilvl so it doesn’t go higher than current phase raid ilvl.

There now you have a better way for fresh 80’s to work up the loot ladder.

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I think this is where a lot of people are confused btw. H+ is NOT for gearing fresh 80s. It’s for bridging the gap between phase 1 pre-raid BiS and Ulduar so you can skip Naxx. It should be taking you from 3.8k GS to about 4.2k+, NOT gearing you up from sub 3k like a fresh 80. For people in the right gear, H+ is as simple as paying more attention than usual.

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It would do both things. I won’t argue the dev’s intentions, but I have seen people quoting blues talking about catching up, not specifying that it is a catch up for p1 pre raid BIS. But I’m not here to argue that point, as I don’t care. I just care that H+ was a waste of dev time and won’t be utilized at all in about 2-3 weeks. Because most of the people who are running it right now are P1 BIS and just want their P2 conquest badge items ASAP.

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Lmao no 90% if your post was about how frustrating the mechanics are. I literally just reread it. And then you suggested that they do Even More work to make the game like retail. Total lack of self awareness lmao bye

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Frustrating the mythic+ affix mechanics are. A++ reading comprehension. Thoughtful reply.

Also not thinking at all past “make more like retail” is big brain. I’m impressed.

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Loot was never humanized. It’s pixels.

I mean yeah it’s the same ilvl and same item from naxx 10. It’s just been changed on who drops it.

It’s not m+.

Classic and retail both have tier.

Tier matters more in retail than it does in classic right now.

Mostly trinkets, just like the trinket names you dropped, which are also, just trinkets.

Always has been.

Th concept is loosely similar, but heroic+ is more heroic than it is m+.

M+ is divisive. It’s also not required. The only concept where it is required is if you’re in a top end guild maximizing your chest drops.

Heroic Vault can be done with just pugs. You don’t have to minmax your vault to play the game which means you don’t have to do M+ if you don’t want to.

Most of this is not actually required. I literally play 6 hours a week, max.

I agree, add RDF.

What even is the point of your post? Do you just want target dummy loot piñatas? Classic era is still up if you want that.

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What nerfs??

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The thing is that atleast now in DF, you have the option to play around with your spec in order to better account for the affixes this week. For example, I am playing thunderstorm but not the talent that knocks mobs up instead of away in order to have that to knock mobs out of sanguine this week. You have an option to adjust your talents in order to contend with different challenges. After that point, you’re just a bad player if you cant contend with it.

An issue with affixes in Wrath is that you lack that flexibility. Sure you can drop gold to respec all the time but that becomes tedious. It also seems as if Blizzard did not really design current affixes with an understanding of what tools tend to be available for various different combination of class makeups can have on offer. Which leads to some affixes being DoA and others (looking at you Gundrak) being nightmarish.

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What nerfs?

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