With the removal of the seasonal affix next season and the newly revealed affixes that are…questionable, there have been more community posts here, on reddit, and wowhead about removing affixes entirely.
I wanted to make sure that Blizz knows that there are some of us who love the affix/mythic+ system. I have had more fun in the last 3 expansions of this game doing mythic+ than anything else in the many, MANY years I’ve been playing. It allows me to test how far I can push myself and play with a close circle of friends, improving our skills, coordination, and knowledge of our classes. Most of all though, the affixes keep it from becoming boring.
If all the higher levels did was increase health/damage of mobs, you would be doing the EXACT same thing every time you went into the dungeon with the exact same spec, and things would just take longer. It would get old, fast (see: dungeons as a whole prior to m+/challenge modes). Different combinations of affixes encourage me to pick different talents, do pulls differently, and treat each run as it’s own puzzle, and I enjoy that. I REALLY like that Tyrannical and Fortified change the nature of the entire dungeon between trash or boss focused, so the focus of my gameplay changes as well. It really keeps content from getting stale. I’m actually a but disappointed to see the seasonal affix go, but Thundering wasn’t my favorite, and with the changes to the dungeons each season, I get the reasoning.
Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. Certain affixes could be altered, added, or improved in many different ways, and there’s a ton of ideas floating around the forums (for instance, Spiteful: make them spawn 20 yards away from their target like Thing From Beyond in BfA). Certain combinations probably shouldn’t happen. But that’s a solvable problem without removing something that I feel adds to what would otherwise be repetitive gameplay that would quickly lose replay value.
I get that other people feel differently, and that’s totally reasonable, but I’d love to hear from others who like affixes, and make sure our voices are heard as well.
I think this is one of the bigger divides of the whole issue. The very tippy top has issues on an absurd level. Even the small kiting from sanguine can cause them to fail their keys. Grievous can make an already impossible fight a guaranteed wipe. I get their gripe with affixes.
But in the normal range, say from 2-24/5 they really are just a rotating set of challenges added to a content we already have memorized. The vast majority of people who complain, though, are the people who see affixes standing between them and their precious loot or they don’t like keys generally and chose, probably at random, for this to be the reason.
We’ve seen threads to jetison the timer, the affixes, readd hard cc, reduce the healing, increase the healing, punish anyone who doesn’t want to play in that group anymore, rework the lfg tool (yes plz), etc. The overarching theme is that they will fall in love with this thing they call a chore if only they would just make it something completely different.
I’m excited for the new affixes, 2 of which seem nearly finished and the other 1 still needs some frequency adjustments. If the play strat will be to hard cc the adds, that’s a good thing. If there are 3 up at a time in the middle of the pack, that’s bad. Only 3 classes don’t have a dispel that works for the healer one. Almost every class has either some way to remove snares outright or move 10yds instantly.
Prot pally stonks are up for 2 of the affixes. Double freedom is premium for roots, we might see bop or spellwarding get worked in. Pallys have direct off healing and a dispel for the healer 1. Stonks.
Under no circumstances extant in the known universe could you possibly know this, or make this determination.
It’s nothing more than a reductive statement intended to make the argument against affixes invalid.
It’s cheap, inaccurate and lazy.
I am not prohibited from getting loot by affixes. I’m not struggling to make any score or feeling gated from any content. I agree in principle that affixes are beneficial and I think they genuinely keep the content fresher than it would be without.
But I still think some of the suck monkey nuts and that they often stand in direct conflict with dungeon tuning.
In my opinion mechanical fine tuning is the difference between a good mechanic and bad mechanic. For instance, in Halls of Valor there’s a delay between Hymdal’s Horn of Valor and the time that the first drake sweeps across the platform. Too fast and it would be too hard, too slow and it would be lame. There is no snare mechanic so it doesn’t have to be factored into the timing of the drake pass.
In the future, do they tune every mechanic with a potential snare in mind or do we just have to keep putting up with dealing with mechanics that are not tuned with the potential circumstances that may exist some weeks. It’s those conflicts that are making affixes suck and that won’t go away with the new ones they are proposing.
Themselves, you know all the stuff you ignore. The every man schtick is tiring. Because you agree with the premise you don’t read anything about the topic or the replys
You’re trying to tell me what I do and don’t see, now?
There’s nonsense argument and then there’s you telling me that you have the pulse of the community and that I just haven’t read about it. Get real.
I don’t know what everyone wants, but from the countless complaints I hear it has never been “I’d be 3k if it wasn’t for affixes.” Almost exclusively it’s “well that was a load of bull manure. Nice game.”
You are stuck on the idea that everyone wants a free handout. There appears to be no divorcing you from that mentality so any attempt would seem pointless.
I’ve ignored Deevax because he has a personal issue with me and probably at least 1 other person and refuses to let whatever nonsense he’s harboring go.
Generalizations/claims in the rest of the post aside, I’m not sure that’s much a gripe from top level players. Even if dungeon levels did nothing but increase health and damage, there would be a point where it would scale to mathematically impossible levels, and players would find that and do what they could to find tricks and comps to work around it. That’s just unavoidable in an infinite scaling system where our gear has a finite limit. The affixes merely make that limit less well defined and more complex.
Anecdotally, I hear similar complaints about m+ that really dont make sense to me outside of people who seem to want to just grind out BiS as if it were a chore, and this just makes this chore longer. I personally question what the value in playing that way is.
I’m reserving judgement on the new affixes. I’m just hoping that whatever issues/problems are worked out on PTR, and dont have to be adjusted too much on live. Regardless, I’m in favor of more new affixes to diversify the means of play for all the reasons I mentioned in my OP.
To Deevax’s point about the timing between mechanics and the balancing issues that can create, that point again seems to be in favor of changing the affixes, rather than removing them completely. As we’ve seen, a badly timed quaking in say AA could cause a wipe because the healer is cut off from their tools to handle mechanics. But we’ve also seen in SMBG how certain affixes can be adjusted around boss abilities (Quaking not going off during Inhale)
I think that’s my main concern about the newly proposed affixes. They appear to be following the same old path of the previous affixes and we’ll just have new overlaps that won’t feel good.
Think about all the potential overlaps that could exist with the new explosive implementation. What happens if it spawns during a crucial burn window like Malidrussa’s shield phase, Sha of Doubt’s add phase (the unrecognized actual healing check of the fight) or something like the add phase on Kokia. While it’s true that it would “change the way you play the encounter” it would just artificially increase the difficulty, at random, potentially in a ways that suck worse than we can imagine.
I am conflicted because I do think they have place in the system. Perhaps Thundering is simply making things seem worse than they are.
What relevance does this have to anything I said? Of course the infinitely scaling system has a limit. I’m saying that when I hear 10-15 top level players say that they don’t like an affix, it’s usually followed by a high end exclusive issue. Either it’s the gigantic pulls necessary to complete the key make the affix unbearable or the minor gains from a screwed up affix (Like sanguine) add significantly to the overall health and damage requirement. I’m not saying these are invalid, just that they’re first world problems of sorts. Not super relevant when you aren’t pushing the limit.
This was what I was referring to. 1 sentence is “why do I have to do this?”, second is “remove this part of m+”. It’s super common around here.
Undeniably, but when they put in writing that it’s not there intent they still get treated with the same indignation. When they claim they want more positive affixes or kiss/curse they just get shouted down with the same old accusations.
It’s a reactionary defense to the fear of change.
I don’t want M+ to be adulterated for the sake of baseless complaints but I think there’s a tangible dissatisfaction that’s coming from the community that’s prompting these changes.
At the very least they need to better test the affixes so that we don’t spend the first week of each combo, every season, learning what they overlooked and waiting for fixes.
There’s nothing left for me to loot. Probably the same for a lot of players by now. I just want the mythics themselves to be as enjoyable as they could possibly be.
Mythics shouldn’t feel like merely a labourious obstacle to gearing up. The journey should be as rewarding as the destination. And there’s no reason whatsoever this can’t be achieved without impacting difficulty.
Based on what I’ve seen on the PTR, explosives and incorporeal are literally broken.
Groups have no where near enough interrupts to deal with incorporeal (who could have predicted that… oh wait, everyone did. Within the first 5 minutes of glancing at the notes.)
And groups can’t even nuke down 1 explosive orb before it detonates in 10+s.
A kiss/curse element would probably have been all it took to incentivise DPS to engage with the orbs.
Instead they went through all that trouble just to break it.
Actual clown world. Their call back to office can’t come soon enough.
I’m one of the people who don’t like M+ in it’s current state. It has nothing to do with affixes keeping me from loot and more about it just not being a fun game mode. If I had to give the biggest reason that it isn’t fun it would be that M+ forces me to play a certain way, which is sort of counter to the whole RPG aspect. Timer’s aren’t fun for a lot of people. There’s dozens of threads and hundreds of responses all saying affixes aren’t fun and are far more annoying than they are a challenge. Personally I don’t think removing either would change what M+ is, infinitely scaling dungeons. The only thing that would change would be top end players might push slightly higher and WAY more people would do M+.
The timer offers no real benefit, but plenty of negatives. Something comes up mid-key and you need 5 minutes? Bricked key. Want to explain a strat? Nope, times ticking. Want to take a different route? Can’t because it’s not time efficient. Want to CC certain mobs like back in vanilla to make a pull easier? No, they all need AOEed down at the same time. It limits people into certain classes/specs because those do the best AOE+single target damage while having the most utility and survivability. The timer severely restricts gameplay, which is not a good thing. That of course doesn’t even account for the mental aspects, like anxiety and stress, that timers cause some people, which of course turns to toxicity in other players.
Affixes much like the timer have almost no benefit. Some people feel it adds variation to the dungeons. Personally though I don’t think it adds variation to the dungeons at all. You still run the same routes and use the same boss strats, just with more annoyance. The other positive, in some people’s books, is that they offer more challenge. This is certainly true, but for a lot of people it’s not the type of challenge they are looking for. You could make an affix that kills everyone every 2 minutes, it’s more challenging sure, but it’s not the least bit fun. A lot of people want the challenge to come from the dungeon, not just some tacked on BS Affix. That’s my thoughts at least, let the difficulty come from the scaling, not from a random mechanic.
The negatives though are massive. Certain classes deal with certain affixes better so they get taken, while other classes get left out. This might be okay if all classes had affixes they dealt with better than other classes, but class balance is pretty terrible in the utility/survivability department and some classes have WAY more than others. If Blizzard was better at class balance this might get ironed out, but Blizzard is glacial at making class changes and the changes they do make are often ill-advised to put it politely.
Affixes also heavily limit dungeon design/balance. Blizzard needs to account for all affix’s and their combinations. Just look at entangled for the massive example here. A boss with an AOE you need to get out of ASAP could be tuned perfectly without an affix, but now with entangled it’s a death sentence and poorly tuned, after tuning for entangled when you don’t have that affix the mechanic is a joke. We’ve seen this season after season, a boss mechanic and an affix that simply do not work together in the slightest. Finally affixes just ruin the whole dungeon immersion. Having random stuff spawn for no reason just takes me right out of the dungeon feel, just feels super arcadey. It’s especially bad when the things that randomly spawn demand your immediate attention…like almost all the new affixes.
I would much rather have well crafted/balanced M+ dungeons that I could take as long as I wanted to get through using whatever strategy I felt like using. Honestly, who cares how long it takes you as long as you complete it? We can change the current M+ into a leaderboard competition for those that like that, but not gatekeep normal progression behind the toxic mechanics.
BTW Normal keys are 2-15, >20+ is the realm of the top 5% who are very much not normal.
In my opinion, affixes are something that has just made m+ worse since mythic plus was first introduced. I have never liked having them since Legion. I don’t think I actually know anyone who does like them. There have been a couple seasonal ones that were pretty fun but Blizzard doesn’t like those ones. It’s like they don’t want people to have fun. I get that games need challenge but there is plenty of that already in the dungeons, and it’s much more interesting than the crappy affixes that don’t have anything to do with the dungeon design.
M+ is timed content. At it’s very core. If timers aren’t fun for some people, then those people aren’t who M+ is designed for. You’re only ‘forced’ to play that way if you a) choose to engage with the content, and b) choose to engage with it to meet the timer. There’s nothing really stopping any group of 5 from saying the timer is stupid, let’s just play the way we want and finish when we finish.
But these types of complaints are incomprehensible to me. While there are a lot of people who don’t find timers, or the affixes fun, there are a lot of people who do. Asking to have it removed because you don’t like it is the equivalent of joining a marathon and asking them to restructure it because you don’t like the idea of a race. Or complaining that you’d like to SCUBA dive but only if they can do something about getting wet. You’re not really a fan of being wet. The easiest answer if you don’t like one of the core elements of an activity is opt out of it. Stop trying to ruin other people’s fun. Find some fun of your own.
That’s just it, a removal of affixes doesn’t make the journey any more rewarding. Many people see affixes as added difficulty, I don’t view them that way. They are a part of the dungeon that week. The suggestion was made that you remove affixes and increase the scaling, the true approach in that scenario is to lower the timer.
Almost every affix is intended to slow you down for not interacting with it in the way you’re suppose to. The reworks of shadowlands made the affixes more lenient, have less impact on the timer.
Sanguine duration reduction means that your space frees up more quickly. Remember the 1m sang in TD? That was a puzzle and a half that I enjoyed solving, the first time then became irritating as enemies didn’t die like they were suppose to.
10s necrotic mean that the majority of a tanks dungeon experience that week was spent running (I don’t view excessive kiting as skill expression, anyone can hold Strafe), whereas 5s necrotic now felt like what the affix was intended to do, keep the tank on their toes about a debuff while not forcing them out constantly.
Bolsterings 20s duration is a fantastic change to an affix that always felt like one rear end pull was all it took to wipe the party. Finishing off a 5 bolstered behemoth and accidentally walk into a new pull with a bunch of 5hp Andys. We’re talking that guy still had 20% millions of hp and now he’s taller than Brutallus.
This is the same issue Infested had. You fail worms twice, only twice, and the dungeon isn’t completable, not just out of time. That’s a poor affix design. Prideful could also do this.
Affixes receive positive recognition when they are simple and don’t cause wipes (In the 2-24ish range, again bleeding edge have their own game they’re playing). Affixes like volcanic don’t really do anything. They’re not even guaranteed to spawn under anyone. There was a lot of praise for this affix. I think you remove the horizontal push from storming and it would be a melee equivalent. Both knock up, but the moving v not moving makes them equal since ranged don’t want to move and melee don’t care about movement generally, they care more about range.
This is essentially an argument between 500m dash and 500m hurdles and which is more fun.