Lots of players complaining the number of interrupts and stops needed are getting absurd? Incorporeal, let’s waste one of your much needed stuns on this garbage affix.
Healers complaining there is way too much to heal in Dragonflight? We got you, also heal this soul, and if you don’t you get a debuff!
Casters complaining there are far too many swirlies? We’ve got snares for you, now don’t even try to get that cast off!
People complain dps don’t swap to explosives and leave it to the healer to deal with the whack a mole? We’ll give them more hp so if the dps don’t swap you’re guaranteed to die!
See guys blizzard has been listening to the feedback all along, they just decided they hate us.
Yea, I’m not sure what to make of these. They definitely sound like more stuff I don’t really want to deal with. I guess it’s different stuff I don’t want to deal with… but they definitely don’t look like they’re headed in the direction of embracing kiss/curse in the absence of an actual fun seasonal affix.
This doesn’t really sound like anything anybody asked for though…
Whoever came up with these new affixs for the season should probably be fired. How do they even get some of these past the idea board without a single one of them saying “wait guys i actually have stepped foot in a key and this would be the worste idea ever”, your group CC will be wasted and large pulls will be WAY harder, your dps will die as your healer franticly tries to heal some random ghosts, and some melee is going to be “entangled” for just long enough to blow a bomb right inside your group adding 5 more points to the death counter.
Were you expecting positive effects from affixes? Feels like there’s nothing they can design that will satisfy people outside of making the affix free.
I was hoping for a rework to the affixes to give them positive effects if done properly (or improperly to add a twist) here’s a few examples.
Explosive - when healers pop them it’s a group heal, when dps pop them it’s an aoe damage on the mobs, and when tanks pop them it can be either a damage reduction or a shield.
Storming - Make it so the person who pops it gets a haste buff, now you can make the choice to pop it, don’t do it at a stupid time and its safe, do it poorly and you can get blasted by an aoe. Maybe stop it from randomly moving so it doesn’t get accidently popped so it can be a more purposeful effect, increase the damage it does to involve the healer maybe.
Grievous - make it actually more painful but reward the healer, every time you top someone off they become immune to grievous for 10 seconds and you get bonus healing, making it kind of a mini game to top people off one at a time instead of just triaging to keep people alive. Maybe add a damage component where once people have the 10 second grievous immunity they get 10% more damage, now everyone is popping health pots for a damage boost.
Quaking - any damage taken from quaking gives a damage boost. It becomes a trade off, wanna do a 3 stack for big damage? Hope theres no mechanics coming.
Volcanic - Make them last longer on the ground, and allow the tank time to move the mobs on them, make them do big damage to mobs that get dragged on them.
Instead of making them more annoying, make them more fun, still have downsides but playing them right (or wrong in the case of quaking) gets a reward other than just dealing with it.
I agree affixes add flavor, but they’ve become too impactful. IMO.
There has been a significant amount of conversation amongst the community on this topic.
Affixes are good for M+, but they need to be less impactful and more interactive, IMO. Give us affixes that we can use to be creative, that benefit us if executed correctly, and punish us for failing.
I’m okay with kiss curse style affixes, but the “kiss” portion should never make the dungeon/affix a net difficulty decrease; affixes are there to add challenge. The old design of seasonal affixes where the gain was more powerful than the loss created a dynamic where 8s and 9s were harder than 10s and 11s. That’s so backwards.
You mean make them less difficult?
Right, which is why they’re removing the seasonal affix.
Kiss/curse affixes that lean too far into the “kiss” aspect run the risk of actually stifling creativity. If everyone goes into a dungeon with an idea of how their class is able to tackle the dungeon, then the best method ends up being “do X with the affix for a damage boost”, that would feel worse than what we currently have, at least to the people who’s idea of fun isn’t just “not failing”
What’s more difficult? 1 big explosive everyone has to switch to, or multiple small explosives with trade off depending on who pops them?
If you only have 1 big one, everyone swaps, simple, annoying, not really any more fun.
If you have multiple small ones with bonuses for killing them, now your dps will want to swap off to them, but does the healer trust them to get all the explosive? If not they may pop them wasting extra damage, it becomes a trade off, adds more thought to the affix, keeps the difficulty, and rewards the group for playing it properly. Maybe double the rate of explosives spawning to increase the difficulty, that’s the beauty of it, you can ramp up the difficulty while still making it feel rewarding for doing the affix properly.
Other than the storming suggestion they all become more difficult but with rewards, but honestly storming is more annoying than anything at the moment, I think the only 2 places it’s actually got me killed were TJS and COS first bosses and it was mostly because it blended in to all the other effects going on at the same time, hard to see a storming with all the water shooting up in the air or the piles of purples crap on the ground. But that is still my own fault for not popping it earlier or being aware that it was there before the other mechanics went off.
Currently Explosive is relegated to healers in most competent push groups, which is something that healers have been complaining about for multiple seasons now, so making bulkier explosives that everyone needs to contribute to is more interactive and solves that issue.
Making explosives deal damage to packs would be too much imo. Imagine you’re a class with impactful, but long or long-ish cd windows, maybe a boomy for example. You’re in the Algethar tree room as and you’re just ready to blast, but you instead just moonfire spam explosives because the amount of them that spawn and the damage you would get as a result is worth more than your cooldown. That wouldn’t be a great experience either.
Not to mention that would just make the dungeon easier which is kind of the antithesis of affixes in general.
That sounds like it just adds more complexity to it for me, that just becomes a tuning issue, have it so the explosives can’t do as much damage as you can during CDs, but more than when you have none up, now people are taking turns popping them vs CDing the trash, or maybe all your dps are popping off and the tanks and healers pop them for the duration of the CDs. Again, complexity and difficulty with a reward for doing it properly.
The current explosive affix spawns more orbs as you get into combat with more mobs. Even if they tried to tune the damage to be “less than cds but more than not having cds”, there would reach a target count where this becomes imbalanced.
Adding a damage reward to Explosives doesn’t make them complex. You would just handle them the same way; they would just make the dungeon easier than if explosives didn’t exist at all.
Affixes exist to add challenge to dungeons, not make them easier.
Affixes exist to make it so the dungeons aren’t the same thing over and over so people don’t get bored. Not necessarily to make the dungeon harder.
They have done plenty of level 10 affixes that make the dungeon both way more difficult, G’huunies as an example, or way easier, awakened, whatever that SL S3 one was. Or both harder and easier at the same time, thundering, prideful as examples.
Having different challenges to the dungeons that give rewards would keep people doing them and maybe actually looking forward to affixes instead of looking at it like omg explosive week F that I’m taking a week off. Or oh these affixes aren’t too terrible maybe I will push harder this week. That isn’t a good feeling and mindset for the playerbase.
Edit: Think about how much nicer it would be to be thinking oh I like those affixes I’m gonna push this week instead of well I guess these affixes are less horrible so I’ll push this week
People take weeks off because affixes aren’t balanced, which by the way positive affixes aren’t immune to.
If every affix was positive, but one enabled some crazy routing that saved like 3-4 minutes on the timer over another, turns out that week is push week and other weeks are cancelled, same as before. Affixes can be annoying even if they’re positive too.
Also, positive affixes just homogenize how you approach dungeons. Crafting a comp to tackle certain challenges brought about by affixes, the dungeon itself, or just to round out weaknesses that your own class might have is more interesting than none of that mattering because the damage buff is more relevant than anything in a class kit.
You can dispel it… There’s an “or” there. You can remove it’s curse/disease/poison OR heal it to full. And its a little early on the outrage train when we have no idea how often it spawns.
This was a great change. The only reason it was considered a healer job was because they could do it. Let’s say it’s an average of 1 orb per pull and it has 500k hp. It’s now a group swap and not whack a mole.
