Hey Blizzard,
This is a thread/discussion regarding M+ Affixes. I know you’ve seen these many times before, so rather than re-hash the argument of “delete rotating affixes and bring back seasonals”, I want to instead move away from that argument and instead find common ground with what I believe your philosophy to be with rotating Affixes. Maybe we can come up with a solution that helps both players and developers achieve their objectives.
Here’s the TL;DR of the discussion so far:
Click here to see the details of the discussion on this topic so far
- M+ Player’s Philosophy: I hate rotating affixes because some are incredibly punishing, which creates push weeks (i.e. Volcanic, Bursting) and AFK weeks (i.e. Bolstering, Sanguine). Furthermore, these affixes are typically more punitive in dungeons that are already difficult to begin with (i.e. Uldaman or Vortex Pinnacle back in S2, Murazond’s Rise in S3 (impossible to pull the lady mini-boss in the first room w/ bolstering d/t one shots from the AoE)). We also want to see Seasonal affixes because Encrypted, Awakened and Shrouded, as well as some others were amazing.
- Blizzard’s Philosophy in Response (I think?): Rotating affixes are necessary in order to provide some form of change week-to-week to make sure the dungeon content isn’t stagnant for the whole season. If weekly affixes are removed, then this diversity will be gone and people will get bored of M+. Regarding seasonals; yes Encrypted was amazing but some of the other ones we’re received as well (i.e. Thundering), and they are difficult to design when taking into account every dungeon available.
- My Philosophy: Let’s create a middle ground. I believe that the reason for why these seasonal affixes were amazing was because they all had a positive aspect to them.
- Inherently, you are always given more options when you have a new positive (i.e. Speed + Invis from Encrypted) than when you have a new negative (i.e. Bolstering) because the negative affix will prevent you from doing what you normally would, thus making you do a route that is less optimal, while the positive affix will allow you to do something that you would not normally be able to, thus surpassing the optimal route and allowing players to design things outside the box. Having rotating weekly positive affixes still creates the week-to-week diversity that Blizzard wants while not feeling as punitive to players. Certainly, some affixes will be stronger than others, but this is already the case, and simply requires tuning.
- After giving it some thought, I actually agree with Blizzard that it’s quite difficult to design Seasonals (kiss/curse) affixes every season and making sure that they aren’t OP or oppressive either. Something like Awakened ended up being really good, but it could’ve been a disaster given what was proposed on-paper.
- My solution: Remove the rotating negative affix pool and instead create rotating weekly positive affixes based around assist all 4 roles available to players (tank, healer, DPS and support). Keep Tyrannical/Fortified and no need for seasonals.
Current Affix Pool
In total, there are 12 currently rotating weekly affixes (counting Fortified/Tyrannical). Each of the Level 7+ and Level 14+ Affixes rotate once with Tyrannical and once with Fortified per 10 week cycle, at which point the cycle repeats.
Here is the list of current weekly rotating affixes:
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Key Level 2+ Affixes:
- Fortified
- Tyrannical
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Key Level 7+ Affixes:
- Incorporeal
- Entangling
- Volcanic
- Storming
- Afflicted
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Key Level 14+ Affixes:
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Sanguine
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Bursting
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Spiteful
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Raging
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Bolstering
- Source:
https://www.wowhead.com/guide/mythic-plus-dungeons/dragonflight-season-3/overview#affix-rotation
- Source:
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Suggested New Affixes
Here is the list of new suggested affixes or changed old affixes that I would recommend. The level 2+ Affixes remain the same as current (Fortified + Tyrannical). The level 7+ Affixes are meant to provide some kind of mechanical advantage, such as increased movespeed/stealth, the ability to silence mobs in an AoE, etc. The level 14+ affixes are meant to provide damaging benefits, though these are not solely focused on improving DPS throughput (i.e. Rapturing)
Key Level 2+ Affixes
Fortified/Tyrannical
- Fortified: Non-boss enemies have 20% more health and inflict up to 30% increased damage (unchanged)
- Tyrannical: Bosses have 30% more health. Bosses and their minions inflict up to 15% more damage (unchanged)
Key Level 7+ Affixes
Speedrunning
- Speedrunning: When out of combat, you move 150% faster and are stealthed (similar to Wo buff from Encrypted w/o the damage reduction). When entering combat, you instead move 50% faster for the duration of combat.
- Developer’s note: The purpose of this affix is two-fold; it will help tanks like DKs who have a hard time gathering and positioning due to their low mobility, and it will help the party with their mobility and skips due to the stealth component, which removes the need for certain specs (i.e. Rogue’s Shroud of Concealment or Mage’s Mass Invisibility) to make skips on the weeks with these Affixes. Notable examples where this would be useful in the current dungeon pool is DHT, where this could be used to skip the 2 bears prior to first boss and the next couple of mobs on the way to the 2nd boss.
Taunting
- Taunting: Tank players generate 50% more threat and take 33% less damage from non-boss enemies.
- Developer’s note: This buff is intended to allow tank players to make bigger pulls without having to worry about their own survivability. Note that this does not guarantee the survivability of their team, which is often a problem for certain pulls, so while your tank will likely be immortal on this week, your group still needs to find a way to survive.
Quaking
- Quaking: Every 30 seconds, players will emit a shockwave that will silence all enemies hit within 8 yards for 5 seconds.
- Developer’s note: This affix is meant to provide benefits to melee-focused compositions since melee specs will be able to use this without awkward positioning more often than range specs. The silencing component will also provide the group with a moment of reprieve from kicks without stunning the targets and risking the tank getting one shot when the auto-attacks of the mobs sync-up after the stun wears off.
Sanguine
- Sanguine: Whenever an enemy dies, it drops a pool that is 8 yards wide that lasts for 20 seconds and heals players for 5% of their maximum health every second. Pools and their healing effect can stack.
- Developer’s note: This is simply Sanguine in reverse, but note that it does not damage enemies. The purpose of this is to be able to pull mobs into bosses and have the pools drop later on in the fight so you can heal by standing in them rather than having to get healed/rotate defensives. This can also help tanks survive near the end of the pull when they are usually trying to save their defensives for the next pull
Terrifying
- Terrifying: Crowd control effects and kick effects (time for mob to cast next spell after being kicked) last 50% longer.
- Developer’s note: This is intended to provide more benefits to CC-heavy compositions, like is currently the case w/ VDH in S3 (which will likely see nerfs to its CC duration in the coming expansion). It also allows players to be able to solo kick certain mobs that they normally weren’t able to due to their kick CD.
Key Level 14+ Affixes
Rapturing
- Rapturing: 100% of the healing and overhealing done to your party is dealt as damage to the nearest enemy. Note: this does not apply to Sanguine healing.
- Note: Blood DK damage from healing from this affix decreased by 75%.
- Developer’s note: This affix allows healers and off-healing specs (i.e. Nature’s Vigil for Druids, Ancestral Guidance for Shamans) to do damage by healing. This will incentivize the use of these healing-while-DPSing cooldowns from Shamans and Druids more liberally while also allowing healers to have a choice to do large amounts of damage by popping their healer cooldowns or to save their healer cooldowns for when their party needs it.
Bursting
- Bursting: When an enemies dies, it explodes, dealing 20,000 Shadow damage over 5 seconds to all nearby enemies in combat (scales with key level). Additional enemies that die within this time adds additional stacks and resets the duration (similar to current).
- Developer’s note: This is simply Bursting as it is currently, but reversed, where you will instead want to extend this buff as much as possible to kill off the rest of the pack. This also removes the need for Mass Dispell on Bursting weeks, as is currently the case.
Melting
- Melting: Every time damage-over-time effects damage a target or heal-over-time effects provides healing (including overhealing), you gain a stack of Melting. At 100 stacks, you summon a Fiery minion that will run towards the nearest target and explode, dealing 100,000 Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards (scales with key level)
- Developer’s note: This meant to provide damage output to DoT classes like Affliction Warlock, Assassination Rogues and Feral Druids (which have not seen much play sadly), as well as HoT specs like Restoration Druids. Specs that stack more DoT effects will accumulate stacks more quickly, so they will spawn these suicide mobs more often than specs who only have 1 or 2 DoT or HoT effects available. For specs like Boomkin, Fire Mage and Shadow Priest that are already high performers with DoT damage, I would simply reduce the damage that the suicide mob does for those specs by 50%.
Exploding
- Exploding:After using your major cooldown, your next ability cast will deal 100% additional damage and have a 100% chance to critically strike.
- Developer’s note: This is the inverse of Melting, where specs that do few large-hitting bursts of damage (i.e. Arcane w/ Arcane Harmony) may actually see a rotational change from this effect.
Empowering
- Empowering: Healers and Support specs (i.e. Augmentation) are able to select 1 ally and 1 tank player to empower them for the rest of the dungeon, granting that both the tank and the ally target 10% Haste and 25% cooldown reduction for the rest of the dungeon encounter. Tank players can benefit from up to 2 buffs, while DPS players can only benefit from 1 buff.
- Developer’s note: This affix is meant to provide a benefit to healers and support specs by allowing them to provide both the tank player and 1 DPS player with a permanent haste and CDR buff. Note that the tank is guaranteed to get 2 buffs, which does stack, but DPS players can only get one. Obviously in the current meta Augmentation has been a controversial topic, but I suspect that Blizzard will continue to nerf it, which will eventually make it less-playable and thus weeks like this will improve its use. In addition, Blizzard has hinted that they may create other Support specs as well, and this affix would grant them extra benefits for supporting that week.
Other Suggestions for M+
Below are some other thoughts that I think would be worth integrating into M+, though I won’t include these here since these deserve their own threads/discussions.
Key Depletion Philosophy
I firmly believe Keys should not deplete, mainly because this philosophy restricts the notion of experimentation. Yes, players will keep resetting the key over and over until they get the giant first pull done correctly, but they will also experiment more liberally with pulls and comps if the fear of key depletion is removed.
Rank 1 M+ title
I believe Rank 1 M+ title should be done on an overall basis, as is current, but there should also exist a secondary Rank 1 M+ Title for the top 0.1% of your given spec. This is because there are certain specs that currently have 0 players in the 0.1% range (i.e. Affliction Warlock and Assassination Rogue currently have 0 players in the 0.1% range).
Balancing Specs in M+
It is evidently clear to me that Raid is finely tuned relatively quickly, while M+ is not. In S2 of Dragonflight, while everybody malded over Fire Mage, I think a lot of people forgot that while Fire received 4 consecutive nerfs, Augmentation Evoker did not, and was clearly more impactful to M+ scene than Fire Mage was by the end of the season (whether people want to admit that or not). I think Blizzard is a little lacking in AoE DPS balancing.