Afflicted
As a healer, I really dislike this affix for several reasons:
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Blizzard recognized that current affixes are disproportional falling healers. Why introduce another affix that is solely the responsibility of healers? Seems to be making the problem worse not better.
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Healing/Dispelling NPCs is problematic mechanically. Healers have to key bind healing spells, DPS spells and CC/Utility spells. In the past we used complex conditional help/harm macros or rely on healing addons like Vuhdu to manage healing frame-specific key binds. Recently Blizz added click-to-cast functionality, which helped. However its tied direct to healing frames and don’t work on NPCs.
With this affix, healers are back to square one. I can’t rely on my click to cast (through addons or the default blizzard UI) to bind my heals/dispells, because I have no way to click-to-cast on NPCs. This makes this affix even more punishing for newer players who don’t use addons, or know how to make macros.
Entangling
Why get rid of quaking and then introduce this affix? This is just a worse form of quaking in almost every way.
- Like quaking, it will likely spawn on a set timer demanding an weak aura to track it (or randomly which would be even worse because you can’t predict it)
- The solution to quaking was to reposition your character. The solution to this affix is also to reposition your character.
- However, this affix also comes with a slow. Every season sees dozens and dozens of move-out-of-X mechanics that will just screw you when combined with a 50% snare.
- With quaking, if one player was unable to move for some reason, other players could help them out by moving around them. This rewarded coordination and communication. Entangling takes away that agency from the group. Everyone has to move.
- A 3 second stun is more deadly that taking a single hit of quaking damage is most situations.
- Being slowed/stunned is just frustrating and not fun.
Suggestion
I would replace entangling with something like this:
Hatching
3 eggs spawn within 20 yards of an enemy. After 6 seconds, the eggs hatch into spider adds that attack players. Players can run over the eggs before they hatch to destroy them.
An affix like this still requires repositioning, but it doesn’t have the annoying slow component, its far less punishing, and it gives players more agency to choose either to deal with the eggs, or wait and deal with the spiders.
14 Likes
Or. Hear me out.
We remove… Affixes altogether. And simply rely on normal Boss/mob mechanics. Like, Oh I dunno… How it was before this god aweful thing of Mythic and affixes came around.
They truly want to go away from requiring Addon’s… Then they truly need to SIDESTEP away from the things that are driving them as requirements.
Affixes are not fun. I seriously strove to never go into a 10+ simply because of the affixes that would appear. Could I have done a 10+, sure could… But I am not going to venture into that at all. Affixes turn away more players than they bring. We all know there are weeks where the affixes alone cause a DEEP gouge into the amount of people doing mythics. Those actions alone should be enough cause to venture away from affixes.
9 Likes
Im not in favour of killing affixes all together. In a season that last 6 months, dungeons will become too stale. That doesn’t sound fun to me.
If we think about a reality where there are no affixs, every dungeon gets solved in the first month, then every run becomes an optimized choreographed dance. Every route, every pull, every interrupt, its always the same, every week. If you don’t learn the optimal route and strat for every single pull, you will be “doing it wrong” and people will not be kind. We need some variance to maintain variety.
That being said, variance doesn’t need to come from negative or frustrating affixes. If I were in a design meeting with the team I would suggest some ideas to solve the variance and affix problem:
- Remove seasonal. Don’t need them with rotating dungeon pool. already done.
- 3 affixes per week: Tryan/Fort, 1 Buff affix, 1 Curse Affix.
- Tyran/Fort and the Buff Affix start at key level 1
- Curse Affix starts at key level 7
- Buff Affixes are designed to change your game play in a desirable way. Can pull from some past seasonals and make new ones
- Curse Affixes are an edited list of current negative affixes. Remove the most annoying and least impactful affixes, and add a few new ones.
Some under-cooked brainstorm ideas for Buff affixes:
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Arsenal: Weapons have been placed throughout the dungeon. Players can pick them up and get and extra action to use based on the weapon (Like the weapons from Necrotic Wake).
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Speedy: Globes spawn throughout the dungeon, running over them gives your group a 1% stacking speed increase (or temporary speed boost).
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Blessed: Certain mobs and all bosses in the dungeon are blessed. Killing them gives you a stacking buff that increases your highest secondary stat by a small amount.
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Heroic: Your first cast of Bloodlust/Heroicsm/Timewarp in the dungeon doesn’t cause sated and has no cooldown.
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Rescue: Friendly NPCs in cages are scattered throughout the dungeon, free them and they will help you in combat.
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Supportive: Every X minutes, payers get a mark above their head. Running into a player with the matching mark gives you and that player a dps/hps buff for a 10 seconds. No penalty if you miss it. (Like a positive version of thundering).
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Charged: Charged totems have been placed through the dungeon, destroying them will release an explosion that stuns all nearby enemies for a few seconds.
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Blazing: Every X minutes player’s feet burst into flame. For 10 seconds, you get 100% increased movement speed, and leave a trail of fire on the ground that does ticking damage to all enemies.
6 Likes
Incorporeal – lasts too long, keeps you in combat post-pull which specifically punishes healers. it’s good that these things are CC’able by anything but they tend to spawn too close to packs and will get broken, making them another healer affix where the healer just has to babysit the CC
Entangling – overly punishing for classes that can’t break it easily relative to classes where it is a 1 GCD and move on.
Afflicted – not sure why this is interesting to anyone. Just another healer affix that has the added issue of being UI unfriendly.
Explosive – needs some tuning on the HP. Don’t mind the direction on the HP but it’s in a place right now where if 2 spawn at once you’re automatically having one go off.
What are some alternatives? The best affixes over time have been kiss/curse. You should consider implementing something like that on a smaller scale for the rotational affixes. Examples - explosives spawn off one mob per pack 3-10 secs after pull, they have a reasonable amount of HP to force a team swap to them but then after they are killed you get 20% haste for 10 secs. Entangling gives you a dmg buff to compensate for the GCD/movement. When afflicted is dispelled the healer gets 10% mana and the party gets 5% dmg for 10 secs.
As a healer, I would love them to remove tyrannical/fort. I want bosses to hit has hard as tyrannical all the time. It is super fun and satisfying to complete a boss after using all your buttons perfectly. I’m sure DPS would also love big pulls where trash lives longer like fortified so they can do big numbers.
There’s not a single other affix that I actually like. The only ones I’ve enjoyed and would love to see again are encrypted and awakened because they added more route flexibility and interesting choices. Every other affix feels like an annoyance, and while I don’t completely believe that affixes don’t belong in mythic plus, they certainly don’t add to my current experience and I know with certainty that the new ones are not offering me anything better.
I do like the weekly flavor that affixes can provide, but right now it’s more of a weekly dread. It’s less like “Oh boy this week is storming, I can’t wait to play around this!” and more like “Oh nice this week is so much more bearable than last week”.
The only affixes I want to see are the ones that make me think “I can’t wait to play this next week!” and until that’s the case, I’m not sure they have a place in keys.
2 Likes