I believe a complete rework of affixes is overdue for the upcoming expansion, but I don’t want to just say that without providing feedback or suggestions, so here I will lay out my detailed thoughts on the current problems with affixes and how I believe they can be fixed.
— What is the goal of an affix? —
Since their creation, the goal of affixes has been to provide a unique dungeon experience from week to week. Inherently there is nothing wrong with this idea, but the design philosophy behind affixes since their inception has been all about increasing dungeon difficulty, rather then increasing fun. Dungeons already scale infinitely so the logic that every single affix ALSO needs to make dungeons more difficult is flawed. Players shouldn’t be logging on each week wondering ‘how bad are the affixes this week’, they should be excited. Right now the most excitement I see is relief on weeks where the affixes are the least obnoxious, rather then the most fun (side note: there should never be weeks that are significantly easier/better but that’s a separate tuning discussion).
— How can we change the affix system to make it more fun, while still creating a challenge? —
Affixes should still be challenging, so I’m not suggesting that we make every affix give us infinite power, but there are many ways to create an affix system that is both challenging and fun. I believe the best way to do this is to create a positive and negative affix pool. Each week you get 1 positive affix and 1 negative affix. Positive affixes would be things like the blessings in torghast, while negative affixes would essentially be like the affixes we have now. This would maintain the unique dungeon experience, and challenges, while making affixes something you are excited about rather then dread.
— What should be done with the current affix pool? —
We’ve had a very similar set of affixes since the original creation of Mythic+ almost 6 years ago. Every expansion there are a few removed / changed / added, but that’s about it. It’s time for something new. When creating these new affixes it’s important to look at the current affix pool and assess what people dislike and why.
- Why is Bolstering so universally hated, even after the nerfs? Because it slows dungeons down and forces you to do smaller pulls. There’s a big distinction between creating affixes that are challenging, and creating affixes that simply slow you down with little room for outplay.
- Necrotic is an example of an affix that has strong outplay potentional, but is simply awful to play around from a tank, healer and dps perspective. While its good that this affix is challenging and rewards smart play, any affixes that force you to constantly run around kiting mobs instead of fighting is bad. It’s extremely unfun for the tank, awful for the healer who can’t help outside of maybe one or two emergency buttons, and terrible for dps who have to deal with mobs constantly running away from their damage throughout the entire dungeon. This same exact logic can be applied to Sanguine: while its good that there is outplay, the challenge of Sanguine is simply not fun for anyone.
- Inspiring is another great example of an affix design that should be avoided. Any affix that removes your ability to CC mobs is counterproductive to the nature of Mythic+. In lower keys, 90% of the time someone just CCs the Inspired mob, then you pull the pack away and fight it separate, which turns this affix into nothing but just a way to slow down the dungeon similar to Bolstering. In higher keys, you either avoid packs with inspired completely by skipping them, or you just brute force your way through by popping cooldowns. Almost all of the difficulty of trash in Mythic+ is outplaying mobs by preventing their dangerous casts through CCs or interrupts. Inspired actually does the opposite of what a good affix should do, which is promote mechanical outplays. Instead it forces you to either ignore the affix completely or say screw mechanics we’ll kill it before it kills us.
All these examples are to make a point that the goal of negative affixes should be to create challenges that are difficult but fun to play around. Lets take Explosive as an example: currently it has a chance to spawn for each mob in the group. In lower key levels / pugs this basically does nothing but slow the dungeon down by limiting the amount of mobs your group can pull (same issues as bolstering). In higher key levels it doesn’t really affect your group at all outside of your healer who simply gets to spend 90% of their globals in every single key that week killing explosives. So what can change about this affix that would maintain a challenge but be more fun to play around and not needlessly slow down the dungeon? Lets say a large bomb spawned randomly while in combat (how many mobs you were in combat with had no effect on how often the bomb spawned). The bomb could be picked up and dropped, similar to Halondrus, but if a player is holding it when it blows up, rather then dealing party wide damage it only deals damage to the holder. Each time it is picked up it resets its timer and is reduced in strength by X%, so you choose who it blows up on and how intense the damage is. This is just an example of how I think affixes can still be challenging, but actually engaging / fun.
— Tyrannical and Fortified —
The community has been very vocal about its frustrations with Tyrannical and Fortified since Legion and it has only gotten worse over time. The idea behind these affixes is to add even more variance to keys from week to week by switching the difficulty focus from trash to bosses. On Tyrannical weeks bosses feel insanely long and drawn out while trash feels like a breeze. Meanwhile on Fortified trash feels extremely punishing while bosses just kind of fall over. The most frustrating thing is that the perfect balance for dungeons where bosses and trash both feel like a challenge is just removing those affixes entirely. The damage scaling of Tyrannical also causes the majority of the difficulty to fall on your healer since mechanically nothing changes, everyone just takes way more damage and the fight is simply much longer. (Sidenote: Tyrannical damage scaling also makes some bosses legitimately impossible at key levels that can be done easily on Fort weeks because their abilities 1 shot. While this is really only a 1% player problem, it’s still a problem. It also pigeonholes players off of certain specs that can’t live high tyrannical unavoidable damage).
— Seasonal Affixes —
When Seasonal Affixes got introduced it seemed like a great idea, and for the most part they have been a really great addition to Mythic+. Reaping aside, which of course was the goat, the best Seasonal affixes have been the ones like Awakened, Prideful & Encrypted. These affixes were huge successes becauses they employed the “kiss/curse” concept where you had to deal with something negative to gain a positive effect. Tormented also had this but the lackluster nature of the positive effect was what turned people off (also the slow aura on last boss because killing him was never worth was extremely obnoxious). Seasonal affix benefits should be highly impactful and enable you to do something your group otherwise could not have done, which was where Tormented missed the mark. For example, enabling really unique routes with Awakened / Wo or doing massive pulls with Prideful / Urh, etc.
The biggest change I’d make to Seasonal Affixes is applying it to all key levels. When Seasonal affixes were first introduced, they started at a higher level because they were affixes like Infested, Reaping and Beguiling which purely made the dungeon more difficult. With the new design philosophy of Seasonal affixes, there is no reason everyone shouldn’t experience them at all M+ key levels, in fact they often make keys easier.
— The Ideal Mythic+ Affix System —
1 Seasonal Affix on all key levels
1 positive & 1 negative affix, both introduced at +6 key level
12 week rotation of 6 positive and 6 negative affix lineups, unique rotation each season
Those are all my thoughts for now, apologies for the extremely long read I’m just passionate about M+ and want to see it grow/thrive.
. Why would a new system not be starting from scratch?