Here’s my thoughts in general.
I think the Seasonal Affix should be something that’s dropped in fairly early. If not at +2, I’d be down with +2-3 being no affixes (to be intro level), and have affixes start at +4.
I’m not necessarily a fan of the positive/negative affix system, but that’s only because I think I’ve seen too much duplication across various systems with these sorts of generic concepts. The same Blessing/Torment thing is used in Torghast, and I’d see them porting exactly some of those over into affixes - just like they literally copied Torghast anima powers and plonked them into Legendaries, or probably will into talents next expac. And frankly, part of the issue in Torghast is that most of them are not fun either.
Instead, my personal preference would be if affixes were 1 or 2 things that kicked in, and that could still rotate week to week, but I’d rather the focus of affixes be on new gameplay objectives.
To tie in with that, I think I should comment that I think the M+ approach of a timed objective has been a missed opportunity on what M+ was initially billed as, and loses sight of the fact that there are different types of challenges within the game. And frankly, even in the absense of an explicit timer, people would have a natural tendency to go/finish as quickly as possible anyway.
So what sort of stuff can I personally think of?
- Timer - A timer is activated when you start the keystone. Finishing within the limit awards you full points and an upgraded keystone, and any finish beyond the timer gives reduced points and a downgraded second item (fairly similar to current timer behaviour).
- Immortal - Complete the run with no player having to Release spirit or receive an out-of-combat res. Effectively no deaths, but it allows battleres to remain a useful mechanic. Currently almost anything challenging requires no wipes, but this raises the bar beyond that. Meeting those requirements gives you full points, for every player that has to Release, you get progressively lower score, and downgraded second item.
- Surgical Precision - 5 targets across the dungeon are marked on your map. You must kill all 5 and complete the run, but any extra/unnecessary mob you kill lowers your score beyond full. You could pepper Invis pots around, make the targets get stronger as more targets die, stuff like that to spice it up.
- Hard mode - I think this is where I’d prefer to see Tyrannical have gone, but I’d much prefer it if the way it worked is that it gave bosses either an extra mechanic, or an extra secret phase that has to also be beaten. How would I score this? This is the probably the closest to other affixes, but I’d say you start off with a pool of score + a buffer, let’s say 100 god points. Each death takes away 5 god points, and any deaths on bosses takes away 20 instead. So it’s not QUITE like Immortal, but heavily accentuates good play on bosses, and battle resses won’t save me from losing points when you mess up. You can also deal with one full wipe (if nothing else happens), and still make it.
- Endurance - You do the run, except you’re occasionally told to live through things you really shouldn’t. How would I implement this? Probably something like all trash mobs, when killed, live on in Zombie mode for 5 additional seconds before dying. THe last mob in a pack lives for 10 seconds in Zombie mode, and does severely increased damage (e.g. 200%), and all CC lasts for 33% of the time it normally does. Bosses last for an additional 20 seconds in Zombie mode when the encounter ends, with the same 200% increased damage, but no additional special phase transitions or fatal mechanics can trigger during Zombie mode (e.g. Mueh’zala won’t phase, Ingra Maloch won’t just pop Death Shroud, Millificient won’t just pop Aerial Barrage and leave you screwed, etc.). Any death to Zombie mode mobs reduces your score.
- Chain pulling - The challenge is to stay in combat as long as possible. Any time spent out of combat would lower your score, fairly simple. I personally think this is the weakest idea, but it probably belongs in the pile.
- Twisted Fate - This sort of thing would be about throwing sheer chaos into the mix. If you say have 2 Orbs that 2 players of different roles can pick up, and while they have them, they swap roles. A healer and a dps means the healer gets a certain % reduction to all but self-healing they do, but do % more increased damage with all abilities. For a dps who transforms into a healer, they become friendly to mobs and hostile to party members, but all “damage” they do to players instead “heals” them. Stuff like that. When 2 players pick up an orb, they keep it for 2 minutes. Healers and tanks can only pick up an orb every 4 minutes (forcing you to cycle between healer and tank), damage dealers can only pick up an orb every 5 minutes (forcing you to cycle between all dps). You need to keep it cycling constantly to retain perfect score, any time spent where an Orb is on the ground loses you points.
- Spirit Link - This should be the simplest one to explain, all trash mobs in a pack are HP linked. They all stay up until they all die. The increased danger of dealing with more mechanics all the time should be offset by certain cleave effects being amplified.
Now these are just basic concepts that I’ve thought of in the last … 15 minutes. I’m not saying all of them are good (I’m personally not a fan of a couple), but others can come up with better idea, or probably iterate on concepts to make them better. The second part from that is to take a basic challenge idea and flesh is out to actually create a full affix. I also think it’s a good principle that nothing should arbitrarily make things take longer than usual. I also think it’s a good principle that people shouldn’t be encouraged to stand around waiting for cooldowns for every pull. And here I think some of this could use kiss/curse concepts.
My solution to people waiting around for cd’s would be that after 30 seconds out of combat, cooldowns stop ticking down. Any mob that is “kept alive” (this should be calculatable by the game, any mob should expect to lose a certain % health within X seconds if all players are up and hitting it, even if it’s not perfect the game should be able to get close enough that at best players doing “light” damage will be able to squeeze 20 seconds or w/e but that won’t be a big deal in the grand scale) to try and game this will instead heal to full, get a ramping damage buff/pulse a ramping reduced damage done debuff, and force players to stop trying to do that. So yeah, people waiting a few seconds for stuff is fine, people running back from a wipe, things like keep ticking down to a point, people standing around for 2 minutes for Hero to come back up, not so much.
I’ll take a couple to demonstrate what a full affix might look like.
- Inevitable Dooooooooom - (Timer) An NPC is there as soon as the timer starts doing something, e.g. Lord Chamberlain is draining someone, or Nalthor is unleashing a Cosmic Blizzard on Bastion or whatever. Something obvious and trackable. Players need to prevent this from happening. Very simple, it’s just wrapping up a gameplay aspect to the timer rather than pure UI.
- The Veil Beyond Death - (Endurance) This is the easiest example of one that would increase time taken in an unavoidable way. So what I’d propose here is that for every final Zombie in a pack killed, players get a stacking % primary stat buff. This doesn’t increase health, so the super deadly abilities stay super deadly, but it’s simply a small buffer to help counter the extra time spent dealing with Zombie mobs and bosses - which on a typical dungeon would probably added up to 3-5 minutes, so we’re aiming to trim just that down. If it’s capped at a reasonable level (e.g. the typical pulls to get 100% completion), players won’t feel incentivised to pull extra mobs for MORE stacks cause they won’t exist. This makes it kinda like kiss/curse, but I think it’s in a more interesting way than just saying that all mobs and players do 15% extra physical damage, or w/e. It forces a gameplay adjustment, using cooldowns to work through a Zombie Infectious Rain, or Purifying blast, or w/e would probably be elevated to oneshot mode.
- The Master’s Lair - (Hard mode) My preference would be that this interacts with the dungeon in some way, e.g. think of how Nefarian activates Hard mode on all Blackwing Descent bosses with some RP and thematic sarcasm. Whether bosses gain extra mehcanics or an extra phase is probably a case-by-case call, and I think that would affect whether the dungeon takes longer. I could see Lord Chamberlain being an extra mechanics boss (e.g. Sinstone Statues that are thrown come alive and chase the closest player, if a Sinstone Statue collides with another Statue all players take damage and are stunned for 5 seconds), whereas Hakkar is probably an extra phase boss (think at 40%, he goes immune, activates Jin’do, who has a bunch of Jin’do mechanics to deal with before he dies and you go back to killing Hakkar). If on the whole, only 1-2 bosses in a dungeon have an extra phase, it probably won’t affect the timer toooo much, but you could do something minor like a 5-10% trash HP nerf in conjunction to help offset it.
Stuff like that.
If you had 5-6 solid affix ideas that rotated, the timer aspect would be up for only 1/5 or 1/6 of them (or if you’re varying 8-10 ideas but having 2 at a time, maybe 1/3 to 1/4 of the time, but still not ALL the time), and you could even graduate how scoring is done even more. So if you say at +15, each dungeon awards a “dungeon” score of 200, but each affix adds 10% more on top of that base score to equal 300 per dungeon (making 2.5k KSM with 10 dungeons), you have factors you can modify with base dungeon score, % each affix contirubtes, where KSM is etc., to vary HOW score thresholds work for people. For example, if you decide people would on average need to do dungeons with a mix of 2-3 affixes to make KSM (so 2-3 weeks in if they’re doing a range of +15s), or they could progress into +18-+20 in week 1 and get it outright, that’s kinda nicer than the current Tyrannical/Fortified split. I also think it’d be a nicer way if different affixes focused on different challenges to overcome for groups to opt into the different challenges they want to do, and maintain separate scoring systems into them. So people who are into time trials can do that, but people who want to push higher and higher on the “super bosses” aspect, or the Immortal challenge can look at that.
I think beyond that with affixes, Blizzard should think more about seasonal changes to dungeons. Having story progression from patch to patch happen within a dungeon could create some interesting changes to pathing, and offer different challenges. Some examples might be stuff like in De Other Side, you start of at the bottom of the Ardenweald zone in 9.3. You now fight through an Ardenweald that has been re-originated from Zereth Mortis, causing it to instead have frog prototypes, avians, and what not. You fight your way up into the trap room, where the boss of this wing is - a Crazed Oracle. Once you’re out of there, you meet up with Bwonsamdi, and do ZG and Mechagon wings as normal. Or in the case of Theater of Pain, you start in the bottom, do all wings, come up to Affront of Challengers, do that, then a Maw invasion happens, then you fight Mordretha.
Along with this, replace Loot tables with new items, new cosmetics, new pets, stuff like that. There’d also have to be new achievements, new achievements that tie into Glory meta-achievements, etc. Given you’re able to re-use an existing dungeon and all the platforming, and even most of the mobs, it should be much easier to move/insert some mobs around, and maybe change a small handful of bosses, and make things feel fresher between Season to Season, without having to wait on whatever trashy megadungeon comes in to be buggy and annoying one patch.
A lot of these are various random thought, and I’ve already disclaimed that some of them are ideas I’m not a fan of (but others might be), but that’s the direction I’d personally like affix design to go more into.