Mythic+ Affix Updates -- July 9

In Development The War Within Beta Test
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Greetings, dungeoneers!

Thank you all for your feedback on our new Mythic+ affix system. As we continue to review community responses for future adjustments, we’ve made updates in this week’s Beta.

New Affix

Continuing with the theme of Xal’atath’s Bargain, where players can harness powerful boons granted to dungeon enemies by the Harbinger, we’re adding a new affix to our Beta testing this week.

Xal’atath’s Bargain: Voidbound

  • While in combat, Xal’atath summons Void Emissary to empower nearby enemies, gradually increasing their damage. Upon defeating the Void Emissary, players harness the void energy for themselves, increasing their critical chance by 20% for 20 seconds.

Affix Adjustments

Xal’atath’s Bargain: Ascendant

  • We’ve seen a lot of feedback regarding the visual noise caused by the number of orbs being created. To address this issue, we’re reducing the total number of Orb of Ascendance from 20 to 10.

Xal’atath’s Bargain: Frenzied

  • We’ve heard feedback that this affix feels less visible compared to Ascendant, and is more punishing due to its passive nature without too much counterplay. It’s also less thematic compared to Ascendant where Xal’atath is present throughout the dungeon. With these considerations, we’re removing this affix from Beta testing.

With the Xal’atath’s Bargain affixes, we want to create varied challenges that highlight different class skills and utilities in ways that do not feel exclusionary. We look forward to your feedback and discussions on these changes.

We’ll see you in dungeons!

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You forced a purge into every group cause the shield is massive w/o one.

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Still way too many. I’d rather have it redesigned to something like: a few orbs appear (3-5 max, these orbs are not targetable, have no nameplates or castbars) far away and slowly move to mobs, if player walks over that orb it despawns and player gets a buff, if orb reaches mob, then mob gets a buff… Doesn’t spawn during bosses and doesn’t affect bosses.

11 Likes
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If they did this, they would have to make the orbs spawn away from the enemies, instead of just randomly falling from the sky and on top of enemies with no counterplay.

I still do not enjoy wasting an AoE stop/CC for these orbs when the dungeons require so many stops/interrupts.

But it is still a win, so far.

We will have to test this new affix, but at first glance, appears to be quite interesting. It also depends if this thing has a massive, scaling health pool.

2 Likes
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How about we just go with the fort/tyrann thing and stop cooking? You tried, meal burned, we appreciate the effort, it’s clear there won’t be an affix that doesn’t 1. Suck and remove fun 2. Force some kind of meta even more heavily.

Seriously, no sarcasm, the effort was deeply appreciated by a lot of us but it just doesn’t seem to work. Make scaling harder if the concern is vault being too easy to get (who cares, we all get there anyway or it just encourages sales), those of us that like pushing will find the cap, don’t worry; we’ll get there regardless but have far more fun with consistency and an unforced meta due to utility requirements.

14 Likes
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Howl of terror is still capped at 5 targets, which seems silly. It would be nice if you guys were to re-evaluate its power in relation to other classes with uncapped CC to deal with these orb sets. It’s a bit confusing why it is capped in the first place, I’m not entirely sure why it was designed this way, and it goes back over a decade now.

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Much better, great change.

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I dont speak for everyone but imo keep voidbound as a seasonal affix change it to “…increasing their damage by 20% for 20 seconds.” make is not purgeable and remove all other affixes just scale the dungeons better…easy fix only need to create and balance 1 affix per season

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Just get rid of voidbound…
stop cooking already, the food is already burned.

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Is the shield being purgable intended?

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Still far too many and you didn’t touch their haste buff?. I think you missed some of the feedback. Having to waste an AOE interrupt on these things feels horrible, we need those for the dungeon packs already so you’re forcing people into “Play the affix not the dungeon”, especially with the insane haste buff if you don’t stop them. It’s also very exclusionary as some classes have AOE stops in spades and others do not. It’s the exact same issue that came with afflicted and incorporeal, you’re setting up certain classes being excluded. So anything more than 1-2 is too many and requires an AOE. These either need to be poppable by running into them or some other mechanic.

7 Likes
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I wonder if the intention of this new affix “wasting” aoe stops is a roundabout way for Blizz to address the “stop” meta that’s developed over the course of DF.

One of the problems that’s been identified about healing in m+, and why so many coordinated high end groups can drop a healer, is they can lock down enemies with their AoE stops.

If we now have to waste them to interact with the affix we now aren’t able to lock down enemies as consistently and reliably, so in theory more healing will be needed.

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If a coordinated, high end group is so good that they don’t need a healer then they would be doing +12 and up which means they would not be doing these affixes at all.

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I absolutely detest them being called stops.

Don’t know why but it really grinds my gears. It’s CC. Which is even shorter to type out. Dang nabbit.

The ones doing 20s with no healer currently are running very specific comps, and I have yet to see them do it on beta.

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I’m failing to see how Voidbound achieves this.
For that matter, I’m failing to see how Ascendant achieves this.

Also, idk, it seems lowkey concerning seeing these affix ideas, especially with Frenzied getting scrapped. It seems like there’s a serious lack of creativity with affix design, which makes me wonder what the point is. Ascendant is essentially a reused mechanic, Frenzied isn’t a particularly original concept, Voidbound the same. If we go back further, the damage profile rotation idea seemed very … low-effort.

Going back even further, Entangling wasn’t exactly breaking the barriers of innovation. Afflicted and Incorporeal felt so copy-pasted from Explosives that players were literally memeing about 3 flavours of Explosive before the “reworked” Explosive got scrapped.

It certainly seems like the team is struggling to come up with good ideas on how to make interesting affixes that fit your stated goals, and it isn’t helping that you post one brief about what you’re trying to achieve, and then 2 weeks later come up with an idea that shatters exactly what you said you were going for.

If I assume Voidbound being Purge-able is a bug, why am I supposed to feel excited about having Void Emissaries drop in every just over a minute? The very design seems like it’s either going to be forgettable (when it pops in at an ideal time), or very annoying to the point of unfair (when it pops in at the worst possible time and players’ attention is busy having to deal with other mechanics). It’s the same pitfalls previously scrapped affixes have had, being repeated in a new flavour.

Not to mention, yay Crit buff. That’s certainly not going to cause issues with varied effects across specs.

The reason it’s called stops is that they’re spells that aren’t being used for their CC effect, but for the brief instant where they prevent a spell being cast but will be broken immediately. You aren’t popping a Disorient expecting mobs to stay disoriented; whereas when we’ve typically used crowd control, we’ve talked about things like keeping a mob trapped for the duration of the trap, or chain stuns, etc.

And sure, there’s some level of that still being used, like the chain stuns. Or silences. But stops conveys the effect of what these spells are being used for.

I don’t see how it would “address” that so much as petrify it so a group just has to bring a bunch of stops to deal with the affix, on top of anything else they can save for the mobs. It certainly isn’t going to help classes/specs who don’t have good, or shorter cooldown abilities get picked, or feel useful.

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Thats still crowd control. Even if momentary, you’re controlling their behavior.

Yes, it’s irrational but it drives me bonkers. Was never called that when I played last year, this popped up after I quit for a while lol.

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there’s plenty of creativity, the playerbase just doesn’t want to engage with any affixes period that aren’t effectively negligible mechanic wise

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Correct, we don’t, because it leads to dead weeks or an even more heavily enforced meta.

We want to play the game with scaling challenge points that allow us to A. Improve and see our improvement B. Not be locked to an exact 5 classes due to who can deal with what affix, and therefore building our comp around the affixes we can’t avoid as opposed to being able to have more than 1 giga comp.

Affixes have been here for ages, they’re outdated, the game and the level of play and achievements have surpassed them as a requirement. I love M+, when I was more casual affixes didn’t bother me at all, as I play the game more for the challenge I hate them deeply because there are weeks, simply put, where it’s better to just AFK and not exist on WoW.

For my personal experience; I cannot help with Afflicted, Incorp, Raging. Storming + Entangling are far more punishing to melee than ranged, which further exasperates the problem.

These are removed, thank god, but replacing this issue with a new affix that has similar issues shouldn’t be the solution.

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Right, and I agree fwiw. Creative mechanics or anything particularly demanding is fun for a key or two and then it’s tired.

Also agreed. They were nice to shake things up when we had the same dungeons for 2+ years straight, but now that’s not a factor.

I’m glad that moving forward affixes as we knew htem are more or less gone, and gone entirely at 12+

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110%, it was a great thing before the game was “e-sports” directed, but it simply doesn’t work now.

I appreciate the effort they put in, really, it was so refreshing to see new ideas being tried, and I think a lot of us now just agree that even with what I just said, simply letting them die is the ultimate win.

We shall see I guess haha.

5 Likes