Beta is about to begin but after playing Mythic+ in BFA for a couple seasons I can guarantee a few things (In my opine-ion at least):
Explosive is bad
Sanguine is bad
Fortified is bad
Tyrannical should just be default
Explosive is so frustrating to play as a caster, and as melee people are just using macros and tricks to delete them immediately which is unfair. It’s a really bad feeling and discourages casters in M+ when explosive is in play. I can say with certainty that being on a warlock and draining the souls of explosive orbs made me quit the game for several months as my rage-o-meter exploded off the charts like a missed orb.
Sanguine is another one that’s just totally frustrating depending on the dungeon geometry. In larger open areas it’s OK but in corridor dungeons like Waycrest in BFA and Sanguine Depths in Shadowlands Alpha, dropping a single sanguine incorrectly can totally derail a run as a caster mob stands in it and just heals to full for example. When that happens, it makes me want to scream, it’s just one of the most irritating things I’ve ever experienced. Plus, sanguine encourages DPS to be IN FRONT of the tanks! What the hell, it’s a complete 180 U-turn from common MMO knowledge where most of the time we’re screaming at the DPS to not run ahead and pull stuff, so arguably it breaks the very fundamentals of MMO dungeon gameplay.
Fortified is bad because mob health and damage already scales with the M+ key level anyway. It’s extremely confusing to new players in M+ when they realize that every other week the trash is super powerful and this adds entire trash mechanics which can otherwise be ignored on non-fortified weeks. For example maybe a mob AOE doesn’t do much damage but then fortified kicks in and suddenly your group is dying and nobody knows why. Not fun, just get rid of it and keep the scaling with every level of M+ in, that way as the keys scale higher people will be forced to gradually learn trash mechanics, and the trash mechanics will be more consistent in their behavior!
WoW bosses have too little health in general, even raid bosses. You don’t even have to worry about boss mechanics for the most part except on Tyrannical even before corruption started deleting everything and everyone in the game. The strategy has been to just max DPS and slaughter in almost every case except maybe on Tyrannical week where you might have to actually do some of the mechanics (e.g. Waycrest Sisters interrupts and stuff). Just make tyrannical baseline, maybe reduce it slightly in the damage output and let damage scale with M+ key like mob health. This way we get consistency in boss mechanics back from week to week and as the key scales people will be forced to learn more mechanics, instead of fumbling through some bosses one week, and then wiping nonstop on tyrannical week because the swing in boss damage is so extremely different from week to week. Let the boss damage scale with the key level so people learn it gradually, and buff the HP so the fights last long enough to actually see the mechanics in the first place.
If bosses are meant to be more serious by default, including way more health, than brez needs to be available baseline to all healers. Better yet it should be a consumable item of equal power to that of rebirth/soulstone/raise-ally itself. The current situation is unacceptable and brez is absurdly important in tyrannical weeks.
Also if bosses are more serious then all wombo combo stupid RNG must be removed. No more crap like extreme high damage powder shot on first boss FH, or barrel + grapeshot combo on second boss FH with eudora.
Explosives should have 1 hp so all classes can deal with them.
Sanguine is fine, although it really makes dungeons with mobs that run away pretty much unplayable on some weeks. (looking at you TD)
Fortified and Tyrannical are fine, they just need to be tuned. IMO, damage should not be tuned up on either of the affixes,
If Fort/Tyrannical only effected mob/boss HP, that would put more of the duty on the dps to succeed opposed to the incredibly uneven amount of responsibility on the tank.
I like the current system. Some dungeons are harder then others depending on affix combinations and to me that’s ideal. if you start pruning affixes and making every week the same it will get real Boring real fast. You want no sanguine, explosive, or fortified at all? What about bolstering? Some weeks trash is gonna be bolstered? What about bursting? Some weeks trash will die and kill you and some weeks it won’t? Grievous sucks for healers, necrotic for tanks. Skittish, so some weeks the trash just destroys everyone but the tank? What’s going on here!? You can go on and on here. It’s meant to be endgame, challenging content. More affixes the better! You can always do it ion mythic 0 without the affixes. The cream rises to the top. Adapt or die.
Explosive’s purpose is to be an attention check. It’s only problematic because it has just enough health that some classes can’t one-shot it, but not enough health where it’s actually difficult.
They need to either reduce their spawn rates but make them focus targets by ramping up their health (and probably damage), or reduce their HP to 1 and be done with it. I prefer the latter.
Honestly I think Sanguine should be larger, heal more, deal more damage, but silence/pacify everything standing inside of it.
It’s only a problem because of the sheer number of mobs that refuse to move without the whole group going on a sacred pilgrimage across the universe to get just far enough out of range and LoS for the mob to realize that maybe it shouldn’t stand there doing nothing.
Remove both and just increase the scaling per key level to compensate. Put another rotational affix in its place.
Honestly the problem with bosses being boring is a combination of lack of interesting mechanics paired with a lack of affixes that alter boss fights. Trash packs can change drastically but every boss fight is exactly the same every week regardless of the first affix, and usually the very limited number of affixes relevant in boss fights are trivial when fighting 1-2 targets.
Tyrannical turning bosses into massive health sponges is boring. I’d rather see more boss-specific affixes come into play. Random idea off the top of my head: Affix that allows all bosses to inherit an ability or mechanic from the previous boss killed. Unfortunately since they would have to do a lot of hand-picking and tuning to account for various combinations, I don’t think we’d ever get something like that.
Also, y’know, maybe they should stop making bosses that do 1 basic mechanic every 30 seconds and nothing else. Both Mechagon and back then Karazhan had bosses that were way better M+ bosses than the rest of the dungeon lineup.
100% agreed. I usually have the puddles planned out and then, mobs just run through me to get to them. Outside of TD, I can count on 1 hand the pulls that feel too squished to manage puddles.
Okay, this is finally the last darn straw Blizzard. How about you fix Shadowland Keystone runs with the ability to bring in folks after a pug person leaves or something in that manor. Here’s a fix as well along with that suggestion, instant fail the dungeon, you don’t get to upgrade it or get the chest, but at least allow players to find someone to complete it, get some form of loot at the end and at least try again at a lower level key. It’s finally gotten old that you spend 30 minutes to possible an hour, (yes sometimes you dirty trolls) and still people leave. I mean come on, listen, and fix this and stop wasting time to folks who can’t marry this game and who you would like you all to be on it 24-7-365. Please fix this.