Necrotic is a Tyrant of an affix. Please fortify my hope

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Edit: 9-15-20: Thank you for your reconsideration of the necrotic affix.

I understand that you guys are trying to close the time gap between fortified and tyrannical. In that aspect you have largely succeeded. Tyrannical has felt more reasonable than ever. At my level of keys it was always playable and tough but fair. And at my ratio of pugs to premade runs (very pug frequent) tyran mostly just punished groups with underperforming dps.

Necrotic is already brutal in its current state. Learning of the necrotic revert on PTR was some of the most devastating news I’ve seen in a while. While it may have been misinterpreted via data mining in the first place, cutting the rate of stacks for all mobs would have been a great change. My greatest fears have been confirmed, and fortified necrotic now exists in the game. This season is more accessible than ever for those coming to mythic plus keystone master has been easier to get than it’s ever been. Necrotic, however is an immense outlier, and now that it’s paired with fortified this is compounded greatly.

With the routes that I’ve followed to this point in the season, and what the best players normally pull, I’m trying to picture this affix if the interpreted 50% nerf to all mobs had gone live. It would still be quite prohibitive without good play, and still by far the most difficult affix.

In it’s current state, yes I can time 15s on the 5/6 tank classes that I play. However, logging onto one of my dps for a max vault will be an unecessairly long wait for a tank. An overwhelming amount of the time in group finder this long wait is for a tank that shows the affix no respect, dies instantly and leaves or compels other players to leave and ruin the key after a 20-40 minute wait.

This week and most necrotic weeks the average Joe is deciding what they can sacrifice on their M+ progression path for the week. The majority player opinions I regularly read are usually to the tune of getting much lower, much less of or no mythic plus great vault at all on necrotic weeks.

The ability to solo carry this affix varies greatly across all tanks. Paladin and UFR Bear feel quite good. Warrior is dependent on the pull and what’s hitting you. Demon hunter was the king of getting threat and running for their lives in 2 globals all of 9.0 regardless of the affix. Brewmaster being all but immune to boss necrotic is pretty cool, and ring of peace. Blood death knights have excellent tools to deal with dropping necrotic stacks, but their effective health drops faster than any other tank per stack. They also lose threat extremely fast without uptime damaging the mobs, even with mediocre DPS players.

I’m not even sure what it is I’m asking for here, and this is going off topic. You guys are really on a roll with quality of life and accessibility changes though. 9.1.5 looks like even more reason to play the game than ever before. Mythic plus has been a huge part of my life, I literally can’t enjoy this game any other way my life doesn’t allow it. It feels like a chunk of the group finder dies whenever this affix comes around, and I’m hopeful you guys can give it another look.

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How they’ve swapped the difficult affixes to fortified really makes the week difficult in pugs. Bolstering and necrotic really feels bad in a fortified setting. Every push week this season has bee tyrannical imo and it feels gross. That being said I agree with the post!

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I think it’s pretty clear the issue was never about fortified or tyrannical.

It’s easy vs. not as easy.

Mythic+ is already the welfare source of gear, and the 1-2 weeks it’s harder due to a tougher affix setting people get up in arms.

Maybe the players should just get 3 vault options of 252 from the raid if mythic+ isn’t good this week.

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Necrotic for +15s is a non issue. Ran 5 pugs, timed 5 pugs. It’s only challenging when you have dps who do less than the tank because the mobs stay alive longer. Or if someone keeps stunning/rooting them in sanguine. Both of which increases the challenge due to poor play.

Is it more challenging than some other affix combos? Absolutely.

Is it broken? No.

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It couldn’t be any more obvious that Necrotic and Bolstering are just terrible affixes no matter what week they occur. They just need to go.

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There are probably a lot of DPS at 15s who do less damage than a 248 ilvl prot paladin. If you’re doing 15s at that ilevel you’re slumming it, of course it will be easy.

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DPS were doing more than what I currently do, at 248, last season. This many weeks in, most players doing +15s are 240+. +15s were easy since week 1 without the new season gear.

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Again, I’m going to have all my vaults on my tanks this week. I probably won’t go for 2 on every character like usual, just because of the annoyance.

My main frustration is getting vaults for my non tank characters. This affix is an outlier among the others, it deters players, It makes wait times longer. If that’s their objective, to push players into other forms of content I can respect that. But I don’t think that’s the case.

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If there’s one week out of the rotation that’s particularly challenging, I don’t have a problem with that. People avoiding necrotic in lower keys doesn’t make sense. It’s not an issue for +15s and under where the mobs die quickly even on Fortified. Tanks that avoid this week are the ones who don’t know how to play the affix and they never will if they don’t learn how.

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Also, tanks by the nature of our role get amplified when doing content that’s below our level.

Because tanks get first dibs on hitting the mob, get control on positioning (e.g. no danger of having someone drag the mobs out of your ground effect), have snap aoe because it’s an integral part of the role, and are effectively guaranteed to have the majority of required tools on each pull (as opposed to damage dealing specs who are cooldown-dependent making some pulls do a lot of damage, and other pulls starved), “Tank DPS” is going to shoot much higher on trivial content relative to damage dealers, as a general rule.

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It sounds oddly like you’re trying to insult people you can’t even emulate. Seems like a case of sour grapes.

Either way, this isn’t a matter of ego. This shouldn’t be about specific individuals or how well the best players can perform. This is about how it affects the health of the game for everyone.

M+ has to strike a balance between offering a challenge without alienating players by setting the bar too high. Most affixes (not you, Bolstering) do a pretty good job of adding challenge, altering the status quo and not aggravating players irreversibly.

Affixes have a range where players at the bottom end slowly get squeezed out. That impact starts much lower with Necrotic and no other affix drives tanks into hiding the way it does. That’s not healthy for anyone, no matter who feels superior if they succeed over it.

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While Fort/Necrotic leads to some light-clenching moments, I was able to get my first timed 20 under my belt this week. The affixes are fairly easy to manage as long you’re not waiting until 60 stacks to start taking them seriously.

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Tyrannical is still an issue. They may of made tyrannical weeks better but at a certain level tyrannical bosses are still a huge pain. Having to change comp just so we can phase bosses is infuriating. Forced to have a ww for majority of keys.

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With an infinite scaling system, by definition doesn’t this have to happen at some point?

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But fortified even with terrible affixes is still doable at a certain level. Example we tried 24 mists last week. Bosses were extremely hard to kill due to scaling. This week while more painful is possible to time it and more flexible on time.

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I have to agree it’s a relatively manageable week, but I think there’s a significant disparity between what different types of groups can achieve. Necrotic is far more navigable with an organized group in coms. Even pugs at the upper levels will be more prepared to react when the tank needs to kite.

I think the problem with necrotic is that it can highlight any lack of coordination or preparedness far more than other affixes. If you tank doesn’t kite soon enough, or if your dps and healer don’t help manage mobs, things get out of hand quickly.

It punishes less experienced players far more, to the point I’d describe it as hard to learn, hard to master.

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I wonder if that might be part of the core issue. Is it reasonable to expect the general difficulty of keys between affix combos to be consistent, or is it okay that one week may be significantly more difficult than another?

By that I mean, should a +15 key be roooooughly the same (to a degree) difficulty no matter the week, or does Blizzard want a game where a +15 on one week is easy to the point of being trivial, but on another week it’s so extremely difficult for a lot of the player base that they just opt to not do it.

To be honest, I can’t really speak to one or the other. Personally, I like the challenge of more difficult weeks, but it also does feel at odds with the loot reward structure of the Great Vault, where many players expect to be able to carve a notch in their progress bar to progress their player power.

I think it’s really about expectations… what do players want vs. what does Blizzard want. I’m frankly a bit unclear on both.

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if they had someone think out the affix combos better, and then test them out before revealing the entire schedule, I think we’d see far less weekly complaints. Some of these combos just don’t sync well together, and feedback on these affix combos is valuable for the team, especially if they care about player participation metrics

There have been combos that were lots of fun for players of all levels & specs imo.

Bolstering is a really bad one imo that needs to just go away, or reward bonus stuff or something…necrotic means I can dps more as a healer, so i’m not complaining about that one lol

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My problem with necrotic is that its just a boring affix to play around. Nobody would complain if necrotic was removed, same with bolstering.

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It’s the combination of necrotic and sanguine on fortified that is the issue, either affix is not too bad by themselves, but together they are a recipe for disaster if your group is not managing sanguine correctly. Normally on sanguine if you get a mob healing for a lot, you just lose a bit of time. This week, it’s a group wipe because your tank can’t tank a pull for 2 minutes on necrotic week.

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