I understand the Devs want to find a fun and challenging way to keep M+ keys feeling fresh. I also understand one players hatred for an affix, may actually be a fun or a mechanic that other players can just ignore.
Now the Kiss/Curse affixes are one I find rather engaging. Storming for the most part has been quiet fun and it lets players gamble pushing clearing their debuff to the last second to get the most performance from their character. This is actually good and those who play very high keys can use this to help push their keys. While in lower keys, most everyone annoying runs strait to you to clear the debuff ASAP. Regardless this is a good Affix.
Now EXPLOSIVES is one of those that is not fun and actually quiet distasteful ones that most everyone finds they have to not only dodge crap on the ground that can kill them. But also play whack-a-mole while trying to DPS/Heal or Tank… And instead of just getting rid of it. You gave it 600k HEALTH!!!
Honestly most affixes just need to be removed and instead just scale the dungeons of hard. Putting more Kiss/Curse affixes in that are optional are IMHO the way to go if you want to add more. But any affix that doesnt feel as if it is actually a part of the dungeon its self does nothing but take away the fun of actually playing the dungeon.
Blizz has been battling against addons. Many of their content is being beaten just by using an addon. Affixes were made becoz it is something that addons wont be able to help you.
M+ has very decent loots especially on Vault. Blizz wont give away such loots easily. That’s why there’s affixes in addition to the fight mechanics.
To me affixes spices up M+. If there are no affixes, doing the same dungeons over and over every week would be boring. Affixes changes that. Grievous last week is not the same as the current Explosives. It’s like we’re having different dungeons every week. I love it. I like it. There are affixes that completely counter my specs causing me to have low performance. It’s okay. With the right combo, you could still beat the affixes. Like right now, I hate Explosives as MM Hunter. I dont want to interrupt my Aimed Shots just to hit some Orbs. But when I get a group of combo of 2x melees plus the tank and healer focusing much on the orbs, I could just let my Aimed Shot nukes unleashed over and over. The most painful is when I grouped with 2x Range on Explosives week. 3 Range DPS’ers tab targetting on orbs and the Tank pulled 3 groups of mobs, it’s GG. ROFL.
But overall, affixes is fine. The harder the dungeon, the better it is for me. I am not coward on affixes even before I got KSM.
I wish they would add lockouts to M+ at every five levels. 1-5 once a week, then to 10 once a week, etc etc instead of tornadoes in an underground tomb. Make the actual mechanics of the dungeon harder and harder. Don’t just throw tornadoes at us in court of stars.
The only problem I have is when the additional damage and 1 shot capability from affix scales so high that your gear is null.
The whole point of doing all of this to get gear is to have a more powerful character but the affixes basically make it to where the game is dodge not gear up.
Gear in a M20 is pointless for survivability. It only matters for damage. It kind of makes the whole journey feel pointless. The whole game becomes super mario.
The problem with that is that M+ is a system to let players have fun constantly. Even heroic is just a one day lockout. If they made them almost weekly lockouts. Blizz would loose subscriptions as for many players its the only game play that fits their needs.
It’s just like Skayle said above. Your basically playing either Dodge Ball or like I mentioned Whack-A-Mole with the affix mechanics.
I personally like affixes where they can either be ignored or engaged in an way that when you complete them, you get a buff. They had sort of this at one point in Shadowlands. I would like to see where there is a few extra mob in a few placed packs that buffs those packs dmg (like giving them more stats). Defeating those packs allows you to take that buff from them for 8 mins. This allows players to decide, should be get them or should be just ignore them. These are excellent affixes.
They have changed Explosive on the PTR from Whack-A-Mole to a mob that everyone must defeat and is no longer a healer assigned task (yes everyone should do it, but pugs you know). This is fine as long as 5 of them do not spawn all at one time like they do now. However, I still believe that if you ignore them you they blow up and you loose 40% health is fine (if your close to them that is, like with-in 20 yards). But if you defeat them. Then you should get an additional 40% total health for 3-5mins… And reduce the radius of the blast to like 20yards if you choose to just run from it. You know, like put a carrot at the end of the stick…
It’s still going to be advantageous to run keys.
More chances at loot once you are locked to raid.
Aspect crest farming for the final upgrade tier and the crafted reagents will come virtually exclusively from mythic+ just like now with concentrated primal focus. And with crafted gear being bumped to 421, up from 418, it’ll be even more important to get them.
I feel like some of you people fundamentally understand what problem affixes try to solve.
Dungeons are played a lot, lot, LOT more frequently than raids. While we do have a new paradigm where dungeons will rotate every six months, reducing the need for something like a seasonal affix, week to week it would get monotonous if the challenge presented was the same. However, the goal of affixes is to present a challenge that is roughly uniform week to week, or at least roughly uniform across tyrannical keys and across fortified keys, and it is much easier to balance with respect to players optimizing the impact of an affix to zero than trying to balance positive affixes that could have a wide range of possible influences.
We do NOT want to make the game unplayable certain weeks by having one positive affix clearly better than others. At the current time, almost every single week of WoW is a push week. We have damn near perfect balance. It isn’t actually perfect, but it’s pretty tight in terms of balance, with only some slight outliers. You open up a nasty can of worms with positive affixes suddenly having an unknown balance point to shoot for, and if one positive affix is too strong we can end up disincentivizing every other week of M+.
to me positive affixes would also lead to a power creep scenario where classes perform much differently in m+ than they would in say raid or out in the world. Given how these types of benefits often scale off each other it could lead to scenarios where to make classes reasonable in m+ they’d have to be pretty much gutted everywhere else. I don’t think people would really find it fun to say, run with 50% haste in m+ and go back to having 15% or so in the open world.
Yeah, it’s really really weird. People talk about hating borrowed power but then they want their class to rely on temporary dungeon mechanics…?
Like I see healers constantly talk about wanting a mana regen affix and I’m thinking… just ask for Blizzard to fix your class bro. Or fix drinking mechanics. Something.
Oh man, it’s already bad enough that I can feel the haste diff between AA and other keys. Having S4 style affixes with 30+% haste and then losing it would feel awful.
Same, so I can finally just stop doing it at all unless I get a wild hair one weekend every few months. It hasn’t been terribly fun for me since early BFA.
Affixes keep things relatively interesting, and force you to adjust your play style and pay attention, without having to give the mobs new and random abilities.
Consider that with Classic, Onyxia, the big raid at the time, was 2-manned not too long after being released. Players have gotten better over time, and nobody wants to essentially do Torghast lvl 16 over and over again.
Imagine a world where affixes were randomized for each instance. I might be able to get into that.
Ironically affixes cause more addon usage. Weakauras seem pretty necessary for the new affixes
Affixes don’t make the challenge feel new and different despite that being their intention. Affixes get old fast. Some affixes that will be in S2 have been around since Legion. That’s not new! That’s a continual same-old.
IMO what would be better is putting that effort into dungeon design because affixes are a losing battle
BTW I’m not into the idea of positive affixes either.
Yea, sort of sux to get gear from raid. Just to then have to do keys to replace it…
OMG I would love that… After you put in the key and the instance starts you get a dice role for your affixes. That way the chance of doing other affixes and not stuck on what you just did. It would also help curb the weekly meta mess.
