With this season just getting started, I wanted to pump out as much feed back as I could to hopefully get some good changes out.
The new seasonal affix is just not fun in it’s current form. The reasons why are:
The sleep bubbles that come out from the normal guys are sometimes hidden under the floor textures and literally impossible to see. This needs fixed ASAP as tanks are getting stunned for 6 seconds back to back. Maybe add a diminishing returns aspect to the sleep cuz 2 back to back 6 second stuns from sleeps that you literally can’t see is almost a guaranteed whipe when it’s the tank or healer that gets it.
The normal guys are fine damage wise, but the mini boss is just un-fun, and requires way too much to pump into them to make them worth the stats they give. It’s almost always going to be better to skip this mob then waste CD’s to kill it. The only caveate to that is if you have a healing reduction like mortal strike that makes his shield and healing somewhat ok. But even then, it’s shield is just way too big, too frequent and just uninspired. Additionally, the bat is just not a fun mechanic either. it being CC able is great. However, most every class has AOE built into the single target rotation and because the miniboss chain shield and stands still, CCing the bat in a place that wont get the CC broken is almost impossible. Especially in places like upper kara where you’re on a bridge with limited places to move anyway.
The rewards for killing these, the stacks, are not very impactful to people playing classes that don’t benefit from haste as much. Classes like Shadow priest are absolutely loving it, but classes like WW monk don’t play any differently and the affix doesn’t change any way you play the dungeon. It’s almost like a single sprinkle on a sundae. Sure, it’s nice to have, but I’m not going to buy the sundae for the spinkle and it’s not going to make me enjoy the sundae any better.
My suggestions for fixing the seasonal affix would be to make it so that instead of flat secondary stats, we all just gain primary stats. That would make all classes feel the impact of gaining these stacks and have positive benefits to all classes instead of just some. Additionally, rework the miniboss to make the shield have a longer cooldown between casting it, reduce the healing she does, and remove the bat. It’s just not a good addition at all. As mentioned before, bring the sleep bubble up to the top layer of the textures on the ground as well.
For the dungeons themselves:
Lower Kara - Needs tuned badly. Kind of hard to comment on anything with real substance atm because of the tuning.
Upper Kara - 1 shot party kills in lower key levels is bad. Make flame wreath damage scale with key level and start out lower. Remove all mini bosses and seasonal affix mobs from the walkways. This feels bad. It’s not fun, it’s not intuitive, it’s not skillful. It’s a crap shoot on where sleep bubbles are going to go and if you’re going to get pelted with a billion bat vomits all at once because of the sleep bubbles that take up 50% of the path wandering aimlessly. Make the falling portion when you get shrunk happen way faster. This takes up so much time just idle and falling. Treat it like a cinematic and let us skip it.
On the curator, fix the visual indicator of the blue swirls. The swirls are not the correct size of the actual AOE and it causes a lot of confusion and frustration in pugs. The last boss, remove the portal over top of the last platform it blocks view from overhead and makes it impossible to see anything. Super frustrating.
Mechagon junkyard and workshop - Both of these feel fine
Tazavesh - Both of these feel fine
Iron Docks - The ranged non-caster mobs at the start of the dungeons are shooting through walls and can’t be LOS’d to group them up. Specifically the first or second pull and then when you’re pulling the room with the miniboss in it. That should be adjusted.
First boss of iron docks, the arrows need to have an indicator of where they are going to land and the damage is a touch too high. Iron star interaction and tank interaction is big good! really like things like this where you can pull a ton of trash into the ironstars and let them get mowed down. 2nd boss seems fine. 3rd boss - Omega cat - The damage needed to stop his ravage of a target needs to be tuned down. It’s currently too high and things like bop and immunes are needed to break it. This will not scale well with higher tyranical keys especially. Additionally, provide a shield or visual representation of how much damage is needed still to break it. Last boss, damage is slightly over-tuned, but doable. The biggest thing is there is no way to proc the knockback early or late and so it sometimes will just launch your group together with quaking to just 1 shot the whole party. No way to outplay or anything. Maybe give us a way to make him throw us back early or late so we have some player agency in this and allow us to play around the quaking.
Grimrail - First boss - damage is way too high and too much. Trash in the train car its self has too many AOE’s that are not visible. I found myself standing in a flame patch as the tank and had no clue because the textures are not visible, same with the flame thrower. These textures need to be clearer. Cannon boss is just bad. Theres no way to spawn the adds you need when you need them so it’s a crap shoot on if you’re going to take 5 minutes on the boss or 10 minutes. the volume of valuable mobs needs to be increased to make this a viable dungeon on higher keys. Last boss - this boss needs a visual representation of where the lightning breath is going to go. There is currently none. I dont mean a small tinge anywhere, I mean literally nothing that says where it’s going. This needs changed. The frost traps are great! they give a big blue spire of light showing where they are. Add swirlys or something that show where the big blue bad is going too and that makes the boss 100% more doable.
In general, I will say that it feels like these dungeons are made for single target ranged classes more than AOE classes and melee classes - less warriors, who are only good to deal with the mini-boss from the seasonal affix due to shattering throw and mortal strike. This also feels like the meta will shift to be rogues again as there is no way for non-stealth classes to skip trash without pots/etc. I would like to see things that give us real choice in how we play the dungeons going forward when considering seasonal affixes.
-ADDED 11:39 PM 8/3/22 -
just did a workshop on my survival hunter. Need to remove the blue texture colors of the legs on king mechagon and other mobs similar to that (skolex, etc) when resonating arrow is used. On King Mechagon, 2nd phase, resonating arrow makes it so the legs of king mechagon are visible through the platform and are so big and blue you actually can’t see any mechanic (quaking or swirlys or lazer, etc). Just disable the visibility effect for mobs/portions of mobs that are underground. There’s literally no need for it. Noticed this same thing on legion timewalking in eye of azshara’s 2nd boss.
Just got out of upper kara. It was just a +2 but can confirm. Flame Wreath is a horrible ability that detonates if your non-combat pet sneezes and instawipes your group.
And no, it won’t tell you whodunnit. Room explodes and it’s Medivh’s fault, apparently.
The general texture/graphical bloat in retail is out of control. If the game is going to continue to push towards overlapping dodge-or-die mechanics, they need to be much clearer and not obscured by the world-ending anime abilities that every player has now. Turning on essential only graphics also turns down enemy effects, so that’s not helpful. The edges of many effects are fuzzy and with a little lag, it’s very easy to clip, especially as melee when you’re trying to stand in the one tiny hole available to you in range of the boss.
Yeah… some of the mechanics like ground fire are instant spawn, instant dmg effects.
Some of the enemies have directional attacks that are only distinguishable by which direction the npc is facing. You can’t see them at times through all of the enemies, players and spell effects.
Just cleared a +16 Grimrail Depot and Thunderous Breath does 45k dmg to everyone in the group and there’s no visible way to avoid it.
Also, enemy hp bars don’t show up in some of the dungeons even with enemy nameplates active.
I found this to be brutal in upper Kara with Quaking.
Blizzard Pitch meeting be like:
“Here’s a small Ramp/Platform with a mini-boss who spawns swirlies and sleep puddles, so let’s also throw in some bats dropping bombs and a quaking affix for good measure. Don’t worry about too much ground clutter, we’ll hide half of them under the floor due to textures clipping”
I agree with basically all of your points. I would add that both Karas need more/better respawn points.
I pointed out that ground /frontal effect visibility is a big thing that needs to be improved on, and it’s not just a “L2P” issue but it ventures into accessibility. I went MM for this week but because there’s so little room to move for melee.
Junkyard was a blast, every effect is clearly visible. Grimrail is just misery, which I knew was coming but now I’m experiencing it firsthand. Suppression fire lasts way too long and is miserable if you’re targeted.
Feel free to take a stat that isn’t haste if your spec doesn’t like haste. There’s three others to choose from.
Heaven forbid poor little windwalker monk doesn’t get the absolute most benefit from the seasonal affix, and the great and oppressive Spriests and Boomkins of the world are actually allowed to play the video game. /s /notreallyflamingjustbeingoverthetop
This is a super boring affix, but it’s one of the best they’ve released in terms of equity among specs. Urh literally did nothing for 3m classes like Balance druid last season because we had to sync our long buttons and trinkets. I dunno what spec doesn’t enjoy having 20-40% haste or crit added onto their character sheet, but I’m surprised to hear anybody complain, honestly. Especially one of the specs who is contender for literal best M+ spec in the game.
as soon as the bat is cc’d in anyway, even if broken, you can ignore it currently. the cc stops his MC cast and he doesnt recast it and eventually despawns without any more dps being applied to it allowing you to focus on breaking the shield
you can pick your stat, as a prot pally I grab mastery every time, but when I eventually get more S4 gear I will swap to haste when I am not pushing.
this would not benifit tanks survivability unlike secondary stats
I think you’re missing the point, but to keep things on track, I’ll clarify. All I’m saying is that this affix doesn’t change anything in the way you play the dungeon. Regardless of if you like urh or not, there was still a strategic choice on if you wanted to invis skip things or if you wanted vy for the haste buff that lasted longer and then stack it into urh too.
Thanks for that information! I didn’t realize that this happened, but I knew I needed to CC it. I guess the point then goes, why even have it if any disorient/CC makes it do nothing.
I know we can swap the stats, but it doesn’t change anything in how you play the dungeon regardless of the stats we have. I personally choose versatility on my tank because I’m already over 50% block chance and have enough haste that I permanently have the SOTR buff up while also being able to spam WOG. You’re not going to pull more or less mobs in a pack based off of how many stacks you have.
In most situations that I’ve been in, survivability has not been an issue. I’ve been able to pull 3 packs together with the seasonal affix into some bosses and not feel at all in danger. This is while still at 277/278 Ilevel so this is only going to get better, especially when we get updated trinks like fated shard/OWS.
Speak for yourself. I got to 81% block chance and 20% from consecrate alone… There are certainly dungeons where you can’t upscale pulls, but in dungeons where you don’t overload your team, being an unkillable God will allow for some really big pulls.
There are 6/8 dungeons that are brand new to a large portion of the game’s population, and haven’t been ran in years for the rest of us. To have such a large portion of the dungeons be new, to have the season only be ~4 months long, AND to have a new affix that gives you some kind of dungeon skip warp powers would mean the learning curve for most players to get proficient at these dungeons would be way too high. That’s why half of the dungeons are straight line dungeons with very little extra percent to even pull. They want the season to be easy to digest and master because you don’t have very much time. That’s why the affix is simply kill mob get stat, and that’s great. If we were going into a fourth season of having to do plaguefall and spires again then I’d absolutely want an affix that somehow makes those dungeons shorter and gets me out of them as soon as possible, but that’s not the season we have.
UPDATE i have now tanked everything at 15+. Definately the clear outlier is lower karazhan.
lower Kara -aside from the scaling there are a few things that should be adjusted. Checkpoints need to be added to account for the long distance you have to run in this dungeon. My suggestion would be the stage after you kill the theater boss. This gives you some choice in going to any of the other bosses quickly without all the running through of what you cleared. The spotlight ability hides other mechanics. On explosive weeks this is going to be extra unfun. Huntsman debuff needs to be more visible as well as the ground effects of the charge and frontal cleave. Additionally, there should be cast bars or somrthing to tell when the melee soak is getting ready to take place outside of addons. Base game doesnt let you know when its happening and can cause whipes. Moroes adds need visible aoe indicators. Like crispins frontal cleave, theres no indication on when its about to happen.
We appreciate all the feedback on the Season 4 Mythic+ dungeons that has been made thus far. We’ve made the following adjustments that will be in effect with scheduled weekly maintenance (starting tomorrow, August 9 in this region):
Dungeons and Raids
Mythic+
Affixes
Shrouded
Zul’gamux now casts Blood Barrier less often.
Zul’gamux has found a new location to hide in Return to Karazhan: Upper.
Grimrail Depot
Grom’kar Far Seer’s Storm Shield can now be purged.
Grom’kar Cinderseer will no longer cast Lava Wreath.
Railmaster Rocketspark
Borka the Brute’s Mad Dash damage reduced by 30%.
Skylord Tovra
Thunderous Breath initial damage reduced by 25%.
Iron Docks
Fleshrender Nok’gar
Dreadfang’s Shredding Swipes should no longer hit players multiple times.
Oshir
Feeding Frenzy now requires Oshir to suffer 5% damage to be interrupted (was 8%).
Skulloc
Skulloc’s melee damage reduced by 15%.
Koramar will no longer cast Shattering Blade.
Return to Karazhan: Lower
Ghostly Philanthropist will no longer cast Throw Coin.
Gang Ruffian’s Poisonous Shank damage reduced by 30%.
The Opera Hall: Wikket
Winged Assistant health reduced by 30%.
Moroes
Moroes’ Garrote duration reduced to 1 minute (was permanent).
Moroes’ Dinner Party effect now increases the damage and attack speed of nearby dinner guests by 50% (was 100%).
The thunderous breath change is nice, but what we really need is telegraphing for this ability. RNG and that dot are just stupid right now on higher keys.
Thanks for reading our feedback! Its really cool when it feels like your being listened to! Big props to the blizzard team! These look like some really good changes!