Hi there, this may or may not come across as a rant… But why is it that we have to have such bad affixes for weeks that most people consider them flat out as one and done skip weeks? More often than not there’ll be certain affixes that are just too much of an annoyance to see yourself attempting to push out keys with, so instead you’d rather just get 1 key done for the weekly box gamble, and call it a week. Tyrannical should either stop existing, or be reworked to make it where some bosses that don’t have pride and lust available for them deplete the key in and of themselves. I would honestly take tyrannical saying there’s some other gimmick, or just reduce the boss health down by 10-15% to be in line with their damage increase, rather than have them have 30% more health/15% more damage. But also, if you could playtest your affixes rather than designing them and making players beta test them in real time, that’d be nifty too. As marking certain mobs with inspiring makes some keys require an absolute stupid amount of coordination, necrotic makes certain bosses with quick attacks and no real breather a very hard enrage, especially when in combination with tyrannical, and let’s just cover necrotic wake and plaguefall while we’re at it… Both of these dungeons have uber deadly mobs for both tyrannical and fortified, which honestly is a good thing but they’re miles above all the other bosses/mobs in every other dungeon, aside from hakkar de other side on specifically tyrannical weeks. But at the end of the day, you walk out with 1 226 piece a week, and once you have ksm, which not counting the top1% groups in the world, most players already have a good stock of 226 gear getting theirs, unlocking an achievement to upgrade gear to 220.
And with that being said, why is it that mythic plus and raiding have to be tied together when the communities for them are so vastly different? You don’t have to do RBGs to get the best arena loot, though arena players and rbg players mindsets are completely different, So why do you have to raid to get the best mythic plus gear? Blizzard you want to tie down the idea that mythic plus is this starter to raiding, but then release a valor system for m+ that you cannot get from raids, It’s genuinely mind boggling that you’re self aware enough to know people from m+ community don’t have to go to raid to get valor, but keep the system in place so the only route people can get higher ilvl to make mythic plus at all doable for the average player is very end game mythic raiding… I get you want to reward players that struggle bus their way through mythic stone legion generals, and so on. But don’t punish players who do not like your raids by hindering our progress in your dungeons.
The only players who “skip weeks” should be those pushing several keys above +15, which is what Mythic+ was scaled for. Players who skip week, will generally still run their 10 +14/15s for the vault. Players who are running keys under +15s have no reason to skip.
You don’t have to raid to run mythic or vice versa, it’s a choice of trying to gear up as fast as you can. I don’t have a single piece of raid gear and I’m starting +19s.
You actually have it backwards. In general players who run keys will out gear raiders faster.
One way or another some affixes are straight out cancer while others can be breezed through. The rotation is flawed and some of them need to be redesigned or reworked to make things balanced because it’s not fun trying to do higher keys on Grievous, Bolstering or Storming weeks, let alone Tyrannical that’s up for 50% of the time.
Just because it’s more difficult doesn’t make it “cancer”. All of the rotations are completely doable with pugs to the +15 mark as long as the group is competent.
You have a problem with storming? Bolstering is also a non issue if you know how to focuses the right mobs or cleave down evenly.
In keys under +16, I actually prefer tyrannical. Most of my KSM +15s were pushed on a tyrannical week. Its a know your mechanics issue.
I’m talking about +20 range. Some affixes make doing those incomparably harder than this week’s affixes for example. It’s unbalanced.
Storming is a nightmare for melee. If you are ranged, you barely notice it. It isn’t as gamebreaking, but it’s definitely the most annoying affix for melee players.
Not quite. The difference on Fortified Hakkar to Tyrannical Hakkar for example is night and day past +18s. It isn’t noticed as much at +15s range.
The game was balanced for +15s and under. Anything higher is pushing beyond scaling along with unintended consequences. Keys have no limit and scale infinitely as long as it can be timed. They can’t possibly tune it so every affix is equal difficulty for every key level.
I mean, even the average player finds these affixes annoying. I’ve had friends new to WoW or returning players that played before M+ was a thing tell me without prior knowledge that some affixes are just not fun. An average melee player for example will rage at Storming and Spiteful to the last second, a lot of people will dislike Bolstering that slows everything down and healers will hate Grievous weeks, especially so during Prideful.
The thing is, they aren’t just unbalanced at bleeding edge keys. Some affixes are just inherently problematic to balance. Especially when there are weeks like Quaking + Sanguine or Bursting + Volcanic that are SEVEREAL times easier to do.
Annoying yes, but manageable. I wouldn’t go as far to call them toxic/cancer though in terms of the content it was tuned for. I agree that +18 and up you can really feel the balance shifting. Then again, I understand that part of the content is what I consider “extra” content for personal intrinsic reward rather than in game loot.
I wouldn’t know where to begin, the affixes are so different in terms of strategy and how they interact with other affixes. Strictly in terms of +15 and under I think it’s challenging and rewarding when a group does them successfully. I’m not sure how they would tune it for higher keys without upsetting the balance on lower keys.
They already nerfed these bosses because of tyrannical. My concern is that by tuning affixes for higher content, it would make lower keys not challenging enough relatively for those pushing that conent.
Things are definitely not perfect the way things are. I just don’t know how they would tune content for high keys like +20 without removing the challenge for lower keys like +10/+15.
They applied flat nerfs to the bosses health, but they didn’t remove the scaling issue. The issue is that extra encounter elements (shields, adds etc) are also scaling up in HP on Tyrannical weeks, meaning that these bosses effectively have a lot more than 30% extra health in Tyrannical weeks. This is something that they promised to fix at the end of BFA but still haven’t.
And it’s only an issue on certain bosses - eg adds on Amarth don’t scale their HP on Tyrannical week, but banners on Xav do. Why?
They did a flat tyrannical nerf, but they also did boss ability nerfs. Like Hakkar, his blood barrier deals like 25% less damage which is converted to a barrier. Same with the adds that deal 50% less damage which was also converted to a barrier.
You are right tho the bosses with barriers/shields are the more problematic ones.
The short answer is that Blizzard removed face roll easy affixes and replaced them with harder ones which are mixed in more into the schedule. Spiteful, Inspiring, and Storming are the new affixes this expansion. They also made Tyrannical too punishing because the bosses have way more mechanics than they did in BFA. We’re just not seeing the true difficulty yet because we’re killing them with Pridefuls that give us +30% damage for 60s.
So we’re in cycles of 1 push week, 3 bad weeks, 1 push week, 3 bad weeks, etc. Everyone will slam out every 20+ keys on the push week and then only do +14/15s for the next 3 weeks for the Great Vault. New world records have only been done on the push weeks and if you look at the top players the last few weeks: they haven’t been doing anything higher than +15s and +18s.
The only way to fix this is Blizzard needs to nerf or remove Tyrannical to give players confidence in actually pushing those weeks. Bolstering needs to be completely removed as well. If we’re going to have affixes like Spiteful, Storming, etc. than we should only face them at least once max in the entire cycle.
We need less of a punishing affix cycle as well. I’ll give an example rating them 1 out of 10 in difficulty.
Fortified Bursting Volcanic Prideful → 2 on difficulty (push week)
Tyrannical Bolstering Storming Prideful → 9 on difficulty.
Fortified Spiteful Grievous Prideful → 7 on difficulty (grievous is brutal on healers and Spiteful is a big time waster)
Tyrannical Inspiring Necrotic Prideful → 5 on difficulty.
Fortified Sanguine Quaking Prideful → 3 on difficulty. (push week)
Tyrannical Raging Explosive Prideful → 5 on difficulty.
Fortified Spiteful Volcanic Prideful → 5 on difficulty.
Tyrannical Bolstering Necrotic Prideful → 10 on difficulty.
Fortified Inspiring Storming Prideful → 1 on difficulty. (push week)
Tyrannical Bursting Explosive Prideful → 4 on difficulty
Fortified Sanguine Grievous Prideful → 5 on difficulty.
Tyrannical Raging Quaking Prideful → 4 on difficulty.
Yes but this is the same on Fort and Tyran week. But on Tyrannical week his blood barrier does more damage, which means he gets a bigger shield too. So again this boss in particular is effectively getting more than 30% buff on Tyrannical week.
Personally the only affix I really have a problem with is explosive. They already nerfed it to the point where it’s one of the easier affixes, but it’s still by far the most annoying. The amount of APM due to target switching required on explosive week vs every other week is off the charts.
If it was up to me I’d remove explosives, move bolstering to a level 7 affix (I think it’s too punishing for really low level groups) and come up with a new one to replace it at level 4.