The War Within: Dungeon and Affix Updates

[Renae-sargeras]

I have never heard a single healer I’ve ever run with say that.

[Ssear-zuljin]

@Nicechint-stormrage

Who thought this up? Is it April Fools? This has to be a joke. SERIOUSLY WHO IS THIS FOR!!!

This is the question I want answered. Who does this make the game more fun for?

[Bonezz-area-52]

So you have a week that melee literally can’t play the video game, no negatives for casters, and the new dungeons are already anti melee. lol. Absolutely incredible game design. I sure can’t wait for the exact same god comp that’s going right now to be the only specs you’re allowed to play again for another two years

How is this even real

[Ryeshot-icecrown (Ryeshot)]

@Stonekey-11472

We intend to better align reward and difficulty increases in the Mythic+ system by updating the introduction points of affixes in Season 1 of The War Within.

• +2 - Fortified/Tyrannical
• +4 - A new set of passive affixes
• +7 - Bursting / Bolstering etc.

Bad change. I don’t want to engage with on-death affixes when grinding my Aspect (or Aspect equivalent) crests.

@Stonekey-11472

Before we dive into the specifics of the new affixes, we would like to outline our goals and the purpose these affixes serve. Our overarching goal is to minimize the mechanical overlap between affixes and dungeon trash design in the current +4 affix bucket. We aim to achieve this through a more passive approach, focusing on the following objectives:

Notice how nowhere is “fun” mentioned. Give us seasonal affixes and remove everything else.

[Boremonk-area-52]

please im begging you, you made a mistake. its ok your confused delete this entire post. none of this is good you removed good affixes and kept the worst ones

we are all going to quit your game, wake up. fire the person who did this now

[Reynahrd-area-52]

Removing afflicted, incorp, entangling, storming, and volcanic so that we can focus on the dungeons is an amzing change. Even if these affixes are easy, they’re incredibly annoying. Not having to focus on boring chores will make M+ much more fun.

The new affixes don’t seem that good though. The goal of incentivizing different classes is good, but this is going to make things ugly for pug dps. It also sucks that none of the beneficial effects help healing. Shifting these effects from damage types to things like speed, cdr, or haste would benefit all classes and roles.

[Felrynpr-malganis]

that means you avoid twitter, god bless stay pure

i’ve seen a lot of trash

[Voidarcane-whisperwind]

@Stonekey-11472

With our new passive affix bucket set to replace the current +4 affix bucket, the following affixes will be retired for Season 1 of The War Within:

• Afflicted
• Incorporeal

This alone, makes TWW S1 a winner imo.

@Stonekey-11472

New Affixes

• Reckless
  • Non-boss enemies without mana ignore 20% armor with their attacks, but their armor is reduced by 30% and they take 10% increased Arcane damage.
• Thorned
  • Non-boss enemies without mana inflict Physical damage to their attackers when attacked, but take 10% increased Holy and Shadow damage.
• Attuned
  • Non-boss enemies with mana inflict 20% increased magic damage, but take 10% increased Nature damage and 30% increased damage from Bleed effects.
• Focused
  • Non-boss enemies with mana have 30% increased Haste, but take 10% increased Frost and Fire damage.

Also maybe instead of different attributes of damage you can simplify it to Physical/Magic instead?

[Cäpslöck-proudmoore]

@Renae-sargeras

Why get rid of afflicted

Because warriors on the forums complain.

[Zoki-malganis]

yeah, no, these are bad. these aren’t positive affixes in any way. they create one shot scenarios at lower key levels if fortified still scales the same way and having vulnerabilities to specific schools will either be so good you are required to bring classes that take advtange, or so unimpactful that they are not a positive benefit in any way. and bolstering and raging just don’t belong in a game mode that requires large pulls of aoe controls and slowly whittling down health pools evenly in order to time. bolstering already destroys pug tanks. raging will make the one shot scenarios you are creating with the +4 affixes even worse.

[Symm-bleeding-hollow]

@Stonekey-11472

Sanguine

Stormbringer is so dead lol. Perm 50% slow and Sanguine still exists.

[Vhx-black-dragonflight]

Since Chaos is every magic school but Holy, DHs have all 4 new affixes covered, right?

[Felrynpr-malganis]

prot warr on increase magical dmg week gonna be a banger

[Cäpslöck-proudmoore]

Then maybe people shouldn’t have complained so much about easy affixes that required you to do something.

[Asdasfdsfasd-area-52]

@Stonekey-11472

New Affixes

• Reckless
  • Non-boss enemies without mana ignore 20% armor with their attacks, but their armor is reduced by 30% and they take 10% increased Arcane damage.
• Thorned
  • Non-boss enemies without mana inflict Physical damage to their attackers when attacked, but take 10% increased Holy and Shadow damage.
• Attuned
  • Non-boss enemies with mana inflict 20% increased magic damage, but take 10% increased Nature damage and 30% increased damage from Bleed effects.
• Focused
  • Non-boss enemies with mana have 30% increased Haste, but take 10% increased Frost and Fire damage.

Please reconsider this. You are recreating the accessibility issues created by affixes like Afflicted and Incorporeal. People will generally min-max to have the highest chance to time their key. So that means classes or specs without a certain damage type will not picked up on certain weeks.

[Ravenfell-azralon (Ravenfell)]

Retiring Spiteful and keeping both Sanguine and Bolstering seems incredibly odd when these two are practically universally hated.

[Gorepally-sargeras]

This makes me sad. Blizzard was so close to a massive W and then they forgot to look at sentiment and ended with a massive L.

Hey blizz. All you gotta do is remove sanguine and bolstering from the game and you’ll get your massive W. Everyone hates those affixes. The data and sentiment supports this. Additionally these 2 affixes are far too impactful on the timer/routing and doesn’t align with the rest.

Spiteful wasn’t an issue. Keep that one and bring back volcanic and suddenly you got a good looking season.

[Xeph-aegwynn]

Retired Affixes

These include Entangling, Storming, Volcanic, Spiteful. Entangling and Spiteful primarily are commonly perceived good affixes. They rarely interact with dungeon mechanics and/or are easily dealt with.

Storming and Volcanic are disruptive for melee/ranged players respectively, but are also largely considered to be okay affixes.

Removing these is tone-deaf while keeping obnoxious affixes such as Bolstering and Sanguine which have seen nothing but nerfs and complaints over the years. There’s nothing positive about either of these. I urge you to heavily reconsider these choices.

New Affixes

This is not it. None of this makes sense. None of this is what people have been suggesting and asking for for years. Retiring bad affixes is good. Forcing people off their specs / to literally not play a pillar of the game for a week is not good design. A spec shouldn’t be bullied out of a week just because its not “their” week - this leads into the same problem Afflicted and Incorporeal have presented and those are well documented.

Reckless

• ignoring 20% armor hurts some tanks more than others, so this is already confusing

Thorned

• “non-boss enemies without mana” comes with an obvious accessibility issue of having to know to which this applies to
• does this include enemies with energy?
• a Thorns effect disproportionally affects specs that passively cleave as well as specs with uncapped aoe as well as specs with high attack speed. While this may be the intention, this again bullies people off their specs for no good reason.
• taking increased Holy and Shadow damage benefits only very few specs, again, trying to bully people off their spec

Attuned

• same as above, accessibility and vagueness
• increased Nature damage gain very niche, so are Bleeds
• probably the least impactful at this time
• on (current) Fortified, would lead to unexpected deaths because suddenly some mobs randomly do 20% more damage on the same key level as you’re used to last week. We’re already used to this from Fortified/Tyrannical in general, or just Bolstering. Not a fun experience.

Focused

• same as above, accessibility and vagueness
• 30% increased haste is guaranteed to lead to problems with some spells that already have a low cast time
• again, increased spell school damage is arbitrary

More Concerns

There’s also a secondary effect to this, assuming the damage amp for individual spell schools proves relevant enough (it won’t for coordinated groups, it will for pugs):
there’s now an increased burden of knowledge for tanks to be prepared for their current group setup in terms of routing.

As example, on Thorned, a tank now must be prepared for group compositions with uncapped aoe, knowing which specs are uncapped, when to pull around them for cooldowns while not pulling too big because otherwise they will just kill themselves from their uncapped aoe due to Thorned.

This directly goes against the proclaimed Dragonflight dungeon design which announced simpler dungeon layouts so routing doesn’t get as complicated. Not to mention that the scenario of DPS blowing themselves up for doing what they came to do is extremely concerning design if intended.

This announcement immediately has me less excited for Mythic+ in the coming expansion. Whoever came up with this is out of touch with the community. Do better.

[Omegal-proudmoore]

@Boogiemain-illidan

This does not make any sense… I understand the need to be inclusive to all classes and specs, but this is not it for me. Favoring certain damage types is NOT THE WAY.

Issue is, it’s not even fully inclusive. it ensures some specs will be good some weeks vs others, but other specs who are never good any of these weeks will enjoy the bench permanently.

this is also gonna lead to tank meta of the week nonsense too and that’s not fun either.

[Lådora-stormrage]

all that needed to happen was remove the terrible affixes to make the community happy. Bolstering, sanguine for example. What in the actual garbage is this? why do affixes need to be this crazy complicated thing. Imagine fortified with a caster having 30% increased haste??? like what??d