You have to stop with these Affixes

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

TLDR: We’re sick of negative affixes and 40 minutes dungeons, give us positive affixes that if executed correctly, turns a 40 minute s**tshow in to a 12-15 minute enjoyable experience.

Wall of text alert, this is primarily for Blizzard - if the boffins in HQ ever even look at anything the player base has to say (mostly not, evidently.)

Every affix we’ve had to date, has put players in the position where they don’t want to do Mythic Plus for a whole week because the affixes are so damaging to their play - especially on weeks where they DEFINITELY don’t go together… Grievous and Bursting from just a few weeks ago ring any bells, healers?

Now, we’re going to get Affixes with a vine snap where you have to click it and move 10 yards in 8 seconds or suffer a 3 second stun… in game where it seems like more and more mechanics are appearing or changing, to the point where if we carry on at this rate, we’ll need a 3rd Trinket slot to slap a PVP Trinket in, to counter the ridiculous amount of stuns, snares and roots.

Then you go and do a thing like make an Affix where you have to heal it up or dispel it… with dispel/cleanse being the primary focus… when there are SO MANY cleansable spells popping off at literally every moment, and any one of them can kill someone at any given time… so… here’s an idea, in a system where we’re already abusing the ever loving hell out of a classes’ ridiculous dispel cooldown (Here’s looking at you Evokers, with 2 on massive CD’s) - it’s just getting beyond a joke at this point.

I do not understand why you have to make Mythic Plus as unbearable for SOME (NOT ME, I wanna set that straight right now, I’ll go in any week regardless of what’s on - but… sir, I’m a Demon Hunter, so all I care about is damage and CC)… but SOME find it unbelievably stressful and unbearable…

Have you ever thought of… oh, I dunno… making it fun?

What about a rotation of POSITIVE affixes, and the stronger an affix is, the less time you have to complete the dungeon?

See… right now, when someone messes up these current affixes, people leave the key and it gets bricked down to the next peasant level below. Now that can be… 2 people die to thundering stun in the first 3 minutes of a dungeon, I’ve seen it happen - and then someone leaves. Key’s done for.

Why not make it so, that worst case scenario is you just don’t get the good rewards. Like if you suck so bad at the affixes, you don’t get the positive effects of them, and you fail the timer… but, it can still be done just like a normal dungeon, it’s just going to take 25 minutes, instead of 11. As a rough example.

Not only would positive affixes negate the leavers of keys, forcing players to either sit out of Mythic Plus, or battle with trying to get people to come to their keys - but it would also increase the rate of play. We competitive folks like fast paced play… we get a much bigger sense of achievement when the urgency of something is overcome, and the best way to do that - is by giving positive affixes that buff you, if you complete the objective of the mechanic.

Let’s take the healing Affix for Season 2, Afflicted.

Currently, the mechanic is:

Afflicted – While in combat, Afflicted Souls appear that seek the aid of players. Afflicted Souls spawn with poison, curse, and disease afflictions. Removing any of these afflictions or restoring the spirit to full health causes it to despawn. Fail to remove their afflictions in time will inflict players with a negative status effect.

But what if… instead of being a negative impacting design, on a 40 minute key timer at say, +15… it was… positive… on a 20 minute timer at the same level, and what if it looked a little like this:

Afflicted – While in combat, Afflicted Souls appear that seek the aid of players. Afflicted Souls spawn with poison, curse, and disease afflictions. Removing any of these afflictions or restoring the spirit to full health causes it to despawn. Fully healing or cleansing the posion, curse or disease affliction will grant a 15% healing increase to all players.

Now… because this is a positive affix, it means… instead of lengthening the timer, we shorten it. A 15% healing increase means the tank is going to heal harder, the healer is going to heal harder, so the pulls can get bigger and more aggressive, in order to beat the timer.

There’s literally no downside to positive affixes and a smaller timer. Having it this way would mean…

  1. Players who struggle with mechanics won’t get abandoned so frequently in their keys, because the dungeon is still achievable without receiving a single positive buff from the affixes, it just won’t offer more than the base level loot and won’t increment to a new difficulty.

  2. Those that DO do well with Mythic Plus Affixes, will find their dungeons taking 10 minutes, instead of 20-30. Meaning they can consume more of your content at a rate that doesn’t require us to invest so much time in to the game that it becomes a second job. We’ve all done it, just 5 keys and you’ve lost almost 3 hours of your night when all is said and done and you’ve done the forming of a group, etc. This is unsustainable, and explains why half the player base who enjoys Mythic Plus, falls off after they’ve done their 20’s for the achievement and portals. Why the hell else would you even continue at that point, when it sucks up so much of your time. 10 minute dungeons from strong control and mechanic play, means we can do more and feel good about it.

  3. It’s more rewarding. Why do we do dungeons and raids and all the rest of it? LOOT. That’s why. So if you’re able to attain it quicker, that by definition is… more rewarding. Which means more players are more happy for more of the time.

  4. Mythic Plus right now, is a toxic cesspool of Chads and Bads, the 5% elite population, the extremely terribads, the casuals, the people having an off-day… switcheroo for the better of the players, making this content easier to digest.

  5. Player retention. Try it out, and then I’ll be happy with a $1,000,000 check from Blizzard, for this beautiful, insightful idea that ultimately leads to you retaining more players, for longer - a direct business profit that can be quantified extremely easily just by simply looking at the players previous drop off points prior to the change, vs after the change.

8 Likes
2

And I’m sick of people pretending like they’re asking for a reform instead of simply nerfs.

Affixes are inherently kiss-curse for the simple fact that the difficulty level (a +13, +18, etc.) is tuned around those affixes being a potential constraint and challenge and the bonuses per rank to mob %Damage and %Health are thereby reduced for having those Affixes.

The tuning increase per keystone level is already being deferred into (reduced in compensation for) those “negative” affixes. If, say, an i410 player is managing to do a +20 before being necessarily one-shot by an unavoidable raidwide boss AoE, it’ll be because of the reduced damage increase per keystone level that those Affixes already brought about.

The dungeons are supposed to average some given difficulty per keystone level, with or without Affixes, as to be deserving of X item level gear directly and per week via Vault. Drop the Affixes, which you’re rightly calling an extra challenge/constraint, and that difficulty is just added to the raw scalar. You’ll just have that much less agency in dealing with it and variance between runs from week to week.

Whereas those who handle the given affixes well will get through a dungeon in some 30 minutes, if you trade the affixes for further raw damage and health, then everyone would take as long to get through their dungeons as those who handled the Affixes poorly.

To be clear, I’m not against directly kiss-curse Affixes, but you should expect then to see higher mob %HP and %Dmg bonuses per rank affected by them. Unless, again, you’re just going for outright nerfs.

  • Moreover, unless you’re wiping repeatedly, you’re not coming up against those timers anyways at any key level where the Affixes would still give people significant trouble, so your reducing difficulty makes the shortened timers largely redundant/irrelevant.

To me, a good speed for a “marginal-difficulty/appropriate-level” dungeon is around 25-35 minutes. Moreover I like there being a real threat of a wipe in a dungeon that could potentially increase one’s ilvl directly, even if I’m not typically going to go for a Tyrannical dungeon well above my means just for the higher weekly vault (since I’m not a fan of taking an hour+ on a single run). But I’d be bored af is they all went as quickly and easily as a ~12-minute Valor farm run. To my mind, such should be an option (via Valor farming) but also an outlier, not the norm.

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That’s all very good, but the point of a proposed change is lost on you, it seems.

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4

I largely agree with most of what you said, but I do disagree with this. Having a JY or SBG in the pool means that the correct play pattern is to reroll repeatedly to get that key and then +2 it to get your +20s or +25s or w/e. That play pattern shouldnt exist and having a “valor key” immediately makes this the case.

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Why is this bad? Even the most successful content in this game follows a similar pattern. People complete all of their personal goals within the content and then move on. This is how most things work, even outside of WoW.

You mean easier to ignore? People who want to learn dungeons and affixes can do so in lower keys and gradually climb, but if someone doesn’t want to learn, they just aren’t going to, no matter how much you want to change affixes or mechanics to spoon feed them.

Player retention tends to spike downwards after removing valor caps and implementing multiple nerfs. Turns out when players can just grind out their goals within a week, they end up logging off afterwards. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the idea that making content easy keeps people running content. Eventually the people who want easy content in a scaling system will still hit a wall, and on a ladder system that wall will be the same place relative to their position on the ladder regardless, and they’ll approach it with the same mindset. If a player is adverse to failure and walks away from the game as a result, they’re going to do that anyways, even if the content is easy.

1 Like
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As someone who has been playing M+ as their main source of content since the start of bfa with a little bit in Legion, These affixes have got to be the worst to date, and there’s weeks in this current rotation that i don’t even want to touch, this weeks combo being an obvious one of said weeks, its miserable having to deal with explosives and sanguine, and Sanguine + Tyrannical just does not go well, especially not in pugs. AA is almost damn near impossible to time 19 and higher because people don’t knock mobs or they don’t kill explosives. This next season i’ll probably just hit KSH and be done with M+ besides weeklies because just, the dungeon pool alone will be miserable, the only one im remotely looking forward to is Freehold, it’s the only dare i say it, fun dungeon. UR coming up after that one. The 4 dragonflight dungeon’s were going to be doing will be hell to do. each and every one of them. i wish they would just stop ruining M+, but Blizz clearly don’t care about the m+ community even though it’s quite possibly the most played content in the game.

3 Likes
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???

I’m not sure why you’re taking “the only 12-minute runs I’m okay with would be hugely overgeared Valor farms” to mean "I’m okay with significant imbalances in difficulty between dungeons.

That comment had nothing to do with the dungeon, only the difficulty level relative to its runners’ capabilities.

That a player capable of running +25s can reroll faster slightly shorter dungeons to get from an M2 to an M25 a bit more quickly is mostly irrelevant. I can’t honestly say I care whether a BiS Mythic raider stepping into M+ for the first time might farm their key up a bit faster.

  • The problem is if a couple dungeons are so much easier to progress than others that those dungeons’ inclusion or exclusion skews the expected quality of a M+ player with a given overall M+ score and oblige rerolling for weekly clears. That sh*t’s annoying.
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From everything I’ve seen from the PTR I have almost no desire to run M+ at all this season outside of Storming and entangling weeks. It flat out doesn’t look fun and that’s why i play the game, to have fun.

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overtune dungeons, and make affixes be mandatory buffs that must be obtained and used properly for the timer and survivability to be possible.

win-win.

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Because they’re the same thing.

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Spamming M2s for Valor is in no way literally “the same thing” as getting your first 25 in SMBG because the others are harder.

???

One is a matter of the run being quicker because it’s a low key done only for the Valor. The other is a dungeon easier than most others. The relative ease is miles apart and for two totally different reasons.

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You don’t speak for me. The people that predominately run mythic plus will be fine. Our lord and savior Ion is based he knows it’s just a player skill diff at the end of the day . They will be nerfed heavily tho before release don’t worry

Believe it or not their is people that like affixes

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Affixes being difficult isn’t really what bothers me. It’s when affixes are just really annoying is when M+ stops being fun.

Explosive is a really annoying affix even though it’s one of the easier ones. And these new affixes, even after they are inevitably nerfed, are just new iterations of explosive.

Just to clarify what makes explosives (and incorporeal and afflicted for the same reasons annoying)

  • Nameplate spam making it difficult to target anything in particular on large pulls
  • The feeling of futility when you wasted time swapping to do the mechanic only to see someone else do it 0.2 seconds before you did, making your effort pointless

That is why I really don’t like explosives and it’s why I already know I’m not going to like afflicted and incorporeal either.

I think the affix would be greatly improved by just only having the Orb/Mob appear to a single person at random, and only they can deal with it - and if you fail the effect falls only on you. This would solve both of the issues I have with these type of affixes.

2 Likes
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TLDR but would like positive affixes.

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I’m just tired of getting constantly bombarded with annoying affixes.

The week before it’s Spiteful+Grievous so I as a healer can’t even drink after trash pulls and then I have to deal with Grievous adding +25% additional healing requirements.

Then you get Explosive+Sanguine so I have to blow up 80+ explosive a dungeon.

Then Bolstering (trash affix) + Storming and Bursting+Explosive (absolute cancer combination) after.

I’m completely done with running keys until 10.1 launches out.

2 Likes
16

The only affixes that ever made me not want to play have been necrotic and explosive. One is gone, hopefully the other follows soon.

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Old bolster Was that for me. Infinite 20% damage and pull a boss with adds and that boss is 5 key levels higher or just wipe it up.

1 Like
18

Oof, I remember our group making that mistake in SL at some point (not sure when the duration change was though). Pretty sure it was in NW, we pulled all the trash into the first boss and learned quickly that was a very poor choice.

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Agree. I support OP’s idea. There is no valid reason for negative affix craps. High end groups will be limited by their own class’s dps or survivability limits. At least let us civilians who are the majority enjoy the game with positive affixes.

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My most hated affix is sanguine. I have to kite mobs all over place and can’t control mobs properly. And sometimes I have a small add dying right bellow a big guy that start channeling a 10s uninterruptable ability, then I automatically /bubble-hearth out of the dungeon.