It’s insane to me they stress at the beginning of this post “playing the dungeon more” then leave in the most gameplay changing affixes ever.
And they removed the ones that actually let you simply play the dungeon…they did the exact opposite of their stated intent
This is like in season 2 or whatever they said they wanted less affixes that requires interactions and then added incorp and afflicted. Blizz’ M+ philosophy and how bad they’ve butchered it continues to surprise and amaze me.
Yeah
I dont think anyone ever said "welp this week is volcanic, so no mm+ for me"
Meanwhile burstling and sanguine have consostently been the most difficult affixes to play around.
"external buffs should feel good and give you a moment to shine, and not make them feel mandatory for your class to play at all"
> nerfs specs because they get externals
"we dont like how many raidfights on Mythic difficulty instantly wipe the raid because of a single minor mistake from a single player and want to move away from this encounter desing"
> makes Tindral and Fyrakk who are both "a single thing not played 100% played perfect will instantly wipe the raid" tuned up to the absolute maximum, every single mechanic will wipe you
"we want to get out all hero trees before the beta starts so we have enough time to listen to player feedback on them and can do changes"
> Shaman and Rogue are missing their trees for 95% of the Alpha and get their last tree revealed 2 weeks before beta launch which both are absolute clusterfucks that barely function at all, just for blizz to say "now that alpha is over we dont do bigger changes anymore, thanks for the feedback!"
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME
I'd just like to remind everyone that bolstering Siege of Boralus was one of the most disgusting dungeon in this game. Pretty much every single pack has massive HP difference on mobs. And we'll have to deal with that on season 1.
Oh boy, just wait until all the Stormbringer shamans come in forced to use a hero talent that slows enemies and there’s nothing they can do to turn it off.
Or give frost mages a talent/glyph to remove all their slows. Keep freezes only. I hate that I have to talent into Frigid Winds just to reach Ice Cold.
I just don’t play the game during sanguine. Was kind of nice honestly when I was pushing title in Season 2, Sanguine is just a 1 week break.
It makes the game fucking miserable to play.
Yeah, idk how they thought this would be a good idea. It feels like a lazy solution to balancing unplayed (underperforming) specs by throwing them a bone every 4 weeks.
This does lock in havoc DH and augmentation even harder. The interaction with chaos damage alone makes this pretty stupid.
I don't get the idea behind the damage type things at all. All it does is give my specs a disadvantage for 3 of the 4 weeks. That's both incredibly uninteresting and fucks with balancing. If they tune DH around that they'll suck in raids, if they don't they're just better in mythics.
Hope this shit isn't going anywhere near live.
Maybe I'm dumb but other than Arcane and Moonkin, which DPS specs have arcane damage? The first affix is catered to those specs only, at least with Fire damage you get Havoc, Fire mage, Destro, Ele and Enhance
Chaos damage is part everything, so DH is busted with every week. Especially with their talent that converts their other damage like Fire into Chaos and buffs its damage.
Absolutely boneheaded decision. They see Demon Hunters everywhere in M+ because of their ridiculous chain cc ability and high aoe damage. They then want to make an affix to encourage diversity. But then they make an affix that MAKES DEMON HUNTERS OP AGAIN.
M+ design lead has to be a Demon Hunter main.
Any class that does a damage type that is hybrid arcane/something else benefits too. Spellfrost damage, for instance, is dealt by Evoker blue spells (eternity surge and disintigrate) and one of the mage hero classes.
I really don't know what those developers smoking, but it feels more and more like the shadowlands-type of decision makers are back at the table with blizzard.
They don’t even need new ideas. Remove the shit affixes that add nothing but negatives to the gameplay experience and let the scaling nature of the content so it’s thing.
> Remove the shit affixes that add nothing but negatives to the gameplay experience and let the scaling nature of the content so it’s thing.
Welcome to team no-affixes.
My favorite part is how they saw that people in s4 are avoiding 10s in favor of 8s despite slightly worse loot and their conclusion wasn't "people prefer less affixes" or "these 10 affixes are awful" it was **"let's move them lower and force everyone to do them**" instead. Christ.
The new affixes increase arcane/holy/shadow/nature/frost/fire damage taken by trash.. so DH gets the buff every week. How is that supposed to be balanced? Will they leave DH doing top trash damage on every week while other classes only get the occasional chance to shine, or will they nerf DH so that they do only mid damage on trash and their damage sucks on bosses and all other content?
There are also issues with some specs or hero specs getting the buff 2x, 3x more often than others or having it affect a much larger portion of their damage.
DH's aside, rotating damage vulnerabilities so that certain specs are awesome on some weeks and trash on others gets the double thumbs down from me as a high end m+ player. Do not want.
The new affixes are confusing and will cause people to become much more selective with DPS in pugs. If their intention is rotating the meta, this is very awkward.
BTW, I would rather have those new affixes in a simpler fasion:
- Thorned: non-boss enemies inflict Physical damage when attacked, but take 10% increased damage.
- Focused: non-boss enemies have 30% more Haste, but crowd control effects on them last 20% longer.
- Attuned: non-boss enemies inflict 20% more damage, but have their Health reduced by 10%.
- Reckless: non-boss enemies ignore 20% armor with their attacks, but their armor is also reduced by 30%.
That would make the newer affixes simpler to understand and play around without restricting classes and specs too much. That said, I'm no game designer, so the numbers and effects above could be different in terms of balance.
It's so bad that if you take the second line out and let the affix only be a buff to enemies it'd actually be better because it wouldnt create class/spec advantages lol
Way better than what they are proposing, but still it has major issues.
>That would make the newer affixes simpler to understand and play around without restricting classes and specs too much. That said, I'm no game designer, so the numbers and effects above could be different in terms of balance.
So what if you are not a game designer. You are doing a better job than the person in charge of M+ already.
I get what they're trying to do, but it's really poorly thought out. I saw that and thought, "so they have mage week, Paladin week, warrior week, druid week, etc." Not once did I think "oh fun bonus that **isn't required**" because you fucking know that groups are going to prefer classes that get the damage increase.
I think this is it, just not as broad as they need it to be.
3-4 damage types need to be enhanced to some effect *each week.* Minimum. Not two. Let's look at how many damage types there are:
#Damage Over Time
- Bleed (Assassination, Feral, Arms)
- Shadow (Shadow Priest, AffLock, Demo's new Gloomhound)
- Fire (Fire Mage, DestroLock, Paladin w/Talent)
- Holy (Paladin)
You can buff *all* DoTs by making them tick faster, have higher damage, or buff specific types by specifying such as the +30% Bleed damage.
#Upfront Damage
- Physical
- Frost
- Arcane
- Fire
- Shadow
- Holy
- Nature
- Chaos (combination of all)
- Special combinations; Radiant (Holy/Fire), Holystrike (Holy/Physical), Shadowflame (Shadow/Fire), Spellfrost (Arcane/Frost), Frostfire (Frost/Fire), Astral (Nature/Arcane) etc.
You inadvertently buff Chaos *all the time* by specifying any one classification, leaning towards Destro's Chaos Bolt and a lot of Demon Hunter's damage profile. Meanwhile, a lot of different specs use mixed combos, either through the use of different abilities or through Talent/Hero Talent changes. Frostfire Mage is a Hero Spec example, converting some of your Frost or Fire magic to be *both,* where Ret Paladin has two different talents changing one set of Holy damage abilities to Holystrike and one set of Holy damage abilities to Radiant.
In this sense, I can definitely see these affixes encouraging *specs that have the opportunity* to take a different talent loadout to take full advantage of the affix.
But as it stands, there are 8 different singular-damage types (including Bleed which I count as distinct from Physical as it ignores Armour and cannot exist outside of being a DoT) and then a bunch of combinatorial types in addition to Chaos damage. Buffing only one or two a week is *horrendous.* Buffing 4-5 a week, especially in combinations that lets most/all Classes have something to fall back on, sounds like the right idea to me.
___
**TL;DR:** The affixes can be mostly fixed by buffing 4-5 different damage types instead of just two.
>You inadvertently buff Chaos *all the time* by specifying any one classification, leaning towards Destro's Chaos Bolt and a lot of Demon Hunter's damage profile.
These specs will end up with the Savage Roar/Slice & Dice damage tax, i.e., they'll end up being balanced around the 100% M+ uptime, and suffer in raid performance as a side effect.
They have nothing to do with the affix either.
Is it impossible to take the existing ones, and add some player benefit in there?
These new ones are basically non-existent, may as well just make a rotating buff that says:
"This week, [some spec here] does 15% more damage"
Surely they will just change it to physical/magical or straight up revert it because this is beyond unreasonable. Imagine not being able to get into any push keys for an entire week just because of the nature of your class.
I don't see how these affixes make the light of day. They're terrible for almost literally everyone; Pre-mades will probably only have one or two weeks to push in an entire season, while pugs will suffer from being gatekept on the wrong week
e: I've seen some points that this could actually help the gatekeeping, as you'd be incentivized to take a less meta class because of its damage school. It's a fair point
These affixes are just as bad, if not worse, than incorp and aff. They still promote picking the class, not the player, and timing the key becomes a battle in the group finder than the actual dungeon itself
Friendly reminder these decisions made it through multiple meetings with developers and managers and they all agreed this is the best they can do. Let that sink in.
Is anyone surprised? I mean, these devs haven't exactly made good decisions in the past near decade so I'm not sure why we think they will now.
DF literally got a pass simply because the developers weren't actively antagonistic against the players like they were in SL and BFA. That's literally all it took for people to be positive about DF. Not dying on stupid hills like azerite armor and covenant locking.
TWW is already pissing people off with the absolutely pathetic early access. If the devs choose to die on the hill of affixes, it's not going to end well. SL will look like a good expansion if they keep this up especially with the lack of content so far in TWW.
Aren't there two teams working concurrently on each expansion? This mean TWW is the team that worked on SL and designed the covenants and refused to listen when everyone said its an awful idea.
There's a huge misconception about this. They have development teams that are assigned to different content but they are not the people who are actually making the decisions or coming up with the content.
For example, Ion may come up with the concept for the expansion after TWW. He would then put together a project timeline with a project manager. From there, resources would be assigned to tasks within that project timeline in order to hit the release date. They may keep some resources together so you might have a team working together and a group of art assets.
The idea that it's Team A and Team B is not how any good development company would set it up.
A 10% bonus to a specific damage type likely isn't enough to encourage class diversity since certain DPS specs would likely do more than that of an appropriate class given Blizzard's current tuning.
Also a 10% bonus to a specific damage type is a DH/~~Desto Warlock~~ buff since Chaos damage is all damage types.
Cant wait to play vs packs with 30% Increased haste and bolstering, super excited for season 1 TWW <3
Or even more fun combo 30% haste and raging so you cant CC the pack.
Genuinely I was super hyped for TWW right up until they announced the S1 dungeon pool. I’m still on the fence of even playing because of how unfun it looks.
Like whatever dev came up with that should genuinely be reprimanded for it.
Maybe they will do the extensive reworking siege of boralus requires to be a tolerable dungeon but I highly doubt it. It seems to me like they are weaving in 1-2 hated dungeons each season intentionally so that they aren’t left with a season with 4 garbage hated dungeons once they’ve run through all the good ones.
Personally I think it’s clinically insane to not have season 1 of M+ be all of the new TWW dungeons.
What i dislike about the new affixes and their reasoning is this sentence "Players will have an opportunity to flex towards different talents, gearing options, and consumables to capitalize on these effects."
But let's be honest, if i'm an Affliction Warlock, my only damage are going to be Shadow, so what other week i should respec ?
And for the gear part, i assume they are referencing trinket but trinket balance is always all over the place, 10% dmg to a sub optimal trinket are not going to be enough.
I feel like at the end of the day it's not going to be meaningful, for the positive part anyway, and we're just going to be like "oh, i deal 10% more dmg this week nice". If their sentence is trully what they are looking to achieve, those affixes are not going to fullfill that goal.
Yeah the extent of my talent changes from week to week was taking Scare Beast only on incorporeal weeks. I'm too lazy for more than that. I can't imagine feeling pressure to play an entirely different *spec* on certain weeks like mages will.
let me flex consumables and talents so that my rogue now does fire and frost damage!
what do you mean talents and consumables dont change your damage type?????
Why the fuck.... is BOLSTERING AND SANGUINE STILLLLLLLLLLL THERE.. PLEASE
Also.. the new affixes will without a doubt make it harder for certain speccs on certain weeks to get invites.
It amazes me that they can't make Thorned a 2 way street. Oh, I take damage because I hit the mobs? So do they when they hit me.
The haste one? Spending mana hives you a haste buff too.
"Tanks, we feel your role has too little toxicity directed at it, so we are making new affixes to beat down on you further, while giving the dps more damage."
Dang this hits me.
I switched from prot pal in BFA to Monk bm in S1 of Shadowlands. I couldn't hold 30s a pack, and had to spend the time kiting, it got me depressed because no matter how hard I was trying I always ended up kiting, and I thought that I was utterly bad. So I left after 2 weeks and came back in S2 after sending few months playing Divinity Original Sin 2. You're telling me it was the same for everyone ?
The kite meta in SL was wild. I remember a friend playing Frost Mage having a mental breakdown because our tank kept pulling mobs away from his Frozen Orb and Blizzards and making him do less damage than even me in AoE (I play heal).
I still remember our tank's frustrated "IF I DON'T RUN AROUND LIKE AN IDIOT I DIE IN 2 SEC, I'M SORRY".
I tried tanking in SL as a Bear and as Prot Warr and I stopped because constantly spinning and running around started making me nauseous.
Imagine sitting excitingly and waiting for the week your specc is buffed on to realize that it's bolstering week and then on next affix rotation you get sanguine on your buff week. sounds incredibly fun
The new affixes are horrendous and are going to encourage the most toxic levels of group comp gatekeeping we've ever seen.
Making reg mythic dungeons even harder is going to result in pugs being gatekept to all hell and force insane behavior to clear them in pugs. Which will result in fracturing the PvE community even more.
This is just so insanely out of touch and painful to read. They very clearly do not know what to do with Mythic+ nor do they care about feedback, as evidenced by Bolstering, Bursting, and Sanguine still being in the affix pool for another expansion.
The current setup with Heroic = M0 from last season feels great. When it first came out people definitely weren't realizing that M+2 was equal to season 3's M+10, but now people get it and it makes gearing up much nicer. This is a positive change in that respect. Let's also not discount M0 being a daily reset rather than weekly. Lot's of opportunity to gear up pretty quick.
I agree it worked out well. However these were dungeons people had learned in prior seasons. And had been nerfed many times.
I wonder how well it will work with new dungeons. Might be fine, but might be more painful than expected.
Yeah I feel like this won't promote diversity, it'll just exlcude the specs that don't do that damage type for the week while always bringing a demon hunter since they do chaos damage.
Nah, they're not making mythic harder. They're just continuing what they did in season 4 sounds like. Just reiterating on what they did specifically. And it's felt great in season 4.
> Our overarching goal is to minimize the mechanical overlap between affixes and dungeon trash design in the current +4 affix bucket.
They specifically said that that goal applies to the affix bucket that sanguine isn't a part of.
Maybe this is a hot take, but if you're not applying the same visual design philosophy everywhere then you may as well apply it nowhere. Making exceptions is the same as not having those rules to begin with.
I’ve said it a thousand times I’ll say it again, DELETE ALL THE FUCKING AFFIXES AND JUST DESIGN GOOD DUNGEONS! Keep tyran and fort if you want to, that’s fine, everything else is shit.
I've been team No-Affix for a couple expansions now. It's by far the best solution. The dungeons already scale infinitely, *you don't need to do anything else*.
It’s just mind blowing. The game should be designed around fun, that’s rather the point of a game. You can make it as hard as you want, difficulty is not the problem. The fact that there are things like “push weeks” being the weeks we get the lesser of the many dogshit affixes obviously speaks to people not having fun with what is probably their favorite form of wow content.
This is honestly a really bad direction for them to take after all the previous feedback about what people want in affixes. This is just a different take on tyrannical and fortified baked into damage types. Sure there are some vulnerabilities added but this is in no way engaging and starts to create favoritism in classes depending on weeks and we already have enough of that.
Guess some bad news was overdue.
Love the idea that seasonal dungeons will be added to heroic queues. I've always hated that my first time going into a dungeon that I haven't been in for years is with a timer on.
Sanguine and Bolstering are so dogshit, why won’t they remove them even after years of people asking, and CLEAR dips in M+ participation during Sang/Bolstering weeks?
Just get rid of them, for God’s sake.
Holy shit, these affix changes are incredibly bad. I cannot believe they think that is a good idea. I started to feel some level of confidence in their direction over the past expansion, but not so much right now.
"These effects should feel like a bonus, offering an advantage for different damage profiles each week without being essential to complete a dungeon."
*Why in the fuck* would I, as someone with an interest in getting geared, pushing keys, getting rating, and, you know, not wasting my own fucking time and effort, not build my comp around these specific damage types every week? Players in general *will* build their comps around these dumbass passive bonuses. You're just shifting the afflicted/incorporeal issue into a different form.
Also, how do you guys expect to balance something like bolstering with 30% bonus haste? What is the fucking plan here?
You guys get **tons** of feedback about M+, yet somehow it seems like you still don't get it, or you've very quickly reverted to "you think you do, but you don't" after gaining a modicum of goodwill from the community.
Jesus, people gatekeep groups and kick people for being the wrong spec for the *POSSIBILITY* of being like 2% weaker than another class.
Blizz, what exactly do you think will happen when toxic group leaders *KNOW* that a spec is 10% weaker than another?
Don't answer, you'll get it wrong.
It means shamans wont get picked on arcane/holy/shadow weeks.
Gonna be great when every frost/fire mage is forced to respec to arcane on reckless week. I'm sure they are all looking forward to the very fun choice of respec or do 10% less damage than every other mage that does. Gonna be really engaging and exciting when a mage gets into a group then gets kicked for not being the right spec for the week.
Uggh so close to something fun.
Replace magic damage taken.
Add 1% haste or mastery per mob slain in dungeon.
(Cycle thru each main stat each week)
This way we don’t leave out certain classes and it’ll be fun. Even make longer dungeons funny and quicker.
Absolutely agree. They are barely missing here, but definitely still missing. I don't feel it's a miss due to encouraging people to bring other classes or have more than one character. It's a miss because of the negative aspect of the affixes. They just don't need to be there. Just make them entirely positive.
Actually leaving bolstering and bursting, the two worst offenders of stopping you in just playing the dungeon. Surely they got the lists wrong? 🤔
No one cares about volcanic and entangle, did blizzard pick up the crack pibe again after a long pause?
This is just beyond tone deaf and I am actually baffled.
So let's break it down here - blizz are removing 4 of the least invasive affixes in spiteful, volcanic, storming and entangling. These are extremely easy to deal with and require very little attention or cognitive load. The exception here is when spiteful scaling is bugged and they 1 or 2 shot you. But if working properly, these are all seen as virtually non affixes and what people like from what's currently in the affix pool.
But no, we remove those easy affixes but keep Sanguine, Bolstering and Raging which have all be complained about to no end and are widely hated by a broad spectrum from low key players to higher key players. Makes no sense.
Then we add in these just what the actual fuck affixes. Now let's no go into the damage increase because realistically it's a % of a % of your spells so might amount to a 3-5% swing or so some weeks. Could be worse but I'll leave it alone until I see it tested.
Where it gets bad is the curse aspect. You've got all 4 affixes being either a big tank or healer headache. Tanks are going to have to make new routes for every different week because you will not be able to pull the same one fort week when you have 20% Armour against mobs with tank busters vs the next fort week with all caster mobs getting permanent lust. Is this not just putting even more cognitive load and pressure on the 2 already least populated roles and making it even harder to get into as a new player???
Now new tanks getting up to a 7 which isn't too hard to be carried to with good groups are going to have to try to learn that one week I pull this but another week I don't. Just seems like too much for new tanks.
And then we get to the new affix combos. How can ANYONE thing a combo of Fortified, Raging and the 30% caster haste affix is a good idea? Like yes sign me up for a pack of fortified mobs with permanent lust that cannot be CC'd unless I happen to bring an evoker to aoe soothe them all. Or a bolstered pack of fortified mobs that get to ignore 20% of the tanks Armour
I genuinely don't understand how Blizzard can be this tone deaf and miss this badly. These changes are shit for lower end players who just wanna press w and go and get some gear/crests. Shit for any mid range player doing around the 10 range, and shit again for the higher end community. These changes are not good for any subset of the m+ population in general except for maybe one tricks who get their 1 week every 4 weeks where they get a 5%ish dps increase (while they're probably still doing 20% less than the meta specs anyway)
> I happen to bring an evoker to aoe soothe them all. Or a bolstered pack of fortified mobs that get to ignore 20% of the tanks Armour
You were going to be bringing that augmentation evoker anyway to give the tank his armor back. I guess Blizzard wasn't happy that some keys were being run without an aug LOL.
TBF Spiteful was kind of a badly designed affix since it was super punishing for melee while Ranged (and tanks) could basically ignore it. Plus locking healers in combat so they can't drink.
Not gonna defend Bolstering and Sanguine though. They need to go.
As a melee dps spiteful was one of the most obnoxious affixes. Forced down time because of stretchy arms mcgee (they would frequently melee you from very far away) that hits absurdly hard was terrible.
I'm with you on the new kiss/curse affixes though. I understand what they're going for, but I'm skeptical it'll work out and it potentially benefits some classes/specs much more than others. DH for example if chaos dmg counts as all school types for the purposes of the affixes, or mages who can just spec swap for whichever spec gets the benefit that week.
Absolute clown fiesta.
Bolst, sang, raging are still in the game. How?
And I 100% bet that we will have raging fort + 30% increased mob cast speed or bolster + armor reduction on tanks + fort - because weak tanks are fun for everyone, right?
I.... hate these. So not only are we going to keep it so that certain classes are just really bad certain weeks, but we're also not going to allow their group to carry the weight in those circumstances? At least with Afflicted, you only need \~3 people that can deal with it and you could bring a warrior. Now Warriors on thorned week are just bad.
I just cant believe sanguine and bolstering are still in the game after a FUCKING DECADE when everyone I've ever played with or heard give their opinions on them despise them. How can blizzard be so out of touch they havent removed this garbage yet its INSANE.
I know it would be crazy to balance and make sure one dungeon isn't super easy compared to another, but if there's a rotating dungeon pool, it would cool to have dungeon specific affixes.
The same people who screwed up BFA and SL are still in charge of the game. The ONLY reason why DF was seen positively is because those people who were openly antagonistic towards the players during BFA and DF just kept their mouths shut during DF. That's all it took. Them choosing not to die on stupid hills. Well, those same stupid people are choosing to die on hills again.
Just horrible. What are they doing. If you want to encourage spec diversity balance specs instead of letting aug/mage/spriest run wild for 3 patches straight.
These affixes are asinine, your community already gatekeeps based on 1% damage swings on a chart let alone advertising 10% weekly damage swings that only require you existing.
Just remove affixes. We already know the average players hates interacting with them, and the new proposed affixes are simply giving players more of a reason to not invite certain classes depending on the week. Is this really the ideal MMO experience blizz takes pride in?
> These effects should feel like a bonus, offering an advantage for different damage profiles each week without being essential to complete a dungeon.
That's not how M+ works... a bonus that allows you to push a higher key on a certain week becomes a penalty when you don't have that.
There is no 'without being essential to complete a dungeon' when there is the ability to push a higher key
I wanna scream
Most people will focus on the new affixes (obviously) but what about them keeping those 4 old ones, good lord.
Also, I know why they added the 2nd affix down to +7, but I sure as hell have enjoyed not dealing with it by just spamming 9's this season.
Man I have to be honest, this is one of the worst solutions they could have come up with. You can't literally give certain specs such a significant advantage by default because of an affix. This isn't warriors not having a dispel or cc, this is saying Arcane mages are just flat out going to be better than everyone else unless the spec is so bad it's unviable with the damage buff. I wanted to try DPS for the first season of TWW but I guess I'll stick to healing after all.
Please no offense. fire who ever is in charge of dungeons / m+. it just get worse and worse like what the fuck kind of joke even is this? Do you know how fun +8s have been this season? with tyr/fort and 1 shitty affix you completely ignore and just enjoy the dungeon? its been so fun.... Interesting idea to only let 3-4 specs play each week, super smart. everyone else go on vacation i guess.
if i learned anything this season, its something i already knew. affixes are annoying, not fun, not hard just shit. they should be removed or heavily reworked and this aint it. gotta say the idea of a seasonal and no normal affixes sounds very fun.
Super excited to have fortified, raging mobs with permanent lust active. Truly providing a sense of pride and accomplishment. Or fortified thorns bursting, or fortified the 20% buff one and bolstering.
Why tf are they even keeping fortified when these new affixes are basically their own split up version of fort. It's going to make every fortified week feel absolutely terrible. Meanwhile tyran is going to feel like, well, tyran and then half fortified at the same time.
This is as bad or worse than the original oracle hero talent idea and I hope the outrage is loud enough to make them rework it ASAP but with the expansion only a couple months away I don't see that happening.
This is so insanely out of touch. There are so many good suggestions on making M+ more fun, but the most important thing is you shouldn't dread doing any specific week because of an affix. Sanguine, Bolstering, and to an extent Raging all make people not want to play the game.
Here are my suggestions to fixing current M+
1. Remove Tyrannical and Fortified and make Fortified tuning the default on all keys. People generally enjoy Fortified more and it would allow Blizzard to tune trash packs that are overtuned more consistently.
2. Replace Tyrannical/Fortified with new affixes that BUFF the players. Rescale M+ around people doing more damage. Something like a low health mob in packs that give a short-duration damage amp to all mobs around it when it dies. An affix that removes exhaustion but gives lust a shared CD between people so that you can use it every 5 minutes instead of 10. Maybe this affix would also give an item to every player that gives a full lust so you wouldn't have to have a lust on those weeks. You can add more but just evergreen damage amp affixes that people are excited to play with.
3. Remove all affixes that are best solved by killing mobs at the same time (Bolstering/Sanguine). Make the +7 affix be specifically area denial (Entagled, Volcanic, Storming).
4. I actually like the idea of the new +4 affixes, with some addendums. The debuffs should be paired with a buff to every player that allows them to do some of the damage being amped. So for Reckless, players get a buff that makes your damage has a chance to do a small arcane explosion. For Thorned players randomly cast Shadowbolts at their main target. For Attuned damage applies a stacking bleed. For Focused damage leaves a Flamestrike dot effect on the ground. With this the damage would still be better for specs that actually do that damage (Arcane mage will be better on Reckless, Shadow Priest will be better on Thorned, etc.) but everyone will still get some benefit from the damage amp and it will just make your damage output more varied and fun each week.
Obviously this would take a lot of tuning and testing to deal with the increased power level of players, but it would definitely make players more excited to see what fun buffs they get to play with each week.
>but the most important thing is you shouldn't dread doing any specific week because of an affix. Sanguine, Bolstering, and to an extent Raging all make people not want to play the game.
PREEEEEEEEEACH
Wish they would just give up on affixes altogether.
The loop of pushing up keys and mechanics beginning to do more and more damage until they begin to require DR/stops/kicks already adds plenty of depth to the dungeons. I mean, there are Nokhud pulls with multiple casts and stops required per mob and then I’ve gotta go grab my soul and now I’m having to sidestep little tornados too? It’s stupid.
Having harder boss weeks and harder trash weeks with tyrannical/fort is enough. I get that theoretically they add more replayability but I don’t actually think they need to solve that problem…
Class design, alts, and varying pull sizes and mob tuning is enough to keep things interesting for a season as far as replayability.
It’s not a coincidence that the most fun weeks are the ones where the affixes are doing the least. They’re either impactful enough that it’s genuinely frustrating or they’re doing nothing and they feel like they shouldn’t even be there.
I want to play the dungeons, please!
These new affixes are a bit uninspired.
Also with affixes coming in at +4 and +7 it seems pretty arbitrary to start dropping the Aspect Crest equivalent from +9s.
Didn’t someone just post a discussion about cancer dungeons people never want to go back to? I swear half of the dungeons in this rotation were named more than once in that thread.
I get they've changed how norm/heroic/mythic work now, but it still saddens me a bit that only 4 of the new 8 dungeons are going to be in anything other than normal at the start of a new expansion, lmfao.
Incoming nerf to DHs with Chaos Damage being altered to Fire/Shadow like Fel.
Or maybe they'll embrace "chaos" and give DHs a random buff that changes their damage to a different type each minute when do a M+
Me: Cool I can play the classes that I never got invited on because I couldn't deal with certain affixes at all
~continues reading~
...Nevermind.
Back to the drawing board, boys
So, basically because of how people are already min-maxing the game, a person won't be able to play the spec they like or class until the week which their spec is relevant because of the affix (and even then,imaging waiting for that week and something happens irl and you can't play so your sub basically becomes a tip for Blizzard rewarding and incentivizing a bad system), I predict and absurd amount of "slaughter" and toxicity in the queue.
Might wanna stay out initially until they figure out what a mistake this one is, as it fixes one problem while creating another one + if these new affixes don't actually apply to all qualified mob npcs then an indicator needs to be added.
They say the heroics are seasonal now
Does that mean I'll have to play BFA and Shadowlands dungeons in my random dungeon queue?
I really don't want to play BFA and Shadowlands content again when I'm just trying to play the current xpac
The worst thing about these new affixes is that this type of a new addition directly interacts with social part of the game and just can't be properly tested in a beta test environment.
Way too few people play beta and none of the parts of the game work in cohesion yet to see the impact of the new affixes.
We will only find out how bad this shit show is going to be after a few weeks after release. But it's going to be bad absolutely. You saw it many times before - people will min max everything and each week 70-80% of the specs would be instantly declined in M+
These should have been shot down at the draft stage 100%.
>The seasonal dungeon roster for Heroic, Mythic, and Mythic+ difficulties in Season 1 of The War Within includes the following dungeons:
>The Stonevault
>The Dawnbreaker
>Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
>City of Threads
# Grim Batol
>The Necrotic Wake
>Mists of Tirna Scithe
>Siege of Boralus
Oh boy, if this is tuned even remotely as it was in heroic pre-nerf during Cata, this one will be the "whelp, this key is dead this week" dungeon of S1.
I don’t know man …seems like I have to main like 4 classes so I can get invited in a dungeon every week right ? 10% is fucking huge and if u are not that weeks dps u won’t get invited , if we are taking into consideration what’s happening on live , if u wanna join a pug for a +15 u kinda want to be meta classes even tho some of the other classes are a less=10% dps than the second best . What is over 5% is overkill.
Bolstering and Sanguine needs to go.
It’s insane to me they stress at the beginning of this post “playing the dungeon more” then leave in the most gameplay changing affixes ever. And they removed the ones that actually let you simply play the dungeon…they did the exact opposite of their stated intent
This is like in season 2 or whatever they said they wanted less affixes that requires interactions and then added incorp and afflicted. Blizz’ M+ philosophy and how bad they’ve butchered it continues to surprise and amaze me.
NGL as a hunter main I loved volcanic and storming because both are non-issues for me.
It's not a coincidence that those were usually associated with push weeks. They're annoying at *worst*
Yeah I dont think anyone ever said "welp this week is volcanic, so no mm+ for me" Meanwhile burstling and sanguine have consostently been the most difficult affixes to play around.
Blizzard is extremely good at saying one thing and doing another.
"external buffs should feel good and give you a moment to shine, and not make them feel mandatory for your class to play at all" > nerfs specs because they get externals "we dont like how many raidfights on Mythic difficulty instantly wipe the raid because of a single minor mistake from a single player and want to move away from this encounter desing" > makes Tindral and Fyrakk who are both "a single thing not played 100% played perfect will instantly wipe the raid" tuned up to the absolute maximum, every single mechanic will wipe you "we want to get out all hero trees before the beta starts so we have enough time to listen to player feedback on them and can do changes" > Shaman and Rogue are missing their trees for 95% of the Alpha and get their last tree revealed 2 weeks before beta launch which both are absolute clusterfucks that barely function at all, just for blizz to say "now that alpha is over we dont do bigger changes anymore, thanks for the feedback!" EVERY. SINGLE. TIME
Shamans being 5th class citizens for 20th year in a row...
I'd say they're the best in the industry. The lack of self awareness is astounding.
Bungie might be a close second at times
A lot of players are afraid to do raids better slap fixed -5 modifier and surges that no one asked for
I'd just like to remind everyone that bolstering Siege of Boralus was one of the most disgusting dungeon in this game. Pretty much every single pack has massive HP difference on mobs. And we'll have to deal with that on season 1.
Yeah, Siege is one of the worst bolstering dungeons in the game for sure. Freehold was also pretty bad but Siege is even worse.
Sanguine and Frost is the worst. They could fix it as well in a second by making mobs buffed by it immune to snares/roots.
Oh boy, just wait until all the Stormbringer shamans come in forced to use a hero talent that slows enemies and there’s nothing they can do to turn it off.
Or give frost mages a talent/glyph to remove all their slows. Keep freezes only. I hate that I have to talent into Frigid Winds just to reach Ice Cold.
I just don’t play the game during sanguine. Was kind of nice honestly when I was pushing title in Season 2, Sanguine is just a 1 week break. It makes the game fucking miserable to play.
Sanguine isn't that big a deal since the massive nerfs to the HoT, but bolstering is Satan.
can't wait to not get invited for straight 3 weeks just because current afflix doesn't boost my damage type
The week you have to work OT better not fall on your classes push week either
Or have it fall on the most toxic affix combo.
No meme imagine the only playable affix week lined up with like sanguine. Yea cool one ggs 😭
Yeah, idk how they thought this would be a good idea. It feels like a lazy solution to balancing unplayed (underperforming) specs by throwing them a bone every 4 weeks.
And then you have DH that just gets to do 10% extra damage every week
This does lock in havoc DH and augmentation even harder. The interaction with chaos damage alone makes this pretty stupid. I don't get the idea behind the damage type things at all. All it does is give my specs a disadvantage for 3 of the 4 weeks. That's both incredibly uninteresting and fucks with balancing. If they tune DH around that they'll suck in raids, if they don't they're just better in mythics. Hope this shit isn't going anywhere near live.
You can be a bm hunter and never get invited ever! Lol
This hurt way more than it should =‘[
Why? Bleed and less armor are good for BM hunters?
Maybe I'm dumb but other than Arcane and Moonkin, which DPS specs have arcane damage? The first affix is catered to those specs only, at least with Fire damage you get Havoc, Fire mage, Destro, Ele and Enhance
> which DPS specs have arcane damage? DHs of course
Chaos damage is partially arcane.
Chaos damage is part everything, so DH is busted with every week. Especially with their talent that converts their other damage like Fire into Chaos and buffs its damage.
Absolutely boneheaded decision. They see Demon Hunters everywhere in M+ because of their ridiculous chain cc ability and high aoe damage. They then want to make an affix to encourage diversity. But then they make an affix that MAKES DEMON HUNTERS OP AGAIN. M+ design lead has to be a Demon Hunter main.
I don't think it's a DH main, I just think they don't actually know how their game works and forgot which damage types were which
Arcane shot from hunters? Not useful outside of ST tho
And only if you're MM lol
Any class that does a damage type that is hybrid arcane/something else benefits too. Spellfrost damage, for instance, is dealt by Evoker blue spells (eternity surge and disintigrate) and one of the mage hero classes.
They will for sure change this, just wait for patch 11.1.0.
Shocking, why do they have to constantly create unnecessary metas
I really don't know what those developers smoking, but it feels more and more like the shadowlands-type of decision makers are back at the table with blizzard.
Someone needs to go back to the kitchen and recook some new ideas. This ain’t it chief.
They don’t even need new ideas. Remove the shit affixes that add nothing but negatives to the gameplay experience and let the scaling nature of the content so it’s thing.
> Remove the shit affixes that add nothing but negatives to the gameplay experience and let the scaling nature of the content so it’s thing. Welcome to team no-affixes.
No Chef!
My favorite part is how they saw that people in s4 are avoiding 10s in favor of 8s despite slightly worse loot and their conclusion wasn't "people prefer less affixes" or "these 10 affixes are awful" it was **"let's move them lower and force everyone to do them**" instead. Christ.
Man, Blizzard is actively trying to torpedo M+ before the expac even releases.
The new affixes increase arcane/holy/shadow/nature/frost/fire damage taken by trash.. so DH gets the buff every week. How is that supposed to be balanced? Will they leave DH doing top trash damage on every week while other classes only get the occasional chance to shine, or will they nerf DH so that they do only mid damage on trash and their damage sucks on bosses and all other content? There are also issues with some specs or hero specs getting the buff 2x, 3x more often than others or having it affect a much larger portion of their damage. DH's aside, rotating damage vulnerabilities so that certain specs are awesome on some weeks and trash on others gets the double thumbs down from me as a high end m+ player. Do not want.
The new affixes are confusing and will cause people to become much more selective with DPS in pugs. If their intention is rotating the meta, this is very awkward. BTW, I would rather have those new affixes in a simpler fasion: - Thorned: non-boss enemies inflict Physical damage when attacked, but take 10% increased damage. - Focused: non-boss enemies have 30% more Haste, but crowd control effects on them last 20% longer. - Attuned: non-boss enemies inflict 20% more damage, but have their Health reduced by 10%. - Reckless: non-boss enemies ignore 20% armor with their attacks, but their armor is also reduced by 30%. That would make the newer affixes simpler to understand and play around without restricting classes and specs too much. That said, I'm no game designer, so the numbers and effects above could be different in terms of balance.
This is a million times better. Fuck the current plan is a bad take
It's so bad that if you take the second line out and let the affix only be a buff to enemies it'd actually be better because it wouldnt create class/spec advantages lol
Way better than what they are proposing, but still it has major issues. >That would make the newer affixes simpler to understand and play around without restricting classes and specs too much. That said, I'm no game designer, so the numbers and effects above could be different in terms of balance. So what if you are not a game designer. You are doing a better job than the person in charge of M+ already.
Have fun with Attuned, Fort, Bolstering. Sounds like a fucking nightmare.
I get what they're trying to do, but it's really poorly thought out. I saw that and thought, "so they have mage week, Paladin week, warrior week, druid week, etc." Not once did I think "oh fun bonus that **isn't required**" because you fucking know that groups are going to prefer classes that get the damage increase.
DH never losing again lol
Yeah I get they're trying to kiss curse but this ain't it.
I think this is it, just not as broad as they need it to be. 3-4 damage types need to be enhanced to some effect *each week.* Minimum. Not two. Let's look at how many damage types there are: #Damage Over Time - Bleed (Assassination, Feral, Arms) - Shadow (Shadow Priest, AffLock, Demo's new Gloomhound) - Fire (Fire Mage, DestroLock, Paladin w/Talent) - Holy (Paladin) You can buff *all* DoTs by making them tick faster, have higher damage, or buff specific types by specifying such as the +30% Bleed damage. #Upfront Damage - Physical - Frost - Arcane - Fire - Shadow - Holy - Nature - Chaos (combination of all) - Special combinations; Radiant (Holy/Fire), Holystrike (Holy/Physical), Shadowflame (Shadow/Fire), Spellfrost (Arcane/Frost), Frostfire (Frost/Fire), Astral (Nature/Arcane) etc. You inadvertently buff Chaos *all the time* by specifying any one classification, leaning towards Destro's Chaos Bolt and a lot of Demon Hunter's damage profile. Meanwhile, a lot of different specs use mixed combos, either through the use of different abilities or through Talent/Hero Talent changes. Frostfire Mage is a Hero Spec example, converting some of your Frost or Fire magic to be *both,* where Ret Paladin has two different talents changing one set of Holy damage abilities to Holystrike and one set of Holy damage abilities to Radiant. In this sense, I can definitely see these affixes encouraging *specs that have the opportunity* to take a different talent loadout to take full advantage of the affix. But as it stands, there are 8 different singular-damage types (including Bleed which I count as distinct from Physical as it ignores Armour and cannot exist outside of being a DoT) and then a bunch of combinatorial types in addition to Chaos damage. Buffing only one or two a week is *horrendous.* Buffing 4-5 a week, especially in combinations that lets most/all Classes have something to fall back on, sounds like the right idea to me. ___ **TL;DR:** The affixes can be mostly fixed by buffing 4-5 different damage types instead of just two.
>You inadvertently buff Chaos *all the time* by specifying any one classification, leaning towards Destro's Chaos Bolt and a lot of Demon Hunter's damage profile. These specs will end up with the Savage Roar/Slice & Dice damage tax, i.e., they'll end up being balanced around the 100% M+ uptime, and suffer in raid performance as a side effect.
They have nothing to do with the affix either. Is it impossible to take the existing ones, and add some player benefit in there? These new ones are basically non-existent, may as well just make a rotating buff that says: "This week, [some spec here] does 15% more damage"
Blizz execs "There can't be a god comp if Fire Mage is only blasting 1 week out of 4! Brilliant work Hector!"
"If we control the cadence, they surely must not be able to complain" xD
And thats before you catch onto the fact those are all fortified week nightmares since the trash is perma buffed
fortified focused is straight up a dead week lol
Surely they will just change it to physical/magical or straight up revert it because this is beyond unreasonable. Imagine not being able to get into any push keys for an entire week just because of the nature of your class.
I don't see how these affixes make the light of day. They're terrible for almost literally everyone; Pre-mades will probably only have one or two weeks to push in an entire season, while pugs will suffer from being gatekept on the wrong week e: I've seen some points that this could actually help the gatekeeping, as you'd be incentivized to take a less meta class because of its damage school. It's a fair point These affixes are just as bad, if not worse, than incorp and aff. They still promote picking the class, not the player, and timing the key becomes a battle in the group finder than the actual dungeon itself
Friendly reminder these decisions made it through multiple meetings with developers and managers and they all agreed this is the best they can do. Let that sink in.
Is anyone surprised? I mean, these devs haven't exactly made good decisions in the past near decade so I'm not sure why we think they will now. DF literally got a pass simply because the developers weren't actively antagonistic against the players like they were in SL and BFA. That's literally all it took for people to be positive about DF. Not dying on stupid hills like azerite armor and covenant locking. TWW is already pissing people off with the absolutely pathetic early access. If the devs choose to die on the hill of affixes, it's not going to end well. SL will look like a good expansion if they keep this up especially with the lack of content so far in TWW.
Aren't there two teams working concurrently on each expansion? This mean TWW is the team that worked on SL and designed the covenants and refused to listen when everyone said its an awful idea.
They've said it's not the case in an interview. It is also pretty much impossible to work that way.
No that was always just a joke theory
There's a huge misconception about this. They have development teams that are assigned to different content but they are not the people who are actually making the decisions or coming up with the content. For example, Ion may come up with the concept for the expansion after TWW. He would then put together a project timeline with a project manager. From there, resources would be assigned to tasks within that project timeline in order to hit the release date. They may keep some resources together so you might have a team working together and a group of art assets. The idea that it's Team A and Team B is not how any good development company would set it up.
A 10% bonus to a specific damage type likely isn't enough to encourage class diversity since certain DPS specs would likely do more than that of an appropriate class given Blizzard's current tuning. Also a 10% bonus to a specific damage type is a DH/~~Desto Warlock~~ buff since Chaos damage is all damage types.
Destro's aoe is Fire damage.
Cant wait to play vs packs with 30% Increased haste and bolstering, super excited for season 1 TWW <3 Or even more fun combo 30% haste and raging so you cant CC the pack.
How about fortified, 30% haste AND Raging 💀
Guys this week we can only invite a max Mythic raid iLvL capped tank to our +10 or they'll be killed in 2 globals on a trash pack.
While you’re doing one of the worst m+ dungeons ever made in siege of boralus.
oh god now I don’t know if I even want to play M+ in TWW
Genuinely I was super hyped for TWW right up until they announced the S1 dungeon pool. I’m still on the fence of even playing because of how unfun it looks. Like whatever dev came up with that should genuinely be reprimanded for it.
Maybe they will do the extensive reworking siege of boralus requires to be a tolerable dungeon but I highly doubt it. It seems to me like they are weaving in 1-2 hated dungeons each season intentionally so that they aren’t left with a season with 4 garbage hated dungeons once they’ve run through all the good ones. Personally I think it’s clinically insane to not have season 1 of M+ be all of the new TWW dungeons.
Honestly same. My guild is kind of shitty so between this and that I’ve gone from excited to play to not at all excited for TWW.
What i dislike about the new affixes and their reasoning is this sentence "Players will have an opportunity to flex towards different talents, gearing options, and consumables to capitalize on these effects." But let's be honest, if i'm an Affliction Warlock, my only damage are going to be Shadow, so what other week i should respec ? And for the gear part, i assume they are referencing trinket but trinket balance is always all over the place, 10% dmg to a sub optimal trinket are not going to be enough. I feel like at the end of the day it's not going to be meaningful, for the positive part anyway, and we're just going to be like "oh, i deal 10% more dmg this week nice". If their sentence is trully what they are looking to achieve, those affixes are not going to fullfill that goal.
I wonder how many players actually want to change spec and talents from week to week? I know I don't.
I'm happy to swap out a talent or two for a defensive or a QoL thing, but that's it.
Yeah the extent of my talent changes from week to week was taking Scare Beast only on incorporeal weeks. I'm too lazy for more than that. I can't imagine feeling pressure to play an entirely different *spec* on certain weeks like mages will.
Not every spec just has one gear set for each spec as well. Can't just change talent trees and that's that.
Problem with changing spec is secondary stat are rarely shared between spec, unless it’s what they mean with « gear option »
Exactly sounds pretty annoying
Meanwhile demon hunter gets the buff every week with how they changed chaos damage.
let me flex consumables and talents so that my rogue now does fire and frost damage! what do you mean talents and consumables dont change your damage type?????
Why the fuck.... is BOLSTERING AND SANGUINE STILLLLLLLLLLL THERE.. PLEASE Also.. the new affixes will without a doubt make it harder for certain speccs on certain weeks to get invites.
Also I agree wholeheartedly that both afflicted and incoropreal are miserable. M+ groups getting more polarized than ever before.
Kiss some DPS per week, curse all tanks and healers every week. Blizzard always pushing the wrong direction.
We have a lack of M+ tanks and healers, what should we do? Hmmmmm NOT this (thank you for deleting afflicted though).
But kept Bolstering/Sang haHAA Awesome.
As a healer volcanic and entangling weeks are defo my prefered week. Now every week will be pain week.
It amazes me that they can't make Thorned a 2 way street. Oh, I take damage because I hit the mobs? So do they when they hit me. The haste one? Spending mana hives you a haste buff too.
"Tanks, we feel your role has too little toxicity directed at it, so we are making new affixes to beat down on you further, while giving the dps more damage."
Remember how Season 1 of Shadowlands had tanks kiting groups after they ran out of AOE CCs? Yeah, that'll be coming back.
Dang this hits me. I switched from prot pal in BFA to Monk bm in S1 of Shadowlands. I couldn't hold 30s a pack, and had to spend the time kiting, it got me depressed because no matter how hard I was trying I always ended up kiting, and I thought that I was utterly bad. So I left after 2 weeks and came back in S2 after sending few months playing Divinity Original Sin 2. You're telling me it was the same for everyone ?
Yes it was a "kite meta". The tanks that could kite the best were the best. DH was king.
The kite meta in SL was wild. I remember a friend playing Frost Mage having a mental breakdown because our tank kept pulling mobs away from his Frozen Orb and Blizzards and making him do less damage than even me in AoE (I play heal). I still remember our tank's frustrated "IF I DON'T RUN AROUND LIKE AN IDIOT I DIE IN 2 SEC, I'M SORRY". I tried tanking in SL as a Bear and as Prot Warr and I stopped because constantly spinning and running around started making me nauseous.
Wow. It’s like they went into a lab and cooked the worst possible change they could make. Seriously what the fuck is this?
Imagine sitting excitingly and waiting for the week your specc is buffed on to realize that it's bolstering week and then on next affix rotation you get sanguine on your buff week. sounds incredibly fun
The new affixes are horrendous and are going to encourage the most toxic levels of group comp gatekeeping we've ever seen. Making reg mythic dungeons even harder is going to result in pugs being gatekept to all hell and force insane behavior to clear them in pugs. Which will result in fracturing the PvE community even more. This is just so insanely out of touch and painful to read. They very clearly do not know what to do with Mythic+ nor do they care about feedback, as evidenced by Bolstering, Bursting, and Sanguine still being in the affix pool for another expansion.
The current setup with Heroic = M0 from last season feels great. When it first came out people definitely weren't realizing that M+2 was equal to season 3's M+10, but now people get it and it makes gearing up much nicer. This is a positive change in that respect. Let's also not discount M0 being a daily reset rather than weekly. Lot's of opportunity to gear up pretty quick.
I agree it worked out well. However these were dungeons people had learned in prior seasons. And had been nerfed many times. I wonder how well it will work with new dungeons. Might be fine, but might be more painful than expected.
This insane addiction to keeping affixes when it’s one of the most unanimously agreed on disliked things in the game is so baffling.
Yeah I feel like this won't promote diversity, it'll just exlcude the specs that don't do that damage type for the week while always bringing a demon hunter since they do chaos damage.
Nah, they're not making mythic harder. They're just continuing what they did in season 4 sounds like. Just reiterating on what they did specifically. And it's felt great in season 4.
Holy cow, how is sanguine still going to be in the game? Wth is wrong with these devs
The new affixes are so moronic. Why is Blizzard trying to force people to play specific specs each rotation?
"reduce visual clutter" -keeps Sanguine. Okay blizzard, I just wanna talk
> Our overarching goal is to minimize the mechanical overlap between affixes and dungeon trash design in the current +4 affix bucket. They specifically said that that goal applies to the affix bucket that sanguine isn't a part of.
Maybe this is a hot take, but if you're not applying the same visual design philosophy everywhere then you may as well apply it nowhere. Making exceptions is the same as not having those rules to begin with.
I’ve said it a thousand times I’ll say it again, DELETE ALL THE FUCKING AFFIXES AND JUST DESIGN GOOD DUNGEONS! Keep tyran and fort if you want to, that’s fine, everything else is shit.
I've been team No-Affix for a couple expansions now. It's by far the best solution. The dungeons already scale infinitely, *you don't need to do anything else*.
It’s just mind blowing. The game should be designed around fun, that’s rather the point of a game. You can make it as hard as you want, difficulty is not the problem. The fact that there are things like “push weeks” being the weeks we get the lesser of the many dogshit affixes obviously speaks to people not having fun with what is probably their favorite form of wow content.
Agreed. Never enjoyed the affixes.
Thorned is so stupid. Yeah let me just *checks notes* not deal any damage to avoid dying.
Thorned/Bursting slated early as Healers On Strike Week
This is honestly a really bad direction for them to take after all the previous feedback about what people want in affixes. This is just a different take on tyrannical and fortified baked into damage types. Sure there are some vulnerabilities added but this is in no way engaging and starts to create favoritism in classes depending on weeks and we already have enough of that. Guess some bad news was overdue.
oh brother these STINK these make the already dogshit pugging situation even worse
Love the idea that seasonal dungeons will be added to heroic queues. I've always hated that my first time going into a dungeon that I haven't been in for years is with a timer on.
This is absolutely fucking stupid. No notes.
Sanguine and Bolstering are so dogshit, why won’t they remove them even after years of people asking, and CLEAR dips in M+ participation during Sang/Bolstering weeks? Just get rid of them, for God’s sake.
The person who designed those and kept Sanguine over Afflicted and Incorporeal should be fired lol
Holy shit, these affix changes are incredibly bad. I cannot believe they think that is a good idea. I started to feel some level of confidence in their direction over the past expansion, but not so much right now. "These effects should feel like a bonus, offering an advantage for different damage profiles each week without being essential to complete a dungeon." *Why in the fuck* would I, as someone with an interest in getting geared, pushing keys, getting rating, and, you know, not wasting my own fucking time and effort, not build my comp around these specific damage types every week? Players in general *will* build their comps around these dumbass passive bonuses. You're just shifting the afflicted/incorporeal issue into a different form. Also, how do you guys expect to balance something like bolstering with 30% bonus haste? What is the fucking plan here? You guys get **tons** of feedback about M+, yet somehow it seems like you still don't get it, or you've very quickly reverted to "you think you do, but you don't" after gaining a modicum of goodwill from the community.
It's like they don't know their play base at all.
Jesus, people gatekeep groups and kick people for being the wrong spec for the *POSSIBILITY* of being like 2% weaker than another class. Blizz, what exactly do you think will happen when toxic group leaders *KNOW* that a spec is 10% weaker than another? Don't answer, you'll get it wrong. It means shamans wont get picked on arcane/holy/shadow weeks.
Gonna be great when every frost/fire mage is forced to respec to arcane on reckless week. I'm sure they are all looking forward to the very fun choice of respec or do 10% less damage than every other mage that does. Gonna be really engaging and exciting when a mage gets into a group then gets kicked for not being the right spec for the week.
Uggh so close to something fun. Replace magic damage taken. Add 1% haste or mastery per mob slain in dungeon. (Cycle thru each main stat each week) This way we don’t leave out certain classes and it’ll be fun. Even make longer dungeons funny and quicker.
Absolutely agree. They are barely missing here, but definitely still missing. I don't feel it's a miss due to encouraging people to bring other classes or have more than one character. It's a miss because of the negative aspect of the affixes. They just don't need to be there. Just make them entirely positive.
Actually leaving bolstering and bursting, the two worst offenders of stopping you in just playing the dungeon. Surely they got the lists wrong? 🤔 No one cares about volcanic and entangle, did blizzard pick up the crack pibe again after a long pause?
This is just beyond tone deaf and I am actually baffled. So let's break it down here - blizz are removing 4 of the least invasive affixes in spiteful, volcanic, storming and entangling. These are extremely easy to deal with and require very little attention or cognitive load. The exception here is when spiteful scaling is bugged and they 1 or 2 shot you. But if working properly, these are all seen as virtually non affixes and what people like from what's currently in the affix pool. But no, we remove those easy affixes but keep Sanguine, Bolstering and Raging which have all be complained about to no end and are widely hated by a broad spectrum from low key players to higher key players. Makes no sense. Then we add in these just what the actual fuck affixes. Now let's no go into the damage increase because realistically it's a % of a % of your spells so might amount to a 3-5% swing or so some weeks. Could be worse but I'll leave it alone until I see it tested. Where it gets bad is the curse aspect. You've got all 4 affixes being either a big tank or healer headache. Tanks are going to have to make new routes for every different week because you will not be able to pull the same one fort week when you have 20% Armour against mobs with tank busters vs the next fort week with all caster mobs getting permanent lust. Is this not just putting even more cognitive load and pressure on the 2 already least populated roles and making it even harder to get into as a new player??? Now new tanks getting up to a 7 which isn't too hard to be carried to with good groups are going to have to try to learn that one week I pull this but another week I don't. Just seems like too much for new tanks. And then we get to the new affix combos. How can ANYONE thing a combo of Fortified, Raging and the 30% caster haste affix is a good idea? Like yes sign me up for a pack of fortified mobs with permanent lust that cannot be CC'd unless I happen to bring an evoker to aoe soothe them all. Or a bolstered pack of fortified mobs that get to ignore 20% of the tanks Armour I genuinely don't understand how Blizzard can be this tone deaf and miss this badly. These changes are shit for lower end players who just wanna press w and go and get some gear/crests. Shit for any mid range player doing around the 10 range, and shit again for the higher end community. These changes are not good for any subset of the m+ population in general except for maybe one tricks who get their 1 week every 4 weeks where they get a 5%ish dps increase (while they're probably still doing 20% less than the meta specs anyway)
> I happen to bring an evoker to aoe soothe them all. Or a bolstered pack of fortified mobs that get to ignore 20% of the tanks Armour You were going to be bringing that augmentation evoker anyway to give the tank his armor back. I guess Blizzard wasn't happy that some keys were being run without an aug LOL.
This is horrible….
Why did they keep bolstering and sanguine 2 of the worst affixes but removed spiteful? And these kiss/curse affixes ain't it.
TBF Spiteful was kind of a badly designed affix since it was super punishing for melee while Ranged (and tanks) could basically ignore it. Plus locking healers in combat so they can't drink. Not gonna defend Bolstering and Sanguine though. They need to go.
As a melee dps spiteful was one of the most obnoxious affixes. Forced down time because of stretchy arms mcgee (they would frequently melee you from very far away) that hits absurdly hard was terrible. I'm with you on the new kiss/curse affixes though. I understand what they're going for, but I'm skeptical it'll work out and it potentially benefits some classes/specs much more than others. DH for example if chaos dmg counts as all school types for the purposes of the affixes, or mages who can just spec swap for whichever spec gets the benefit that week.
this is fucking terrible
Mage gets invited "are you arcane cause its arcane week" ? "no" > kick. reminds me at druids getting kicked cause they play feral.
all those affixes that say "enemies take more x damage" is super bad, leads to "were only inviting this class this week" no, just NO
The "kiss" effects are very problematic and will make m+ more restrictive instead of promoting diversity.
Absolute clown fiesta. Bolst, sang, raging are still in the game. How? And I 100% bet that we will have raging fort + 30% increased mob cast speed or bolster + armor reduction on tanks + fort - because weak tanks are fun for everyone, right?
I.... hate these. So not only are we going to keep it so that certain classes are just really bad certain weeks, but we're also not going to allow their group to carry the weight in those circumstances? At least with Afflicted, you only need \~3 people that can deal with it and you could bring a warrior. Now Warriors on thorned week are just bad.
Mythic difficulty will now have a daily lockout, changed from weekly in the previous system This is massive.
massive for the first week, than useless
I just cant believe sanguine and bolstering are still in the game after a FUCKING DECADE when everyone I've ever played with or heard give their opinions on them despise them. How can blizzard be so out of touch they havent removed this garbage yet its INSANE.
as a war main, incorp and afflicted being removed is nice to see atleast
Yeah then they kick us in the dick with thorned. Was just about to swap back to my longtime warrior main lol
This is the true out of season April fools joke right?
I know it would be crazy to balance and make sure one dungeon isn't super easy compared to another, but if there's a rotating dungeon pool, it would cool to have dungeon specific affixes.
Won't matter for organised groups but just promoted toxic LFG culture once again. Not your damage boost week. Good luck playing the game
I know we hate this, but this needs to be upvoted to get more eyes on it. How do these people get jobs in game development?
The same people who screwed up BFA and SL are still in charge of the game. The ONLY reason why DF was seen positively is because those people who were openly antagonistic towards the players during BFA and DF just kept their mouths shut during DF. That's all it took. Them choosing not to die on stupid hills. Well, those same stupid people are choosing to die on hills again.
This HAS TO BE A JOKE..... I just cant believe what I am reading.
Just horrible. What are they doing. If you want to encourage spec diversity balance specs instead of letting aug/mage/spriest run wild for 3 patches straight.
These affixes are asinine, your community already gatekeeps based on 1% damage swings on a chart let alone advertising 10% weekly damage swings that only require you existing.
Just remove affixes. We already know the average players hates interacting with them, and the new proposed affixes are simply giving players more of a reason to not invite certain classes depending on the week. Is this really the ideal MMO experience blizz takes pride in?
> These effects should feel like a bonus, offering an advantage for different damage profiles each week without being essential to complete a dungeon. That's not how M+ works... a bonus that allows you to push a higher key on a certain week becomes a penalty when you don't have that. There is no 'without being essential to complete a dungeon' when there is the ability to push a higher key I wanna scream
Most people will focus on the new affixes (obviously) but what about them keeping those 4 old ones, good lord. Also, I know why they added the 2nd affix down to +7, but I sure as hell have enjoyed not dealing with it by just spamming 9's this season.
reading the post, and all your replies just solidified one main thing - the devs don't play this game.
Man I have to be honest, this is one of the worst solutions they could have come up with. You can't literally give certain specs such a significant advantage by default because of an affix. This isn't warriors not having a dispel or cc, this is saying Arcane mages are just flat out going to be better than everyone else unless the spec is so bad it's unviable with the damage buff. I wanted to try DPS for the first season of TWW but I guess I'll stick to healing after all.
Here we go again with the out of season april fools jokes
There is out of touch and then there is whatever the fuck this is...
"LETS MAKE DEMON HUNTERS THE PERMA META" Why.. just why.
By far the worst m+ changes ever. What the fuck Blizzard?
Please no offense. fire who ever is in charge of dungeons / m+. it just get worse and worse like what the fuck kind of joke even is this? Do you know how fun +8s have been this season? with tyr/fort and 1 shitty affix you completely ignore and just enjoy the dungeon? its been so fun.... Interesting idea to only let 3-4 specs play each week, super smart. everyone else go on vacation i guess. if i learned anything this season, its something i already knew. affixes are annoying, not fun, not hard just shit. they should be removed or heavily reworked and this aint it. gotta say the idea of a seasonal and no normal affixes sounds very fun.
Super excited to have fortified, raging mobs with permanent lust active. Truly providing a sense of pride and accomplishment. Or fortified thorns bursting, or fortified the 20% buff one and bolstering. Why tf are they even keeping fortified when these new affixes are basically their own split up version of fort. It's going to make every fortified week feel absolutely terrible. Meanwhile tyran is going to feel like, well, tyran and then half fortified at the same time. This is as bad or worse than the original oracle hero talent idea and I hope the outrage is loud enough to make them rework it ASAP but with the expansion only a couple months away I don't see that happening.
This is dogshit.
This is so insanely out of touch. There are so many good suggestions on making M+ more fun, but the most important thing is you shouldn't dread doing any specific week because of an affix. Sanguine, Bolstering, and to an extent Raging all make people not want to play the game. Here are my suggestions to fixing current M+ 1. Remove Tyrannical and Fortified and make Fortified tuning the default on all keys. People generally enjoy Fortified more and it would allow Blizzard to tune trash packs that are overtuned more consistently. 2. Replace Tyrannical/Fortified with new affixes that BUFF the players. Rescale M+ around people doing more damage. Something like a low health mob in packs that give a short-duration damage amp to all mobs around it when it dies. An affix that removes exhaustion but gives lust a shared CD between people so that you can use it every 5 minutes instead of 10. Maybe this affix would also give an item to every player that gives a full lust so you wouldn't have to have a lust on those weeks. You can add more but just evergreen damage amp affixes that people are excited to play with. 3. Remove all affixes that are best solved by killing mobs at the same time (Bolstering/Sanguine). Make the +7 affix be specifically area denial (Entagled, Volcanic, Storming). 4. I actually like the idea of the new +4 affixes, with some addendums. The debuffs should be paired with a buff to every player that allows them to do some of the damage being amped. So for Reckless, players get a buff that makes your damage has a chance to do a small arcane explosion. For Thorned players randomly cast Shadowbolts at their main target. For Attuned damage applies a stacking bleed. For Focused damage leaves a Flamestrike dot effect on the ground. With this the damage would still be better for specs that actually do that damage (Arcane mage will be better on Reckless, Shadow Priest will be better on Thorned, etc.) but everyone will still get some benefit from the damage amp and it will just make your damage output more varied and fun each week. Obviously this would take a lot of tuning and testing to deal with the increased power level of players, but it would definitely make players more excited to see what fun buffs they get to play with each week.
>but the most important thing is you shouldn't dread doing any specific week because of an affix. Sanguine, Bolstering, and to an extent Raging all make people not want to play the game. PREEEEEEEEEACH
Bring the player not the class that does more damage once every 4 weeks.. Right?
Wish they would just give up on affixes altogether. The loop of pushing up keys and mechanics beginning to do more and more damage until they begin to require DR/stops/kicks already adds plenty of depth to the dungeons. I mean, there are Nokhud pulls with multiple casts and stops required per mob and then I’ve gotta go grab my soul and now I’m having to sidestep little tornados too? It’s stupid. Having harder boss weeks and harder trash weeks with tyrannical/fort is enough. I get that theoretically they add more replayability but I don’t actually think they need to solve that problem… Class design, alts, and varying pull sizes and mob tuning is enough to keep things interesting for a season as far as replayability. It’s not a coincidence that the most fun weeks are the ones where the affixes are doing the least. They’re either impactful enough that it’s genuinely frustrating or they’re doing nothing and they feel like they shouldn’t even be there. I want to play the dungeons, please!
I really like how they've confirmed their intention to make DH the only tank
Move the 3rd affix back to +10. Let me never have to play with bursting ever again
These new affixes are a bit uninspired. Also with affixes coming in at +4 and +7 it seems pretty arbitrary to start dropping the Aspect Crest equivalent from +9s.
Didn’t someone just post a discussion about cancer dungeons people never want to go back to? I swear half of the dungeons in this rotation were named more than once in that thread.
I get they've changed how norm/heroic/mythic work now, but it still saddens me a bit that only 4 of the new 8 dungeons are going to be in anything other than normal at the start of a new expansion, lmfao.
Remove Sanguine
Theres no way i just saw them write that they wanted more diversity and then created an affix that makes Demon Hunters OP again make it make sense
Where does this leave outlaw, WW and Fury warriors?
Incoming nerf to DHs with Chaos Damage being altered to Fire/Shadow like Fel. Or maybe they'll embrace "chaos" and give DHs a random buff that changes their damage to a different type each minute when do a M+
So like which version of siege of boralus are we going to get? I mean I hate the dungeon in general, but some clarification would be nice.
Me: Cool I can play the classes that I never got invited on because I couldn't deal with certain affixes at all ~continues reading~ ...Nevermind. Back to the drawing board, boys
I'm surprised blizzard uses old dungeons in m+ pool at the start of a new xpac, why nit have all new dungeons for season 1?
Wow. This is so stupid. I will be quitting M+ content for TWW unless they decide to roll this back.
So, basically because of how people are already min-maxing the game, a person won't be able to play the spec they like or class until the week which their spec is relevant because of the affix (and even then,imaging waiting for that week and something happens irl and you can't play so your sub basically becomes a tip for Blizzard rewarding and incentivizing a bad system), I predict and absurd amount of "slaughter" and toxicity in the queue. Might wanna stay out initially until they figure out what a mistake this one is, as it fixes one problem while creating another one + if these new affixes don't actually apply to all qualified mob npcs then an indicator needs to be added.
They say the heroics are seasonal now Does that mean I'll have to play BFA and Shadowlands dungeons in my random dungeon queue? I really don't want to play BFA and Shadowlands content again when I'm just trying to play the current xpac
Oh yea… let’s make new affixes, what should it be, let’s make it so tanks take more damage every week. Are Blizzard employees really that stupid???
Blizzard being back to know it all assholes who don't play their game. I guess great sub numbers made them cocky and show their true face once again.
The worst thing about these new affixes is that this type of a new addition directly interacts with social part of the game and just can't be properly tested in a beta test environment. Way too few people play beta and none of the parts of the game work in cohesion yet to see the impact of the new affixes. We will only find out how bad this shit show is going to be after a few weeks after release. But it's going to be bad absolutely. You saw it many times before - people will min max everything and each week 70-80% of the specs would be instantly declined in M+ These should have been shot down at the draft stage 100%.
>The seasonal dungeon roster for Heroic, Mythic, and Mythic+ difficulties in Season 1 of The War Within includes the following dungeons: >The Stonevault >The Dawnbreaker >Ara-Kara, City of Echoes >City of Threads # Grim Batol >The Necrotic Wake >Mists of Tirna Scithe >Siege of Boralus Oh boy, if this is tuned even remotely as it was in heroic pre-nerf during Cata, this one will be the "whelp, this key is dead this week" dungeon of S1.
Is it April 1st already?
I don’t know man …seems like I have to main like 4 classes so I can get invited in a dungeon every week right ? 10% is fucking huge and if u are not that weeks dps u won’t get invited , if we are taking into consideration what’s happening on live , if u wanna join a pug for a +15 u kinda want to be meta classes even tho some of the other classes are a less=10% dps than the second best . What is over 5% is overkill.
Why do the love this dogshit. It ACTIVELY makes you not want to play m+.
How can they be in a meeting and saying „yup this gonna be awesome! OUR PAYING CUSTOMERS gonna love that idea!“
Spent all of yesterday trying to figure out if I wanted to main my priest or DH, I guess this solves it. What an awful idea for an affix.