I’m gonna be honest, as a seasoned M+ player, I like the concept of challenging affixes. I like the added difficulty and I don’t think all affixes should be positive. What’s bothering this season is that the seasonal affix isn’t following the usual “challenge -> reward” concept. Rather it follow a pattern of “buff -> punishment”, which is extremely stupid, paired with a very low visual and other stuff, it makes it just extremely annoying. I think everyone aggrees that this seasonal affix is just very bad. The buff doesn’t last long enough, it’s hard fo coordinate with pugs and the punishment is instant wipe in 95% scenarios. Which brings me to the other affixes. Some of them have a good concept, but almost all of them force you to have certain classes to deal witb them, and makes other classes with less utilities completely obsolete. In higher keys, if you don’t have a soothe for raging, you’re done for. Bursting without mass dispell makes it just a very slow pull, aka won’t time the key, etc. These are the ones that needs rework the most in my opinion as it tunnels the meta on certain weeks. The second type of annoying affixes are the instant wipe ones. Quaking, Explosives in particular. I’m fine with having to deal with additional things, but these 2 in particular means an instant wipe if you miss 1 thing. No way to catch back up if you do 1 mistake with them. Quaking is badly designed for 50% of the fights where you have to stack together. I’m talking about you, 3rd boss of Azure Vault. If your quaking timer is alligned with his big aoe buret where you have to stack in a rune, it’s gg. No counterplay. Extremely ridiculous. And explosives just keep spawning and spawning, impossible to target with a macro, and on top of the packs mechanics, if you miss only 1 explosive, you’re dead. It’s over. I’m against removing them purely, but they definitely need a rework. In my opinion the only well balanced ones are Storming and Volcanic lol…
Blizz should make new affixes, not just seasonal ones. would bring more variety to the mythic+
I think the visual vomit has gotten extreme. When thundering hits on a platform with tornadoes with tornadoes on your head or tornadoes from the mobs or orbs from the totem vs. orbs on your heads making you use weak auras to try and sort it out. Then quaking hits on mobs with equally sized swirls like RLP - techtonics the whole visual interplay is just ... They need to get their visual indicator house in order. It feels more like design laziness rather than "ooo let's be hip and confuse them into dying".I also agree with Dratnos that most affixes just convert into how they want to torture the healer this week. The affixes that are supposed to challenge melee end up landing on healers:
I thank the gaming gods that Necrotic affix is gone - as a healer for atleast 50% of all seasons I absolutely loathed this. Now get rid of certain combos that do not gel together, like quaking and thundering. They should never happen at the same time, seems like a really easy timing fix in the code. Also some affixes should never happen in boss fights, for example do you remember the first boss in Mists, when explosives would spawn alll over the little arena? that should not happen imo. Bosses are designed and tuned in their own right. Some weeks they are harder due to tyrannical and thats enough - we shouldn't have to contend with the secondary affixes like orbs or quaking, on top of thundering imo.
Fort and tyrannical need to go, the only modifier for health and damage should be the key itselfThis may allow for keys to go higher. Who knows maybe be able get to 40 for once
In my opinion the entire design of M+ needs a rework and has since day 1. I think the whole premise of setting it all against the clock is just lazy design. They should design dungeons to reward good play more than quick play. Atm the whole against the clock design encourages zerging and lazy play, as long as it gets the job done faster even if it makes the experience miserable for some or all of the party members it doesn't matter as long as it's quicker.I certainly think a timer should be involved, but it shouldn't be the only metric, points handed out for good play, avoiding mechanics/correct use of abilities or mitigation etc should be a much bigger measure than time. Correspondingly taking points away for bad play, failing to dodge/interrupt etc. An easy example would be dodging an avoidable mechanic, atm if it doesn't kill a player outright then they don't care, they just expect the healer to adjust which can lead to a miserable(if everyone is failing most of the time) or in some cases even a toxic experience for the healers(when players get annoyed that they are dying, even if it's their own fault). But if the player getting hit would lose points and decrease the chance of maxing the rewards, suddenly through game design you encourage good gameplay and good behaviour.The thing with this is that it is a lot more challenging to design and build for the devs, whereas slapping a timer on is a cheap, easy and boring way to instantly increase the difficulty.
I feel like they should add a positive benefit to each affix, just like they do to the seasonal one. For example: during explosive affix, add effect of +.1% haste per explosive destroyed, lasting 10 seconds. This would give players something to look forward to each week.
I've never thought any affixes individually were terrible or unplayable but this season feels like the same 3-4 affixes on rotation which all feel terrible vs some weeks are better than others. I've never minded necrotic but some more variety would be nice.Also, lots of comments asking Blizzard to be "more creative" without any original ideas for affixes. Those types of comments are pretty much worthless and help no one.
Yes, I would like to see more affixes that affects all party members not just the healer.
I think the key issue is the fact that they've had to disable how some affixes work on certain bosses and trash. Simply because at their core their poorly designed and prove to be problematic over fun and have required all the changes we've seen since BFA. Truthfully I feel like the way trash is should be more than enough in terms of difficulty. All the affixes accomplish is making already problematic trash and bosses even more problematic based on what week it is, like this week for instance to where you can't effectively stack well and a lot of bosses require you to stack to deal with their mechanics. I think that we should simply only have three affixes as well, the primary fort or tyran, one of the minor affixes, and then the seasonal. As the headache mostly comes in the form of having two minor affixes to deal with at a time, which made sense when we didn't have the seasonal affix to deal with. Yet as storming has shown four is simply too much and leads to a pure detriment to keys over making them run and engaging.
I think the dugeon should be built in a vacuum and just designed to be a good dungeon. I think affixes are stale. You already deal with the exponential difficulty increase with key level, thundering, fortified, and tyrannical. Build a good dungeon, create a good seasonal affix...and if you really want, keep tyrannical and fortified.
They need to get rid of just blatant affixes that just makes mobs/bosses more like sponges. No one likes that, its a extremely lazy way of adding difficulty. Just have the keys scale more and add in more unique affixes. Look at GW2 fractal instabilities as some examples.
Yes, they should be reworked. I don't think all of them are necessarily all that bad but they have mostly been around since legion. A completely fresh set of affixes, for better or worse, would at least freshen things up.
Mythic + was great, but years ago. Needs a solid revamp.
Remove tyrannical, fortified. First, tyranical is freaking boring. Dungeons bosses are not encounters built to last more than +-2minutes. After that it is just boring rinse and repeat and unless we talk really high keys were managing every single CD is a key (and that will be the case even if tyranical didnt exist, just maye in different key level), wipes happens just becuse of how boring it is and people failing basic mechanics due to loss of focus. In raids, you dont usually have phases that are longer than 2minutes without anything changing either. Tyranical is unbalanced from common players perspective because wiping on tyranical boss mid fight pretty much means you wont make the timer. Compared to some commong trash wipe that (usually) doesnt change much and dungeon is still timable. (Once again, I am talking from the generic player perspective, not talking on MDI level where any wipes is the problem, of course)Second, both of this affixes and the main reason of frustration and dead keys that people avoid especially early in the season. Ofc right now it is fine, after xxx weeks of balance tuning. But there was so many trash packs that were so broken on fortified that they were oneshotting by basic abilities, or bosses that were almost unkillable on tyranical. Because it is really slippery slope. If you have some badly balanced mechanic, if you suddenly drop another huge % damage modifier on top of that, you have a problem. As we are going the direction of having fresh dungeon pool every season (which I love personally), this WILL be problem every single season. It took several cycles of tyranical and fortified to get this pool of dungeons to reasonable level. And from next season, we are back on square one. And third, those affixes dont bring any reasonable benefits for common player. It is annoying to grind rating in 2 separate weeks and gameplay value is not that different. Yes maybe some classes or specs play a bit different build. But its not like you would be picking some heavy ST builds on tyranical, or could completly ignore you ST profile and go full ham on AoE on fortified. If anything, it is more dictate by dungeon than by the affix. It is completly missing the mark of what it should be hitting.So lets just remove those as soon as possible and then we can talk about other affixes.
i think affixes in a mythic + season are terrible why not just a simple affix fortified/tryanical enough? why they put more affix this for example quaking and enrage affix makes me unsatisfied with the runs and harder.
Raging needs to go... it really enforces bring the class not the player. Getting melee'ed for 800k within .3 seconds feels terrible... just because you didn't have a soothe between 5 unique classes in your group...These type of scenarios apply to other affixes as well.
I feel like before we talk about affixes there are be much bigger and obvious issues with the way the system works that should be adressed first. The inability to choose which key you get for example is still a huge RNG factor that has literally no place in competitive play. As a 3.3k io player who's aiming for 26's, i constantly see sub 3k rio people posting 25's in LFG because they managed to RNG bounce between COS and SBG two or three times. At the same time, my group might need a specific key that just won't come out, and you spend hours and hours and hours pushing and rerolling keys to try and get the one we need just to have a shot at gaining a few points. The whole system needs a rework, or an overhaul that makes it so the system is not inherently wasting your time. Nobody really cares about affixes beyond which weeks are worth playing and which aren't, so that whole disccusion is sort of whatever in my opinion.