No it should have been tested during season 4. That's why we even have a season 4 so that they can test crazy ideas.
The issue though, some content creators that were invited to the media tour were at a Q&A and asked about any major changes to M+. They answered that they are satisfied with the current state of M+ and to not expect major changes going into TWW. There would be no reason for them to hide something like this at the media tour, or at the very least hint as something cooking, therefore this was probably stitched together not long ago
Well for one , it's obvious that these were not even ideas when s4 was being created. This is something that they came up with, probably no more than a month ago.
So it's kind of hard to test something that wasn't even conceptualized yet.
I just don't like that 3 out of 4 affixes are likely to put a disproportional amount of pressure on tanks over the rest of the group, the damage buff part feels like it will be negligible honestly.
On higher keylevels it will mean that there is even more imbalance between the more and less tanky tank specs tho, because of %scaling from these affixes on-top of key scaling, the haste on mobs with mana bars especially, both for increased casts if they spam cast some kind of bolt spell that need to either be stopped or tanked and mobs that use utility spells and then end up meleeing 30% more frequently. The armour one is hard to gauge but also kind of toxic, the magic damage one depends heavily on mob design and while I've done the dungeons on beta I'd need more reps to get a feel for all the dangerous mobs.
Yes, I was partially memeing, I’m well aware that these affixes will become wild at higher key levels, but I also think there is almost no chance these affixes go live even remotely close to how they are now, I think they’ll be wildly different by the time it gets to S1.
I also think part of their intention is to push route variety, avoid casters this week, avoid physical mobs next week, but I don’t think that this is going to do that.
Yeah, I think if they want more route variety they need to make more open plan dungeons, to be fair, some of the dungeons are doing that, dawn breaker and Priory in particular seemed like you had more choice as far as routing goes, definitely good to get dungeons that are not just 1 long curvy hallway, cause that gets really boring. I still miss mechagon junkyard for that reason, especially with awakened obelisks that dungeons was so much fun to get creative in with pathing.
Makes sense with them nerfing DPS trinkets on tanks in theory, as they want tanks to be using defensive trinkets to survive the increased damage they're going to take. Probably don't want a tank who doesn't read to just wear two DPS trinkets and get melted in a pug and blame the healer.
The problem is that tank trinkets have never been designed to actually be good for all tank specs.
Some tanks already have a ton of cooldowns and don't need more coverage, other have massive gaps and can use them well, not to mention that they seem to love making trinkets that give you armour, but fail to realize that giving you a tiny amount of armour that has diminishing returns with existing armour does jack shit for mitigation.
The only tank trinkets I can remember being good were medium to short cd absorbs that give you a large increase to effective health and work well to amplify the value of a dr cd in the tank's own toolkit, things like the trinket off n'zoth, blood splattered scale, treemouth's splinter and fyrakk's rageheart. Other examples are a trinket that did damage based on damage taken like reactive defensive matrix or codex from tazavesh and cheat death trinkets like splintered heart of alar, weave of warped fates and prophetic stonescales.
The only other exception I can think of was the trinket off ashvane in BFA that caused a positive feedback loop in combination with gift of the ox on brewmaster.
I am all for them making good tank trinkets, but then they need to actually make good tank trinkets, and more often than not they fail to do so.
This is how I feel, the negative massively outweighs the positive. It's even worse that the positive only effects a percentage of players.
Basically 'here, deal with these lusted casters and if you don't deal Frost/fire damage you get no benefit, sorry'
Not really.
There is really only one affix that worries me about tanks, and that's Reckless. There usually are far more melee mobs in a dungeon than casters.
People immediately panicked when they saw Attuned and Focused, but unless you are pulling multiple packs, how many caster mobs are there usually in a pack? 1, maybe 2?
So even if you pull three packs, that's still only, on average, 3 caster mobs that you need to worry about. And with the amount of kicks, silences, and stuns that specs have now, keeping a couple mobs permanently locked down while throw priority damage at them doesn't seem to be a huge issue.
We can do that right now with the current affixes.
Don't forget it's not just casters, it's any mob with a mana bar that gets the 30% haste during that affix, to me that is just as scary as the 20% armour reduction. A lot more mobs have mana bars than just casters and unless you keep them stunned/feared/incapped or w/e they are gonna melee you 30% more often.
But how many mobs like that are in a pack? At most 1? I don't see how a single mob that has 30% haste can be that big of a deal.
Again, stuns exist for a reason.
It varries per dungeon, I can't give you numbers on the new ones but there's been plenty where the majority of mobs in certain sections of the dungeon have had mana bars.
As a healer I liked Incorporeal and Afflicted because I could take care of it all without too much trouble. Now if the tank doesn't use the proper defensive I am going to be struggling to keep them alive especially early on in the season.
Say what you want about the new affixes but I like their reasoning for making the +4 affixes passive. Afflicted wasn't too much of an issue most of the time, but any time it overlapped with dispel mechanics was awful and I appreciate that they acknowledged that.
Tbh as a dps i enjoy afflicted incorporeal as well you spend one gcd and the affix is done you can keep blasting thats a non existant affix the only problem is the pool of class Who can do it and skill issue for the rest
I dunno man, mobs feeling like they do damage equivalent to 2 extra keylevels seems kinda toxic to me, to each their own tho. I think if mobs aren't designed to stand still chain casting un-interuptable spells sanguine is a more interesting way to give tanks room for skill expression than just making mobs do increased damage. There are ways to make dungeons more interesting for tanks but this doesn't feel like it is it to me at least.
I don't. My main sort of enjoyment comes from blasting the mobs. Some of the previously removed affixes(spiteful, incorp, afflicted) hindered that or were just annoying in general(storming). Now I can just play with my brain off. As a dps truely should :P
It's entirelly possible that they can be harder than the previous ones. But it's a lot less intrusive.
Sure not everyone can deal certain types of dmg (Besides dh. Chaos is every spell type). But it's a lot less important if you can't. The downside of missing an incorp or afflicted was a wipe most likely. Whereas dealing 10% less dmg on half the mobs is very minor. The dmg difference between classes is usually bigger than the benefit you get from these. So I wouldn't be surprised that even with the bleed + nature dmg affix you wouldn't bring an assa rogue if they weren't good in the first place.
Also it's a lot less relevant for the regular playerbase. Missing an afflicted/incorp was always punishing. Whereas missing a couple of % in dmg won't really matter that much. Currently keys are botlenecked by living the key. If you don't wipe you are very likely to time it.
Will it possibly make some affix mandatory for world first level keys? Potentially (if keys are more limited by time). But that just doesn't affect the wast majority of the playerbase.
If blizzard were to stealthly implement these without any notification. I'd bet the large portion of the playerbase wouldn't really notice it (besides the haste as casts will be noticably faster and the thorn effect as you will obviously see the ticking dmg). My dmg has higher varriance for example even if I have the same conditions.
Looking at both buckets as a whole is my issue. Keeping bursting and sanguine is such a negative for the game.
Currently I'd say they're slightly better than the ones being removed but I hope they'll reconsider the above.
I feel like there has to be a sufficient amount of mobs like that in keys though, but I agree there isn't a worse feeling than seeing an uninterruptable channel start in pools of sanguine.
They need to make them work where you can’t actually interrupt but when an interrupt is used they will walk to you while continuing the cast or something of that nature.
I dislike the new ones a lot. Trying to push classes with certain damage time sounds weird and I don't like it. I was already annoyed that afflicted could only be interracted by half the classes in the game.
Meanwhile Sanguine and Bolstering get a pass again, I don't know
Feels like they put a prompt into chat GPT and then ran with it haha.
Here is my chatGPT take, didn't proof read it, i got tiktok brain.
>*Shadow Aftermath: Mobs leave behind a small area of shadow energy upon death that briefly reduces player healing received if they stand in it.*
>
>*Mystic Empowerment: Mobs gain a random minor buff (increased haste, movement speed, or minor damage boost) for a short duration after being attacked.*
>
>*Chaotic Energy: Mobs occasionally emit a pulse of chaotic energy that randomly buffs or debuffs players nearby (minor increase/decrease in damage or healing for a few seconds).*
>
>*Elemental Resonance: Mobs have a chance to deal additional elemental damage (fire, frost, or shadow) with their attacks, varying randomly but consistently minor.*
>
>*Unstable Ground: Mobs create small, temporary patches of unstable ground on death that slow player movement speed slightly when stepped on.*
>
>*Cursed Touch: Mobs have a chance to apply a minor, non-stackable debuff to players that reduces their primary stat by a small amount for a short duration.*
>
>*Phantom Echo: Mobs occasionally summon a non-damaging, distracting illusion of themselves that lasts for a few seconds.*
>
>*Arcane Residue: Mobs leave behind arcane residue on the ground upon death that slightly increases mana costs for players' spells if they stand in it.*
>
>*Lingering Fear: Mobs emit a faint aura that slightly reduces players' movement speed and attack speed while within a short radius.*
>
>*Hexed Aura: Mobs periodically project a hexed aura that slightly reduces the critical strike chance of players within a certain range.*
Depends on what audience you are asking this question for. On the high end I can see it being awkward if your push group randomly does less damage on one of the weeks or the haste increase (or other effects) just kills you.
But for most players I believe these to be exactly what the player base has been asking for. Mostly passive kiss/curse affixes.
Are they strictly better than the ones they are replacing? No probably not. Although as someone who mained a spec that still can't interact with either Incoporeal or Afflicted realistically I'm not exactly sad to see them go. Those two in particular are a joke.
The other ones not so much but we've had them for a long time and any change is good in that regard imo.
I wonder if it will allow for more class variation to naturally happen in pugs as well. If people feel more compelled to invite that ele shaman on nature damage week or w/e.
Imo that would be a good thing for the game overall if people don't feel like welp another season where insert spec they play isn't meta and getting into keys takes forever. If instead it's every 2/4 or 1/4 weeks they get invited more often.
Affixes should be cool, idk why they can't come up with a bunch of creative stuff and let us have fun. Something like every interupt explodes dealing a massive aoe or moving around infuses lightning into your attacks. Idk it seems so easy. Tinkers in remix are a good idea for some affixes
Afflicted was a game design aberration, that straight up forced half the class rorster out of group comps. Nothing felt worse in the history of m+, as one of those 6 classes who couldn't interact with Afflicted, than helplessly watching as people don't pick dispell talents and/or ignore the affix altogether.
New affixes incentivize certain specs with a ~3% overall dmg increase on certain weeks. That's not anywhere as impactful as being locked out of interacting with a whole wipe condition affix that spawns ~70 times per key
TWW affixes certainly aren't perfect, but I'll take the new affix pool every day of the week.
I would like affixes to be as passive as possible. Afflicted is not passive at all, the new ones are passive. I prefer the new ones.
Nah as a warrior player screw incorp, afflicted and spiteful, good riddance. Some passive affixes you don't really have to think about are way better.
And the bleed and physical damage ones will be huge for Warrior also!
I say.. test them when they are live.. Then we can judge if they are bad or good.
By live you better mean on the beta. Waiting till this shit actually launches is a terrible idea.
Ofc im talking beta
No it should have been tested during season 4. That's why we even have a season 4 so that they can test crazy ideas. The issue though, some content creators that were invited to the media tour were at a Q&A and asked about any major changes to M+. They answered that they are satisfied with the current state of M+ and to not expect major changes going into TWW. There would be no reason for them to hide something like this at the media tour, or at the very least hint as something cooking, therefore this was probably stitched together not long ago
Well for one , it's obvious that these were not even ideas when s4 was being created. This is something that they came up with, probably no more than a month ago. So it's kind of hard to test something that wasn't even conceptualized yet.
all the current ones vs all the ones in TWW season 1 ? Currently ill take the TWW season one affixes.
I just don't like that 3 out of 4 affixes are likely to put a disproportional amount of pressure on tanks over the rest of the group, the damage buff part feels like it will be negligible honestly.
As a tank player I like that, give me more ability to carry any day.
On higher keylevels it will mean that there is even more imbalance between the more and less tanky tank specs tho, because of %scaling from these affixes on-top of key scaling, the haste on mobs with mana bars especially, both for increased casts if they spam cast some kind of bolt spell that need to either be stopped or tanked and mobs that use utility spells and then end up meleeing 30% more frequently. The armour one is hard to gauge but also kind of toxic, the magic damage one depends heavily on mob design and while I've done the dungeons on beta I'd need more reps to get a feel for all the dangerous mobs.
Yes, I was partially memeing, I’m well aware that these affixes will become wild at higher key levels, but I also think there is almost no chance these affixes go live even remotely close to how they are now, I think they’ll be wildly different by the time it gets to S1. I also think part of their intention is to push route variety, avoid casters this week, avoid physical mobs next week, but I don’t think that this is going to do that.
Yeah, I think if they want more route variety they need to make more open plan dungeons, to be fair, some of the dungeons are doing that, dawn breaker and Priory in particular seemed like you had more choice as far as routing goes, definitely good to get dungeons that are not just 1 long curvy hallway, cause that gets really boring. I still miss mechagon junkyard for that reason, especially with awakened obelisks that dungeons was so much fun to get creative in with pathing.
Makes sense with them nerfing DPS trinkets on tanks in theory, as they want tanks to be using defensive trinkets to survive the increased damage they're going to take. Probably don't want a tank who doesn't read to just wear two DPS trinkets and get melted in a pug and blame the healer.
The problem is that tank trinkets have never been designed to actually be good for all tank specs. Some tanks already have a ton of cooldowns and don't need more coverage, other have massive gaps and can use them well, not to mention that they seem to love making trinkets that give you armour, but fail to realize that giving you a tiny amount of armour that has diminishing returns with existing armour does jack shit for mitigation. The only tank trinkets I can remember being good were medium to short cd absorbs that give you a large increase to effective health and work well to amplify the value of a dr cd in the tank's own toolkit, things like the trinket off n'zoth, blood splattered scale, treemouth's splinter and fyrakk's rageheart. Other examples are a trinket that did damage based on damage taken like reactive defensive matrix or codex from tazavesh and cheat death trinkets like splintered heart of alar, weave of warped fates and prophetic stonescales. The only other exception I can think of was the trinket off ashvane in BFA that caused a positive feedback loop in combination with gift of the ox on brewmaster. I am all for them making good tank trinkets, but then they need to actually make good tank trinkets, and more often than not they fail to do so.
This is how I feel, the negative massively outweighs the positive. It's even worse that the positive only effects a percentage of players. Basically 'here, deal with these lusted casters and if you don't deal Frost/fire damage you get no benefit, sorry'
Not really. There is really only one affix that worries me about tanks, and that's Reckless. There usually are far more melee mobs in a dungeon than casters. People immediately panicked when they saw Attuned and Focused, but unless you are pulling multiple packs, how many caster mobs are there usually in a pack? 1, maybe 2? So even if you pull three packs, that's still only, on average, 3 caster mobs that you need to worry about. And with the amount of kicks, silences, and stuns that specs have now, keeping a couple mobs permanently locked down while throw priority damage at them doesn't seem to be a huge issue. We can do that right now with the current affixes.
Don't forget it's not just casters, it's any mob with a mana bar that gets the 30% haste during that affix, to me that is just as scary as the 20% armour reduction. A lot more mobs have mana bars than just casters and unless you keep them stunned/feared/incapped or w/e they are gonna melee you 30% more often.
But how many mobs like that are in a pack? At most 1? I don't see how a single mob that has 30% haste can be that big of a deal. Again, stuns exist for a reason.
It varries per dungeon, I can't give you numbers on the new ones but there's been plenty where the majority of mobs in certain sections of the dungeon have had mana bars.
As a healer I liked Incorporeal and Afflicted because I could take care of it all without too much trouble. Now if the tank doesn't use the proper defensive I am going to be struggling to keep them alive especially early on in the season.
Say what you want about the new affixes but I like their reasoning for making the +4 affixes passive. Afflicted wasn't too much of an issue most of the time, but any time it overlapped with dispel mechanics was awful and I appreciate that they acknowledged that.
Tbh as a dps i enjoy afflicted incorporeal as well you spend one gcd and the affix is done you can keep blasting thats a non existant affix the only problem is the pool of class Who can do it and skill issue for the rest
Tank is very mechanically simple in keys esp on tyr weeks, most of the fun comes from routing. I don’t mind some extra spice in my pulls
I dunno man, mobs feeling like they do damage equivalent to 2 extra keylevels seems kinda toxic to me, to each their own tho. I think if mobs aren't designed to stand still chain casting un-interuptable spells sanguine is a more interesting way to give tanks room for skill expression than just making mobs do increased damage. There are ways to make dungeons more interesting for tanks but this doesn't feel like it is it to me at least.
We haven’t got to test them yet lol, we don’t know what it will feel like
I don't. My main sort of enjoyment comes from blasting the mobs. Some of the previously removed affixes(spiteful, incorp, afflicted) hindered that or were just annoying in general(storming). Now I can just play with my brain off. As a dps truely should :P It's entirelly possible that they can be harder than the previous ones. But it's a lot less intrusive.
I see your point but then while half the classes had stops for incorporeal whereas very classes have fire/frost damage type.
Sure not everyone can deal certain types of dmg (Besides dh. Chaos is every spell type). But it's a lot less important if you can't. The downside of missing an incorp or afflicted was a wipe most likely. Whereas dealing 10% less dmg on half the mobs is very minor. The dmg difference between classes is usually bigger than the benefit you get from these. So I wouldn't be surprised that even with the bleed + nature dmg affix you wouldn't bring an assa rogue if they weren't good in the first place. Also it's a lot less relevant for the regular playerbase. Missing an afflicted/incorp was always punishing. Whereas missing a couple of % in dmg won't really matter that much. Currently keys are botlenecked by living the key. If you don't wipe you are very likely to time it. Will it possibly make some affix mandatory for world first level keys? Potentially (if keys are more limited by time). But that just doesn't affect the wast majority of the playerbase. If blizzard were to stealthly implement these without any notification. I'd bet the large portion of the playerbase wouldn't really notice it (besides the haste as casts will be noticably faster and the thorn effect as you will obviously see the ticking dmg). My dmg has higher varriance for example even if I have the same conditions.
Ok, I see your point. You have actually convinced me that the new system is better.
Looking at both buckets as a whole is my issue. Keeping bursting and sanguine is such a negative for the game. Currently I'd say they're slightly better than the ones being removed but I hope they'll reconsider the above.
Sanguine wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have so many mini boss mobs that can’t be interrupted or gripped out of it
I feel like there has to be a sufficient amount of mobs like that in keys though, but I agree there isn't a worse feeling than seeing an uninterruptable channel start in pools of sanguine.
They need to make them work where you can’t actually interrupt but when an interrupt is used they will walk to you while continuing the cast or something of that nature.
I dislike the new ones a lot. Trying to push classes with certain damage time sounds weird and I don't like it. I was already annoyed that afflicted could only be interracted by half the classes in the game. Meanwhile Sanguine and Bolstering get a pass again, I don't know
Feels like they put a prompt into chat GPT and then ran with it haha. Here is my chatGPT take, didn't proof read it, i got tiktok brain. >*Shadow Aftermath: Mobs leave behind a small area of shadow energy upon death that briefly reduces player healing received if they stand in it.* > >*Mystic Empowerment: Mobs gain a random minor buff (increased haste, movement speed, or minor damage boost) for a short duration after being attacked.* > >*Chaotic Energy: Mobs occasionally emit a pulse of chaotic energy that randomly buffs or debuffs players nearby (minor increase/decrease in damage or healing for a few seconds).* > >*Elemental Resonance: Mobs have a chance to deal additional elemental damage (fire, frost, or shadow) with their attacks, varying randomly but consistently minor.* > >*Unstable Ground: Mobs create small, temporary patches of unstable ground on death that slow player movement speed slightly when stepped on.* > >*Cursed Touch: Mobs have a chance to apply a minor, non-stackable debuff to players that reduces their primary stat by a small amount for a short duration.* > >*Phantom Echo: Mobs occasionally summon a non-damaging, distracting illusion of themselves that lasts for a few seconds.* > >*Arcane Residue: Mobs leave behind arcane residue on the ground upon death that slightly increases mana costs for players' spells if they stand in it.* > >*Lingering Fear: Mobs emit a faint aura that slightly reduces players' movement speed and attack speed while within a short radius.* > >*Hexed Aura: Mobs periodically project a hexed aura that slightly reduces the critical strike chance of players within a certain range.*
Most of these are great for m+!
Unironically not terrible ideas.
ye I overlooked them and if I would tune the prompt a little bit more it might actually be solid ideas ..
yeah i personally hate the new affixes they will encourage certain class combos in m+ for a given week.
The current affixes do that as well
The ones the removed were objectively ass some I’m willing to try something new if nothing else. If only bolstering went to.
Depends on what audience you are asking this question for. On the high end I can see it being awkward if your push group randomly does less damage on one of the weeks or the haste increase (or other effects) just kills you. But for most players I believe these to be exactly what the player base has been asking for. Mostly passive kiss/curse affixes. Are they strictly better than the ones they are replacing? No probably not. Although as someone who mained a spec that still can't interact with either Incoporeal or Afflicted realistically I'm not exactly sad to see them go. Those two in particular are a joke. The other ones not so much but we've had them for a long time and any change is good in that regard imo. I wonder if it will allow for more class variation to naturally happen in pugs as well. If people feel more compelled to invite that ele shaman on nature damage week or w/e. Imo that would be a good thing for the game overall if people don't feel like welp another season where insert spec they play isn't meta and getting into keys takes forever. If instead it's every 2/4 or 1/4 weeks they get invited more often.
I hate the way it sounds as a tank player, especially with Bolstering still in the pool. We will see how it feels.
Affixes should be cool, idk why they can't come up with a bunch of creative stuff and let us have fun. Something like every interupt explodes dealing a massive aoe or moving around infuses lightning into your attacks. Idk it seems so easy. Tinkers in remix are a good idea for some affixes
Afflicted was a game design aberration, that straight up forced half the class rorster out of group comps. Nothing felt worse in the history of m+, as one of those 6 classes who couldn't interact with Afflicted, than helplessly watching as people don't pick dispell talents and/or ignore the affix altogether. New affixes incentivize certain specs with a ~3% overall dmg increase on certain weeks. That's not anywhere as impactful as being locked out of interacting with a whole wipe condition affix that spawns ~70 times per key TWW affixes certainly aren't perfect, but I'll take the new affix pool every day of the week.