There will be a special place in my heart for bolstering with no duration though.
It may not have been fun playing with. But it did create some pretty funny moments that bricked keys!
That's a tough one for sure, but I think Necrotic takes this one for me. Straight up did not play during Necrotic weeks as a tank. Avoided sanguine similarly, but not entirely like I did necro.
Blizzard: *designs a tank spec based around self heal as a primary mechanism for tanking*
Blizzard, immediately after doing a line: let's add an affix that makes you not heal
I think it comes down to class. As a Prot Warrior Necrotic wasn't the worst for me. It was bad for sure but I had the mobility to escape mobs and drop stacks plus Necrotic did nothing to hinder Shield Block. Sanguine was worse because I don't have tools to move enemies. No grip like DKs or circle like Monks. The worst thing was when some enemy would start casting while standing in a pool or something. I can't Pummel because so much shit is uninterruptable and stunning would just leave them in the pool.
Nothing was more fun than, in the first room in rise, watching the mini bosses heal to full because they cast for 15 seconds at a time. It truly was engaging gameplay that I pay $15/month for.
Heeell no. Sanguine is a fairly chill affix that generally never ruins runs if your tank has any amount of competence since the nerfs (as 3/5 tanks have a solution to the affix, as do many dps and healers). Maybe one mob stands in it for a bit, but every mob in the game can be LoSed.
Necrotic, *all* forms of bolstering, prideful, inspired. All far more likely to fuck your key even if it's not that high a level. People talk about bolstering making tanking hard, but they won't ever feel the pain of necrotic stacks on a dk in ToP.
Idk if I necessarily agree that sanguine is the worst of all time, but even played near perfectly sanguine will still amount to basically a few packs extra worth of health. It's an extremely loathsome affix that makes the game unfun, whether or not it's the "hardest."
Worst part as a non tank during sanguine weeks was the lack of tanks. I don't want to wait fucking 30 mins per key to find a tank because no tanks want to do the affix so they quit for the week or play another role. Not to mention when high level streamer tank players don't like the affix then your opinion must be wrong.
High level content where timers are razor thin is where sanguine hurts, but 99% of people have zero interaction with it, and 100% of high keys next expac will have zero interaction with any of those.
High level content is a different game than the rest of us. That's why blizzard shouldn't have listened to their opinions about bursting, for example. It's a much more deadly affix without a counter comp/race combo, but decent teams doing high end content use these counters.
The real problem like I said was lacking number of tanks in lower keys on any sanguine week. Not to mention while we continue with using dungeons from previous expansions in the M+ pool some dungeons are just not made for affixes like sanguine. Affixes in general are kinda shit and make certain weeks for playing and others bad which is just bad design what they are doing now is perfect other then adding a seasonal affix imo.
sang can go and f itself. so annoying
even for a partly colour blind person. someone i coundnt see the sang on the floor and would wonder whats hitting me
Next expansion is removing a lot of painful affixes and adding consistency to higher M+, and adding variety to the low end of keys. Wowhead has a detailed article I'd recommend reading.
Not a lot of affixes, literally all affixes we have now won't exist. Not counting fort and tyranical as they're just health and damage scaling, no gameplay involved.
I'm the healer of a m+ group and i'm litterally the only one in my group who is happy about bursting going to be gone. Or, as Dratnos said in some of his videos: "Bursting is ok, i guess." I am happy all 4 are garbonzo in the tww.
Only people that despise bursting are the ones that have to deal with it; healers healing it and good tanks trying not to let themselves get too low as to overburden their healer.
Tanks also hate it cause they gotta mark shit for dumbasses and explain to them 'kill this first, then second and so on' so we don't all wipe 15x before we time the key barely with 1 minute left.
Most dps are pretty mindless when it comes to monitoring their HP, that's why its meh to them.
I heal and bursting is super easy to deal with and its super nice just having a healer affix I can just pump through. Only lost like 2 people total last week to it running 14s and 15s when we hit like 17 stacks. It's considered a push week for a reason.
Still, the new affix system should be a lot better. I'm kinda over affixes in general but as far as affixes go bursting is great.
We know, for people running high keys it’s a nothing key, for everyone else it’s absolutely horrible. It’s a well known difference between casual players and key pushers
I hate afflicted cause I'm the only one that dispells the damn things 50% of the time and in small corridor dungeons when a tanks rushing, it gets real hectic trying to be the only dispell, healing the group taking massive damage cause the tank pulled 4 huge mobs to AOE down and trying to move the camera around to see the one stupid one still left up and whether I'm gonna waste a LoH on him to hurry up and get back to healing/dpsing or start panic healing it cause I dispelled the first like 3 seconds into it's spawn; incorp is just lock this up and I can deal with one shouting at least once.
Bursting though, I can't stop it. Best you can hope for in pug groups is they're smart enough to nuke one thing down at a time, which is very rare. Usually a group of 8 get nuked down and me in max level gear popping everything I have to try and save them only for us to wipe and a dps leave cause now they wont +3 the key.
Necrotic was less annoying than that, tank just had to know how to kite and DHs made that trivial with monks in a close second (though no one ever plays monk tank which is a shame).
Sanguine seemed less annoying back in Shadowlands for some reason. This xpack (even though I came back in january) it seems way more powerful in how fast it heals something to max.
Bolserting was pretty controllable though and kicked in too late to really hurt the group.
I was dps and dealing with incorp and afflicted. I didn't mind them, I just wish they were a little less often.
Having said that, I am liking this new direction (except the +10 affix).
Afflicted is an affix that the healer should be able to handle by themselves anyway. Having another party member that *can* do it is nice, but it's not required.
Incorporeal is similar except you only need one person who can handle it besides the healer (unless you have a priest, which can handle the affix by themselves and even turn it into a buff via dominate mind).
Im gonna miss Bursting :( I always liked that week since it felt like i had a way bigger impact on the runs success than other weeks, while not being particularly hard to execute or making me fight the UI like Explosive/Afflicted/Incorporeal did. It also didnt really have horrid overlaps (i guess you could count everbloom flowers, but that was still mostly a can you press your cds right check).
I actually had a lot of fun with Afflicted as a Priest, since I could use Power Word: Life to typically 1-shot one and then just dispel the other, clearing them both in back-to-back GCD's :)
I know it sucked that some classes literally couldn't interact with it though
I had no problem with afflicted either. But i just liked bursting as that was the only time being a good healer really matter. Rest of the time it wasn't so much healing as just keeping people at 100% hp or they get one-shot.
Or how about we just let the mechanics of the fight be the mechanics of the fight and stop trying to make blanket mechanics.
At this point, I don't think affixes even do the thing that they were put in as a bandaid to do.
Because then that falls into the territory of allowing players too easy access to top level gear, and that means they'll get bored faster and stop playing faster. Blizz has been trying to keep people crazily engaged with the game since mists by adding stupid amounts of dailies or hurring up to patch any bugs or glitches that speed things up for the player.
I do agree though, a dps reduction would get dps doing something more than pew pew for once, but think of it this way, the longer some fights take the longer a healer has to deal with keeping the group up. I'd prefer dps that can pump and get crap overwith sooner than later.
>Because then that falls into the territory of allowing players too easy access to top level gear
How? It's actually easier to balance the difficulty scaling when you don't have affixes to take into consideration.
> that means they'll get bored faster and stop playing faster.
WoW is ridiculously time gated in gear progression. It doesn't matter how many M+ you run or how high of m+ you run, you will always be gated by the weekly chest as it's the only place to get the highest gear (outside of mythic raiding obviously).
Lower DPS still punishes the healer.
It's got to be something that only negatively impacts the DPS Score at the end. Like character specific times that give a penalty for each avoidable thing you miss.
You can't get away from "punishing" the healers as long as healers find themselves in this constant state of self victimization where they perceive fulfilling their chosen roles job as getting punished.
Say they do introduce a mechanic that instead of dealing damage debuffs a player so they do less damage, you'll probably bemoan the fact that you don't have the mana for long drawn out fights.
As a MW monk I have mixed emotions about bursting. With a good group it's fun and challenging. But hell and stressful if the group is mediocre. (stop extending to 4+ please god) but glad it's going to be gone.
I disagree. Every week, with these boring affixes... it will feel the same. Run the same thing over and over and over and over and over, until you don't want to do it.
No push week. No difference. The point of affix was same dungeon new feeling (even if not fun) ... Now it's same dungeon old feeling (absolutely not fun)
A few YouTube celebrities influenced blizzard, so yea good for them. I wonder what they will complain about next season? LOL
>you can't just buff health and damage to make up the difference
Actually, this is exactly what you can and should do.
The reason is because it creates consistent and progressive difficulty changes. When you start trying to add arbitrary mechanics across the board, it creates pain points within certain mechanics that artificially inflate the difficulty and provide inconsistent challenge. This is what you want to avoid because it CREATES push weeks and weeks where you don't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole.
If it's too easy just do a key level higher...? If you mean there aren't enough mechanics then you aren't doing high enough keys, because in high keys you have to pull so large to make the timer that its basically impossible to keep track of every cast that must be stopped/kicked without a weakaura helping you out or a vdh spamming their stops to carry you.
Found the guy who's not doing high keys I guess. It just costs you tons of time, makes pulling packs onto bosses risky, forces you to save CCs for displacement that you need to stop casts (which will usually just one-shot someone if not stopped), and forces you to constantly move enemies which lowers overall dps for many specs. Even in a perfect run, where you got 0 sanguine healing, the number of ccs you wasted to accomplish that and the time you lost from pulling less mobs at a time and kiting them out correctly outweighs the time loss from any other single affix.
My hot take is that sanguine with some changes could be the best affix in the game by far. Its incredibly simple and interactable - there's just so many damn ways to deal with it. Its genuinely amazing.
The problem is when a massive hitboxed, unstunable abd uninterruptable mob starts hardcasting with 1 pixel in the pool and goes back to full it feels awful.
Straight to the Maw.
Believe it or not, straight to the Maw
It was all part of the *Jailer's plan.*
That legend really did plan everything, huh. Neat.
You heal unmoveable add to full? Straight to Maw.
Only thing that place should be used for
fuck Bolstering. Let it sit next to Thundering.
And Explosive.
Fuck explosive, and I’m saying that as a DK main.
And quaking!
I actually liked explosive, because I got super good at it and treated that explosive count meter as my challenge for the run.
And my axe!
There will be a special place in my heart for bolstering with no duration though. It may not have been fun playing with. But it did create some pretty funny moments that bricked keys!
mobs running away in fear, pulling one mob that becomes a literal raid boss due to all buff. That was amazingly fun to have happen!
and when you cleared them all the buffed seagull from above attacks
Lol, the Angry Birds in Eye of Azshara.
I remember a rat in arcway with more hp than guldan lol
Thank the gods.
Oh ye gods!
Sanguine is my pick for worst affix ever. NGL
That's a tough one for sure, but I think Necrotic takes this one for me. Straight up did not play during Necrotic weeks as a tank. Avoided sanguine similarly, but not entirely like I did necro.
Blood DK mainly here, necrotic was an absolute no go but sanguine was fine for most mobs you could grip.
Blizzard: *designs a tank spec based around self heal as a primary mechanism for tanking* Blizzard, immediately after doing a line: let's add an affix that makes you not heal
Also blizzard: gives DK a grip ability, while making many mobs ungrippable.
I think it comes down to class. As a Prot Warrior Necrotic wasn't the worst for me. It was bad for sure but I had the mobility to escape mobs and drop stacks plus Necrotic did nothing to hinder Shield Block. Sanguine was worse because I don't have tools to move enemies. No grip like DKs or circle like Monks. The worst thing was when some enemy would start casting while standing in a pool or something. I can't Pummel because so much shit is uninterruptable and stunning would just leave them in the pool.
I love being a frost mage & until DF blast wave, Sanguine always made me worried my party will think Im trolling x,x
Raging as frost mage was super fun to, losing dps not being able to freeze mobs on low %
Nothing was more fun than, in the first room in rise, watching the mini bosses heal to full because they cast for 15 seconds at a time. It truly was engaging gameplay that I pay $15/month for.
Heeell no. Sanguine is a fairly chill affix that generally never ruins runs if your tank has any amount of competence since the nerfs (as 3/5 tanks have a solution to the affix, as do many dps and healers). Maybe one mob stands in it for a bit, but every mob in the game can be LoSed. Necrotic, *all* forms of bolstering, prideful, inspired. All far more likely to fuck your key even if it's not that high a level. People talk about bolstering making tanking hard, but they won't ever feel the pain of necrotic stacks on a dk in ToP.
Idk if I necessarily agree that sanguine is the worst of all time, but even played near perfectly sanguine will still amount to basically a few packs extra worth of health. It's an extremely loathsome affix that makes the game unfun, whether or not it's the "hardest."
Worst part as a non tank during sanguine weeks was the lack of tanks. I don't want to wait fucking 30 mins per key to find a tank because no tanks want to do the affix so they quit for the week or play another role. Not to mention when high level streamer tank players don't like the affix then your opinion must be wrong.
High level content where timers are razor thin is where sanguine hurts, but 99% of people have zero interaction with it, and 100% of high keys next expac will have zero interaction with any of those. High level content is a different game than the rest of us. That's why blizzard shouldn't have listened to their opinions about bursting, for example. It's a much more deadly affix without a counter comp/race combo, but decent teams doing high end content use these counters.
The real problem like I said was lacking number of tanks in lower keys on any sanguine week. Not to mention while we continue with using dungeons from previous expansions in the M+ pool some dungeons are just not made for affixes like sanguine. Affixes in general are kinda shit and make certain weeks for playing and others bad which is just bad design what they are doing now is perfect other then adding a seasonal affix imo.
I suppose you're right overall, as dungeons get mechanically more complicated, affixes like sanguine have less of a place.
sang can go and f itself. so annoying even for a partly colour blind person. someone i coundnt see the sang on the floor and would wonder whats hitting me
NGL I literally cried out of happiness reading it. This literally solved pugging
“Solved pugging” lol they’ll find something else dumb to kill them selfs. /s
They're going to the Maw 😭
I'm a bit out of the loop here as I haven't done a lot of mythic stuff. Could someone tell me whats going on here?
Next expansion is removing a lot of painful affixes and adding consistency to higher M+, and adding variety to the low end of keys. Wowhead has a detailed article I'd recommend reading.
Not a lot of affixes, literally all affixes we have now won't exist. Not counting fort and tyranical as they're just health and damage scaling, no gameplay involved.
blizzard listened are completely removed the most frustrating affixes in the pool.
dunno what's going on but that 3rd panel slayed me
Fleks saving WoW Twitter from itself, one bait tweet at a time <3
Raging is much worse than bursting
At high keys absolutely. At the level of the average r/wow poster they weren't stopping casts anyways so it's basically a non-affix.
ow my ego
At high keys absolutely. At the level of the average r/wow poster they weren't stopping casts anyways so it's basically a non-affix.
Unironically I didn't mind incorporeal or afflicted - and that's as a healer. I *loathe* bursting though. Bolstering was pretty meh IME.
fuck bursting. fuck it to hell.
I'm the healer of a m+ group and i'm litterally the only one in my group who is happy about bursting going to be gone. Or, as Dratnos said in some of his videos: "Bursting is ok, i guess." I am happy all 4 are garbonzo in the tww.
Only people that despise bursting are the ones that have to deal with it; healers healing it and good tanks trying not to let themselves get too low as to overburden their healer. Tanks also hate it cause they gotta mark shit for dumbasses and explain to them 'kill this first, then second and so on' so we don't all wipe 15x before we time the key barely with 1 minute left. Most dps are pretty mindless when it comes to monitoring their HP, that's why its meh to them.
Idk im a healer and i like bursting
I heal and bursting is super easy to deal with and its super nice just having a healer affix I can just pump through. Only lost like 2 people total last week to it running 14s and 15s when we hit like 17 stacks. It's considered a push week for a reason. Still, the new affix system should be a lot better. I'm kinda over affixes in general but as far as affixes go bursting is great.
We know, for people running high keys it’s a nothing key, for everyone else it’s absolutely horrible. It’s a well known difference between casual players and key pushers
Yeah I never had too much of a problem with it in low keys either but YMMV I guess.
I hate afflicted cause I'm the only one that dispells the damn things 50% of the time and in small corridor dungeons when a tanks rushing, it gets real hectic trying to be the only dispell, healing the group taking massive damage cause the tank pulled 4 huge mobs to AOE down and trying to move the camera around to see the one stupid one still left up and whether I'm gonna waste a LoH on him to hurry up and get back to healing/dpsing or start panic healing it cause I dispelled the first like 3 seconds into it's spawn; incorp is just lock this up and I can deal with one shouting at least once. Bursting though, I can't stop it. Best you can hope for in pug groups is they're smart enough to nuke one thing down at a time, which is very rare. Usually a group of 8 get nuked down and me in max level gear popping everything I have to try and save them only for us to wipe and a dps leave cause now they wont +3 the key. Necrotic was less annoying than that, tank just had to know how to kite and DHs made that trivial with monks in a close second (though no one ever plays monk tank which is a shame). Sanguine seemed less annoying back in Shadowlands for some reason. This xpack (even though I came back in january) it seems way more powerful in how fast it heals something to max. Bolserting was pretty controllable though and kicked in too late to really hurt the group.
I was dps and dealing with incorp and afflicted. I didn't mind them, I just wish they were a little less often. Having said that, I am liking this new direction (except the +10 affix).
The issue with those first two affixes is that some classes have no way of interacting with them.
Afflicted is an affix that the healer should be able to handle by themselves anyway. Having another party member that *can* do it is nice, but it's not required. Incorporeal is similar except you only need one person who can handle it besides the healer (unless you have a priest, which can handle the affix by themselves and even turn it into a buff via dominate mind).
Bursting... made no sense. Either you pull small, save healer CDs, pop Darkness and pray, or have your MW or priest clear it. Truly good game design.
Im gonna miss Bursting :( I always liked that week since it felt like i had a way bigger impact on the runs success than other weeks, while not being particularly hard to execute or making me fight the UI like Explosive/Afflicted/Incorporeal did. It also didnt really have horrid overlaps (i guess you could count everbloom flowers, but that was still mostly a can you press your cds right check).
Bursting was the only fun healing affix, since you could actually flex your healing-muscles, a bit.
I actually had a lot of fun with Afflicted as a Priest, since I could use Power Word: Life to typically 1-shot one and then just dispel the other, clearing them both in back-to-back GCD's :) I know it sucked that some classes literally couldn't interact with it though
I had no problem with afflicted either. But i just liked bursting as that was the only time being a good healer really matter. Rest of the time it wasn't so much healing as just keeping people at 100% hp or they get one-shot.
you should change the bursting icon with the raging one. Bursting was mostly a non-affix once you got past M+10
How about mechanics that punish dps by lowering their damage instead of mechanics that punish the healer.
Or how about we just let the mechanics of the fight be the mechanics of the fight and stop trying to make blanket mechanics. At this point, I don't think affixes even do the thing that they were put in as a bandaid to do.
Because then that falls into the territory of allowing players too easy access to top level gear, and that means they'll get bored faster and stop playing faster. Blizz has been trying to keep people crazily engaged with the game since mists by adding stupid amounts of dailies or hurring up to patch any bugs or glitches that speed things up for the player. I do agree though, a dps reduction would get dps doing something more than pew pew for once, but think of it this way, the longer some fights take the longer a healer has to deal with keeping the group up. I'd prefer dps that can pump and get crap overwith sooner than later.
>Because then that falls into the territory of allowing players too easy access to top level gear How? It's actually easier to balance the difficulty scaling when you don't have affixes to take into consideration. > that means they'll get bored faster and stop playing faster. WoW is ridiculously time gated in gear progression. It doesn't matter how many M+ you run or how high of m+ you run, you will always be gated by the weekly chest as it's the only place to get the highest gear (outside of mythic raiding obviously).
Lower DPS still punishes the healer. It's got to be something that only negatively impacts the DPS Score at the end. Like character specific times that give a penalty for each avoidable thing you miss.
You can't get away from "punishing" the healers as long as healers find themselves in this constant state of self victimization where they perceive fulfilling their chosen roles job as getting punished. Say they do introduce a mechanic that instead of dealing damage debuffs a player so they do less damage, you'll probably bemoan the fact that you don't have the mana for long drawn out fights.
The only way to make this perfect is edit the jailors face on the reaper. Since this was clearly his plan all along!
As a MW monk I have mixed emotions about bursting. With a good group it's fun and challenging. But hell and stressful if the group is mediocre. (stop extending to 4+ please god) but glad it's going to be gone.
Man I feel sad for them now …
Now if they remove key depletion things would be perfect
Good meme, but he missed raging
Wait until you see that it's actually just more nameplate vomit
I disagree. Every week, with these boring affixes... it will feel the same. Run the same thing over and over and over and over and over, until you don't want to do it. No push week. No difference. The point of affix was same dungeon new feeling (even if not fun) ... Now it's same dungeon old feeling (absolutely not fun) A few YouTube celebrities influenced blizzard, so yea good for them. I wonder what they will complain about next season? LOL
unpopular opinion but I think m+ is going to be far too easy now you can't just buff health and damage to make up the difference
There is no "easy" for infinite scaling content, depending on your levels affixes were not hard, just annoying.
Right now damage is absolutely the limiting factor in top keys
not talking about top keys, I'm talking about +10s for gear
>you can't just buff health and damage to make up the difference Actually, this is exactly what you can and should do. The reason is because it creates consistent and progressive difficulty changes. When you start trying to add arbitrary mechanics across the board, it creates pain points within certain mechanics that artificially inflate the difficulty and provide inconsistent challenge. This is what you want to avoid because it CREATES push weeks and weeks where you don't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole.
If it's too easy just do a key level higher...? If you mean there aren't enough mechanics then you aren't doing high enough keys, because in high keys you have to pull so large to make the timer that its basically impossible to keep track of every cast that must be stopped/kicked without a weakaura helping you out or a vdh spamming their stops to carry you.
The problem I see is not dificulty related. My concern are more about the content being repetitive.
I like bolstering and raging because they are not my fucking problem lol
The changes are better than what they were, but it's still not good by any stretch of the imagination.
its what you get. something tells me this would be your answer regardless of what changes happen.
Well, you're wrong. If this is there best ideas the that's pretty fucking sad.
No this is alright. You are pretty fucking sad.
"Alright" is not good enough. It needs to be excellent, or at least great. Enjoy eating shit.
Sanguine is the biggest nonaffix to have ever existed. Literally free, never understood the hate.
Found the guy who's not doing high keys I guess. It just costs you tons of time, makes pulling packs onto bosses risky, forces you to save CCs for displacement that you need to stop casts (which will usually just one-shot someone if not stopped), and forces you to constantly move enemies which lowers overall dps for many specs. Even in a perfect run, where you got 0 sanguine healing, the number of ccs you wasted to accomplish that and the time you lost from pulling less mobs at a time and kiting them out correctly outweighs the time loss from any other single affix.
My hot take is that sanguine with some changes could be the best affix in the game by far. Its incredibly simple and interactable - there's just so many damn ways to deal with it. Its genuinely amazing. The problem is when a massive hitboxed, unstunable abd uninterruptable mob starts hardcasting with 1 pixel in the pool and goes back to full it feels awful.
Ok sorry. Free for any key level that matters*
Ah yes, only the key levels that can be 3-manned with your monitor off matter, you’re right.
Of course I'm right, anyone who disagrees is stupid. I am after all the protagonist of reality.
People literally whining about having to move lol. Always felt sanguine and volcanic were free affixes.