Thread by @ButNotTheCity

I have a few thoughts about the perpetual problem with mythic+ affixes in World of @Warcraft.

Affixes add flavour and variation, which is good. But affixes are unforgiving and solely negative. Change that and you’ve fixed affixes.

#worldofwarcraft #wowdragonflight

Players want variety. Static dungeons get boring rather quickly when you’re spamming them—a problem that was less present in early expansions.

Affixes are a great and obvious way to introduce variety. Their existence isn’t the problem. But nobody wants death by a thousand cuts.

Now as a tank, being on the brink of death is half of how I find excitement in life so I do tend to find an unhealthy level of enjoyment in affixes that require creative positioning or hurt me like a truck. But that’s not how most players feel.

In a well-tuned game, healers are constantly struggling to keep people up and damage dealers are all about the meters—which affixes mess with. So if tank affixes can be fun, that’s not as true for healers and damage dealers.

The first problem is that they are solely negative. Every affix feels bad because they’re a punishment. You comply with its demands or you get hurt. Nobody who’s not a masochist ever thinks ‘it’s so much more fun with affixes.’

Most people would prefer just pushing consistent healing and damage on harder and harder damage and healing checks.

The solution to that problem is obvious. Reward players for doing affixes. Make every affix both negative AND positive.* A carrot and a stick. Don’t just penalize people for missing an affix mechanic. Give them a heal, a buff, a burst of damage for following the mechanic.

*I say every affix but I actually think Fortified and Tyrannical can probably stay as-is because they don’t touch mechanics. Of course, you can always make Fortified slightly debuff bosses and Tyrannical slightly debuff non-bosses.

I can guarantee you the moment you get your melee DPS fetching interrupts to get that sweet haste buff that will pump up their damage above what they’re usually capable of doing, they’re going to fucking love it. How do I know? That’s how they behave with dungeon mechanics.

Coming up with ideas isn’t even hard—for most affixes, you can just reverse the disadvantage. Exploding? Kills do AoE damage to mobs. Grievous? Stack a buff (e.g. healing taken) when players are above 90% health. The new Afflicted? Instant AoE heal and haste buff when dealt with.

The second problem is the unforgiving nature of affixes. Right now, they feel absolutely mandatory. You want them to feel semi-mandatory. Players should want to follow them but not feel like occasionally ignoring them makes the game unplayable, especially if they’re overgeared.

That one is also fairly easy to fix. Make them hurt less, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Players should be noticeably disadvantaged for ignoring them yet still feel free to prioritize dungeon mechanics where needed.

There’s plenty of examples of that in past raids and dungeons. Mechanics where you want to avoid them since they slow you down but generally don’t make you useless or cause a wipe unless everyone consistently fails them.

Nobody wants a 100% haste debuff, that’s way too unforgiving. But a 20% or 30% one may hurt to make players want to do the mechanic—especially if you lose out on a haste buff—without feeling like they’re dead if multiple mechanics accidentally line up.

Another change is somewhere between quantitative and qualitative. Dungeons are already designed to be somewhat challenging without affixes. Now, players have to deal with three affixes that change up mechanics (in addition to Fortified/Tyrannical).

Three additional things to think about while playing the regular dungeon’s mechanics is far too much. Affixes are meant to add variety and forestall boredom, not make the game arbitrarily hard. This isn’t Dark Souls.

Don’t add affixes until you reach ‘too much’. Find out the optimal number of affixes for your average casual-serious player, and take them out one by one at lower keys to create a learning curve.

I don’t know what the sweet spot would be but I’m thinking that two mechanical affixes is plenty, since that usually means three to four mechanics total with dungeon mechanics. Two new things to think about sounds tough without being pure chaos.

The last qualitative change is also an obvious one. Affixes interact with dungeon mechanics and other affixes in deeply unpleasant and occasionally unforgiving ways. You can’t predict all those interactions but you can design to mitigate them.

Identify the kinds of interactions that would be unforgiving, and build in some safeguards. Make sure that affixes slowing you down are overriden by dungeon slows and speed buffs. Make affix mobs that you must interrupt also trigger a small AoE silence.

And if you have mechanics that require players to stack or spread, have their negative effects nerfed during boss fights since bosses often require you to stack or spread themselves.

None of these changes would radically alter the role that affixes play in the game—they would still make dungeons less repetitive. What the changes would do is make affixes less frustrating and, to some, even added fun. Isn’t that what the playerbase wants?

As a little bonus, I end this thread with a question to which I offer no answer. Should Fortified and Tyrannical exist?

They add variety by changing the balance of single-target and AoE damage you bring. But they also force changes in the composition of teams that only want to play together, and can disadvantage some classes because they don’t have a good single-target AND a good AoE-centric spec.

Thread inspired by @BellularGaming and @TaliesinEvitel videos.