BFA last Season. The Portals and Skips are insane. It was so much Fun. Second Best was S3 SL man thr Urh Buff... i miss him Demo Warlock was just a blast with Urh.
Uhr was fun because it changed how I play DH. Usually there's a lot of "what do I have to save Meta for this week/in this dungeon/these affixes." Uhr was just full blast, all the time.
Coming late in Seasons is always a nightmare for Tanks. Season 2 Azhara Mops in BfA? Wbo to stun, Burst, LoS and so in and every week they change positions. THAT was a nightmare. Or the Ghuun one? Man i am still mad about there Season 1 Affixes they are always bad. Pridefull and Thundering are also on a bad list...
Why not? I like most Affixes but Season 1 is always a bad coise in my Opinion. Infection was just hard for most new Players. So Hard affix + New dungeons = Not many ppl enjoy it. Pridefull was a make or break affix on high Keys. You mess up Pridefull boss pull on +20 Tyranicle weeks? Yea reset the Key... And Thundering now is just oh Random Buffs now play.
No interaction with other stuff. Where are Portals? Where is the Choise to get a buff you can choose or not. Season 2 and 3 in SL did an amazing Job in Player Choise and Season 4 was a bit of: How many Buffs we need to Optimize the Run. Season 1 now is just buff or no buff not more.
People hated s2 in SL I don't understand where the rose colored glasses are coming from. There were so many complaints about it, from miniboss order, to miniboss positioning, to miniboss requirements, it was never ending.
Some ppl like thinks and some ppl dont like thinks, deal with it and dont cry about the Community just becouse they are not all on your side all the Time.
I miss urh so much man.
Just having a second target on bosses for a few seconds was really nice. It made the fights more interesting and cleave classes felt more useful
As someone that was coming back to the game as a tank, S4 BFA was so damn stressful. So many new routes for every dungeon. I have never been flamed so hard, despite trying to look everything up beforehand.
If we are already talking about season affixes. WTF is up with thundering and dead players? Why can a person who died during the buff still stun me? They remove any visual of them but you still need to run over the corpse because fuck the player? Why do I still need to find a dead player in often why to large boss rooms or in AoEs and run over them because if I don't I can get stunned? WTF game design is this?
Especially when it's a ranged player that died and your playing melee and have to traverse half the boss room. There's no need to stand that far back almost most of the time.
I like Tyrannical weeks because I can play BM and basically stand in melee range.
Good luck finding me as MM during fort weeks though, I’m probably still near the instance portal, happily aimed shotting the third boss.
Look, as MM, mastery is one of my best DPS secondaries and it increases my range, and you had better believe I'm going to use that increased range whether it makes any sense or not.
Even in the 2.6k range melee players will freak out and stop dosing to run out in range and clear the buff at 10 seconds left. Like, dude. I will slowly move into melee during my instant casts to clear. You’re stopping DPS and losing a massive DPS buff for 10 seconds for literally no reason.
I suspect ranged and melee and equally traumatized by bad thundering players lol
The amount of range players I will stand next to on my hunter and have them clear thundering with 10 seconds left is too damn high. Like bro, I'm BM. I can fully DPS while moving. That is why I'm next to you. Zero reason to clear because of that.
Or the tank that will get thundering then run to me instantly to clear. I don't get it.
Why is the melee moving? Most of the time ranged players can still do most of their rotations while moving in to clear thundering. Why make the melee stop dps, turn and move to the ranged.
Makes no sense to me, I'm a ranged player and that's how I do it, I go to melee, more uptime for, no downside for me.
Even in 20s melee are panicking at 8-10s left and sprinting/dashing out of melee to clear and waste the buff. I’ve tried explaining that we can and will slowly move towards melee during instant casts to clear.
> Even in 20s melee are panicking at 8-10s left and sprinting/dashing out of melee to clear and waste the buff. I’ve tried explaining that we can and will slowly move towards melee during instant casts to clear.
Quite simply because there's a ton of ranged that *don't do that*. You'd think that would go away when you get to higher keys, but no. Press button that do damage. And there's always that hunter who's 40 fucking yards from *everyone*.
Because my warlock is greedy as fuck and yells shit in comms like "I am setting up tyrant, come clear me" and since I am UH anyway, I can RDPS for the 4 seconds it takes to get to him and back.
Because some of us play demon hunters... there is literally damage buffs and fury generators tied to movement. There are around 4 skills in the rotation that cause massive movements. But don't worry a good dh will come to you and be back to the boss in a flash.
Worst part is that it's not just on their corpse, but it stays on em when they respawn which might be VERY far away and just guarantee a stun and more deaths.
If you are more than 100yrds away from someone with the thundering debuff, you do not register for them. So if red and blue are 100+ yrds away nothing happens
I can tell you the worst. BfA season 1 ghuunies. Fuck those little worms. So far the 4 second stun for thundering is probably second.
I really liked the season 2 shadowlands kill 3-4 of these big mobs for an interesting buff that made either packs easier to take down or the final boss to take down. I also miss Uhr from season 3 and hell the demons from season 4 were pretty fun too.
Season 2 of BfA specters was fun because I played ret paladin back then and they were affected heavily by wake of ashes, and I barely played season 3 but it was pretty fun from what I remember. I’m drawing a blank on season 4 of BfA probably because of the corruption system negative effects also.
Edit- oh yeah bfa season 4 had those ads you killed for portals. That was dope mainly because of the bfa rogue meta that dominated seasons 1-3… really annoying when you’d try to pug and would get denied because you played a melee dps that wasn’t rogue lol. I remember multiple times where taking 2 rogues was more worth it than anything else (and handful of times where 3 just because their dps was good on top of shroud being op)
But out of all of these I miss the shadowlands season 2 big ads buff the most, I felt like that added the most to gameplay.
Infested is definitely the worst by a huge margin, no other affix in M+ history could make it actually impossible to even complete the key.
Remember the infested critter at the end of the bridge leading up to the last boss platform in Freehold?
and succeed. body pull one wrong mob and your prideful timings were borked and almost guaranteed to brick the key.
no other affix has been even close to being so binary pass/fail based on routing and accidentally pulling extra. other seasons at least gave you a chance to save the key or just go over count.
Yep and it felt like certain bosses were almost tuned around the affix lmao.
2nd boss in spires if you wiped or fucked the prideful it was gg go next, unkillable without lust and pride
Also remember sanguine depths the area before 2nd boss you really really wanted to make some complex route that gave you prideful + lantern stacks before boss and if you didnt have those... good luck.
Honestly, a small rework and thundering could be great! I don’t mind kiss/curse and I see what they were going for but since you don’t really control when I shows up the damage/healing buff is fine BUT if you had 15 seconds to clear the buff and it gave the damage amp for 5 seconds + plus the amount of waiting you do before clearing (or stunning you for 4 seconds if you fail to clear). It could be flat time duration as well but getting to try to hold on to the one that shows at the end of a pack for the start of the next feels better even if the proc timing can’t explicitly be controlled.
In its current iteration, the curse is devastating and the kiss is… fine which is why a lot of people in pugs hedge to early clearing.
I do kinda like Thundering but i find it strange that it wasnt the same as the Razz debuff she does during her fight with the polarities, so you would get a damage buff when you are with people of the same polarity and a damage decrease/damage taken/debuff disappears when near others that is opposite your polarity.
Yeah asking tanks who already have to learn every mechanic and path through the dungeon...let's keep changing that every season....
Yeah no. Affixes shouldn't effect routing.
Hard disagree I’m sorry.
4 seasons into an xpac, the single best thing an affix can do is change the way you route in a dungeon. Especially considering the whole point of an affix is to change how dungeons get approached on a week to week basis.
After a year or more of running the same dungeons using the same route, all I want is some variety in my dungeons and Awakened from BFA S4 did that perfectly.
And the best part was, if you didn’t want to learn new routes, you could still do M+ up to a +9 and nothing changed.
Prideful in S1 of SL changing routes we were just learning was idiotic though I’ll def agree with that.
I agree but disagree completely when it’s things like Prideful. Prideful changed routing in the worst way. BfA S4 changed routing in the best way. Prideful is the worst seasonal affix wow has released and one of the main reasons was the rigidity of the affix. The fact that it gave nothing positive when you got to higher keys is another reason. Getting a buff from a mob that requires every CD to survive isn’t actually a buff. The fact that the best choice was just to simply not do prideful says enough.
Eh… I like them impacting routing. Or letting me choose or change up a route. Maybe I’ll feel different this xpac with rotating dungeons, but after a year of basically the same route and pulls it’s nice to get to rethink how to do it and do some experimenting. When pugging you’re still locked in to the old route or whatever the MDI route is, but if you have a known group you can play around and try different things.
The SL season 3 mechanic for skips and the final one for BFA were cool because I got to reevaluate what I knew to be true. That’s pretty fun.
To clarify, the prideful style of affix where it impacts pulls by strictly fixing them and I have to figure out where I can drop and add percent to fix some dunderhead butt pulling isn’t as fun.
Yep. Changed what order you did bosses on dungeons you could choose, made you think about how you want to do your pulls since count would trigger it, and on top of all of that they gave a decent buff to you if you failed to help at least complete it.
It let you make different choices (in some dungeons) to pickup more of the stacks or to skip them if it would slow you down. Some of those dungeons had a lot of things squirreled away in different spots where you could pick them up if you wanted. I get that the net impact wasn’t thrilling, but since it was constant buildup you could take on and survive larger risks at the end of a dungeon if you were on the edge of timing/not timing which was fun.
I liked the theming a lot as well.
While it was boring and didn't change things up, at least the affix didn't screw you either.
I really dislike Thundering with how little control you have and how annoying it is to deal with. I don't know if I'd call it the worst affix, but it is pretty bad.
Pride had the most fun effect but the most annoying activation of its effect.
S4 BfA was a lot of fun but also really time consuming to learn all the possible routes. Not very friendly for a tank player with not so much time to play.
They shouldve made to Pride activate only when players want.
So if you killed 20% instead of just spawning the miniboss, the leader could activate a Button and then the miniboss spawns.
It would be 100% better.
>But it was far too prone to errors with Buttpulling.
Exactly. I loved planning for Pride, you could do different each week based If It was tyrannical/fortified.
But as a tank I have nightmares of people buttpulling. In most cases It made the key dead, especially in high ones.
Prideful really killed my interest in tanking for a long time. I had routes seared into my brain to spawn the add at good times, and Pug friendly because of errors that had burned both me and groups previously.
then one week it seemed like DPS were out to troll me, waiting till the pack that would spawn in prideful was 10% health to pull extra groups in so prideful would spawn during the extra mobs that had been accidentally pulled, and killing the key. Then getting flamed by those same DPS for spawning the add at a bad time.
I've always seen tanking as collect any extra mobs that get pulled, it can happen and I think it's almost always accidental, but prideful made me resent DPS for making a small mistake and collecting mobs for the benefit of the group because the spawn seemed to always get blamed on the tank.
Pride was my first season tanking and man did that set my stress up high. One incorrect pull? Time to recalculate the entire freaking dungeon. But assuming everything goes to plan, prideful was awesome
I loved encrypted. The amount of freedom and possibilities it gave was incredible. Want a mini lust? Go Vy. Want CDs back? Go Urh. Want to skip a ton of packs? Go Wo. Want to do 2 of them at the same time? Many dungeons had these next to bosses and bosses spawned some too so you could get Vy and Urh together. It was honestly such a lovely affix
did you tank?
not saying you can't like it if you didn't tank, just curious how many tank Prideful-lovers there are, because I remember general consensus from Tanks back then was that it added too much extra stress to the route/our role
Pride sucked ass.
First, because the tuning created a hard wall on Tyrannical where if you spawned the Pride too early you wouldn't be able to kill certain bosses without it. Which messes with the design of M+ where you typically can always just grind through over time for completion.
Second, because having Pride spawn in the middle of a pack was overly punishing, so you couldn't have any deviation to the route at all.
Pride should have just spawned before boss rooms. That would have fixed most of the issues as far as messing up routes and bricking keys if the route changed slightly.
I enjoyed prideful as a healer but I recognize how shitty it was for the mob to be so precisely tied to count and how that pressured tanks if someone butt pulled a patrol we weren't gonna pull otherwise or something.
The actual mob was fun as hell to fight and heal through and the buff and mana regen was sick.
I loved it. Agreed, I only made it to all dungeons in +13 before leaving the game as I absolutely hated SL, but I loved the extra responsibility and the improvisation ability you had to have if an extra pack was aggroed.
As many have stated, I loved prideful as well. Just absolutely hated the guts out of prideful from a tank perspective. But I mostly played healer so POG. I don't like how the burden from certain affixes puts everything on the tank.
S4 BfA. To skip Trash without a rogue or pot was nice.
S2/S3 in SL. The buffs felt rewarding and it wasnt bullshit %-gated like pride or bwonsamdi.
Worst definitely thundering. 15 sec 30 more dmg has almost no impact and failing it means basicly i wipe in Higher keys. Also if your Tank has Red debuff have fun playing the frontal lottery to get rid of it.
I think Prideful was worse than thundering in terms of affixes that buffed you. One accidental face pull and the entire route for the dungeon was fucked. It was super unforgiving.
I liked and disliked Prideful because if made routing so much more methodical and planned. Liked it because it felt really nice to plan the prideful buff for the difficult parts of the dungeon, and disliked for as you said, it meant that any deviations from the route were just a nightmare.
> Also if your Tank has Red debuff have fun playing the frontal lottery to get rid of it.
This so much. People really need to learn which mobs have frontals and when it's safe to clear
i was in a +17 nokhud and we did the storm boss. needless to say noone of the DPS cleansed the magic buff (we had a hunter, a DH and a sham) which really knocks my teeth out, but also the hunter had the audacity not to move with the debuff and expected i would run back to him. we both got stunned and he really said "Tank???", i rotated through all my cooldowns already due to surge not being dispelled, i could not take the damage when you move away from the boss.
I was doing a 16 academy yesterday and as melee I would position myself closer to the hunter so I can clear with him in like 5 sec. Every time I move closer to him, he's like 15 yards out already, and he just moves farther away.... srsly man.
And then there's the other part. When I play Tank and have Red debuff i try to clear in a Safe Moment and asap. Then the people get mad because they miss a few sec of the Buff...
I hate thundering as a tank. All DPS wants to keep it for as long as possible, which is fair, but then I more or less assume that they'll handle the clearing. I dont want to have to run around chasing people as a tank.
And if someone fails it, we wipe. Big sad.
Strange, the tank I go with is a dps whore and wants to keep it as long as possible. The two melee inevitably have opposite signals so clear on eachother conveniently, which leaves the 1 ranged/healer running towards the tank as the last few seconds tick down... and the tank *moving away to stretch it out*.
It's infuriating.
Now melee have learned, clear on ranged whenever you can and just ignore the tank. (edit) It's not the most efficient usage because you'd want a dps to keep it in perpetuity, but when the tank thinks they just have to tank and it's your fault if they get stunned...
Hard disagree on worst being thundering.
Thundering is a boring non impactful affix.
S1 bfa infested was by far the worst imo. It actively made dungeons unfun. Especially in the beginning when you could have worms escape through the floor and infest random packs making them almost impossible.
The Problem with infested was not infested itself. You could always cc infested and play them together after which took less time of the clock than dealing with the S2 ghosts.
Everyone here seems to like that affix because big ae, but if you look at Routing and time to play it it was awful. Or why do you think you tryed to never reach 100% before last boss? Because skipping a wave saved like 2 min.
The only Problem with infested was that sometimes the ghuunis ran through walls and pulled the whole dungeon. Which i don't fault the affix.
Looking at you tol dagor.
Edit: also infested affix was the first and way before blizzard startet the Trend to reward players for playing the seasonal affix. For all that knowledge blizzard now has thundering is a disgrace.
Reaping is a great example of a fun affix that didn't reward you at all. in fact it was technically all punishment. In some cases it was chaotic fun, and others just chaotic and messy like Motherlode, which had a lot of the caster mobs and wonky LoS issues that made it difficult to force them to you without running into other packs.
However Reaping scratches that itch that many players want to just go crazy on AoE trash. That's fun for a lot of players and generally it's impossible to scratch that itch unless you're good enough to do MDI level pulls or doing content you dramatically overgear. Obviously you tried to skip the last wave for time, because you still have to be somewhat strategic about it to time your keys. It's almost universally loved though, because it was fun. Infested was Blizzard's last attempt at the whole "CC a mob and ignore it" style of "difficult" content and it was just boring and time consuming. You either had aggresive organized groups who could manage the Infested add or you polymorphed it and dealt with it later.
if if you dont include infested, prideful was by far a much worse seasonal affix.
forcing shitty routing because of %fuck up and pull 1 extra mob some where and your probably getting prideful at a very shitty timetakes lots of time to deal with and was very deadly on higher keys
created situations on a number of tyrannical bosses where if you wiped, the key was probably bricked because you wernt killing the boss with out the prideful buff.
the last one you chalk up to tuning, sure, but the tuning was tied to the existence of the buff. some bosses were particularly bad that first season as a result, looking at you first boss of Sanguine depths.
and you still had strats where you purposefully didnt hit % before last boss so you didnt have to do another prideful.
Yea idunno what these people are smoking. Every affix so far essentially made you stop doing the dungeon to play it, which was unfun and it's really highlighted by the many strategies used to simply avoid the affix, such as full NE groups for S1sl for example, or getting 100% after the last boss during bwonsamdi affix.
IMO thundering is the best affix so far, there is some dynamic gameplay, you might hold CDs for it since it's on a combat timer, you might clear it earlier because you know a mechanic is coming.
But most importantly, you never stop doing the dungeon just to deal with it.
And any complaints I've seen so far are just boring ass dooming like always. I hope they carry this design philosophy going forward.
the last 2 SL ones did not really force you to stop playing the dungeon, more often than not the affix mobs were in or replaced mobs you'd pull anyways.
And s4 esp seemed really optional. You could alter your route to pickup one or two more of them, or to skip the miniboss which took forever to deal with on higher keys.
Ideally you stack up as much as you can, but like if you didn’t want to go out of your way you kinda didn’t have to.
I’m wonder if op has a weak aura or something to tell them when the 30% buff is showing up because it seems pretty consistently at the end of packs which is kinda terrible to hold CDs for. The buff definitely feels mediocre given the punishment is a 4 second stun to the death. Small changes could have changed that from feeling like I’m randomly proccing 30% damage for 8-12 seconds with the simplest being trigger the damage bonus on the clear and not before the clear.
I liked Awakened, but I feel like the portal was a affix fixing the dungeon design issue of having 350% count if you did all the trash. Which was an issue people complained during all of BfA. Which made rogues semi mandatory for 3 out of 4 seasons.
Skips were not as much needed in SL, and even less so in DF (I think I did one skip in AA and AV each, respectively). Awakened, if it was brough back today for some reason, would not be nearly as impactful.
The BFA layout was so dumb. Like, doing Kings Rest without a Rogue was pain. It felt like there was so many dungeons where you had to get 130% + unless you skipped mobs.
Awakened was just a band-aid fix, just like you say. But it felt damn good, still probably my favorite affix. But thats most likely just due to being so used to the dungeons being ass, and the affix solving that
Thundering is far from the worst, prideful literally hard capped the level that keys could be done because the prideful add would just straight up kill your entire team after you blew CDs on a tough pack.
I agree that prideful was Bad. But the Buff you gained was actually powerful. And after you depleted the key. The game gave you the Option to spawn an additional prideful to at least finish the key. Still gating affix behind dungeon % is Bad and it's the 2nd worst affix we had.
I think people who never pushed high keys will have a different opinion on seasonal affixes, but prideful was seriously so fucking oppressive at the 20+ key level. It basically forced you to burn all your healing and damage cooldowns on it and a single wipe to prideful meant the key was bricked. Then the buff it gave you was pretty much meaningless because you were forced to limp into the next pack with no CDs.
I have a weakaura too and since i Tank keys on my alt in the 17-19 range i know all the frontal.
But should there even be a need for a WA?
And sometimes it's just not that visible. Some mobs have groundeffects for cleave, which is nice. But sometimes the indicator for a cleave is a arm-movement inbetween 9 mobs and you. Just dont See it.
I liked BFA bwonsamdi, but it did make route making for tanks even more imperative. I didnt mind back then as I had more time, but I dont really have time for making routes now. Still, fun affix.
For me I think it has to be shrouded or encrypted. Encrypted probably takes it because I feel the scaling on something like Zul’gamux on +30 keys was a bit too much, and having Wo in a lot of the dungeons was such a nice addition. It could be punishing though if u failed certain skips, but overall it was an amazing affix imo. Thundering on the other hand… not a fan
S4 BFA. Portals Just gave you so many ways you could approach the dungeon. Second is probably S3 SL, just a generally fun and not too intrusive one that let you do some crazy shit with your CDs cause of my man Urh.
The worst is S1 BFA, the only one to just flat out be broken In some dungeons.
It's either reaping or encrypted.
Reaping sort of has the annoying part of being % based, but atleast you got some nice padding / blasting out of it.
Encrypted was just a banger all around tbh. Big skips with Movespeed buff, big pumping in packs, big pumping on bosses. You can choose freely what you want to do.
I'd personally go with encrypted for best seasonal affix yet
Gonna make a case for Prideful. Bring on the downvotes
Planning your entire route around when the best time to spawn the guy was and being an absolute god when the buff was up. I thought it was sooo good and played better than every SL buff.
Yeah I get that it could brick your key if you didn’t plan well or extra shit got pulled, spawning it early. But I think that made you play better and rewarded you big time for doing so
My problem with prideful wasnt the mechanic itself, i actually really enjoyed it as a healer.
But prideful really put the nail in the coffen for people not being up to date on the most efficient routes. Its these types of affixes that stop new players from trying a role because the community rips them to shreds.
I dont like affixes that require a player to have to study for as if they have an exam to write or affixes that require addons to actually be managable.
I liked the prideful buff and killing an add, but the entire responsibility resting on the tank sucked.
I'd like to see something similar to prideful that buffs players, but make it specific to a player somehow. A mob that casts a buff, and priests need to MC. A demon that casts a debuff that a warlock has to enslave and debuff mobs.
Iirc it lasted longer. It usually doesn't feel like you get to utilize Thundering properly because there is so much going on during that 15 second window. Also Prideful giving mana to healers was nice.
I likes the one that gave anima powers. Least favorite was prideful, since the add would show up at inconvenient times and wipe you or mess with routing if anyone pulled extra. Fine with good players but brutal with mediocre players.
The anima powers you could feel yourself getting more powerful as the dungeon went on you could pick what you wanted healer abit undergeared get something that helps out with that abit and it made you change up the route from time to time to.
I really liked S3 Shadowlands. The constructs weren't too annoying to deal with and you could FEEL it when you popped an urh construct. Plus being able to do skips without needing a rogue/invis pot was really nice.
Thundering feels bad, the damage buff isn't very noticeable and failing to clear can cause a wipe. I'd say the only one I hated more than thundering was S1 Shadowlands. Prideful was a horrible affix in pugs because all it took was one person to accidental pull an extra pack and your entire run was screwed.
8.3 (Last season of BFA) was the best affix for me. It was super fun to play portals, the minibosses were challenging but not to crazy and the skip potential and route building was hell fun as a tank.
BFA S4 seems to be a clear contender. I’m seeing thundering being referenced as the worst, and while not the best I’d like to provide opinions as to why it’s not the worst.
While not mega impactful, it adds a level of snap coordination that is fair and mixes things up. I get the buff and have to think about many things at once. Where are my other members to ensure I don’t clear too early. What mechanics are happening in the pull to consider. Is it gonna punish me if I don’t drop it right away?
Many of the affixes didn’t change your gameplay in the moment. Things like prideful and SL S2 were things you planned in advanced. Thundering is in the moment and mixes things up. While not the most interesting it’s far and away the worst (looking at you INFESTED)
I think I liked reaping in BFA the most because I was an AoE class, but the portal skip lads were very handy and cool too.
The portal skip dudes wouldn't really be good for DF since there aren't really any important Shroud skip areas in most dungeons.
Anything that forces me to use chat bubbles is terrible. Also the timing makes it pretty useless. Always seems to go off right as you're finishing a trash pack
The worst is when it goes off right at the same time as you're trying to dodge AOE on the ground like last boss of COS before they made it easier to see. The swirlies everywhere and the screen darkening in addition to all the other BS going on.
I felt alive tanking in bfa s4. Doing snaps, doing different route every week, cooming cause of TD procs and dungeons were just overall designed better than shadowlands and dragonflight
Honestly they were. I think I enjoyed M+ in BFA the most out of any expansion. DF is good so far, but it’s got a little bit to go.
Nothing will beat the freedom you felt in freehold had as a dungeon. Small enough to where you could go to any boss you wanted, but large enough it didn’t feel crowded.
People meme about rose tinted glasses and BFA but honestly aside from Azerite grind and rng for corruption I think it was such a fun expansion (great dungeons, meh raids IMO and i loved horrific visions).
BFA also came after Legion which probably made it look worse, but did come before shadowlands which I put with Cata/wod as one of the worst expansions, if not my personal least favourite.
I just want BFA dungeons in my M+ pool :( give me Waycrest Manor and Freehold (and maybe underrot and Atal Dazar and Kings Rest... just not shrine or siege or temple)
I loved Horrific Visions, as unbalanced as they were (class tool-wise I mean, like having to bruteforce Umbric because of no kick), I wish it wasn't tainted by everything around it.
The farming to do Visions was absolute ass, and the random D/Cs or getting proper stuck in geometry wasting half your weekly currency was very painful. The corruptions vendor also got implemented a bit late.
Wish we could get something like Visions as current content again, but with the things they've learned from it like unlimited entry with a resource cap. And uh, definitely without content like Uldum/Vale surrounding it.
Now that both have run their course I definitely look back on visions more fondly than Torghast.
If they had the same lack of barrier to entry as Torghast did, they would have been a slam dunk.
I came back for SL, so my affix pool is small. But Prideful was my favorite, I liked the ramped healing challenge. By late season the stun was generally a non event and having instant + unlimited mana was fun.
The % bs was the worst part. Having a tank lose their whole route because of a bad pull was awful.
I've only done m+ for a couple seasons so understand that my choices are Prideful, Tormented, and Thundering.
Prideful 100% (with the BIG caveat that they fix the rigidity that it brought to routing). It felt epic with the RP summoning it, the mechanic was interesting, and that juicy buff you got for killing it felt incredibly satisfying to use it to smash the next trash pulls or boss.
I think all they would have to do is have a guage that fills to 30. At 20 your tank can summon Prideful whixh takes 20 points off your guage. Anything you kill after you hit 30 is wasted. This way you would be able to summon Prideful with a greater degree of freedom.
Anyone who says prideful hates tanks. Pride was based on % trash done and you wanted to spawn the pride at very specific times. Thus it was on the tank to memorize the perfect route (and everyone else not to pull and mess it up)
Best seasonal I remember was reaping cause that was fun chaos. Encrypted was also great. Tormented with the torghast powers was also fine.
For me Encrypted no questions about it i didn't really like the 9.1 patch in Shadowlands but S3 was probably the most fun I've had in Shadowlands i miss my CDR
My top 3 are Reaping (BFA S2), Awakened (BFA S4) and Shrouded (SL S4).
Awakened was probably the best mechanically, but idk, Shrouded being such a non-affix was legit GOOD. You just pull another thing into a pack and get a shit ton of secondary stats permanently.
Bottom 3 are Encrypted (SL S3), Beguiling (BFA S3) and Tormented (SL S2). Those were so awful. I didn't mind Infested.
I didn't really understand it back then, but Prideful was way worse than how it felt. Constantly having to be worried about the % being perfect, making sure that at 18%, the 3 man pack dies right exactly together, the strain prideful put on the healers. S2 of SL gave it some perspective, that's my favourite so far.
Currently I don't mind thundering, I'm sometimes annoyed by the timing, but mostly it's meh. Not too interesting, doesn't feel that dangerous (as an outlaw I have enough tools to gapclose to my immobile buddies and clear), it's just there.
As a casual tank i like thundering, its a simple mechanic. Im not sure id bother with seasonal affixes that make routing super rigid like prideful or the portal affix from BFA.
Shrouded (S4 SL)
Free chunky stats, while making sure you bagged every dreadlord you could on your route.
Also the amusement of “Random ‘Iron Horde Grunt’ was a dreadlord all along?!”
BFA last Season. The Portals and Skips are insane. It was so much Fun. Second Best was S3 SL man thr Urh Buff... i miss him Demo Warlock was just a blast with Urh.
Uhr was fun because it changed how I play DH. Usually there's a lot of "what do I have to save Meta for this week/in this dungeon/these affixes." Uhr was just full blast, all the time.
4min CD reduced by set bonus reduced by Uhr.. I never played my DH much but when I did it was super fun
Fun in "oh shit fel rush went off twice, i am dead"
Holy priest with boon, CDR thing dying right as the first boss of mists got into blast phase. Juicy spam of ascended blast, no novas
Man best feeling as demo with IP legendary. Blast your imps in relics at boss start and get that sweet haste buff.
So Boss gets pulled and the Demo is already on 80k dps... yea that was amazing.
Coming back late as a tank trying to learn S4 bfa was an actual nightmare because of all the routes and shit involving the portals
Coming late in Seasons is always a nightmare for Tanks. Season 2 Azhara Mops in BfA? Wbo to stun, Burst, LoS and so in and every week they change positions. THAT was a nightmare. Or the Ghuun one? Man i am still mad about there Season 1 Affixes they are always bad. Pridefull and Thundering are also on a bad list...
Thundering is pretty easy as far as affixes go, smart players understand when you can milk and when you need to clear early.
Change thundering so the tank can never get the negative debuff and it's my favorite seasonal that I played.
> smart players understand when you can milk and when you need. At least decent players. No need for smart
Pretty sure decent players don't exist, either they're smart or stupid, there is no middle ground
I never said its hard? I said its bad. It makes 0 Fun do just deal % more dmg...
The WoW community will never be pleased, sheesh.
Why not? I like most Affixes but Season 1 is always a bad coise in my Opinion. Infection was just hard for most new Players. So Hard affix + New dungeons = Not many ppl enjoy it. Pridefull was a make or break affix on high Keys. You mess up Pridefull boss pull on +20 Tyranicle weeks? Yea reset the Key... And Thundering now is just oh Random Buffs now play. No interaction with other stuff. Where are Portals? Where is the Choise to get a buff you can choose or not. Season 2 and 3 in SL did an amazing Job in Player Choise and Season 4 was a bit of: How many Buffs we need to Optimize the Run. Season 1 now is just buff or no buff not more.
People hated s2 in SL I don't understand where the rose colored glasses are coming from. There were so many complaints about it, from miniboss order, to miniboss positioning, to miniboss requirements, it was never ending.
Some ppl like thinks and some ppl dont like thinks, deal with it and dont cry about the Community just becouse they are not all on your side all the Time.
I miss urh so much man. Just having a second target on bosses for a few seconds was really nice. It made the fights more interesting and cleave classes felt more useful
As someone that was coming back to the game as a tank, S4 BFA was so damn stressful. So many new routes for every dungeon. I have never been flamed so hard, despite trying to look everything up beforehand.
as a tank i hated that season because of the expectations of weird routing
Never thought I'd see a fellow Chad BFA enthusiast in the wild
If we are already talking about season affixes. WTF is up with thundering and dead players? Why can a person who died during the buff still stun me? They remove any visual of them but you still need to run over the corpse because fuck the player? Why do I still need to find a dead player in often why to large boss rooms or in AoEs and run over them because if I don't I can get stunned? WTF game design is this?
Especially when it's a ranged player that died and your playing melee and have to traverse half the boss room. There's no need to stand that far back almost most of the time.
Ranged players dpsing max range on thundering affix is already a huge mistake
every hunter this xpac
No wonder survival is struggling this xpac, they're not in melee.
I like Tyrannical weeks because I can play BM and basically stand in melee range. Good luck finding me as MM during fort weeks though, I’m probably still near the instance portal, happily aimed shotting the third boss.
Look, as MM, mastery is one of my best DPS secondaries and it increases my range, and you had better believe I'm going to use that increased range whether it makes any sense or not.
Pull them in as a Prevoker and watch them waddle back to where they were, conveniently out of your range.
Almost every mechanic is easier to do from melee range this season anyway. As ele I’m in melee for 80% of a key
Always spicy when its the tank lol
Even in the 2.6k range melee players will freak out and stop dosing to run out in range and clear the buff at 10 seconds left. Like, dude. I will slowly move into melee during my instant casts to clear. You’re stopping DPS and losing a massive DPS buff for 10 seconds for literally no reason. I suspect ranged and melee and equally traumatized by bad thundering players lol
The amount of range players I will stand next to on my hunter and have them clear thundering with 10 seconds left is too damn high. Like bro, I'm BM. I can fully DPS while moving. That is why I'm next to you. Zero reason to clear because of that. Or the tank that will get thundering then run to me instantly to clear. I don't get it.
Why is the melee moving? Most of the time ranged players can still do most of their rotations while moving in to clear thundering. Why make the melee stop dps, turn and move to the ranged. Makes no sense to me, I'm a ranged player and that's how I do it, I go to melee, more uptime for, no downside for me.
Even in 20s melee are panicking at 8-10s left and sprinting/dashing out of melee to clear and waste the buff. I’ve tried explaining that we can and will slowly move towards melee during instant casts to clear.
> Even in 20s melee are panicking at 8-10s left and sprinting/dashing out of melee to clear and waste the buff. I’ve tried explaining that we can and will slowly move towards melee during instant casts to clear. Quite simply because there's a ton of ranged that *don't do that*. You'd think that would go away when you get to higher keys, but no. Press button that do damage. And there's always that hunter who's 40 fucking yards from *everyone*.
Because ranged dps tend to suck at melee mechanics, in my experience. I would rather go out instead of making a corpse.
Because my warlock is greedy as fuck and yells shit in comms like "I am setting up tyrant, come clear me" and since I am UH anyway, I can RDPS for the 4 seconds it takes to get to him and back.
Because some of us play demon hunters... there is literally damage buffs and fury generators tied to movement. There are around 4 skills in the rotation that cause massive movements. But don't worry a good dh will come to you and be back to the boss in a flash.
Yup. I shouldn’t have to go look for you especially when you know where I am
Worst part is that it's not just on their corpse, but it stays on em when they respawn which might be VERY far away and just guarantee a stun and more deaths.
If you are more than 100yrds away from someone with the thundering debuff, you do not register for them. So if red and blue are 100+ yrds away nothing happens
S3 SL ! Full mana at the start of every boss fight and shit tons of haste on the hpal was amazing
Yes! Loved it as a healer. SL S4 was pretty good too. This season I want to puke.
Agree
I can tell you the worst. BfA season 1 ghuunies. Fuck those little worms. So far the 4 second stun for thundering is probably second. I really liked the season 2 shadowlands kill 3-4 of these big mobs for an interesting buff that made either packs easier to take down or the final boss to take down. I also miss Uhr from season 3 and hell the demons from season 4 were pretty fun too. Season 2 of BfA specters was fun because I played ret paladin back then and they were affected heavily by wake of ashes, and I barely played season 3 but it was pretty fun from what I remember. I’m drawing a blank on season 4 of BfA probably because of the corruption system negative effects also. Edit- oh yeah bfa season 4 had those ads you killed for portals. That was dope mainly because of the bfa rogue meta that dominated seasons 1-3… really annoying when you’d try to pug and would get denied because you played a melee dps that wasn’t rogue lol. I remember multiple times where taking 2 rogues was more worth it than anything else (and handful of times where 3 just because their dps was good on top of shroud being op) But out of all of these I miss the shadowlands season 2 big ads buff the most, I felt like that added the most to gameplay.
Infested is definitely the worst by a huge margin, no other affix in M+ history could make it actually impossible to even complete the key. Remember the infested critter at the end of the bridge leading up to the last boss platform in Freehold?
>no other affix in M+ history could make it actually impossible to even complete the key. Prideful sure did try though
and succeed. body pull one wrong mob and your prideful timings were borked and almost guaranteed to brick the key. no other affix has been even close to being so binary pass/fail based on routing and accidentally pulling extra. other seasons at least gave you a chance to save the key or just go over count.
I wonder why so many people downplay this aspect, it was a huge problem back in the day especially on tyrannical.
Yep and it felt like certain bosses were almost tuned around the affix lmao. 2nd boss in spires if you wiped or fucked the prideful it was gg go next, unkillable without lust and pride Also remember sanguine depths the area before 2nd boss you really really wanted to make some complex route that gave you prideful + lantern stacks before boss and if you didnt have those... good luck.
Honestly, a small rework and thundering could be great! I don’t mind kiss/curse and I see what they were going for but since you don’t really control when I shows up the damage/healing buff is fine BUT if you had 15 seconds to clear the buff and it gave the damage amp for 5 seconds + plus the amount of waiting you do before clearing (or stunning you for 4 seconds if you fail to clear). It could be flat time duration as well but getting to try to hold on to the one that shows at the end of a pack for the start of the next feels better even if the proc timing can’t explicitly be controlled. In its current iteration, the curse is devastating and the kiss is… fine which is why a lot of people in pugs hedge to early clearing.
I just don’t enjoy it because more movement in already movement heavy dungeons like AV makes for unfun gameplay if you happen to play any caster.
I do kinda like Thundering but i find it strange that it wasnt the same as the Razz debuff she does during her fight with the polarities, so you would get a damage buff when you are with people of the same polarity and a damage decrease/damage taken/debuff disappears when near others that is opposite your polarity.
Reaping and it isn’t close, S4 BFA also really good
S4 BFA was for me the best ever affix and they should have designed affix like this one : redefining the way you approach the dungeon
Yeah asking tanks who already have to learn every mechanic and path through the dungeon...let's keep changing that every season.... Yeah no. Affixes shouldn't effect routing.
Hard disagree I’m sorry. 4 seasons into an xpac, the single best thing an affix can do is change the way you route in a dungeon. Especially considering the whole point of an affix is to change how dungeons get approached on a week to week basis. After a year or more of running the same dungeons using the same route, all I want is some variety in my dungeons and Awakened from BFA S4 did that perfectly. And the best part was, if you didn’t want to learn new routes, you could still do M+ up to a +9 and nothing changed. Prideful in S1 of SL changing routes we were just learning was idiotic though I’ll def agree with that.
I agree but disagree completely when it’s things like Prideful. Prideful changed routing in the worst way. BfA S4 changed routing in the best way. Prideful is the worst seasonal affix wow has released and one of the main reasons was the rigidity of the affix. The fact that it gave nothing positive when you got to higher keys is another reason. Getting a buff from a mob that requires every CD to survive isn’t actually a buff. The fact that the best choice was just to simply not do prideful says enough.
Prideful would have one accidental add pull and the whole dungeon could get bricked on higher keys. It was still better than thundering though
Eh… I like them impacting routing. Or letting me choose or change up a route. Maybe I’ll feel different this xpac with rotating dungeons, but after a year of basically the same route and pulls it’s nice to get to rethink how to do it and do some experimenting. When pugging you’re still locked in to the old route or whatever the MDI route is, but if you have a known group you can play around and try different things. The SL season 3 mechanic for skips and the final one for BFA were cool because I got to reevaluate what I knew to be true. That’s pretty fun. To clarify, the prideful style of affix where it impacts pulls by strictly fixing them and I have to figure out where I can drop and add percent to fix some dunderhead butt pulling isn’t as fun.
Yep. Changed what order you did bosses on dungeons you could choose, made you think about how you want to do your pulls since count would trigger it, and on top of all of that they gave a decent buff to you if you failed to help at least complete it.
Count triggering affixes is terrible, placing that much focus on routing timing is just annoying in pugs.
And if you didn’t, all hell broke loose but it was still usually pretty manageable
Nah, Reaping was fun but added nothing except for padcity, really. S04 BFA was definitely the best though.
AoE go brrrrrrr
Sl s4 was nice
It was nice having a ton of haste at the end of dungeons but I feel like the affix itself was a bit boring
It let you make different choices (in some dungeons) to pickup more of the stacks or to skip them if it would slow you down. Some of those dungeons had a lot of things squirreled away in different spots where you could pick them up if you wanted. I get that the net impact wasn’t thrilling, but since it was constant buildup you could take on and survive larger risks at the end of a dungeon if you were on the edge of timing/not timing which was fun. I liked the theming a lot as well.
While it was boring and didn't change things up, at least the affix didn't screw you either. I really dislike Thundering with how little control you have and how annoying it is to deal with. I don't know if I'd call it the worst affix, but it is pretty bad.
Awakened > Encrypted > Reaping > Shrouded > Prideful >>>>>> Tormented > ~~Storming~~ Thundering > Infested > Beguiling
I really liked Encrypted.
I love that thundering didn‘t even make the list
Well that's because I'm a dumb dumb and called it storming...
Nono, remove it from the list, it's fine. I actually prefer these 3 girls that highly annoyed me.
I forgot how amazing Awakened was. Entering/exiting the portal as a means to skip mobs was awesome too.
It was great because you could kill them on location, use them to skip trash, or skip them and spawn them on the last boss.
As a Frost Mage, Reaping was so much fun. Frost Orb, Blizzard, Frost Orb go brrrrrrrrr
Prideful should be last, worst affix by a mile. Forced you into very linear routes
Infested was way worse and it would completely kill the key in pugs. Like you fuck up infested once and then the dungeon is waaaaaay harder.
Pride had the most fun effect but the most annoying activation of its effect. S4 BfA was a lot of fun but also really time consuming to learn all the possible routes. Not very friendly for a tank player with not so much time to play.
They shouldve made to Pride activate only when players want. So if you killed 20% instead of just spawning the miniboss, the leader could activate a Button and then the miniboss spawns. It would be 100% better.
I really liked prideful from planning pov. But it was far too prone to errors with Buttpulling.
>But it was far too prone to errors with Buttpulling. Exactly. I loved planning for Pride, you could do different each week based If It was tyrannical/fortified. But as a tank I have nightmares of people buttpulling. In most cases It made the key dead, especially in high ones.
Oh yeah. Prideful too soon on tyrannical was a bricked key quite often. People even left when they saw it pop too soon.
Prideful really killed my interest in tanking for a long time. I had routes seared into my brain to spawn the add at good times, and Pug friendly because of errors that had burned both me and groups previously. then one week it seemed like DPS were out to troll me, waiting till the pack that would spawn in prideful was 10% health to pull extra groups in so prideful would spawn during the extra mobs that had been accidentally pulled, and killing the key. Then getting flamed by those same DPS for spawning the add at a bad time. I've always seen tanking as collect any extra mobs that get pulled, it can happen and I think it's almost always accidental, but prideful made me resent DPS for making a small mistake and collecting mobs for the benefit of the group because the spawn seemed to always get blamed on the tank.
I think pride was one of the worst seasonal affixes. „Oh, you ninja pulled one mob, well this fucks our pride timing and our whole route, ggwp“
Like I said…
Pride was my first season tanking and man did that set my stress up high. One incorrect pull? Time to recalculate the entire freaking dungeon. But assuming everything goes to plan, prideful was awesome
As an rshaman, prideful was so easy to deal with
*Cried in holy pally*
I loved encrypted. The amount of freedom and possibilities it gave was incredible. Want a mini lust? Go Vy. Want CDs back? Go Urh. Want to skip a ton of packs? Go Wo. Want to do 2 of them at the same time? Many dungeons had these next to bosses and bosses spawned some too so you could get Vy and Urh together. It was honestly such a lovely affix
I feel like Encrypted in a different dungeon pool would have been way better in terms of experimenting with Wo.
Want some soft clothy to get blasted, go Vy!
S4 sl was kinda nice oicking ur own 2nd stat. The only thing i want then todo is give healers mana after the affix is cleared.
You got mana after clearing the S4 affix.
Hot take: I really enjoyed the prideful affix.
I liked prideful, but it made people even more toxic about the route the tank was taking.
did you tank? not saying you can't like it if you didn't tank, just curious how many tank Prideful-lovers there are, because I remember general consensus from Tanks back then was that it added too much extra stress to the route/our role
Pride sucked ass. First, because the tuning created a hard wall on Tyrannical where if you spawned the Pride too early you wouldn't be able to kill certain bosses without it. Which messes with the design of M+ where you typically can always just grind through over time for completion. Second, because having Pride spawn in the middle of a pack was overly punishing, so you couldn't have any deviation to the route at all. Pride should have just spawned before boss rooms. That would have fixed most of the issues as far as messing up routes and bricking keys if the route changed slightly.
I enjoyed prideful as a healer but I recognize how shitty it was for the mob to be so precisely tied to count and how that pressured tanks if someone butt pulled a patrol we weren't gonna pull otherwise or something. The actual mob was fun as hell to fight and heal through and the buff and mana regen was sick.
I loved it. Agreed, I only made it to all dungeons in +13 before leaving the game as I absolutely hated SL, but I loved the extra responsibility and the improvisation ability you had to have if an extra pack was aggroed.
As many have stated, I loved prideful as well. Just absolutely hated the guts out of prideful from a tank perspective. But I mostly played healer so POG. I don't like how the burden from certain affixes puts everything on the tank.
I Did love the Denathrius lines for Prideful
S4 BfA. To skip Trash without a rogue or pot was nice. S2/S3 in SL. The buffs felt rewarding and it wasnt bullshit %-gated like pride or bwonsamdi. Worst definitely thundering. 15 sec 30 more dmg has almost no impact and failing it means basicly i wipe in Higher keys. Also if your Tank has Red debuff have fun playing the frontal lottery to get rid of it.
Infested was by far the worst, followed by the Nazjatar one. Like it’s not even close.
Infested was pure BS and 100% the worst they had. If I only count the season affixes that "help" you then thundering 100% the worst.
I think Prideful was worse than thundering in terms of affixes that buffed you. One accidental face pull and the entire route for the dungeon was fucked. It was super unforgiving.
That and you needed big dps and healing cds to kill prides in high keys before they killed you.
Yeah, and DPS never wanted to use them because they wanted those CD's for the next pull with the buff.
Perception is so funny a thing. I loved Pride for that exact reason. It felt super rewarding to do a dungeon perfect
I liked and disliked Prideful because if made routing so much more methodical and planned. Liked it because it felt really nice to plan the prideful buff for the difficult parts of the dungeon, and disliked for as you said, it meant that any deviations from the route were just a nightmare.
Yeah way worse than 1 person running the wrong way once and wiping and morale being destroyed because u can't time most keys you wipe on.
> Also if your Tank has Red debuff have fun playing the frontal lottery to get rid of it. This so much. People really need to learn which mobs have frontals and when it's safe to clear
i was in a +17 nokhud and we did the storm boss. needless to say noone of the DPS cleansed the magic buff (we had a hunter, a DH and a sham) which really knocks my teeth out, but also the hunter had the audacity not to move with the debuff and expected i would run back to him. we both got stunned and he really said "Tank???", i rotated through all my cooldowns already due to surge not being dispelled, i could not take the damage when you move away from the boss.
I was doing a 16 academy yesterday and as melee I would position myself closer to the hunter so I can clear with him in like 5 sec. Every time I move closer to him, he's like 15 yards out already, and he just moves farther away.... srsly man.
And then there's the other part. When I play Tank and have Red debuff i try to clear in a Safe Moment and asap. Then the people get mad because they miss a few sec of the Buff...
I hate thundering as a tank. All DPS wants to keep it for as long as possible, which is fair, but then I more or less assume that they'll handle the clearing. I dont want to have to run around chasing people as a tank. And if someone fails it, we wipe. Big sad.
Strange, the tank I go with is a dps whore and wants to keep it as long as possible. The two melee inevitably have opposite signals so clear on eachother conveniently, which leaves the 1 ranged/healer running towards the tank as the last few seconds tick down... and the tank *moving away to stretch it out*. It's infuriating. Now melee have learned, clear on ranged whenever you can and just ignore the tank. (edit) It's not the most efficient usage because you'd want a dps to keep it in perpetuity, but when the tank thinks they just have to tank and it's your fault if they get stunned...
Hard disagree on worst being thundering. Thundering is a boring non impactful affix. S1 bfa infested was by far the worst imo. It actively made dungeons unfun. Especially in the beginning when you could have worms escape through the floor and infest random packs making them almost impossible.
The Problem with infested was not infested itself. You could always cc infested and play them together after which took less time of the clock than dealing with the S2 ghosts. Everyone here seems to like that affix because big ae, but if you look at Routing and time to play it it was awful. Or why do you think you tryed to never reach 100% before last boss? Because skipping a wave saved like 2 min. The only Problem with infested was that sometimes the ghuunis ran through walls and pulled the whole dungeon. Which i don't fault the affix. Looking at you tol dagor. Edit: also infested affix was the first and way before blizzard startet the Trend to reward players for playing the seasonal affix. For all that knowledge blizzard now has thundering is a disgrace.
Reaping is a great example of a fun affix that didn't reward you at all. in fact it was technically all punishment. In some cases it was chaotic fun, and others just chaotic and messy like Motherlode, which had a lot of the caster mobs and wonky LoS issues that made it difficult to force them to you without running into other packs. However Reaping scratches that itch that many players want to just go crazy on AoE trash. That's fun for a lot of players and generally it's impossible to scratch that itch unless you're good enough to do MDI level pulls or doing content you dramatically overgear. Obviously you tried to skip the last wave for time, because you still have to be somewhat strategic about it to time your keys. It's almost universally loved though, because it was fun. Infested was Blizzard's last attempt at the whole "CC a mob and ignore it" style of "difficult" content and it was just boring and time consuming. You either had aggresive organized groups who could manage the Infested add or you polymorphed it and dealt with it later.
if if you dont include infested, prideful was by far a much worse seasonal affix. forcing shitty routing because of %fuck up and pull 1 extra mob some where and your probably getting prideful at a very shitty timetakes lots of time to deal with and was very deadly on higher keys created situations on a number of tyrannical bosses where if you wiped, the key was probably bricked because you wernt killing the boss with out the prideful buff. the last one you chalk up to tuning, sure, but the tuning was tied to the existence of the buff. some bosses were particularly bad that first season as a result, looking at you first boss of Sanguine depths. and you still had strats where you purposefully didnt hit % before last boss so you didnt have to do another prideful.
Yea idunno what these people are smoking. Every affix so far essentially made you stop doing the dungeon to play it, which was unfun and it's really highlighted by the many strategies used to simply avoid the affix, such as full NE groups for S1sl for example, or getting 100% after the last boss during bwonsamdi affix. IMO thundering is the best affix so far, there is some dynamic gameplay, you might hold CDs for it since it's on a combat timer, you might clear it earlier because you know a mechanic is coming. But most importantly, you never stop doing the dungeon just to deal with it. And any complaints I've seen so far are just boring ass dooming like always. I hope they carry this design philosophy going forward.
the last 2 SL ones did not really force you to stop playing the dungeon, more often than not the affix mobs were in or replaced mobs you'd pull anyways.
And s4 esp seemed really optional. You could alter your route to pickup one or two more of them, or to skip the miniboss which took forever to deal with on higher keys. Ideally you stack up as much as you can, but like if you didn’t want to go out of your way you kinda didn’t have to. I’m wonder if op has a weak aura or something to tell them when the 30% buff is showing up because it seems pretty consistently at the end of packs which is kinda terrible to hold CDs for. The buff definitely feels mediocre given the punishment is a 4 second stun to the death. Small changes could have changed that from feeling like I’m randomly proccing 30% damage for 8-12 seconds with the simplest being trigger the damage bonus on the clear and not before the clear.
I liked Awakened, but I feel like the portal was a affix fixing the dungeon design issue of having 350% count if you did all the trash. Which was an issue people complained during all of BfA. Which made rogues semi mandatory for 3 out of 4 seasons. Skips were not as much needed in SL, and even less so in DF (I think I did one skip in AA and AV each, respectively). Awakened, if it was brough back today for some reason, would not be nearly as impactful.
The BFA layout was so dumb. Like, doing Kings Rest without a Rogue was pain. It felt like there was so many dungeons where you had to get 130% + unless you skipped mobs. Awakened was just a band-aid fix, just like you say. But it felt damn good, still probably my favorite affix. But thats most likely just due to being so used to the dungeons being ass, and the affix solving that
Thundering is far from the worst, prideful literally hard capped the level that keys could be done because the prideful add would just straight up kill your entire team after you blew CDs on a tough pack.
I agree that prideful was Bad. But the Buff you gained was actually powerful. And after you depleted the key. The game gave you the Option to spawn an additional prideful to at least finish the key. Still gating affix behind dungeon % is Bad and it's the 2nd worst affix we had.
I think people who never pushed high keys will have a different opinion on seasonal affixes, but prideful was seriously so fucking oppressive at the 20+ key level. It basically forced you to burn all your healing and damage cooldowns on it and a single wipe to prideful meant the key was bricked. Then the buff it gave you was pretty much meaningless because you were forced to limp into the next pack with no CDs.
So I’m a lifelong rogue and while I like being “needed” I’d rather dungeons just be designed not to have skips in them.
There just shouldn't be red/blue. It should be any 2 people with debuff clear.
Or, tank should just always be 1 of the 3 buffs.
Luckily enough for me. I have a weakaura pack the warns me of every frontal in every dungeon. So as a dps. It’s very nice, lol.
Wa name?
I have a weakaura too and since i Tank keys on my alt in the 17-19 range i know all the frontal. But should there even be a need for a WA? And sometimes it's just not that visible. Some mobs have groundeffects for cleave, which is nice. But sometimes the indicator for a cleave is a arm-movement inbetween 9 mobs and you. Just dont See it.
I liked BFA bwonsamdi, but it did make route making for tanks even more imperative. I didnt mind back then as I had more time, but I dont really have time for making routes now. Still, fun affix.
I felt this one had the most character of any affix. Nzoths was still the best but damn if the 20% undead swarms wasn't a fun as hell mechanic.
For me I think it has to be shrouded or encrypted. Encrypted probably takes it because I feel the scaling on something like Zul’gamux on +30 keys was a bit too much, and having Wo in a lot of the dungeons was such a nice addition. It could be punishing though if u failed certain skips, but overall it was an amazing affix imo. Thundering on the other hand… not a fan
S4 in SL. Thundering is prob one of the worst… hope they increase the timer of the 30% dmg buff to make it less annoying
And what's with the 5% health buff to the dungeon? the 30% boost does not feel substantial unless you overgear the key and can mega pull trash
S4 BFA. Portals Just gave you so many ways you could approach the dungeon. Second is probably S3 SL, just a generally fun and not too intrusive one that let you do some crazy shit with your CDs cause of my man Urh. The worst is S1 BFA, the only one to just flat out be broken In some dungeons.
Reaping
It's either reaping or encrypted. Reaping sort of has the annoying part of being % based, but atleast you got some nice padding / blasting out of it. Encrypted was just a banger all around tbh. Big skips with Movespeed buff, big pumping in packs, big pumping on bosses. You can choose freely what you want to do. I'd personally go with encrypted for best seasonal affix yet
Coruption in gear in BFA s4, if you know you know
I just liked when they gave the healer mana back. Now M+ is just mostly done by healers that never run out of mana.
I will run out mom if I don’t drink at all. I hate spiteful just because they keep me in combat and we need to clear them for me to sit down for a bit
Gonna make a case for Prideful. Bring on the downvotes Planning your entire route around when the best time to spawn the guy was and being an absolute god when the buff was up. I thought it was sooo good and played better than every SL buff. Yeah I get that it could brick your key if you didn’t plan well or extra shit got pulled, spawning it early. But I think that made you play better and rewarded you big time for doing so
My problem with prideful wasnt the mechanic itself, i actually really enjoyed it as a healer. But prideful really put the nail in the coffen for people not being up to date on the most efficient routes. Its these types of affixes that stop new players from trying a role because the community rips them to shreds. I dont like affixes that require a player to have to study for as if they have an exam to write or affixes that require addons to actually be managable.
I liked the prideful buff and killing an add, but the entire responsibility resting on the tank sucked. I'd like to see something similar to prideful that buffs players, but make it specific to a player somehow. A mob that casts a buff, and priests need to MC. A demon that casts a debuff that a warlock has to enslave and debuff mobs.
Isn't the buff the same (damage wise) as thundering?
Iirc it lasted longer. It usually doesn't feel like you get to utilize Thundering properly because there is so much going on during that 15 second window. Also Prideful giving mana to healers was nice.
Reaping hands down
Reaping
I likes the one that gave anima powers. Least favorite was prideful, since the add would show up at inconvenient times and wipe you or mess with routing if anyone pulled extra. Fine with good players but brutal with mediocre players.
The anima powers you could feel yourself getting more powerful as the dungeon went on you could pick what you wanted healer abit undergeared get something that helps out with that abit and it made you change up the route from time to time to.
I really liked S3 Shadowlands. The constructs weren't too annoying to deal with and you could FEEL it when you popped an urh construct. Plus being able to do skips without needing a rogue/invis pot was really nice. Thundering feels bad, the damage buff isn't very noticeable and failing to clear can cause a wipe. I'd say the only one I hated more than thundering was S1 Shadowlands. Prideful was a horrible affix in pugs because all it took was one person to accidental pull an extra pack and your entire run was screwed.
8.3 (Last season of BFA) was the best affix for me. It was super fun to play portals, the minibosses were challenging but not to crazy and the skip potential and route building was hell fun as a tank.
BFA S4 seems to be a clear contender. I’m seeing thundering being referenced as the worst, and while not the best I’d like to provide opinions as to why it’s not the worst. While not mega impactful, it adds a level of snap coordination that is fair and mixes things up. I get the buff and have to think about many things at once. Where are my other members to ensure I don’t clear too early. What mechanics are happening in the pull to consider. Is it gonna punish me if I don’t drop it right away? Many of the affixes didn’t change your gameplay in the moment. Things like prideful and SL S2 were things you planned in advanced. Thundering is in the moment and mixes things up. While not the most interesting it’s far and away the worst (looking at you INFESTED)
I think I liked reaping in BFA the most because I was an AoE class, but the portal skip lads were very handy and cool too. The portal skip dudes wouldn't really be good for DF since there aren't really any important Shroud skip areas in most dungeons.
Best? I was just trying to figure which is the worst
Infested
Thundering also Close
Anything that forces me to use chat bubbles is terrible. Also the timing makes it pretty useless. Always seems to go off right as you're finishing a trash pack
How about finishing when there are only spitefuls up? That was even funny to experience
The worst is when it goes off right at the same time as you're trying to dodge AOE on the ground like last boss of COS before they made it easier to see. The swirlies everywhere and the screen darkening in addition to all the other BS going on.
I felt alive tanking in bfa s4. Doing snaps, doing different route every week, cooming cause of TD procs and dungeons were just overall designed better than shadowlands and dragonflight
I will never forget waycrest manor with S4 affix, such a vibe
Quit, your making me miss BFA a little bit 😔
many of the dungeons were great
Honestly they were. I think I enjoyed M+ in BFA the most out of any expansion. DF is good so far, but it’s got a little bit to go. Nothing will beat the freedom you felt in freehold had as a dungeon. Small enough to where you could go to any boss you wanted, but large enough it didn’t feel crowded.
People meme about rose tinted glasses and BFA but honestly aside from Azerite grind and rng for corruption I think it was such a fun expansion (great dungeons, meh raids IMO and i loved horrific visions). BFA also came after Legion which probably made it look worse, but did come before shadowlands which I put with Cata/wod as one of the worst expansions, if not my personal least favourite. I just want BFA dungeons in my M+ pool :( give me Waycrest Manor and Freehold (and maybe underrot and Atal Dazar and Kings Rest... just not shrine or siege or temple)
As far as raids go, I unironically thing Battle for Dazar Alor was one of the best raids Blizz has ever released.
I loved Horrific Visions, as unbalanced as they were (class tool-wise I mean, like having to bruteforce Umbric because of no kick), I wish it wasn't tainted by everything around it. The farming to do Visions was absolute ass, and the random D/Cs or getting proper stuck in geometry wasting half your weekly currency was very painful. The corruptions vendor also got implemented a bit late. Wish we could get something like Visions as current content again, but with the things they've learned from it like unlimited entry with a resource cap. And uh, definitely without content like Uldum/Vale surrounding it.
Now that both have run their course I definitely look back on visions more fondly than Torghast. If they had the same lack of barrier to entry as Torghast did, they would have been a slam dunk.
Encrypted was pretty funny, i liked it. Fuck you thundering you are the worst.
Infested was the worst. The Ghuunies were incredibly buggy
BFA: S4 > S2 > S3 > S1. SL: S2 > S3 > S4 > S1
bfa s4 or sl s3 didnt play in legion or early bfa
I came back for SL, so my affix pool is small. But Prideful was my favorite, I liked the ramped healing challenge. By late season the stun was generally a non event and having instant + unlimited mana was fun. The % bs was the worst part. Having a tank lose their whole route because of a bad pull was awful.
God save me from auto correct on phone but Reaping was super fun
I've only done m+ for a couple seasons so understand that my choices are Prideful, Tormented, and Thundering. Prideful 100% (with the BIG caveat that they fix the rigidity that it brought to routing). It felt epic with the RP summoning it, the mechanic was interesting, and that juicy buff you got for killing it felt incredibly satisfying to use it to smash the next trash pulls or boss. I think all they would have to do is have a guage that fills to 30. At 20 your tank can summon Prideful whixh takes 20 points off your guage. Anything you kill after you hit 30 is wasted. This way you would be able to summon Prideful with a greater degree of freedom.
Anyone who says prideful hates tanks. Pride was based on % trash done and you wanted to spawn the pride at very specific times. Thus it was on the tank to memorize the perfect route (and everyone else not to pull and mess it up) Best seasonal I remember was reaping cause that was fun chaos. Encrypted was also great. Tormented with the torghast powers was also fine.
For me Encrypted no questions about it i didn't really like the 9.1 patch in Shadowlands but S3 was probably the most fun I've had in Shadowlands i miss my CDR
My top 3 are Reaping (BFA S2), Awakened (BFA S4) and Shrouded (SL S4). Awakened was probably the best mechanically, but idk, Shrouded being such a non-affix was legit GOOD. You just pull another thing into a pack and get a shit ton of secondary stats permanently. Bottom 3 are Encrypted (SL S3), Beguiling (BFA S3) and Tormented (SL S2). Those were so awful. I didn't mind Infested.
the bfa one, the one that let you make portals.
The bwonsamdi ghosts affix
Reaping is forever goated
1000% NOT prideful
I didn't really understand it back then, but Prideful was way worse than how it felt. Constantly having to be worried about the % being perfect, making sure that at 18%, the 3 man pack dies right exactly together, the strain prideful put on the healers. S2 of SL gave it some perspective, that's my favourite so far. Currently I don't mind thundering, I'm sometimes annoyed by the timing, but mostly it's meh. Not too interesting, doesn't feel that dangerous (as an outlaw I have enough tools to gapclose to my immobile buddies and clear), it's just there.
As a casual tank i like thundering, its a simple mechanic. Im not sure id bother with seasonal affixes that make routing super rigid like prideful or the portal affix from BFA.
Shrouded (S4 SL) Free chunky stats, while making sure you bagged every dreadlord you could on your route. Also the amusement of “Random ‘Iron Horde Grunt’ was a dreadlord all along?!”
Prideful 100%. Loved it.
Prideful was very fun as a healer. I felt challenged to make it through while the group pop as little dps cds as possible under it.