New Affixes
Afflicted
Afflicted was a new affix added in Dragonflight Season 2 and has been dubbed a “passenger affix” by the community. The biggest problem with this affix is the range in difficulty depending solely on your class composition — ranging from trivial to very difficult, with a large punishment for failure. It has thus has not been received well by the community.
Afflicted looks to have been made to try to replace the “healer” affix of Grievous, but Afflicted has not turned out to be a healer affix at all. Since Afflicted Souls can be dispelled, the easiest method of dealing with Afflicted is to have multiple hybrids in your key and just have them dispel it. Actually healing the Afflicted Souls is difficult due to targeting and a large health pool / low single target healing. As if Dragonflight Season 2 dungeons, didn’t have a wide range of dispels already that promote bringing hybrids, Afflicted weeks have only increased the difference between “meta” specs and non “meta” specs.
In addition, this affix just feels like it happens so often. It has a chance on spawning every 30 seconds, which means you can deal with up to 60 sets in a 30 minute dungeon. It’s just overwhelming and feels like you’re setting up your comp and play to deal with the affix and not playing the dungeon.
I don’t think this affix has worked out as intended and I think it’s personally harmful to community perception as classes that don’t have a dispel do not feel useful this week. It’d be a different story if the classes without a dispel brought a bunch of other utility and for one week they were less important to be brought to keys. However, the classes that don’t have a dispel (e.g. Hunter, Warrior) tend to also be the ones that don’t have a lot of other utility in keys, so this affix is just doubling down at excluding classes that already weren’t being incentivized to be brought.
Entangling
Entangling was also a new affix added in Dragonflight Season 2 and has been the most well received by the community of the 3. This affix is relatively easy to deal with and only has a small punishment for failure compared to the others. The actual mechanic of running out of the circle is straightforward and while it can have some bad overlaps, gives players 8 seconds in order to break the tether. Some classes can even break it right away without moving! It does have some annoying positioning issues for tanks as they need to leave the circle as well which could cause positioning issues or cleaving issues.
There’s a case to be made as to if the 30% slow even needs to exist and could be reduced down to like 5% or something completely negligible but overall, this affix is a welcome addition compared to the other two.
Incorporeal
Incorporeal was the third new affix added in Dragonflight Season 2 and has been okay. With their duration of 20 seconds, and the fact that they have no kick lockout, realistically the only way to handle them is to Hard CC them. At the start of the Season, this affix was a “passenger affix” for Warriors and DKs. This changed partway into the Season with every class now having a way to Hard CC an Incorporeal. However, with Incorporeal being able to spawn every 45 seconds, some classes are unable to deal with every set: Warriors Shattering Throw (3 minutes) and Rogues Blind (2 minutes).
Similar to Afflicted though, this affix feels like it spawns so often being able to spawn every 45 seconds and the penalty for failing can be the sole reason for a wipe. If the goal is to have people play the dungeons, not the affix, this affix currently doesn’t satisfy that in my opinion.
This affix does have a nice benefit that isn’t key warping towards DK and Priest as Mind Control effects make the enemies deal less damage for a short amount of time. This is a form of cool utility that isn’t required, but nice to have unlike Afflicted which is completely binary; it’s not nice to have, it’s essentially required.
Reworked Affixes
Bolstering
Bolstering was reworked in Patch 10.1 to not increase health with each stack and only damage. While this has been a fantastic change, I believe this affix still has problems, especially when combined with trash that now has healing checks or EHP checks. I think most people have probably seen or directly died to a Bolstered Enforcer Shout in Freehold or a Bolstered Dragon Shout in Halls of Infusion.
Unfortunately, the removal of the health increase still leaves Bolstering as one of two affixes that have a direct time loss. It’s a time loss in:
- Watching your pull size, especially when combined with packs of different health pools or dangerous casts
- Having to ensure that mobs die at the same time, or dangerous mobs die first by single targeting.
In my opinion, the Bolstering affix at 20% damage per stack still means you’re playing the affix more than you’re playing the Dungeon. The entire dungeon and its pulls need to played around the affix, and that likely means the affix is still too powerful and too dungeon warping. While the damage per stack could be decreased, it’s also possible that changing the affix to a massively decreased duration (currently 20 seconds) could work as well.
Raging
Raging has been massively improved in Dragonflight Season 2 with the affix not increasing the creature’s damage anymore. Most of the time, this affix is actually nice now, except in two specific circumstances:
- 1. When mobs flee (e.g. Brackenhide Hollow or Freehold)
- 2. When mobs need to be “stopped” (e.g. Containment Beam in Halls of Infusion or Vicious Clawmangle in Brackenhide)
This affix is better for more cases, but there are still cases where it feels overly punishing to not have a Soothe available. Personally, I think the Raging affix should just be removed on the very first Crowd Control (or Soothed off), but I do think a few small tweaks to Raging can be made to make this a great affix.
Sanguine
Sanguine‘s only change in Dragonflight Season 2 was to reduce the duration of Sanguine puddles from 20 seconds to 12 seconds. Overall, I don’t think this changed the difficulty of the affix. How many times does a mob stand in Sanguine for between 12 and 20 seconds? Most of the time, the mob stands in Sanguine for 5 seconds and you’re already cringing. In addition, Sanguine puddles stack, so even 3 seconds in multiple puddles means at least a 45%+ heal. Sanguine is one of two affixes that is a time loss currently, and arguably the biggest time loss. It also has negative interacts with certain specs with Frost Mages and other specs.
Sanguine just takes a significant amount of attention and scales its difficulty exponentially with key level. Since Sanguine scales with health pools, and key levels increase health pools exponentially the punishment for messing up Sanguine also scales exponentially. In addition, watching an un-knockable creature just channel in a Sanguine puddle is just frustrating. Also, Bolstering was removed from buffing bosses. Why does Sanguine still heal bosses?
Compared to every other affix, Sanguine requires players the most focus and requires a large chunk of knowledge, while also having the biggest punishment for failure.
- How many unknockable mobs do you have?
- Should you knock before or after the mobs die?
- Are these mobs going to channel or cast anytime soon?
I think Sanguine is the affix that needs some big changes going into Season 3 due to how exhausting it can be. That could be mobs not being healed completely and only damaging players, Sanguine puddles shrinking over time or as it heals mobs, Sanguine scaling flat damage with key level, or other changes.
Spiteful
Spiteful in Dragonflight Season 2 had its melee damage reduced by 10% and they no longer scale past keystone level 20. Honestly, this was a great change and while Spiteful is still more annoying for melee, the damage is bearable doesn’t scale out of control.
I believe that Blizzard could definitely use this “no longer scales past +20” tech on more things.
Unchanged Affixes
Bursting
Bursting requires healers to put in a little extra healer throughput at the end of pulls. Most of the time this affix is perfectly fine.
However, that being said, I do think the delta between having a priest and not having a priest is a little too large though for Bursting at the moment. For only one class having Mass Dispel, Bursting can feel a little too all or nothing with its existence, but it’s not as big as say Afflicted.
Storming
Storming for the most part is a fine affix and the melee version of Volcanic. However, there are some issues with Storming that are annoying mostly for the Tank.
- Unlike Volcanic, Storming isn’t just a look at feet and dodge. Since it travels in a circular pattern, and goes quite fast, it’s a lot harder to dodge and deal with.
- Storming knocks you away from the tornado rather than directly up which can affect mob position.
- While a tank get knocked into the air, sometimes they’re out of range of the mobs and mobs can evade or even Fervant Strike others in melee.
I’d like to see a small adjustment to Storming in Season 3, possibly slowing down the speed of the tornado or making them less spirally and more travel in a straight line.
Volcanic
Volcanic for the most part is a fine affix. It’s a lot easier to see and track compared to Storming since it doesn’t move and is in one spot. Can cause some issues if you get hit at the wrong time, but don’t think any changes are really needed.
Wishlist
Personally, the stand out affixes for me are:
- Time Loss: Sanguine and Bolstering
- Class Stacking: Afflicted and Incorporeal
I don’t know how much you can fix the Class stacking issues of Afflicted and Incorporeal, so I think this affixes should just flat out be removed. I do think Sanguine and Bolstering can be fixed, but could also seem them being removed as well. One idea from the community has been to remove all 4 of the above affixes, leaving only 1 affix, but return Seasonal affixes.
Overall, the affixes into Season 2 went in the right direction and some feel a lot better than previous, but I still think there’s room to grow and improve the affix pool. If Blizzard doesn’t add new affixes, I think the affixes should try to incentivize bringing less popular class (e.g. Warrior, Hunter) rather than incentivizing classes that are already brought.
