Weekly Mythic+ Affix Updates on Patch 10.1 PTR – Explosive Massively Nerfed

Mythic+ testing is available again on the Patch 10.1 PTR and there are some massive nerfs to the Explosive affix in both health and spawn rate!

If you want to know more about the basics of the new affixes, click here.

Explosive

The Explosive affix has received some massive nerfs on the PTR. In their developer notes this week, Blizzard mentions that they are discussing a potential changes to Explosives where the health left on Explosives gets converted into a shield. This has not been implemented yet.

Health

Explosive Orb’s health was massively nerfed.

This amount seems to be much more reasonable than last week’s 480k health, which still requires more than a healer to swap to it. However, these Explosive Orbs are still immune to AoE spells making some classes like Protection Warrior much less effective at killing Explosive Orbs than others. However, if everyone turns and uses one or two abilities on the Explosive Orb, this Orb will die relatively quickly.

Spawn Rate

The biggest change for Explosive seems to be its spawn rate though!

From testing, a maximum of TWO Explosive Orbs can be summoned at a time regardless of pull size. This means that you can pull 20+ mobs and only have 2 Explosive Orbs at a time. In addition, it looks like the spawn of Explosive Orbs has a short ICD, so killing (or letting one blow up) doesn’t immediately spawn a new set, giving some time to breath rather than just playing Whack-An-Explosive-Orb the entire dungeon.

This could be wrong and not be the case with future testing, but from my testing so far, I never had an instance of a third Explosive Orb spawn anymore and there was always time between Orb sets. You can watch a clip of the testing below:

Brief Thoughts

While this Explosive is much better, I do think that classes are not balanced around hitting Explosive Orbs due to some single target abilities not being able to hit Explosive because they have an AoE component which leads to frustration and severe comp selection during Explosive weeks. “Make sure we have at least 2 Explosive killing classes.” In addition Explosive Orbs is still a time sink and you’re losing ~270k damage every wave which will add up over the course of the entire dungeon.

But overall, I do think this new version of Explosive is better than the old one because of the significantly reduced spawn rate. Sometimes when you pull big on current Explosive, you get an incredible amount of Explosive and you just die if you miss one or two. Now, a maximum of two will go off and that’s it. But most importantly, this affix no longer smothers the dungeon; you’re not solely focusing on Explosive the entire key and only have to deal with it occasionally.

Afflicted

Here are the changes to Afflicted this week:

The health being nerfed slightly is good for higher keys, but the health on these is likely to continue to scale out of control past keystone level +20, forcing players into dispels rather than healing the mob on Afflicted weeks. especially with the current spawn rate issues.

Unlike the spawn rate change for Explosive, no spawn rate change seems to have been implemented for Afflicted. You can see the results of a 20+ mob pull below:

This will definitely be fun to deal with…

Unless the majority of your party has a dispel, this affix continues to look brutal as another version of Explosive for healers. As mentioned above, past a certain key level, healing this won’t be an option and you’ll be forced to bring dispels to deal with every single one because of how much their health will scale. This affix looks to currently be overwhelming and dominating the dungeon — you’re not playing the dungeon on Afflicted weeks, you’re playing the affix and the dungeon is in the background. From the brief testing that was done with this affix, 5 Afflicted spawned at a time, but more testing needs to be done with this affix to test spawn rates.

In my opinion, the new Explosive spawn rate feels very reasonable and Blizzard should match that spawn rate with Afflicted as well.

Incorporeal

Here are the changes to Incorporeal this week. Blizzard has mentioned that they’re looking into making Incorporeal despawn when out of combat.

This change means that you can’t break hard CC on them anymore which is great. However, they are still completely immune to AoE CC abilities (likely from a previous ability where they were intended to be immune) ,making abilities such as Blinding Light and Leg Sweep useless against them.

In addition, unlike the spawn rate change for Explosive, no spawn rate change seems to have been implemented for Afflicted. The maximum Incorporeal that you can have active at a time seems to be FOUR, spawning 2 sets of 2 in close succession (1 second apart), and this means you can even get 3 Incorporeals active on a 3 mob pull.

My opinion on this is that this affix continues to be overwhelming even with everyone having Hard CC. Some Hard CC even has a cooldown and won’t be up for every wave of Incorporeals. Having to deal with 4 Incorporeal at a time seems overwhelming while also dealing with the regular mobs for a pull and it makes it seem like you’re playing the affix and not the dungeon. Once again, the new Explosive spawn rate would feel much more reasonable.

Summary

Currently the spawn rates for these new affixes seem to be capped at:

The changes to Explosive feel like a massive win: a much slower spawn rate that isn’t impacted by how much you pull and a massively reduced health pool. However, the other two affixes feel like they’re still suffering from a spawn rate issue and in their current state smothering the dungeon whenever they are active. I believe that mechanically Incorporeal and Afflicted are fine affixes, but they are currently just happening too often. When 3 mobs can summon 3 Incorporeals, this seems like a little much.