WoW Community Council Mythic+ Interview Summary

Mythic+ Affixes Design

• Goals for affixes have changed over time and were originally “How can we challenge different roles?”
• Moved away from gameplay changing and role specific affixes, and more towards broader group affixes
• They overdid it and heard the feedback in Season 1 with affixes taking up your focus and it was in a lot of ways more about the affixes than the dungeons. There were also a lot of times when things were happening both with the mobs in the dungeons and the affixes or even affixes overlapping.
• Seasonal affix not existing in Season 2 is part of this and why they’re dialing back affixes a little bit. They want affixes to still be a challenge, to be interesting and shake things up from week to week, but overall reduce the amount of headspace that affixes take up.
• The new affixes were very iteration heavy and they wanted to get them up on PTR as soon as possible.
• In a way new dungeons are an affix in themselves. This is the first time that we have a Season rollover and there is no mastery for these new dungeons.

Seasonal Affixes

• Were initially designed in a world where the dungeon pool wasn’t changing from season to season.
• Seasonal affixes needed to change the routing. They needed to impact every role and be able to plan around it.
• With the dungeon pool changing they feel like they don’t need that anymore.
• “Never say Never” about it coming back. There’s something cool about the fantasy of having the “big bad” of the patch invading the dungeons, but current goal is taking a step back.
• With Seasonal affixes being cool, if they were to return, it is possible that they could come into effect earlier.

Morgan Day

Affixes are meant to provide a challenge, we saw some degree of that with Thundering where we had the kiss/curse element but we said, we need to offset this so that we don’t run into the situation where actually a level 7 Mythic+ is easier than a level 6 Mythic+ because now you’ve got all these buffs that are turning on.

Removal of Old Mechanics

Andrew De Sousa

One of the overarching goals for Season 2 was a little bit of de-escalation, disarming of dungeons and affixes.

• Not only did legacy dungeons have abilities removed or tweaked, but also the Dragonflight dungeons got that treatments as well. They’ve adjusted the gauntlet in Halls of Infusion, removed packs or mobs in Brackenhide.
• This was intentional to slow down the pace of the game a little bit, let players adjust to what is going on.
• Affixes have a lot going on (e.g. Quaking) and overall complexity of a pull, where do you want the brain bandwidth to be in a pull? Previously, some Dragonflight dungeons you had to do a kick rotation and a protection kick (aka stop) rotation.

Kiss/Curse Affixes

• They’ve heard a lot of community feedback on it.
• They want to make sure that with kiss/curse affixes, going up to the next level of keystone and gaining an affix doesn’t actually make the dungeon easier so it needs to be counterbalanced.
• The direction that they’re moving is they want the dungeon to be the most impactful
• Kiss/Curse affixes need to be pretty transformative for them to work.
• Mythic+ is one activity that you can engage with in WoW. Morgan worries about how things feel when you leave a Mythic+ with lots of buffs and your character power is always shifting around, so it’s hard to figure out the impact of an upgrade. As an example, the reason that Thundering didn’t give you haste was class balance; some classes care more about haste than others. Maybe if it was a bucket of kiss/curse affixes that changed week over week (haste one week, mastery the next), but class balance is a concern.
• By not having kiss/curse affixes, it leaves them open to doing more things like the Necrotic Wake weapons, the Barrels in Plaguefall, the Living Bomb ability in Ruby Life Pools.
• Needs more discussion, definitely not closing the door on it.

Morgan Day

A major goal of ours with moving into Season 2 is that, and the direction that we are moving is that we want the dungeon to be the most impactful thing that you’re interacting with. The affixes are there to add texture and add variety and enable opportunities for you to feel like a hero and use some utility

Affixes Spawning Based on Pull Size

• For Afflicted and Incorporeal affixes, they’ve implemented a new system for how they’ve spawned. It’s meant to give a more consistent experience with those affixes, regardless of the pull size but they haven’t done that for all affixes yet. Volcanic and Storming will still scale based on pull size.
• Not a 1/1 scaling on these affixes but there is some texture to some affixes scaling a little more with pull size.
• In some ways, that linear scaling is there to throttle your pulling.

“Healer” Affixes

• Some of the efforts to pull back affixes have been for part of this reason.
• All 3 of the new affixes are meant to be more than everyone taking a bunch of damage.
• They’ve been addressing this for a while now with a Quaking change.
• This is something that they’re trying to address on the affix rotation side. There were bad healer weeks, you might not see Bursting and Afflicted paired up. You have an affix that is affecting your role, so they don’t need to double down with another affix that affects your role.

Andrew De Sousa

Some of design philosophy in Season 2 has been to pull damage out of affixes: Entangling, Incorporeal, Afflicted all don’t have damage associated with their penalties. If they go off, you might take a throughput hit, It’s going to slow your run down but people won’t suddenly die, or they shouldn’t.

Dungeon Scaling More Than Just Damage/Health

• They believe that part of the fun of Mythic+ is about mastery and how as you spend more time with the dungeon and learn, you learn how to deal with them more effectively. The concern would be if they are changing how the dungeon functions as you go up in difficulty, you practice it a certain way and now it works a different way.
• In a way this kind of already occurs through just key level as a Frostbolt at level 5 might not need to be kicked but at a +20 you might want to. So there’s a natural change.
• The issue might be messaging. With raid, you have a difficulty or an affixes during on in Mythic+.

Creative Use of Game Mechanics

Matt Villers

I think that we just have to accept that when we’re giving players an infinitely scaling mode and you can make it as hard as you want, we are basically saying “Yeah, go nuts. Figure out ways to be creative, figure out ways to break the game.”

• They try as much as possible to let players use creative solutions to problems.
• The place where they might step in is when it makes the dungeon less fun or if it creates a situation where you must have a very specific class to do the dungeon and it creates more of a negative impact than a positive one.
• Sometimes they hope players will find things they do anticipate while other times players surprise them.
• They saw the Azure Vault ring skip relatively early on and it seemed spicy but they just decided to let it rip and players caught on.
• They’ve fixed snaps.

Tuning

• They’re looking at ways to improve PTR testing so that keys are ran with affixes, etc.
• Ideally in a perfect world everything would be perfectly tuned for launch
• Personally if they are missing the mark, they would rather it be slightly overtuned than under to avoid the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds situation from this Season and competitive integrity.
• You may have unknowingly played with dev on PTR in keys!
• There are different types of nerfs too: ones targeting complexity, health nerfs targeting the timer or just this thing hits too hard nerfs.
• It starts off through various sources (forums, word of mouth, streams, etc.), then they have tools to verify that data. However, they also do want to monitor how things occur over time as players are smart and they don’t want to rob players of the opportunity of solving those problems.
• They try to avoid tuning the timer if possible.

Double Dispel Encounters

• This is something they keep an eye on similar to Jade Temple last boss.
• The first boss Brackenhide had this issue, but it’s been addressed.
• It could be cool to have that second dispel, but they want to avoid situations where you feel like you have to have it.
• Similar thing with Brackenhide disease, they’ve made it more avoidable by interrupts, moved the penalty more towards the haste rather than damage.
• One of the ways they can solve the issue is offering multiple ways to solve a problem.

Checkpoints

Matt Villers

At a very high level, we want our dungeons to feel like places, and part of feeling like a real place is you traverse through it; It’s not like I magically teleport through the dungeon. Our baseline is that actually we would prefer to not have updated release points and have more natural ways to get through the dungeon.

• They want dungeons to feel like places that you have to traverse through and don’t magically teleport through.
• They’d prefer natural ways to get back through the dungeon.
• Don’t want players to have really long run times or have the feeling that some dungeons that are really rough on that. They want to make sure that it feel like you’re naturally traversing through the space and they want to make sure that they’re offering ways that make sense.

Solo Q for Mythic+

• Solo Shuffle has a unique twist for PvP.
• When you have a queued activity there is this expectation of winning. For Normal+ Raids and Mythic+, the matchmaker has a very difficult problem to solve versus just giving players the tools to find like minded players.
• One of the biggest things that causes toxicity or frustration is a mismatching of expectations and they’ve been trying to find better ways to align those expectations.
• Would require a lot more discussion, no plans in the near future.

Mechanic Visibility in Dungeons

• They’re trended towards getting better at mechanic visibility. They’re looking to continue to improve those in the legacy dungeons and they have.
• Clashing colours is an interesting thing that they’ve ran into from Vortex Pinnacle. It’s a wind themed palace but they’ve done a pass on it and have reviewed almost every visual in the dungeon. They’ve changed the map itself so it takes

RP in Dungeons

• Stuff like the Court of Stars spy event, the Ring of Booty in Freehold are stuff that you can master, so they keep it in.
• However, stuff that is just RP and players are going to stand there waiting they will try to pull it out. Tazavesh waiting for the stage event, or the guards right away were removed right away.
• Sometimes it is okay to have some breaks in the action where you can take a break and drink.