Patch 10.1 PTR Mythic+ Affix Tuning: April 4th

(Source)

Greetings!

We’ve been watching everyone play Mythic+ on the PTR and monitoring feedback, and wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts on where things are at. Overall, we’re seeing a lot of the type of gameplay we’d hoped to see from our updated level 7 affixes, but we also see room to improve and are looking to make a number of changes for our next round of testing based on player feedback:

• Afflicted now has less health and has more consistent spawn behavior.
○ The Afflicted affix is meant to incentivize a greater focus on dispel utility, while also offering players with healing spells an alternative solution in cases where dispel availability is more limited or where other enemies have threatening dispellable abilities.
○ This is mostly working out, but their health (especially at higher key levels) is a bit too high for healing to feel like a practical option.

• Incorporeal is now immune to damage and has more consistent spawn behavior.
○ The Incorporeal affix plays a similar role to Afflicted, but with emphasis on crowd control utility.
○ A few things we’re hoping to smooth out include both the rate at which these spawn (sometimes too many at once), and the ease with which crowd control can be accidentally broken once applied.
○ We are discussing a change to Incorporeal Beings that would cause them to fade away when combat with non-Incorporeal Beings has ended.

• Explosive now has less health and has more consistent spawn behavior.
○ We’ve heard feedback both that explosives in their new form have too much health, and that in general it makes sense to try and ignore them, thus making them a “healer problem” in a different way than before.
§ We are discussing a redesign for the Explosive affix to shift responsibility away from healers. The proposed change would cause Explosives to instead shield creatures for a percentage of the Explosive’s remaining health when its cast completes.

• Entangling
○ We’re keeping an eye on the potency of the snare and required response from players to successful snap the vine with movement.
○ We are looking to improve visual clarity and audio cues for the Entangling affix.

• Keystone Affixes
○ In addition to the above, we are also discussing a change to the progression of affixes on keystones. With item rewards now increasing up to level 20, we’re evaluating which levels affixes are added to keystones. Our proposed change would delay when affixes are added to keystones. This is to give players more time to acclimate to baseline dungeons before additional mechanics come online, and to better match the complexity of a Mythic+ dungeon to the rewards it offers.
§ Keystones would gain their second affix at level 7, up from level 4.
□ Spiteful
□ Raging
□ Bursting
□ Bolstering
□ Sanguine
§ Keystones would gain their third affix at level 14, up from level 7.
□ Afflicted
□ Incorporeal
□ Explosive
□ Entangling
□ Storming

Thank you again for taking the time to play Mythic+ on the PTR! We appreciate your feedback and will continue to read, watch, play, and let you know as we make additional changes.