Most affixes boil down to a healer issue, even when it’s not obvious at first glance:
Any group damage loss (stat loss, reduced casting speed etc.) means longer pulls which require more healing → healer problem
Dispels ? See this week, people specifically prefer shamans to handle it easily, especially resto shaman. This is historically true for other affixes as well.
Any type of damage or hp increase of mobs? Longer pulls which require more healing → healer problem
Any kind of additional movement (e.g. collect orbs)? Healers has to move more, which often means less heals = your healer is on the backfoot on bad overlaps with dungeon mechanics
I have thought about this for a while and have come up with a solution: create an affix which reduces the count of mobs in M+.
This could take many forms:
Every X non-kicked spells reduce already achieved enemy count by Y, up to at most Z% lost count
1.1 Both X and Y could be a tuning knob dependent on key level, Z should be constant for each dungeon to avoid not being able to get 100%
1.2 Successfully interrupted spells could reduce X to have some form of counterplay
1.3 The count loss could be dependent on the mobs own count-%, making lieutenant mob kicks more important (as they should)
1.4 Before anyone gets mad, the numbers on here should be low like X=15 and Y=0.1%
A special spell which may be cast by any mob that takes e.g. 3 seconds. If completed, the mob despawns. This implicitly reduces the count of a pack.
2.1 Kinda sucks to have more spells to kick, but is a bit more dynamic
2.2 Should be kind of predictable like Prideful
The whole mechanic could be inverted as well: a successful kick increases the count a mob provides. Overall count of all mobs would have to be decreased for this to work
The main drawback of the idea are as follows:
Kind of disincentivizes big pulls
Makes “bad kick classes” less desirable but you know what? That should be homogenized anyways (looking at you, heal priests)
While I do not agree: people may hate the dynamic nature of dungeon routes this would create. I can see tanks hating this a lot, but I tank some high keys and wouldn’t mind.
I believe the pro’s far outweigh the drawbacks though:
This is a true non-healer affix. You may have to pull more, but no specific pull gets any more problematic for the healer
This would create some route dynamic in every dungeon run, which some people (including myself) would like
Adding counterplay like 1.2 or even using 3. could be very satisfying
Has nearly zero impact on boss fights, which is desirable in higher keys. Wipes on e.g. heroed boss pulls often spell doom immediately.
I think this affix could best replace challengers peril. It still incentivizes clean play while not grieving one group-wide misplay.
Any thoughts ?
P.S: The affix interaction between real kicks and knocks/stuns would have to be worked out, I have no real opinion.
Previous seasons I was complaining about Fortified Bolstering asking for kiss/curse affixes. And that is what I got.
And as a shaman, I could cheese 4 seasonal affixes.
I could dispel BOTH afflicted mobs at once with poison cleansing totem, with out even targeting them or using my dispel. 100% of the time with totemic recall.
Incorporeal I could frog it and solo it. With reduced frog CD I could solo BOTH affixes. 100% of the time.
Entangling I could cheese with Thunderous Paws.
I could also cheese spiteful with slow+root totem.
And in S1 DF I could solo all the fire orbs with instant cast Frost Shocks.
These are the only 5 affixes in DF that actually asked you to do something. Shaman could cheese ALL 5. No other healer in DF had the utility to deal with the affixes 100% on his own, with out DD assistance, 100% of the time, every single week.
The only one I could not cheese was bursting. Not like a priest at-least. What I did instead is use Link for those occasions to make the party immortal after a massive pull and having 22 stacks of it. Which is kind of “cheesing it” but with extra steps.
And in spite of being able to cheese every single affix. In spite of being able to solo each affix, RShaman was STILL the worst healer in DF by FAR. And in spite all that, I still stand to my statements:
That is literally your role. That is what you signed up for. You don’t like, you can roll a damage dealer or a tank.
Yes, the dispel argument. Yet it can be managed with self-healing too. If you don’t want to deal with it the affix solo, let your team know at the start of the run.
That is called playing the game.
Just for you to know: This will make healers mandatory to interrupt, hope you ready for it.
What a load of… Hold on. This is pretty interesting. Should explore this a bit more.
I have always wondered why they don’t have more dps reducing mechanics.
You can make the dungeon harder by killing people who fail mechanics, thus failing the timer if they die too much. This ultimately makes healers suffer for every mistake the rest of the team does.
You could also make it so standing in a big bad stuff debuffs that player with a % damage reduction. Thus making them fail the timer by doing too little dps.
It’s all about the timer in the end, why does it always have to be about damage taken.
There are even mobs in TWW in the spider zone that does a cast of a debuff that makes you unable to crit for X amount of seconds. Kickable cast abilities like that could replace damage casts just as well.
And since the dps meter is such a ubiquitous tool, measuring performance would be a lot more fair. If a dps stands in a lot of debuff stuff they do terrible damage, their dps is low and no one can make the mistake of blaming anyone but that player.
And since dps want to do big damage, maybe they’d become better at avoiding stuff instead making it a healer problem.
Could even incorporate defensive cooldowns to work against such debuffs, if you pop something maybe it reduces the effect of the damage nerf to make it less punishing.
Then you could balance the healers job with more steady damage intake and not just periods of near one-shots all the time.
This doesnt fix anything , it either makes life of others worse , especialy tank because variable % from packs based on group performance looks like pure candy .
And if others have life worse, it doesnt mean mine is better, we just both have it worse now.
Tbf , we have 4 affixes ,
2 are group wide either heal tank or dps can deal with them( kicks/ccs and orb colecting )
1 is pure healing ( dispel/heal) even tho it can be dealt with as dps , usualy healer has most on his shoulders .
1 is more on a dps but you used argument “stuff lives longer = more healing and then its healers affix” . With that logic , both fort and tyra and 12lvl afix are healer afixes which, honestly are not
Apart from OP stats you get with 50% uptime, the DDs are literally competing who does the most affixes.
I swear that this week I have considered not taking poison cleansing totem for the affix. Because DDs automatically deal with the affix, and plan their CDs according to the buff they get.
Its amazing. Its night and day compared to what we had before. Where I had to inspect DDs to make sure they had dispel talented… and ask them to do it and help out a little…
Now they just have to get rid of fortified and tyrannical and fix some of the bugs in the existing affixes. Not a fan of the 15s death timer either, but I can live with it
For once M+ has a lot of issues but the affixes aren’t the main reason, which is cause for celebration if you ask me.
That’s only because others simply refuse to click dispel (or some self-heal) even though they can (in the average pug).
These are all group-cooldown mechanisms.
You can’t solve people being lazy or tunnel-visioned by adding different affixes. They just have to stop thinking that others will fix everything for them.
