As M+ was introduced it was peak content, eventually it became content equal to many live service games themselves. In BfA it was bigger than ever with the fourth seasonal affix and couldn’t be more exiting time from all of WoW from Vanilla which I played as young as 13yo.
4th affix, the Seasonal Affix, brought excitement for whole Season and rotations for the weeks in that Season, bad affixes and good affixes, along with their challenges were a rollercoaster like it should be.
Now in Dragonflight the Seasonal Affix was removed and you could instantly see the downgrade of the excitement that M+ brought every season and less repetitiveness from week to week. Sure the change of new set of dungeons for first 2 seasons might be interesting but only for like first month.
And now the affixes has been reduced from 4 to 3 to 1½.
Seasonal affix was removed in Dragonflight which brought from 4 to 3.
Clamping up together the Tyrannical and Fortified negates each other so from 3 to 2 and Challenger’s Peril can’t be called an affix so 2 to 1½.
It has come that, there is only 1 affix for each week for whole expansion.
As an example to this degeneration is when Freehold and Underrot was brought back to M+ rotation, they were only mediocre (even they are good dungeons overall) due’ the fact people only remembered and hyped the instances from the times when “Awakened” seasonal affix was around.
Removing affixes like Bursting, Bolstering, Sanguine, Spiteful, etc. is really not a downgrade. They were responsible for weeks where nobody really wanted to play at all. Some affixes also excluded entire classes.
I don’t like the Devour affixes for TWW as it still excludes some classes from contributing and makes keys below +12 potentially more frustrating than higher keys, which I feel is backwards, but I need to see it in the game before I can really form an opinion.
In any event, I very much prefer static affixes that are the same every week.
I’m not very good at maths but if I remember correctly 1+1 = 2, not -1.
Anyways, IMO affixes are a thing that should have never existed they way they were, there is nothing fun or engaging in having a mechanic that makes your class unplayable or unwanted in content (for example a Warrior during afflicted weeks) so I’m glad they are slowly removing that crap and changing it into a mechanic that makes you:
Engage with it directly.
Gives buffs or debuffs depending if you do it correctly or not.
Therefore making them relevant now as opposed to “what crap am I gonna have to deal with this week and what class should I invite to carry this annoying mechanic”.
Affixes were added to keep dungeons fresh because we had them for a whole expansion
Now we only have them for a season affixes have served their purpose. That and they got old and irritating. “Oh no, bolstering, guess i’ll take the week off” kind of thing.
This. I’m pretty happy that we’ll get the same affixes (no rotation) starting with +12s. Removes the randomness and the “guess we gonna just play alts this week” weeks.
Cant say I would miss some of those affixes. Made no sense that some weeks were miles ahead better to push than others. Either balance them all into equally challenging or remove from either of the extremes easy/hard to make it more even. It was boring to know that some weeks you cant push, or wait that some bis week when all the stars align with affixes and you knew now is good to push, that makes it feel bad as a design for the players.
Theyre supposed to create variety in repeatative content, not cause variety in challenge. The challenge is already in the key level itself.