Title.
Tyrannical and Fortified are the two level 2 M+ affixes as it is in Battle for Azeroth, and, they suck. Due do the nature of M+ itself already being a scaling content, having affixes that do nothing but make mobs or bosses take longer to kill and do more damage it’s overkilling.
Since the two affixes are just number increases, they are boring and don’t promote a lot of change to the way you play, so the solution Blizzard thought to make them feel less bland was to put the two in a alternate rotation of each other, so if one week is Fortified, next is Tyrannical, the cycle goes on, those two affixes are never combined in the same week, and they are never absent.
The idea was that if they alternate that way, you would play dungeons differently each week, adapting your plan depending if the mobs or the bosses are tougher than usual. In practice, it’s just the strategy that changes, because the gameplay is the same, bosses will just take forever to kill in Tyrannical weeks, or mobs that do randomly targeted abilities will one shot people without counterplay more oftenly in fortified weeks. You don’t really feel you are playing differently when dealing with these affixes, unlike other regular affixes like bursting, explosive, grievous, volcanic or sanguine.
Another thing that is problematic about the two affixes alternating between weeks is the fact they aren’t balanced compared to one another at all, to put it straight, Tyrannical weeks are substantially harder than fortified weeks, and even Dungeons with the most trash like Freehold, Motherlode and Junkyard are still harder in Tyrannical than they are in Fortified. If you’re doubting me, just take a lot at the M+ leaderbords.
https://www.wowprogress.com/mythic_plus/
Of the top 100 highest pushed keys, only two of them are from Tyrannical weeks. “But you’re talking about just the high end”. No i’m not, you can keep going down on the list to lower keys, and the pattern will be the same, the overwhelming majority of keys timed out are Fortified, Tyrannical only stop being problematic on really low keys, but on those keys, things become so simple and easy that even mechanics start to become irrelevant, and real talk, Blizzard don’t balance M+ based on lower level keys, we have to think at least on 15s when talking about M+ balancing.
Another issue is more centered around BfA dungeon design than the Tyrannical affix itself, some boss fights get worse the longer the fight extends, like Yazma and Machinist Garden, while others like the Aerial Unit in Junkyard are broken up by it, and i’m not talking about phases, i’m talking about fights overextending too much due to the 40% health increase. I hope Blizzard learns from their errors regarding boss design and Tyrannical in this expansion and improve in Shadowlands.
Talking about Shadowlands, it seems little is changing regarding Tyrannical and Fortified in the next expansion, only that Boss minions no longer get a 40% Health increase, meaning that adds should be easier to kill in boss fights, a step in the right direction but perhaps a step too small.
I have some suggestions and ideas on how the problems regarding these affixes can be addressed and i’m open for criticism and other ideas from players more experienced and better on M+ than i am, but here’s what i thought:
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A more extreme solution: Just get rid of the two affixes as the title suggests, compensate this by making the health and damage scaling higher and put other affixes in the level 2 tier. This would fix any difficult gap that comes from the alternation of the affixes between weeks, but it would make keys less variable as less affix combinations would be possible while trash and bosses wouldn’t variate in strength between weeks.
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A more simplistic solution: Nerf or tweak the Tyrannical numbers, 40% health increase makes fights take way too long and depending on the way the fight is designed, it can break it. Dropping it to 25 or 30% would be a great improvement. The 15% damage increase has mixed effects, either it makes little difference since a lot of boss mechanics already one shot people depending on how high the key is without the damage increase, or the key is too ow for it to make a difference anyway. On the other hand there are some bosses with mechanics designed to put stress in the healer and i can see that a buff to the increased damage effect can get out of hand and make the affix even worse than it already is, Kragmaw Tantrum and pretty much all of the single targeted heavy damage abilities from King’s Rest bosses comes to mind. Either keep the damage increase 15% and design bosses in a way the damage increase from the affix feel balanced and meaningful, or buff it while lowering boss damage in general.
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A more complex one: Change the way affixes vary in weeks, so Tyrannical and Fortified aren’t alternating between each other and aren’t guaranteed every week, instead you can have a weeks without them so you can have more variation and one less bland and boring affix to deal with.
Any feedback or ideas, post it bellow. I’m not a native English speaker, so i do apologize for grammar and spelling errors, I’m slowly learning the language and writing long texts and phrases is still a complicated task for me. Anyways, hope this thread produces better ideas than mine and the feedback is useful for the devs.
