Quaking, Bursting, Explosive, Grievous, Void Emissaries, etc all do damage based on your maximum HP. The devs probably did this to make tuning easy, but it fundamentally doesn’t make sense to do this in an RPG:
1. It invalidates gear progression
The more gear you get, the more stamina you have, the more damage you take from affixes. You can never outgear it. As a side effect, on weeks with a lot of affix damage, an undergeared healer will have it easier healing a party with ilvl similar to his own than healing a well-geared party.
2. It punishes classes for having more HP
Having a high HP pool is supposed to be a good thing for survival, but when somebody in the party buffs stamina, all affix damage just increased by 10%. On Bursting weeks I usually skip buffing Fortitude.
Similarly, using defensives such as Rallying Cry, Desperate Prayer and Last Stand before a high Bursting stack makes you less likely to survive.
Tanks are supposed to take less damage from hits than the rest of the party, but they take more damage from affixes due to having more HP. Tanks with naturally high health pools take more affix damage than mitigation-focused tanks.
3. Keystone difficulty
A third problem specific to WoW is that these affixes have the same difficulty regardless of keystone level. I remember in a previous season we had the affix combination Quaking+Bursting. During this week, I did a +15 on my main and a +7 on my alt and I did almost the same overall HPS in both runs due to the vast majority of damage coming from those two affixes.
Affixes should have static damage values just like everything else. There are plenty of ways to tune them so that they work for everyone. For example you could make Quaking deal X damage, scaling with keystone level. If the damage gets out of hand in high keys, put a cap on it at +15 or so.
That is a valid question, and while I’m nowhere near an expert on Mythic+ mechanics, I would say, it is to basically not trivialize the Mythic+ experience.
I remember, in expansions where Mythic+ was not in-game as of yet, after a few weeks of characters being at max level, and gearing up the Heroic dungeon experience, was less than… heroic, in my view. Eventually a patch would come along that would introduce a new dungeon, until the cycle would begin again.
I feel that this is not the case when it comes to Mythic+ dungeons. Higher Mythic+ dungeons are meant to be tough and challenging, and the mechanics should not be ignored or be simply out-geared. The participants have to find ways around them, be always on alert.
That is a very good discussion to have however, so please keep giving more
feedback on this subject!
100% agree with this. Honestly, it’s really silly that one of the top forms of PvE outside of raids is using HP scaling damage. Part of the biggest excitements in an RPG is getting gear that makes you feel stronger. Now for DPS and healers, that’s still partially true with the damage, but not gaining any suvivability from it still seriously dampens the feeling of getting stronger. As for tanks, especially HP based ones, it’s just silly that the better gear they get, the MORE damage they take. It’s counter productive and completely defies the logic of gear in an RPG.
We already lost the sense of getting stronger as we level thanks to scaling mobs, we should still get that feeling from one of the biggest forms of end game content. I get the point is to stop trivializing the content, but one of the big selling points of M+ is that there are multiple levels. If people are getting max level gear and stomping +15’s or whatever easily, then that’s fine, they’ll eventually hit key levels that are challenging as they up the key. The whole point of M+ is to push keys, no matter how good the gear people get are, there will still be a ceiling they can’t pass eventually.
If I do a +10 and take 50% health damage from an affix, then go and get a bunch of gear upgrades, I don’t want to then go back into a +10 and still lose 50% of my health to that same affix. It makes no sense and definitely doesn’t feel good as a player. It just feels like lazy design, especially when mobs already have % increase scaling per key level, surely affixes could be done with a similar approach. X base damage at +1 with a % increase to that damage per key level.
I agree with you, how can we feel stronger with better gear if game scales to you? M10 should be way easier to do at ilvl 440 than at 420, but no, it won’t let you do this so easily.
They did it to stop things becoming impossible after a certain level.
I agree some of these things could be done better but some comparisons aren’t valid, like the bursting on a +7 and +15 and you having done the same amount of healing. This implies that the +15 people took relatively less damage, they handled the affix far better.
This is just plain wrong, if you feel like gear doesnt make it easier, you are doing something very wrong.
While it’s true the affixes dont really change in difficulty because of gear, the mobs attacks do scale, and its against this that gear does make a huge difference…
What else would you do to keep the affixes meaningful? If they did flat damage they would hit like a potato today.
We are stronger than at the start of the xpac. Because of gear ppl can do more difficult content so gear still matters.
Tanks hp is bigger but also their selfhealing compared to the start where they relied more heavily on a healer.
Healers are also a lot stronger now.
Imagine if quaking hit for 10k today lol. Might as well delete the affix.
It makes total sense to have it HP scaled.