Hello everybody, my name is Ratnos and in today's video, we have a Mythic+ status update for the week of April 13th here on the 10.1 PTR. There's a lot of big stuff in this one, so let's get into it.
Greetings! As we continue to watch everyone play M+ and share additional changes to this week's PTR, our changes aim to further lessen the impact of affixes on Mythic+ dungeon gameplay and match our more challenging affixes to later Keystone levels as players progress through the system. This lessening of impact is something that I feel like people, especially if you engage with M+ frequently, may appreciate.
This may sound like a potentially bad thing, but I think this is moving the affixes in a pretty good direction to make them less impactful. Several of them felt like you were playing the affix rather than playing the dungeon, and I think the changes we have here are going to do a great job of making that not the case anymore.
Alright, we've been evaluating our affix tiers and their impact. While we feel the change to bring them at 7 and 14 instead of four and seven is healthy, we wanted to ensure that the right level of challenge is coming online at levels 7 and 14. We feel our seven affixes have a larger impact on the moment-to-moment gameplay and have decided to switch them so the periodic affixes are now moved to level seven.
It's nice they are also adding themed affixes. There already was sort of this, but they've now cemented it, and so they're going to have Afflicted, Incorporeal, Volcanic, Entangling, and Storming all at the level seven level. All of the affixes have in common that they spawn periodically while you're in combat. Note that Volcanic is here now instead of Explosive. Explosive has been retired for Dragonflight Season Two and replaced by Volcanic.
I think for this, the set of changes here looks good. Everybody that I know likes playing the game the most on Volcanic week. I can understand that Blizzard might want to not have an affix that kind of doesn't do all that much, and that is largely especially everybody that's not a ranged DPS. A ranged DPS that wants to plan during a healer gets to just completely ignore that affix pretty much, and even those players can be pretty minimally impacted by it.
So, I could understand why they would want to replace it to bring the affixes kind of have them all be closer, but I'm really glad that they're not doing it right now and getting Explosive gone instead because I just have so much fun playing the game on Volcanic weeks.
That already wasn't true on Explosive weeks before, and it was becoming a lot less true with the changes they made to Explosive into the 10.1 PTR. Now they had been bringing Explosive in a good direction towards the last few weeks, and if they were to revisit it and keep moving it in that direction, I think it could be a good affix.
But for now, this is just great news for my excitement about the season. In addition, we've also reviewed the impact of our affixes and made tuning adjustments with the goal of lessening their overall impact on dungeon gameplay. Explosive is gone. Incorporeal Being is now Fade Away when combat with non-incorporeal beings has ended. This is really nice.
Seemed like an obvious thing to do, and they've done it. That's really good. Entangling - they've nerfed the snare effect down to 30 from 50, which is actually a reasonably sized nerf because that gives you a lot of benefits. Right, and tangling is this affix where it procs, you have eight seconds to get out of it.
The less that you're snared, the less time that you have to spend moving, which also means the later that you can react to this affix and still successfully break your snare, so that's really nice. It also now has a visual indicating the maximum range of the vine, so it will show you how far you need to go to break it. Right, it'll probably put like a circle on the ground that you know if you cross the line on the circle you'll break the vine, and then it also has a distinct sound cue when applied to players, which is fantastic.
This is the sort of thing that the affix needed to avoid the like 95 weak or a usage against it that was otherwise definitely coming. Afflicted - Afflicted Souls' health no longer scales after Keystone level 20. This is another fantastic change here. Afflicted, it was this suffix where these friendly mobs spawn, you have to either dispel or heal them, but particularly at those very high key levels, those health pools started to get really, really beefy.
And, you know, the skill of being like an insane healer, a really, really sick healer, it's not like their healing globals do twice as much healing as a less skill dealer. Right, it's just that they're better at choosing where to go, obviously. Like they're going to pick the better globals as well, but prioritizing what stuff to do is something they're better at, but it means that you sort of get to this level where it's like okay, you know, if these Afflicted souls are going to take me five globals to top, right, there's kind of no option for handling that on harder pulls except for just having a bunch of off to spells in the group so that you can just dispel The Afflicted.
So capping the scaling here at level 20 is going to be that's gonna be really nice for making this a week that you can push on without feeling like you cannot play those dungeons at high levels without just having the ability to dispel every single Afflicted that spawns. Obviously, that's still going to be the best way to handle the affix, which is fine. That should be the best way to handle the affix. All right, level 14 now. Spiteful Shades melee damage reduced by 10 percent. These things melee, I mean, that's nice, that's nice.
You know, one key level less of damage on spiteful Shades. But here's the big one - their health and damage no longer scale after Keystone level 20. Now, I don't know if this is going to be enough to mean that they won't one-shot players past level 20. I suspect it means they probably will. This combined with the 10 damage nerf probably means that, yeah, you're never really going to get one-shot by these things anymore if you're doing keys at kind of any level unless you're severely undergeared.
You're probably still getting two-shot by these things if your key is much higher than 14 and you're not like a character of the boatload armor, so yeah, this also seems good. It's five full Shades always kind of felt to me like it was a little bit too binary, right? They would connect with you.
Soothe it off though on those characters and then stun them so, and a lot of the, you know, most groups are going to have access to one suite effect. You've got evokers, druids, rogues, hunters that can all do it, so it'd be cool.
I mean, it means that as a tank, you're not going to be in danger because the mobs are hitting you really hard at the end of the pull, but you are going to be in danger because the mobs are, first of all, you know, like you can't just Shockwave them to stop them from mauling you for a few seconds, right? You can't AOE send them to run away or anything like that.
Tentatively, I think this is going to be a cool change. I'm excited to play with this one. Yeah, this affix was tough because they had to keep nerfing this percent here. You know, this used to be 100, then 75, then it was 50.
I think it was in an okay place at 50, but I think this was a cool affix for them to give another try to. Bolstering no longer increases the health of affected enemies, was health and damage. Wow, so bolstering is another affix that has just received several gutting nerfs to it over the course of its existence.
You know, it used to be multiplicative and permanent, then it used to be permanent but not multiplicative, and then it used to be like 20 instead of 15, it used to affect bosses, uh, now it's just going to affect health instead of health and damage. I think this is, or sorry, it's just gonna affect damage, not health and not, uh, health right. So it no longer increases the health, so it's still going to increase the damage. Really cool because, like, you know, in some spots, this is going to be kind of annoying to be like a tanker healer because now you're DPS.
The thing that they cared about about bolstering was that the mobs took longer to kill, right? And now they might just not, and you're going to have to deal with mobs autoing you really hard at the end of pulls and stuff. But, you know, I just think this is going to make bolstering a lot more fun to play. It's gonna make it a lot less restrictive.
It's going to open up some more counterplay to it where you can, you know, kite the end of a pole or something like that, and it's still a time gain to combine multiple packs together. Chaining is now something that has a risk-reward trade-off, chain pulling, rather than before where it was basically just always a mistake to chain pull at the end of bolstering pulls, right? I mean, some actually sometimes it was not a mistake, and people didn't consider it when they should have, but uh, it was still extremely punishing to chain pull, and now it is punished.
It's risky but rewarding to chain pull, so that I think is sweet. I think this is a really good change to this affix, and I'm just super stoked to see this one. Then, sanguine puddles now last for 12 seconds, was 20. Sanguine, so again, the historian dratin is here sanguine and Legion used to take five seconds to arm, and it was a really small puddle. Then going into BFA, they were like, "Okay, this affix doesn't do anything. We're gonna make the puddle twice as big, and we're gonna make it spawn quicker.
The whole group's looking at it, everybody's getting mad at the tank. That is something that I feel like is the problem with the affix, and I don't think that the 12 to 20 change does too much to change that. So, I think this is mostly not a super impactful change to the affix. The times where it will be relevant obviously it's going to be nice that it goes away sooner.
Rooms will be less polluted for less time, but the change that I would have rather seen to this is sanguine puddles getting smaller and getting consumed as they heal or damage enemy, you know, things. And once they've done a certain cap of maybe a percentage of the health of the mob that spawned it or just a certain cap, a static cap based on key level, then the puddle just disappears.
And that way, you know, if you sanguin up a big CC immune guy with like multiple mobs, it's still just going to full heal. But if you just put one mop, if you just kill one mob by accident, and the lieutenant's pinky toe is touching the sanguine, it just drains it up a little bit, and then the puddle's small enough that it's no longer in it. Or if it's in the middle of it, the puddle goes away fully, but it's still on the heels for 20 or 30 of its health instead of 70. And that would be, I think, the better change to the affix, but I don't think this affix is one of the outliers right now.
And I think this is a good if small change to the affix, and overall, this post is has dramatically restored my excitement about season two Mythic Plus because man, there was shaky there when they posted the first set of changes that was basically like, hey, we've been cooking some new affixes here they are. It was just like just whammy after whammy, but this seems really good.
Um, so yeah, I'm just looking forward to looking forward to playing with these things on PTR, looking forward to playing the season on live. Um, kind of, you know, a lot of these changes, it's gonna mean that I can't imagine awful weeks between these two rows anymore. Like I think you're just gonna wanna do Keys every week, and you know, a lot of pressure is going to be on the dungeon mechanics themselves being good as well, and there's some work to be done in some of them, uh, on that I think.
But yeah, this is for me, at least really, uh, really an optimism-inspiring post. Now, obviously, optimism comes easily to me, but this is still, I don't know, so let me know what you think in the comments below. Hope you've enjoyed this video going through these things, uh, let me know in the comments below. You know, when I do these videos if you if you liked or didn't like the sort of historian, uh, bits where I talked about what's happened with these affixes before, if you'd rather just cut those things out. I don't know, I was looking for feedback on those sorts of things.
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