IMO the most important part of Awakened is that it removes the "requirement" of a rogue's Shroud of Concealment. They should either add a thematic variant of Awakened baseline to M+ in Shadowlands, or design the dungeons in a way that doesn't make Shroud of Concealment so powerful.
Really great retrospective. Have to agree with most, if not all of it. I hope Blizz takes note of this and apply it for SL!
Season one's affix was excellent. Literally dictated the pace of dungeons, as an affix should. Season two's affix? What, where?Season three's one probably got the team who designed it a huge pay decrease for launching such a miserable product.Season four is largely ignored, much like season 2, but provides some interesting routes. Not great, not terrible.Complete rework is needed. 4+ years of the same keystone affixes, some slightly changed, is the wrong decision when moving forward with new content. Seasonal affixes could be great if they were altering the dungeons to a point where it feels like running that place for the first time. They have a massive opportinuty to expand on the idea of dungeons being the primary goal of play for a huge part of the player base if they dig a little deeper.
Seasonal affixes are neat idea and if done correctly like Bwonsamdi and Awakened they come out well received. Like to see the buff if failed the key you would get x health and damage increase. If they're buggy and annoying like other two especially the g'huun one than it deters people away from mythic plus.
I only played 8.0 and 8.3 but I could not stand Infested and actually loved Awakened. Infested had several dungeons where it was just awful, Awakened actually improves some dungeons
Reaping was fine but heavily favoured mass aoe specs in an expansion where the dungeons were already trash heavy. Awakened is perfect though although it’s clear they catered to the players by putting a lot of the skips where people were using invis pots anyway (not a bad thing). Infested felt really punishing if you were a dot class or ranged with cast times. Beguiling was ok but the flip flop linked with tyrannical was annoying - “oh it’s void week” The biggest two problems with BfA Mythic plus though are nothing to do with the awakened affixes:1) Tyrannical/Fortified are awful and should be removed. Maybe as one off affixes here or there but not as a flip flop every week.2) The lack of being able to switch gear within a dungeon has meant that the meta has become even more narrow. In Legion, you used to be able to work around the limitations of the non meta specs by using different combos of legendaries on a pack by pack basis, which meant you could ‘make it work’ and still have fun pushing higher keys with your chosen main, whether they’re meta or not.
From a PUG tank perspective (since BC) awakened is the worst thing ever could happen.You are forced to use an add-on to plan routes. Plan ahead, plan again on special affix weeks, post them at start.No one complain. You run your route as always, everything is fine. But then, way too often, someone start flaming. Flaming you as hell, route is $%^&, skip is @#$%, you are @#$%. So, give me your route? Haha, no. Continue flaming. Most people don't get that a tank can't see other routes from other tanks, cause there is only 1 and that's me. DPS see another route in every try. (At start, ignoring guides at first cause I wanna look up the route by myself and don't wanna be forced to lookup a guide before i tried it once)Don't like leaving in keystone dungeons, but sometimes i'm nearly forced to do it.So, from tank perspective who LOVES tanking, leading, explaining in 5man random groups this affix killed it completely.Since BC I never played another role, but on S4 I switched to heal, so I don't need to deal with flaming idiots in nearly every !@#$in try.This don't help the lack of tanks. That don't help queue times for crying ("queue is sooooo long") DPS.In my opinion -from PUG perspective- this affix is the worst ever happened to the game. Hope it will never return.-This looks completely different with a premade 5man group.-
What exactly is the "MDI"? I assume it stands for "Mythic Dungeon" something, but the article references "MDI" multiple times without first clarifying what it stands for.
I hate Mythic+. I'd love to see a complete rework of the Affix system. Most importantly, though, I wish they'd stop designing the dungeons specifically for Mythic+. This made the BFA dungeons miserable as hell even outside of M+.
As someone who loves tanking I HATE Awakening, to the point where outside of guild runs, I did not tank anything 10 or higher. It is completely stupid to basically require an addon to have a good route through the dungeon, and to risk having some clown be a completely toxic ass for not following *his* route.I hope we never get an affix like Awakening again.
Awakened should be a permanent affix in place of both Tyrannical and Fortified (or, at least, in place of Tyrannical). I couldn't agree more with the verdict about Awakened, it is perfect in every single way.If Blizzard removes it from the game, just like Reaping, then they will be in big trouble. I only do M+ again and again because of how fun Awakened made dungeons. If it was any other , I would've canceled my subscription a few months ago.They should embrace this masterpiece they created and make it permament, maybe increment with more types of adds, maybe more rotations. It's literally the best thing that happened to M+ ever since it's creation.
I just think it's boring running the same dungeons for an entire expansion but that's my opinion. I also thought it was more fun in legion because with bfa they designed the dungeons with m+ in mind and it showed way too much. I was happy just to finally skip everything by the end of this expansion. Seasonal affixes are a welcome addition but I don't feel it's enough to give me a sense of variety. That being said I'm not sure what the solution would be so I understand as we don't want things too rng. I guess I'd prefer less fixation on mobs and more on number of affixes.P.S Give us the option to skip stupid long RP in m+. We're there for gear, not immersion.
I think one of the problems still hindering good affix design is that such a high number of the dungeons are just corridors. More open floor dungeons to allow players to choose dungeon movement, packs, and boss order would open player options in dealing with affixes. Awakened worked so well because of that added choice and was doubly powerful of removing the need for rogues. The high use of using rogues just illustrates that players want the option to move through dungeons more freely in a way BFA dungeons just didn't allow. Outside of Atal, Junkyard, and to a lesser extent Freehold, regardless of the spaces between bosses they were a series of corridors always directing us the same way through the same bosses and trash.
