Initial Reactions to the New Affixes in The War Within

Blizzard has just announced 4 new affixes in The War Within, and here’s some early reactions!

New Affixes in The War Within

Earlier today, Blizzard announced new affixes and changes to dungeons in The War Within.

While there are some cautiously optimistic reactions, there are also some major concerns from the community. We’ll have to see how these play out this Thursday in Mythic+ Testing.

Damage Buffs

As Yumytv (Growl) points out, this seems to be in line with Blizzard’s philosophy on affixes, trying to get different classes to be incentivized from week to week. The previous affixes didn’t do this and actually incentivized the meta even more, so this has a chance of doing this with incentivizing certain specs each week. Since specs spend more than 50% of the time not on a week of their choice, I think it’s possible that players will feel excited about their week, rather than sad when it’s not their week.

Now there is some valid concerns about the damage buffs.

First, it doesn’t affect bosses and only on certain mobs, likely making these buffs… relatively small in the grand scheme of things. Does it matter if the caster dies 10% faster when the big lieutenant mob isn’t buffed and already dies slower? Probably not. I kind of think that the damage buff should probably be expanded to include everything.

Secondly, there are specs like Warlock and Demon Hunters which deal Chaos damage and it seems like these specs will just always be buffed each week then. In addition, some specs like Mages can benefit from more of these weeks if they want versus specs with only 1 DPS option.

Mobs With/Without Mana

One of the concerns is identifying the mobs with and without mana. Tracking mana on enemies hasn’t been very useful apart from very specific boss mechanics recently and so many players might not even be tracking this.

Hopefully, there will be a buff as to which mobs these affixes are affecting, otherwise having to memorize which mobs are buffed on which weeks will be a nightmare. It’s possible that “with/without mana” could be the technical term for “melee” mobs and “caster” mobs, but it’s hard to know until testing.

The 7+ Affixes

It seems that Blizzard has kept the 4 affixes that the community disliked the most: Raging, Bolstering, Bursting and Sanguine.

Sanguine and Bolstering have been around for a long time and gotten nerf after nerf after nerf after nerf and they’re still around. With the addition of the level 4 affixes buffing damage and Tyrannical and Fortified, Bolstering weeks will probably be even more frustrating and players will be getting one shot all over the place. Similarly, a Raging damage buffed mobs will be really frustrating to deal with unless you happen to have one of very few classes who has a Soothe — speaking of which Blizzard removed the other class utility affixes of Incorporeal and Afflicted, why isn’t Raging going with it?

Bring back Volcanic.

Impact of More Damage Affixes

Most of these 4+ affixes add more damage, especially to the Tank. The previous level 4 affixes didn’t really add more damage, so this will be adding more damage affixes into the pool and putting even more pressure on the Tank. Combine this with Tyrannical and Fortified and the level 7+ affixes and you have keys that are scaling even faster than before. 30% Haste on a mob with mana (caster) or 20% more magic damage seems really deadly.

Community Reactions

Other Tweets

Here are some of the community’s tweets!

Tettles

Dratnos