Jdotb BFA Q&A #10 - Recent Affix Changes, Underrot and Tol Dagor Timers

Jdotb Q&A #10In Mythic Keystone dungeons, the health of Explosives has been reduced by 50%, and Explosives should no longer spawn from a crowd-controlled enemy.

As soon as last week’s reset occurred we saw a tidal wave of complaints about Explosive. And they were warranted. Explosive is the most impactful affix at the moment, for a number of reasons, but mostly because the nature of its scaling makes it impossible to keep up with on big pulls. There is no limit to the number of orbs that can spawn, and orbs can spawn other orbs, so when you try to do big pulls (that are viable on pretty much any other affix), you can have half a dozen or more orbs pop up almost instantly. Let’s break down why that’s a problem.

Explosives bottleneck your pulls for one very important reason: they cannot be affected by area of effect spells (jk Wildfire Bomb). This doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing on first impression, but let’s stop and think about the way damage works in WoW. There’s a reason that single target and AoE spells exist -- if you’re dealing with one or two or three mobs, your single target spells will probably still be your highest DPS and you’ll continue using them, but as the number of mobs goes up you change the spells you use because single target becomes inefficient. Imagine trying to kill the huge packs of Faithless Conscripts in Temple of Sethraliss with your single target spells. What would take 20 seconds with AoE might take two minutes with single target.

And that’s where Explosive becomes unmanageable. You’re forced to use single target spells that don’t scale, but Explosive scales with the size of the pull. And after a certain amount of orbs are spawned, you literally don’t have enough global cooldowns as a group to kill them off. Even if you devote your entire rotation to killing the orbs, at a certain point they simply cannot be DPSed fast enough to kill them before they explode. And the orb health scales with the health of the mobs in the dungeon, meaning that higher keys make orbs take even longer to kill and also that Fortified will make the orbs extra tanky.

“Just pull smaller, duh.” The best way to shave time off of a dungeon, which is necessary to time higher keys, is to pull bigger. If your pulls are limited by Explosive, so too is your ability to complete dungeons in time. Some dungeons have big pulls which are almost mandatory in high keys, but Explosive makes them impossible. So Explosive weeks, as the affix currently exists, will always lag a few key levels behind easier affixes, and this is bad for the M+ community because it makes players just want to take the week off instead of feel artificially limited by overbearing affixes.

All of this is prologue to my thoughts about the Explosive nerf. It’s a step in the right direction, and it’s extremely positive that Blizzard recognizes that one of its affixes is overtuned and needs adjustments. But the health reduction and CC changes probably aren’t enough to bring Explosive in line with other affixes. The changes still don’t address the core problem of Explosive which is that players are forced to use single target abilities to kill orbs that have an uncapped spawn rate.

One of the pieces of advice I’ve seen from those working in the industry about how to give developers feedback is not to offer your own solutions but simply to frame the problem, so I’ll avoid suggesting my own ideas and instead try to distill the Explosive conundrum: orb scaling outpaces player DPS scaling because players are limited to single target spells and have a finite number of GCDs to use before orbs explode.

In Mythic Keystone dungeons, the Grievous affix now stacks every other tick (was every tick), and now deals 2% of the player's total HP per stack (was 1.5%).

Grievous was another mechanic that was causing a lot of angst in the M+ community, and I’ve given my thoughts on it in a previous Q&A. I’ve seen some feedback from other players regarding this change, especially other healers, and the optimism has been very cautious and in some cases there were questions about whether this was even a “nerf” because it will be doing more damage per tick once it’s maxed out. So there are doubts.

But I’m firmly in the “this is great” camp. My primary frustration with Grievous was how incessant it was, proccing at <90% HP and then stacking with each tick. It made every source of damage a fire drill of trying desperately to heal someone back over 90% to avoid snowballing minor damage into a five stack of Grievous. And this change to Grievous will help quite a bit in that regard. You now have substantially more breathing room to top someone off after damage, and you won’t feel quite as compelled to burn important healing cooldowns as a prophylactic on someone sitting at 70% HP just to make sure they don’t get a five stack of Grievous.

It is true that Grievous will now deal more damage per tick, and if you DO happen to find yourself in a situation with a few maxed Grievous stacks it will be harder to pull out of that tailspin. But the problem with Grievous in its old form was that you’d be so worried about trying to prevent Grievous that you’d use cooldowns on relatively trivial damage to make sure you didn’t get max stacks and then find yourself with no cooldowns to use if someone did get max Grievous stacks. Ideally with the new system you’ll feel safer holding your throughput cooldowns until you “need” them to clear the now-less-frequent Grievous emergencies. This is in my opinion a superior design and one that I think most healers will enjoy more. Luckily we have a Grievous week already queued up so I can instantly form some more hot take opinions.

Tol Dagor timer is now set to 36 minutes (was 33) and Underrot timer is now set to 33 minutes (was 30).w

Both of these dungeons were candidates for timer changes, Underrot probably more than Tol Dagor. What’s interesting about both of them is that you can time them relatively easily under certain circumstances but certain missteps will make it very difficult to time the key.

Underrot’s primary issue is that its spawn point is a fixed one at the start of the dungeon, and it never updates after any bosses. This would be annoying in any dungeon, but it’s especially problematic in Underrot because the du jour strategy in Underrot is to either stealth skip or res skip to the first boss immediately and avoid all the trash before that. So if you wipe or your healer dies and you have no classes that can res, you have to somehow navigate a completely-uncleared gauntlet of mobs to get back to your group. The long run combined with the need to skip mobs again will probably be enough to cripple your chances at completing the dungeon.

If you could do Underrot without wiping, the timer was appropriate. But even one wipe might blow the key, so a timer extension was nice. I think Underrot could still use some work on the mobs at the start of the dungeon, though, as they are so disproportionately more difficult than the rest of the trash in the dungeon that groups are still considering it nearly mandatory to skip them. A nerf to some of that trash I think could have avoided the need to mess with Underrot’s timer.

Tol Dagor is also a dungeon that can be timed fairly easily if you do it “right”, but in a different way than Underrot. Whereas Underrot required you to avoid wiping, Tol Dagor heavily encourages pulling a ton of trash at the start of the instance before you enter the prison. The mobs outside the prison (alligators and crabs primarily) are all more-or-less capable of being kited fairly easily, and the wide-open nature of the beach gives you plenty of room. If you can gather up those mobs and burn them down efficiently, it gives you enough mob count and saves enough time to enable you to res skip the cannon portion of the prison before the third boss.

The reason skipping cannons is important is because the cannon mobs are tuned to be dealt with by cannons, so their health pools are huge which means that only people in the cannons are doing any meaningful damage. And it’s tough to keep the mobs grouped up to fully utilize the cannon’s splash damage. Aaaand the cannons don’t hit Spawns of G’huun, so if any of the mobs in that stretch are Infested then you have to DPS the Spawns separately without the aid of cannons. All of which is to say that these pulls are inefficient at best and huge a time sink at worst, and if you can avoid them it makes the key much faster.

If done “correctly”, Tol Dagor can actually go pretty quickly, but on any week with affixes that strongly discourage big pulls (like Explosive or Bolstering), or in a less experienced group that wouldn’t know to pull everything outside the prison, the key becomes much more difficult to time. Like Underrot, I think this dungeon could have used some work to make the trash less disparate in terms of difficulty rather than a flat timer increase.

Weekly Affix Advice - Nov 20Dungeons Most Affected by Tyrannical

Temple of Sethraliss - Aspix and Adderis will be rough. Aspix’s Static Shock will drop the entire party’s health fairly low on Tyrannical weeks, and Conduction is going to leave someone at low health right before Static Shock goes off. Galvazzt will ramp in difficulty the longer the fight goes on, and if his Consume Charge goes off it will probably kill at least a few people. Avatar of Sethraliss is already a marathon fight, and now Pulse will squeeze healer mana that much more.

Freehold - The Azerite Powdershot from Skycap’n will deal mega damage on Tyrannical, so make sure everyone is topped off before he casts it. Council of Captains has three bosses, one of which will be friendly depending on the week (it rotates each week). If Eudora is one of the two enemy bosses, this fight becomes very dangerous. Eudora’s Grapeshot will heavily punish bad positioning, and the RNG nature of Powdershot means it will inevitably pick the same person two or three times in a row and kill them if they aren’t healed up very quickly. Shark Puncher’s sharks start dealing ridiculous damage on higher keys, and standing next to them for one or two ticks will get you killed. Once both sharks are out, you need to be very diligent about kiting them.

Waycrest Manor - The Triad gets infinitely more dangerous when it’s allowed to use its abilities multiple times, which is almost assured on Tyrannical. Immunities will be a big help on this boss. Goliath will hit the tank extremely hard, and resetting your stacks will do quite a bit of group damage. Lord and Lady Waycrest will also rough up the tank, and Lady Waycrest’s Wracking Chord will do an annoying amount of party damage. Gorak Tul’s adds start to become an issue the longer he lives, so your party will need to stay on top of using the Alchemical Fires at appropriate times throughout the fight.

Dungeons Most Affected by Bolstering

Waycrest Manor - Waycrest has its share of pulls featuring lots of small mobs with a few big ones, such as any of the pulls with Devouring Maggots, Jagged Hounds or Blight Toads. You’ll need to be careful not to burn down all the fodder. Even the pulls with mobs that are closer in health still have mobs that are different enough in health that it will be hard to kill them simultaneously.

Motherlode - The trash in Motherlode has lots of nasty trash abilities that are already lethal, so whichever mobs are still up at the end of a pull are likely able to kill party members from full health. And Motherlode has lots of big pulls, so Bolstering is going to get stacked up pretty quickly. Be especially careful with Mech Jockey’s Grease Guns and Venture Co. Earthshaper’s Rock Lances.

Shrine of the Storm - The Tidesage Initiates and Dredged Sailors can Bolster another mob very easily, so pay attention when pulling them. Abyssal Eels should be burned down evenly as they have a DoT they put on anyone in melee, and one mega Bolstered eel can shred someone if the DoT is already up.

Dungeons Most Affected by Grievous

Temple of Sethraliss - The first two bosses might will be somewhat annoying with Grievous, but the real threats are the last two bosses, Galvazzt and Avatar. Galvazzt will constantly be dealing damage to various group members making it difficult to ever get anyone topped off and will be doing considerable tank damage at the same time. Avatar is a long fight that strains healer mana even with Grievous, and Grievous will make Pulse ticks continuously put players into Grievous range.

Waycrest Manor - Waycrest has several AoE-intensive boss fights that will cause Grievous to be an issue. Each Triad sister has her own thing that makes Grievous dangerous: Solena has a 50% healing debuff from Aura of Apathy; Malady has Unstable Runic Mark and Aura of Dread that deal damage to the group constantly; Briar has Aura of Thorns which hurts and Jagged Nettles which can already be difficult to heal off. Resetting Soulbound Goliath’s stacks will put a group deep into Grievous. Lady Waycrest periodically casts Wracking Chord which will drop players below 90%, and the tank will be getting smacked hard the whole fight as well. Gorak Tul’s Dread Essence will give everyone Grievous stacks as well.

Siege of Boralus - The first two bosses aren’t bad, but Hadal and Viq’Goth are nonstop Grievous fun. The frequency of Hadal’s Break Water ability will basically keep the healer tending to Grievous throughout the entire fight. Viq’Goth’s Putrid Waters are already a challenge to heal even when Grievous isn’t an issue, and now whichever person you don’t dispel will be taking heavy damage from the debuff and Grievous simultaneously. Groups that use the Spotters to help with clearing trash should also be mindful of the fact that they will stay in combat for prolonged periods of time meaning Grievous will never stop stacking.

Dungeons Most Affected by This Week’s Affixes

Temple of Sethraliss - Tyrannical Temple is always going to be rough, but adding in Grievous makes it especially bad. Galvazzt’s constant group pressure will keep Grievous up on the entire party throughout most of the fight, which will be challenging to heal but also a nightmare for mana. Avatar is one of the longest fights in M+ and is always a mana crunch, but this week doubly so. Having hybrid classes to help with healing Avatar during transitions will be extremely valuable for your healer. Thankfully most trash pulls are on the smaller side in Temple so Bolstering shouldn’t be a huge deal.

Waycrest Manor - Triad is one of the nastiest boss fights in M+ and also one of the few fights in BFA with real pressure on group health. Grievous will be rampant through this encounter and extra bad during Solena’s phase with 50% reduced healing. Goliath will likely keep your tank in Grievous range for extended periods of time, as will Lord and Lady Waycrest. Lady Waycrest’s Wracking Chord will stretch healer mana thin as well. Waycrest trash will also be scary with Bolstering, especially the trash around Raal’s room. Most mobs in this dungeon do something that hurts, so anything that has 5+ Bolstering stacks will probably be lethal.

Shrine of the Storm - Shrine has so much trash in it that it’s nearly impossible to escape some tragic Bolstering mishaps. Most of the boss fights in here are already on the longer side, so Tyrannical is going to make this timer tight. A common strategy in Shrine is to pull trash with the bosses, since most of the bosses have available “filler” trash near them, but Bolstering will nix that idea this week.

Dungeons Least Affected by This Week’s Affixes

Atal’Dazar - Aside from the saurid trash packs, most of the pulls in this dungeon feature mobs with similar health values so Bolstering never gets too bad. The bosses in here all manageable from a Tyrannical perspective, and only Vol’kaal presents a real challenge for Grievous.

Siege of Boralus - The last two bosses will be annoying with Grievous but probably not deadly, and otherwise this dungeon isn’t too bad on Grievous. In some ways Bolstering actually speeds this dungeon up this week if you use the Spotter to clear trash since the Spotter’s Sighted Artillery is buffed with each stack making it deal more damage to other mobs.

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