Method Jdotb Q&A #14 - Gear Swaps in BFA, Seasonal Affixes, Avoidance Gear, MDI LAN Finals

BFA Geposted 20.06.2018 um 02:22 von Squishei

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this weekendWorld Firsts

What do you think about the gear swap changes in BFA M+?

For anyone that has been on safari for the last week or consumes most of their media through traditional print journalism like newspapers, you might have missed a piece of unexpected news in this week’s Dev Q&A -- your gear will be intentionally locked in BFA M+ dungeons. This means that once the key starts, you will be unable to swap any piece of gear around for the duration of the dungeon. The responses to this change run the full gamut from, “So what? I never change gear anyway,” to, “@#$% &%$# *^$& !@#$” with most of the vitriol coming from the top end M+ players.

Why is this change a big deal? Gear matters a lot in M+, more than it does in raiding and certainly (in this age of templates) a great deal more than in PvP. This is because a M+ dungeon will put you in dozens of encounters, each of which will have slightly different optimal gear requirements. I’ll use Legion’s shortest dungeon, Maw of Souls, to demonstrate a typical route through a dungeon: 8 trash mobs, 1 primarily single target boss with 8 eight priority adds spawning about once per minute, 4 trash mobs, 5 trash mobs, 7 trash mobs, 1 primarily single target boss with both a single add and 4 priority adds, 12 trash mobs, 4 trash mobs, a mini boss with constantly spawning adds, and 1 boss with a two or three target cleave phase and a single target phase. Even this relatively quick dungeon will put you in several different DPS scenarios (single target, cleave, AoE burst, etc.) where certain pieces of gear will alternate between being amazing and awful.

A lot of the fun for the top M+ players is min-maxing your way through dungeons to squeeze every drop of performance from your character, and in today’s game that means switching gear almost every time you leave combat. It can sound tedious to the uninitiated, but after doing some of these dungeons hundreds (or even thousands) of times, it just becomes second nature to use gear swap macros before each pull. It lets players get creative with their builds and display a mastery of their class.

But the biggest impact this will have on M+ is on survivability. There are certain legendaries and trinkets that are virtually required to survive some of the nastier one-shot mechanics (like Hyrja’s Überspringender Blitz or Lady Hatecoil’s Gebündelter Blitz), and those items are virtually worthless for the rest of the dungeon. Being forced to wear Ishkars Teufelsschildemitter or Schwelender Titanenschutz for an entire dungeon in order to survive one or two bosses would severely neuter throughput for both DPS and healers. The only viable alternative to this is to stack classes with top tier defensive cooldowns (e.g., warlocks, rogues, balance druids) which is basically how the meta for Legion M+ looks today.

There’s some speculation that Blizzard has made this move with an eye towards shifting the emphasis from pushing keys as high as possible (which is what people do on live servers currently) and instead towards doing lower keys, perhaps in an effort to align live servers with the MDI format. It would be nice to have live servers and the MDI feature the same kinds of competition, but whether this change brings us closer to that reality is questionable.

I don’t think this change is going to make anyone happier with M+. Casual players probably won’t notice much of a change, and key pushers will feel its effects quite sharply. Blizzard could mitigate a lot of the pain by at least allowing players to swap things like trinkets and Azerite pieces, but if they’re going to do that then they might as well just let you keep swapping everything. Given how deep we are into beta, I’m guessing that Blizzard’s mind is already made on this topic, and we should start preparing for how it will affect us in BFA.

What are your thoughts on seasonal affixes, especially the first seasonal affix Befallen?

Seasonal affixes are good for M+. After you run a dungeon 5-10 times with a particular set of affixes, you know what trash you want to pull in what order. The route might change a bit as keys get higher level or you figure out a way to skip things or kite things, but for the most part your pulls are set in stone. There are dungeons right now that my group has been doing more or less the exact same way for six months now.

So having a new affix, especially one that is only around for one tier of the expansion, would help spice up some of the keys and make each seasons distinct. It’s nice to shake things up in a dungeon and be forced to reconsider the way you approach it because planning your route through a dungeon is an opportunity to really play to the strengths of your comp, e.g., do we have immunities can use? Can we dispel multiple poisons? Do we have AoE stuns or silences? Can we keep the trash slowed? These answers change from group to group, and your strats should change accordingly.

The first seasonal affix will be Infested -- certain predetermined mobs in the dungeon will be “infested” with a parasite that makes the infested mob deal more damage, be more resistant to crowd control, and have more health. When the infested mob dies it will spawn the parasite which will begin crawling towards a new enemy to infest. The parasite will need to be killed before it reaches its new target.

I’ve heard Infested described as the opposite of Bolstering in the sense that instead of trying to burn all the mobs down equally, you instead have to prioritize killing one mob first. It’s definitely a unique affix, and it will hopefully add some incentive to bring strong single target DPS classes to ensure the Infested mobs don’t get out of control.

The seasonal affix also means that keys can now have up to four affixes on them (Tyrannisch/Verstärkt, two “normal affixes”, and the seasonal affix) so dungeons will start to get more and more flavor added to them by the M+ system. Ideally this keeps dungeons fresh throughout the expansion and you never fall into a rut.

What are your feelings about avoidance gear as it relates to MDI?

Avoidance is an interesting concept. It reduces the damage you take from AoE abilities by a flat amount, and you can stack it up to 20%. Most of the hardest-hitting abilities in M+ are boss mechanics that affect the entire group and thus are mitigated by avoidance. As a result, avoidance becomes nearly a necessity for pushing keys past a certain point -- without it, you’ll just start falling over on boss fights.

On the one hand, this creates choices for players, and choices are mostly always a good thing. Chances are that everyone has some avoidance gear, but it’s rare that your avoidance gear is also your best-in-slot gear for throughput, so players are forced to trade damage or healing for survivability. For people that really enjoy min-maxing their characters, it’s fun to try to move your gear around to get as much avoidance as possible while still being able to pump. For people that just want to hop in a dungeon and play, though, avoidance can be a headache to try to manage.

On the other hand, avoidance is suspiciously similar to a now-defunct mechanic from the good ol’ days of WoW: resist gear. For those that weren’t around to experience the joys of resist gear, it used to be the case that you had individual schools of resists on your character, e.g., fire resist, frost resist, shadow resist, etc. Pieces of equipment could buff either a specific resist (like fire) or all resistances. These resistances counted as part of the item’s budget, so most resist gear was bad for your throughput but significantly increased your ability to survive abilities of that damage type. Blizzard commonly made bosses that dealt only one type of damage -- for instance, you weren’t going to kill Ragnaros without a boatload of fire resist. There were often quest lines that gave you pieces with heavy resists intended for specific encounters, or raid gear would have particular resists to prep you for later bosses. These resists essentially gated content and required everyone in your raid to have a resist set before you could realistically attempt certain bosses.

Resist gear had few fans, and Blizzard killed it off several expansions ago. I think most of the community was in favor of that move as there hasn’t been any real call for the return of resist gear. When avoidance debuted as a tertiary stat, I think most people were ok with it because it wasn’t “required” for raids in the sense that you needed it. But with the introduction of M+ and infinitely scaling content, avoidance becomes required for pushing keys, and that makes avoidance stop being a choice and start being a burden.

All of this is to say that I enjoy the MDI’s treatment of avoidance, which is that there isn’t any except what you can get from relics, specifically the Master of Shadows trait. The MDI keys are low enough that avoidance isn’t a requirement but rather a safety cushion, and you can choose whether to go more offensive or defensive with your traits. I wish there was a way on live servers to get avoidance back to being an interesting choice instead of a foregone conclusion, but so long as people push keys, avoidance will simply be a thing that you eventually have to max out.

Do you plan on leveling multiple alts in BFA to more easily keep up with the current M+ meta at any given time?

Definitely. A lot gets made of the “M+ meta”, but realistically that meta isn’t going to start taking shape immediately in BFA. People will have some ideas about which classes are strong and which ones aren’t, but class balancing will still be occurring up to and through the release of BFA. You can expect at least a few tweaks even as late as the week of mythic Uldir release. Until Blizzard is done making adjustments to classes, it will be impossible to say which classes will stand atop the M+ mountain.

So for anyone wanting to give themselves the best chance at picking the “right” class, you’re just going to have to play the odds and run multiple characters at the start of BFA. You don’t need to learn them all immediately or keep them in best-in-slot gear, but you’ll definitely want to be keeping on top of their Azerite traits, weekly quests, etc. Once the dust settles from launch balancing, you can survey the landscape and start to get an idea of which classes are seeing the most success. But that might take a few months, so be prepared to be playing the waiting game for a bit.

Also keep in mind that the meta has the potential to swing wildly each time a new balance patch is released or new trinkets show up. As an example, warlocks were considered unplayably bad at the start of Legion. A lot of people have forgotten this because of how good afflictions locks have been since Nighthold, but there was a time when warlocks couldn’t buy their way into M+ groups. Expect to see at least a couple of substantial meta shake-ups throughout BFA, each of which might make your current class a dud.

Lastly, for those that are interested in participating in the MDI, you’ll also have to keep in mind that some classes excel at pushing keys but are only mediocre in a speed run setting. So you might even want to try to guess which class would do well in a “pull everything and blow it up ASAP” environment and spend some time playing around with it on live.

With the MDI Global Finals starting this Friday (June 22), who are the top teams to watch from each region to watch and why?

Obviously you should be watching every team because these are the baddest dudes in the world. But some of these teams have a little extra narrative or a few quirks that you should pay attention to.

China

Skyline.D has been a unicorn of sorts in the tournament so far. When time trials started, Skyline.D jumped to the top of the leaderboards right out of the gate with a really unique triple melee comp (rogue, rogue, DH). Having two rogues enables a lot of really clever skips in certain dungeons, and Skyline.D’s time trial runs took full advantage of these.

Skyline.D did not drop a single map on its way to taking the top seed in the China region, so it enters this weekend as the top overall seed in the tournament. Unfortunately one of its rogues, MMY, needed an emergency surgery earlier this week and will need to be replaced on short notice. This late roster change will make Skyline.D very unpredictable in the tournament.

APAC

If the MDI had championship belts, Free Marsy would be hoisting those belts over their heads as they take their seats this Friday. As the winners of the inaugural MDI, Free Marsy have the most tournament experience of any team in the finals. They took the top seed in the APAC region and look poised to make another run as MDI champs.

One thing to keep an eye on, though, is that Free Marsy’s healer in regionals, Xerase, wasn’t able to make the trip to Columbus and will be replaced by Sups. Everyone knows that the healer is easily the most important position on any M+ team, so this roster change could have big implications. Sups has broad shoulders, though, so don’t expect any drop off from the champs.

EU

Much love to my guys on Kjell’s Angels, but I’ve got to go with Method PogChamp here (unbiased, obviously). This crew sliced its way through the EU winner’s bracket before ultimately dropping its first series of the tournament in the regional finals against Kjell’s Angels. One underrated element of regionals was that weapon ilvl was set at 970 instead of the intended 995. This has been rectified in the global finals, and you can expect no team to make better use of this ilvl bump than PogChamp with its double caster lineup.

This team is as star-studded as any in the tournament, featuring stream darlings Drjay, Sjele and Muscle. I wouldn’t be surprised if this team has the most fans rooting for it in stream chat next weekend, and they stand a great chance at taking home gold.

Americas

I swear to Cenarius, if you aren’t watching me this weekend I’m gonna -- uh I mean, you should definitely check out Method NA because they have the biggest advantage of any team in the tournament: the power of friendship. And also unfettered access to the scoPhone.