The morning of June 6th, 2023, some Mythic Plus players thought that Blizzard had brought them a present – keystones, rolled from the Great Vault with no affixes. None listed in-game, and if you ran the dungeons, sure enough, no affixes – flat scaling on key level but nothing more. This was a bug (obviously) and led to a lot of 0 rating runs, but runs that filled the vault slots and even granted portals for those doing +20 and higher keys successfully, and so…was this legit-ish? A sort of weirdo reward week? Nope, just a bug, and Blizzard turned off Mythic Plus altogether for a few hours (some people’s dream!) while they fixed the issue, returning when keys had affixes and everything was mostly working as intended.

But, of course, it led to another round of discourse about Mythic Plus, about affixes, and about what makes dungeons “fun.” It came at a particularly good time – after two weeks of new level 7 affixes, both of which were fairly poorly received, in Incorporeal and Afflicted, and so the community was hot for discussion on them.

So I guess the thought in my head is this – are affixes actually bad?

Affixes in Mythic Plus started to serve a very specific purpose – to keep dungeons feeling fresh from season 1 through the final season of an expansion. While Legion saw 4 total dungeons added to the M+ pool over time, the base dungeons were there and quite common still, from day 1 to day 700ish of the expansion. Affixes were perceived as a necessary aid to keep Mythic Plus from feeling too stale. Grinding in an MMO is a thing we all know and have varying degrees of comfort with, but two years of the same dungeon pool means freshness is a necessity, and adding new dungeons while mixing things up was key. BfA added fewer dungeons but added Seasonal affixes, which made each season feel drastically different, and until this season, this was the model that was followed. Season 4 of Shadowlands was a mixup season with a mix of dungeons across expansions by sampling the megadungeons of the most recent 3 expansions and then two fan votes from WoD, and Dragonflight so far has kept a formula of 4 DF dungeons and 4 retro throwbacks, retuned and sometimes even remade for M+.

So the variety argument is, perhaps, less applicable now than it ever has been. If each season is a fresh pool of dungeons, and there are some hints that Season 3 of DF might not just rotate back in the DF season 1 modern pool but instead throw a curveball, then there is a real point to be made that the variety argument is old and busted. And it is, in truth. We’re no longer playing the same dungeons for years on end, and even if the DF half of the pool trades off between seasons, it will still put a sizeable break between the last time we seriously ran Ruby Life Pools and the next time we do (and maybe I hope we don’t because I hate that dungeon on high keys!). In that space, then, what are affixes good for, if anything?

Here’s my take, and it’s not exactly new – I like affixes generally, but mostly when they enhance the existing layout, tuning, and abilities within a dungeon. To contextualize, let’s talk Sanguine, Entangling, and the base affixes of Fortified and Tyrannical. These affixes, tuning arguments aside (the base affixes, especially Tyrannical, are a bit too aggressive in my opinion), enhance the existing dungeon by giving you a twist that is framed and thought of in the context of the dungeon. Sanguine just drops a puddle that does damage to your party and heals enemies in it, but that small puddle makes you think about where you are in the dungeon – what’s the route, can I move to the next pull, do I double-back, is there an add pull risk, and other various questions. These can be small or big issues depending on the dungeon – but that’s the ticket for me, that it depends on the dungeon. The dungeon, in an affix like Sanguine, matters because it influences how you handle Sanguine. Sanguine is, likewise, literally only a challenge because it influences routing, path, and pull density through a dungeon, rewarding smart play in the context of the dungeon and punishing only when poorly counter-played.

Likewise, the most successful new affix for me is Entangling for the same reasons – it has lots of counterplay, how you handle it depends on the class, spec, talent choices, and dungeon, and it doesn’t require elaborate counterplay or unique, bespoke fixes – just move out or use a movement-effect removing ability. If it happens when you’re too close to another unpulled pack, you have to consider the routing, and otherwise, it just rewards attentive gameplay. The punishment for failing the affix is minor, but handling it incorrectly in terms of the dungeon placement and positioning can have consequences, which, again, matter because of the dungeon, not anything else.

Lastly, while I have a love/hate relationship with the base affixes, they work well in the context of the dungeon by modifying only stuff that already exists within the dungeon. In my opinion, these affixes are good ideas actually (again, tuning aside), because they make you pay attention to different things within the dungeon. If you think in the context of a Mythic 0, base level dungeon, even at lowly item levels, you end up in a scenario where nothing really matters and you don’t really need to learn that much. Thinking back to the Dragonflight launch window, how much did a Ruby Life Pools base-level run on Mythic really endanger you? Not very much, eh? Like sure, the perma-fire on Kokia was a new touch, but the fight at that level didn’t last long enough to force you to think about it that hard, and stuff like baiting boulders and add spawns didn’t become common knowledge until M+, especially Tyrannical keys. Likewise, in that same dungeon, how much did the upper ring trash matter until M+ fortified keys? Not very much.

Each of these examples pose the exact kind of scenario I want affixes to be around for – they enhance the dungeon’s own innate design, bringing forward and emphasizing different parts for you to interact with. If you just made Mythic Plus a flat scaling curve, you might eventually encounter those challenges, but it would be far later in the curve, and there would never be a need to think about route that hard or consider how you pull – just a flat run that looks the same every time with bigger numbers. That approach doesn’t even work in the context of raiding, where new difficulties add new mechanics, change elements of existing mechanics, and, of course, add scaling to increase numerical difficulty.

Now, are some of the current affixes awful? Absolutely. The tuning levels of Fortified and Tyrannical both lead to scenarios where things just become one-shots, and while that may be the correct end-result for pass/fail mechanics (did you move out of the thing or not?), it’s perhaps less interesting for pulsing AoE or other unavoidable damage to hit as hard as it does. Likewise, a fair few affixes suck ass – both Incorporeal and Afflicted, the other newcomers this season, are trash that cause tons of friction against the dungeon and challenge PUG runs by making you have to ask what talents your group comes ready with. Even if the logic is that a lot of class kits can talent to deal with them, they are still these bolted-on extras that exist outside of the standard dungeon gameplay. A large number of the remaining affixes end up just being dull additions – Storming and Volcanic both encourage thought about positioning, but do so less effectively than the predictable and easily-counterplayable Sanguine or Entangling. Spiteful just makes you use blocking CC or straight-up kiting, with the bonus of disabling things that require being out of combat, since you’ll be stuck until the shades disappear or are killed. Good padding for DPS meters, though! Raging and Bolstering both just make the last sprint through a trash pack harder, although new Bolstering is actually kind of neat in how it changes strategies on mobs that require CC stops for certain casts and abilities. Bursting feels pretty awful and only creates healer challenge, which isn’t great!

But overall, I think the concept of affixes are great, and even in execution, a fair number of affixes are worth having. My criteria are simple – it should work to enhance the dungeon by making you consider the dungeon in handling it, it should offer ample opportunities to counterplay it, and it should encourage learning dungeons so that the base dungeon has a chance to shine. Affixes that work within this framing are great, and those that don’t aren’t, at least as far as I am concerned.

But I think that affixes get too much hate and heat for being bad, when the truth is that a good affix/affix set can meaningfully enhance a dungeon instead of making it obnoxious or bad. With rotating sets of affixes, the problem is that each week likely has a stinker affix that doesn’t do anything but cause bad friction where the affix specifically requires a lot of separate, independent thought from everything else already happening in the dungeon. In the end, I guess the solution I see is this – more affix tuning. Affixes should be in-line with each other at each affix breakpoint, should offer a meaningful, dungeon-enhancing challenge that doesn’t become too much about the affix itself, and there should be an incentive to learn the dungeon mechanics and get better at them. Affixes that are too much about the affix itself, unbalanced relative to their breakpoint tiers, or otherwise create huge gaps should be changed, removed, or replaced.

But I think the hyperbolic answer of “affixes bad, pull them all” is a vast overreaction that ignores what affixes actually do as a system and instead wants to pull Mythic Plus down to an oversimplified mode of play so they can get their shinies faster – and while there’s an allure to that for sure, we should be cautious to engage in sanding every rough edge off the game without understanding first why and what we lose in doing so.