Awakened >> Reaping >>> Beguiling >>>>> Infested.Awakened simply is perfect, I agree. Reaping was fun. Beguiling was ... not terrible. Infested was terrible.
Awakened was not "incredible". Maybe for the small percentage of players pushing high keys but for most people who don't have regular teams, it killed the pug community. There are way fewer pug tanks nowadays and whilst the few tanks willing to pug are good, the part time tanks like me have dried up, unwilling or unable to learn the dozens of new routes needed.
So I guess I'm the only one who really liked Beguiling then?As a tank currently, I'll second the annoyance of finding decent routes in M+. Wowhead could really have helped by offering a few common variants, as it is it requires few hours of research per dungeon watching videos of people running them to see what the good routes are.
I agree that the current affix (awakened) can be rough on tanks. I wasn't too keen to tank m+ at the start of the season, but thanks to the "standard Dratnos-routes" and couple of hundreds 10+ runs this season I'm finally ok with it.Unfortunately the routing difficulty is heavily dependent on the dungeon. Some dungeons have basically only one correct route: Workshop, Temple and Kings' Rest. Then we have routing nightmares such as Junkyard... Yes, you can "wing it" in Junkyard and Atal'dazar if you have the experience, but you are likely to do a sub-optimal run. And that can turn a +1 to a deplete.I know some tanks enjoy the routing-aspect and have the know-how to do it. But it certainly did raise the bar for the less experienced tanks. M+ tanking is already one of the more demanding roles in the game and adding yet another layer of responsibility to the tank is making it even more difficult for the new tanks.
Our guild is trying to get everyone from the raid team a +15 per week for the chest. Since I'm one of the main tanks and actually love running m+, I'll do keys with up to 4 different teams per week, with all kinds of different skill levels and expectations. My main group is running 22s/23s with a rogue - that opens up some possibilities for skips etc. Most of the groups for the weekly keys are completely offmeta: something like shadow + holy priest, lock, hunter or fury, unholy, mage + mistweaver. From my perspective Awakening is simply the best affix ever made. I have a few set routes that i can run with every group regardless of composition. No rogues needed. No nightelf skips. I'd wish they would add a possibility to skip trash in shadowlands in every seasonal affix or design the dungeons in a way where you can choose which trash you want to play.
Awakened was quite interesting and uses of it were quite tactical, but I really don't enjoy skipping trash. I like dungeons BECAUSE I get to fight stuff.What if, instead of filling a meter, you got time back on the timer for killing trash. That way, you could balance skipping trash packs with having to gain more time back on the clock. It would take some balancing to get right, but it would provide multiple ways to game the timer. There would still be strategies to try and skip trash, but some affix weeks it would actually work better to kill more enemies instead of trying to find creative ways to skip them.
Awakened is amazing.I really like all the possibilities it gives.
My thought on awakened is that it also balanced some very imbalanced dungeons. King's Rest was reset to be more "in-line" with the difficulty of the other dungeons because you finally had a way to manage the trash pulls. Without the skips you can now do, that dungeon was always harder than nearly all the rest to time.This article is great though and I only hope Bliz learned a few of these things this xpac. A bad affix ruins the entire season, while a great affix makes it so much more fun.
yeah just remove Shadowmeld as the only strong alliance racial
As tank I like the awakaned. But the flaming part is true. Your route is @#$%, your skips are ^&*!. Why are you not pulling the obelisk there, and OMG we missing percentage, or OMG it's too much percentage. If we missing 2%, and the last obelisk gives 1.7% so I pulling one more patrol, I am also $%^&*!. My favorite players those melee dps who has taunt, and he taunting off the Obelisk guy to position to a different place. Their small brain cannot cover that we already skipped two packs during the run, so if he reposition the Obelisk guy to more skip, we will don't have enough trash. Other than how much annoying is being taunting off something from the tank...So yea, there are smartass idiots, but somehow I met more in this season.About the MDI watching half-dungeon pulling tanks. As tank I also meet with dps who keep pulling extra, as they considering we are going slow, but my favorite was the healer who insisted to pull bigger (said 3 times, quite angrily, big rio score, etc), then when I pulled 2 packs, we wiped, and then he instantly left.
Reading some of these comments im glad blizzard doesnt listen to the players sometimes.
I agree, awakened sucks when you’re pugging as a tank. If you’re not getting flamed for not knowing Dratnos’ super big *!@# route of the week then your melee brain dps can’t stop mashing their buttons cus muh dps and randomly kill it where ever and then say “tank why no move boss?” My favorite is the fear pillar on skittish fortified bolstering, every time: EYE BEEAAAMMMZZZ, dead, “tank aggro?” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Tanking them for me has been mostly painless.I plan a route that looks good and run it out. Might not be "meta" or w/e but you're a moron if you think you need 28 strats in a 15.Only issue I've had is people that decided they didn't want to tank sticking their nose in on routes.Just let the tank run the route or make a tank yourself.
I actually liked the Beguiling affix more than the Infested one. Might have been due to me running as a tank mostly with randoms, because my interest in M+ is completely flipped to most of my guildmates. Running a lot at the start of the season to get the higher equipment, compared to pushing keys as high as possible towards the end of the season.But Infested with randoms was a pretty annoying crapshoot. Infested enemy gets killed, the two worms don't, so suddenly you have to mobs infested, which heal each other. At worst I had 4 infested at the same time, because the group managed to kill both infested but not a single one of the worms.At least with Beguiling you were in a positon of "I am just widdling that add down, even if my group is too dumb to get behind cover."Reaping might as well just haven't been an affix at all. Unless you messed up hardcore, the adds died way too fast to actually be a threat.Awakened was interesting, at least for some dungeons. Skipping those annoying parts of the dungeon without needing rogues or invisibility potions was such a blessing. But it made planning just so much worse. Most of the time I just asked my group "Anyone has a prefered route?", so that I wouldn't be the idiot that made up a crap route. But that is a problem as a tank most of the time. You don't get to see those cheesy tactics, which make some bosses trivial by completely erasing a mechanic you didn't even think could be erased. And then you are the idiot for not knowing that strat, that you were never able to see, because you mostly rely on written guides that only talk about the intended strat.
Seasonal affixes are neat idea if done correctly, which sadly they have not 50% of the time the other 50% people just ignored. So on balance pretty much not worth the effort.