Goodbye to Necrotic and Inspiring - A Retrospective on Discontinued Affixes

By Biggerfish — Oct 8 2022 18:20 UTC

With Blizzard confirming what data miners had already suspected, it’s official: Necrotic and Inspiring will not be returning as Mythic+ affixes in Dragonflight Season 1. Whether these two affixes will resurface in the future seems to be up to our own interpretation:

Source: Blizzard Bluepost - October 7, 2022

Today, let’s take a look at these two notorious affixes and what separated them from the others before we leave them in the afterlife of the Shadowlands, or see them come back to haunt us…

The Current Landscape of Affixes
Necrotic
Inspiring
What We’ve Learned
Looking to the Future

The Current Landscape of Affixes

The community perception on affixes has changed over time as Blizzard has teased us with the greener pastures of seasonal “kiss/curse” affixes ever since Awakened in Season 4 of Battle for Azeroth. The idea of a kiss/curse affix is that the affix presents an obstacle, and dealing with that obstacle rewards an advantage. The simplest form of this was Prideful in Season 1 of Shadowlands. A big, red, baddie appeared for every 1/5th of the dungeon trash we killed, and dealing with it gave us an extremely powerful buff for a short time.

The kiss/curse recipe has been repeated in different variations in all four seasons now, and experiencing the high life of blasting bosses with all kinds of enhancements has left our baseline affixes feeling… Well, not great. Some argue that everyday, working man’s affixes like Explosive or Bursting are necessary to break up the feeling of the dungeons from week to week. Others feel that a world with only seasonal affixes would be utopia. One thing a majority of people can agree upon is that some affixes have become pain points that they actively avoid.

If we accept that the two rotating weekly affixes are speed bumps we’re meant to deal with, what makes Necrotic and Inspiring worse than the other ten we’re keeping?

Necrotic

The reason all the tanks on our friend’s list use the “appear offline” option, AKA Necrotic, has been plaguing the Group Finder for years. Generally, Mythic+ has a tank shortage — and this was exacerbated by an affix that didn’t let tanks pull their normal route without either group coordination or excessive kiting. This was partially alleviated by the coincidence that most tank specs were viable to play as the Kyrian covenant, and thus had a cleanse in the form of their Phial of Serenity. Additionally, a series of nerfs to how quickly Necrotic stacks would be applied by enemy swings helped its public image, but very few people were itching for Necrotic to cycle back in the rotation. Using the data from our leaderboards on Raider.IO, we can look at the highest keys timed with Necrotic versus keys timed with any affix combination in our last season of Shadowlands.

Dungeon	Necrotic	Any other Affix Combo
Grimrail Depot	+32	+32
Iron Docks	+32	+32
Mechagon Junkyard	+33	+35
Mechagon Workshop	+31	+32
Lower Karazhan	+32	+32
Upper Karazhan	+30	+31
Tazavesh: Gambit	+32	+32
Tazavesh: Streets	+32	+33

With most keystones being done at the highest level or only one level lower, the data suggests that the inconvenience of Necrotic may be more anti-fun than anti-progress. Essentially, Necrotic is an affix where voice communications and seasoned teams have a sizable advantage compared to pug groups that simply group up through LFG and play without hopping into Discord or another voice chat.

Is it healthy for the game if some affixes disproportionately affect pug groups compared to teams? Quaking is a good counter point. The Quaking affix presents a mostly individual experience outside of a select few encounters where spreading out might have to be more coordinated. An earthquake spawns during one of its predictable intervals, players take a step out to avoid their party, they stop casting before it goes off, and they are done for the next 20-60 seconds. The consequences are rarely dire, but just enough that it can’t be completely ignored. This way, there is a clear disparity in the repercussions between two teammates Quaking each other versus an affix like Necrotic that has overreaching implications on the entire dungeon. The brunt of these punishments fall on the tank, both in reevaluating their routing and in the gameplay of dealing with their stacks either through peeling for themselves or relying on their team to control the mobs so that they can kite. Worst of all, an affix like Necrotic that disheartens tanks further compounds the supply and demand issue of tanks in Mythic+.

Inspiring

Inspiring is when the teammates of Protection Paladins find out how much heavy lifting Avenger’s Shield has really been doing. Similarly to Necrotic, this is another affix that can ruin traditional routing. In the past, Blizzard has suggested that they don’t like mechanics that force us to have new routes for certain weeks, as we don’t need yet another barrier to entry for pug groups or mechanics that discourage tanks. This is one of the reasons Teeming was removed, and seasonal affixes were given fixed locations after Beguiling changed weekly in Battle for Azeroth. Perhaps it is because of this that the dungeons in Season 4 seemed to have been designed in such a way that exceedingly dangerous mobs were rarely packaged with an Inspiring mob or they were given the Inspiring buff themselves. Whether this was intentional on Blizzard’s part or not, this made Inspiring relatively easy to manage in organized groups, which we can see in the following table that compares the highest keys timed this season for Inspiring versus other affixes.

Dungeon	Inspiring	Any other Affix Combo
Grimrail Depot	+32	+32
Iron Docks	+32	+32
Mechagon Junkyard	+34	+35
Mechagon Workshop	+32	+32
Lower Karazhan	+32	+32
Upper Karazhan	+31	+31
Tazavesh: Gambit	+32	+32
Tazavesh: Streets	+33	+33

What We’ve Learned

The two affixes leaving us in Dragonflight suffered from similar issues. They started out as strong negative experiences, so they were tuned to be easier. While the re-tunings made Necrotic and Inspiring viable for high keys, the root of the problem was not fixed. These affixes penalized a single role, had more extreme outcomes, and were more harmful to groups that lacked the luxury of coordination over voice chat or consistency of teammates. Affixes are intended to slow us down and challenge us each week, but the consequences of laughing off a Storming tornado don’t create nearly the amount of stress that Necrotic and Inspiring did. We’ve all had a stray Sunfire break the Crowd Control (CC) on an Inspiring enemy and send the key tumbling into chaos. We’ve had the desire to pull every single baby bird and its mother in De Other Side, but remembered too late that our tank will be drowning in Necrotic stacks long before we can screenshot our damage meters.

We’re in a design space where mechanics are often polarized into being “anti-ranged” or “anti-melee” and we haven’t had many options that challenge the group as a whole. A lot of the arguments made against Necrotic can be applied to Bursting or Grievous because the burden that these affixes create is almost entirely in the healer’s hands, but they don’t carry the same negative connotation in the community. Outside of the considerable nerfs/reworks to Bursting and Grievous over the years, one reasonable explanation is that the counterplay to both of these affixes is for the healer to do exactly what they already were going to do; heal and dispel their allies. In contrast, the nerfs we’ve seen to Necrotic over the years have never truly fixed the underlying issue of why the affix is just simply anti-fun and burdensome. Either way, an affix being fun or unfun rides a fine line between added nuance/difficulty versus a chore on top of our gameplay for that week.

Looking to the Future

So where does all this leave us? Were Necrotic and Inspiring the two biggest offenders? When their removal was confirmed, many players were surprised that Sanguine survived the culling. It’s true that Sanguine fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. It’s an affix that discourages tanks, has some effect on routing, and slows down the dungeon too much if handled poorly. This feels in line with the same criteria that gave our two departed affixes the boot, but for now it lives on. Only the first two dungeons we’ll have available to us in Season 1 have hit the Dragonflight Beta for testing this weekend and we’re only getting the first taste of the direction Blizzard wants Mythic+ to take moving forward.

With that said, claiming that the initial feedback to the current iteration of our first seasonal affix, Thundering, has been negative would be an understatement.

For now, we would be bucking the trend of the last five seasons, as there is no upside or “kiss” to the version that hit the Dragonflight beta servers on Friday. Blizzard has acknowledged the popularity of affixes with “kiss” benefits to them, but also explained how they felt their borrowed power was getting out of hand, and that those effects meant that they could never be brought forward as permanent additions. There’s plenty of time for revisions before Season 1 launches on December 12th, so for now, we’ll have to wait and see how Blizzard responds.

About the Author

Biggerfish is a recovering Boomkin who has played WoW for 14 years and has been an avid Mythic+ player since it released in Legion. He mostly tanks, and can be found on most weeknights in the NA Group Finder bricking your keys.