The Purge List: Community Calls for Retirement

The clamor across forums and streams points strongly toward the removal of two veteran affixes that have disproportionately punished specific roles, demanding stressful and often non-intuitive counter-play.

The affixes widely expected to be retired or heavily reworked include:

  • Necrotic: The primary target for tank dissatisfaction. This affix forces constant kiting and aggressive positioning, often reducing the tank role to a perpetually stressful game of avoidance rather than focusing on threat management or using cool-downs for damage mitigation.
  • Grievous: The bane of all healers. The relentless nature of this stacking debuff often forces non-intuitive healing patterns and heavily penalizes teams for minor execution errors, feeling overly punitive rather than truly skill-testing.

Impact on the High-Stakes Meta

The removal of these “pressure cooker” affixes will have a profound effect on the high-key meta, potentially allowing for greater compositional diversity.

Expected Strategic Shifts:

  • Tanking Focus: Tanks will be able to utilize more direct combat abilities and concentrate on maximizing damage mitigation rather than constantly managing distance. This could lead to a resurgence of tank specializations that previously struggled with mandatory kiting requirements.
  • Healing Freedom: Healers will likely gain more throughput flexibility. The pressure could shift from constant triage due to persistent stacking debuffs to dealing with predictable, massive burst damage events, potentially bringing utility-focused healers back into the spotlight.
  • Compositional Flexibility: The mandatory requirement for massive slows or specific crowd control (often needed to manage Necrotic or Sanguine) may ease. This relaxation could open up more slots for diverse DPS specializations that bring unique damage profiles but lack high-end utility.

The Future: A Focus on Engagement?

While there is always intense speculation about the new affixes that will fill the void, the community hopes the developers will introduce mechanics that interact uniquely with dungeon objectives or enemies, rather than simply taxing a single role.

The coming rotation is more than just a seasonal refresh; it is a critical litmus test of whether Blizzard can successfully shift Mythic+ difficulty from frustrating punishment toward rewarding tactical mastery. The wait is almost over.