Dragonflight Season 3 content is…interesting.

Blizzard aimed at changing up some of the things that made last season feel heavily frontloaded by new changes – better integration of the crest and flightstone upgrade systems, a larger item level jump that saw the peak item level jump 39 item levels instead of the usual 26, and a far more robust system of catchup gear that rewards three pretty decently high-level pieces of gear per week for weekly zone quests in the Emerald Dream. These, coupled with other reward philosophy changes including Heroic, Mythic 0, and Timewalking dungeons counting for the Great Vault (DM me for my address Blizzard, let’s talk royalties on this one), aim to make players more able to get gear, and there seems to be an effort to prolong gearing for most high-end players – more upgrade tracks, slightly fewer upgrades per crest level per week (6 vs 10), and a much larger jump in item level such that even LFR is offering gear on-par and even better than last tier’s Mythic raids.

All of this, overall, so far, is really good. 8 days into the season as I write this introduction, I have done my Keystone Master on my main Monk, gotten my 4 piece tier bonus, and boosted my item level by around 26 levels already, with plenty of progress I can still make. The upgrade system does feel noticably more constrained compared to the first iteration in 10.1, where it was very possible to make huge leaps in item level just a week into the season and even be close to done by week 2, but that constraint isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are some warts about the new systems implemented around this (downgraded crest rewards on content completion isn’t clear, and the trade-up you can unlock is very opaque, because since the higher-tier crests count against season cap, the vendor simply does not show the item at all unless you have room in your current seasonal cap to buy them, which has since been hotfixed). But overall, I think there’s been a clear effort to make the game and upgrade system more enjoyable to more people and to curtail freaks like me who ran close to 40 dungeons in 8 days for the sake of it.

However…there is one change, or set of changes, I do think is missing the mark.

In the past, WoW has settled largely onto a strict, well-laid plan of inter-tier upgrades. In Wrath, we established that a difficulty tier is worth 13 item levels, and that formula persisted until Warlords of Draenor, where it was made 15 to account for Titanforging, and it stayed that way until Shadowlands squished item levels down to earth, where it then made sense once again to use the smaller 13 item level difficulty bump to keep numbers relatively constrained (and I’ve now crossed the 1 million health mark on the lowest-health tank spec in the game, so, uh…constraint?). Alongside this, Blizzard has established since Mists of Pandaria that when a new tier launches, the new LFR is equal to the prior Heroic tier, which gives a natural curve that limits item level growth – only Heroic and Mythic in the new tier have actual item level growth that is new to the game.

This stability has been relatively good for the game, because it means that setting goals is always relatively straightforward in terms of item level and you know the ballpark of where the next tier will land before it ever launches. It also gives Blizzard a common balancing target, which has been crucial with the seasonal content model introduced in Legion – if you expect players to gain 26 item levels on average at all levels of play, then you can tune up existing content that rolls into a new season by 26% or so, since an item level represents a 1% increase in power. Easy enough to start with, and then you test and fine-tune after launch once players hit walls or demolish doormats. This stability hinges on the scaling being consistent, and that is a theme I want you to put a pin in for now.

So if I had to guess what Blizzard wanted to do (I swear they said as much publicly but I could not find it for publication here), I would say that increasing the item level jump this tier is intended to elongate gearing for the tier – more goals to chase and more granular rewards with more upgrade tracks to use and higher difficulty content to chase. My next assumption, in line with this, would be that content would be balanced around this ideal – slightly harder than usual and made to climb more sharply at the start of the season as a pacing mechanism to keep the hardcore Mythic-anything audience from blasting through their goals in short order. You can make a harder raid tier with more numerically-difficult DPS and healing checks, you can tune the M+ season more aggressively (Dragonflight already doesn’t get to simply scale the same dungeons since the pool is different each time so far), and there can be a climb and a journey that people enjoy and want to work on – similar in spirit to Season 1 of any expansion, the best and longest-lived season in many cases just because the vertical climb of gear is much harder and requires chipping away at the base of the mountain before you can really start to ascend.

In practice, what seems to have happened, to my eyes, is that the team kinda goofed and tuned the difficulty increase the same as ever, put the higher item level rewards onto normal tracks without a gap-filler between the Season 2 item level and Season 3 that players had to contend with, and so players have a tier of content overall that assumes they will be increasing 26 item levels in power, except oh no it’s actually 39 item levels and now they are stomping through kicking all the bosses in the face and shaking them down for loot.

Before I continue this train of thought, I want to say something I kind of dance around with any discussions of difficulty in games. It’s subjective, and you might be perfectly challenged by the current tier or disagree with my assessment, and that is fine. Good, even. Difficulty is ultimately hard to broach in a broad way because there are so many vantage points by which to assess it, and that’s why difficulty discussion in video games is a tedious chore most of the time. If you say something is too difficult, you get some asshole neckbeard who tells you to “git gud” or writes an essay about cheating yourself of the experience (hi Soulsbourne fans!). If you say it’s too easy, an opposite audience will complain about how things should be easier, it’s just a game, “I miss when the game wasn’t just a constant speedrun,” and they’ll generally miss the point in the other way. My point with this discussion, to be clear, is this – for a large subset of the dungeon and raid audience in WoW, having something that takes effort and learning to overcome is the point and so when a tier misses the mark on tuning, it can be frustrating to that audience. That’s not everyone who does dungeons or raids, and the counterpoint I also somewhat support is this – it’s actually nice that the lower difficulties of this tier are tuned in a way that you can just kind of veg out and blast through them. As I come back to this draft a full week after starting (and again a second week after to revise and finish the point), I can say with some Heroic raid experience in Amirdrassil that this tier might have a good formula going, but I do sort of want to explore that.

Firstly, I think that the Normal raid is, almost to a bad point, too simple. Not easy, although simplicity can give way to ease, but simple. The mechanics aren’t terribly hard to figure out, the failure state for almost all of them is very forgiving, and right up to the very last boss on Normal in Fyrakk, you can have a very thin awareness of what is going on and still muscle through it if enough, like 2/3rds, of the raid know well enough what to do. This simplicity means that clearing week 1, even in a PUG raid, was very possible and likely. I assumed, based on the scares about item level, that my raid would probably go 5/9 week 1 and then hit some walls we’d have to play around, but instead we went 8/9 and then did a one-night full clear the next week. In PUGs I did that same week, I was able to tackle Fyrakk as both a DPS and healer with little actual effort, and for the last two weeks I have full-cleared normal on 3 characters (tanking for my guild raid on my Monk, healing on my Discipline Priest, and DPS as Havoc Demon Hunter), with the latter two characters being entirely-pugging. I’ve also gone to 3/9 Heroic on my Monk in PUGs and 2/9 Heroic on both other characters. The tier’s difficulty curve is heavily back-loaded, as you won’t start seeing major mechanical hurdles until Larodar on Heroic (arguably Volcoross is tough, but so much of his toughness relies on the raid just paying attention to where they stand and reacting calmly and quickly to movement requirements). Fyrakk on Normal is somewhat anti-climactic as a final boss of the expansion story, as the core difficulty to his fight is one mechanic in the final phase and you can brute-force the difficulty of that down by having insanely good DPS.

Likewise, in Mythic Plus, keys don’t even start to feel challenging until north of 15, and while it is possible with an unskilled or unserious group to have trouble earlier than that, you almost have to try to find that. Week 1 PUGs were already into the 20+ range and there are consistently almost as many 20+ keys listed when I look for PUGs as there are keys below that range. While Mythic Plus this season is still very much Mythic Plus (a mechanic is either a healer annoyance or a straight instagib and which are which depends mostly on the weekly base affix), the tuning is far friendlier than ever before – most mechanic checks can be recovered on failure and provided your tank has a decent route and your healer has decent mastery of their big cooldowns and reactive recovery healing, almost nothing is truly that threatening. Some dungeons are, with enough mechanical mastery, free keys (Dawn of the Infinite’s Galakrond’s Fall wing is basically just a binary mechanical check and if you pass, you’ll pretty much easy 2 or 3 chest even tough keys in there), and even the worst dungeons this season are largely things in the realm of mechanics (Throne of the Tides has a lot of basic mechanical checks, like kiting on the second boss, killing the totem on the third, and managing ink placement on Ozumat).

Why is that? Well, I keep coming back to the item level and overall tier tuning this season – it feels about 26% harder mathematically while most players have gained vastly more power than that and the ceiling is still higher. My Monk, as I write this in the tail-end of week 3 of the season, has already gained around 30 item levels, and it makes almost everything tough in the dungeons and raid feel, well, not so tough. Likewise, my priest gained 30 item levels on his hunt for my second KSM this season, and between getting that and 4-piece of the new tier bonus, everything feels pretty breezy in most keys, even when the DPS are paste-eating dipshits (sorry, it happens). Demon Hunter is probably a poor example because that class in general, in both specs, is pretty OP right now, but the namesake Demon Hunter of this blog can outDPS my best raiders with lower item level and can tank aggressively with even only meh-levels of gameplay aptitude (I got decent at rolling Demon Spikes into Calcified Spikes and using Frailty last season as tank, but good lord those skills I needed to just live last tier now make me feel like an indestructible god lol).

So on the one hand, Blizzard has made gear progression slow down a little bit in a relative sense this tier, if you just look at where things drop in relation to current content. Crests come slower, M+ loot is about the same speed as ever as-is raid, but the net effect of the changes made to upgrades slow down the ability to peak your item level in the high 470s and low 480s as you become Crest and drop-capped waiting for that trickle of Vault loot to come in alongside pushing prog on higher tiers of content. On those merits, some of the stated intent about preventing the rapid plateau at peak item level that came about last season has been accomplished – while a lot of players are in the 470s, few are at full BiS or near the peak item level in the mid-480s. Upgrade planning matters more this tier, in a relative sense. On the other hand, the issue is that while item level has indeed jumped tremendously higher, there’s nothing in the middle of mid-high progression last season and the start of the current season. Without that intermediate item level progression smoothing out the tier jump, the tier jump ends up effectively meaningless or actively contributing to the feeling of ease in the current content – you will jump 20 item levels or more just for doing a normal season’s worth of play for whatever you enjoy, and then you can coast on upgrades against the relatively-easy state of the content.

And, here’s the kicker – is this bad? Well, no. Not necessarily, at least. To some players, the new tier being a cakewalk to many on Normal and early Heroic as well as keys up to 15 is blasphemous diminishment of the accomplishment they might feel, but in honesty, I think it’s fine. Normal raiding isn’t supposed to be hard, it is supposed to be a difficulty that you can group with strangers in LFG for and knock out in an afternoon. Keys up to 15 are supposed to be fairly straightforward PUGgable affairs that you’ll have a good success rate with most of the time. Are these things this way because of design intent or a mixup? I assume a mixup, given how the last two seasons were in Dragonflight, but also, I can’t say that with certainty. Maybe Blizzard purposefully designed the season this way as a draw, because getting players engaged and going “that was easy” is a hook to push harder and higher than you otherwise would have. Certainly in my guild, we have more people doing keys for longer than typical this season and more early KSMs and even close to KSH pushes happening. I am on the cusp, 3 week in, of having my third character at KSM, which isn’t an outcome I would have expected even with how crazy I’ve pushed M+ this expansion overall.

I think there is a legitimate conflict to be had with the question of difficulty in WoW, because I think that reaching a goal and having that goal feel like an achievement that took learning and growth is worthwhile, and if a tier feels too easy it can diminish that feeling by a lot. Certainly, as someone who advocates for goal-oriented gameplay in WoW, I can understand why that might feel underwhelming or even at best whelming to some people, and I sympathize with it. At the same time though, I think that WoW has tiering the way it does so that players can always have a thing to push for beyond what they can currently do if they so desire, and that still exists with this season – heroic’s back half is still tough, Mythic raid still poses some real challenges, and high keys are still a force that sorts players who know their kits from those who do not, even if they also become idiotic metagame checks (having an Augmentation Evoker makes high keys a very different ballgame, and there’s definitely early-season meta pressure to play Blood DK or Vengeance DH tanks alongside Disc Priest and Mistweaver Monk healers with Havoc DH, Rogues, and Demonology Warlocks (rotate out one for an Augvoker as appropriate). But overall, there’s a lot of room to just have fun in lower tiers of content this season, which is nice – LFR is straightforward as ever, but Normal PUGs can be a fun way to burn two hours on a Saturday afternoon and still get a full raid clear and a good amount of loot and progression.

So I guess I come away from the current season thus far with two things in mind. Is it an easy season at most levels of play? Absolutely. The overall mechanical complexity and need to learn is way down, and that means there is a lot of room to just come in and play. Gear progression doesn’t matter as much as expected, and that leads to some of the feeling, but overall I think I could say it was a choice that was made to balance and build the tier overall in this way. At the same time, I could give Blizzard some more direct credit and say that as a decision, balancing the low-end of the season the way they have makes the whole thing more enticing – it is far more tempting to more people to have a season that gives you a reason to want to push higher and test your limits for better rewards, and if this is a trial balloon for their strategy with tier balance and content presentation going forward, it’s actually kind of a good sign to the majority of the playerbase that doesn’t touch high-end raiding or dungeons, because it means that there will be something presented explicitly to be enjoyed by those players. That’s a pretty good approach to take with a playerbase divide like modern WoW’s, and I am interested to see what it means to Season 4 of Dragonflight or especially The War Within.

Now if only they could clean up the shitshow of this story…nah, we’ll save that one for later.