Dragonflight Season 3 has been something of a return to form for me.

I set a lot of ambitious goals for Season 2, and I accomplished only some of them. I ended up not pushing a character to Keystone Hero, for a mix of reasons including my own decision to not slog through PUGs, the emergence of the “god comp” that made getting into high-enough keys as a Windwalker Monk exceedingly difficult once 10.1.5 came out, and a bit of general burnout on WoW and rekindling of interest in FFXIV that saw me logging into the latter more often than not for my average night of gameplay. Also, I ended up finding the glows for Season 2 tier sets that are rewarded for Keystone Hero to be a little-bit meh, and while it would have been a nice goal to accomplish, ultimately I’m not too disappointed in where I landed for the season. I pushed hard early, still broke 2200 rating on my main character in Mythic Plus, had 3 Keystone Master characters including my Priest’s first and my Demon Hunter’s fourth, and I maintained a pretty good gear level across my alts that made playing them remain fun. If Season 2 hadn’t ground my interest down with long periods refarming the endboss in the raid for a chance at the Evoker legendary (which is even easier to replace this season than I anticipated!), I might have had the desire to keep pushing, and I fear how I’ll feel this tier once we’re doing Fyrakk kills week after week for what is, by some estimations, another subpar legendary, especially given that the skip quest in Amirdrassil still requires doing FIVE bosses including Fyrakk, only saving you the trouble of doing the side wings. But for now, I’ve been enjoying the season a lot, and I think there are some interesting things to discuss in that regard.

Amirdrassil, The Dream’s Hope

The raid this tier is quite a nice departure for Blizzard, given that the reduced mechanical density of a lot of the fights on Normal means that running in pick-up groups is actually quite simple, to the point where I have four characters who have completed Normal at this point – my Monk as my main raider, my Priest, my DH, and my Warlock. 3 of those (every character but Warlock) have done Heroic PUGs and gone at least 2/9 H with randoms from the internet. The raid aesthetic is very nice compared to the rest of Dragonflight, which has unfortunately suffered from Blizzard Color Palette-itis – everything is dragon-y and elemental, skewed towards earth tones and fire tones, with small bits of ice and lightning thrown in, while Amirdrassil has verdant greens and blues alongside some unfortunate intrusion of earth and fire tones. Fight-wise with up to 3/9 H experience, I don’t think I dislike any of the fights that much, but I will also say that I don’t really love any of them either – it’s a cool-enough raid tier that marks a good departure from the style of Dragonflight to this point, but I feel like very few of the fights will stick in my head in a year or two. One thing I find interesting this tier is that in a patch where Blizzard put some effort into revamping healing as a role, there are multiple boss fights that involve healers having to heal some other non-player targets to keep mechanics rolling. It happens twice in the raid (Larodar and Fyrakk) and again outside the raid in the Galakrond’s Fall segment of the Dawn of the Infinite dungeon in M+ (where Chromie has to be topped-off between stack mechanics to avoid her death). 3 times isn’t a lot, perhaps, but given that NPC healing hasn’t often been a feature in WoW raids, it’s a fascinating look at what might become a new normal way to engage healers, as opposed to plain raidwide unavoidable damage or going FFXIV-mode and making healers into DPS that have a side-responsibility.

While Normal is pretty straightforward and easy to a point that you can PUG it and pull a fair number of subpar DPS through the run, Heroic does at least have a difficulty curve that fits well and I think in a sense that this design is actually good, as it creates the cleanest delineation of Normal and Heroic the modes have had since the introduction of Mythic raiding in Siege of Orgrimmar. Heroic has the same rough idea as Normal but the mechanics hit more aggressively and with just enough twist that the concept changes in a consistently-challenging way. This has a bit of an unfortunate trickle-down in that LFR is so simple that almost nothing you do matters at all, but with the tuning, LFR is fine to exist as the literal tourist mode for story content while Normal is a step-up that doesn’t demand too much more of you. Knowing that this is both the last raid of Dragonflight and yet also not the last season, I think that’s great – it means that as you bring up new alts, moving into Normal and doing some light raiding with strangers is an easy-enough option to give the season some extra life beyond what it might otherwise have had.

Season 3 Mythic Plus

The rotating dungeon pools of Dragonflight have been a boon for me overall in maintaining interest, because each season isn’t just more tuning and a new affix, but instead a new set of dungeons altogether. The dungeon selection has been far more interesting than I first expected – I mostly anticipated the team using dungeons with existing M+ tuning, and in Season 1 while they kind of did that, they brought in two older dungeons that had Challenge Mode timing, so there was at least a template to work from. Since then, though, they’ve gone pretty crazy in terms of what they’re willing to do, reworking two old Cataclysm dungeons in back-to-back seasons with Vortex Pinnacle and Throne of the Tides, alongside a bit of what I predicted (recycled M+ and Challenge dungeons where there’s a base to build on). Even with the predictable more recent dungeons though, changes have been made throughout the seasons, like keeping Waycrest Manor and Freehold open to route choice and some major rebuilds of the two Cataclysm dungeons that make them more like brand new dungeons in old maps than actual old dungeons brought back.

My failure to hit my publicly planned goals last season, for me, boiled down to a couple misplays in my planning. The first is that I just kind of did too much preplanning, and that bristles against everything I tend towards as a person. I don’t normally do spreadsheets or grids and set myself onto that kind of schedule and rigor, and the pressure I could feel from my own self-imposed goals was a big challenge. Watching route videos from PTR before the season even started also kind of torched some interest, because there was less discovery and less process of feeling out I got to do – the answers were there and the challenge was solved (a big part of why I fail to see any appeal personally in doing old raids on Classic). The dungeon pool for Season 2 was dungeons I just kind of didn’t like or enjoy – Halls of Infusion, Brackenhide Hollow, and Uldaman are my least-favorite Dragonflight dungeons, and all of them were looped up into a single season all together with none of the dungeons I like from Dragonflight. Couple that with the distaste I have for some of the retro dungeon choices (I absolutely hated Freehold in BfA and that didn’t change much in DF Season 2), and the combination of that side of the pool with the DF half was just not a good setup for me. I also ran alt-play into the ground with the Twisted Timeways event before season 2, running around 6-8 characters a week through the event for some heroic raid loot, and so when the season finally arrived, I had been grinding pretty hard and felt it.

Season 3 averts the dungeon fatigue by being dungeons I largely like. While I had some deeply bad runs of Dawn of the Infinite in mega-dungeon mode during the Season 2 cycle, I enjoy the dungeon conceptually a lot and the tuning changes made for M+ help that a lot (Galakrond’s Fall is pretty straightforward if you just do mechanics, and while Murozond’s Rise is one of the tougher keys this time out, it’s also my second-highest run right now as I write this at a +19 two-chester). Everbloom’s aesthetic and music are appealing to me (I used to, no joke, play the Everbloom song in the car off the WoD CE CD when I was running late for work), and Throne of the Tides is, actually, a dungeon I really enjoy in the new form. I think a lot of the complaining about it is that some of the mechanics of the last boss are not quite intuitive, but once you get there, it’s real fun to just smash through it. Both Legion choices this time out are solid, and both Atal’Dazar and Waycrest Manor are Mythic Plus bangers in that they exemplify what is good and fun about M+ – route choices, pull decisions, boss order changes – no linearity in these two except that the final boss is always gonna be last, so smash through how you want and I suspect that while there are standard-ish routes today for these, there’s room to change and find new tech.

In general, my assessment of this season is very positive so far, and while there are pain spots (second and last ToTT bosses, second boss in Everbloom, a couple of spots in the mega-dungeon), overall, I’m having more fun this season and I’ve enjoyed pushing keys a lot more.

The Cumulative Impact of Difficulty

Late-season WoW always has a few interesting things going for it (or against it, depending on your perspective). Firstly, late seasons of an expansion are generally easier at a player level because we’ve been using the new talents and systems for a year or so, and as a result there’s just less learning to do. Dragonflight has thrown a wrench in here slightly in two ways – by having a rotating M+ pool but also by having a substantial number of mid-expansion reworks to entire classes and individual specs, as well as a mid-expansion added spec. However, even in the case of most reworks, the changes are generally easy to learn and it doesn’t take long for skilled players to adapt to the new styles. Secondly, because of how Blizzard scales gear and tunes the content around them, we as players always outpace the scaling. The easiest way I can explain it is this – Blizzard tunes dungeon baseline difficulty in large chunks of around 26% to correspond with the item level increase from tier to tier, but because this change is a single shot of 26%, it is outstripped by player power, which scales at 1% per item level, but multiplicatively. So while a dungeon gains a flat 26% season to season, players gain slightly more than that, because the 1% baseline per item level scales up for players with more breakpoints, so our actual increase is closer to 27-28%. After two or more seasons of this kind of scaling, dungeons are outstripped even further because they get a little lower in threat relative to players each time and that effect accumulates as seasons grow. By season 4, most baseline dungeon tuning will likely be easily facerolled because we’ll be much more powerful comparatively.

There is one more modifier this season in particular, though, which is the item level leap growth. I’m still holding to my theory that the item level jump this tier was not offset in the difficulty tuning as would have been expected, and I think that’s a big part of why this tier feels easier overall, in my view. If you gain 30+ item levels against content tuned assuming 26, then of course it’s going to be easier – numerically it has to be. Not every point of difficulty in WoW is numbers tuning, of course – there’s mechanics checks, binary pass/fail style stuff where you can get one-shot, and there’s team jumprope where everyone has to manage – but overall, a lot of this tier feels easier in the low levels and it starts to kind of pickup at a much higher point than usual.

I think that this can be demoralizing to some, as it ultimately can feel bad if your whole love of the game is in pushing difficult content, but I think the upshot, as I discussed recently, is potentially much higher – more players in the lower-end of the game (where the majority of WoW players actually are) have something tantalizing to consider in pushing the content on-offer. Before, the prospect of even just doing a key felt like an insurmountable challenge to some players, and when they try something challenge-appropriate for their gear level and time in-game, they could often meet with failure. Low keys tend to be full of people stuck there and thus acting out in toxic ways to their teammates, which creates a sustaining cycle of people trying keys, meeting with eventual failure and teammates who are going to lash out for it, and then those players decide not to try again until some later point, if at all. This season, by contrast, has been relatively gentle in the lower keys so far, and you can run into the teens without encountering as much toxicity, because the content ultimately just isn’t that hard. It’s still challenging, and you can still fail, absolutely, but the scale of mistakes needed to actually tank a lower-level key is much higher this time aroud. It does mean that the band of mid-high teens, like 16-19, has a little bit more of that walling happening, where people stuck on rating go, get toxic at minor mistakes that could still easily be timed, and then either quit or grouse until the group is sick of their shit, but even that has been less prominent in my experiences across 4 characters so far.

Overall, I think that most of the things that traditionally make late-season WoW gameplay easier are still in play here, and coupled with other things that are likewise exerting additional easing on difficulty that makes low keys and lower-tier raiding less difficult and, in my opinion, more interesting for players who wouldn’t otherwise consider doing it or alts. I’ve done a ton more of all activity this season because, well, why not? I like having geared alts, I enjoy doing different jobs in the dungeons and raids to see how things feel for my team, and it’s been fun to let it rip and see how hard I can push before I wall out and scale back my gameplay to accomodate FFXIV patch 6.55 and that last stretch before Dawntrail and whatever comes next in WoW for me to do.

My Experience So Far

My season 3 of Dragonflight has been marked by the aforementioned return to form and a new energy around playing a lot. Firstly, without having it as a goal, it was a lot easier to hit both KSM and KSH – I had a day 8 KSM and a day 26 KSH, slow by comparison to a lot of the higher-end key pushers but it made me happy. Secondly, for the first 3 weeks of the season, I averaged one KSM character a week, with my Monk, Priest, and then DH all hitting KSM in close proximity to each other. I currently have 10 total characters who’ve done at least one key this season, 4 characters with full normal clears and 4 piece tier bonuses, 6 characters with two-piece tier bonuses, and that is before I finish this post and push another 3-4 characters through the last day of the Mythic Dungeon weekly event for some heroic loot. My level 70 character arsenal has an average item level of 435.77 across 18 level 70 characters, and that will likely spike higher after this week, when over half of those characters will have vault options to open up on top of additional heroic raid caches.

On my main, I’ve made a pretty good amount of progress, sitting at 2,513 M+ rating. I’m currently the 29th best monk overall on my servergroup, the 4th best WW monk, and the 39th best monk tank in M+ ratings, and that feels really neat. In overall ranks, my Monk is in the top 500 players on the server at 456th, and my guild raid retains a top 50 ranking for raid progress – all of these are points I’m pretty happy with and enjoy seeing. Now, granted, something I think I can and should say is that early-season M+ ratings and rankings are largely about the amount of time you can devote to the game, and I have admittedly put a lot of time in, so as people with more aptitude rise up and play more, I expect that I’ll lose some of this standing as time moves on – but I’ve been keeping on the grind and I think I can hit some bigger goals this season. In particular, I want to push to get all of the +20 portals to dungeons this season, as even my best prior season in DF Season 1, I only got one – the Nokhud Offensive portal (LET FLY). I had a 45 second close call in the most recent Fortified week with Waycrest Manor, so it feels very doable – I’ve gained another 8 item levels since, sitting just shy of 478 now, and I’ll have some room to progress further with another week or so of Vault options and the last major crafting I need to do for an embellishment item (I’m playing the Slimy Expulsion Boots/Toxified Armor Patch combo, just need to get bracers made with the armor patch to bring the bonus damage way up).

On alts, I have a goal of getting some first time KSMs done on my Blood DK, my Prot Warrior, and my Demonology Warlock – all of those have been a blast to play in keys and I think I could make the push happen as the need to run hard on my Monk subsides. Raidwise, I’ve got an itch to attempt to PUG the first boss or two on Mythic to see that side of things more, but I’m not setting it as a goal given that WW monk tuning sucks ass right now and would likely not get invited to PUG Mythic raiding. I’ve debated progressing my Blood DK to Heroic raid pugging to try and maybe get the legendary, but I also know that if I did that, I’d need to put up a substantial personal gold investment that I’d likely struggle with (I suck at goldmaking, it’s my weakest spot of serious WoW play) and I’d also almost certainly feel a pull to switch raid mains if I did happen to get it – which would make our raid lose the Mystic Touch debuff that helps our DPS comp and would also stick us with double-Blood tank, which is probably not an ideal scenario.

Overall, this season is a lot of fun so far. My raid team has grown, my enjoyment of Mythic Plus has grown, the design and difficulty template this season feels rewarding and more interesting for alt play, and not overpreparing this season has led me to be more loose and have more fun with it, because it still feels like there is uncovered ground to discover and more I can do to feel that sense of achievement and reward from the game. As I like to do in these posts, here’s my current list of best runs on my main Monk and my roster’s current standings!