It’s been a minute since I wrote about my Mythic Plus journey in Season 3.

It’s been an interesting one with some first-time pushes and new experiences and I’ve been enjoying the season a lot longer than I expected to. Sure, as January progresses, there will be a Final Fantasy XIV patch to pull me away for a bit, but I expect the season 3 journey I’m on to go a bit longer. Let’s break it down with some quick observations by character!

My Main Monk – KSH, The Worst +20 Portal, Gearing to a Plateau

My main monk, Kaylrizen, is just shy of 2,600 rating as I write this. I’ve had Keystone Hero for a bit now and spent some time this week knocking out my first portal for the season, a two-fer requiring completion of both halves of the mega-dungeon on a +20. My gear is up to 481, just shy of 482, and my need for crests is winding down almost entirely to a couple Hero and Myth track items and one crafted piece needing the jump to 486. I’ve mixed in more tanked keys this season on my monk, but the bulk of my key pushing has been done as Windwalker.

Windwalker is in a predictably odd spot this season. For a lot of reasons, WW scales poorly with gear, to the point that they generally overperform in early seasons of an expansion before falling off without focused buffs by the end of an expansion cycle. Windwalker got two rounds of small buffs – an overall aura buff and some targeted ability buffs, and those have made them generally better, but still not exactly meta. There’s a lot of various issues with the spec that need a proper rework (haste scaling, mastery scaling, ability flow, the overwhelming presence of cleave abilities making single target builds just weird, the general everything with Faeline Stomp in some AoE builds and most ST builds, the clunkiness of their AoE in spite of the cleave focus that sees them using ST builders to ramp into AoE, and some genuine bug-level issues that still persist with stuff like the logic on what breaks Spinning Crane Kick’s channel and the targeting and ability logic of Storm, Earth, and Fire), but buffs have generally helped with getting invites into that reasonably-high level of 18-22 keys without too much issue.

In raid, Brewmaster is doing okay. The tier set is meh in raid compared to M+ tanking where it shines, but the overall performance of Brewmaster this tier is pretty good and I enjoy playing it a lot. Brewmaster, while it has some of the issues that Windwalker has in places where they share abilities and general stat scaling, is better off overall and the biggest issue of clunk in the Brewmaster kit is just how large it is – I have 3 full 12-button hotbars mapped completely with almost all stuff from the kit I need on a regular basis. It’s a neat toolbox, but very large.

My goals for the season as it continues are simple – getting that AOTC (we’re 5/9 and agonizingly close to 6/9 and pushing on through in Heroic), knocking out the remaining six +20 portals in Mythic Plus, and getting my gear to plateau right around 484.

Priest: KSM Get, Pushing Higher (Eventually)

My priest was my second KSM this season, and I’ve pushed more on him since getting KSM, which was a weak spot last season for me with KSM alts, where they’d hit the rating and I’d stop playing them to move on. My priest is currently just shy of 472 item level and I’ve done pretty much every key as Discipline, except one guild key which I pushed as Shadow (and did fairly well at, all told). I’ve also taken this character to raid for 9/9 Normal and 2/9 Heroic, and raid healing as Discipline post-rework is really fun with Ultimate Penitence (one cast doing 4 million healing, sure, that’s fiiiiine). On the note of the rework, I think Blizzard generally did a good job here. While the complexity being pruned away is kind of a bummer in some ways (the ability to ramp Shadow Covenant on its own gave you some interesting setups you could play with even if they were often suboptimal), it’s resulted in a cleaner gameplay loop that has some interesting depth to it. In dungeons, it can feel a bit spammy, as you’re often just blanketing Atonements as easily as you can with the tools on-hand and then ramping into damage, but in raid there’s a certain elegance to the new flow I really like – it rewards knowing when to hold cooldowns like Rapture for a big damage ramp and it rewards you for doing ramp properly with some stupid high HPS numbers alongside respectable healer damage.

Demon Hunter: Busted AF (Complimentary), Third KSM, Might Try for Second KSH?

My blog’s namesake, the DH class as a whole got a substantial rework in 10.2 to respond to some real concerns the class had in Dragonflight, and they are better for it. Arguably too fixed, because both DH specs are insane right now, but it is pretty neat.

I spent most of my DH’s KSM push sticking to tank, as I did last season, and Vengeance in the rework is pretty awesome. They kind of made them better baseline in that they feel more tanky and secure than they did in 10.1, but you still need to make sure you play around your resources and that has expanded in a big way to be more all-encompassing. The biggest skill I needed to learn to KSM-tank seasons 1 and 2 on my DH was cycling Demon Spikes into Calcified Spikes, to the point of getting a tracking WA that would show me with an easy visual how long I had on both buffs. If that bar was missing, I needed to remedy that, and if it was yellow for DS, I needed to let it cycle to red for CS, then refresh DS at around 8 seconds to keep both buffs rolling hard. Frailty, the other pillar of DH tanking, wasn’t quite as important, and the funny thing in raid tanking when I played at that briefly in Season 1 was that the build was both totally different and felt far more innately tanky then.

In 10.2, Frailty management is a bigger deal, but it balances the kit out so you have some good compromises. You’re no longer shit out of luck if you fail to cycle DS in the precise manner needed, Frailty stacking on enemies is easier to do and matters more in big and threatening pulls, and the self-healing of the kit has been pulled back a smidge so that you play ping-pong less and the spec rewards proper planning over the medium-term. All 3 components matter, but the individual weight on each is about equal, so there’s less immediate threat if you fail the DS cycle or can’t get a 5-stack of Frailty rolling immediately on pull. It is, generally, a lot more recoverable, and that’s nice.

Havoc, on the other hand…it’s a beastly spec with so much damage for what is a relatively-simple gameplay loop. There’s setup, sure – specific building of Fury, various interactions of mechanics like Immolation Aura feeding Fel Rush and a reworked take on the old Momentum buff, and all the normal DPS mechanics like watching resources and not overcapping – but overall, playing Havoc DH is just like being a cat with zoomies – you can do a lot of random stuff and still absolutely melt the meters, especially since the core rotations remains a really basic two-three button core with small additions. I dislike adding a Fury cost to Throw Glaive for Havoc, because it was good filler in the old rotation and the current rotation still feels like it has spots where it needs that filler but now doesn’t really have it as easily, but overall, the rework is an improvement and after a few seasons being meh, a season where both DH specs are doing extremely well is cool.

I ended up going about half the season and 3/4th of the KSM push as tank, but then went Havoc because the damage output is too high to ignore. Since then, I’ve also pushed this character to 9/9 Normal in the raid and 2/9 Heroic. Currently I’m at 470 item level on this character and debating about what it might look like to push this character to a second KSH achievement, which would confer no real reward, but it would be pretty neat!

Death Knight: A First Time KSM, Blood Tanking Thoughts

My most recent KSM push was on my DK, pushing to the achievement solely as tank. Blood DK is interesting – perhaps a funny anecdote, the first tank I played in any endgame content ever was Blood DK in the halcyon days of Wrath of the Lich King, and so while I haven’t played it a lot over the last decade and change, I have a sort of baseline familiarity with the spec from that nostalgic imprint (where’s my rune strike?). So while I wasn’t starting from no knowledge, I did need to build on the foundation I had, and account for years of changes since the last time I seriously played it – Legion during my 36/36 mage tower push.

What’s changed? Well, something fun that I enjoyed is that current Blood DK does, on pull, feel a bit like the Vengeance DH at the start of Legion, before artifact traits were kitted out. That is to say, playing DK is a big risk up front, when you run into a pull with 0 resources and need to start hitting things to get the resources needed to properly start mitigating. On almost every other tank, there is a way for me to roll defensives into a pull from scratch, or a high innate tankiness that defines the spec, but Blood DK feels like paper in those first few seconds until you learn the ropes. The process of learning was so cool and interesting that I kind of ended up just going for it, and Blood DK overtook my warrior as the new tank to KSM this tier. I still plan to go back for the warrior, but Blood DK got there first because learning it and seeing the lessons click was such a blast that I couldn’t really stop wanting to push more difficult content with it. Now, of course, the fun thing is that Blood DK is not pre-artifact Legion Vengeance DH forever, because once a pull is rolling, you are absolutely rock solid with reasonable levels of play. But when other tanks can and often do need external intervention, healing, even full external CDs, I think the ultimate mode of tank play is the Blood model – if you die first in a pull, it is because you fucked up at playing and it means you have learning to do and lessons to take-away from that pull. Once you start learning, Purgatory keeps you, as my co-tank says, honest – as you start to feel invincible and pull huge, Purgatory exists to slap you to reality and teach you the boundaries of the kit and your current gear. It’s a lot of fun.

To that end, my DK is currently my second-highest raid prog toon at 3/9 H and the one I am most trying to farm the current legendary on (I just bought the materials to craft it today as a just in case, so I’m either cursed to not see it ever or I will get a drop on reset day and piss my 2H strength users in my guild off lol). I’ve also done a little Frost DPS, but I wouldn’t have much to say about it as of yet.

The Next Level Down – Focused Alts

My warrior has been playing Prot mostly with a dabble of Arms, and she’s at 460 item level and halfway by rating score to KSM. Prot warrior was a late DF Season 1 pickup for me in alt rotation and it’s still a lot of fun, although I think the kit kind of feels less exciting now that I have Blood DK in the stable and with gear. My Warrior has seen full normal raid prog in both specs I play on her and while I have done some extracurricular Fyrakk kills for legendary chances on her, I’m kind of hoping she doesn’t get it since I enjoy Prot a bit more.

My main warlock, who I play Demonology on, is likewise a bit over halfway to KSM and with full normal raid clears to her name. Demo is a lot of fun for me in general and this season it is a crazy good DPS spec, so it’s been great to have in the alt stable. I kind of have a hunch this character will be the next big KSM push I make.

My resto druid has been a blast who I’ve only done a few keys on alongside a full normal raid clear. Resto has been a lot of fun to learn, because it has ramp similar to Discipline Priest in how it responds to damage events, but it also has less viable reactive tools, so it helps train me on healing in a different way. I can see how the changes made to healers in general hit Resto Druid, because the mana efficiency in raiding I’ve done feels real bad, but in Mythic Plus it’s like I never run out. I think the preferred M+ DPS mechanism for resto being catweaving helps, since you spend 0 mana during catweaves and with Grove Guardians in the kit and empowered by tier bonus, you can put out your tree buddies and then just kittymode for a while – if Resto Shaman wasn’t a thing, Druid would be my highest DPS healer in M+!

After years (hell, decades) of being dismissive of Rogues (the class fantasy is too basic, the appeal isn’t there, the gameplay is clunky), I finally think I kinda get them now. I started the season goofing around on Outlaw, which is a fun spec to play and has the flavor I like in Rogue (pulling out a gun as an attack for a stealth class is American level 3000 tactics), but I think Assassination is the one I actually enjoy more now, because the building around poison damage and setting up bleeds is a fun bit of gameplay. The one thing I strongly dislike about Rogues in general is that they are still very much locked on weapon types – after switching from Outlaw to Assassination, I went to the dummies in Valdrakken to test and found that I couldn’t even hit Mutilate without having daggers equipped specifically, so my mace and axe for Outlaw went poof in favor of item level downgrade Dreamsurge daggers. But the spec is fun, I full cleared the raid on normal on an eigth character with it, and I’m compelled enough to push some more and see how it goes.

The Less-Focused Alts

My mage went from Arcane to Frost because I was struggle-bussing the Arcane rotation. Frost is fun and the damage comes easy – the kit has a very logical setup and loop of gameplay in M+ and a lot of the AoE options are very satisfying compared to the old just-Blizzard and maybe Frozen Orb style. I think this is the next character I want to drag into the raid for a normal clear, but we’ll see.

I’ve been tanking on both Prot Paladin and my second Guardian Druid for a minute. Prot Paladin is very nice and I could see it pushing a lot higher, but I’ve just generally not had it catch me like the other tanks. For bear druid, I’m keeping it low and slow since my second druid is my newest level 70 and among my lowest-geared toons. Guardian is fun, but the defensive model of Ironfur competing with DPS rage spenders feels bad compared to Prot Warrior, which has the same basic resource system but feeds rage-spending DPS abilities with loads of procs instead, which makes Prot Warrior feel more enjoyable. Additionally, the flavor of the Warrior kit is excellent and far more fun for tanking, like leaping between pulls, charging into the fray, and Thunderclap having a big animation and sound effect with it when compared to Swipe and Thrash, which both feel very meh in excitement by comparison.

My Evoker, my third and last KSM in Season 1, fell off for me in Season 2 and hasn’t much recovered yet in S3. I’ve been playing and pushing higher on her than most alts, but I disliked playing Augmentation in the open world and that led to me switching back to Devastation, which is fun most of the time but feels weird in dungeons with Pyre spam, especially given the overall bent of the current tierset. I’ll keep slowly grinding it out here, but not feeling it as much.

My healer stable is rounded out by a Resto Shaman and a second Monk as Mistweaver, which are both pretty fun to play since they both tend towards damage-heavy playstyles with maintenance healing being up for those moments with less incoming damage. Both are satisfying to play and enjoyable, but I just haven’t pushed either character that seriously. The Mistweaver rework this patch has made them very strong, which I have seen even at low levels of gear, but in terms of available time I just haven’t gotten around to big pushes on these two.

My second Warlock (as Destro) and Shaman (as Enhancement) have been fun-ish to play. Enhancement feels like a dark horse meta pick – it has gained value over the season so far and it generally seems on-track to be really strong by the end of the season. Destro Warlock…I kind of like it, but I also don’t. The playstyle is a smidge too simple (having a single talent build that works in all scenarios means the view never changes), and the way their AoE is setup and works feels kind of clunky and bad to me, even if I know that once it’s rolling, it is great. I started this Warlock as my Affliction build, but Affliction the last two expansions has just felt like it’s been in an awful place for most levels of content outside the very high end due to awkwardly long ramp times for damage. They’re really good in AoE…if a pull will last long enough for Seeds of Corruption to blow up about a dozen times. If not, well, sometimes the healer can beat you in M+ low keys at DPS and well, that feels awful.

I’ve been playing my Hunter as Marksmanship, as I have for years now, because I enjoy the big crits and the overall spec gameplay flow. Marksmanship is doing fine this tier, but it gets meta-chased out of comps because Beast Mastery is higher than it at damage in most analysis and Survival is also having a decent season. The gameplay loop in M+ requires some setup, but Trick Shots isn’t hard to maintain and the habit I have to train myself away from more is trying to early refresh the buff when it lasts for a couple of casts. I might cave and try BM again because I do like the spec and I hear it’s piss-easy to play this season and do bonkers numbers, but I kind of like the no-pet hunter style especially in a season where you have to very quickly dismiss pets a few different times in multiple dungeons for the sake of skip routes, jump-downs, and avoiding overpulls.

Lastly, there’s my dedicated Shadow Priest, a second max-level priest. Uh…Shadow is overall still fine enough this tier, although I know that it’s one of those meta-excluded specs because it remains Shadow – clunky and insistent on lots of ramp to do real damage. Being able to reliably get Shadow Crash in every build helps a ton, because you can easily apply DoTs to a full pack and run, but the curse of pugging at low level keys is that tanks there rarely sit still for stuff like Shadow Crash to hit properly, so you’re constantly playing a guessing game around how bad your tank’s zoomies are and losing thousands or even millions of points of damage due to Shadow Crash whiffs or having to manually multi-dot everything. Without Mind Sear in the kit, there’s no longer a lazy, easy-mode AoE option – you have to have DoTs rolling hard on everything so the echo effect that cleaves damage from single-target casts out will work – so if you need more than a two-GCD window in a large AoE pull to get DoTs on 80%+ of the pack, it feels really awful to play around. When the tank can plant for placed AoEs and you can get solid Shadow Crash coverage, conversely, it feels awesome – but if you do most of your keys with PUGs still learning the ropes in baby keys, you will know suffering as a Shadow Priest.

Overall Season Plans

So I wasn’t sure how to end this post, because I started out not intending it to be a comprehensive update to this extent. Also, I chafe at the idea of setting firm goals again given my experience in Season 2, but at the same time, I’ve already hit a higher point of success than my best-ever prior season in DF Season 1, so there’s not necessarily a whole let left to do where I’d feel bad for setting and failing to meet such a goal.

Firstly, I think as a goal, I want my DK to get the legendary axe. It’s still kind of a meh legendary (there’s a lot of nerd math out that suggests the interaction of the channel and DoT mechanics can cause some lost damage that scales negatively with Haste, not to mention that on any melee, being locked in place for a 3 second channel to get the biggest benefit of the weapon feels real bad), but I have the mats and of the characters I could get the drop on, having it on my DK makes the easiest usage of the weapon – the only way it can be used to tank, for one. If I do get it, my guild and I have talked about what it might look like to switch mains – because, on the one hand, we’d lose Mystic Touch from my Monk and my Monk is currently the second-highest geared character in the entire guild, which counts for something, on top of having practiced it to a good level over two prior tiers of DF raiding, but on the other hand, the legendary adds a ton of damage reliably over a fight and having a second Blood DK tank is not actually a bad move given the Blood DK kit and the interaction of that kit with a lot of the fights in Amirdrassil (grips on Fyrakk adds alone is a huge net benefit and not nearly as fussy as trying to launch those same adds with Ring of Peace on Monk). Playing my DK regularly and keeping her gear moving upwards is a part of that deal, in my head, so that should I be cursed with such luck and end up making the main swap, it won’t require me rolling on a bunch of new gear and suddenly being a gear-competitor in Heroic when right now, my Monk only needs crests and a higher upgrade-track pair of pants to be like, completely done with gear.

The second idea I have is to push a few more KSMs. With KSH done and the account-wide tier set glows open, the sweet-spot for alt prog is KSM – you get a Heroic-equivalent tier piece omnitoken, the rating grind isn’t that hard or troublesome, and seeing the content from more roles and perspectives is cool and genuinely performance-boosting when you go back and play on your main. I feel like a stronger tank for knowing what my healers deal with, a stronger healer for understanding when tank damage and party damage will spike and when I can ease off the heals and ramp the damage, a stronger DPS for knowing what pain points a healer will have and how to use defensives and self-healing to smooth it without losing too much damage output while also knowing how to try and ease a pull on threat for the sake of letting the tank establish a comfy lead, and in all cases, you learn what utility a group can bring in different classes and specs and get better at assembling groups and managing the process as a leader.

My third base goal is to push at least two more characters through the normal raid, reaching 10/18 level 70s who’ve progressed the entire raid on normal. At a certain point, maybe more than just 10, but I also don’t want to overcommit, especially since M+ is still a faster overall gearing experience. At the same time though, doing Normal gave a lot of my lower-tier alts big boosts in item level in a single run, so there’s a temptation to just say “fuck it” and push all 18 through the raid on Normal at least one time.

So far, Dragonflight Season 3 has been a lot of fun for me personally and one thing I really think shines about the Dragonflight design paradigm this deep into the expansion is how easy it is to play alts and want to do stuff like this. In the past, getting to this level (of insanity) would take weekly chores, pointless opaque grinds, and a lot of general bullshit to deal with, where here, I can log on and ask “what do I want to play today?” and just go. Socially, sure, some issues with getting into groups can exist, but it is relatively straightforward to farm up better gear, get to tier bonuses quickly, and then push a couple of low keys or a newbie-friendly Normal raid PUG and be in a good spot where some of those social factors fade away. Even at the point I started keeping every class at max level, over 10 years ago now, I never played a full stable of characters like this, and it’s kind of neat to be able to do so now. I think it also helps make me a more effective raid leader and more understanding of what the players who I run with go through and have to understand about their specs, which is very helpful to me personally.

Sure, it’s likely going to start winding down a bit for me as new FFXIV content comes into view (more on that in a future post), but for now, I’m hyper-engaged with DF Season 3 still, and I expect that to remain the case until something upends it for me from outside (or I hit all my goals and start to ease off the gas).