Today, ahead of the drop Season 4 of Dragonflight (date TBA), we received a huge announcement about dungeons, dungeon difficulty, and the tuning of rewards and difficulty in Mythic Plus for Dragonflight Season 4…but also news about changes to both Heroic dungeons and Mythic base-difficulty, what ends up being called M0 by the community.

Blizzard’s approach here is both smart but also potentially challenging, and it also continues a legacy of Season 4 filler arcs being full of testing changes that end up sticking around.

First, the Change Sans Editorial

Blizzard’s changes are aimed at recalbrating dungeon difficulty. To do this, they’re doing the following:

-Normal dungeons remain as-is.
-Heroic dungeons are being tuned in terms of rewards and numeric difficulty to match the current M0 difficulty, but without added Mythic-only mechanics. You can still queue.
-M0s are being tuned up in terms of rewards and difficulty to match what a season-appropriate M+10 would be and remain on a weekly lockout that requires using a premade group (assembled from friends, trade, or the LFG tool). M0 will remain without a timer, affix, or limits on changing gear, talents, or spec inside the dungeon.
-Mythic Plus tuning will adjust such that what a +2 is next season will be what we would expect from a +11, scaling up from there with a +5 being roughly equal to a +15 under current rules and a new +10 being roughly as difficult as a +20. Affixes enter at +2 (base affix), +5 (first affix pool), and +10 (second affix pool). The vault rewards for this banding are adjusted to accomodate, with max reward from the Great Vault now existing at +10.

TL;DR – Heroic is M0 without bonus mechanics and queueable, M0 is M+10 without M+ restrictions (and with existing M0 restrictions), and M+ now functionally starts difficulty at a much higher curvepoint, adjusting rewards to match.

The Role of Heroic Dungeons

When they were first introduced in The Burning Crusade, Heroic dungeons existed as an aspirational goal for players of that era. You needed to grind enough rep to get a key to unlock Heroic for the dungeons tied to a given faction (TBC was winged-dungeon city, so one rep could unlock around 3 dungeons on average), and Heroic was a grindy sort of way you could choose to engage with WoW dungeons that gave decent rewards throughout, through both higher base item-level drops and Badges of Justice, used to buy raid-level gear. The major catchup mechanic of TBC was the late-expansion addition of Magister’s Terrace, a dungeon that had higher item level drops with both a normal and Heroic mode. Heroics were crucial in TBC to filling gear gaps during raiding, getting attunements done for the major raids of the expansion, and a weekly dungeon quest that rewarded handsomely.

As time went on, however, Heroics sort of lost their niche as challenging content. In Wrath of the Lich King, Heroics became an expected part of most PvE players’ endgame diet, with a similar structure to TBC in terms of reward, the addition of Dungeon Finder allowing you to queue in directly for one (and the buffs for doing content in a random group), and the upgrading Emblem system allowing you to run Heroics for current endgame rewards, with no in-dungeon scaling but instead offering new dungeons to match with almost every new raid tier. This was the model through Cataclysm, even if Cata launch was plagued with a substantial increase to the difficulty of Heroic dungeons in that expansion compared to Wrath before it.

Dungeons basically stayed this way until late Warlords of Draenor, when the Mythic difficulty was added to dungeons during the lifecycle of patch 6.2 as the M0 we know today – good-ish loot, weekly lockout, harder difficulty. Legion then used this as the base for Mythic Plus, adding the infinitely-scaling keystones on and creating the seasonal model we’ve had ever since.

Since M0 and M+ have existed, they’ve basically pushed down the role of Heroic dungeons. At the very start of an expansion, doing Heroic is worthwhile to almost everyone because the early start with no seasonal content means you can’t run M+, raid, or rated PvP, and gear upgrades need to come from somewhere. Plus, while you can do M0 in that window, it’s a weekly lockout with a relatively low chance of giving you everything you need – so Heroic is great for filling those slots. Outside of that…once seasonal content starts, Heroic basically only exists for people that are spinning up fresh alts from scratch, casual players who like to queue in, and those who have self-determined their ceiling is at Heroic. Even then, in Dragonflight the gearing capability of Heroic dungeons was challenged by the existence of Super-rares and their loot being better (if rarer), and even in the scenarios I mentioned, a lot kind of depends on the player – if I was spinning up an alt today, I’d do Emerald Dream questing for 415 gear I can upgrade and then push straight into M+2s for farmable loot over doing Heroics. As seasons wind on and world gear gets better (especially the case in Dragonflight), lower-tier dungeons have even less of a role. Normals are basically and almost exclusively the domain of leveling characters and absolutely fresh level 70s getting their feet wet in the game. Heroics, meanwhile, don’t offer a substantial enough upgrade over Normals (save for the new-in-10.2 vault slot for it) and even M0s are not particularly worthwhile given that you can farm M+ on low key levels for better rewards with very little increase in difficulty.

So for a while now, basically since Legion, most players who do dungeons would have done a tiny number of Heroics compared to even Normals but especially M0 and keys. This expansion, hell this season, I’ve done more M+ keys on a fourth-string alt than I’ve done heroics the entire expansion, and I haven’t done a single Dragonflight Heroic dungeon since 10.0! Where Heroics were once the point of endgame gameplay for those outside of raiding, in the modern model, they’re a speedbump you roll over on your way to your first season gameplay in the real content. I know that saying “real content” in this case sounds elitist, but honestly, I think at all levels, it is safe to say that Heroic dungeons have almost 0 point to anyone outside of that first-season grind. If you’re a world content enjoyer, that track has equivalent and even better rewards and isn’t tuned to need pre-gearing. If you’re a raider, the raid ecosystem gives you better gear more consistently, and if you run dungeons consistently, Mythic 0 is a better current starting point, but so is just jumping into keys at the low-end.

To my mind, Heroic has needed an adjustment for a while and I think that this, while it’s not a lot, at least serves to delineate Heroic from Normal so the difference isn’t just 7 item levels and an almost-unnoticeable increase in numeric difficulty.

Expanding On Mythic Baseline

Mythic 0 has been interesting because it has, basically since Legion, been sort of a barely-there bridge into Mythic Plus. It exists, in essence, to create scaling opportunities, to provide a base for tuning the keystone levels from. For most players in the dungeon ecosystem, Mythic 0 is a similar stopgap to Heroic dungeons – a thing you do to fill out loot but not much more than that. They aren’t bad, mind you, same as Heroic – but they just don’t really currently fit in the rewards ecosystem, especially as it has changed in Dragonflight. Like right now, M0 gear is 437 item level, which is great, but the Emerald Dream quest gear can all be upgraded to this level, the world gear weekly rewards are higher, and farming M0 once per dungeon per week for loot is a fool’s errand when you can just go run +2s for better loot, better vault, and an overall easier experience finding a group and getting people in.

In the Dragonflight model, dungeons have needed unique tuning for a minute since Mythic baseline no longer has to be an actual baseline – each season is tuned to it’s own standard because the seasons are a mix of old and new dungeons and you cannot rely on scaling up difficulty in a 6-year old dungeon to provide those results. Because of that, Mythic 0 no longer has to serve the role of being the baseline to which all scaling is applied and so for gameplay purposes, it is a valid and good idea, to my mind, to push M0 into a niche of its own that better suits what players are looking for. In this case, the keywords are crystal-clear – M0 in this new model is designed to be the difficult, no-timer pressure dungeon mode where you can meet a good challenge for decent rewards without having to optimize routing or pull to a specific, tightly-tuned timer. Do I think there could be blowback from pushing the intro Mythic difficulty for dungeons to this height? Perhaps. A +10 isn’t necessarily hard in the way a lot of us who do dungeons see it, but that’s also from a relatively-higher level of exposure and practice. Will M0s be a challenge for the average player? Absolutely. I think most players won’t be spooked and a lot of players who don’t push high keys could very easily get to the +10 range today, so this scaling has a certain logic to it. Will it rejuvenate M0s in late-season play? Eh, I’m skeptical of that. It has the same problem in a way, which is that the scaling works out in favor of just doing the +2 instead. However, it does offer a dangling carrot to a specific crowd – those who want to do dungeons as progression content but don’t want the timer. Sure, current iteration M0 is just this too, but the reward scaling is too close to the low end of the reward spectrum, so I think there’s value to it.

Mythic Plus Gets Subtracted

The biggest changes are, as expected in this kind of situation, to Mythic Plus. Mythic Plus is basically being scale-condensed, so a +2 of tomorrow will be the same relative difficulty as a current +11, with the rest of the scale basically continuing up past that so that a +5 is roughly similar to a +15 of today, and a +10 is the equal of a current +20.

What’s the point? – you might ask, and it comes down to a few goals and ideas.

-Mythic Plus’ existing granular scaling means a lot of key ranges are underserved. There are generally fewer groups in, say, the +4-+8 range, fewer in the low teens, and fewer in the high teens, because the rating system and reward model congregate palyers around defined starting or ending points. You get a lot of +2s for newbies, a few +6s for easy Drake’s crest farming, +11 for Wyrm’s crests, +15 for KSM and +16 for Aspect’s crests, and +20 and up gets granular since a lot of people want 20s for max vault/portals and others want to push their skill and prog as high as possible. Everything between those is sort-of inconsequential.
-Most people who do a +2 today will 3 chest it, move to a +5, three-chest that, move to an 8, and two-chest that to hit their first actual challenge at +10s. Very few players in the Mythic Plus ecosystem actually need to do 2-9 range keys for skillups or gear – if you can get into M+ and play to a base level of competency, the first real challenge exists at +10 for a simple reason that is the third point here.
-Gear curves make lower keys somewhat silly as-is. The way dungeons scale numerically so often means that most players overgear the low keys and you only start to meet challenges on par with an average player’s item level once you get into that 10 and up range. Not even dungeon gear specifically, but like any gear – world content gear at max upgrade will be enough numerically to deal with everything up to around a +10, and with exceptional skill you can surpass even that in a 437 set of kit.

So today’s Mythic Plus scene has an issue for people moving between tiers, because the between-tier space is just not there. You can easily find breakpoint keys – entry level, crest farms, rating breakpoints, portals, vault – but the key ranges between are hard to find. This isn’t quite so bad in the lower range, because you can step from an 8 to a 10 easily enough or especially like a 4 to a 6 without breaking a sweat, but if you need the genuine skillup of moving from a 16 to like an 18 range, finding that 18 is really, really tough. Low keys are basically training wheels because they help ease you into the timer pressure, but on their own they aren’t compelling content for the most part, because the tuning doesn’t become a substantial challenge until about a +10 which makes most dungeon mechanics in keys below that recoverable, often easily, and even when they might be a wipe signal on a higher key. Loot and reward scaling in Dragonflight has also meant that pushing low keys in seasons past the first one is kind of silly because you just have the power of math on your side – you can outlevel M0 without touching a dungeon and that makes that first range of keys feel really weak and simple as a result.

So Blizzard’s aim with the change is to consolidate the key ranges, to create a spike of difficulty that corresponds with the branding of “Mythic” in the raid context, but then to create a smaller, overall smoother difficulty curve in the keystone range. If you were around for the start of Dragonflight, one of Blizzard’s big tweaks to M+ was to incresae the scaling value per key level starting at +11, such that a +11 in DF is harder than a key equivalent to it in Shadowlands or prior, but now we start Mythic Plus in general at that point of scaling and then climb relatively gracefully from there. This also condenses the reward structure so that every climb up the ladder should, in theory, feel better and more rewarding. Mentally, the idea of “only” needing to hit a +10 for the Vault is an interesting way to overcome the feeling of limitless climbing that some players can get looking at a progression of rewards all the way from +2 to +20. It seems, generally, better. Let’s discuss each point.

-With the main key range as +2-+10, each key level should have a distinct place to serve for players. The increase in difficulty should mean that the distribution over the course of a season changes too – fewer low keys will get 3-chested from scaling alone, which should push more players into 3s and 4s, and that should have a knock-on effect all the way up into the low 10s, where the hardcore rating pushers will be squeaking out new records.
-By starting on the rough scaling of the current +11, low-key Mythic Plus runs should have a greater challenge that will make them more distinct from the lower difficulties and non-timed M0. This means that mechanical adherence and learning will matter more, but you’ll also be learning better behaviors in dungeons earlier in the curve since you can see why the mechanic matters first-hand through gameplay experience.
-By placing the lowest keystone difficulty at a level of reward that beats what most current players have, the gear incentive exists for a lot of players to do some low keys and for the more casual climbers to start in there and farm up a gear base to push ahead with. It will no longer, in theory at least, be possible to simply immediately outlevel the low keys and as long as the numeric tuning follows this, it should stand up that players will have a more gradual progression through key levels instead of spiking into low double-digits nearly immediately.

My Take on the Changes Overall

The changes to Heroic, as they stand, are interesting. Being able to queue up next season for easy runs at 476 gear and 489 vault slots is pretty appealing on a lot of my low-string alts and the army I’m working on leveling now to prepare for The War Within. It also does a decent job of setting apart Heroic difficulty from Normal and giving you a clear reason to run it for certian audiences of players. Will this matter to a lot of raid mains who do extensive prep work? Eh, probably not until TWW. For S4 of Dragonflight, any raiding main doing Heroic should already reasonably be at or around 476, and those who do extracurricular M+ can be in the 480 range with ease. At the start of a new expansion, though, especially when the seasonal content isn’t available in those first couple of weeks – this will be a godsend to gearing, because if the proportionality of the scale remains in place, then Heroic drops will match LFR loot and M0 will match Normal raid. I don’t know that I expect them to have that scaling in place at the start of an expansion – traditionally raid loot leapfrogs even M0 (DF started S1 with LFR at 376 and M0 at 372), but at the same time, I think modern Blizzard is less likely to hard gate everything into raid and I think that with the upgrade system in place across the game from the start of an expansion, the dropped item level matters less for gear since what matters more long-term is the upgrade track and max potential item level.

Changing M0 to be a harder check is an interesting move that I think opens up a clear space for a new model of progression, and that is pretty neat. It should mean, in theory, that those week 1 M0 runs people do at launch are going to be harder, and I think that sets an interesting model for TWW that parallels Cataclysm heroic dungeons in that way – hard, worthwhile content to prep for raid. My controversial take on Cataclysm is that I enjoyed the nailbiting dungeons at launch because it made me a better player and gave room for skill expression, and I think that if TWW M0s capture some of that same vibe, it will be a nice step for the game. The weekly lockout on M0 continues to be baffling, however, given that M+ loot remains like the breadsticks at Olive Garden – unlimited. If dungeon meta-achievements continue to be tied to Mythic difficulty, I could see potential problems with this scaling and the difficulty curve it will provide those achievements, but I could also see the TWW versions of these being backtracked to Heroic like the good old days, given that the numeric tuning of Heroic is supposed to be in-line with current M0, and the whole point of pushing achievements to M0 was that the tuning better aligned the overall difficulty intended for the achievements. Given that early access will have, potentially, opened up doing M0 for 3 resets prior to a season launch, this could get interesting fast (and it depends on how Blizzard is defining the “no player power gain” caveat for the Early Access launch window).

What I do think is overall well-played is the changes to Mythic Plus. I think that there are some real genuine issues with how key levels scale currently, with where players end up by force of scaling and by reward planning, and what behaviors can get ingrained in that 2-10 range currently that translate negatively into higher key levels because you’re not forced through genuine challenge to play a lot of mechanics well until those double-digit current key ranges. I do think that the change in key range might inflict minor psychic damage to some folks just because of the numbers (the perception of such a switch is always going to feel weird to a subset of players!), but the overall intent is sound. My only fear, and it’s just from the perspective of analysis and not my personal play, is that this does leave a bit of a void for players who currently only really play keys in that low range. Is that a lot of players? I don’t really know and can’t say with certainty. In my play groups, people either push hard towards the top end of rewards or don’t do keys at all, and I think this change only means that’s likely to calcify everyone into their existing positions. Removing something those players currently can do, not replacing it, but having something with the same name still in the game is potentially confusing and I think how Blizzard messages this in-game is going to matter to overall perception.

Speaking of messaging, Blizzard kind of bungled this a little bit. The table is hard to read on their announcement post if you can’t get the whole thing into a single view and the verbiage choices are odd, which makes it kind of sound like they’re getting rid of 2-10 keys altogether except they aren’t. For something that was obviously in the oven for a bit, it needed a little more cooking (as an announcement), because every group I’m in spent a few minutes of back and forth discussion trying to figure out what exactly they were trying to say. Without the context of raid item levels for Season 4 codified explicitly, it is also a bit hard to judge the table. If we assume the tracks work the same as they do today, then we can reasonably conclude what item levels in the raids will look like, but it’s not assured yet (and Vault of the Incarnates could be wonky given that it didn’t have an upgrade track for gear).

Overall, I think the changes are largely positive, because when they’ve done difficulty increases to Mythic Plus in the past, it has generally improved player retention and acquisition for the mode. Dragonflight coupled that with a rewards change, however, so given that rewards are not changing that much in the new model, this might be interesting to see unfold, especially since this is the first destructive change to Mythic Plus, where there is basically no real replacement for the difficulty curve of 2-9 keystones. I do think that we’d also need to see it in the context of an expansion designed around this philosophy from the beginning, which TWW will give us as that is the plan for dungeons in the expansion as well. It also sort of side-steps the debate about how well one should be able to gear from M+ (some salty dumb Mythic raiders, mostly Liquid’s THD, have been moaning on Twitter with bad takes again), but I think that is a positive because I think the current model with the upgrade system from Season 3 is at a pretty good level of chase balanced between rapid short-term climb and settling in to longer-tail goals. With crest acquisition changing slightly to compensate, feedback may change when things go live, but overall – it is a promising start towards a substantial revamp of content curve in WoW.