Yesterday, I was able to cross off a major goal for the opening window of Season 1 of The War Within – I accomplished Keystone Master, getting my Heroic-level tier token (traded for a helm), my Diamond Mechsuit mount (I love my new big boi), and getting to take a bit of a chill on my Monk so I could focus in on other characters and other goals.

This also makes a convenient breakpoint to talk about how Mythic Plus has changed from Dragonflight into The War Within, and to summarize it in a narrative fashion around how I followed (or mostly didn’t follow) the changes. Let’s go!

What Worked in Dragonflight (And Didn’t)

Dragonflight saw a fairly substantial number of changes to Mythic Plus in its own right. Season 1 started like any of the last 8 seasons that preceded it, with a seasonal affix at level 10 and up, the same overall distribution of and versions of affixes, and the only major changes being a minor scaling increase that kicked in at level 11 and up and the maximum reward tier for the end chest and Great Vault now capping at level 20 (19 technically for end chest but hey). In Season 1 of Dragonflight, the only source of PvE upgradeable gear that could carry for a full season was Mythic Plus, as the Elemental Storms gear only had two ranks to start, with a third added in 10.0.7 that extended it to just below Normal Vault of the Incarnates gear.

Mythic Plus in Season 1 of DF started with the same issues a lot of players had noted – that affixes were a nuisance that meant playing against the affix more than playing the dungeon, which also meant that Push Weeks were a thing – a week where the affix selection made dungeon play noticeably easier and thus where many players chose to push their harder keys and seek bigger rating jumps.

In Season 2 of DF, we saw a major overhaul that completely retooled affixes, adding new ones, retiring old ones, and setting new key level milestones where affixes were introduced, with the base affixes of Fortified or Tyrannical on all keys, but only two affixes, introduced at levels 7 and 14. This is also the point where the current, game-wide two currency upgrade system was added with crests and stones. This kinda worked, but the new affixes added kept the same problems – they were just added nuisances that distracted from the dungeon and created more push weeks. They had a bigger problem, which is that it became common for most affixes to be healer problems, especially with affixes like Afflicted where healers often have to have their dispels talented but DPS and tanks with them don’t always (and it became a major pain point when selfish and lazy DPS wouldn’t make easy talent swaps to get their cleanses). These affixes were also all curse and no kiss – with curse/kiss philosophy being the idea that an affix properly played should give a reward while improper play was punishing. In this iteration, affixes were all curse – doing them meant no benefit other than continuing on normally, but failing them meant a huge punishment to the group.

Season 3 of DF saw relatively few changes, with the major gamewide change being the addition of an extra tier of power scaling between Season 2 and Season 3, creating a 39 item level gap instead of the prior 26 level standard, which, when coupled with tuning, made Season 3 of DF one of the easiest seasons of Mythic Plus in the game. Gear scaled high and all was well, except all the existing problems that the Season 2 affix revamp had wrought which remained everpresent.

Season 4 of DF was the experiment ground, where Blizzard introduced a scaling change that was a test for The War Within. Dungeon difficulty was compressed, making Heroic dungeons equal to old Mythic 0s, Mythic 0s being roughly equal in tuning difficulty to an old Mythic +10, and starting keys with the new +2, which was roughly in-line with the prior +11 tuning. This experiment meant that the key range was compressed, with the top reward tier now being +10s and affixes at 2 (Fortified and Tyrannical), 5, and 10. This experiment was meant to accomplish a few things – to increase rewards for Heroic and Mythic 0 dungeons while also introducing better overall difficulty progression that would see fewer empty key ranges (in the old system, stuff around 4-8 was kind of a graveyard of people baby-stepping keys up or just doing alt keys and that range was often hard to find a group in as the season progressed). This experiment was, overall, successful. For players who love Mythic Plus, it meant a hot start to the season as the difficulty of your first keys in a season was noticeably higher, but after a normative period, everything was pretty much back to business. It was hard to judge as a season however, because Season 4 of Dragonflight was kind of a low-engagement season for most players except the truly dedicated.

Season 4 of DF was the template, but what happened in beta for The War Within as Blizzard worked to change the system?

Constant, Erratic Changes

I’m going to be real, I am constructing this in retrospective by using dated news stories, because it felt Blizzard made so many changes over time to Mythic Plus on TWW beta that it was kind of just not worth following for me!

Blizzard’s big gambit for TWW was to carry forward the difficulty squish of Season 4 of Dragonflight, but to then expand upon it with a substantial affix rework and reward tweaks. The first round of affix changes saw a new set of affixes that made trash in dungeons carry a new kiss/curse combo that rotated, like Reckless, where enemies would have 20% Armor Penetration, but would give up 30% of their armor value and also take 10% increased Arcane damage. The idea was that weekly changes could shake up the meta by introducing new vulnerabilities for damage and create different effects that players would have to manage, but many of these also just ended up being healer affixes in practice – all the curse-side effects just meant your party took more damage. Shaking up the damage meta on a weekly basis would have self-evidently been a nightmare to tune correctly, so these affixes got dropped pretty quickly.

There was some back and forth with tuning and affix levels that took place over months of time, with that first round of new affixes being dropped in about 11 days to make way for the Xal’atath affixes, which did make it to live in revised forms. The changes trickled out over time, so it was frankly not worth getting too invested until the end of beta, and I didn’t even pay attention until live, when…

The New State of Affixes…is Good?

Now, let me start with this – I was a rare Affix Defender, even in the old system. I like variety and if my main mode of play is going to be running the same dungeons a lot, having something change, even if it doesn’t directly interact with the dungeon mechanics, is a net positive for me unless it is highly annoying. Most affixes did not cross that threshold for me, and I also liked Seasonal affixes, so understand that as I discuss the new system.

The new affixes are all, largely, things that interact more with the dungeons. The 4 rotating Xal’atath affixes all exist in the same form regardless of dungeon, but when they spawn and on what pulls is based on timer and group progression, which changes the execution, in some cases by a lot! The remaining affixes all either directly buff dungeon mobs to make their mechanics more standout, or interact solely with the timer, which increases punishment for failure and is maybe the one negative of the new affixes.

The new affix structure is as follows: at +2, one of a weekly rotation of four Xal’atath themed kiss/curse affixes spawn, where you have to do something to stop enemies from getting buffed by them and receive a buff for doing so – so far it’s been to lock orb mobs to gain stacking Haste and movement speed or intercepting moving orbs to gain Mastery and Leech, with two more that have not been seen on live servers yet, then at +4 the old Tyrannical and Fortified rear their heads in much the same form as ever, level +7 and up adds Challenger’s Peril, which increases the death timer penalty to 15 seconds per death (up from 5), then at level +10 whichever of Tyrannical and Fortified isn’t active that week becomes active alongside the existing affixes, and then at +12 and up Xal’atath stops spawning her fun mechanics (which means no more buffs for you!) and just flat buffs everything in the dungeon to have 20% more health and do 20% more damage!

There are some standout things we’ll talk about here – put a pin in the fact that Tyrannical and Fortified are no longer base affixes and that it is possible to have both, as that has implications across the Mythic Plus ecosystem.

Firstly, the Xal’atath affixes are actually quite enjoyable to me so far. The mechanics of them are forgiving and far easier to execute against compared to some of the Dragonflight added affixes, and a slight or even total failure of these affixes (at least for the ones on live so far) is relatively un-punishing given the short buff duration on enemies. They play quite interestingly with the dungeons, and while they are an additional thing on top, I think they integrate better as a part of these dungeons just by virtue of the fact that the way they spawn and times they spawn can reshape some pulls and require you to mind mechanics a bit more. Getting a buff on keys 11 and lower is nice and it means that you have some assistance with timing the dungeon that plays to different secondary stat buffs and strengths week over week (without being as aggressive as the first crack Blizzard took at the idea).

Secondly, Fortified and Tyrannical are still kind of ass. Yes, they enhance the base dungeon with more power and thus are in alignment with playing against the dungeon, and yes, they do add build diversity in keys where only one is active, allowing you to have differing optimizations for different affix sets, but they feel bad because they retain their imbalance against each other – Tyrannical is a slog that makes bosses much more frustrating and punishing while Fortified is relatively breezy and makes trash slightly harder but because of how much less damage and health trash mobs have, the buff is innately less threatening. The first week of the season (and expansion!) being Tyrannical meant higher keys were a bit of a slog and struggle with deflated item level values, but that should smooth out a bit as the season progresses, and obviously, at +10 and up, you get both, so hey, the struggle is real!

The Challenger’s Peril affix is just kinda bad feeling, no real way around it. Sure, the idea is sound – by the time you hit +7s and up you should really mostly be over accidental deaths and so it doesn’t necessarily hit too hard, but it feels bad to punish minor mistakes with death and with a tripled death penalty, especially since around +7 is the point where incoming damage is substantially higher and defensives are far more necessary to keep rolling. The skill floor at a +7 does mean this isn’t as bad as it sounds, but it makes mistakes feel bad – my KSM-winning key was a +7 Siege of Boralus where I didn’t notice the brown cone AoE on the brown bricks and got one shot in the first minute of the dungeon, which was not exactly crowning me in glory.

+10 means you get both Tyrannical and Fortified as mentioned, so lots of big numbers. This is also where rewards cap out!

Lastly, at +12 and up, Xal’atath replaces her +2 affix with a generic aura that buffs enemy health and damage dealt by 20%, so now you don’t have to do the dance of the +2 affix, but you also get no added buffs and the dungeon scales up pretty harshly with a stack of Fortified, Tyrannical, and this 20% buff on top.

So, overall, I like this new structure, and nearly all of these directly work with the dungeon to create enough unique experiences that you can still learn and grow from week to week. There’s something I mentioned putting a pin in with these though that we need to visit now…

Rating, Rewards, and Raising Difficulty

With Fortified and Tyrannical no longer existing as base affixes, the rating system added to the game in Shadowlands Season 2 no longer works the same. Before, in order to have full rating for a dungeon, you needed two runs per dungeon – one per base affix. The highest of the two in level and point value was 2/3rds of the score and the lower key the remaining 33% of the total point value you had in a dungeon, which meant that getting Keystone Master (2,000 rating overall) meant landing around a +5 in each dungeon twice under the new levels in DF Season 4, with Keystone Hero coming around a +7-8 in each dungeon and portals at +10. Under the new scoring system, where you only have one score per dungeon that is simply the highest key, you need to reach a little harder for KSM, with around a 7 untimed per dungeon being enough rating or a spread of timed 7s, 6s, and even a 5 or two. This means that getting KSM is categorically harder this season than it has been in a while, since under the rating scheme, you could coast with a few dungeons on the lower end and even pre-rating, KSM was a timed +15 per dungeon, which is exceeded in difficulty by current 6s and 7s, which are now mostly required for KSM.

I am of mixed opinions about this. On the one hand, KSM is a reach and aspirational achievement for a lot of players, and I think there’s value to being forged in the crucible of difficult content if you’re trying to get better at the game and more able to challenge yourself. On the other hand, it’s not like KSM was actually all that easy in spite of how some people represent it, with most public data from sources like DataforAzeroth suggesting that only 20-30% of players tend to reach KSM in a given season – which is a lot, but is also a relative minority of the playerbase. At the point I reached it yesterday, DFA suggests that only 0.23% of players have this season’s KSM, which is an incredible ego boost but is also quite interesting as a data point. Granted, the first season of an expansion is a tough data point for this kind of info, given that gear deflation between expansions is real and a lot of players are still struggling to grind up their item level over time, but you might normally expect that to be higher and the real test will be in subsequent seasons in TWW to see how the trend continues (or doesn’t, as the case may be).

Speaking of item level, something that has annoyed me a lot about M+ in TWW is that Blizzard has given in to the Race to World First crowd in multiple ways with Mythic Plus. Firstly, Mythic Plus has been stepped down 1 upgrade tier in terms of rewards, with a max reward item from the Great Vault at Myth 1/4 compared to 2/4 in DF and end-chest rewards being stepped down slightly in the same manner, albeit with a higher base in +2 and +3 keys. The second change is that Crests now drop in different difficulty levels, with keys at +2 and +3 only dropping Carved, matching with M0, while 4-8 drops Runed for Hero track upgrades and only +9 and up dropping the top-end Gilded crests needed to bring items to Mythic raid item level equivalence. This does mean that the days of running chill +6s for crests is done, as eventually you will need to push +9s and up for those last couple of Hero track upgrades and all Myth track upgrades. Lastly, Blizzard brought back Heroic week for the raid, releasing Mythic raid one week after season start, and instead of capping M+ rewards but allowing keys to be done as they did in the past when this was the case, Mythic Plus was just simply not open for week 1 of the season. As a positive, I will say that having a week not pushing dungeons meant time to acquaint with higher-tier Delves and to farm some early drops from those, which was nice, as well as increased focus on the raid, but this was 100% a move to placate the whiny RWF players who cried about M+ being this annoyance they had to deal with to maximize rewards, and appealing to a minority of a minority of a minority of your playerbase doesn’t seem like a particularly smart move!

Functionally, this entrenches Mythic Plus in a way that I think might scare people outside of it from getting into it – the rewards are lower tier, more effort than Delves (on average), the upgrade system is less generous than it was in Dragonflight, and the milestone rewards take an increased amount of effort compared to past seasons. This is all sort of okay, but I also love Mythic Plus, so for me, that didn’t dissuade me – but I can see the compelling counter-argument that it would absolutely push some people away and I think that’s worth consideration. The real test will be a month or two into the season, to see what KSH attainment rates are like and to see how many more casual key pushers elevate towards those +10 max reward keys, let alone how many people push higher for the skill check of +12 and up!

The Dungeon Pool for Season 1

Season 1’s dungeon pool is interesting overall and I kind of like it. For the TWW side, both Azj-Kahet dungeons make the cut alongside Hallowfall’s Dawnbreaker and the Ringing Deeps’ Stonevault, while the retro side of the pool includes our first Shadowlands throwbacks with Mists of Tirna Scithe and Necrotic Wake, BfA’s Siege of Boralus, and Cataclysm’s Grim Batol.

Of the newer dungeons, I like all 4 – I hated Dawnbreaker prior to M+ but having to run it on keys and do some trash in the second boss segment gave me an appreciation for it (protip – disable Skyriding as your mount style in here, you still get 820% move speed mounted in this dungeon but can get the control of static flight by switching!), and while Ara-Kara was incredibly overtuned in week 1 M0, especially the last boss, the adjustments it got prior to M+ season start have made it pretty straightforward and far less punishing. The worst 3 dungeons of the season so far are Grim Batol, which has some readability issues on the last boss that have been tweaked with hotfixes this week, Siege of Boralus, which was very punishing for mechanical failure in week 1 (and also got hotfixed) which was bad because some things work differently than they did in BfA, and Stonevault, which has trash interrupts reaching a high craziness level and some very odd mechanics that require a lot of studying (the tank debuff on EDNA should only be dispelled prior to the subsequent tank buster for a damage reduction buff, Skarmorak’s crystal adds require killing one at a time and then eating their leftover goop to get a damage buff on the shield, and the last boss requires all players cleansing their Void debuffs on the moving portals by getting close, but not into them. All of these dungeons, as it turns out, got quick hotfixes for week 2, which is actually more responsive than standard Blizzard fare, so I’m here for it. I don’t hate any of these 3, by the way – they’re still fun, they just have moments of frustration!

Grim Batol actually is quite fun as someone who found it as the dungeon that most sharpened my play back in Cataclysm era. While the first and fourth bosses are pretty substantially changed from Cataclysm into almost completely new bosses with very little mechanical or even visual overlap (new boss models too!), the overall dungeon is very reminiscent of the Cata original, and the middle two bosses have very few changes and still feel much like they did, which is pretty cool! The other 3 throwbacks are more modern, but they have retooled everything slightly. Hadal in Siege has two rounds of tidal waves that require quick positional adjustments and the tentacles on Viq’goth are now a more fixed order – destroy the demolisher first always and then break the engineer out. The two Shadowlands dungeons mostly just adjusted trash count (Shadowlands routes will leave you short so don’t lean on old skips!) and have corrected the Covenant-based items to be usable in different contexts (anyone can take weapons in Necrotic Wake while in Mists of Tirna Scithe, Herbalists, Druids, Night Elves, and Tauren can all activate the Night Fae gate locks and respawn changers). Seeing Shadowlands dungeons as retro is a sort of mindfuck, reminiscent of my best and worst times in WoW, but they are also very good dungeons (hot take – Shadowlands was an exceptional expansion on dungeon design overall!) and they are nowhere near as old as Grim Batol, which is 14 years old and very much in an older transitional era of WoW.

There are a couple of interesting changes with dungeon pool that don’t affect M+ as much, though!

Firstly, the dungeon pool for Mythic Plus is actually just the Season 1 dungeon pool in general, so Heroic, Mythic 0, and Mythic Plus all use the same 8 dungeons scaled and adjusted for difficulty accordingly. I really love this as a change, since it means that with the new difficulty scaling, you can practice mechanics and runs in a no-timer, no-stress setting before attempting a key, and it means that the gear rewards from the Vault and from drops have a consistency across the board. Secondly, there is a problem with this however, which is that TWW dungeons have dungeon-specific profession drops that are harder to get as a result – the Radiant ring enchants are only farmable in normal Priory of the Sacred Flame and all difficulties of Dawnbreaker, but worse is that recipes like Authority of Radiant Power, Waders of the Unifying Flame, Busy Bee’s Buckle, Rolling Thunderstrike Talons, and the Artisan Chef’s Hat are in dungeons that are only available now on Normal difficulty, making them much harder to farm (since they require either running on a different character or running just for the recipes and no other goals, which feels bad!). I wish this had been thought through a bit more and that more sources were given for these recipes, or for the dungeons not in the pool to at least remain available on Heroic (as they were prior to the season start). This is likely to repeat as an issue since there are also unique recipes in this season’s TWW dungeons that will rotate out in Season 2 (in all likelihood) and leave us with no way to get those recipes, like the Cursed ring enchants from City of Threads and Ara-Kara or the Authority of Air enchant from Dawnbreaker.

Overall, as a seasonal pool and overall set of changes, I’m positive on this season and curious to see what we get next season, especially given that Shadowlands is on the table, and if we go in a Goblin direction with Undermine as the zone, we have some options for dungeons that could play off of that a little bit. The anniversary event’s addition of Classic timewalking also introduces the potential for some older dungeons to end up in the M+ pool, where so far the oldest they’ve been willing to go is Cataclysm.

In Closing

I’ve been pretty happy to have Mythic Plus back on the table and as a part of my content diet in World of Warcraft. The changes are overall good moves that set a new foundation for Mythic Plus to build upon and I am curious to see how things evolve as TWW moves forward. I’ve enjoyed grinding out my first KSM and it is nice to have a small break to focus on alts and other goals before I resume pushing my Monk towards Keystone Hero. The mount is cool and I enjoyed the gameplay of the dungeons a lot, and while the reward structure for keys is a little less exciting than it was in Dragonflight, it’s still an effective way to gear and power up that compliments raiding and Delves.