This week, I went back to start cleaning up the remaining goals I had for The War Within’s first season of content. That involved finishing up Glory of the Nerub-ar Raider for the cool mount it gives, and then most importantly, knocking out an additional bit of rating in Mythic Plus for Keystone Hero to get the glowy effects for all versions of the current season tier sets.

When I last wrote about my own experience doing main-character keys here, I had finished this season’s Keystone Master in 9 days and was generally positive-ish on the season. While I want to say something changed after that, I came to a realization quickly that I was not enjoying Season 1 very much in Mythic Plus, and so I went on a nearly 4-month key hiatus on my main, only doing a rare alt key here and there. There was genuinely a thought in my head at most points that I was going to do what I did in Dragonflight Season 2, another season I found iffy – I got my mount, time to relax and not bother grinding to KSH. In fact, this season, I had an easy out – the glow effects for most tier sets on classes I play a lot were decidedly meh. The Monk set almost doesn’t have one – it gains 20% of a wispy effect around the horns on the shoulders and helm. Priest’s glow is solid, and it makes the weirdly empty belt of the tier set suddenly alive with a big Naaru buckle. Most sets are in the Monk style, with so-subtle-they-might-as-well-not-exist glows, and a special nod to the Warlock shoulders gaining disembodied ghostly hands of a Shivarra out of nowhere (I like that effect, to be clear!).

I was all set and ready to ride off into the seasonal sunset and write this season off. At the same time, once 11.0.7 was announced and a new uber-ring (how uber it was prior to hotfixes is a discussion for another time!) with it, it was compelling to me to revisit the idea. If my gear crept up enough and the ring was a good fit for Windwalker Monk, I could see an angle where I’d use the catchup time wisely and come back to keys. Surely enough, over the last couple of weeks, my key running habits awakened from their slumber and I was ready to rock and roll, pushing towards my KSH in earnest. I had maxed out my hero track gear upgrades, gotten a couple of crafted goodies including a shiny new 636 polearm with embellishment, and it felt like a good time to start back on the grind.

I ultimately decided to do this for two reasons: I wanted to start the expansion strong and I had finished up basically every other goal I had for the season, and because while the tier set glows are kinda meh, this is the first tier where I have fully unlocked (as in fully available to transmog as a complete set including non-dropping pieces) at least one tier appearance per class. In fact, for 6 of the classes, I have at least two full versions of the current tier set unlocked, and for my main Monk, I have 3, with only two frill pieces for the Mythic colorway left to unlock until I have literally all non-PvP variants of that set unlocked.

Rather than blow by blow, I want to discuss what I enjoyed and didn’t this season, now that I’ve pushed to the limit of non-dedicated key gameplay this season (my highest key is a +11, I don’t dare try applying to a +12 as a Windwalker Monk this season). It feels like a good bookend to my early season experiences with a more measured look through the lens of my gameplay in keys on my Monk (with some additional discussion of healing thanks to nearly pushing my Disc Priest to KSM).

I Hate Tanking In Dungeons This Tier

My trusty fallback on most main characters I play is to tank. I vastly prefer to DPS in dungeons anyways, making tanking more of an alt project, as I did in Dragonflight Season 3 when I pushed my Death Knight to her first KSM mostly by tanking, but I’ve always enjoyed having the fallback and there are times both in PUGs and in guild groups where I will tank because I can. I’m a decent tank, and while I have room to learn and grow in dungeon tanking, I pushed harder last expansion to get better at it than I have previously, to the point where I was comfortable and confident in doing 18-20 range keys as a tank (or 8-10 post-key squish).

There’s just one issue – playing tank in TWW Season 1 dungeons is basically an active request for a bad experience.

Most tanks have some form of problems in M+ this season – Prot Paladins, the meta tank, still need to ensure they come into a pull with 3 Holy Power to pop Shield of the Righteous or they will get flattened, if a Vengeance Demon Hunter jumps into a new pull, they sync up melee autoattacks from their targets and get pounded into sand, and it is very possible for most tanks to have some form of bone-itis at the start of a pull – go in without resources and available recovery and you will be made into a tank pancake. And to an extent, that is fine. Encouraging tanks to play smart is fine, being knowledgeable about your resources and how they impact your play is good – all of that, surface level, is fine. The problem is that pulls never really relent.

Nearly every pull this season on trash has a couple of mobs with tankbusters (yep, trash mob tankbusters), coupled with some unavoidable party-wide magic damage and steady bleed-out from melee autoattacks. What makes the worst dungeons bad this season is that so many of their pulls are just tank poison for all tanks in different measures – you’re getting chunked for physical damage, you’re taking decently large magic hits that the whole party is also taking, you’re dodging, you have some DoTs and debuffs accumulating including steady ticking damage, and each of these plays into each tank’s mitigation weaknesses in different ways.

Coupled with the tank nerfs coming into TWW, and tanking just feels awful this season. Tanking in Mythic Plus always carries a certain level of stress – you are the routemaster, your ability to survive and manage pulls directly controls the tempo of the group which can make your DPS able to optimally perform or ground them to lesser gameplay, and most tanks carry with utility that can help alleviate the concerns of the healer, making their lives easier. A good tank makes runs and a bad tank breaks them, but this season, even good tanks can struggle to just manage not getting flattened. For me as a Monk, Brewmaster feels pretty awful in dungeons (for reasons I previously discussed) and while I find it quite funny that playing Brewmaster in dungeons inverts the current season paradigm (you are godly on pull but every second the pull drags on your life is more and more in danger!), every time I tanked a key, I just felt it wasn’t for me this season.

The biggest opportunity for Blizzard in season 2 is to make the support role fun again in dungeons – to lighten the burden on tanks and healers and switch things up a little bit. Speaking of healers…

Healing Is Enjoyable Enough But Needs Help

Blizzard stated that a design goal of TWW was to remove some of the problems that healers had at the tail end of Dragonflight, where failed healer tuning and damage intake tuning led to the “defensive or die” meta, killing any non-tank who didn’t hit a personal defensive for huge partywide damage spikes and making the best healers the ones who could provide external defensives and/or quickly top the party up after, while also rewarding especially skillful groups with…healerless runs. Oh boy!

Healing in TWW has a couple of changes targeted at addressing the Dragonflight meta issues. Firstly, tanks now require some amount of external maintenance for the most part, so they are, in difficulty-matched content, no longer completely and fully self-sustaining. Secondly, there was some measure of reduction of incoming damage, at least in theory – far fewer of the Season 1 TWW damage spikes are one-hit wonders and instead there’s a lot more of a different design – heavy pulsing damage where an unprepared healer can see the first couple of hits and panic respond while skillful and dungeon-knowledgeable ones can pre-plan a cooldown or get ahead with HoTs and damage absorbs.

These changes are…fine. They aren’t completely bad, and it doesn’t feel quite as awful as the tank changes. What I will say is that while I have enjoyed healing more than tanking in M+ this season, I have to find myself in the right mindset to heal M+ and so if the mood isn’t right for it, I just won’t do it. Healers, like tanks, endure a heavier perceived burden in M+, but where routing is sort of mysterious to most bad DPS, the state of their healthbars isn’t, and so you’re more likely to get sass from dumbass damage dealers when playing a healer than you are a tank. While the TWW changes have helped a bit with that defensive necessity, because players still have similar kits coming into TWW, DPS should still be hitting defensives, and even in lower keys, there’s a massive delta between DPS that understand what they are doing (and hit their defensives or self-heals to weather those big pulses) and those that don’t (never hitting interrupts or defensives and then going “HEALS?” in chat like the morons that they are). Yeah, I had some fun keys as healer this season, what gives it away?

When the group plays well, playing a healer still feels pretty damn fun and unique run to run, which is nice. When a group is suboptimal, it’s still pretty fun, but as the group’s average aptitude falls and the saltiness rises, healing often ends up feeling irritating – which can always be true, but the pulsing damage meta this season has led to DPS being more snarky and irritating about it, where at least in Dragonflight, you could point to how they went 100-0 and the group would generally stand with you. The thing that saves some of the frustration of the DF meta also creates a new problem – a perception that the healer can always solve the incoming damage without the assist.

The Dungeon Pool and Tuning Are A Big Problem

This season’s dungeon pool is one of the worst since Blizzard started rotating the dungeons back in Shadowlands Season 4. There are compounding issues – the new dungeons, while mostly shorter, are mechanically dense and require some fairly precise execution at higher key levels, and then the trash packs in the dungeons are full of danger with the tank problems I mentioned above – tankbusters on trash hitting tanks for huge damage, pulsing magical damage hitting everyone, and an abundance of mechanics that require you to interrupt or die (or barely survive and put the pull in jeopardy). What’s funniest to me is that the older dungeons are a tossup too.

For example, Grim Batol joins the curse of the overtuned returning Cataclysm dungeons with Vortex Pinnacle and Throne of the Tides from DF – Grim Batol’s redesign gave damn near every trash pack all of these things, making double pulling for the average group a pretty dicey scenario, and the boss mechanics heavily lean on certain group comps (it is incredible how much easier the third boss is with a Curse dispel). Siege of Boralus, on the other hand, started the season as a chore, but ended up being one of my favorite dungeons this season, because it has not changed too much and the changes made actually make it feel about right. Packs in Siege have no real tankbusters, debuffs that can be healed through as a check on a competent healer, and a pacing that allows you to multi-pull and deal with things well. Necrotic Wake is fine, the weapon meta is both more and less present than it was in Shadowlands now that everyone can grab them (no more Kyrian-checking!) but it also means that the only viable routes involve pulling trash off of all the spears so you can triple-spear the third boss or two-spear him and then save one for the last boss. Mists of Tirna Scithe was my favorite dungeon in Shadowlands, and I generally enjoyed it this season, although I found that it had a high occurrence of random bugs like the couple of weeks where Dodgeball on the second boss was turbo-fucked. I also just generally dislike the random routing where the maze dictates how you pull later on – in a season with high tank stresses, that feels pretty bad!

But a big part of what accents the tuning of roles and specs is the dungeon design, and so many of the dungeons this season have nailbiting trash packs coupled with high-powered boss abilities that require some unintuitive responses. Anub’ikkaj in Dawnbreaker is a key example – the Dark Orb mechanic looks like an easy dodge, but you also need to place it such that it sails off into the sunset without hitting anything until it is miles away from the party, because if it hits a close wall or, god forbid, a lamppost, the party dies. Fun! The tank is bleeding from being hit by 10 different trash tankbusters and the party is being chipped by pulsing damage as your healer runs out of key cooldowns and then you have stuff like that. The pace and overall design is unrelenting, and because of the timer (which I still think is a crucial and enjoyable part of M+), you can’t simply stop to recharge and wait things out – you have to keep on trucking.

Interrupts and Stops Were Butchered This Expansion

In Dragonflight, we saw the rise of the stop meta – the idea that you wanted to blast interrupts onto as many fatal casts as possible while also using stopping abilities to stop less lethal casts or uninterruptable casts. As a Monk, this shit was my bread and butter – I could interrupt a cast, Paralyze another caster, Ring of Peace things out of casts and into a pack, and then Leg Sweep any remaining casts, all alone. A large number of specs came equipped with similar utility. Coming into TWW, Blizzard changed how stops worked, however.

In DF, stopping a mob while it was casting counted, functionally, like an interrupt. When the mob came to after the stop, they’d move on as though the ability was cast and so you could buy valuable breathing room through smart use of stops. It was still a higher level strategy – a lot of low keys I did in DF had nobody stopping shit – but it was what I love about WoW’s combat gameplay – you do something thoughtful with your kit and are rewarded commensurately. In TWW, this no longer works. Mobs that are stopped in dungeons during their casts resume the same cast immediately upon breaking the stop, which means that while stops can still be useful in the context of delaying action to allow for defensive cooldowns to come up or a real interrupt to be available, they aren’t as viable. A big part of why Prot Paladin has been meta this season is down to this – when Avenger’s Shield is a real interrupt that works on multiple targets, it will always beat other tanks where they either only have a single target interrupt plus stops, and it beats Vengeance Demon Hunter, who has an AoE interrupt that was neutered coming into TWW and even then was previously still on a longer cooldown and less frequently usable.

So you end up with situations like the last few trash pulls in Ara-Kara, where you have two+ mobs casting Venom Volley, all needing interrupts, and in PUGs, coordinating this is a nightmare where in DF it would have been manageable to a high degree if one got interrupted and the others got stopped instead. This isn’t necessarily awful, but it makes PUGging objectively harder than it was last expansion, and if it continues, that is going to decrease overall M+ participation, which has already been the case in TWW S1!

Rewards Changes Kinda Screwed Mythic Plus

M+ was a fun shortcut to higher-tier rewards in previous seasons. If you, like me, raid Normal to Heroic at the AOTC level, but could perhaps push harder outside of a group you are attached to, M+ was a great way to push ahead and come to those raids with inflated item level and performance. Blizzard has changed this in two major ways, one that I would like to see changed and one I would not – they cut down the rewards from Mythic Plus by reducing the track level by around 1 at each tier and introduced Delves with higher rewards for less difficulty.

First, let me state the easy case – I think Delve rewards, while generous, are fine and should stay as they are or increase even, at least in terms of crests and upgrade materials. Gearing fully from Delves is subject to a high degree of randomness and also provides a good reason to do them and keep doing them throughout the season for players less inclined for dungeons or raids, and it gives dungeon and raid players another valuable way to keep their power progression rolling. Leave Delves alone (mostly!).

However, the reduction in track rank by 1 at every tier of the Mythic Plus ecosystem has been a big contributor to the decline in doing keys. In DF Season 4, comparing on equal levels thanks to the key squish, keys from 2-5 were rewarding slightly better gear and better Great Vault slots, reducing the amount of upgrade materials needed to keep your loadout progressing and providing a feeling of steady power increase. In TWW, not only has that nerf hit the keys a majority of the audience does hard, but it has also, on the backend, reduced Vault rewards for high pushers by making only +10s give Myth track loot, compared to DF S4 where 8, 9, and 10 all gave Myth loot and 10s were giving Myth 2 loot. These are relatively small differences, sure, but because of how power scaling in WoW works (multiplicatively leading to exponential gains in power as item level creeps ever higher), 3 item levels up is a fairly large increase. Couple that with easier access to Hero track Vault loot from Delves and much easier access to mid-tier Champion track loot from Bountiful Delves, and the compounding problem is clear.

For S2, I would very much like Blizzard to consider returning to DF S4 track levels for M+, or at least adjusting the low-end keys to be more rewarding. Honestly, the high keys give the same with regards to the end of run chest, so they’re probably okay – but I think neutering low-level keys to be less rewarding was not the right approach, because it creates that logical perception that if you want to gear, don’t bother with keys – just run some Tier 8 Bountiful Delves instead, and I think most content in WoW should be additive – I should want a character I am trying to gear to be able to run keys when I can get groups and then run Delves otherwise, so I have multiple viable pathways to gear and low keys are more popular than they have been this season.

An Affectation of Affixes

I like Affixes (HOT TAKE ALERT, GET THIS GUY). I think the world some envision where Mythic Plus just scales numbers endlessly is dull and lifeless and would quickly grow to be boring as fuck. Generally, I think the affixes this season have been fine, although of the Xal’atath base affixes, Devour needs changes as it is the most adjacent to the annoying “healer” affix, even if many specs have counters for it. Likewise, from what I have heard (my highest key is a +11), the +12 affix scales dungeons ridiculously high, which is already targeted for change in S2 so hey.

Overall, I think the affix design is generally good this expansion even still, because the way Fortified and Tyrannical are tuned and cycled through applies what a lot of people wanted – to emphasize the dungeon design through affixes and scaling. Tyrannical is still a bit aggressive when it is the lone affix of the two applied, but even then, it isn’t as bad-feeling as prior seasons.

What has been annoying is the use of Challenger’s Peril. The always-on past +7 affix, which triples the death penalty on the timer. This affix fucking sucks, there is no way around it. Sure, in gameplay terms, it doesn’t really do anything, but it punishes failure in a very large and substantial way that makes progressing past +7 keys feel daunting and tears at the fabric of groups. I was in a +10 just the other week where a Hunter pet-pulled an extra pack, we wiped, the Hunter was gently noted as causing the overpull, and instead of trucking on to finish a very doable key, he left and the group was dead in the water. The way in which people get heated or just leave to avoid the heated discussion is not healthy for a team-based mode often tackled by groups of strangers (we’ll come back to this point later). Mid-season, Blizzard added a timer extension at +7 and up where you get an extra 90 seconds to the base timer when this affix comes online, which has helped a little bit (you can suffer one full party wipe and one extra death and still not chip into the original timer for the dungeon), but I think this approach is wrong, to state it plainly.

The timer is the most contentious part of Mythic Plus and the thing that both makes it exciting (beating the timer and especially +2 and +3ing keys is very rewarding feeling) but also makes keys uncomfortable for some (timer pressure brings out the worst in some people and in a social game I don’t blame people wanting to dodge that bullshit altogether!), and I think wrenching on that to create negative pressure feels awful. The problem, one that you would think Blizzard would get by now, is that there is no positive side to the affix. If you play the Xal’atath affixes correctly, you are rewarded. The other affixes are just scaling so they have no real impact other than providing added challenge for you to meet, which has an intrinsic reward for meeting the skill check, but Challenger’s Peril is all downside. If you succeed, you time the dungeon, same as before, but if you fail, it is extra punishing, literally 3x the punishment, so it doesn’t really modify your gameplay. By the way scaling works, there’s not really an incentive to cut down on how big you pull because of it – tanks sometimes scale better if they can align big cooldowns to fat pulls, DPS get to go HAM and have fun with huge target counts in AoE, and well-designed big pulls also keep your healer happy because they can, like the tank, align cooldowns to fantastic results.

Overall, I think affix design is simultaneously the best it has ever been (the core experience of the Xal’atath affixes, Devour notwithstanding, has been fun) while also being the biggest drag on the mode it has ever been (Devour being pushed onto overburdened healers, Challenger’s Peril existing, the ramp in scaling from both Fortified and Tyrannical plus the Xal’atath big buff at +12 and up), and I think the easiest change I would suggest is to replace Devour (they are replacing the crystal one instead next season, which feels like an error to me) and to strike Challenger’s Peril from the game altogether.

The Pick-Up Problem

I love doing keys in PUGs. I know, it’s weird, but why?

For me, it is a couple things. Generally, I can find groups that run when I play, that have a skill level equal to or often slightly better than that of my raidmates, and it allows me to play without feeling the burden of responsibility to put together and shepherd a group to the dungeon or to be restrained in the face of challenge. If a PUG fails, I can leave, but if a group of friends or guildies does the same, I feel a certain obligation to them socially to stay, to try to work it out and at least limp over the finish line for the Vault. I try to do a lot of guild keys (my project this season was to try and push people to be more proactive in forming their own groups and doing the legwork instead of inviting me and then foisting it all into my lap), but for my personal play, I push fast in the early season, so at times, I don’t really wait for people to be on or available – I go hard, and if that means I step back a few key levels to play with friends, so be it.

Blizzard clearly does not want PUGging to be the route most players take, and it seems the intention of many design decisions around Mythic Plus in particular are set up so that players have to make friends through the system and build networks to tackle keys, as well as be in active comms with each other to manage mechanics like multi-interrupts, stop rotations, and big group cooldowns.

And on a surface level, that is a good ideal! MMOs are social spaces and so little of modern WoW really leans on that, so Mythic Plus being that space where the social design of the game matters more isn’t inherently a bad idea. The problem is that the reality of the game isn’t conducive to that. Sure, I’ve made friends in Mythic Plus, hell I got my KSH done because a healer I did a failed key with invited me to do the one-level lower version of that key which was enough rating, and I got it done – that felt good! But the communication level needed exceeds what the game’s tools allow for – pings can only convey so much, text chat in combat is incredibly awkward, and while WeakAuras and related dungeon-helper tools can do a lot, there’s something about higher key levels that would be better served by voice chat, which would be great if Blizzard’s built-in one was good or I didn’t have to join 69 (nice) different burner Discord servers just to be in a voice call with strangers.

The cumulative effect of the changes that Blizzard has made to Mythic Plus this season has made non-voice PUGging a substantially harder challenge than ever before. That, coupled with everything else, further depresses participation and has a really negative effect on the game as a whole. A big part of the discussion scene around WoW right now is full of doomerism over how bad this season has been, and it is hard to disagree even as I have enjoyed a lot of it and still am excited to play. I think it is reasonable to play with randoms and not need perfect comms the same way I can queue up for ranked matches in a MOBA or competitive FPS or team shooter, so I think that while Blizzard’s heart is in the right place with wanting Mythic Plus to be more of a team endeavor down to needing team coordination, it also has not demanded that level of play in prior seasons.

Granted, as gear has crept up, the key level where this feels needed also creeps up with it – I did my hardest keys this season, as usual, in PUGs with no voice comms and barely any text chat short of interrupt announces from WeakAuras, and it worked and was an overall fun experience. I just think that the level of play and coordination being expected is growing in a problematic way, and I saw it in how I did keys (I went into deep slumber after finishing KSM and only just came back to doing keys on my main in the last two weeks!) and how people around me did them (fewer guild keys, fewer friend keys, lower number of KSM players, overall lower enthusiasm for them). I think that’s fixable, but Blizzard has to be on the ball for that fixing to happen.

In Conclusion: Mythic Plus is Still Fun, But There Is a Big But

I love Mythic Plus. Since I got deep into it in Shadowlands, it has been the connective tissue of my WoW experience, allowing me to show up big for my raid with upgraded gear and power, to have fun outside of raid on my own terms with PUGs, and to run baby keys on alts for gear and play experience. In TWW, I have loved M+ a lot less, because it just has an aura of impenetrability around it. My baby key alts are better served in Delves, my characters at most gear levels still have higher benefit for lower effort from Delves, tanking is a higher level of punishment this season I do not enjoy, healing isn’t much better, and then these problems mean if I try to queue up as a DPS and join some groups, there are far fewer groups running and it is much harder to just get some keys going, even without going into the metagame problems that keys currently have (trying to PUG my last 500 rating to KSH on Windwalker Monk involved spending literal HOURS queuing for and being denied from groups because I’m not a Retribution Paladin, Frost DK, Enhancement Shaman, or Augmentation Evoker), and tanks and healers only kinda get to skirt the meta because no one wants to fucking do those jobs given how thankless and stressful they have been made to be.

When I got keys running, I enjoyed them, oftentimes a lot. Hell, in the process of drafting this post, I started pushing keys on my Havoc DH (the blog namesake has to stay in play!) and I had a great time! There’s a lot to like about Mythic Plus and it is a mode that really sparked my journey of improving at WoW and enjoying the game on my own terms a lot – it gave me social freedom at a time I really needed it. But this season has not been it, Blizzard. There are just too many layers for the average player to peel back, only for low-key dungeons to be far less rewarding for more time investment and for high-key dungeons to push the worst buttons of the average player in exchange for slightly worse than last season reward structure.