With the 11.1 PTR entering what is likely a near-final phase of testing on the Liberation of Undermine update for World of Warcraft’s The War Within expansion, we are starting to see things change in an interesting way.

In a blog released last week, Blizzard laid down their big points about Mythic Plus changes coming to the test servers in the next couple of weeks. They acknowledged, out loud, that a lot of the feedback about Season 1 of TWW’s M+ scene was frustration over the state of the game and the higher leap in difficulty with keys compared to the past and issues with the system. A quick synopsis of what Blizzard identified as pain points in that post:

-Delves have pushed the gear curve in such a way that a large number of players attempt to start their M+ journey at +7 keys, failing hard due to scaling and Challenger’s Peril
-Rewards from M+ coupled with Delve gear mean that low keys, in spite of the key squish, remain scarce and harder to find groups for
-The prevalence of tankbusters and fast-casting spells on trash meant that the pace of Mythic Plus was too fast and hard to adjust to in pick-up groups which also reinforces and locks in a spec-meta for who can come to hard keys

Blizzard’s answers to all of these are interesting. I think they are cooking something very good, and so today we are here to discuss that.

The Problems As Outlined By Blizzard

Firstly, Blizzard actually kinda nailed the issues in their post. Delves aren’t the problem so much as they are an indicator of the problem – running low keys has so little value in Season 1 of TWW that you might as well just Delve instead and even exclusively if you don’t plan on pushing keys for the fun of it. Gearing in WoW is an end-goal that players are encouraged to do in lots of ways, but what will win for players is an individual preference that exists between how fun the activity is and how easy it is to gear via that activity. If something is fun but frustrating, as Season 1 Mythic Plus has been, it pushes players away rather aggressively, and if something is dull but easy to gear through, people will be drawn to it even if they don’t particularly enjoy it, especially if there are few alternatives. In WoW, there’s a lot you can do, but each activity has a sort of entrenched community and it is rare for higher engagement activities like raiding or rated PvP to pull in a lot of new players. Open-world content, dungeons, and now Delves all have a large player pool they can draw from with enticing enough gameplay and rewards.

In Season 1 of TWW, Delves won the comparison every single time over Mythic Plus for most players. In specific cases, M+ will just always be better (higher-level gear acquisition, high-Hero and Myth track upgrades and currencies, strategic depth) but for most players, Delves can be a sweet spot. You can fine-tune your difficulty and have a climb, they’re tuned to be doable but challenging as you climb until you get your Brann and your skills in the Delves down, story variants push a semi-randomness that keeps them from feeling too repetitive, and they’re very easy to do – you just fly to the door and pop in.

Players will gravitate to their own sweet spot on difficulty versus reward, and Delves in Season 1 have generally been better. Now, there is an interesting inversion as the season has gone on – as Delves lose reward viability and the scaling power makes Mythic Plus easier to tackle, there has been some migration of people doing more Mythic Plus – that’s definitely where I have found myself. But Blizzard is generally spot-on here – the curve has made M+ less viable and fun to do in favor of other activities.

The Solutions

Blizzard’s post had one major message, which is that in Season 2, help is coming for beleaguered Mythic Plus players. They announced this set of changes:

-M0 is reverting to DF S4 style, a weekly lockout that drops Champion-track (Normal raid equivalent) gear, and rewards are generally being tweaked upwards across the key range from +2-+10
-Trash tankbusters are functionally being removed nearly fully, and enemy cast times on interruptible spells are being increased
-M2-10 keys will scale up by 7% enemy health and damage per key level, down from 10%
-For +2 and +3 Mythic keys, the only added effect besides numbers scaling is a timer (no affixes)
-+7 and +10 adds Fortified or Tyrannical, delaying the scaling effects until deeper into the curve
-+4 keys add the Xal’atath affix of the week
-+12 has a redesigned affix, replacing the current-season Xalatath affix with Challenger’s Peril under the new name
-There is a second mount reward for an achievement called Keystone Legend, which was originally at 2850 seasonal M+ rating but will now be at 3000 rating to maintain the intended challenge level
-In addition to the mount, Keystone Legend also rewards you with anti-deplete for keys, provided you have timed all dungeons for the season at a given level. For example, if you have timed all 12s, then your personal key cannot deplete below level 12, even if you fail a timer. You can still manually downrank the key, though

So there’s a big set of changes we can tackle all at once, and then two points to make beyond that.

The Scaling Is A Big Help, But…

So firstly, reducing scaling such that each key level is a smaller jump is a strong start. A part of the current difficulty is a leftover of the key squish and how keys were scaling back in Dragonflight, so this makes some logical sense. Likewise, at the dungeon level, scaling back on trash abilities and keeping things a bit more simple is probably a good thing that will allow a higher level of coordination and skillful play in the random group environment. Scaling also starts higher with the relative increase in numbers to baseline Mythic dungeons, so there’s a trick afoot – dungeons from M0 through +9 are actually mathematically harder, but the offset is in ability nerfs and affix changes.

For many players, changing the affix structure yet again is interesting and puts forward a fun starting point, where Mythic Plus is just the dungeon, but harder. These changes also do create a smoother scale where you don’t have to immediately learn a new mechanic to start pushing for the week. It does maintain the TWW fatigue where every week, functionally, is a push week once you progress high enough up the key level ladder, but that has some positives as well.

A lot of these changes, while good, do have a problem though. Removing trash tankbusters is generally a good idea! – however, it only really became a problem in Season One TWW because tanks got nerfed. In Season 2, tanks are still generally weaker than their DF incarnations, so this change is fine enough, but there is an alternate path where we keep some trash mechanics for tanks that aren’t just pull size and positioning with tanks being stronger and able to have effective answers to the mechanics aiming at their heads. As it stands now, on PTR for Season 2 dungeons a lot of tanks aren’t exactly thrilled because removing these layers of mechanics can make tanking feel too simple. Sure, you have route responsibility and how big you feel safe pulling can dictate a run’s pace and overall throughput – but there’s just less to that from a gameplay perspective. Tanks were overburdened in Season 1, for sure – but I don’t think you have to take away everything that added challenge to fix that.

Rewards and Changes at the High End

Some of the bigger changes here are aimed solely at the +12 and up crowd, your title pushers and overachievers. Firstly, while renaming Challenger’s Peril and shuffling it to +12 and up is a funny maneuver, it is still the same affix and it still sucks even up there. Good news for us normal plebs in the under +10 mines, but really, just strike it out! It’s been live for one major patch cycle, it can die, no one will miss it or even have nostalgia for it!

Secondly, though, this marks an interesting ideal that has been creeping into M+ design in TWW, and another trend we’ll discuss in a moment. Changes to depletion are great, but at such a higher level of attainment that most of us aren’t gonna be able to, for example, freeze lock our +7 keys so that we can run with PUGs until we time it. It makes things better for title contention players, cool, genuinely keep it for them, but I wish there were levels to it that more players could attain. I think it is neat that Blizzard has been targeting the M+ hardcores for this expansion, but I want more balance in that effort so that all of us can benefit.

Rewards changes are interesting, because it was a major component of my post about Season 1 recently. Rewards structure in TWW felt pretty bad because the changes hit across the board in a bad way, reducing vault rewards in the upper half of the reward range while reducing end of run chest rewards in the lower end and making M0 way less worthwhile this last season. Fixing that to near, but not quite at, Dragonflight Season 4 levels is a net positive, so I’ll take it. However…

Blizzard Is Clearly Cooking a Rewards Level Increase for Mythic Plus, but with Obstacles

Keystone Legend as an achievement is generally kinda whatever. With the difficulty tone-down this season, it feels like it will probably be doable by those of us who push to max rewards, and the mount is a more monochromatic version of the KSM mount for the season, so it isn’t really super unique or unobtainable.

This achievement, however benign it may otherwise seem, is to me the signaling of a trial balloon being floated.

Multiple times in just Mythic Plus’ lifespan as a play mode in WoW, Blizzard has done this two-step dance where they dangle a tasty new carrot at a higher level of M+ attainment, usually first as a non-combat reward before extending it to a player power reward if the change is reasonably successful. In Legion, to start with, rewards capped at +10 keys, with anything higher being for show aside from the achievement and Artifact appearance rewards for timing a +15. This was also largely the case in BFA until the end, where Blizzard opened up rewards through to level 15, a change which was made permanent in Shadowlands S1 alongside the addition of the Great Vault system. In Shadowlands, we got the first portal achievements for +20 as a hotfix late into Season 1, which encouraged enough people to run +20s that Blizzard then made +20s the maximum reward level for keys as of Dragonflight. The key squish maintained that with the newer truncated key levels, which carried over into our current expansion.

So given this history, I have been side-eyeing how much attention Blizzard has been giving to +12 keys, because it felt somewhat similar, although in S1 of TWW, without any sort of reward increase, it felt a little flimsy to apply this lens. Now, though – it fits like a glove. Keystone Legend is, to me, a signal flare piercing through the night, telling us that by the end of this expansion or S1 of Midnight, +12 keys will be the new max power reward level. Hell, it’s already listed in the post from Blizzard as a part of the rewards table, albeit solely for increases to crests.

Now, to an extent, this is fine. I’m not here to go “oh no, not more gear rewards!” and try to create a panic. What I am here for, though, is an interesting conundrum this creates.

Throughout WoW’s history since Mythic raiding dropped in 6.0, it has been a purposeful decision that the only source of Mythic raid level loot is doing weekly lockout activities. You’ve only ever been able to get something at that level of power through a lockout-bearing Mythic raid boss, a weekly reward chest like the old M+ chest back in BfA Season 4 or the current Great Vault, or through a hardcapped currency for crafting like how Crests currently work and interact with the Sparks crafting currency. You can never, through any sort of shenanigans, go over Blizzard’s lockout limitations to gain more Myth-track gear through farmable sources, with the only real exception being at the point where Crests go capless for the season (and even then, that has a secondary control in crafting spark caps, so yeah).

Why bring this up? Simply put, it is this – if Blizzard wants to extend the end-chest reward currently, the next logical step would be Myth track 1/6, which then means you can farm Myth items with no real lockout. There’s room in the Great Vault rewards, and making +12s able to fill your Vault with Myth 2/6 items would be great! – but it also means there would be 3 keystone levels with the same end of run reward level, which is not a particularly good design.

So if Keystone Legend is well-received, I do expect to see Blizzard back in the lab cooking on how to extend rewards track further up to around +12s, but they also don’t have much runway here. If you further extend Myth level in the Vault, it’s probably fine, but if you do the same in end of chest rewards, now you risk making Mythic raiding even more anemic and at risk of dying than it already is. To be clear, I think that is maybe an okay outcome – certainly for a large number of players it would be a treat, but at the same time, Mythic raiders are already a needy bunch with a dying game mode played by an increasingly smaller number of players as their main concern – and a valid one, at that. Blizzard is, at times, relatively protective of the idea that Mythic raiding is the pinnacle endgame activity in WoW and wanting Myth track gear means you have a goal to strive for. If it becomes farmable, even if the overall skill level of play required is similar – I think that signals a near-end to Mythic raiding. For players, obviously the path of least resistance and more enjoyment to power rewards is going to be taken – it’s the same logic at the low end for why Delves overall succeeded in Season 1 of TWW. For Blizzard, at a certain point the development effort put into Mythic raid can’t be justified as a business decision if not enough players are going deep into that mode of play.

So this is my interest in the topic – I think expanding Mythic Plus rewards would be a great way to keep the upper ranks of the key ladder moving and interesting with more player population, but I also think that Blizzard is backed into a corner in the current rewards system where doing so means encroaching into Mythic raid more than they have with just Vault rewards (which was, historically, initially also heavily protested against when it happened in BFA Season 4). They could choose to make a bigger change to rewards game-wide as a means of making this feel better, but then that also means that players will still compare in terms of relative power to each mode. Maybe the answer is that higher level keys don’t need an extrinsic reward, and that’s probably fair, but for a large percentage of WoW’s player population, rewards are the reason to do a thing and I think Blizzard will be revisiting this topic again with Mythic Plus before The War Within is over.