Unintentionally, it has been a few weeks since the start of The War Within’s second season and the last time I checked in here.

I’ve been enjoying the season a lot, and it has been the marker of a lot of goals and new levels of attainment.

Firstly, this has been the first Mythic Plus season where I have earned every single portal available for timing +10 and up keys. It has been the fastest I reached Keystone Hero in a given season (20 days), the highest score in Mythic Plus I have pushed in a given season (2613 and counting?), and generally, short of raid prog, has been about the fastest and cleanest season of progression I have ever had. I finished my Undermine rep (the main Renown, at least) within a month of patch, did the zone meta-achievement for the campsite in the first week, knocked out a level 80 Brann and full Delver’s Journey, and then all the other goals I mentioned in my last check-in – both Underpin difficulties blasted, multiple alts up to Heroic item level tracks, self-sufficient crafting capabilities – the works. I’m not generally an efficiency gamer type, but I have enjoyed how completely self-sustaining my gameplay is at this point – I can craft my own armor and weapons to top quality without a lot of difficulty, I’ve got geared characters in every role with play history this season, and even now, that efficiency has allowed me to step away from having to push as hard – my 6 main pusher characters basically no longer need Delves short of Gilded Crests weekly since every one of them is at or above 649 ilvl average, I don’t have to spend as much time pushing hard on keys on my main because I have the major rewards I usually try to get every season (although we’ll revisit this topic later in this post), and I managed to pull it off right as I had to begin raid-prepping for the new Savage raid tier in Final Fantasy XIV. Hooray!

So what makes this season hit like crack for me?

It’s The Difficulty, Dumbass

TWW Season 1 was a tough season that embittered veteran tank and healer players and made pugging a nightmare. While the first season of key-squish was the end of Dragonflight, we only got a small taste of what key squish would do to the game there, as Season 1 of TWW saw rapidly climbing difficulty curves, excessive overtuning that Blizzard was slow to course-correct on, a bad rewards curve that meant most players tried to start their journey higher than they should have and met with failure and excess pain, which led to a season that slowly bled out weekly runs and participation in a way that both allowed it to have a fairly high number of runs going but also feel like nothing was going on.

Blizzard’s commitment for Season 2 was that they had heard our complaints and that the excessive difficulty would be tamped down through a lot of measures. Indeed, Blizzard took a lot of easing to this season, using global tuning levers (-10% health and damage across the board!), specific per-dungeon tweaks (no trash tankbusters, longer cast times for crucial interruptible spells), and rethought how the system ought to work in a world with Delves (specifically stepping down Delve rewards by one tier of quality across the board while generally stepping up Mythic Plus rewards by about a tier at most levels). These changes were interesting to see, because PTR for the season started very bad and quickly gained a footing once Blizzard announced they were putting this level of effort to it – and indeed, they had put some effort in.

On my mind at the start of the season was the question of how easy might be too easy – but I think Blizzard struck a good balance here.

Blizzard’s big initial change for tuning was that the baseline Mythic tuning changed a lot – Mythic 0 dungeons were buffed by 25% relative to where they had initially been planned to land, making them harder, but then the per-level key scaling was reduced for 2-10 keys by 3%, which means that the initial onboarding takes some lumps, but once a player is in the system, the scaling is quite smooth. They then made up for the initial scaling challenge by making keys from 2-3 not have affixes at all (eventually even removing the timer penalty for deaths from these levels too!), so that the early range of Mythic Plus is basically just adding baseline timer pressure and some light scaling. While the scale of the global tweaks coupled with per-dungeon tuning (usually to ease difficulty) seemed pretty huge and maybe even excessive, where Blizzard has landed is in a space where I think a lot of people want Mythic Plus – by and large, it is about playing the dungeon, and the addition of most affixes serves to refocus on that – fortified and tyrannical obviously scale up the dungeons more, the Xal’atath’s bargain affixes are their own thing that exists up to the +12 key level, and then Guile at +12 and up refocuses so that the highest levels of keys have no notable affixes at all save for scaling (and the renamed form of Challenger’s Peril as the new spooky effect at +12).

In terms of ease, the early season (both pre- and post-nerfs) seemed a little shaky, in that it did kind of seem like Blizzard might have missed the mark, but overall, as knowledge and gearing has improved, those issues have organically reduced down a lot. You have far fewer 610ish range item level players in keys and people are beginning to understand the routing and available tech in each dungeon, so runs are generally smoother and better. Blizzard has been substantially faster on making specifically-targeted per-dungeon tweaks, like the Priory of the Sacred Flame timer, multiple different issues in Operation: Floodgate, and improvements to generally okay things like the minecart in Darkflame Cleft (which is so refreshingly tame compared to what it felt like we’d have to deal with in the doldrums of Season 1). Much of the early season concern was just down to the same stuff that happens every new season – people learn, people gear, and as comfort rises, so too does performance. On the other side, any concerns of the season being too easy have been quickly squashed – the base tuning of the dungeons has been done rather artfully for the most part such that the scaling innate to Mythic Plus brings out challenges quickly and keeps layering on new levels of performance for players to meet. My Windwalker journey was such that my overall DPS throughput has tripled over the course of the season already, and mathematically that isn’t just down to gear – but a mix of gear, improving skill personally, and tanks and healers gaining confidence in double, triple, and even some quadruple pulls that are possible in current season dungeons.

Better-Balanced Roles…Mostly

Role-wise, there’s a much better balance overall for the most part. My second-highest pushing character is a Guardian Druid, allegedly one of the weaker tanks this season but yet here we are and I am feeling pretty confident that he can get KSM this week. I’ve played Brewmaster and Windwalker Monk, Guardian Druid, Havoc DH, Ret Paladin, Disc Priest, and Destruction Warlock in keys so far this season, and all 6 characters across 7 specs have felt reasonably good to play in those roles. Outside of some specific spec tuning difficulties (Brewmaster still feels too squishy and easy to fail at compared to Guardian Druid, where I have so many rotational defensives and self-healing abilities that I never feel unsafe), all of them overall feel capable of doing the content above and beyond where I am without issues.

There is one outlier role that I think still needs some love, which is healing. Healing is feast or famine based on both your own personal skill and understanding of the dungeon, damage profile, and ability to mold your toolkit to match these things, but also based on the relative skill and execution of your party members. I have easily healed +4 PUGs without a sweat but then faced incredible difficulty in a guild group +2 where people took lots of avoidable damage, hit almost no interrupts, and with a PUG Prot Paladin who couldn’t hit a defensive to save his life, leaving that task, frequently enough to be annoying, to me. To an extent, this is the curse of healing in a holy-trinity MMO – it is the role that most depends on your party members playing to skill level and where you have the least runway to fix things if they cannot do so – but I think I would like to see Blizzard do more with the role to relieve at least some of that burden. As Discipline especially, things like interrupts are sore spots because I simply cannot cover them myself – in a lot of other specs I play, I have some leeway to fix things if everyone else is playing like crap, but on Discipline, all I can do is cover the failures with a ton of healing, which is not always easy to do with a ramp-based healing model.

I’m not fully sure how you could change that weakness of healing to still feel compelling without being such a burden, though! The Discipline rework of 11.1 takes some steps towards making that easier in some ways – reducing the need to stack buffs and charges of effects for Penance, making Evangelism a groupwide heal that also extends available Atonement buffs, and changing the way cooldown reduction on Shadowfiend/Voidfiend works – and these changes do generally make the spec a bit easier to play and less ramp-y in execution, so you have room to do some spot-healing and step outside of building the perfect onramp to mega HPS. However, healing Priests ultimately still lack some tools like interrupts and better CC options, which I will still note as a complaint even if Discipline is, yet again, the meta-healer for the season in Mythic Plus (and generally a lot better in raid this time around too!).

Rewarding Replayability

With 6 characters I designated as pushers this season, I’ve been busy, but not as busy as you might think. For the 5 alts, my weekly routine was basically down to running 4 Bountiful Delves per week at Tier 8 or 11 (started at 8s, went straight for 11s once gear was less of a concern) and then running at least one key per week worth rating – whatever I could get into in LFG. It led to a point where most of my alts outgear the members of my guild that simply raidlog, and often by a lot. In many ways, this reinforces a common belief I have repeated here frequently – raid is no longer that rewarding and that kind of sucks! However, I do also think this is kind of the idea Blizzard has in mind for gearing.

At this point, I think Blizzard and most players see the game as a patchwork of things you can do for rewards, and it is rare to be a player who only does one thing in the game. World content players might still do dungeon events, run the occasional dungeon or raid, or even do LFR, and this kind of play diversity is pretty common across the board. Gone are the days where WoW is designed primarily as a raid game, or even a dungeon game – Blizzard has made world content substantially more rewarding and it is possible to get most of, if not all of, a Mythic-level tier appearance solely from solo Delves, given enough time and effort to push Hero-track rewards over the course of a season. The only players at a disadvantage in gearing and getting a character up to snuff are those who stubbornly cling to only one mode of play – only ever raiding, or just doing dungeons, when mixing in all available modalities of gearing takes less time than you might suspect and gives far greater rewards. The problem here, of course, is that WoW has always been a raid game at heart (the initial design and development team was largely comprised of a raid guild from Everquest, after all!) and so there are a number of players who still hold fast to the notion that raiding is the only place where the best gear comes from, when in truth it has some of the best gear but the worst ratio of time:reward in the entire endgame of WoW.

There are some snags worth mentioning, though. Firstly, as much as I didn’t want to see it, Delves did get hit slightly on baseline rewards. The tradeoff has been worth it, though – Mythic Plus and Delves now cleanly feel like an interlocking system that can hand players off easily without needing to scale beyond their play skill, Delves are still fairly rewarding on their own, and the changes to Delver’s Bounty maps and the addition of guaranteed available Gilded Crests for doing Tier 11 Delves has made them stay viable for gearing well into a season. In return, Mythic Plus low keys are more valuable this season and see relatively higher participation rates for it, which is a net positive all around I think. The Crest rewards being tuned around the level of the late Season 1 is nice, although I want to see Crest caps dropped sooner rather than later. Valorstones seem generally more available than before, but I do have some push alts who play a lot of content and are running out of Valorstones before Crests or Sparks, which is not ideal – I still think Valorstones need more work.

Lastly, while my formatting betrayed this bit, I think raid gearing still needs some love. Having cool and higher-powered cantrip items is fine, but the time-to-reward ratio of raiding is godawful compared to Delves (very farmable up to a practical cap of Coffer Keys) or Mythic Plus (infinitely farmable, provided you can get into runs for dungeons with stuff you want). What’s more, raid this tier has some sim-bait items that look really good on paper but can fall apart in practice – the Eye of Kezan trinket looks incredible until you realize you need to be in combat for at least 3 minutes for it to reach full value and any dropped combat means it immediately withers into nothingness, and the Gallywix fist weapon runs into the same issue, where in short combat against a trash pack it is just not that great but it gains value on longer (raid-length, conveniently!) boss fights with one primary target. This is nice in a way – it creates a clean separation where some really amazing items in raid aren’t that valuable outside of it and thusly you can be just fine, if not better-served, by using the non-raid items available in those same slots.

A Personal Question – Can I and Will I Reach Keystone Legend?

This is the question that is defining the next part of my seasonal journey.

In the past, I would usually hit Keystone Hero and basically stop running keys on my main, pushing alts up to KSM levels for tier sets, appearance unlocks, and to continue enjoying dungeon gameplay in a less-stressful setting. As much as I do genuinely enjoy pushing keys, the practical limit for me is where unique rewards begin to tap out. If I hate a season, I won’t even do KSH (DF Season 2), and if KSH is not rewarded with the Mythic glows unlock, then I also won’t do it (DF Season 4). Keystone Legend, added with TWW Season 2, prompts an interesting reflection for me – am I willing to push exponentially harder than I ever have before to get a mount color variant?

For those that don’t know, Keystone Legend requires reaching 3,000 Mythic Plus rating for the season, and it rewards two things – a recolored version of the current KSM mount (a more elegant black and silver version instead of the scrappy red/silver one for KSM) and the ability to lock your key downgrades once you’ve completed each dungeon in the season on a given level (starting at +12). Getting to 3,000 rating requires mostly timed +13 keys with the others at +12, so it is no easy feat, but it also isn’t a huge reach from KSH once you’re already there – just like with KSM > KSH, in fact, it’s a 3-level upgrade per dungeon basically.

I’m at a crossroads with this one that has led me to not fully commit just yet, because on the one hand, I have enjoyed this season, and I am right there. I have a timed +11, my Windwalker performance is great and I feel capable of doing it, but it also means committing at a level where people get more meta-happy or pushing my own key far more aggressively. It would feel good to achieve this goal and even if the mount is just a recolor of the KSM mount I already earned, there’s a certain pull to collecting a time-limited mount that comparatively fewer people will ever get.

On the other hand, I have some doubts about how ready I might actually be for this level of play. I can’t deny that a big part of how quickly I accomplish things in a given season is a relative scale due to how much time I can invest – 6 days to KSM is great but that first week I am just spamming keys pretty consistently and upgrading in smaller jumps than you might suspect, so it isn’t like I get my feet wet in 2-3 keys and then jump right to 6-7s. Am I good at the game or do I have time to spend on the game which allows me to learn slower per unit time but spend more time learning? Outside of any self-deprecating jokes I could make, it is a genuine question I ask myself a lot. While I’ve done pretty well with Windwalker this season, I also know I could be doing better and maybe pushing into more +11s and beyond would reveal the depth of knowledge I still need to work on. Scaling per key level starts getting harder here, since it goes from 7% per level to 10%, so any feeling of not keeping up in +10s is only going to amplify in those higher keys.

Overall, I’m feeling this way about it – the season is likely to last another 5-ish months, so I don’t have to be ready to commit right now. I can push Vault keys weekly to get more Myth track gear, and I can work slowly with my guild on Heroic raid (some day all the DPS will break 1 million in single-target reliably…) until I have my gear upgraded to a point where I can blitz harder and have more practice playing WW in those higher-level keys. I’ll probably slowly push keys up to +11s per dungeon, then 12s, and then see where I can use the easier seasonal dungeons like Rookery or Darkflame Cleft to fill in more points and get ahead. I do think that by the end of the season, I’ll be all-in on this goal and pushing very hard to get it, but right now, I have the luxury of time on my side, since I have done so much for the season already and am effectively done with a lot of content!

Skill-wise, I do think I’m closer to it than I would give myself credit for. While I have opportunities to improve, my baseline isn’t bad, and the 10s and 11 I have done so far this season have had me not just keeping up but often in the mix and even sometimes atop the meters while also hitting interrupts and managing mechanics effectively. My overall total DPS for most dungeons is around 3 million DPS, which is about the level most people I see in those low-double-digit keys are doing, so I don’t think I’m far off or a key bricking key assassin. I could definitely do more (I’ve seen some crazy WW runs with them hitting 5-6 million overall DPS, which is nuts!), but by most rankings available, I’m pretty solidly in the bracket where I need to be for Keystone Legend to be attainable. Meta-wise and in terms of the social landscape, I fully expect that as the season winds on, the comp requirements people will attempt to enforce will get more lenient, although being a spec with a very meh party buff and a lack of haste buff or battle resurrection is tough sometimes just because at that level those things are needed a lot more, especially when a Mistweaver is a very good healer in the meta and can bring the same buff while leaving other options for DPS to bring those things.

In short – yeah, I’m probably going to do this in time, but I’m also giving myself some space and grace for room to grow and chances to push some alts for a bit, get a couple more KSMs and reduce my weekly want list before I go all in on pushing higher.

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Season 2 of The War Within has corrected a lot of the rocky start of Season 1 and generally has provided a much more enjoyable experience for playing dungeons while keeping a lot of the strengths of the Delve systems, the reinforced world content with zone events and world quests all over, and overall enjoyable raid encounters. Like many post-launch seasons, it feels accessible in a way that any Season 1 isn’t because the sheen of new expansion and leveling alts has given way to steady gameplay, which is especially true this expansion given the sheer volume of bonus experience available in events that overlapped during S1 of TWW. There’s still room to improve more – to tune healing a bit less aggressively, to improve raid-first gearing and rewards – but the overall experience of the season is, to my eyes at least, substantially improved in a lot of ways. Most importantly to me, I’ve had a lot of fun playing this season, and that is, at the end of the day, what kinda matters most in a game to me.