Last time I wrote about my journey with The War Within Season 2, I reflected quite heavily on my personal play, and what I felt about my own skill and ability to push to the new-this-season Keystone Legend achievement and second seasonal mount. The reflection there, coupled with some time spent on alts, gave me what I needed to start pushing – and so while it is unusual for me to document my progress in this new era where I write roughly once a month, while I am not yet a Keystone Legend, the work has begun in earnest.

The Power of Motivation

I started seriously and regularly doing Mythic Plus keys in Season 1 of Shadowlands. There were a few reasons for it – the elongated content season timing being a big one, but the biggest one was an extrinsic motivation – the desire to prove some assholes wrong. I had tired of people I raided with being jerks to me, questioning my skill either directly or indirectly, and so I went hard on PUGging keys to get to KSM myself and have that moment of acknowledgement. And of course, that acknowledgement didn’t come, and I wrote a fair bit about what happened next at that time which isn’t worth revisiting, so in Season 2 of Shadowlands, starting off in my own bank guild and with no raid, I pushed hard – I got KSM in 10 days all through PUGs, and while that did get me some acknowledgement I wanted from the previously noted jerks (albeit not to me directly), it also kind of made me love Mythic Plus. In Season 1 of Shadowlands, I had started to like it – quite a bit, in fact – but connecting the idea of Mythic Plus achievement to the kind of problem solving and challenge-facing I liked about raid in a smaller format made it really stick.

And then I quit WoW for a year.

When I came back to World of Warcraft for Dragonflight, the first thought in my mind was that for all the fun I had pushing keys, being fast, getting to higher levels of attainment faster, my initial motivation for doing so wasn’t exactly healthy for me. It was petty and small-minded in a way I didn’t like to be, and the core of that motivation, the idea that I might get some acknowledgement for improving my play from the jerks who had questioned it, was never going to happen. If I was to continue and really enjoy the game of Mythic Plus, I needed to move on and accept the idea of intrinsic motivation – that I was playing to improve my own skills, and that the benefits of it were the achievement I would feel from doing so, plus the stuff the game was poised to give out as rewards with the Dragonflight shift in Mythic Plus reward tiers. It would be less stressful, less emotionally taxing, and more rewarding – and I was correct. Starting in Dragonflight Season 1, I largely moved to set my own goals and for my attainment of those goals to be empowering and motivating to me in their own right – to reflect the journey that is the core of WoW’s progression systems, moving ever higher in the ranks at a faster pace. Being recognized by those I play with as a good player or one to model after would be nice, but it was important to me that I move past the notion that I needed anyone else’s rubber-stamp on my play quality – it would speak for itself and I could be content with that.

Thanks to a lot of factors, I do have a lot of time to play WoW, so my “fast” pushing, as I noted in my last post, was and is really just a longer effort compressed into a small timespan by virtue of the fact that I can set aside more time to run keys and work on learning in a smattering of low keys before stepping up to higher and more difficult challenges. Because of that, something I used to do in Shadowlands that I stopped doing over time was remarking over day 1/week 1 standings on Raider.IO that would reflect me being highly ranked at those brief moments in time. Sure, being the number 1 Demon Hunter on my server for about a week of Season 2 in Shadowlands was neat – but by the end of the season, I was 54th – not bad at all! – but also not nearly the same accolade. It is one thing to have enough time to run 12 keys on day 1 of a new season and cheese the ranks, but quite another to actually maintain a high position over the long-term run of a season.

Once I began pushing for my own benefit and intrinsic satisfaction, keys became my happy place. I like raiding, but what I like about raiding is largely social – banter, jokes, the loud and boisterous completion of content – and the gameplay itself is secondary to a point, sometimes even becoming a nuisance depending on how on-point the group is. What I like about keys is being able to join a PUG group, sit without having to speak, throwing on a podcast or video on a second monitor and just going in to demolish a key. I do keys socially from time to time, but for pushing, I largely go it alone and quietly, which is a good recharge for me as an introvert.

The Joy of Learning

One thing I really love about Mythic Plus is that the large number of runs you can do leads to discoveries of new things you can do, the new “tech” of each dungeon. Learning how to execute easy skips to time dungeons, learning new rotational foibles that allow you to maximize your damage/healing output, and the variety of routes and mob efficiency ratings you can use to optimize is just fun to me. As I’ve pushed into current 12s and felt out how that tech meaningfully improves timing dungeons, I’ve gained a new appreciation for that process of learning. In the past, I would sometimes use the various tech that was discovered over a season, but in low keys, it could feel exceedingly extra – like sometimes you’d be trying to skip a pack of mobs that could just be easily blasted and spend more time doing some weird movement tech to avoid them that took longer to setup than it would take to just pull and defeat them. On higher keys, of course, that begins to invert – scaling does its work and even if the skip takes time to setup, it becomes preferable to actually pulling in that case.

While I’ve always enjoyed learning about M+ routing, skips, and strategies, I never really had to be particularly great at them to time keys even up to the Keystone Hero range. Especially since I push my highest keys as DPS, as long as I showed up and blasted as hard as I could (and that “as hard as I could” met a sufficient threshold of performance), I didn’t really need to know. Now though, knowing the tech and expecting what the group will want to do is valuable information, and by getting to execute on that tech and those time saves, I have a far better understanding of the current season than any other season I have ever played. I know 3 different top-level Operation Floodgate routes, I know four different ways to skip the first pack of trash in Theater of Pain, two different skip methodologies for the second-to-last trash pack in Mechagon Workshop, and I’ve personally executed about a half-dozen different forms of Shadowmeld cheese. I know that you are best served pulling the first room of trash in Workshop in a cross-pattern so that you don’t have more interruptible mobs than you have players and a sweet Bloodlust-enabled five-pack and miniboss pull in the first part of Priory of the Sacred Flame that I have done safely as high as a +11 key. Being able to play through those moments and live to tell about them and then later implement them into my own runs, especially on my alt tank, is something that has been surprisingly fun this season.

The Inversion of Difficulty

Keys get harder as you level up, right?

Well…yes, but also no.

Sure, from a strictly numeric standpoint, yeah, keys scale ever higher and by the time you’re doing +12s, mobs are 122% more sturdy and damaging without taking into account the effects of Tyrannical and Fortified affixes. This is doubly applicable because you do reach a point where gear upgrades slow and eventually stop while scaling continues indefinitely beyond that for enemy health and damage, so something that challenges you on a +12 or +13 is never really going to get easier from power creep, only from skilling up or maximizing certain combos of abilities and buffs.

At the same time however, there are a couple of things that actually make doing +12s feel easier.

Firstly, at +12, the Xal’atath affix is gone and replaced with Season 1’s Challenger’s Peril rebranded. This means that the hustle that happens when Xal’atath zones in to spawn her bullshit is gone, so you just play the dungeon. You lose the positive benefit for doing that hustle too, sure, but that rapid movement in objectives is gone and that helps keep your mental focus on the dungeon mechanics and stuff happening around those. You no longer have to save crowd-controls for the affix, or plan burst cooldowns around the Void Harbinger – you can just plan a route around what the dungeon itself has and play around that, which makes lining up your abilities and saving from powerful mob abilities much simpler and more straightforward.

Secondly, there’s the group effect.

People won’t like this a lot (a topic I do plan to detail in its own post), but the simple fact that most players in PUG +12 groups are invited only with heavy scrutiny and that a lot of players generally only apply to +12s if they pass their own self-scrutiny makes those groups better at the game, generally speaking. I had to time every single dungeon this season on +11 to even get invited to my first +12, and my acceptance rate for +12s only went up as I started timing more of them. Getting into a +12 is hard, and I suspect that a similar grind awaits to get to +13s, and if I decide to push beyond after getting KSL, well, I expect something similar.

Generally the quality of play I have observed in +12s is higher, and it feels markedly so, even over the +11s I ran to get to that level. Whiffing on interrupts, lacking CC, not knowing core mechanics, those things happen far less at that key level. Not to say they never happen, but it is far less common. That actually makes +12s almost more relaxing in a way, because as long as I am playing well myself, I don’t ever have to feel like I’m carrying a group or the guy pushing the group to success – if even one player is off their game, we’re just not timing it, so people do generally step up in a really good way.

The Social Dynamic Of High Keys

The higher you go in Mythic Plus earlier in a season, the chiller the experience is – it holds true.

At this point in a season, while +12s are not the peak of attainment or particularly crazy out of reach, they are far enough above most players that the people who join them are, overall, very relaxed and generally more enjoyable to play with. There’s more banter and socializing happening, loot is extraneous since it stopped leveling up two key levels ago so no one is blowing up your whispers with “NEED?!” 10 seconds after the end of the dungeon like a fucking clapping seal, and people generally understand that mistakes can happen and are usually pretty calm about them. This, coupled with the simplification of dungeon play at this level thanks to the Xal’atath affix, makes running +12s pretty great!

One other major thing that helps is that a lot of the excuse making you could pose in lower keys is gone at this level. If you never interrupt and the group dies to an interruptible cast, well, everyone can see that. If you die to a one-shot because you didn’t pop a defensive, you can’t blame the healer here because unlike in lower keys, you no longer are able to be saved by a healer in those mechanics – you have to execute correctly for your own benefit or else you die. There’s far less incendiary shit-stirring in these higher keys because everyone knows what happened, generally – it is rare that people won’t be able to quickly determine that an interrupt was missed, a defensive wasn’t used, or personal resources weren’t committed well.

Sure, every now and then you’ll get a hardstuck player who was peaking in +11s and gets very growly and shitty in those +12s when the group fails to time or hits an obstacle, but those players are a minority and generally they get selected out as their stalled progress holds them down in the lower ranges. I’ve rarely encountered someone unwilling to admit a mistake in a +12 and even making them myself has only once led a group to any sort of comment or consequence (stealth removal from the party during resetting the dungeon, lol). And there’s a new in Season 2 reason why I think that is happening!

The Benefit Of Resilient Keys

This season, as a reward for timing all +12s, you are given a character-specific quest and reward that your keys cannot decay below +12 from depleting them, and the level that they cannot decay beneath increases as you time higher level keys – timing all +13s means your floor is now +13 and so on. You can still manually deplete them by talking to Lindormi in Dornogal, but it means that failed runs of any sort at +12 don’t lower the key. What this translates to is a nice bit of social cohesion in those keys – if the keyholder for your run has this feature unlocked, they can choose to simply reset the dungeon and restart if something goes too badly to time but could be timed with a do-over. My Theater of Pain +12 run just yesterday, in fact, used this – I messed up the Monk skip for the first pack, we got the adds in and mad during the first boss, so we wiped. No problem, says the group leader – we zone out, reset, and restart – and we used an Invisibility Potion skip this time but it worked and we completed and timed the key, no sweat.

Resilient Keys is a great feature because it reduces group friction in those higher keys in PUGs specifically. Sure, in organized groups it means you no longer have to really work hard at pushing keys as much or doing homework keys, since you can guarantee your key is always at a certain floor, but for PUGs it means that there is no longer as much tension to listing your own key and worrying about what will happen if you don’t vet the group appropriately, and not having that worry means you can just focus up and play the dungeon. First pulls or first bosses go poorly? Well, you’ve probably only lost 5 minutes if you just reset and go again to fix the whoopsie-uh-ohs from the first run at it, and you then have a chance of timing it! Just like all the other easing of friction at +12s, it actually makes the social environment around those keys so much better than even the +11s below them, because a lot of the factors that make those lower-level keys socially problematic are just gone, and Resilient Keys is such a big win that I hope they consider keeping it and even extending it lower – +10s seem like a real win so that weekly vault keys are easier to do!

The Tuning of The War Within Season 2

The overall tuning of TWW’s second dungeon season is really on the ball too, which helps. There’s a satisfying level of progression between item level and content difficulty that allows you to gear up as high as mid-650s without a lot of effort just from open-world and Delve content, and the tuning of the dungeon curve this time skews pretty heavily for that too. While Blizzard noted that players doing Delves in season 1 were skipping to +7 dungeons and getting frustrated, with the implication that they’d be better served learning lower on the curve, the tuning of this season actually kind of allows it – you can gear in Delves (albeit less effectively than last season by a smidge) and that puts you right onto Heroic raid/Mythic +7-ish item level ready to rock and roll, and the tuning of most mechanics at those levels of play means that if you are a good player with that level of gear, you can do it pretty well! Granted, I did say “good player” here, because I know that you’ll need to be a quick learner ready to adapt, but we took a druid healer from our raid team and threw him at a couple of +8s and succeeded quite handily.

At the +12 level, so far, things are relatively fair in my opinion. Stuff that should one-shot does, but there are still mechanics where you can survive just barely and recover, alongside some mechanics where a powerhouse healer can really blast through and do a lot to help the group (which may carry a cost for subsequent partywide hits but at least it is possible). One thing that becomes clearer in higher keys is how much more DPS ought to be doing in lower-level keys, because a lot of times what makes some of the gargantuan pulls you see done in higher-tier settings possible is not a hero-level tank or healer, but DPS doing a good job of providing support not just through damage, but through utility. That penta-pull plus miniboss in Priory of the Sacred Flame I mentioned above is doable only with Bloodlust but also with the group stacking close, using LOS to bait the shooting mobs into range, using CC and stops to reduce incoming damage, and snowballing the pack by blowing up the easy mobs while using control abilities to keep the harder mobs from being able to do much until they can be focused, and while damage output does matter there (it was a pull where group DPS was over 20 million!), it also matters less than you might think.

So much of the “MDI strat” that people like to roast in lower keys is actually about making a setup through smart damage-dealer gameplay where the tank and the healer can comfortably pull a huge pack and expect the DPS to help them control it and defend against the worst parts of it. Of course, bad DPS who can’t get into a +10 will still blame the tank or healer for failing them when they can’t prioritize their interrupts, manage their controls, and funnel damage into priority targets to get to a stable place quickly, and I only say that snootily because I’ve had to explain this to a player who was baffled no one would take them for a +10 and wanted to blame the tank for their failure of a +9 (that the tank had already timed previously). When done well, the big pull strats actually end up being safer in some ways, because you can pool cooldowns for them, keep the worst abilities from going off, and increase relative group DPS through more targets to cleave onto and optimizing the target count to bring out best performance.

So far, in the 11-12 range, I find the tuning very satisfying. It takes noticeably longer to kill stuff if done poorly, but a lot of the pulls change very little and there is something exhilarating about doing a 15-mob plus miniboss pull and just destroying it without a single death or issue that feels very rewarding.

My Progress In Mythic Plus Season 2 of The War Within

At the start of the season, I identified 6 characters with which I planned to push Mythic Plus – my main Monk (playing primarily Windwalker), my original main Priest as a healer, my blog namesake Demon Hunter, a newish Guardian Druid, my Horde Retribution Paladin, and my original Warlock as Destruction. Of them, all have reached KSM except the Warlock, who is over halfway there on score (which actually is more like 25%-ish there, but hey).

My monk is currently at 2831 Mythic Plus score, with half of the dungeons in the pool timed on +12s and the other half on +11 (including one two-chest run). By this time next week, I am aiming to be done with her push for now and to have attained the 3000 rating for Keystone Legend. Currently, my monk is 6th best Windwalker on my combined realm and 3,347th in the world, which is easily the best mid-season ranking I have ever obtained.

My Priest is my freshest KSM at 2029 score. I started the season playing him as Discipline, but after working with the wife of a raider on learning healing on a Priest in the current game, I switched to Holy which is so much easier in keys I couldn’t believe it, finishing up the push to KSM playing on Holy. Healer is an iffy role amongst my friends and guildies for filling M+ groups, so I might continue to dabble and see how far I can go.

My Demon Hunter was my fourth KSM getter this season, locking in at 2020 score. Havoc is strong this season so it was an easy blitz and I enjoyed it – Havoc’s fast and furious playstyle has always appealed to me and not much has changed there.

My Guardian Druid is at 2113 rating and has even done a +10 (untimed barely but completed!). I find Druid tanking so much easier in M+ compared to the suffering of playing Brewmaster at that level so I have happily continued to pocket tank for guildies on this character and his gear is closest in item level to my main monk. I’ve debated pushing this character to his own KSH run just to finish upgrading gear and getting more of the Mythic colorway for the Druid tier set, but we’ll see how the season goes!

My Retribution Paladin is at 2026 and was an early pusher for me. Retribution Paladin is a spec I enjoy explicitly because it is almost braindead easy to play for a melee and does huge numbers if you play with a modicum of thought, so when I want to turn my brain off and just hit the buttons it is a go-to choice. Melee range? Nah, try 12 yards, so I can still dodge mechanics while doing most of my damage. Tanky? You bet, I can pop a straight immunity alongside a damage reduction and an exploding shield similar to the Touch of Karma I like on Windwalker so much. I want to round out the Heroic and Mythic tier appearances for this character too, so we’ll see what late season brings.

Lastly, my Destruction Warlock. Destro has been displaced by a very-strong Demonology spec this season (and even Affliction has good numbers across the board for the first time in a while!) but I enjoy the Destro playstyle of slinging hard-hitting spells coupled with the AoE Rain of Fire stacking for big numbers. This was my last designated push alt, so I have been slower to take to him (my only pusher below 657 item level at this point and the only non-KSM of my 6 push characters!) but he’s 649 item level average and at 1071 M+ score, so it won’t be a hard task to push him up nice and high when I am ready to do so.

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Mythic Plus this season has reinforced the lesson I worked to teach myself since my return to WoW in Dragonflight. Playing for self-satisfaction, learning and growing as a skillful player, and admitting to/learning from mistakes to make myself a more enjoyable person to play with are all things I’ve aimed for since moving away from playing for external validation from people who were never going to give it – and this season has really taken that to a new high for me, as this is by-far my most successful season but also my most sustained level of achievement in the game ever. Even with breaks away from my main to push alts and work on obtaining all the lower difficulty current tier set appearances (guide coming soon), I’ve been able to focus in on doing at least a bit of something to progress my main character and push harder, and that has felt incredibly rewarding. Overall, I think my biggest joy with this season of content in WoW is just that playing the game is a reasonable expectation. Nothing takes so much time that I can’t get a bit of alt time, run some delves, work on professions, or study up for the next raid fight I need to develop calls on – and so I feel like it is the most tuned-in and active I’ve been in a season of WoW ever. Especially since I finished off my major alt leveling project in Season 1, all my focus in-game can be on Season 2 current endgame content…well, until the patch this week where I’ll probably level a couple of extra alts to goof around with and open up some different options on.

The Warband feature continues to be a huge winner here, as I can just grab consumables from a shared stash and go when I switch characters, on top of having all the +10 portals unlocked account wide so my baby alts can surprise PUGs by simply appearing at the dungeon in short order after accepting an invite, on top of having the Mythic effects to lock in across the board on all tier sets.

Blizzard has a potent lesson to learn for future seasons – this level of tuning has been generally satisfying to most audiences for Mythic Plus, and provided they refine it further without losing the core idea, there is so much potential in the future of Mythic Plus, in my opinion.