On Saturday night, April 26th, 2025, I did it – I obtained The War Within Season Two – Keystone Legend achievement. It was essentially a buzzer beater, as I hit 3,000 Mythic Score right on the nose, with Raider.IO saying my score is 2,999.9, which makes me glad that Blizzard’s own tabulation said “close enough” and rewarded the achievement!

So, how was it?

Well…interesting.

Last time I wrote about the push, something I noted is that the +12 keys I was doing at the time were serene in a weird way – knowledgeable players, no real drama, a reduction in clusterfuckery due to the removal of the Xal’atath dance affixes, and generally relaxed as a result of those changes. I hadn’t timed all +12s at that time, but my observations were generally holding true. However, I have come to realize there is one rule that throws all of that out the window…the nearness to a goal.

When you get near the 3000 rating mark, there is a certain level of anticipation of being done. To get to that level, you have to enjoy the push at least a little bit, but as you close in on that major goal there’s a certain level of desire to be done – to reach the goal and to no longer have the closeness of that goal lingering over your head. Even the milestones along the way carry that same level of feeling – finishing all the +11s, then +12s, and then finally closing in on the 4-5 +13s you need to reach the Legend level – all of them carry a certain tension. At the +11 level, that’s mitigated slightly because the keys are still pretty similar feeling – you have the Xal’atath affixes still, the level of play required is not so precise as to feel like a step up from the Keystone Hero level of play, but as you start to reach a plateau, the grind can feel grindier. I actually had a very funny version of this, which was as follows: the last key I needed for the last two layers of my goal took multiple attempts and a lot of frustration to reach. When I had every single +12 dungeon timed except Priory of the Sacred Flame, I spent a long afternoon just constantly applying to groups for it, and in the end it took eleven runs of the dungeon on +12 to get a single timed one on the board. As bad as that sounds, most of them were simple and early failures – usually the tank trying the uber pull at the start of the dungeon, failing and dying, and then the group disbanding. One completed run in the failure stretch saw us fail the timer by 1.5 seconds – which, at this level, rewards no points!

The grind to my necessary +13s for the achievement was similar, in that the first 3 timed +13s were pretty much one-shots. I started with Darkflame Cleft and immediately timed it with relative ease, then did a Mechagon Workshop and same thing – one run, one group, we smoked the dungeon and it was looking good. Then it was Motherlode – one group, one run, in and out with the win. In between these runs, I was doing +13 Rookery keys and failing, and before the Motherlode key I tried a Theater of Pain that fell apart hilariously because the priest used Mass Dispel on the first pack instead of Mind Soothe for the skip, and it turns out that Mass Dispelling generates aggro – who knew! After that timed Motherlode, I joined 6 different groups for various +13s that would give me the rating, but each came up short in usually small ways. We’d finish the dungeon but fail the timer by 1-5 minutes, or a big trick pull would go incredibly wrong and we’d wind down. Rookery, one of the easiest dungeons this season, was hard for an interesting reason – at +13, the sponginess of mobs becomes challenging if your DPS is low, and I took a lot of work on myself to bring up my overall DPS, even eventually going back to a Shado-Pan hero talent build for Windwalker because it gave me better burst AoE DPS for knocking over trash pulls (and required a lot less from me in terms of alignment of abilities and management of buff timings). Last night, I queued into another Rookery +13 – and it was the one, because the DPS was on-point, the tank was chain pulling so we rarely left combat, and the healer was on-point with big heals as major damage went out. Instead of reaching the last boss at 26 minutes (leaving just 3 on the clock to do the last boss), we finished the whole dungeon in 25 minutes, and with that, my achievement popped.

Let’s go into some more detail about some points of the experience.

Being Hardstuck Sucks

The negative player experiences I did run into during the final leg of the push came down to something simple and understandable – being stuck just outside of achievement range. My own personal frustration (never vented into any group, thankfully) was that it felt like a lottery in groups – sometimes I could get a relatively competent group that just couldn’t do numbers, like the number of failed but completed Rookery runs I had at +13, other times I got a pack of killers who were just destroying the dungeons with ease (including me!), and other times I had total mechanical failures in the group, like zero interrupt DPSers, a healer that stood in the lighting swirlies on Kyrioss in the Rookery and died twice, and a hunter with range and easy mobility who couldn’t avoid the sweeping lightning lasers on that same boss.

In a lot of cases where we completed the run but didn’t time it, DPS performance was just anemic, or we died too many times and incurred enough 15-second penalties to kill the timer where if we lived and otherwise played exactly the same, we would have won. A lot of the times, the tanks and healers were often the most toxic in those groups, and to an extent, I kind of get it – one super good Paladin tank I did a Cinderbrew Meadery +13 with was at 2998 rating (TWO points shy of Legend) and he did great, aggressive pulls, managed his own survival well, but in the end we failed the timer by barely a minute because of deaths (mostly DPS taking avoidable one-shots). He was mad at the end, because of course, had we timed it, he would be done with the KSL grind. Something similar happened in a Rookery +13 with a resto shaman healer and with a couple of the tanks in the Rookery +13s I strugglebussed through – some comments about how timing it would have been possible if only the other players had played a little better – higher DPS, better interrupts, etc. And the thing is that they weren’t wrong – a lot of the callouts those salty boys made were correct – but it wasn’t the best note to end on in those cases.

From my own POV, I worked to improve my play a lot and the failed +13s where we went far or even finished the run without timing gave me a lot to analyze and work through – but it also felt terrible at times to be stuck. Every 13-15 points of rating in that last stretch felt like a struggle, even though, as I mentioned above, a lot of the +13 runs were nearly effortless slams through the dungeon. I can get why a tank who played incredibly well would be mad at a failed dungeon timer when he’s two points away from Legend and playing so well – when I was at the final stretch of 13 points and failing runs for a couple of afternoons in a row, it felt awful, and I wasn’t even playing on that same level!

So yeah, while I do think the majority of high keys I’ve done so far are generally better socially and play skill wise, when you reach near those achievement levels and players are trying desperately to finish their goals, there is a higher level of salt that emerges, and to an extent, it is understandable why.

The Skill Requirement Is Real

I don’t just say this to puff out my own chest (although, you know, I did it, hooray), but those +12 and +13 level keys require a higher level of aptitude than you might expect, especially in the TWW model where those high keys are both Fortified and Tyrannical. Trash mob spells you’d avoid interrupting at low level keys become lethal combos, like in a Rookery +13 where two Lightning Bolt casts back to back on me was an insta-death, and the failure penalty for not interrupting and using stops becomes death in a lot of cases. Most of the early big-fun Rookery pulls require immaculate CC and interrupt play to avoid getting wombo-comboed to death, and failing to use defensives when you are getting blasted by a DoT or the partywide unavoidable damage is going out often just means dying too. If you’re not good about using defensives and utility up to around a +10, you can kind of get away with it, but beyond that, your death is far more likely and more punishing. A lot of the groups I was in that didn’t go on to complete the dungeon were because a critical pull was failed and we fed the timer too much, so people would just hit a “gg” in chat and head home.

In a lot of ways, high key Mythic Plus tests your ability to learn from those lower keys and carry that knowledge with you – the more you know about the dungeon, the better off you will be, especially if you have frequent reminders like Plater profiles showing casts, timer mods to show the big damage moments, and especially learn to stay calm and avoid over-committing resources so that you have some form of response to every major threat. It also becomes crucial to manage your DPS cooldowns better – I am in the habit of sending everything as it comes up so as to not miss a usage, but in +12s and especially +13s, doing that is no longer prudent if it means you send a full burst window when a pack/boss is sub-10%, unless you know you have sufficient recovery time between sending those cooldowns and the next major pull where you want them.

That’s something I will talk about more later in this post, but the knowledge requirements on every layer are higher – you need to know your class and spec kit far better, know the dungeon better, know what your teammates are capable of more, and combine all of that into a layered idea of how you’ll execute against the stuff being thrown at you.

By The End I Wanted The Grind To Be Over…

The harsh push up to get that last timed +12 and last timed +13 was a window where I felt the biggest sense of wanting it to be over. I was committing a lot of time to the endeavor and so each failure ground against my will in a way, where I had to tell myself that I was close to my goal, I wanted to reach it within a week of locking in and saying publicly here that I was going to do it, and it was something that I felt this dogged insistence to do from within – even as frustration with the lottery of groups and failed runs mounted. I related to the aforementioned salty boys because I was becoming one, disillusioned by pushing hard and not quite getting there just yet, and each time I watched a DPS fail to interrupt or myself fail a mechanical check, my irritation would grow. It wasn’t that the goal itself felt bad or that I hated the process, just that I hated being so close to the goal for what felt like a prolonged period of time. Because the major thing is…

…But I Loved The Push, It Made Me A Better Player, I Would and Will Do It Again

Since I got deep into Mythic Plus in Shadowlands, pushing keys has generally been my happy place. Provided a season doesn’t feel like ass to play (DF Season 2, TWW Season 1), I love doing keys and the majority of my game time and thought about WoW is through the lens of Mythic Plus. Even as a raid leader, guild leader, and mass altoholic, keys are where my heart lies in the game these days. I love doing them, I enjoy teaching them to newer players (when they show up ready to learn), I like taking most of my characters through them, and it just feels like fun to push keys and reach new levels, learn new tech, and generally just engaging with the game at a deeper level, getting to use tech that world content and raids don’t expose in each class and spec’s toolkits.

Even for a spec I have played a lot the last 3 years and done fairly well at in Windwalker, pushing to these high keys made me better at it, because I had to get better to meet the goal I set for myself. I settled in the 10-range of keys around low-to-mid 2 millions in DPS average across a key, but I knew I could do better, and by the end, I had improved to over 3 million average per run, with bursts up to 10 million. I died less, used defensives smartly, engaged my strong off-healing for my own benefit but also to save group members and play cooperatively, and even experimented with different builds like multiple Conduit of the Celestials builds, Shado-Pan builds, and even by the end working in the new-in-11.1 talent Slicing Winds, adding a Plunderstorm ability to my toolkit. I finally built no-clip macros for my core abilities, worked on having a dedicated Windwalker set with proper stat priorities for it, and I learned how to make myself an attractive applicant for high keys by learning to find groups where my kit had a high degree of synergy. Many of these are things I already knew to a lesser extent, but the high-key push made me learn more, dig deeper, and I think it improved my gameplay a lot.

At the end last night, I had to ask myself – if this new achievement continues into the future, would I keep doing it? Will it be like Keystone Hero, a thing I must have and will work hard to get provided I enjoy the season? I think the answer is yes. To an even-greater degree than normal, doing this push has made it so that I don’t have to take raid loot, which benefits my guild, it means I show up with higher item level which also helps us to push harder in raid, and personally, I found the chase and reaching those heights satisfying. It was frustrating and at-times tedious, failure was a blessing and also a curse to sit in LFG refreshing and applying more, but I’m happy to have done it in the end. I’m especially happy to have achieved it prior to late-season easing mechanisms, like the upcoming return of BfA Corruption effects as head enchants, so there’s no perception that I waited it out or to think that maybe I’m not skilled enough to do it with just the baseline of power available to start a season. I did it, I did it before any extra boosts or power-ups, and I did it through PUGS – no carries, no community helpers, no premades in voice talking through each run – just playing to skill and meeting the tough challenge of the highest keys I’ve ever done.

And that leaves a last question for my personal play this season…

What Next?

Well, I still have my Destruction Warlock to push to KSM to round out the six characters I designated as pushers to start the season. I also have catchup gear to get from the Nightfall scenario on a ton of level 80 characters, so there’s that.

Will I go back to high-level keys though?

Well…probably. When I think about the rest of the season, still another 4 months in all likelihood, my ideal is to reach Resilient Keys for +13s on my Monk, so the goal is to finish up timing the remaining +13s I have yet to do. I also think I would like to push my Guardian Druid to Keystone Hero, perhaps also my Holy Priest. I want to round out the Heroic and Mythic tier set appearances for my Havoc DH and Retribution Paladin, and I still have a handful of LFR/Normal tier set appearances to finish up. I have a few baby alts I want to push to level 80 to round out some gaps in my current huge lineup (no Horde DK, another non-Evoker Dracthyr to max level), which I hope to do prior to the end of the current event buff that started with patch 11.1.5.

From a raid perspective, my team has a short-ish grind on Heroic Mug’zee left (surprisingly despite his wall status, my raid was chewing through that fight in a single night of prog lol) before we lock in on Heroic Gallywix to close out the raid tier. The raid tier on Heroic has been a bit draining for me in that a fair few of my raiders are not playing to potential, but that’s something that I think will improve (and taking just the initial steps to make it a focus created a lot of nearly instantaneous improvement, heh).

Overall, I’ve been rather happy with this season of content in WoW. The difficulty tuning has been spot-on in that things feel challenging but fair, having an objective to lock-in on that made me push high keys got me to try something that was really fun and exciting, and I feel like in my perpetual journey to improve my gameplay and show up stronger for my friends, raid, and guild, this push has given me a lot to learn from and mull over. I’m tempted to broaden the challenge next season or maybe even later in this season, like the thought of pushing my Guardian Druid up to KSL and not just KSH seems tempting to a point as does trying healing at that level, which would be a fair bit higher than I ever have before.

This is the most aggressively I have ever pushed in a WoW season and I’ve really enjoyed the results. I’ve had a lot of fun with the gameplay and gained a lot of self-satisfaction from proving to myself that I could reach these levels of play without needing to change much other than to just stay focused on self-improvement and playing for the experience. Sure, sometimes it was frustrating, and sometimes it felt dead-endy and iffy, but I’ve done all of my major goals for the season except Ahead of the Curve on Gallywix and 1 last KSM on my warlock. My Delver’s Journey is capped, I have Underpin dead on both difficulties (and dead on ? difficulty on all 6 of my pusher characters!), I’ve got my tradeskill knowledge leveled to a point where I can make just about anything at 5-star with proper quality materials, and my Warbank and overall stash is still in really good shape. My guild is making better progress towards the AOTC goal as of this week and my Warlock that was my last KSM project for the season is already half-rating towards it with a decent item level to resume and conclude pushing. I feel validation from my approach, that I played smartly and was able to get myself skilled up and prepared easily so that I could just play the game and it has been a lot of fun.

At this point I’m waiting to see what the seasonal wind-down brings – my old fave Horrific Visions are back in a couple of weeks, the Turbo Boost concept is interesting (with some quirks I plan to talk about in a future post), and by late summer we should be locking in on season 3 and the Deepgrove (that’s a hunch, hoping to discuss that one more in the future too!).