In Dragonflight’s fourth season of content, Blizzard made a move to try and address friction with the dungeon system in World of Warcraft – creating a clearer divide of difficulty that aimed to include queueable dungeons as well as the Mythic dungeon system that is a cornerstone of the game’s modern design. Heroic was being amped up with harder-hitting mechanics and higher tuning, Mythic baseline dungeons were being adjusted to roughly match what a +10 was around Dragonflight Season 3, and then the Mythic Plus system basically picks up from there and scales up using that higher starting point, with new affix introduction levels but otherwise cutting the progression curve for the average player in half – moving top rewards from requiring a +20 key to +10 in the new system and hoping this would create a level spread with more mid-tier keys, less-frequent skipping up the ranks, and a smoother experience to the average player, while still retaining that high-level scaling for the top-end players.

And now it’s been two years and about 4 total seasons of gameplay, and I think we can look back on that change now and speak on it a bit more. My hypothesis for today – the key squish was kind of a failure that hasn’t really produced the end results Blizzard claimed to want.

So first, let’s discuss the core ideas behind the initial squish. The big thing Blizzard wanted to target was a lack of smooth progression, which emerged because low keys were, in the old scale of things, largely things that many players in Mythic Plus viewed as a waste of time. Doing a +2 wasn’t for most people in the system, and even most new players who had never touched M+ could blitz a +2 with a handful of deaths each and still time the key easily to the 2-chest level. For those unaware, Mythic Plus timers use 20% segments for additional rewards/scoring, so timing a key with 20%-39% time left on the timer is a 2-chest, which adds two key levels to the new key you get at the end, while 40% or more timer means a 3-chest and three added key levels. It was incredibly common for the progression path through low-key Mythic Plus to be +2 into +5, +5 into +8, and then potentially +8 into +10, because your average modern WoW player can relatively easily blitz the scaling as designed at those levels in the old system since Blizzard kept the curve in check to keep scaling smooth into those much-higher key levels. Now, to be fair, the issue is that not everyone has the confidence in their own abilities or the dungeon knowledge to follow that path, but because a majority of players could, it meant that trying to find a group for, say, a +3 or +6 was often a failed endeavor from the start. Few players choose to play in that key range because of reward scaling and the overall fun factor/challenge of the dungeons not being super-present in that key range. Also, from the experienced player point of view, playing low keys to learn feels like a good idea but was (and still is) often a bad one, because the threat of failed mechanics is just not nearly present enough to actually teach. Most DPS don’t learn to interrupt bolt casters in the new scaling until like +11s and up, because that’s the point where those bolt casters with random targeting start killing DPS (and even then, many dumbass DPS players will just blame the healer or tank because they don’t have the situational awareness to understand what got them and why). In the old system, starting at +10 was actually the smart play, because then you had a sense of what was actually dangerous and how you could counter-play it – anything lower just reduced the stakes and thus reduced the number of teachable moments. I don’t doubt that particularly observant players could learn on lower keys, I did that myself many times in fact – but it was generally not the best teacher.

By reducing the key level “bloat” down to the current level, the hope is that most players would skip around the lower levels less – because higher tuning would mean that the old path of 3-chesting your first 3 runs wasn’t nearly as obtainable just mathematically. The tuning to non-keystone dungeons was likewise intended to give a sense of learning to those lower difficulties – making basic Mythic difficult and rewarding and making queueable Heroic dungeons more popular and a better teacher to prepare players for the full-fidelity versions they would face in Mythic difficulties. And to an extent, at least in Dragonflight Season 4, it was a modest success! Heroics were more commonly run, Mythic baseline runs were more interesting and gave normal-raid level loot that was a good upgrade path for many, while Mythic Plus had more runs in the lower key levels range and still had a strong reward for those +10s with strong progression beyond for those who dared. This tuning also came in the final season of an expansion, when stat inflation had made everyone more capable at a baseline of dealing with the challenges and with dungeons that the dungeon audience was already familiar with, albeit with a gap since the Season 4 cohort was split between the first two seasons of DF, with the third having the super dungeon Dawn of the Infinites and more old dungeons than usual.

The War Within was the first expansion with the key squish from the beginning, and well…let’s say it hasn’t quite kept hitting the mark.

Firstly, the tuning felt off from the beginning. In terms of preserving the difficulty that had been established as the goal for Heroics and baseline Mythics, the TWW dungeons just weren’t quite there. To be fair, that’s not the biggest deal – they were still okay-enough early into the expansion, but they weren’t as good as teaching experiences as they had sort of been in Dragonflight Season 4 (and you can even argue there that the teaching part was kind of not great!). Secondly, though – the reward curve for them was borked hugely. Heroics no longer gave as good of loot, dropping below LFR level and also being subject to weird two-tier scaling in Season 1 of TWW due to early access, where Heroics in the first week or so were lower rewards than what they would end up giving after that window. Mythics likewise dropped lower-than-raid level gear, which removed a lot of the incentive to do them that was present in DF S4. They were on a daily lockout instead of weekly for the first season of TWW, so that was kind of nice – but it wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of power in the gear, especially once mid-season catchup came via the very-easy-to-farm Siren Isle gear.

Secondly, the tuning of Mythic Plus in TWW S1 was a huge pain in the ass which neutered a lot of the goodwill towards the change. This was a multifactorial issue, because tanks were undertuned and felt weak, trash mobs in dungeons had an abundance of high-damage tankbuster mechanics, healers had relatively little power to recover health after such major chunking on the tank (hence the prominence of Discipline Priest in the meta that season, preventing the damage and having a backstop was infinitely more useful than good recovery after the fact or good ramp into the damage intake), and the tuning of affixes, particularly the introduction of increased death timer penalties via Challenger’s Peril at +7, all combined to make Mythic Plus an absolute slog that season. Pushing was too difficult for many and even the top end of the system barely cracked into high teen keys. This is something they remedied a lot in Season 2 and beyond, and while I think that is a positive change overall and certainly one that I have enjoyed more in later TWW seasons, it does undermine (ha!) the original idea of the difficulty scaling, as it is now common-ish again for players to quickly 2- and 3-chest their early keys right up into the +10 level, which leads to…

Thirdly, the scaling goals have kind of fallen off due to changes in tuning and led to lower-level keys being barren once more. Granted, more keys happen in the +3-+7 range than prior to the squish, but that is by virtue of the fact that those levels represent a much greater range of player activity compared to the old system, which spread those players thinner over a larger range of levels. If you’re actually trying to find a group in that range, it often feels just as difficult now as it did in Dragonflight Season 3 prior to the squish, because many players quickly outpace running stuff in that range and generally quickly push their opening +2s of the season into the +10s and never look back.

Fourthly (how many lists have people written that make it this far with the -ly numbering? I feel like I am seeing fourthly for the first time in my life lol) – Blizzard has been steadily introducing rewards to keys higher than +10s which further incentivizes pushing beyond the rewards boundary that was originally defined by the squish. The introduction of a +12 affix that actually removes affixes in favor of harsher scaling and allows you to just “play the dungeon” as many M+s profess to want made running lower keys harder in some ways, because there’s more mechanics due to the Xal’atath affixes in the deadzone of +4-+9. If you can do the dungeon mechanics and hit your buttons well, +12s are actually in many ways easier than doing lower keys, especially the +10 and +11 keys, because you no longer have to manage burst windows around the Xal’atath spirit or hold AoE crowd controls for the orbs or any of that – you can just do the mechanics and hit your buttons and prosper. This has been accompanied by the addition of more upgrade Crests to keys up to +12, the Keystone Legend rating breakpoint and second seasonal mount, and was briefly in Midnight beta about to be even further rewarded with higher-tier Myth-track item rewards all the way up to +18 – a change that was never confirmed by Blizzard posts or notes but was working on the beta until it was removed just a bit ahead of the prepatch launch. These changes have been made because the playerbase has pushed higher and harder even post-squish – top key levels are matching prior records (with a -10 to account for the squish, obviously), and the addition of Resilient Keys has made pushing higher easier for the average player (with drawbacks related to boosting and the “value” of keys that are not in-scope for this post haha). Turbo-boost has also flattened the higher ends of the difficulty curve by introducing more player power mid-season and allowing gear power to break down walls for less-skillful players, who can continue pushing until the twilight weeks of the season and eventually end up at their goal just by sheer overpowering of difficulty via gear creep.

Fifthly (this one is even weirdly than fourthly!), like in any long-lived game, average player skill continues to increase at a decent pace which makes any difficulty-based measure that was mathed out in 2023 hard to maintain consistency with. Players get smarter, faster, and more able to solve the problems WoW throws at them, and so scaling to solve that problem is only going to do so much, especially when Blizzard is also constrained by their own gear scaling in terms of how hard things can scale, especially at lower levels. At the top end of keys, the infinite scaling is the point and where pure skill and strategy begin to close that gap, but for most players, the range of content has to keep at least a bit of soft-scaling so that it remains in-line with rewards available to players. This, coupled with a new expansion in TWW, meant that the original motive from DF Season 4 was not going to be easy to maintain, because player gear power would be reset going into the new expansion while the increase in skill is a constant, and tuning something based on the assumptions of what players will bring makes a challenging environment. What we saw in TWW is that Blizzard both over- and under-shot tuning, by making M+ far more difficult at the start while keeping Heroic and Mythic baseline relatively undertuned, followed by then reducing difficulty in M+ from Season 2 onward. That’s not even necessarily a bad thing, because the last two seasons have been very fun to progress in Mythic Plus! But if the goal was to avoid people sprinting up the ladder quickly and abandoning the lower key ranges, well…we’re not quite there, even if we are maybe slightly closer than we were before the squish.

Is The Key Squish Goal Aligned With Player Needs?

I think a question that pops into my head is this – is Blizzard’s goal with the changes made in alignment with us as players? And you know, I’m not necessarily sure if it is or isn’t. I think for myself, it generally isn’t – I don’t mind pushing high keys and I think that any system with a wide range of difficulties is going to tend to self-select over time into a Bell Curve-like distribution of players. Within Mythic Plus, the center of that curve is around +8s to +11s depending on the point in the season we are at, obviously pushing the center higher in key level as the end of season approaches. This can be bad news if you’re a newer player trying to shake the rust and try out a Mythic Plus without the immediate threat of failure from scaling, and likewise it means a small group exists at the high end pushing into and beyond +20s. I think the problem is that what drives players out of that low range isn’t difficulty scaling but lack of rewards and incentive structure within the system to push higher faster. Mythic Plus is widely regarded as a gear faucet, which it absolutely can be if you are able to push quickly into +10s and then farm those for Myth track Great Vault slots and Hero track gear drops from the end of the dungeon. Old incentives that persist like the old 2 and 3-chest incentives to key level exacerbate this, because most players with the skill to go higher are going to quickly outscale lower difficulty levels, and it takes a certain kind of weird obsessive (in my opinion) to force themselves to linearly scale by doing +2s, then +3s, and so on into the higher end. As long as the game incentivizes reasonably good play and timer performance with skipping mid-level keys while also making the rewards as you climb more appealing (up to that +10 level, at least), then players are naturally going to push into the top incentive tier as quickly as possible and feel little reason to persist in lower level content.

What I think Blizzard had right in DF S4 and then lost the plot on very quickly was the balance of Heroic dungeons. Making Heroic dungeons viable pathways to good loot and worth queuing for was a good goal and one that was met reasonably well in DF S4, but if you try queueing a Heroic today on live servers…uh, I hope you have time to wait. There needs to be a reimagining of rewards and incentives around queueable content in the game in general, because LFR suffers a similar problem in the current state of the game where there’s just no real reason to queue it unless you really want to see the full raid, because Story Mode end bosses usurp the story purpose of the raid in general and open-world rewards from even just world quests, much less Delves and mid-season catchup sources, completely overshadow LFR gear unless you really desperately want your tier set bonus as early as possible and it is worth taking a huge item level dive to get it.

The other major issue I have avoided discussing to this point which Blizzard was trying to solve is the “onboarding” experience of Mythic Plus. Part of making Heroic have more mechanics and Mythic baseline being more challenging with greater rewards was that it was intended to push more players that direction and create gradual scaling for those wanting that ease-in to pushing keys, and I would argue here is where Blizzard failed spectacularly. They went back on the scaling and rewards in the space of a single season, because by TWW S1, the value and challenge were both lost and in many ways M0 and Heroic dungeon queues are largely dead content from nearly the start of a season. Instead, players get in via low-level keys a lot of times, and they usually skip right through the dungeons with minimal learning until they hit a wall and either attrit out of the system or study up and learn – but that also often requires external resources, and even in Midnight with changes to a lot of dungeons that make things clearer, this will still be the case. I think Blizzard could do a lot to incentivize players to push down into those lower difficulties, as they haven’t made any real changes to the Satchel of Cooperation in literally forever, where I think additional Crests, higher-tier Crests, or even maybe a once-a-day higher-tier gear reward guaranteed could encourage players beyond those difficulties to pull the lever on the slot machine while also giving a powerful incentive to players in those tiers to run that content instead of just choosing world content or Delves. All of these modes of play can and should coexist and I think it is important that players have that choice – but right now, the rewards skew in favor of basically never running Heroic or even Mythic baseline dungeons.

At the end of this thought experiment, I think that’s why I would say Blizzard failed. For the average player, the experience hasn’t meaningfully changed in the ways they wanted it to, and the push of increased rewards and decreased scaling has incentivized pushing higher more, which put us right back in the same place we were when Blizzard wanted to squish in the first place. I don’t think this is a squishable problem, to be frank – the solution look like rewards and incentives to do those lower tiers of content and maybe even training wheels or a way to help new and nervous players push into their first few keys. The new Lindormi’s Guidance affix to help tanks and groups with routing decisions is a smart first run, but it would be ideal to see that open in even lower difficulties or even Follower dungeons so you could scout out a route and try to see how things feel before a group is there with you. Healers and DPS need something similar though as well – incentives to interrupt casters for DPS that aren’t just “not dying” would be great, and more ways to dispel-train healers to help them figure out the right way to tackle certain pulls and challenges would be ideal. At least there is something new to try, and I hope that Blizzard keeps iterating to find a better spot for the system for all players.