On Monday morning, 4/13/2026, at 12:09 AM, I finished a Pit of Saron +14 to lock in my Keystone Legend achievement for the season. As I like to do here, I wanted to talk today about the process of getting there, how the season has felt so far, the interesting role I took up to get my keys done and how a recent (almost literally the same day I thought I was wrapped on main keys for the season) announcement from Blizzard of some new Keystone features and achievements has pulled me in some new directions.

My Gameplay First

As I noted in previous posts, after starting out on day 1 getting to KSM and pushing up to a +11 key on my Demon Hunter, raid situations dictated that I switch to a healer and ended up with me playing Holy Paladin as my new main. By Sunday of that first week, I had finished out Keystone Master on the Paladin, and about 3 days later, on April 2nd, I had reached the 2500 rating for Keystone Hero.

In choosing to go Holy Paladin as my main, I decided to set myself on a course to practice and succeed at the role, so as soon as the Paladin was set as my main character, it meant I had to practice and get comfy in the role – no playing Protection or Retribution in keys to ease my play, I had to heal and practice it to get better. While Holy Paladin plays differently in dungeons compared to raid (you generally play single-target whack-a-mole in dungeons while raid is about building Holy Power to use on the AoE Light of Dawn), the skillset and crossover was valid and building my capabilities in both modes of play. What’s more, I needed to build (rebuild really) the muscle memory of chasing health bars and getting them topped back up, because I have been maining tanks and DPS characters for so long now that the challenge is in the flexibility of healing and the unique challenges of each run based on the players you’re with and how they respond to the predictable damage events.

Holy Paladin in particular gave me a lot to chew on with regards to how talents in modern WoW are designed and how I feel about them, as well as opened my eyes to some gameplay modalities I hadn’t really used before.

Firstly, while I am cooking a larger post on this topic, until playing Hpal in keys, I have been of the general opinion that the Dragonflight talent revamp was largely a failure. There’s generally a right answer for a mode of content, the meta on what is good feels relatively rigid, and talent interactions with abilities and synergistic interactions are poorly explained unless you read every single tooltip of every single talent and contemplate the ways they interact together to build your response to a given scenario. However, I think with the perspective I gained from playing Holy Paladin (and modifying my build for my own ends), I came to realize that Dragonflight talents are actually better than I have given them credit for. The meta is less rigid and far less enforced than Classic, where talents are all boring tuning knobs and picking the wrong ones in most settings will get you judged by players who know the meta, and while Dragonflight talents do have a “correct” answer for many scenarios, it’s also more opaque in a way such that if you genuinely play better with or enjoy a talent, it is fine to take it and no one is really going to give you any grief about it – much less notice it at all.

When starting out, the recommend builds for Holy Paladin were all Herald of the Sun Hero talents with a build in the class and spec trees that emphasized Holy Light generally, then strengthened either Light of Dawn (raid build) or Flash of Light and Holy Shock power (dungeon build). And…there’s a fair reason for that. Herald has higher HPS throughput overall, some powerful healing over time effects that give you a ramping method to plan ahead around incoming damage, and it synergizes with Holy Shock particularly well, which is a key Holy Paladin spell but also strongly buffed by this season’s tier set. However, as I watched high-end Holy Paladin play, something really stuck out – almost all of the VODs and runs I was watching were Holy Paladins playing Lightsmith Hero talents instead. Lightsmith in Midnight is a bit weird – it replaces the now-signature Divine Toll (remember when that was a Covenant thing?) with Holy Armaments, a spell that places a rotating buff onto a targeted group member (and the Paladin themselves) which is either Holy Bulwark, a shield for 15% of the targets maximum HP that adds 2% of their max HP to the shield every two seconds, and Sacred Weapon, which adds a Holy damage proc to the targets attacks (with the damage attributed to the Paladin themselves) but the proc can also be healing based on targets and it will echo your Holy Power spenders while using your chosen wings buff, which can make it a very potent burst aid for the Paladin.

Lightsmith also opens up an interesting way to play – some damage to healing conversion. Through Hammer and Anvil, Lightsmith gets a small (usually not significant) burst of healing when using Judgment, and the spec talent Empyrean Legacy also allows an angle where Judgment becomes rotationally significant to healing throughput (if it was only stronger than it currently is!). However, the real fun begins when you get a little off-meta and take Avenging Crusader instead of the typical Avenging Wrath. For each Paladin spec, you get two choices of how to pop your wings buff – Ret gets either the choice to pop it or has it tied to their Wake of Ashes, Prot gets the choice of “crit wings” (standard Avenging Wrath) or the defensive Sentinel option, and Holy gets the standard crit wings or Avenging Crusader, which instead gives you 1,000% increased auto-attack damage, returns Crusader Strike to the Holy kit for the buff duration (it was removed as part of Midnight pruning), and makes it so that both Crusader Strike and Judgment (Hammer of Wrath while in wings) heal for 80% of damage dealt. While the healing isn’t significant enough to build your entire identity off of it, this combo does open up some interesting options, and I think the point I tried a Lightsmith/Crusader build is the point I genuinely fell in love with playing Holy Paladin.

For me, LS/Crusader specifically appeals to both modes of play I enjoy. In dungeons, it restores Holy Paladin DPS to a reasonable contribution (Healer damage got gutted this expansion in the worst way holy shit) while providing baseline passive healing during those damage moments so that I can learn to slot in the damage effectively while still tending to my core responsibility. It still has good utility and throughput, with the caveat that it requires a bit more planning and foresight compared to Herald Holy Paladin, but it feels a lot more fun and engaging to play, especially to optimize doing damage while still doing the healing role as well as you can. In raid, where we often struggle with damage checks, playing a raid version of the Lightsmith/Crusader build allows me to put up great healing throughput still while also adding a non-trivial damage contribution, which makes my life as a raid leader easier and specifically contours my play of the healer role into a form where I can do that job well while also addressing a typical shortfall we run into during prog often enough to be a problem.

For me, healer has always been a comfortable role to play. My start in WoW, the class that got me into the game, was Priest, and I raid healed as a Priest as the beginning of my WoW fandom and as my longest-tenured main character, as I was a Priest from vanilla all the way through the tail end of Warlords of Draenor, and while I’ve had several strong main characters since then, none have served as the primary focus of my gameplay for anywhere near as long as Priest did (and my AccountPlayed addon timers reflect that strongly, lol). The vast majority of my Priest playtime was as a healer. Having said that, I had a sort of archaic way of playing healer due to entrenched habits and pushing high keys on my Holy Paladin revealed a need to change. Primarily, through targeting healing spells – I was a “click to target, then cast the heal” player, but I realized pretty quickly that while that did well enough up to the +10s I was goofing around in on my Priest and Shaman last expansion as healer, my targeting methodology was poor, especially if I wanted to properly optimize the damage I was doing as well. I needed to quickly learn a better way, so I ended up picking up mouseover casting for healing, building macros to enable it properly so that I could heal without switching targets and keep a hostile target locked and loaded to hit with Judgment, Holy Shocks unless moused over a friendly, and Shield of the Righteous (which you can use without a target but hey). Doing that immensely improved my healing performance and my damage performance, to the point where I am genuinely on a new level as a player (mouseover macros are getting added to nearly every kit because even on non-healers that means mouseover dispels, off-heals, certain buffs, battle resurrections). While I tend not to be a parse jockey (I do reasonably well for myself and am confident in my abilities without needing funny number to validate it), I have become the Damage Gremlin because I have a legendary-rank average…for damage as Holy Paladin (lol). Healing-wise…I have room to improve, but I’ve slotted in well to our healer core and I can often top on raw throughput with minimal overhealing (and the buffs to Hpal coming next week with the patch are going to be very fun haha).

The Season

The dungeon pool this season is…interesting. I didn’t expect to like it very much, because the retro-half was very oddball and the new half was an unknown, but I’ve enjoyed it overall.

I think my oddball winner that I like the most is…Pit of Saron. The oldest dungeon brought into the rotation as a new titleholder (the previous oldest was a tie between Vortex Pinnacle, Throne of the Tides, and Grim Batol all from Cataclysm), Pit was a dungeon we all ran dozens of times in that twilight year of Wrath of the Lich King for Battered Hilts and 232 item level gear, and it was very much a 2009 dungeon at the time – simple mechanics, simple trash, generally not hard in the Wrath era where dungeons were roundup AoE fests – but the revamp actually made it kinda fun. It won’t be my favorite-ever dungeon, mind you, but I am pleasantly surprised at how engaging they made it and how well it slots into M+ gameplay – open map, lots of routing choices, mechanically interesting trash that leverages group utility well, and boss designs that keep the original ideas present while making them more modern and fun to play as they scale up into higher keys. It’s also maybe a smidge of nostalgia – that dungeon is now 17 years old and reminds me of a simpler time in my life (in some ways, at least). Skyreach also got a good glowup, although I do feel like it slots into the season in a similar way to the last Warlords of Draenor dungeon we got in the first season of an expansion, as similar to DF Season 1 bringing back Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, Skyreach is a very linear “hold-W” dungeon without a lot of interesting route choices or pull variance to it. Seat of the Triumvirate has a lot of very punishing mechanics that probably make it my least favorite key this season (chains of subjugation on the trash when your average ret pally doesn’t even know what Freedom is or that they have it, lol) but with a good group it is a fun roll, and while I expected to love it as it was a favorite in Dragonflight, Algeth’ar Academy returning has been made worse by the changes pushed to the dungeon and an overly tight new timer that punishes a shockingly small number of deaths or inefficient tank routing.

For the Midnight half, I…kinda like them all, actually? Each of them has pain points (I’ve played all 3 roles in each of the dungeons this season already, between key levels 8-14), but the designs are generally open, quite nice, and they’ve made a lot of effort towards more 3-boss, 30 minute bangers this expansion, so there aren’t 5-boss slogs or an abundance of 4-boss, standard-paced, blurred-together dungeons – everything feels reasonably flavorful and captures a distinct idea, gameplay setup, and offers unique routing, even in some hold-W scenarios (Nexus Point Xenas has two halls you have to do but which you do first and how you optimize for bloodlust varies). While I don’t like the prevalence of some timewaster mechanics (the library in Magister’s Terrace, looking ahead to next season the bar in Murder Row lol), things are pretty well-designed and fun overall. If I had to pick a favorite of the Midnight-side Season 1 pool, it’d probably be Windrunner Spire – lore flavor a plenty, some routing variance and choices, recoverable failure states for many mechanics, interesting dense pulls with a need for smart counterplay and mechanical respect, and bosses that put a lot of thought into basic ideas like positioning and room space management.

On the raid side, while it’s not quite the topic today, I like the overall design, with the caveat that I think they swung a bit towards the simple side to ease people in after the addon changes. Heroic upgrades to bosses are sparse and kinda not interesting, so the fights feel very samey after a while and the Heroic upgrade usually just requires one minor adjustment (not killing both orbs together on Salhaadar, not all soaking Gloom on Vaelgor and Ezzorak, managing adds differently on Crown of the Cosmos, etc). That being said, my understanding is that Midnight Falls on Heroic is pretty different and substantially more difficult (I saw someone claim that more guilds have done 5/9 Mythic than have done Heroic Midnight Falls, which is actually nuts), so I think the tier is extremely backloaded into March on Quel’Danas, haha (I have attempted Heroic Belo’ren and yeah, it is a bit more challenging in a unique way compared to Normal).

The addition of Lindormi’s Guidance to low keys has been a boon to tanks, even if the routes and recommendations they offer are pretty poor. Blizzard clearly wants us pulling one pack at a time but that has never been the way of M+ and simply doesn’t work as keys scale, but in terms of getting players in the door to start and push to max gear rewards/vault, it isn’t bad. I think they need to expand on this a little bit more with other mechanics like highlighting interruptible casts and offering incentives in low keys to do those so players learn better, and I would like to see some community feedback on the routes offered to new tanks via the Guidance affix, but it is a promising start.

If you look at Reddit, you’d think this season is a toxic cesspit of angry players flaming tanks and healers, but my experience having played both roles is that I think the people complaining things always smell like shit might need to check their shoes. My lone +14 so far had the tank overpull by 20% of trash and we still timed and laughed about it afterwards, and even as a healer, I’ve never gotten a crass anything from players even on wipes that were attributable to me. It follows a general trend I see in the community that a lot of players lack self-reflection and meaningful self-critique and blame everyone else when things fall apart instead of looking inward to what they could have done or if they were actually meeting the moment. Obviously it won’t always be you or something you can fix, but changing that focus is something that helps with PUG content a lot!

I think that the overall cries of “too easy” are maybe somewhat valid, as pushing into +10s is pretty breezy, although it still requires skill and gear and I think that people overstate how easy the season is – plus, as I said previously, I don’t think M+ can be too easy because it scales up into being as difficult as you want and beyond. I have 3 characters at KSM or higher – the Holy Paladin, my Demon Hunter, and a Restoration Druid, and I’m pretty close to pushing Brewmaster Monk and Holy Priest at least that far with a few more runs as-is, and I think I’ve seen a fair mix of challenges – keys are far from free and PUGging or running with lower skill players will still let you find plenty of challenge and depleted timers if you want that in your life, haha. I do think a part of this is intentional, however…

The Announcement of Keystone Myth and Umbral Legend Achievements

When I finished my Keystone Legend achievement on Monday, I breathed a sigh of relief – I enjoy pushing keys, but there is a certain satisfaction to being done you know?

And then, later that day…Blizzard announced that next week’s patch 12.0.5 would be bringing two new, mount-bearing achievements to the Mythic Plus rating system. The first, Keystone Myth, is awarded at 3,400 rating, and gives a token that can be used to buy a mount from a selection of both new mounts and prior season KSM and KSL rewards (actual selection of mounts tbd). The second, Umbral Legend, rewards a new mount, and is given to the top 1% of players in Mythic Plus rating at the conclusion of a season. And…well, I started contemplating what level of play represents “too much” for me.

At first, my thought was that I would maybe pursue the 3,400 rating target – which represents timing all seasonal dungeons at +16, roughly. Would it be a challenge? Oh, absolutely – but past Keystone Legend, you’re just seeing numeric scaling per key level, which is a climb to be sure, but also not necessarily new mechanics or even strategies to manage the dungeons – it’s just numerically harder, and since I’ve been feeling pretty comfy in the +13 and +14 keys I’ve done, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to blast up to +16 over the course of the season. But surely, most definitely, Umbral Legend is out of reach, right?

Well, I checked and…uh oh, I might be chasing it too.

As I write this very sentence at 1:50 PM PDT on 4/16/2026, the 1% cutoff overall for North America on rating is 3,370.18 rating according to Raider.IO. That’s…lower than the Keystone Myth level. Now, this is a moving target, and it does increase over time based on community rating levels (by the very nature of being a percentile it will adjust upwards as the community continues to climb the ranks), but if you look at most prior season rating charts on Raider.IO, there are two or three phases of movement – the early season spike, a plateauing where the rating moves up by miniscule amounts for a majority of the remaining season, and then a final push in some seasons, where the title pushers going for top 0.1% then nudge their scores up as high as possible in the last week or two in order to cement their place on the chart. Midnight season 1 is only 3 weeks deep at this point, but the chart is functionally very similar looking to all the ones you can still view on the Raider.IO database.

So that lends itself to a question I am still kind of pondering, a similar one I had to ponder when Keystone Legend was added back in The War Within’s second season – do I really want to chase these goals?

On the one hand, the self-doubt that plagued that decision for me in TWW is mostly gone – I played a healer I barely knew from 0 rating and a Protection gearset to KSL in around 3 weeks, have already successfully timed a +14 with a 20% overpull route (it was very funny, haha), and am comfortably cruising at 274 item level, waiting on Myth vault drops, the Voidcore system in patch, and crest caps in subsequent weeks to help bring that up. I am confident that I could push into +16s with my current loadout and build and I have PUG aptitude and group understanding to apply smartly to groups in such a way that I rarely encounter a big gap or failure. There’s definitely a desire to do it – a mount and achievement are tempting rewards and I think the self-satisfaction of reaching the new milestone is very tempting in its own right. Keystone Myth was kind of a no-brainer, but I think at first, I had logically decided Umbral Legend was out of reach.

But is it?

Well, I don’t actually think so based on the data. Sure, being top 1% is hard. It means a commitment to continue pushing keys deep into the season and never getting too complacent with reaching that milestone as it will continue to adjust upwards weekly and even daily until the day the rating window is locked. Right now, being at Keystone Legend rating requirement means I am in the top 10.6% of players – and that will change too, but by how much? The variable is community investment, because while this is an “easy” season in a relative sense, how many people are motivated that much to push that high? Most people I know play to gear reward tracks, which means pushing to +10s for best vaults and 3/6 Hero track gear drops, and the Voidcore system means +10s will be run even more. Some people push to Legend on the motivation of the cooler mount and achievement, but even then, you still get increased Crest rewards up to +12, and Legend is a mix of +12 and +13 keys, so there is logically still a player power incentive that improves as you push up the levels towards Legend. However, Legend represents the plateau of pure gear power from Mythic Plus – beyond that range of play, you’re doing it for the glory and satisfaction, to be challenged sufficiently and met with a puzzle to solve – and I think that is represented by how few players actually push beyond it. Certainly for me, Legend became a thing solely because I wanted the mount, and the gear prog was a pleasant secondary benefit but also a benefit. While I’ve had grand ambitions of pursuing higher keys and pushing beyond, I’ve never actually done it – I take my main to the Legend level ever since that was added in TWW and that is where I stop. Before that it was KSH, and in Shadowlands before that it was KSM. Blizzard knows what they are doing with this achievement and what type of player it appeals to, and spoiler alert – it’s me (a lot of others too, but y’know, my blog).

Looking at two prior “easy” season in Dragonflight Season 3 and TWW Season 3, we can see some interesting notions that might help inform this choice for me. Within the first 3 weeks of the season, rating for 1% reaches a plateau (using that word a lot today!) and then climbs about 8-10% for the rest of the season. TWW S3, for example, has 1% at 3101 rating on September 1st 2025, and then ended the (longer than usual) season at 3515 rating for 1%, so slightly larger than 10% climb but not a huge jump either. Dragonflight Season 3 had 1% at 2953 rating around the beginning of week 3, and then climbed over the season to 3287 by the end.

So if we assume a 10% inflation from Week 3 beginning values, and we are past that time marker already with Midnight’s first season, then that means that Umbral Legend could theoretically be done at around 3670-3700ish rating. A big commitment and a step up from Keystone Myth, to be sure, but also not necessarily as huge a jump as one might expect. With napkin math, if Keystone Myth is all +16s, then 3700 rating would be about all timed +19s. Given that pro-level groups are doing +20 and +21 keys currently without gear inflation, that feels like an obtainable target – we still have the Voidcore system with weapon slot upgrades, and that’s not even accounting for the possibility of them doing another Turbo-Boost to end the season on and inflating gear levels further. A lot of current keys are being done with players in the 270-282ish gear range, but as crest caps open up and players push further, many dedicated push players will be close to current maximum of 289, and if a Turbo-Boost also hits with 12.0.7 (which still seems at least somewhat likely), then we’ll be looking at an item level cap closer to 295, which means many of us will gain another 20-30% further player power, plus getting the repetitions in on the dungeons and refining routes and techniques to squeeze out further improvements. If we assume that these ideas are baked in to at least the TWW S3 score data in some form (since it had an early Turbo-Boost, end-expansion player power progression and a longer end-of-season window due to waiting on prepatch), then the model likely holds up and represents a similar climb to what we can expect to see in Midnight’s first season. And knowing that is…a little bit dangerous for me.

At first, I dismissed the Umbral Legend out of hand as being an unobtainable goal that would remain out of reach. Now, though…I dunno, it seems a little less daunting and a bit more like a fun thing to tackle? I didn’t expect to arrive here and I’m still kind of thinking through how I might go about that goal, or if it would even make sense to stop at 1% (at that point, could I potentially push for season title? I’d be pretty close although also far away at the same time), but it is tickling the same motivation centers in my brain that chasing after the Hall of Fame on Nullaeus did. Can I do it? I’m not sure, but it seems like it would be worth a shot!

I think that opening up something like that with a tangible reward has put me into the scenario of not just thinking in terms of what it might be like to push higher, but how that would actually look, what it would demand of me, and if I can meet the challenge, and I think that’s great. The variable I can’t account for is how exciting it might be to other players and how people being encouraged to push towards 3,400 rating might then make the 1% that much harder by inflating the community rating more, but based on the look of Keystone Legend seasons and how the curve didn’t really change for those – I do find myself somewhat skeptical that it is going to mass-inspire people to push, especially since there are no new gear rewards or player power in that tier and it just increases the skill requirement to reach that level. The players I know who would be most likely to try are either vocally skeptical or quiet about it, and none of the ones I would expect to express an interest in pushing it are even Keystone Legend yet, so within my circles at least there isn’t a ton of open enthusiasm for that push, although the actual end result is still very much in the air.

While the curve of rating in terms of shape hasn’t changed much, it is worth noting that KSM and KSH have become larger percentages of the active M+ pool over time. As far back as we can go for free on Raider.IO, Shadowlands Season 3 saw only 22.8% of players in the M+ pool get KSM and 6.7% get KSH. An expansion later, in DF Season 3, those percentages were 34.8% and 21.2%, substantial growth, and by TWW S3, those numbers were even higher at 50.2% and 37.1%! Even just for KSL, we’ve gone from TWW S2 to Midnight S1 with values of 14.7% > 17.4% > 10.6% (with another 20-some odd weeks to go in the season), so we are very likely to see KSL reach 20% or higher by the end of the season. Player rating growth based on achievements is pretty substantial, even if it doesn’t reshape the climb of the overall chart as a whole. However, there are a bundle of motivations tied up in that which can be hard to decode from the outside – Keystone Legend accompanied a crest reward change and a downward difficulty adjustment to M+, and the same is not true of either Keystone Myth or the 1% mount, which means it may fall flat for players motivated by power rewards and it may be out of reach to collectors who could reasonably learn to do up to +13s for a mount but may not want to invest the time in pushing higher for a mount purchase or having to remain in push mode for a rarer mount. It will be fascinating to see how these achievements unfold either way!

For me – yeah, I guess at this point I am soft-committed to pushing at least Myth and trying for Umbral Legend. I’ll likely talk more about that in the future as I work towards it and feel out what makes sense for me, but yeah – I guess we’ll see, haha.

Overall

This season has been really enjoyable overall for me, and I have enjoyed feeling my skill progression as I tackled new record keys in the healing role on a healer I haven’t played much of in the past. I still believe that the Mythic Plus system is the best thing in modern WoW -approachable, interesting, infinitely scalable and with rewards for players across a wide array of skillsets and interests that can be done in easily PUGged groups or a fun activity to smash out with the homies. Blizzard’s continuing approach to evolve the system and encourage pushing beyond gives me greater reason to engage with it and test my skills against it and I am really happy to see them pushing the idea higher in a way that even gave me a bit of pause (before I decided to lock in, haha). I think with some improvements to the low key experience (Lindormi’s Guidance is a net positive but I would love to see interruptible mobs highlighted and buffs rewarded for playing those mechanics well), the system could do better to encourage more players to get in and push, but the initial changes with Midnight’s first season (and those coming in the patch) are a strong start that builds on the strength Mythic Plus already had coming out of the systemic changes made in The War Within.