When World of Warcraft was first released in 2004, the game was all about the journey and not the destination. Players had to learn the ins and outs of the MMORPG genre, including leveling, gearing, talent trees, stats, and other features. As players’ knowledge and understanding of the game grew, having streamlined end-game content with battlegrounds, raids, and dungeons wasn’t enough. Looking to keep the game still accessible to casual players while giving hardcore players more challenges, Blizzard Entertainment started adding various difficulties to dungeons and raids, starting with the release of The Burning Crusade in 2007. But the biggest addition to the game has been, by far, the Mythic+ dungeons.
Designed in the image of regular dungeons from that expansion, Mythic+ dungeons were first introduced in Legion. Unlike Normal and Heroic-difficulty dungeons, Mythic+ dungeons are dungeons that need to be completed within a certain time window and have weekly affixes that increase both trash mobs and boss health, making them altogether more challenging to complete in time.
Seeing the undeniable success of this experiment, Blizzard kept this mode in the game and later in 2023, Mythic+ dungeons will be celebrating its seventh anniversary. Although Mythic+ dungeons are still one of the community’s favorite aspects of the end game, Dragonflight has shown that the system is overdue for a revamp. Here’s everything wrong in Mythic+ dungeons in Dragonflight that Blizzard should look to fix in the near future.
Grouping elitism
Unless you have a premade group of friends or guildies to run your Mythic+ keys with, you will have a bad time when trying to group with other PUG players as you will be declined time and time again. This is mainly due to group leaders looking to put together a group with players that outrank or outgear the dungeon in question. But that’s not all. No matter your item level, rating, and how good you might be at your class, there’s still a chance you won’t get accepted in the group since you’re not playing a meta class or spec like Havoc Demon Hunter or Enhancement Shaman.
On top of that, Blizzard removed the Valor cap, and high-end players, instead of running high Mythic+ keys, have swarmed to level 2+ keys or slightly higher for easy Valor farms. Although this allows for interactions between high and low-end players, this means that players are now having a harder time gearing up, because why would group leaders accept a Destruction Warlock who’s still gearing up when they can get a free boost from a 3000 rating Feral Druid farming Valor?
Leaving at the first sign of trouble
If you’re lucky enough to get into a Mythic+ group, the next challenge you’ll need to overcome is the increasing number of players that tend to leave a group at the first sign of trouble. We have all been in a situation where you log into Dragonflight, spend half an hour or more queueing up for Mythic+ dungeons, waiting for all party members to arrive and buff up, only to see the run end in less than five minutes as one player leaves at the first sign of trouble.
Although there are Mythic+ runs that are doomed from the very beginning and you leaving the run only means saving everyone some time, there are many salvageable runs that could be timed if players would lose their attitude and focus on their gameplay.
Because of this, many players are too anxious and scared to even start their Mythic+ journey as they don’t want to be blamed for ruining a perfectly good run. Not only does this scare away one part of the WoW population, but it also wastes everyone’s time.
Overwhelming number of mechanics
If you manage to get past the first trash pack without anyone leaving, you’ll soon notice you have a lot on your plate with the incredible number of interrupts you need to time perfectly, defensives to use, Thundering and other regular affixes spawning every so often, and keeping track of all the mechanics you need to dodge. The main offenders are, by far, Dragonflight dungeons where it can often seem as if the entire floor is lava and you can basically work with only three pixels around you.
Healers and tanks, on top of that, have even more concerns on their minds, as they have to worry about the routes and maximizing their cooldowns to nullify big damage windows. To have at least an average run, you’ll need to have tons of addons that will help you keep track of all mechanics you need to soak, interrupt, and dodge.
Stale and frustrating affix rotation
Coming from Shadowlands into Dragonflight, Blizzard removed the two most frustrating Mythic+ affixes—Necrotic and Inspired. Although this has made everyone’s life much easier, Mythic+ affixes are still a pain to deal with, especially if you pair them with the overwhelming number of dungeon mechanics and terrible timings. Picture this: you’re clearing 15+ Halls of Valor on Quaking week and the run has been going smoothly until you reach Hyrja and you have to stack for Eye of the Storm with Quaking ready to go off. This, of course, ends in a wipe and depleted key and you’re left with nothing but frustration as you did the mechanics correctly, but were still unsuccessful.
Since fixing all these interactions is simply too much work for the WoW team, especially during a single season, many players suggest only keeping the main two affixes—Fortified and Tyrannical, and the seasonal affix, believing that these affixes paired with the limited-time would be enough of a challenge on their own.
Too large loot pools
The main reason why players grind Mythic+ dungeons, aside from rating, is the gear. Naturally, everyone wants to have their best-in-slot pieces. But if you’re farming a piece of gear from Halls of Valor, where the loot table consists of 23 unique items, you’ll be spending quite a while in that fabled dungeon. This leads us to our next point—Mythic+ dungeons have too large a loot pool, meaning you can run the dungeon hundreds of times before you can get the piece you really need.
Although the obvious solution to this might be to increase the drop rate of gear in Mythic+ dungeons or tweak how the Great Vault works, a better solution would be cutting back on the number of items that can drop in Mythic+ dungeons, effectively increasing your chance to get your best-in-slot items earlier.
What can be done in Dragonflight season two?
Considering how diligently Blizzard has been listening to the community feedback since Dragonflight started on November 28, 2022, we can expect Mythic+ to change further down the road. As of yet, we haven’t seen any blue posts or official Blizzard blog posts confirming this, but it’s highly likely that Dragonflight as the expansion oriented toward recovering WoW to its former glory will address this.
In the meantime, you can continue leaving constructive feedback on WoW’s subreddit and official forums in hopes that the devs see it. According to WoW content creators and streamers, the best approach to reworking Mythic+ dungeons would be reducing the number of affixes to only two main affixes and one seasonal one and reducing the loot table. Still, we have a long way to go before we see which route will Blizzard take.
