Getting Invested in Mythic+

A Classic Andy’s Journey to Keystone Hero

So I’m a bit of what you could call a WoW boomer. I played Warcraft as a child after seeing it being played at a family friend’s house back in the mid-90s. Later I moved on to other Blizzard games like Diablo and StarCraft, followed by spending my early teens playing far too much Warcraft 3.

It was only natural that WoW followed this and after playing the beta at a convention in 2004, I was hooked. Even if my PC at the time could barely handle the game, I spent months being terrible at WoW and loving it. I raided Molten Core and Zul’Gurub, finishing neither of them. But it was still a part of my life I remember fondly.

When TBC arrived, I spent my time PvPing. I was terrible at that too, but in an era before esports had taken off, I was surrounded by other people who were the same. People sucked at the game and that was ok.

I dipped my toe in occasionally after TBC until Warlords of Draenor was released, but I never really found myself enjoying the game. I, like many, had felt put off by the direction the game had taken and it wasn’t until Classic WoW was released that I started playing WoW again.

During my time away from WoW, I got into running local esports events.

Towards the end of 2022, I started working as a video editor for WoW streamer Eiya and decided to start playing Dragonflight as well. I’d be editing retail WoW footage, so it made sense that I learn more about the game itself.

I was pleasantly surprised by how good Dragonflight felt to play. The world felt alive with things to do, the story felt far more grounded than a lot of recent WoW expansions, and I could enjoy higher-end content without the need to do any kind of mandatory grind.

I ran into a couple of stumbling blocks as I started getting caught up on what it was to play modern retail. The game is a weird mixture of player power and agency skyrocketing since vanilla WoW, but with significantly more challenging endgame content that pushes a player’s capabilities of being able to use that power. It’s interesting how retail feels easier in some ways, while also feeling much harder overall. Maybe I’ll write about that particular subject one day.

One of the less enjoyable aspects was a community one though. It’s no secret that there have been a lot of hostile voices between the retail and classic communities. I wasn’t exactly exempt from this either, as I had some of my own hot takes about retail in the run-up to Classic’s release. I had an eye-opening experience though when mentioning Classic during a retail raid and it made me realize just how unpleasant that hostility could be. I’ve since tried to move on as a person and I have good people in all communities that I enjoy spending time with.

That moment also led me to want to get into Mythic+ this season. Whether true or not, the feeling of being a “Classic Andy” was in the back of my mind and I wanted to prove that I could reach a notable goal in retail off my own skill. The season 3 dungeon pool for Mythic+ doesn’t appeal to me at all, so I decided I would use the remaining 4 weeks of season 2 to reach 2500 rating, aka “Keystone Hero”.

Getting Started

So with the stage set, I decided to try my hand at pushing towards 2500 rating. I’d be doing this on my terms:

• No researching any of the content ahead of time. Including dungeon mechanics, affixes, routing guides, and how rating worked.
• No researching builds for my character or how I should gear them.
• No using addons. I would be doing the content purely as Blizzard designed it. I also don’t see the point of doing something to challenge myself, only to make it easier.
• No use of boosts or asking for something equivalent to being carried by friends.

There were of course limits to this. While I didn’t use addons, I still saw messages from other people’s addons in chat. I did look up a boss mechanic online once because I didn’t understand why a particular Neltharian’s Lair group kept dying on the first boss. I also ran maybe 10 dungeons or so with a friend or two at various points and asked people for some help explaining a particular aspect of item crafting.

I also had some previous experience with Mythic+ and wasn’t completely fresh. This would simply be my first time applying myself to it rather than just hopping into whatever key people I knew were doing at the time.

Not exactly a pro gamer right here.

I also made the decision that I would play a healer, having previously tanked, played augmentation evoker, and tried a couple of different DPS classes. I saw someone mention that Holy Priest was the closest to a “pure” healing class, so I decided to see how well my experience healing in Classic would transfer over. I’d also seen talk of healers being in short supply right now, partly due to the current state of how healing functions as of Dragonflight season 2.

Healing in Retail

So immediately I noticed differences in healing between Classic and Retail. The first is that my job as a healer has shifted from ‘keep the tank alive and heal the group where possible’ to ‘keep the group alive and help heal the tank when needed’. I had seen this from the tanking side, as I played a tank in Classic and Retail as well. Still, it was a weird shift in mentality.

Next was how the healing class itself functions. In classic, you have a few options at all times with how your healing functions. Typically you have a big heal, a small heal, a heal over time, priests get a shield, and paladins get an instant cast. You have a couple of emergency buttons, but those are few and long in cooldown, such as vanilla Lay on Hands with an hour cooldown.

In retail, the system is far more about managing the balance of smaller heals alongside bigger heals on various cooldown lengths. Typically the smaller heals barely make a dent in people’s healthbars, but provide some kind of ramping towards the bigger heals. As well as my use of heals being important, you also have benefits to weaving in damage-dealing abilities, which can also provide benefits to healing output.

The way damage distribution works feels different too. Typically in Classic, you have the tank suffering the brunt of the damage, with the rest of the group taking somewhat predictable damage depending on the boss. Generally, you’re just pressing the right heal for the right task throughout fights and it’s a fairly chill experience a lot of the time (with some exceptions).

This is roughly the spec I ended up working with for 4 weeks, with minor changes during that time.

As a healer in retail, I had to learn when to use my bigger buttons. I had to learn how to ramp correctly and prioritize which ability I wanted to ramp into. I had to learn when to expect damage to happen and to whom. I had to learn how different tanks needed different things from me. I had to learn when I should start throwing out damage. I had to learn when to use Power Infusion and who I should give it to. I had to learn mana control and when I could take a break to drink. I had to learn when I made a mistake or when someone died from something outside my control.

Do you know what though? It’s been a genuinely fun experience to learn all this. Sure it’s frustrating when other people make mistakes that I can’t outplay, but I had a lot of fun times as well feeling myself improve as a healer over those 4 weeks. Learning about all the fights and how different classes function in my groups was cool.

I get why people don’t enjoy retail healing though, especially after the changes in season 2. It does feel bad to throw 3 heals onto a tank and barely see their health change. Or healing another member of the group as they take damage and their health bar just staying still.

It also sucks when people in the group are just taking avoidable damage that you heal through, only to then die to unavoidable damage phases on bosses. There is a staggering difference between players who can keep themselves alive and those who don’t use defensive abilities (or avoid walking into damage).

Week 1

So I definitely wasn’t about to throw myself in the deep end right away. For me, week 1 was all about getting the hang of what I was doing. My priest’s gear was mostly holdovers from season 1 when I had tried discipline for about a week.

Thankfully due to timewalking, the heroic weekly, and open-world catchup gear, I was able to at least have some semblance of appropriate gear for lower-level keys.

Keystone Explorer was a fun early achievement to reach.

Since I was still doing the easier keys, I wasn’t really paying much attention to affixes yet. Simply getting used to pressing buttons and learning the basics of healing. I also came to understand how the new gear system worked, alongside upgrading the various early pieces of gear.

I would also learn about how different tanks felt to heal in early keys. Guardian Druids and Paladins seemed like good all-rounders who could self-sustain with a little outside help. Monks, Warriors, and Demon Hunters had good movement capabilities but varied quite a bit when it came to staying alive, so I had to be more on the ball when playing with them. Death Knights seemed to do well without much outside help at all, but their health bar bouncing up and down made them stressful to group with.

The first week went by without many noteworthy things happening though. People were generally pretty chill and the content was much the same. Mechanics weren’t too punishing and I was still getting the hang of healing.

Week 2

I think week 2 was where I started making real progress as a player. I was reading through more of my abilities, so I started learning what ramping was and when to apply it. I would also start using cooldowns (such as Power Infusion) more liberally, as opposed to only during emergencies and during boss fights.

One other small thing I changed was taking the time to swap to mouseover healing instead of targeted healing. It’s funny because I was already doing this in Classic, but just kept forgetting to turn the option on until I had already started doing a dungeon. This helped a lot immediately after turning it on, especially when I also started using it for throwing out damage spells as well. I also found where to buy Dragonflight quality water, which was a silly mistake to make in the first place.

Another set of weeklies alongside my first vault opening of the season gave me my 2/4 tierset bonus and the Beacon trinket. I was fairly sure Beacon wasn’t ideal for healers, but dropping a ton of damage in one go was very fun.

As I started to push into double-digit keys though, I noticed the difficulty curve go up quite heavily as well. While Raging wasn’t necessarily the most difficult affix to deal with, Afflicted required a level of group coordination that many people I encountered weren’t exactly up to.

I should note that as I hadn’t researched anything about M+, I spent the first couple days of week 2 dumping heals into the friendly neighborhood ghosts instead of dispelling them. It wasn’t until I saw others using dispels, that I tried doing it myself.

It was a real rush when I did that too, as I felt a sense of progressing as a player. Here was this mechanic that I was unfamiliar with, but as I spent time with it, I also felt a sense of mastery over the game. Sure, I wasn’t about to enter MDI or join a cutting-edge guild anytime soon, but there was a real sense of progress as a player getting better at the game.

It was also during this time I learned a very real lesson about how I invested my time during M+. You see, while a healer can handle Afflicted by themselves, it becomes substantially easier if others in the group use their dispels as well. I quickly found myself asking other players on the way to dungeons who would help me with Afflicted. Depending on the response, I found myself leaving groups before they started. Sometimes during a run that was having issues outside of just the affix, I’d just leave if I was the only one dealing with it.

It was around this point in time that I quickly became jaded and distrustful of players who didn’t communicate. Aside from the affix itself, I noticed people who didn’t speak up to say “I’ll help you with it” were also doing less damage and dying more than those who would help.

Because of this, I would go as far as to say Afflicted is the best-designed affix in the game:

• It promotes social interaction within groups ahead of a dungeon run.
• Indicates player skill based on this social interaction.
• Serves as a red flag for a group if players aren’t getting on board with the social side.

Maybe my attitude seems overly harsh in this regard, but it’s also the reality of the situation and this would get cemented further as I continued to do harder content. It becomes very obvious who is using abilities to help the group outside of just dealing damage. The people who stun and interrupt at the correct times. The people who use defensives when they know they’re about to take damage. The people who dispel and throw in some extra heals when needed.

The skill curve in Mythic+ is about far more than a simple damage meter will tell you and the ceiling is higher than most people will ever come close to. This became most apparent when I had the opportunity to run a couple of keys with people from Team Liquid on my Evoker. I don’t play my Evoker much, but they wanted an Augmentation Evoker while Emsy learned to tank.

“Bárdvoker” joins them at around 1 hour in.

I didn’t really count this as getting boosted or looking up guides on how to play since it was just me messing around on an alt. But it did make me truly appreciate how big a difference it made to play with much better players. All of a sudden, I wasn’t worrying as much about dealing with line-of-sight issues or players not doing mechanics, except for a couple of small fumbles from Emsy, who had never tanked before.

Looking back at it 2 weeks later, it was kind of amazing how someone with little-to-no tank experience was better than the majority of people I played with on my way to 2500.

Despite starting to get jaded towards my fellow players at times, I was still having a good time overall. The sense of feeling my skill go up and reach 2000 rating (aka Keystone Master) felt good. It also felt good during those times when a group worked out well.

I wasn’t entirely sure about going to 2500 at first, but after ending week 2 with KSM I decided to push for it.

Speaking of which, it did feel kinda bad that it was hard to keep in touch with people I’d previously had good experiences with. I get that battle.net friends are a better way to add others in the long term, but I miss the Classic system of casually adding people as acquaintances. Technically this does exist in retail but is limited to only those in the same realm as your character.

It would be nice to just have a list of people I enjoyed playing with whom I could keep an eye out for in the future without the big song and dance of adding each other through battle.net.

Finally, week 2 was when I first decided to try out getting gear crafted. I had a couple of weaker gear pieces and a bunch of spare gold, so I went to the work order table to get some gear made.

Despite not knowing what I was doing, I quickly found some gear pieces that looked good for healing. They came with a nifty set bonus, so I shifted some gear around to make that work.

Thanks Clancy.

Week 3

If I had to define what phase of learning week 3 was, it was one of learning about specific dungeon mechanics. We were back on Tyrannical, so every boss fight was brought forward as the focus of that week. Technically I had done Tyrannical before, but it’s a whole lot different when you’re pushing above 15.

There was a real moment of focusing on the tempo of how combat worked. Boss mechanics take place on a pretty consistent schedule, with fights becoming more and more like solving a puzzle. I would start positioning myself better to avoid damage and help control mechanics like bosses charging throughout fights. I would also start to throw in about the right amount of damage while balancing the ramping I had to do with my healing.

I would even dodge the leap from this boss sometimes.

The differences in dungeon difficulty and design started becoming far more apparent during this time too. I can safely say that my opinions on what made good and bad dungeons (or at least parts of dungeons) really came to the forefront around this time.

Freehold

Probably my favourite dungeon from the list and the only one I managed to time at +20 difficulty (although I didn’t really push +20 keys at all outside 1 Freehold run). Generally speaking, everything is fairly straightforward, and the bosses never really feel unfair. The routing is fairly simple with some room for variety in what packs you pull later on.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the pig-clicking minigame though since that felt like a strange mouse dexterity test that was shoe-horned in. A bit like the old “loot spew” mechanic in EVE Online before they removed it.

Neltharion’s Lair

Aside from the obvious naming of this and Neltharus being annoying at times, I mostly enjoyed Neltharion’s Lair. The boss mechanics were mostly obvious aside from the cup and ball style mechanic that felt out of place on the second boss.

It did have a couple of annoying mechanics outside of that. Avalanche felt like it needed more of a telegraph outside just a cast bar considering how much damage it does. I realise people use addons to warn themselves that it’s coming, but it felt like that should just be part of the base game like the warnings the first boss gives on Crystalline Ground.

I also didn’t really like the trick where you could jump into the hole at the start of the run to skip ahead at the start of the timer. Don’t get me wrong, the feeling of cheating a system is enjoyable, but it felt kind of gimmicky with the animation feeling jank.

Neltharus

Neltharus is definitely the lesser favourite of the two dungeons named after Deathwing. There are a few reasons for this, but I think the main one comes down to the chain mechanic. I don’t even mind the mechanic itself that much, but I really wish the game had included it in the campaign or even just the open world before entering here. For something that is mandatory to finish higher-difficulty runs on time, the game never mentions them beforehand.

Aside from that, there were a few other lesser pain points:

• The lava waves on the elephant can end up as a wall you can’t escape if your positioning is off. This isn’t really that bad, but more annoying.
• The chain-breaking mechanic on the spear boss could be pretty painful if people weren’t popping defensives when they broke. Definitely died here if both chains broke simultaneously.
• The forge boss had some annoying line-of-sight issues with the podium. These were likely made worse as my priest was a Goblin, but group members would run out of line-of-sight a lot during runs.
• The treasures used to break Molten Shield on the final boss were annoying at times due to their randomness. Again, not the worst thing ever but it was still annoying at times.

The bosses were fairly manageable though, especially with people who played well around mechanics and had good positioning.

Vortex Pinnacle

This might be a controversial take, but I genuinely enjoyed Vortex Pinnacle a lot. Sure, it sucked when people struggled with mechanics and died, but they generally felt fair most the most part. It felt obvious where not to stand and the telegraphing on things was mostly fine.

VP is incredibly punishing at points though. If you don’t have the interrupts and magic dispels on the early packs, you’ll just die from the damage. The first 2 boss fights require a lot of movement and avoiding area damage, some of which can 1-shot people. I noticed the whirlwinds on the second boss that knock players into the air could be difficult to get the timing down on until you had enough experience.

A couple of other small things I disliked were the telegraph on Lightning Lash wasn’t always that obvious as it would get drowned out by other noises and the visual could get drowned out by other things happening too. Much like the earlier mentioned Avalanche spell in Neltharian’s Lair, people just use an addon to make it more obvious, but it feels like it should just be more obvious by default. Overwatch did a good job with this, so it feels weird that WoW didn’t follow that mantra as much.

I also wasn’t really a huge fan of how the light orb packs had infinite range and could kill people who respawned at the entrance to the instance, but that’s a fairly niche issue to have.

I refused to run with 3 melee dps groups at all for a while and the players weren’t too happy about it.

While I get why many people don’t like Vortex Pinnacle, to me it felt like a nice balance of tough but fair. Completing a run felt very rewarding when everyone was playing well, but I also saw plenty of groups hit a brick wall early on. I guess the routing was also fairly simple without much room for creativity, but sometimes it’s nice to have simple routes with the fights being the challenging part.

Halls of Infusion

Halls of Infusion was another one for the list of dungeons I mostly enjoyed but had some annoying mechanics at points.

The obvious complaint that I saw everyone have was the orbs at the start that just laser-beamed damage onto the group, often murdering someone easily. I definitely noticed this during the triple pack on the right side of the first ring area, although I had a fun experience with a group that just went left at the start. Never saw that again funnily enough, even though it seemed like a smooth route to take.

There were a few other pain points as well. I think the first boss of Halls of Infusion is the biggest example of a boss fight in Dragonflight that gets significantly more difficult as the fight goes on in the form of Power Overload getting stronger each time it is used. This wasn’t exactly “bad”, but it really put up a wall against groups with poor damage in a way that other bosses didn’t.

The second boss has some mechanics that aren’t super obvious and could be frustrating. Gulp would result in melee who didn’t know better getting eaten. I wasn’t aware of the smaller frogs being eaten by gulp until people yelled at me in higher-level keys. This is an example of a mechanic that isn’t obvious and can be handled easily in a non-intended way until you reach higher levels, resulting in the game teaching players the ‘wrong way’ to handle a mechanic.

I think these and the belly slam ability could all use a bit more telegraphing for players. The latter felt a lot like it could use a wind-up animation, as the growl that plays along with a cast bar wasn’t quite as obvious. Not to say this is unplayable or can’t be learned though, just that I wish it was a bit clearer without having to use addons.

One last thing I didn’t enjoy was the bridge section before the final boss. The random pattern to the water with a knockback could feel really punishing or super easy depending on the RNG. Not so much from a difficulty standpoint, but moreso that getting lucky in a way that lets you run in a straight line is a huge time saver that doesn’t require you to play better to achieve.

Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr

Another one for the category of dungeons that I enjoyed but had some minor complaints about.

I think the biggest issue I had with the dungeon was how many enemy abilities all used similar brown swirls on the ground for their spells. This would include spells with wildly different effects. One particular example of this is the Trapped in Stone curse, which needs to be decursed but looks like the party member is stuck in the middle of a normal AoE that is about to kill them. I may have died trying to life-grip a party member out of this one time before finding out it was a curse that could be removed.

The trash here also just deals a ton of area damage in general in points. Earthquake and Hail of Stone are particularly nasty as they cannot be prevented by moving out of line-of-sight, which relies on party members to help keep themselves alive with defensives. If you’re in a group that doesn’t do this, then you get to see a lot of people die and potentially rage quit on certain packs on mobs.

The bosses were mostly fine though.

• The Lost Dwarves doing AoE damage while simultaneously throwing out avoidable area damage was a bit confusing at first but was manageable with more fight experience.
• Bromach was definitely a dps check in a way that completely killed some runs I did.
• I still don’t fully understand how Talondras works, but the mechanic seemed really easy to deal with.
• Emberon had a lot of AoE damage and the intermission phase where they split the room in half could make it hard to stay within range of the group.
• Deios took a bit of time to understand the sand puddle-soaking phase, but he’s mostly just a dps race with some AoE damage.

Overall Uldaman felt fine aside from feeling like it needed some additional animations for abilities. Having multiple spells all use the same brown swirls on the ground (that is also mostly brown) just felt bad visually.

The Lost Viking's voice lines could get a bit grating too after a while, but it wasn’t too bad. I guess it’s kinda funny that they did a good job making them stick out more than the voice lines for mechanics that could kill you.

Brackenhide Hollow

Brackenhide is definitely one of the most polarised instances on this list. It was my most disliked of the Dragonflight dungeons on launch. An opinion that I saw held by others before it was nerfed in the 10.1 patch.

Overall it felt fine in Season 2 though, with the exception of the first boss who I would consider one of the more challenging fights from Season 2. This was largely due to the amount of burst damage the boss was capable of. Damage that I’m still not exactly sure how much of it was avoidable and how much just required well-timed defensives.

The early trash is fine, the later bosses all felt fair with good telegraphing on abilities. Some parts like Stinkbreath were frustrating until someone taught me that ranged classes can just stand out of range of his breath attack. A conversation that resulted in one mage member asking for an explanation for “how to stand out of range”. Thankfully as a priest, I could just life-grip them into position.

Some of the later trash could be annoying due to tanks not letting disease stacks fall off between pulls and I saw more than one person die instead of using an ability to cleanse themselves when the damage became unhealable. Also, some of the skips people went for resulted in deaths or annoying runbacks after a later wipe.

Overall though, Brackenhide was fine aside from the difficulty of the place being frontloaded in the form of the first boss.

The Underrot

I hate Underrot.

Don’t get me wrong. With a good group and everyone playing well, it’s fine to run through. Sadly those groups were far and few between.

I think the largest issue with the place is that it represents everything I hate in terms of design. Enemies have abilities that are poorly telegraphed and in many cases deal lethal damage. Addons are pretty much a requirement to avoid these during bigger pulls.

I’ll rant about Fetid Maggots below.

The place also has numerous packs players will attempt to skip, but also features multiple enemies that require players to move around a lot to avoid taking damage. Also later in the dungeon, some mobs can also fear players. This isn’t necessarily bad design by itself, but Underrot just takes it to a level of frustration that resulted in many of my groups falling apart swiftly.

I want to take a moment to talk about Fetid Maggots though. They’re overall a fairly simple mob to fight. They have 1 ability with a 2.5-second cast time that deals AoE damage in a frontal cone for 3 seconds. This cast cannot be interrupted with kicks, but can be stopped by stunning or fearing the mob.

So you’d think it would be easy to deal with right? Either players can sidestep the mob during the cast or use crowd control to prevent the cast. Sadly it suffers from having one of the worst cast animations of any ability you’ll see in Mythic+ from this season. Watching better players typically involved them using an addon that played a loud gunshot sound effect whenever the cast started.

Asking players to kill and crowd-control these things also didn’t work that well either. Some players would and I am thankful to those who did, but so many just left it to me to handle. They also have a 30-yard range on their ability that isn’t telegraphed well at all.

I get that good players probably don’t struggle with these and there is counterplay, but I also think these are stupidly designed for the average person who might be looking to get into M+. Big AoE damage should come with a clear warning and not require add-ons to be made aware of.

The bosses were pretty painful too, especially during the tyrannical week. Since I think Underrot is by far the worst of the dungeons this season, I’m going to give each boss some extra attention.

Elder Leaxa

Having said all that, Leaxa is mostly fine. I think the biggest struggle with her is because she’s such a non-threatening health sponge, it’s easy to find your mind zoning out and getting hit by one of the few abilities in Underrot that is somewhat well-telegraphed.

Cragmaw the Infested

Cragmaw on the other hand, was a complete nightmare to get through. Not even because his abilities are particularly difficult to deal with on paper. His charge could have used a bit more of a warning to reduce the need for an addon that plays an airhorn or somesuch, but it’s definitely manageable without one.

The true difficulty of the fight though comes from the insect-stomping minigame. This isn’t hard because of a failure of design on the developer's part, but because people act in the same way children do when first learning to play football. So many times people would all rush the same ones, even when they see others already running towards them. Since I was playing on the North American servers, I’m genuinely curious if Europeans were better at this since you learn to spread out more while playing Football at school here.

I’ll go into this more later, but after doing this boss, I really don’t think retail WoW players have much of a leg to stand on when talking about having higher player skill than other groups. I’m pretty sure the average children’s football team can figure this out better than the people I did this fight with.

Anyway, since Cragmaw tends to ramp up in difficulty as the fight goes on, many of my groups would fall apart after wiping to him. Even those who saved bloodlust for him would struggle with damage or killing the worms later in the fight.

Sporecaller Zancha

If Cragmaw is an example of a boss being hard despite mostly being obvious what to do, Sporecaller Zancha is an example of a fight that doesn’t explain itself all that well. There are some obvious mechanics in the fight, such as standing in mushrooms being bad because they give a nasty debuff. The mushrooms turn into spores that float around doing damage, with the number of spores directly related to the number of mushrooms alive.

There are also multiple ways to clear mushrooms, which while they aren’t super obvious at a glance, can be learned quickly through observation. The boss has specific moves they use which allows party members to clear mushrooms without taking much damage. There are 2 main pain points with this fight though, one of which is to do with the other way to clear mushrooms.

The first is that the optimal play is to run into mushrooms on purpose while using a cooldown to survive. One of the classes I had previously done Underrot with was my protection warrior, so I had the opportunity to learn the fight with more experienced players guiding me through it. I realized that I could just run through the mushrooms with shield wall active and use my disease cleanse to clear the damage over time debuff. I’ve been told other classes have their own methods of clearing mushrooms too, so this seems to be an intended way of getting through the spore phase.

But then comes the second part of what makes this fight feel absolutely crushing to get through as a healer (or at least as a priest). The damage from the disease debuff is massive. So players try their hardest to avoid getting it at all and only clear mushrooms using the specific boss moves that clear them. This means more mushrooms spawning spores during the far more deadly part of the fight, which utterly murders players. Also as a holy priest, I don’t exactly have the best damage-reduction tools to try and clear mushrooms myself.

Maybe the fight isn’t too awful on paper, but in practice, there are reasons why Underrot on Tyrannical was the lowest Mythic+ clear I managed and this fight is one of them. I definitely enjoyed it more as a tank than as a healer, that’s for sure.

Unbound Abomination

I’m going to be very honest for a moment. Even after 4 weeks of spending a lot of time doing Mythic+ at the end of Dragonflight season 2, I still don’t really understand this fight.

Sure, I understand what I have to do during the fight after getting yelled at by the tank to stack with the group, but I don’t really entirely get what’s going on.

The group stacks to bait a frontal cone, that’s simple enough. The cone leaves behind some stuff you don’t want to stand in, also simple enough. You get a big circle of light that you clean the floor with, it took me a couple times to get used to it, but I got it down pretty quickly. There are some mobs that spawn that need to be killed (I guess). Sure, why not?

But then the boss just kinda dies without their hp hitting 0 and I’m left scratching my head. Aside from obvious times where the boss died from damage, he also seemed to just die randomly, meaning I wasn’t really sure how to budget my mana.

Sometimes the fight would take a long time with people taking lots of damage. Other times the fight would go by relatively quickly without much issue.

I have no idea what the differences between these fights were from my end and at this point I think I’m ok living with not knowing. In fact, I hope I never have to think about Underrot again.

Only 198 rating left to go.

Overall I was happy with week 3. I felt like I had made a lot of progress in terms of rating and progress in terms of my player skill. My understanding of my class was improving, I was learning what other players could do, and I had some nice social interactions with other people at times.

I also had a sick moment where I used eruption to launch my character into the air, getting around a line-of-sight issue to save someone from dying. It was dope.

Week 4

So we roll into week 4 and I get my first experience with bursting. Thankfully priests were built for this, as Mass Dispel takes care of it pretty dang effectively. Sometimes it was rough when dealing with certain packs such as those with the contrarily named Deep Chill (those were not chill packs to heal). That said, it finally felt nice to have my class and spec really shine.

With it being the last week of the season though, it felt like the playerbase had a lot of people on their last-ditch attempt to push rating. Groups were rough and the last 100 rating to reach Keystone Hero was painful. Tornados was an especially frustrating affix to deal with, as it resulted in many trash pulls where the tank would run out of line-of-sight with me struggling to make it through the walls of knock-ups. I did manage to clear Freehold on +20 difficulty though, unlocking my first and only dungeon teleport.

Eventually, I decided to bend my rule about not getting carried and had a friend tank the last few keys for me. I would still be at the mercy of my damage dealers being complete randoms, but at least I could rely on my tank to play at a reliable level.

Hitting this point is funny to think about in retrospect.

We did it though and I would eventually reach my goal of Keystone Hero. I felt like I had learned many important lessons about WoW and myself that I will likely take into the future.

So what were these?

People are replaceable

This is probably one of the harshest realizations about doing Mythic+ content and it’s definitely one that I had to keep myself from taking too far, lest I become a complete bellend.

The harsh reality is though that there is little point in wasting time with people who will waste yours. Sometimes this comes quickly when you find out people won’t help you with an affix before the dungeon starts. Sometimes this happens when the tank loves to pull too much. Sometimes this happens when the group damage is too low or people stand in the bad things.

Whatever it is though, I realised it’s fine for me to just walk away without saying anything. The game (somewhat unfairly) only truly punishes one person in the group for failure and that does suck. That said, it’s not my responsibility to put up with other people if I don’t want to, especially in a freaking video game of all things.

This extends outside of WoW too. Many times in my past I’ve had people in my life that I should have walked away from or been the toxic person others have walked away from. I think though that I shouldn’t feel guilty about doing what’s best for me and I shouldn’t hold it against others for doing the same. The best we can do is to better ourselves for our own sake and for those we do care about. There are plenty of good people in the world and those are the relationships worth putting effort into.

I do worry that leaning too far into the mindset that people can essentially be considered “disposable” can result in becoming a self-absorbed asshole. So there’s certainly still a balancing act there.

People still matter though

On the flipside of the previous lesson, I did really come to appreciate all those people I had positive interactions with. Some of those genuinely made my day and kept me going when I’d had a few bad groups in a row.

I even added some people and grouped with them again later! This had some mixed results and I also learned the lesson of doing certain difficulties with certain people I connected with, but it was nice to form some connections with others.

The other thing was it felt great to help friends and be helped by friends at times. I went back during the week to run some lower-level groups with friends to help them gear up. Playing with people you know with a common goal to help each other is definitely one of the biggest highlights of Mythic+.

My self-worth shouldn’t come from being good at a video game

As I said earlier, I felt inspired to get into this from the whole “Classic players bad” meme that has been going around for coming up on half a decade now (I felt old typing that). I wanted to prove to myself and others that I shouldn’t be defined by playing a different version of the game.

I realise though that feeling that way is largely me putting myself in that box and I shouldn’t let others put me in a box either. So what if I play Classic, Retail, or whatever else? I don’t see Dave Grohl yelling at marching bands that the drummers should play more than one drum at a time.

Looking back at my “people are replaceable” lesson, if people want to put that on me then I should just tell them to jog on. I truly have better things to do with my life than to reach some obscure standard other people who don’t really matter to me judge others by.

Also if I do this to others, I want to be called out on it. Very little good comes from being so judgemental.

Retail players are pretty bad too

Speaking of a community calling another one as being full of bad players, Retail WoW isn’t exactly one to talk. I’m going to try not to be toxic here myself, but I saw plenty of people making tons of mistakes at a relatively “high” skill level.

Keystone Hero has only been obtained by 13% of WoW players according to WoWhead, so I’m in the top percentage equivalent of being a diamond league StarCraft 2 player (which funnily enough, is my rank in SC2).

I saw so many players on my journey there making basic mistakes. People failing to interrupt, people failing to dispel debuffs, people not using defensive cooldowns on timed mechanics, people failing to clear affixes, people doing low damage, people not using crowd control, people walking into things that killed them.

I think the funniest one was when the group would stare at me drinking before a boss fight, but wouldn’t use food to heal themselves. It felt like a bizarro world where something so basic that most Classic players I encountered would do naturally was completely alien to the relatively try-hard Retail players I was with, even when it was an easy way to save time.

I get that at the high-end, Retail is significantly more challenging of a game. But a lot of this stuff isn’t that hard and it makes me consider if the person who makes fun of others is also the person who doesn’t cleanse the debuff that’s about to kill them in Vortex Pinnacle.

The worst players like to blame others

Speaking of people being toxic, I noticed a common trend from those being the most vocal about others in the group making mistakes. While I didn’t have an addon the track information from the run, I saw these people often being called out for being bad in their own ways.

The mage who complained because I gave Power Infusion to another damage dealer once? Turns out they were the lowest on the damage meter despite me giving them plenty of reasons not to be. The person complaining about the group wiping? Turns out they weren’t interrupting or they were taking a lot of damage that could have been avoided.

I’ve had times where I’ve run into bad players and wanted to say something, but I’m also aware that I’m making plenty of mistakes myself. We’re all (ideally) on a journey of wanting to get better and throwing others under the bus just makes you better at whining.

Also talking badly about others has a negative impact on their mood and can result in them playing worse, so doing that isn’t helping anyone.

Damage isn’t everything

It’s a shame that damage meters have become so ingrained in WoW’s culture. This is partly because I truly believe it has made the game more toxic at a casual level, but also because it’s such a poor metric to gauge performance by.

You know when I knew a mage was good during a run? When they popped a mass barrier before big damage came in or when they ice-blocked to remove a debuff stack when they knew I was getting overwhelmed with other things happening.

I think if Mythic+ is going to have such a focus on being a challenging endgame pillar, the game should really have some kind of individual performance rating system at the end like other games do. While not perfect, I think League of Legends does a decent job at this with their stats screen after a game and WoW could benefit from putting a system in so people can see how well they’ve played. Maybe what people need is a personal metric that rewards

Mythic+ rating doesn’t do the thing you want it to do

Another thing I encountered with the rating system is a weird issue with a system that doesn’t lower a player’s rating based on failure. A player’s Mythic+ rating can only tell you had bad someone potentially is, but it won’t tell you how good they are until you reach significantly higher levels of content that relatively few will reach.

Because the system never lets a player’s rating go down, someone can potentially get carried by others either on purpose or through luck. With enough time, you can work your way up to a fairly high rating and hit a brick wall when you’re reaching the 16–20 difficulty for keys.

I’ve heard people describe this range of Mythic+ as the “elo hell” of the game and after playing through this, I can see why. It’s the perfect storm of players reaching a point where they can’t get carried by random groups while also being the point where the best rewards are from the system.

I’m not entirely sure how to fix this though without having the game turn into a PvE version of the ranked solo-queue you find in PvP games. There would need to be wider punishment mechanics for group members. I guess the main thing to take from this is doing challenging content with strangers after a certain point becomes an exercise in masochism.

Mythic+ design

While I have come to appreciate why Mythic+ is an enjoyable experience in its own way, I do think it has some significant design flaws.

The first is how the punishment for failure is primarily felt by one person. 5 people enter a dungeon, but only one carries any actual risk by having their key depleted. This results in that person losing additional time having to re-level their key to access the same difficulty of content again, while everyone else can just go to the next group.

I’m also not a fan of key depletion either. It feels like a system that is designed to punish players rather than challenge them. It’s like watching someone playing an older game that used lives as a mechanic and start over the entire game because they died near the end. All it really achieves is a feeling of frustration as someone goes back to relevel their key through content they’ve proved they’re capable of beating.

The randomness of what keys are available is something I have mixed feelings about too. I get that it exists to encourage a variety of what content you experience, but I wish there was a way to force it to a specific dungeon that you might need to push rating. Maybe there is room for a profession item that rerolls, or even just letting players craft keys.

Timers I have gone from having a negative opinion to a mixed one. I get why they exist and can see why people enjoy the challenge. I also see them lead to a lot of frustration and a kind of brittle mindset when players hit a challenge in a dungeon. It feels like the moment a group hits a wall in terms of a challenge they don’t immediately overcome on the first or sometimes second try, they throw some blame around and leave the group. It’s kind of weird to see this because it assumes content is doable by players before they’ve done it.

I’m going to use a recent example from Season of Discovery here. We went into Shadowfang Keep recently with a group that was under-leveled for the final boss. Because Classic has some weird level bands in dungeons, we went through most of the dungeon with minimal issue, but the last boss was a higher level than anything else we’d encountered.

Rather than giving up and restarting the dungeon though, we spent time figuring out how to overcome the particular challenge of how to deal with a boss that some of the group could barely even touch. It took us 4 tries, but after making adjustments we finally got him down.

Later, he died much easier when the group wasn’t mostly 4–6 levels lower than him.

The end result of this felt really rewarding because the system didn’t encourage us to give up the moment we struggled with something. We were allowed to take time to figure out the puzzle that was dealing with content above the group’s level, something we’re looking to push more in Season of Discovery by tackling higher-level dungeons during each level lock.

I get that sometimes you’ll get groups that are ok with ignoring the timer and most retail raids will also shrug off wiping on a boss, but the general experience I found with Mythic+ groups was people would throw in the towel the moment we hit a wall to overcome.

If I could change Mythic+

I think if there was one thing I could change about Mythic+, it would be giving players more control over the difficulty levers that Mythic+ applies to dungeons. Maybe giving players the option to increase (or remove) the timer, but boost the impact of affixes to offset that.

Letting players tailor the content more to their tastes might increase participation and give a bit more variety as well. It could give professions a role within the system so that players could craft keys to do challenges outside of the fixed ones each week. Hell, you could even let players use previously removed affixes or even test new ones before they are added to the weekly rotation.

According to Wowhead, less than 30% of WoW players engaged with Mythic+ during season 2 and I wonder if opening up the system to people tailoring their experiences a bit more would help encourage people on the fence to give it a try.

Will I play more Mythic+

When I started writing this, Season of Discovery hadn’t been announced and I felt like I might move on from WoW for the most part. Now I’m more on the fence about trying it during quiet periods of SoD and maybe trying to push a bit above Keystone Hero.

I will say I’m not a fan of the dungeons in the pool for season 3. Mostly just from an aesthetic perspective though, so maybe they’re ok to play.

I’d also want to reroll from priest to another class to try out something different. Tanking was fun, so maybe I’ll give that a try next season. Maybe I just try another healer and see how different it feels. I could even go for damage and see if I can make that work without using a damage meter.

If I do decide to play though, it’ll be because I think it’s something I’ll enjoy and not through some weird social pressure to engage with it.

I’m not sure the robe matches the rest of the outfit.