The new expansion's first season is coming to an end soon, and as I did repeatedly during Dragonflight, I wanted to jot down some thoughts.
I initially wasn't sure whether I wanted to do more M+ in War Within, as I was feeling kind of burnt out and tired of it at the end of Dragonflight and wasn't super optimistic about War Within in general, but then I had a blast once the expansion launched, switching roles from healer to tank was invigorating, and I was rearing to go again.
Unfortunately M+ this season was... not great - in fact it's probably been the major criticism about the expansion from people who actually play it. It's like this dark stain on the expansion's (so far) overall positive reception.
I'd even mentally prepared myself for it to be kind of rough, as we didn't seriously get into M+ in Dragonflight until Season 2 and I'd been told that the content tends to be a lot harder at the start of an expansion than towards the end of it.
What I hadn't been prepared for, however, was how utterly, utterly unrewarding it was, in particular compared to delves. I said early on that I wasn't the biggest fan of delves, but I did power through and tried to find some things to like about them because the loot they gave was insanely good compared to the amount of skill and effort required to complete them. The problem with this is that we all ended up with gear that could only be upgraded in M+ if we ran I think... 7s and up? Something generally above our pay grade, so I and others spent the entire season running M+ purely for the "fun" of it and without gaining any rewards from it other than some currency (crests) and the occasional lucky pull from the Great Vault. Which was kind of disappointing, I'm not gonna lie. I mostly do M+ for the social aspect, but it did kind of suck to challenge ourselves so much and basically get no rewards for it. People will argue about whether M+ rewards were bad or delve rewards too good (I think it's the latter, but your mileage may vary) but ultimately the result was the same.
Oh, and I didn't love that all the affixes were Xal'atath-themed, considering that I'm not her biggest fan. At one point I looked up an addon to make her shut up in M+ but ultimately decided against installing it because I felt I did kind of need the sound cues to know what was happening, even if I was tired of hearing her voice.
Here's my personal ranking of the season's eight dungeons, as usual:
The Dawnbreaker
This was easily our group's favourite dungeon all season, which I guess aligns with the general perception that people either love or hate this one. We had our fair share of wipes on the first boss, but ultimately it was a fun romp that always felt quick and not too painful. We never had any major issues with the airship bugging out on us or anything like that, and I appreciated the fact that being able to fly inside this instance gave an unprecedented amount of freedom in regards to choosing which trash to kill with your group.
City of Threads
This was another fun one with the killing of the spies in an otherwise neutral area, and I never got tired of listening to the Vizier's voice work feigning shock at our actions. The corridor leading to the last boss caused us issues sometimes, but otherwise this was another dungeon that we were able to time quite reliably relatively quickly.
The Stonevault
I initially wasn't too much of a fan of this one because some of the boss mechanics seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, and we had quite a lot of wipes on several bosses in here until people started to figure out their roles in each fight. Once we got over the worst of that though, it started to become another staple with fairly straightforward pathing that we could deal with reasonably well.
Grim Batol
I liked this dungeon quite well in Cataclysm, and while I wasn't necessarily too keen on the various upgrades given to the bosses to bring them more in line with modern retail (as in, needing more mechanics and more shit to dodge), none of it was too bad (nothing like Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle during Dragonflight Season 2).
Siege of Boralus
I think this may have actually been the very first dungeon we attempted on M0 back in the day, when we finally got a third person in our guild high enough to join us for some group content. I remember that we tried to under-man it while being over-levelled, but it still went horribly. With that in mind, we didn't do too badly with this dungeon this season, except for a tendency for aggroing way too many unnecessary trash packs and then not quite being able to hit the timer. The bosses were all straightforward and decent fun, but getting to them was the annoying part and for some reason it always felt to me like the trash went on forever. Also, banana peels are my nemesis.
Mists of Tirna Scithe
This dungeon on the other hand was the nemesis of one or more of my group members. It's for the most past fairly inoffensive, if it wasn't for Mistcaller and that damn guessing game... The maze leading up to her wasn't actually that much of an issue, but on the boss fight for some reason seemingly everyone would freeze and be totally unable to solve the puzzle, over and over again. I don't find it hard in principle, but since I was also tanking and needed to pay attention to a cast that could only be interrupted by me and which would kill me if I missed an interrupt, I wasn't always in a good position to call, and the number of times apparently not one of my four guildies (including my husband) could figure out how to find the real Mistcaller among the illusions left me feeling rather bitter towards this dungeon in the end.
Necrotic Wake
People have expressed disdain for having two Shadowlands dungeons in the M+ rotation so soon because of the negative associations people have with that expansion, and I guess I kind of felt that too. And I didn't even dislike Shadowlands, or either of these dungeons in particular! And yet... something about this dungeon always made me feel down the moment we set foot inside it. I blame the fact that during our earliest runs, people were endlessly complaining to me about the trash, about how I should pull this pack but not that, wanting to do awkward skips just for us to end up short at the end and having to go back to the entrance, and so on and so forth. Also, I remember some particularly annoying wipes and fails in this dungeon, such as when one of our damage dealers lost internet close to the end and we continued with one man down and just missed the timer.
Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
First off, please tell me we weren't the only group that struggled with the fact that there were two War Within dungeons called "City of" in the rotation? The amount of times people got confused about that and needed clarification of where we were going was honestly amazing. Other than that... I kind of wanted to like this dungeon actually, because I found it interesting from a trash-pulling and tanking perspective, but the last boss was absolute cancer for our group. I think we did kill her successfully once or twice on low keys, but every visit afterwards was always a pain, mostly due to the pull-in mechanic and us somehow never having enough sticky puddles to stand in. We're quite familiar with failing keys, but we usually still finish every dungeon, even if it takes us a while - except this one: a particularly bad run of Ara-Kara was the one time I remember when we literally just gave up, and one group member was so upset about the whole thing and how it affected him emotionally that he dropped out of M+ altogether. So yeah, can't say this will ever be among my favourites.
Loot and tuning fails aside, I'm also once again not sure I want to continue doing M+ going forward. I was so hyped at the start of the season, but one of our members decided to also join a raiding guild and... I didn't think much of it to begin with, because why not, if that's something that interests him? However, after a while it affected the vibe of our runs and not in a good way. At one point I got into an argument with him after he told me wanted to remove someone from our group for not putting enough effort into their gear by grinding delves and timewalking, which I felt was ridiculous for what I thought was supposed to be a group of friends casually socialising. And there were a lot more minor incidents like that, all of which would probably sound quite petty on their own, but which added up to an increasing sensation of nails on chalkboard for me. And at some point I was just like... why am I doing this to myself? Why am I dedicating my Sunday evenings to something that just makes me annoyed with my friends? Aren't there a hundred better ways to spend my time?
So I didn't even get to 2k rating this time around. While I'd technically have almost two weeks left to get a couple more runs in, I just don't want to. We'll see whether anything changes next season, but I've got to admit I'm not hopeful. The gear curve is supposed to be smoothed out significantly, but the dungeon pool looks extremely unappealing to me at a glance, and I just keep thinking of all the things I'd rather be doing. I'm glad I got to give M+ a try and that it didn't turn out to be as scary as I once thought it was, but at the same time it's possible that it's once again time to move on to other things.
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