My Midnight Season 1

As we're approaching patch 12.1 and with it the start of Midnight's second season, I wanted to take a moment to reflect a bit on Season 1.

My primary activity for gearing have of course been delves, and those have been fun. I already talked a bit about it previously, but I've basically been happy with everything Blizzard has adjusted about delves in Midnight. I got Valeera to her current level cap in no time, and she already feels much better tuned than Brann ever was. Her only weakness are those Spellshield Collaborators in the Darkway, which seem to be capable of reflecting her Mandate of Sacred Death and basically cause her to get one-shot randomly if you don't kill them quickly enough.

One thing I hadn't mentioned yet in previous posts is how much better tuned the delving experience has become as a healer. I did a fair few delves as a healer in War Within, but one thing that always put me off was how incredibly slow it was, even while wearing gear that was better than the drops you could get within the delve itself and with Brann fully maxed out. Boss fights were particularly bad, and I got into the habit of changing my companion from tank to dps for the last fight to speed things up, yet that final boss still tended to remain a 5+ minute slog on tier 11. In Midnight I followed the same strategy early on, but I quickly found that Valeera's dps had improved so much compared to Brann's that I could leave her as tank and we'd still kill any end boss in decent time. That's really appreciated.

Also, it feels a bit weird admitting it, but Blizzard have been very good at stringing me along all season to keep me playing for longer. I was "done" with basic delve rewards months ago, but they kept adding either reasons to re-run them or other/similar content (like the ritual sites) and I went along with it. I've only really been taking a bit of a step back for these last two weeks of the season.

I do think there's a risk of burnout if they keep trying the same trick in upcoming seasons. 

The big surprise this season, however, was that I actually ended up doing some Mythic+ again. You might recall that I decided to nope out of M+ after War Within Season 1, and I had no plans to get back into it since then. And I didn't... really, but what happened was that our guild group was somewhat diminished at the start of Midnight, and my husband was still part of it, so I naturally got pulled in as a backfill to make sure they could keep running. Part of it was that I was obviously an easy person to ask, the other part was that due to my enthusiasm for delving, I had reasonably geared characters of every role at a time when others were still struggling to gear their main.

So I ended up running some M+ in all three roles, though the vast majority of it happened on my hunter - which again, was a surprise considering that dps are usually not the role that's hardest to find. In fact, she ended up doing so much backfilling that by the end of what was declared our last run as a group, she was only a single-digit number away from 2500 rating. I hadn't really cared about it before, but that was so close that it seemed a waste not to take that last step. A more experienced acquaintance who plays tank agreed to take me through the one dungeon I was still missing for rating (Pit of Saron), which eventually resulted in me getting Keystone Hero for the first time, in a season when I wasn't even trying to play M+ at all.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that. There was a lot of talk about how Midnight Season 1 was one of the easiest M+ seasons ever, and my own experience seemed to bear that out in so far as our little group had never been able to reliably clear +10s before (and we even went a little higher than that this time!). At the same time, because of the irregular nature of my backfilling (even if it ended up adding up to a lot of runs in total at the end) meant that I never felt particularly engaged with the system. I couldn't really give you my detailed thoughts on all the dungeons as I didn't run some of them on mythic more than once or twice.

As far as intra group tension goes, which had been the main reason I stopped in War Within: as dps it was easier to just hang back and let people do whatever, and likewise nobody seemed to care that much what I was doing. When I had been tanking there had always been a lot of annoying backseat driving that slowly drove me up the wall.

That said, I still don't know whether I'd necessarily want to do more of this again. In some ways it was good fun, but other times I did feel a bit stressed by the hyperfocus that M+ requires for thirty minutes straight. I don't mind that kind of intense activity as a one-off once a week, but every run? Meh. I guess points go to Blizzard for being able to add me to their metrics this season.

My warrior tank's final M+ scorecard

My hunter's final M+ scorecard

My holy priest's final M+ scorecard