War Within's Mythic+ Season 1 Kinda Sucked (For Me)

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.

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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.

My Last Days of Dragonflight

The War Within launches a few hours from me posting this, and I'm actually looking forward to it now, having managed to overcome the worst of the pre-expansion doldrums I felt a few weeks ago. And yes, I know some people have had early access for days, but really, I don't want to talk about that. The vast majority of us were still hanging out in Valdrakken, running Radiant Echoes and what have you. (At least that was more fun than trying to tiptoe around social media without stepping into massive spoilers or bouncing into invisible walls in game where content suddenly required level 80 to enter.)

I wanted to finish up with some notes about how I spent my last few weeks of Dragonflight and how it managed to rekindle my interest in retail.

Warbands

I've said before that it was about damn time for WoW to make more things account-wide, but it took me a bit for it to really sink in just how fundamental of a change this has been - such as the fact that Warbands and cross-server (almost) everything means that all my old alts could become relevant again.

I can't be the only one who left a lot of alts behind over the years. I played on Darkspear during my early days, switched to Earthen Ring when I swapped to playing Horde, and during my most recent return to retail I got established on the Azjol-Nerub server. Every time I switched server, it meant leaving a lot of connections and resources behind, especially in terms of accumulated profession knowledge and materials.

As the realisation has slowly trickled in that all of those old characters are viable for me to play with my (newer) friends now, I've found myself actually interested in playing them again, going through old banks in search of long-forgotten transmogs or crafting materials that might be valuable (to me personally, if not necessarily on the auction house) and feeling a strange sense of reinvigoration.

Transmog farming

I think I mentioned in the past that while I get the appeal of transmog farming, I'm not really hugely into it myself. Blasting through old raids and one-shotting everything with Holy Nova in order to be able to sport some of the game's most iconic looks is kind of fun at first, but it does get boring quickly, and considering just how many old dungeons and raids there are at this point, it can also be surprisingly time-consuming.

Still, the changes to the transmog system that now allow you to add armour and weapons of any type to your collection regardless of whether the character you're currently on could use them have really upped the dopamine levels, as it will absolutely rain looks on you in every run now. This is opposed to the old slow-drip that could really limit your success, such as when you did a run on your priest just to get only plate, followed by going in on your warrior next and getting nothing but cloth, being able to claim neither for your collection.

Of course, some things are still soulbound... I have to admit I gnashed my teeth a little when I got a Garr binding on my priest and had to destroy it. But I also had fun getting adventurous soloing Cata raids for the first time. Dragon Soul and Spine of Deathwing in particular was certainly a learning experience. (If you know, you know.)

Remix characters

As MoP: Remix approached its end, activity in our little guild saw a bit of a spike as we got back together for one last hurrah and cleared mythic Siege of Orgimmar on the penultimate day of the event. I'm not going to pretend that this was some great achievement with the power levels available to us, but not all of us were that OP, and it was still a nice way of capping off the expansion.

The character conversion process from Remix to regular retail was a bit odd. Landing in Stormwind with empty bags and wearing a set of greens was not a surprise, but it was strange that Blizzard actually redid people's talents - not reset, which I actually would've understood more, but merely changed, which was just bizarre to me. It made the whole experience an odd exercise in picking out just where abilities you may have wanted had been taken out of your setup and replaced with something else.

I was also surprised to get some items in the mail that we were allowed to keep after all. I'd worked on the assumption that absolutely everything we had in our bags would be destroyed, but they did allow us to keep stuff like the bind-to-account rep tokens or various Timeless Isle consumables in the end.

Radiant Echoes

I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised by the Radiant Echoes event, and I found myself coming back to it several times. First I levelled that old paladin (as mentioned in the linked post), then I kept going back to buy all the appearances. (I didn't care about them that much but I was having fun!) Then I realised that I now had every class bar two at level 70, and combined with realisations about Warbands mentioned above, that led to me going back to level my old Draenei mage from Darkspear and my old undead death knight from Earthen Ring to 70 through the event as well. I was just having such a blast! I'm actually a little sad to be saying goodbye to that.

Mythic+ Season 4

I actually haven't done any M+ in several weeks, but I did want to mention it here because I've been making posts about my progress every season all throughout Dragonflight and wanted to at least give a brief shout-out to Season 4 as well before we move on. It was considered a bit of a "nothing" season I think since it didn't offer anything new but just brought back all the Dragonflight dungeons that people had already conquered in Season 2 and 3.

My guildies and I still had a decent time with it though, especially since we didn't actually do that much in Season 1. The new "keystone squish" worked out well for us, as we spent the first two weeks of the season in Mythic Zero just trying to remember mechanics, and this did indeed work out as I had hoped: We did some wiping and then paused at each boss to figure out what we had been doing wrong without having to worry about the pressure of a timer. I broke 2k rating again, which again, isn't exactly the biggest achievement, but we did it in only three months as opposed to the five months it took us in Season 3, so it still felt like progress to me.

In terms of the dungeons themselves, I didn't have strong feelings about any of them in the same way I had during the last two seasons. There were individual encounters I sometimes found challenging, but there wasn't a dungeon I always loved or one that always filled me with dread like there had been in previous seasons.

While I've enjoyed getting to know and understand the M+ system in Dragonflight, I'm still not sure whether I want to get back into it in War Within, but that's a can I'm happy to kick down the road for now.

Reflections on Dragonflight Mythic+ Season 3

On Tuesday, the third M+ season in which I actively participated came to an end, and I wanted to jot down some thoughts on it again. In general, I've been very happy with our little group's progress, something I already talked about in my post about timing my first ever +15. This was also reflected in my rating, as I broke 2k for the first time, finishing with about 400 more rating than I achieved in season two.

I heard that season three has been easier than other seasons of the recent past, and that this also made it more popular, but at least to me, that doesn't take away from my personal sense of achievement. I'm not sure we'll be able to climb much higher in the future than we did this time, but then, Season 4 will also have that systems revamp that will have us spending time in M0 at least for the first few weeks, so we'll see how that goes.

I just wanted to do a quick ranking of the season three dungeons again, because boy, did I have opinions on these. Let's go from favourite to least favourite like last time:

Black Rook Hold

This was the first dungeon we timed on +15 and it was also the dungeon that consistently felt the most doable for our group throughout this season. I didn't play during Legion so I only have the vaguest familiarity with that expansion's instances from Timewalking (which doesn't really teach you anything beyond the most basic dungeon layout), but the bosses all felt very straightforward and like they didn't require any crazy dancing. I've generally noticed that I've liked all the Legion dungeons I've seen in M+, while BfA dungeons have been a bit more hit or miss.

Waycrest Manor

Waycrest Manor was another hit though, and the only other dungeon we timed on +15 on both fortified and tyrannical. The tight corridors were a bit annoying and we had more than one "incident" with people getting lost in the hallways (apparently it used to be even worse with some doors being locked randomly in the past?!) but once again, the bosses were very straightforward and the trash not too bad either. I just hated the Thornspeakers and their infected thorns, a painful disease which as an evoker wasn't covered by my regular dispel and which our dps often failed to interrupt.

Everbloom

I didn't play during WoD either, and I've mostly liked the WoD dungeons featured in the M+ rotation as well. Everbloom is a pretty-looking place and about half the bosses are very straightforward. The Ancient Guardians vexed us for a while, but we eventually got there. (It was funny when we brought our more experienced advisor along for one run and he was really surprised by how we'd been doing the fight because according to him it seemed to require the healer to do a lot of unnecessary heavy lifting, something that wasn't going to be possible on higher keys. That just felt very validating to me.) The mage lady and her trash could also be brutal but I don't know, for some reason I didn't mind her too much either.

Darkheart Thicket

Another Legion dungeon, and to be honest I still liked this one overall as well. The most annoying things about it were the trash density, which made it extremely easy for one of us to accidentally back into something and overpull, and the long runbacks in some places if you wipe. I remember failing the timer in here more than once not so much due to a huge number of deaths but because we wiped in a bad place and it took sooo long to get back to where we were. The last boss is also a bit unforgiving in the sense that if you lose even one person, you quickly get mechanics overlapping on other people that become harder and harder to deal with, which can cause things to snowball into an almost inevitable fail cascade.

Throne of the Tides

After seeing what Blizzard did to Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle in season two, I was rather worried about what they'd do to this Cataclysm dungeon for M+, but fortunately it wasn't quite as bad. We just had way too many wipes in here, both on trash and on the second and last boss. We did learn to deal with all of it in the end, but it was more painful to get there than in most other dungeons.

Atal'Dazar

This is a case of a BfA "miss" for me, which is a bit of a shame as I generally love troll dungeons and it's got both a cool theme and beautiful visuals. However, I found its trash to be really annoying as a healer, and almost all the bosses were annoying in one way or another as well. The golden priestess was probably the least painful, just making me sigh sadly when I realised that saying "this mechanic is just like Hakkar" meant nothing to anyone in my little group of friends. The big troll dude was an insane heal check at the start whenever the dps took their sweet time taking down his totems. Rezan was just annoying with his bugginess (which is something I actually read about, so I know it wasn't just me), meaning you had to be very careful while running away from him as taking a step in the wrong direction could cause the game to instantly snap you into his mouth instead (apparently as an anti-exploiter measure, but it seems that in practice it just makes the fight much harder for normal players trying to run away while also having to make sure to not run away too hard). Apparently bringing a night elf allows you to negate the mechanic completely but we didn't have one in our group. And don't even get me started on Yazma and her spiders, which I think we also did wrong in some way for a lot of the season. Just ugh.

Murozond's Rise

I had my reservations about the mega-dungeon from the moment its inclusion in season three was announced, as we hadn't even been able to beat the first boss in M0 when it first came out. It was indeed retuned for M+ to bring the difficulty more in line with the other dungeons, but even so, it still felt like a clusterfuck from start to finish for me. Starting with the names for the two halves of the dungeon, which to this day I can't correctly connect to the right half, meaning I have to look up which bosses are actually tied to which name every time (including while writing this post). This is the second half of the dungeon, which I minded slightly less as a healer (though I still didn't like it overall). We probably had more wipes on Tyr than on any other boss because he actually requires all of the damage dealers to do a lot of stuff correctly in a way that others can't compensate for, and Time-Lost Battlefield always felt like an encounter that should be relatively easy but that we still managed to screw up more than a few times. Morchie and Deios were okay I guess.

Galakrond's Fall

I disliked the first half of the dungeon more because of the Manifested Timeways boss, which was the boss I hated the most of all of the season three M+ dungeon bosses, primarily due to its requirement to keep moving non-stop. It's not particularly demanding movement when looked at in isolation, but I just found AoE healing as an evoker while almost never being allowed to stand still, while also making sure to dispel people at the right time and dodging orbs, to be way too much for my brain. We did get the hang of it after a while, but I still dreaded the fight every time. Chronikar and Blight of Galakrond were okay I guess, but Iridikron was another pretty brutal boss. In fact, he was my prime example for how the reduced damage in lower keys can teach you to do things wrong, because the way it was at the beginning, we always struggled with Manifested Timeways due to my healing issues, but once we got past that it was completely smooth sailing. Then we did the dungeon on a difficulty higher than +10 for the first time, one-shot the Timeways - and then wiped on Iridikron for half an hour or more because it turns out at that level you can't be healed through standing in the bad anymore, you actually have to dodge all of it, which was a nasty surprise for people and took a long time to get right. I'll be glad to never see this dungeon on mythic difficulty again.

At the end of my Season 2 in review post, I mentioned how we'd had some epiphanies in the very last week of the season, such as that we had been doing two bosses in Underrot wrong all along. There was a funny equivalent to this in Season 3, as something I had done to my Deadly Boss Mods suddenly made it come to life during our last week in a way it hadn't been before. I'd had it installed for months already, but I guess I was missing an important module or something since it didn't really tell me about anything but the affix mechanics. I just didn't realise that wasn't how it was supposed to work! Then during our last week it suddenly started yelling at me about dispels and moving out of stuff and I was just in awe of how much more audio support I could have had all along - and it made me wonder how some of our addon-loving damage dealers were still so bad at standing in things when they've had DBM yelling at them the entire time. I just thought it was funny.

Casual Keystone Master Reflections

Last weekend I hit a pretty significant milestone in retail WoW: me and several of my guildies got the Keystone Master achievement for completing a Mythic +15 for the first time.

It was a really nice run as well; we only suffered three deaths in that Black Rook Hold (two of which were people getting squished by boulders) and we finished with almost ten minutes to spare, which is rare for us even on lower keys.

To more experienced M+ players this probably means nothing, but to me it felt like something that we'd been working towards for a very long time, from our tentative first steps into mythic in season 1, to the growing pains we suffered in season 2. Season 3 has been a bit better in that regard... but I'll write some more about that in a separate post.

I think I finally figured out the biggest challenge to being successful in M+ as a casual player - and it's that the mode feels designed for people who run twenty keys or more per week.

There is just so much information to digest and things to learn in a single M+ season: eight different dungeons make for thirty-two boss fights you need to master, at least as many if not more trash mechanics you need to understand, paths to figure out to achieve the correct trash kill percentage, and then multiple affixes on top of that which rotate every week... it's a LOT.

The problem with being casual, which in our case means running about four dungeons per week, is that several weeks can pass between you seeing the same dungeon twice, and do you really remember every single mechanic from the two or three times you've run it before by the time it comes around again? Of course not!

We generally try to run four different dungeons every week for the sake of variety (which I think is understandable), but it was kind of eye-opening when this season we decided to run the same dungeon twice in one day. The other week we bricked a Throne of Tides so hard it's not even funny - it must've been a +13 or +14 I think and we spent a full hour or so in there. First we wiped multiple times on Commander Ulthok, and after finally getting him down we did the same thing on Ozumat, to the point that my husband was close to losing it again and kept saying that we were clearly too bad at this game and couldn't do it. This prompted our guildie to fetch his more experienced brother (who had helped us out before) and to stream our next boss attempt to him - and the funny thing is that said brother didn't really have anything to tell us other than to comment that we shouldn't run around like such headless chickens when we got the pure water buff, and yet, just by virtue of having him watch us, we suddenly succeeded on the next attempt, clearly pulling ourselves together out of sheer embarrassment. We then did another Throne of the Tides that same afternoon and it was super smooth, because all the pain points of the previous run were still fresh on our minds. That +15 Black Rook Hold was also preceded by another run of the same dungeon that had been a lot less smooth (though we didn't fail the timer), ensuring that by the time we did the +15 we actually remembered what we were doing.

I can't help but wonder how we would have done if we had tried Mythic Plus before Dragonflight introduced the concept of having a different set of M+ dungeons every season. I imagine it must have been quite boring to run the exact same dungeons every season, but at least most of what you learned in the process stayed useful throughout the rest of the expansion, instead of you having to learn new bosses and trash mechanics from scratch every major patch. It's weird how that increased dungeon variety is both more interesting and an additional obstacle to more casual participation.

With that in mind, I'm very curious to see how we will do in season 4. Not only will that take us back to the original Dragonflight dungeons we visited in seasons 1 and 2, but Blizzard is also going to do a "difficulty squish" that will raise the difficulty of heroic and mythic zero dungeons, with the new M+ starting at what's effectively +10 now. I'm tentatively hopeful that this will put our casual group in a better position for season 4 than we've been in before, as we've at least seen all the original Dragonflight dungeons before (even if we may not remember them that well), and the increased damage output in mythic zero will (hopefully?) make it easier to learn the boss mechanics properly there before having to deal with additional complications like timers and affixes. Currently in low keys, you can be healed through doing a lot of things completely wrong, so you don't really realise just how badly you're doing until you die to those same mechanics on a higher key, but then who wants to pause and review tactics while a timer's ticking? We'll see how it goes.

A Noob's Review of Dragonflight M+ Season 2

Yes, I'm still doing Mythic Plus with my guildies. I'm honestly feeling kind of "eh" about it - I don't mind it, but I could also do without it. At least one person in our little friend group is quite into it though, so we keep at it for now. Doing a couple of mythics each weekend isn't the worst way to spend some time (assuming we can all remain chill about failure, which hasn't always been the case).

With tomorrow's patch, Dragonflight's second M+ season is coming to an end, and I wanted to make some notes about it. Mainly, I'm kind of proud that I finished with a rating more than 500 points higher than last season. We're still bad, but slightly less so now I guess? Jumping in right from the beginning of the season, we had more time to learn this time around and I dare say we did get at least a little bit better at playing our classes and roles.

Here's how I'd rate my experiences with the season's eight dungeons, from favourite to least favourite:

Neltharion's Lair

I was kind of surprised when I heard in a video that this dungeon was apparently incredibly hard on higher keys, because on the difficulties we played it on, this was in my opinion the easiest dungeon of the set by quite a margin. The bosses all have fairly basic abilities and the trash is very straightforward as well and always seemed to go by quickly. As someone who didn't play during Legion, I got neither recycling nor nostalgia vibes from this one; it was just another dungeon that was (mostly) new to me. I just enjoyed that it didn't stress me too much as a healer, plus I liked the ride on the river and watching the hubby on his tank run on the spot while trying not to get eaten by the worm boss.

Halls of Infusion 

This was my favourite of the Dragonflight dungeons this rotation, as it's a place with varied trash and interesting bosses, without any single mechanic feeling overly punishing. Frogs are fun. I did have one run here that initially made me feel very bad, when we tried to push a slightly higher key and eventually had to give up due to continually wiping on Watcher Irideus. However, I felt less bad about that once I realised that there's only so much I can do in terms of AoE healing when the party decides to scatter to the four winds all the time, and I'm more assertive now about telling people to stack up if they want to stay alive in an AoE damage situation.

Freehold

Just thinking about Freehold immediately gets its soundtrack playing in my head. It's just a fun place to be, from the music to the pirate theme to the pig chasing- even if the trash is pretty dense and we had a lot of wipes due to accidental overpulls. Also, I died so many times on the Council of Captains when I'd miss the Vulpera lady jumping across the room and doing her massive conal attack... but I did get at least somewhat better at keeping a close eye on her and moving along at the right time after a while.

Neltharus

I think we probably did Neltharus more often than some of the others because one of my guildies was after a trinket from there for a while, and it was always... okay? The mammoth boss and the last fight sometimes wiped us if we messed up, but they never felt insurmountably difficult. All in all, it was a dungeon with the pretty classic WoW theme of "bad guys surrounded by fire" - which was okay, just not particularly exciting to me.

Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr

Legacy of Tyr was another dungeon I didn't mind, but I just thought it was kind of dull due to being (in my opinion) way too similar to the truncated version of the original Uldaman.

Brackenhide Hollow 

I kind of liked the overall theme and ambience of this one, but the trash leading up to the first boss is pretty annoying and was responsible for quite a few wipes on our part. We also messed up on the first boss fight many times, including that one time that nearly caused my husband to lose it. Overall I have more not-so-happy associations with this one than good ones.

Vortex Pinnacle

I was initially excited to return to this Cataclysm dungeon, but the extra mechanics they added to Altairus made him crazy hard in my opinion, and we wiped on him sooo many times - just too many sometimes contradictory movement cues going on. I just really came to dread this dungeon for this boss alone, even though the other two were easy. Also, we once failed a run in this one by literally a single second, which was a bit of a bummer.

The Underrot

Easily my least favourite dungeon by a mile, with annoying diseases I couldn't cleanse, trash mobs with absolutely lethal, randomly targeted frontal attacks that I wouldn't see in time due to being too focused on healing, and we remained absolutely god-awful at the mechanics of the last two bosses all season. Just... so many wipes and depleted keys. Ironically, on our last run of the place last week, we had our guildie's more experienced brother along again, and he actually took the time to teach us how to do those two problem bosses "properly" - revealing that we'd done them wrong all along, which explained the extreme difficulty. He then joked that of course, all this newfound knowledge was about to become useless, as season three will bring a whole new dungeon rotation for us to learn from scratch. C'est la vie.

I'm curious to see what season three will bring. The only dungeon from the new mythic pool that I feel I know well is Cataclysm's Throne of the Tides, though who knows how the devs have decided to spice that one up for mythic. I look forward to seeing more old dungeons that I only know from Chromie Time and Timewalking in their "proper" format, but I'm also worried about Dawn of the Infinite being included in the dungeon pool, since that one was insurmountably difficult for us even on M0 when it came out. (We couldn't even kill the first boss.) I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Not that WoWed

It's been a bit quiet on here, mostly because WoW hasn't been getting that much attention from me. Some of that is due to real life interference - for example I'm writing this post on my laptop while travelling, and while it technically has WoW installed on it and is capable of running it, I do find gaming on my laptop a bit awkward and am not that keen on it. However, other things have been happening as well.

For example, the biggest change affecting my Classic play was that I stepped down from raiding with my guild in era. Not in a hard "I'm never raiding with you guys again!" kind of way, and I'm still trying to join for things like the occasional ZG when I can, but I just felt like I couldn't hold on to the "raider" rank any longer and wanted to be open about it instead of simply having it revoked eventually due to no longer showing up.

When I first started raiding with the Warriors of Sunlight over a year ago, their raid days fit into the rest of my life pretty perfectly, meaning I was able to show up for most of them. However, over time, things changed for me, and more and more raids became a bit of a struggle or outright impossible to make time for. I would basically always sign as "tentative" for everything and then change to "absent" at the last moment.

My attendance had honestly been pretty shocking for a while; I just didn't really want to admit it to myself, because I do like the guild and I wanted to continue raiding with them... but the other week it just really hit me that realistically, I was fretting about sign-ups, consumables, world buffs and being on time three times a week, just to maybe do the first half of Naxx once every two weeks, which was not a very satisfying experience.

(It's kind of funny to me how originally, Sunday was the day I was least likely to make - plus I needed to gear up really - so for a long time, I was only ever running the lower-tier raids and Naxx was this pipe dream that I might be able to come along to one day. Then I geared up, and my availability changed so that suddenly, Sunday was in fact the one day I could make reliably, and it was always Naxx, so I never saw anything else anymore and that got me down. I honestly kind of prefer the chill atmosphere and lack of need for consumables of the earlier tiers.)

And well... while Classic has never been about raiding for me, it's a good way of staying engaged and having a reason to log in. Without that, I've been a lot less active recently, just spending a little bit of time puttering about on alts and keeping my hunter's small engineering gadget business going on the AH.

As for hardcore, I haven't really gone back to play more since my last post. I'd like to some time, but other things have just always taken priority.

And retail... well. I still have reason to log in at least once a week there to play with our little friend group, though we dialled back on the Mythic+ again. Over the summer, people were on holiday for quite a few weeks, and we had to once again rely on (more experienced) outside help to keep the weekly runs going, and let's just say it introduces friction in terms of how capable everyone thinks they are when some people get carried to higher keys and others don't.

After several more dungeons that left my husband and me rather exhausted and unhappy, we agreed to limit ourselves to something like a +10 every other week, and spend the other weeks doing something easier, such as going back as a group and taking a stab at some old BfA raids (which are apparently still not fully soloable on the higher difficulties, even two expansions later). That has been... interesting, with all of us effectively going in blind. For example we learned that mythic G'huun and Jaina still require quite a lot of people because there's only so much you can do against hard-fail mechanics that were originally designed for a group of twenty and haven't been nerfed retroactively (we didn't beat either of them, but at least we cleared the rest of the instance and learned the fights).

I've also taken to levelling a few more alts to better familiarise myself with different classes in retail, as well as to visit more levelling content that I've only seen once before or not at all (BfA Horde-side for example). My investment in those is very on-and-off though.

As for the actual level-cap content... there's been another patch recently, but to be honest I haven't even really looked at it. There was a quest NPC that showed me a cinematic, but that just confused me about just what was happening in what order and didn't make me feel like I should follow up immediately to see more of the story. There's also a new open world event that I did a couple of times and yeah... it's definitely becoming a bit of a meme at this point that all of Dragonflight's events tend to feel a bit samey. I'm sure I'm going to catch up with all of this eventually, but it's just not enticing enough to me right now to make it a priority.

My Continued Adventures in Mythic Plus

Back in February I wrote a post about trying out Mythic Plus in retail for the first time. And I had a pretty good time! So we did more in the weeks that followed... but the moment additional affixes were introduced, things got messy quickly. I'm not sure we timed anything past a +10, and the main reason we finished those at all was our friend's brother, who was an experienced retail player and did a lot of carrying. Basically, both me (the healer) and the other two dps would die all the time, and he'd be the one to combat res me and/or just finish killing the boss by himself.

I found it quite stressful. I can't exactly claim that I wasn't having any fun, but it was kind of draining all the same. It's hard enough trying to learn how to get the most out of your healing abilities while also dealing with boss and trash mechanics, but then the dps who are also noobs take lots of avoidable damage and you can't keep up, and also there's an affix that requires you to stack up, immediately followed by another one that requires you to spread out, and it's all just too much.

I remember one week in particular where I was just absolutely spent after our usual afternoon of dungeoning. Looking at the season one affix rotation, I think it must have been bursting (trash mobs explode and deal damage on death) and grievous (once you take damage, you take damage forever until you either die or get healed to full). I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that turned every single trash pull into absolute mayhem. I just kept muttering about how grievous used to be enough for an entire boss back in Burning Crusade (that crab thing in Slave Pens) and now it was just one of multiple trash mechanics. I took little comfort in finding out later that apparently a lot of healers (including much more experienced ones) also hated that affix combo.

After that, we ended up taking a break from running mythics for a few weeks for unrelated reasons, but I was honestly just relieved. I finished the season with this record, if that means anything to any of you:

However, season two came around and we wanted to try again. As a twist, we'd actually gained a fifth noob for our little team, so no more carrying.

In the first M+ we stepped into, Legacy of Tyr, we wiped on the first boss due to dps standing in fire. One of them actually commented: "Wait, that actually hurts?" We finished the dungeon fine after that, but up next was +2 Vortex Pinnacle, and that was another shitshow. The husband and I had been reasonably confident that we'd know what to do in there since we ran that dungeon many times back in Cataclysm, but as it turns out Blizzard added a completely new mechanic to the second boss that kept utterly obliterating us. I think we wiped three or four times before I gave up and googled a guide which finally told us how to deal with that new mechanic. We did finish the dungeon after that, but the timer had long expired.

Despite that rough start, I've actually appreciated this change of pace with nobody there to carry us, because it means that we have to learn from our mistakes together instead of just being carried to higher and higher keys even as we keep messing up. We're currently successfully timing +6s and looking at taking the step up into +7, which brings in an additional affix.

We did actually try Brackenhide Hollow on +7 already, but that was another disaster with a failed timer. The afflicted affix gave me another thing to watch out for as a healer (because apparently healers don't have enough to do?) but our biggest problem was that we wiped three or four times on the first boss fight. The damage was just insane and I couldn't keep up. After the husband started to lose it and threatened to just call it without even finishing the run, we suddenly sailed through the encounter with barely anyone taking any damage on the next attempt. At least that answered my silent question about whether we'd just been wiping due to my inadequacy as a healer.

The husband and I had a good talk after that, and I said to him that I could see from that run why I often see people say that it's actually the low-level keys that make people the most toxic - "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" as the saying goes, and at that level you've probably done the dungeon quite a few times on normal and heroic, leading you to think that you know what's going on, but in reality you've barely touched the complexities of Mythic Plus and are probably messing up left and right.

I remain conflicted about the whole thing. On the one hand, it can be fun. I feel I've gotten better at playing evoker (even if I'm far from great) because I'm forced to make better use of all my abilities and when it all comes together it feels great. I remember managing to heal us through a massively scuffed trash pull in Freehold and feeling very proud of myself. Learning how to deal with all the different mechanics and how to execute them correctly as a team is satisfying.

It's just... there's so much going on, and with the added time pressure I just find it overwhelming a lot of the time. At least with Burning Crusade heroics, you could start by learning slowly and then increase your pace as you got better. Mythic Plus just slaps you down with a whole new pile of mechanics the moment you think you've gotten the hang of anything.

I'd also forgotten how miserable it feels when your job as a healer is to constantly make up for damage dealers' mistakes, even more so when you're not entirely sure what's even going on and aren't confident that it isn't your fault somehow. So we'll keep at it for now, but I'm not sure how long it'll hold my attention - I expect I'll either feel burnt out at some point or we'll all just throw in the towel after getting mad at each other one too many times.

I Tried Mythic Plus

Mythic Plus has always been a strange beast to me. It was introduced in Legion, when I wasn't playing, and everything I heard about it just sounded incredibly alien. Over the years, retail WoW has sacrificed a lot of immersion on the altar of gameplay and convenience, but the very concept of Mythic Plus just seemed to take things to a whole new level: over a dozen difficulty levels, with mechanics that changed all the time? Seasons, scoreboards and timers? What does any of that still have to do with the World of Warcraft? I seem to remember reading that the whole concept was basically imported from Diablo 3, which I've never played - it certainly seemed like an odd transplant.

It also didn't seem like something that would ever interest me at all, not least because of everything being timed. I was already getting annoyed with WoW's "rush rush" culture by Wrath of the Lich King, and Torghast certainly didn't seem to get any better when they added a timer to it either. The thought of racing against the clock with a bunch of hostile pugs just sounded dreadful...

And yet... I've always been reading about Kaylriene's adventures in Mythic Plus with a certain interest, and from the way he described the whole experience, it struck me at some point that if circumstances were different, if I was fifteen years younger and playing with a tight group of friends, maybe I would have enjoyed Mythic Plus too. After all, if I'm being honest and immersion aside, it's not that different from something like the Zul'Aman bear run, right?

Now, Dragonflight has been a good expansion for me so far not just because I've personally been having fun playing it casually, but also because my friends have been playing too. My husband and I are in a mini guild with a few friends from SWTOR, and we've actually had four of us playing at max level consistently - which might not sound like much but has been unprecedented for our group. Naturally we worked our way through all the normal mode dungeons together, and when we hit heroics we soon realised that we already overgeared them, and that the next step up for us would be mythic - a mode we had never done at level before.

Last week one of the weekly quests in Valdrakken was to do four mythic dungeons, so we agreed that the time had finally come. One of our guildies also roped in his brother to help us, since he's a much more experienced modern WoW player than any of us and could provide guidance and instructions on how things worked. (Incidentally, since said brother played a blood elf this was also my first ever cross-faction group.)

So we went ahead and did some mythics! We started with a mythic zero Neltharus and Algeth'ar Academy, and then used the keystones that we received to proceed into a +2 Ruby Life Pools and a +2 Temple of the Jade Serpent, followed by a +5 Court of Stars and +5 Halls of Valor.

And somewhat to my surprise, it was good fun! Mythic zero wasn't really much of a step up from heroic, and the low keys also only increased the difficulty in baby steps, so it didn't feel like as big of a jump as I had feared. The timer was also just a formality at this level, as we beat each dungeon with plenty of time to spare while proceeding at a casual pace and slowing ourselves down by dying occasionally. I imagine it only becomes an issue once you're pushing higher keys or if you're wiping repeatedly. Also, I had often wondered how the hell people keep track of all these affixes and what's happening when, so I was relieved to see that there are actually some in-game indicators for that too.

We got some loot out of it as well, and earned credit for some more out of the Great Vault. I think that since we had a good time, we'll likely try this again some time, and maybe push ourselves a bit higher... though I'm very aware that there's a risk that being as casual as we are, we're likely to hit our comfort ceiling sooner rather than later. Still, it was a pleasant surprise that low-level Mythic Plus was this accessible at all as I always got the impression that it was a pretty "hardcore" game mode at all levels.