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.

Friday Night Fever

Since I was very enthusiastic about getting back into WoW, I threw myself into a bunch of pugs last night, and - as if through a miracle - there was at least one aspect about each of them that made me happy.

Things started in heroic Stonecore with my hunter. The run wasn't exactly amazing, but we actually had a tank who was friendly and talked to the rest of the party instead of just silently ploughing through things. When we wiped on Ozruk, nobody got mad and instead we discussed what went wrong. When we wiped a second time, the dps death knight said, "okay, can someone explain to me how I avoid getting killed here because clearly I'm not getting it", and everyone piped up with helpful explanations. People being happy to teach others and willing to discuss strategy? Be still, my heart.

Then I decided to tackle my biggest challenge for the evening: since I was home alone and had plenty of time, I was going to tank a Zul heroic pug on my druid. Lady RNG decided to put me into Zul'Gurub. Admittedly the run didn't start out too great: we had a couple of wipes on trash and people kept dropping out. However, I had pretty much expected this and wasn't really fazed by it. I was the tank, I knew this place, and I was going to finish the instance. I didn't care if other people chickened out at the drop of a hat, after all I could always requeue for replacements. (My favourite was the healer who rage-quit after I pulled a named trash mob that most of the party - including the guy himself - needed for their quest but that he didn't want to kill for some reason. I mean, seriously?)

As we approached Mandokir, the group finally started to settle down. We now had a paladin healer who confessed that it was his first time in the instance but who did a fabulous job anyway, a dps warrior from my server with whom I bonded quite quickly ("Earthen Ring pug power!"), a hunter and... I forget what the last dpser was, either a warlock or a shadow priest. We killed the next couple of bosses without any major problems and I got a nice pair of new healing leggings.

Jin'do was where things eventually got hairy and we had a couple of wipes. They didn't feel too bad to me though, if that makes sense, as we always got pretty close to beating the encounter and there didn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with what people were doing. We only had to reset phase one once, after the paladin had stood outside of the deadzone and died, which he sheepishly explained with a friend distracting him at the worst possible moment. Most of us just laughed it off.

The hunter however started to get increasingly cranky, always blaming the healer for everything that went wrong. Finally he declared that the next attempt was going to be his last one and that the paladin should better not mess this one up. Then the hunter himself botched it by standing in the wrong place and wasting a body slam, and we wiped again. He raged some more, but I just said, "Wasn't this going to be your last attempt?" He responded by shouting "fine, do it without me then" and left the group. We got another hunter as replacement, and downed the boss easily on the next attempt. Funny how it's always the pompous gits who end up holding everyone else back. Jin'do rewarded me with a nice new tanking weapon as well, which was welcome as I had had terrible luck with heroic weapon drops and was still using an ilevel 333 blue.

Still, that run had taken over two hours and I wanted something more relaxing now, so I decided to tank one of the old heroics on my paladin next. I got dropped into heroic Throne of the Tides, with the rest of the party already zoned in at the entrance, which gave me the impression that their previous tank had left as soon as he saw where he had landed. What is it with tanks dropping from that one as soon as they see it? I've definitely noticed that one happening quite a lot. And it's not even a particularly hard instance or anything... When the rest of the party started chatting, I noticed that they were all in the same guild. I commented on this as a positive fact and they joked that I should wait with getting too excited until I saw their dps. I didn't care though, I was just happy to be playing with a group of people who were bound to be interested in working together.

We killed the boss that most pugs skip since one of the guildies still had the quest to save Erunak, and he was very pleased. I had fun educating the mage about the wonders of spellsteal when applied to the swell buff. On the last boss things got kind of messy when I died just before the last sapper was killed (not sure whose fault it was really) and at least one of the dpsers had trouble targetting the giant squid. In the end everyone was dead except for the warlock, who easily took care of Ozumat's remaining health and stayed alive through massive self-heals. I also got rewarded with a new chest for my healing gear, which was a nice cherry on top of what had already been a very pleasant run filled with friendly banter.

Up next I ran a quick normal with my shaman. We got Grim Batol and it was a pretty smooth and uneventful run. What impressed me at the end however was that there were two need rolls on each of the two drops from the last boss, but then both winners traded the item to the other person because "it's your main spec" and "I think this is better for you than for me". Quite a change from the usual greed and selfishness that has people needing on stuff they don't even want just for the gold.

I decided to finish up the night with a random heroic on my death knight. (Fun fact: I started gearing up my shaman and my death knight at the same time, but while my death knight has been running heroics for some time now, my shaman is still stuck in normals because even though I'd technically be allowed to queue her for heroics, I'm still having such massive mana issues that I simply don't dare. The joys of being a tank or healer vs. being a damage dealer...) I got Stonecore again, and while this run wasn't as good as the previous ones, it was still alright. I got another upgrade and saw the Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake drop for the third time or so, though I didn't win them.

There was one funny moment when we managed to get nearly everything in the hallway behind Corborus at once, everyone but the tank and healer died, and mere moments after the healer had resed the warlock afterwards, the poor guy got killed again by a bunch of Rock Borers that spawned right on top of him. He started swearing in all caps and for a moment I wasn't sure what to think since it sounded pretty angry to me, but then everyone just started laughing like crazy and eventually I couldn't help it either. Let me tell you, it's a pretty strange feeling to sit in front of your PC and giggle at your screen like a lunatic...

That concluded my night of pugging and in all honesty, I was pretty damn satisfied. It's good to have that kind of experience every now and then, considering how much doom and gloom about the state of the WoW community is going around, just to remind you that it's actually not all that bad.