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.

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.

Ran some normals again

I don't think I've ever hit my weekly heroic cap since it was first introduced, but I used up all of my weekly random bonuses for normals on my newly dinged night elf priest within two days. I think that says something about me as well as about normals, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I've talked about the advantages of running normals before, and all in all, they still apply. I think I'm also finally managing to pin down what has been bothering me about dungeon runs in the game as of late, and it's not so much about point systems, immersion or difficulty by itself, but the whole "rush rush" culture. Players want to get through dungeons as fast as possible, and the developers keep talking about releasing content at a faster pace. I don't like that! It turns fun into stress for me. My favourite run these past two days was actually a normal Grim Batol with four people from the same guild who advanced at what most people would consider an agonisingly slow pace (one trash pull every other minute or so). At one point their dps warrior fell off a bridge, died, and took ten minutes to find his way back. The tank apologised profusely for his friend's drunken stupor, but I honestly didn't mind. I just watched a bit of tv on the side and was happy. I'd rather deal with someone who's ten times slower than my "ideal" pace than someone who pulls even a bit too fast. It's pretty obvious that I'm exceptional in this attitude though - I'm pretty sure that ninety-nine percent of pug healers would have abandoned that group quite quickly.

I also met several nice players again with whom I continued to do more than one run, and even the not-so-nice ones were never outright mean or rude.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses however. In fact, my very first run was pretty disastrous. I got into Lost City of the Tol'vir with nobody using crowd control, two melee dps, and the very belated realisation that my keybinds were completely messed up. I struggled on for a bit, casting the wrong heals all the time and finding myself forced to drink after every single pull, but when we wiped on some trash after the first boss, someone finally complained about "bad tanking and healing". Since I was most definitely performing sub-par, I apologised and left, to try again later.

Subsequent runs with properly set up binds went a lot better, though getting fewer melee dps that loved to bathe in any ground AoEs helped as well. Still, I have to admit that I felt a lot more performance pressure than I had in a while. I think I only met one person who wasn't geared for heroics yet, and most tanks had around 150k health. I remember when we tanked heroics with 125k! I really didn't think I'd feel so undergeared in normals of all places - and other people having better gear only did so much to make my job easier, as AoE damage remains the same if people don't dodge or prevent it, and I was still left with a lot more green bar space to fill than my poor mana pool could handle at first.

There wasn't a whole lot of gear to be had either, since mages are still needing on all the spirit cloth (and winning it) even a full year after 4.0 made the stat obsolete for their class.

At some point I did the Horseman and won a ring, at which point the system suddenly tried to put me into heroics. What is this, I don't even! I'm in greens and can't heal my way out of normal Lost City and you want to put me into heroics? Clearly a single high-level epic can seriously screw with item level restrictions.

In a Vortex Pinnacle run, my group spent eight minutes on the first pull with two Temple Adepts because they just could not control or interrupt the heals. I still don't know how I managed to keep everyone alive that long, even with blowing all my cooldowns. When we ran into the same problem on the next pull, I did run out of mana eventually and we wiped. The tank told everyone that they sucked and left, at which point everyone else dropped group as well, presumably in shame. I requeued for an entirely new group, and we almost wiped to the same problem again, though we eventually managed to scrape by, barely. I think I might have to reconsider my opinions on Cataclysm dungeon difficulty...

Lost City of the Tol'vir was the instance that came up for me most often, and I think there wasn't a single group that didn't wipe on those trash packs at the entrance to the last third of the instance - you know which ones I mean, the ones that people always try to skip, but then someone inevitably butt-pulls them, you get two or more groups at once and you die. I thought it was amazing how consistent that was. You'd think people would learn eventually.

Still, I had fun, because even if it wasn't perfect, nobody was stressing about speed and that made all the difference. Also, chain-running instances is an awesome source of cloth for levelling tailoring!

State of the dungeon finder

I still haven't dared to brave the dungeon finder for a random heroic on my own, but I'm slowly trying to wean myself from only running with guild groups. To be honest I kind of have to - unsurprisingly, the tanks have finished their heroic gearing before anyone else, and I'm pretty sure that even some of the tanking alts have overtaken me on gear progression by now... either way the number of guildies that are interested in joining a heroic group is going down each day, and being able to get a full guild run together is rapidly becoming a luxury. I don't see that as an entirely bad thing though, as I've said in the past that - unlike many other players - I do like pugs. I think at the moment the main thing that still scares me a little is that I haven't done all the heroic dungeons yet, and I'm terrified of having my "first time" with a bad group. Once I know what to expect I'm usually a lot more confident.

Nonetheless, I'm working on it. Initially I only ran with full guild groups; then we had some runs where we pugged one person. The players we got were all very good and we didn't have any problems with them. From there I dared to take it to runs where it was three guildies vs. two puggers. We only got one completely hopeless dps at one point, but after we kicked him it was smooth sailing again. And last night I finally braved the dungeon finder with only a single guildie of mine by my side, an elemental shaman.

We got Vortex Pinnacle, which I hadn't done on heroic before, so I was slightly nervous even though I had heard that it was definitely one of the easier heroics. Fortunately my shaman friend was an absolute star, assigning crowd control on trash and patiently explaining fight mechanics to me and the tank, who hadn't done the instance before either. The dps did their job admirably, using crowd control, interrupts and doing good damage.

The tank was kind of an interesting case. As I mentioned, he admitted that it was his first time in there, but he didn't say so up front. In fact, he charged into the first pull with no crowd control and I immediately broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what that kind of tanking was going to mean for the rest of the run. However, my shammy friend nagged him about marks, so he set some... and then didn't really follow them himself. Again he was asked about this, at which point he finally admitted that he didn't really know what he was doing, and could someone else please mark for him? No problem! I'm just glad that he fessed up.

On those pulls with the tol'vir in the anti-magic field he was advised to make a line-of-sight pull... and had apparently no idea what that meant, as he charged right in anyway. We lived through it, but I couldn't help but wonder whether the tank hadn't just outed himself as a Wrath baby, as anyone that learned the ropes before WOTLK would have known what doing a LOS pull meant. Still, aside from that our tank did very well, used his tools appropriately and generally came across as a genuinely nice fellow. We had a pretty smooth run in the end, with only two wipes on the second boss as some of us had to get used to dodging the tornadoes first. It makes me hopeful for my future pugs; I'll just have to remember to also keep an open mind and to encourage communication like my shaman friend did.

Now, normal pugs are something that I've been doing aplenty, mostly on my druid. Unfortunately they've largely been less fun than my heroics. There is less wiping, mind you, though people have become a bit more tolerant of it even in normals, but the attitudes are rarely pleasant.

Especially in the low-level instances, that is Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides, you'll often run into people that behave as if they've freshly stepped out of a WOTLK heroic and haven't got a clue about what's changed this expansion. "Gogogo"-ing, pulling for the tank, you name it. This isn't helped by the fact that BRC in particular seems somewhat undertuned on normal mode so that you can completely ignore many boss mechanics, such as Corla's zealots and the crepuscular veil of Obsidius's adds.

As you go up in levels this gets a bit better and people will at least wait for the tank to pull, but crowd control is still something that nobody really bothers with. On some pulls it really doesn't matter; on others it means that the healer has to do overtime and then hope that the tank is willing to wait for mana before charging into the next group.

Boss mechanics, interestingly enough, are something I've had few problems with on normal. Occasionally someone will mess up because they didn't know what to do and didn't ask for an explanation either, but even if that leads to a wipe it's usually not a problem to do it right next time. Sometimes the one who messed up will rage-quit because clearly the rest of the group sucks and wiped him, but then you'll only have an even easier time with his replacment, so you still win. Today in Grim Batol I had a warrior who seemed to consider it hilarious to intentionally do the wrong thing on bosses (such as charging Drahga's elemental add to make it explode or running all over the place during Erudax' shadow gale) and we still made it through.

The thing that has really been bugging me in my normal runs however is the incredible loot greed. For example I was healing a normal Stonecore run where the party repeatedly commented favourably on how I had managed to heal through some very sticky situations when we got multiple trash groups at once - and then when Azil dropped her healing trinket, the mage took it and left. /sigh. Why are classes with no healing spells even allowed to roll on trinkets with a healing proc?

Today in Grim Batol, a similar scene. Drahga drops his spirit cloak and the warlock wins the roll over me. I call him out on it and he says that it was better than "the crap cloak" he had - he was wearing the same cloak as me actually, another drop with spirit on it. Maybe he should try rolling on dps gear for a change? In a funny twist of fate, I then won the caster trinket off the last boss which works for both damage dealers and healers, and suddenly the lock offered to trade me the cloak for the trinket. So let me get this straight, you roll on a healer cloak - which you shouldn't have done in the first place - and then graciously offer to trade it to me in exchange for an item that you want as well? How about NO? Is this some sick new kind of loot whoring strategy, needing on everything you can in hopes of being able to use it as a bargaining chip against your competition later on? "Oh hey, I'll trade you that item I ninjaed from you earlier if you give me this drop now..." What will they come up with next?

Likewise I was tanking a normal BRC run today, when I saw a mage roll against the healer on a spirit ring, the healer won, and then the mage got all pouty because the healer had already won some other healing loot earlier as well. Yes, because if someone gets lucky with drops for their class/role, you obviously should try to take some of their loot away just to spite them. What.

I miss the times when people were able to be genuinely happy for someone else getting a great item for their class and spec instead of greedily trying to grab everything that the system will let them roll on just because it has a single useful stat for them on it.

What have other people's pugging experiences been like?