Season 1 finally opened the mythical key stone dungeons for WoW Dragonflight. Many players are now trying to complete the highest keys possible. However, two of the dungeons are so tough that there are even comics about the agony they represent.
What are those dungeons? The Ruby Life Pools and the Algeth’ar Academy are 2 of the 8 dungeons that are in Season 1 of Dragonflight in the Mythic+ rotation. Besides these, only the Assault of the Nokhud and the Azure Vault from Dragonflight are new, while the other dungeons come from old expansions.
The Ruby Life Pools and the Algeth’ar Academy are currently causing a lot of memes and threads in the World of Warcraft subreddit. Players are complaining that the two dungeons are too hard.
Mythic+ requires you to complete dungeons within a specified time with additional difficulty. However, that seems simply impossible for most players at a certain level right now. Even the popular webcomic Dark Legacy Comics has published a new strip about this:
How hard are the dungeons? For the Ruby Life Pools, 30 minutes is given. However, one player shows a picture, where he and his group finished only after 141 minutes. The group accumulated an impressive 192 deaths. Kudos at this point for perseverance.
It looks similar at the Academy. A user shows their completion after over 100 minutes with 123 deaths in the team. The timer requires 32 minutes for an upgrade of the key.
The two posts are not the only ones. Currently, the dungeons are one of the biggest topics in the subreddit, and more and more players are sharing their woeful results.
You can find all information about Dragonflight in our special here. In the trailer, you see the most important features at a glance:
“Is it me, or are the M+-dungeons hell for casters?!”
What makes the dungeons so hard? The season is already a bit tougher at the beginning of the expansion because players simply lack the gear. Hardly anyone is wearing the sets from the raid or already has significant gear from the dungeons.
This is visible in the DPS ranking of the season, which still shows strong fluctuations and has much room for improvement. This will likely only change with the reset on December 21, when the Great Vault can be opened for the first time.
Especially in the two aforementioned dungeons, there are further factors that make them almost unplayable at the moment:
- The affix “Sanguine” requires casters and healers to interrupt their spells often to avoid being incapacitated.
- At the same time, there are enemies in both dungeons that can interrupt spells on their own. Hence, you often can’t get a spell off.
- Additionally, all non-bosses (“trash”) fall into a rage at 30% health and deal more damage, which only a few classes can prevent. Enhanced trash also gets stronger.
Specific enemies like the dragons in the Ruby Life Pools are already borderline concerning regarding damage. Due to the combination of affixes and effects, they sometimes deal nearly unhealable damage or kill players outright.
You can vote for which dungeon you like best in Season 1 here:
In the Academy, many players complain about the “Tree Boss,” the Overgrown Urtum. He has quite nasty mechanics like a stackable poison DoT if the adds are not played correctly. Since the affix “Tyrannical” is coming up next week, which strengthens bosses, many players see a grim future for the dungeon.
Is it even possible to get through? Some players report that they explicitly say in their groups: “Take it slow, pull group by group. It’s enough if we play the key within the time, even if we have only one second left.” This way it can be manageable.
Blizzard has already announced nerfs for the dungeons. Additionally, there are strong buffs for 7 classes that may make the key stones a bit easier.
However, there are also general complaints from healers that they are having a pretty hard job right now. Healers were passively nerfed in Dragonflight and right now, at the start of the expansion, it is hard to keep up.
I can fully relate to this experience. As a Caller, I jump in as a healer quite often at the moment, whether in Mythic+ or even in the raid, because healing simply isn’t enough at times. Right now, healing is truly a struggle, but it is refreshingly different:
