Visiting mythic dungeons will soon be more enjoyable in World of Warcraft. Everything will be a bit easier – and the loot better.
Mythic+ is one of the major endgame pillars of World of Warcraft, which has been continuously changed and refined over the years. However, with the first season of The War Within, there were some issues. This was partly due to the introduction of the Depths as an additional reward option, but also due to changes in the dungeons. New mechanics led to stress, and tank nerfs put additional pressure on healers.
Now Blizzard believes they have understood this – and is reshaping a lot at the start of the 2nd season of The War Within in Patch 11.1 Lorenhalt.
What will be changed? The list of adjustments is long and extensive. The overall intent is to make the leveling in M+ a bit shallower and to reduce the overwhelming number of mechanics that players had to learn. The changes at a glance are:
- Mythic 0 (so “normal mythic”) will be slightly more difficult, drops Champion gear, and has a weekly ID.
- From Mythic+2 to Mythic+10, the health points and damage of enemies will increase by 7% per level instead of the previous 10%. From Mythic+11, it remains at 10% increase.
- The affix Xal’atath’s Bargain will only become active from Mythic+4. This means that on M+2 and M+3, no affixes – apart from the timer – will be active.
- Tyrannical and Fortified will alternate weekly and will be active from Mythic+7, with the other affix active from Mythic+10.
- From Mythic+12, the Challenger’s Guile will become active, where each death is punished with an additional penalty to the timer.
Why is Blizzard doing all of this? The changes are direct adjustments based on feedback from season 1. The community identified several factors that led to Mythic+ being a somewhat unpleasant gaming experience. Especially those characters who had only played Depths before entered the system with “Mythic+7” and were then overwhelmed, leading to a poor quality of group experience.
This, in turn, led to almost only “meta groups” being formed, which excluded the vast majority of specializations.
What else is changing? Aside from the direct changes to difficulty, Blizzard is also shifting the rewards for Mythic+ a bit. So there will be golden crests available starting from “Mythic+7” and heroic item rewards starting from Mythic+6.
However, so that the best of the best have something to do, there is a new achievement and an exclusive mount for reaching a score of 3,000 points. This will create new incentives to complete dungeons beyond the limit of Mythic+10.
What do you think of these major changes to the mythic dungeon system? Is Blizzard on the right track to ensure that the second season goes a bit better than the first? Or would it require completely different changes to improve the dungeon system again?
There are also improvements for warriors, as they were “physically painful” to play.
