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Players are dropping out of World of Warcraft’s hardest dungeon mode in droves, and Blizzard is changing everything from class balance to dungeon mechanics to try and stop the bleeding. Public testing of the next Mythic Plus dungeon season is underway this week, with the first versions of many of those changes in play. That season is likely to launch early in March.
“The health of the M+ system ecosystem is a top priority for us,” senior game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer in an interview. “Our goal is for M+ to be fun, engaging and rewarding for people who really enjoy dungeon gameplay and the difficulty progression. We’re less focused on raw participation metrics than we are on broader player behavior and sentiment.”
The participation metrics aren’t looking great right now, though.
A drastically shrinking player pool
The most popular ranking and statistics site for WoW dungeon runners online is Raider.io—its measure of players’ progression up the levels of increasingly hard Mythic Plus dungeons was adapted by Blizzard in-game, where it’s still frequently called the “Raider IO score” or “IO” by players. The site collects a massive amount of data from every run that shows up on WoW’s leaderboard, along with stats from every run logged by players, and publishes a regular series of insights. The site is working on a beta version that offers more in-depth insights to players, available now to Patreon subscribers.
Raider.io recently compared Mythic Plus participation from Season 1 in the new War Within expansion, which started shortly after the expansion’s launch in August, to participation in the last three expansions. The findings are sobering, especially when compared to the previous expansion, Dragonflight.
“Compared to Dragonflight specifically, we are seeing a pretty sharp decline in Mythic Plus participation in The War Within,” Raider.io general manager Kelsey Cox told PC Gamer. “Almost every season will see a decline in participation numbers from Week 1 of that season, but in most of the Dragonflight seasons the numbers stayed pretty steady after the initial Week 1 drop-off.
“That’s not what we’ve been seeing in this current season though: TWW Week 14 had about one-fourth the Mythic Plus participation of Week 1, in terms of total dungeons done worldwide.”
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In the Battle for Azeroth expansion, by comparison, about 50 percent more players were doing Mythic Plus dungeons in week 18 of its Season 4 as compared to Week 1, Cox said.
Key pain points have been things like depleting keystones when you don’t beat a timer, a very narrow meta [group composition], rewards not feeling like they match up with keystone levels, as well as an overall feeling that keys are just too difficult.
Raider.io GM Kelsey Cox
Hazzikostas said that Blizzard expected some drop in player numbers as more options became available for dungeon-runners at lower difficulty levels, including increased rewards in easier dungeons and the advent of Delves, short dungeons for single players or groups.
“When we added Delves in The War Within, we knew that some number of players would shift from M+ to Delves as their primary activity due to the greater flexibility,” he said. “If a number of players who used to do M+ because it was the best way for them to get loot are gravitating toward Delves or raids instead, that isn’t inherently a problem that needs to be fixed.
“But if people who have really enjoyed M+ gameplay in the past are feeling frustrated today, we agree that’s a problem.”
Based on participation and multiple threads on Blizzard’s forums and Reddit throughout the season, criticizing the dungeons, class balance and other Mythic Plus issues, that frustration definitely exists.
“There’s been significant discourse in recent weeks on social media, and in community forums, regarding Mythic Plus,” Cox said. “Specifically, a poignant sense of unhappiness with how the Season has been progressing. Key pain points have been things like depleting keystones when you don’t beat a timer, a very narrow meta [group composition], rewards not feeling like they match up with keystone levels, as well as an overall feeling that keys are just too difficult.”
How Mythic Plus dungeons work and why they might be struggling
Warcraft’s dungeons come in a variety of difficulties. At the easiest level, follower dungeons allow players to play solo, assisted by AI companions. For dungeon groups made up of a full complement of players, the difficulty progresses through Normal, Heroic, and then Mythic dungeons.
Completing a Mythic dungeon gives you a key to a Mythic Plus dungeon, which adds a timer, new dungeon mechanics and mob health/damage. Each season, a pool of Mythic Plus dungeons is chosen, typically mixing four dungeons from previous expansions and four from the current dungeon rotation.
From there, completing Mythic Plus dungeons on time allows you to get the key to a dungeon that is one to three levels higher, depending on how fast you went. Every few levels, a new mechanic is added. Once you hit +12 Mythic keystone dungeons, the difficulty takes a huge leap, as both bosses and trash get a significant bump in health and damage, and the more playful affixes fall away. Few players consistently run dungeons at that level, and even fewer are doing them now compared to previous seasons.
Raider.io founder Jah Raphael told PC Gamer they track “significantly more” data than they display on the site, and over emails with him and Cox we dug into the current issues with Mythic Plus, and what might fix them.
One of the issues the Raider.io pair identified was in representation by different classes and specializations playing Mythic Plus dungeons and their balancing. My own Mythic Plus group, for example, tends to be fairly static in terms of its membership: a blood death knight tanking, a holy paladin healing, and a retribution paladin, arms warrior and beast mastery hunter on DPS. We’re rarely the most popular classes/specializations, and we’re frequently well-equipped to compete in Raider.io’s Break the Meta event.
In previous seasons and expansions, we’ve always managed to get the cosmetic, mount and portal rewards for challenging level dungeons without issues, clearing them early in a season, then enjoying ourselves picking at the levels to see how far we could push ourselves. We usually wrapped up in the top 1-2 percent of all North America groups, just shy of the title cutoff, which is typically at .05 percent.
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This season was different. We rapidly discovered that our group’s lack of key abilities to handle specific dungeon mechanics without having to swap to different characters was utterly punishing. We quit the season early after hitting a wall at +12s and getting passed easily by groups that typically didn’t reach those levels, but had the “right” classes.
Despite our early exit, our Raider.io team points—which take into account your relative ranking among others playing your specs—put us on the home page of the site, in the top three teams in the world (Number 1 in North America) for weeks. It’s not because we’re world-quality players; it’s because no one with half a brain was playing our dumpster-tier combo of specs.
It’s never been so hard to play at high levels on a variety of class/spec combos, and it shows in Raider.io’s data, Cox said. While a certain amount of meta-chasing happens every season, with players swapping specs or characters to find the easiest or “best” combination to beat the dungeons at ever-higher levels, it’s never been such a narrow band.
When players play specs that aren’t considered ‘meta’ enough to get invited to groups, it is a particularly demoralizing situation.
Raider.io GM Kelsey Cox
Of the six possible tank specs, for example, protection paladins represented all but seven percent of runs at top competitive levels (+16 or above, this season). Compare that to season 1 of Dragonflight, where no tank represented more than 40 percent of all runs.
This season, a single group composition—protection paladin, discipline priest, frost death knight, augmentation evoker and retribution paladin—represented 40 percent of all runs, with no variations. In Dragonflight season 3, by comparison, no one comp represented more than six percent of all runs.
“When players play specs that aren’t considered ‘meta’ enough to get invited to groups, it is a particularly demoralizing situation,” Cox said. “It can easily lead to many players deciding to no longer engage with the Mythic Plus system. When you have a season where the meta is as narrow as it is in The War Within, that exacerbates the issue and definitely has an impact on overall participation.”
“We completely understand the frustration that comes with trying to find a group and getting declined,” Hazzikostas said. “While sometimes there are serious balance issues that we need to address, at other times we see success rates [that are] functionally dead-even when comparing a meta spec to a non-meta one—yet groups overwhelmingly favor the former when extending invites.
“But perception matters more than reality here, and that data doesn’t offer much comfort to someone who is declined because they’re the ‘wrong’ spec.”
Mythic Plus has never been so difficult
The other thing likely tanking numbers in Mythic Plus is dungeon difficulty. Blizzard made huge changes to the system for The War Within, making plain-Mythic dungeons as difficult as level-10 Mythic Plus used to be, and then starting Mythic Plus from that level. Level 12 dungeons were another giant leap up in challenge.
“Many of those changes have been great, but some have created a situation where the jump in difficulty between levels is pretty excessive,” Cox said. That difficulty compounds dramatically if you don’t have a steady group and are trying to play with a random collection of people.
“This has likely been one of the largest contributing factors in the decline in participation we’ve seen this season,” Cox said. “The first aspect is simply that there are players who would previously engage with Mythic Plus at the lower key levels that are instead just running it at the base Mythic 0 level instead, due to the dungeon tuning differences.”
Even players easily capable of running a +10 in a set group quickly found that if their friends weren’t available, pugging a +10 might be largely out of reach.
“Considering a +10 is the minimum level required to get Mythic item level loot in your [weekly reward] Great Vault, that would understandably be a target for a lot of players,” said Cox. “However, when you realize that pugging a +10 is absolutely not an easy feat—especially if you’re not one of the very few meta specs—it is pretty demoralizing.”
Changes are on the way
To its credit, Blizzard has clearly seen the Mythic Plus issue and has been taking consistent steps to address it. In Season 2, keystones will no longer “deplete,” or reduce in level, after a group fails a key, once the group has hit a competitive level (2850 rating, or completing about +10-11 difficulty dungeons). This achievement will also give higher level players that aren’t quite title-worthy something new to chase.
Mechanics “affixes” have been retooled, augmentation evokers have seen some significant changes that might reduce their overwhelming representation, and dungeons were reworked and reworked again from the current pool over the course of season 1. The upcoming dungeons for Season 2 are seeing constant changes.
A recent survey of players asked about options for Mythic Plus retooling, ranging from the key depletion issue to changing Mythic Plus entirely to focus on deaths instead of a timer.
Looking ahead, however, clouds still loom. While many changes are being made for Season 2, the most recent updates announced to the dungeons in the new pool reflect a disturbing trend. Many tweaks will increase, not reduce, the difficulty level of already-tough dungeons in the pool, particularly for players not using the most-popular meta specs.
More iteration is coming
Hazzikostas cautioned that many of those changes don’t reflect updates that are already in internal builds and will become available for testing in the future.
“This first Test build is a starting point for weeks of iteration ahead,” he said. “When we revisit old dungeons, we’re both trying to rein in pain points, but also at times add new relevance to mechanics that were largely ignored during a dungeon’s first run. We also need to ensure that our dungeon pool feels roughly consistent in terms of difficulty.”
At the end of the day, it falls to us to create the conditions that provide everyone who wants to have a fun dungeon experience with the right level of challenge and a group to run with.
WoW senior game director Ion Hazzikostas
Some changes present in the current test build were made before the team made some significant shifts as a result of player experiences in Season 1, he said. In the returning Theater of Pain dungeon, for example, tank-buster mechanics were boosted in this test build. “Players can expect that to be changed in an upcoming [test realm] build,” he said.
The Raider.io crew were hopeful that upcoming class and spec changes might widen participation.
“We should also mention that the next raid tier, Undermine, looks very fun, and typically when players are engaging with the raid content, they also engage with Mythic Plus content,” Cox said. “This is all to say that we’re optimistic and hopeful that season 2 will see increased participation, a wider pool of ‘meta’ specs, and even higher keys being pushed.”
Hazzikostas said that making sure M+ is fun is a top priority for the development team. He was promoted late last year, and oversees both modern/retail WoW and World of Warcraft Classic.
“At the end of the day, it falls to us to create the conditions that provide everyone who wants to have a fun dungeon experience with the right level of challenge and a group to run with,” he said. “As we begin the [testing] cycle, the health of M+ is a major area of focus for our design teams, and for game leadership.”
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