Reflecting On My Journey To Dragonflight Keystone Hero Season 1

Monday afternoon, I did it at last. With a timed Ruby Life Pools +18 key that gave me 11 rating against the 2,497 I had prior to the run, I breached 2,500 Mythic Rating in World of Warcraft on my now-main Monk and obtained the Keystone Hero achievement for the first season of Dragonflight.

I also recorded the run, which worked out for a fun title I got to do on my key run video series:

So, an interesting journey of two and a half months down, how was it?

Interesting, I think.

Going into Dragonflight, I didn’t expect to care this much about keys. The logic in my head was that I would probably push to KSM and that the increased difficulty scaling would put me off of even that, much less going higher. After all, in Shadowlands, the most key-obsessed I had been, I stopped around 16-17 range keys – and Dragonflight’s scaling makes keys in that range harder than they were then in a relative sense. Sure, now gear rewards scale up to +20 keys, and so there is value to pushing harder than before, but it would also be a harder push than before, and early on, I expected to not really care that much. For the content I do, what point was there to 421 item level stuff from the Great Vault? Heroic raid maxes out at 411 and that was about the upper range of what I expected to do.

I started my key grind in earnest and with my methodological approach to it – I wanted KSM and I was determined to do it via min-maxing my returns. Run a bunch of keys, run them in order to fill every dungeon and base affix with points and then run more higher keys to upgrade each slot over time, targeting the biggest gains first and then filling out as available through LFG, guild runs, and attempted key swaps to get the dungeons I needed. The methodology behind my madness worked, because I sprinted to 2,000 rating in three weeks – not the fastest by any means, but for a first season in the expansion, it was fast for me and it felt really good as an accomplishment. I took a week to kind of just cross off more +15 keys and contemplated what I would do next.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my WoW time this expansion on keys, and so I knew that the desire to keep going was gnawing at me. I had pushed faster than I expected, especially given the Season 1 issues you would expect to have – starting way lower on the gear curve, new dungeons with no existing routing or community tech, and everyone coming to terms with the full extent of their new kits at level 70 – especially with the flexibility and changes offered in the revamped talent trees. I honestly kind of expected the Season 1 grind to be, well, a grind. In some ways, to be fair, it was – the affix combos this season have been dreadful in some ways, the seasonal affix has ended up as a miss, and there is a very real and valid question as to how Mythic Plus should carry forward given that the affix system has never been this highly scrutinized within the community.

But at the same time, the truth of the matter is that I enjoy the key grind. Especially with the added raid responsibility I’ve taken on this expansion, Mythic Plus pugging is my happy personal space to just run through dungeons, no voice, no need to organize, all just me against my own skill and development as a player and a chance to test myself against some of the more challenging content in the game. It isn’t for everyone, and sometimes it’s frustrating as hell, but overall, I enjoy running keys and I enjoy the process of improving my play in the game to that degree. I still have a lot of room to go in improving my play, but at the same time, self-deprecation aside, I know I’ve developed a lot as a player for the experience I’ve had and I would say I’m a pretty good player overall, a large part of that coming from the confidence and skills I’ve gained by doing a lot of keys.

The process has been mixed as a result – I enjoy Mythic Plus genuinely, but the affix mix this season has been one of the worst and the dungeons are a mix of undertuned and overtuned in such a way that there are some keys that can feel dreadful to play and others that are just vastly easier as to be sought out by the community. Overall, though, I’ve had a lot of fun with keys and there have been very few points where the grind has felt, well, grindy. Let’s break it down into some points.

The Affix Rotation

Whomever designed the affix rotation for Dragonflight Season 1 should…be treated fairly with fair pay and worker’s rights by Activision-Blizzard (and then step on a Lego). There are fewer good push weeks in the newly-shortened 10 week rotation, and then there are weeks that are just entirely not fun, like the current week, where you have the boss slog of Tyrannical coupled with a complete healer burden through two different affixes that primarily hurt healers in Bursting and Grievous, with Thundering on top of the shit sundae.

So what’s so bad about affixes this time? Well, some of it is the same as ever – Tyrannical as a base affix feels bad because you end up in the situation where a wipe on a boss feels awful and make it harder to push against the timer, the contradiction of Tyrannical and Fortified is that affixes nearly always have disproportionate impact on trash pulls so even a Tyrannical week still has nailbiting trash pulls despite trash being theoretically easier, affixes like Bursting that are meant to create DPS tightening against timer pressure feel bad when so many abilities in the modern game auto-cleave onto multiple targets, and affixes with specific counterplay feel bad in the way they limit group compositions, like how Bursting favors Priests in general for Mass Dispel and Raging heavily favors Druids and Hunters for Soothe/Tranquilizing Shot, alongside needing a good balance with battle resurrections and Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria. While Blizzard made a decent effort at pruning the affix list to something more manageable by removing community-hated options like Necrotic and Inspiring, the combos that do remain are still often difficult in an unfun way, especially when the designed combos on the schedule are often made to overlap in bad ways. Quaking still triggers a lot on mechanics where you’re forced to stack in a way where there is no real skillful counterplay to be had.

While Blizzard has addressed some particularly egregious examples of affix overlap with mechanics (Quaking on Bonemaw’s Inhale being a big one), there are still a lot of issues where tight forced movement can push a group to bad places on Quaking weeks. I also think that in a metagame where people take a ton of unavoidable burst damage constantly, stuff like Grievous just feels bad and, again, has little functional counterplay. It puts pressure on your healer but offers the rest of the group no actual challenge – good tanks and DPS will use personal defensive cooldowns to help, but those only go so far, and a lot of the DPS in keys will eat the debuff damage unmitigated and then just blame the healer, which is not exactly my ideal group play scenario. I think a part of designing dungeons for Mythic Plus should involve more thoughts about how mechanics can overlap with affixes and trying to find ways for that to happen only when it can be countered with thoughtful gameplay from the party. Some of the other issues I’ve mentioned here, like group comp stuff, is fine enough – I’m okay with there being weeks where some classes, specs, and roles get to shine more than others, but I wish the affix mix had better variety of what was meta – Priests get the lion’s share of meta weeks because of Mass Dispel, Hunters get decent representation in Raging weeks because they can haste buff the party AND dispel raging, and some specs are decently in the meta regularly because of their kits – Windwalker Monk was strong this season because it has a boatload of ways to disrupt enemy casting that isn’t just an interrupt, Demon Hunters of both specs are strong for the same reason, and there is a lot to having a Protection Paladin on some dungeons when Avenger’s Shield can absolutely be the MVP of a run with an abundance of interruptible casts.

Thundering has been under a lot of scrutiny as well, and I think it’s warranted. In my early write-up of this season, I was complimentary of it in theory, having only run a single-digit number of keys with it active, but this deep into the season, I am less enthusiastic for it. Thundering sounds great on paper – you can min-max the buff for the greatest net benefit to the party, you get a huge buff from it that can help plow through difficult pulls, and it isn’t that difficult to play around. Having said that, functionally, you rarely get to use the effect to best benefit because clearing on the tank is hard with so many frontals and if your ranged players are tunneling at a distance, it can lead to a lot of really bad scenarios with stuns and wipes. So you either do one of two things – you play overly safe and clear it with more than 10 seconds left on the buff, or you wait for the last 5 seconds and then frenzy clear it. In a PUG with great players or an organized group in comms, this works – but the rest of the time, it does not, and so you either clear early and lose the benefit, or you’re playing chicken and eventually lose.

As a seasonal affix, it’s not the worst (nothing can top a bad Season 1 like Infested in BFA), but it also doesn’t really have the usefulness you’d want it to. The stun swirlies when it pops can exacerbate tight positioning, sometimes to a severe degree with Quaking or in small dungeons like Court of Stars or Temple of the Jade Serpent, and the randomness of it means it doesn’t really have a choice or skill component in any meaningful way short of how you handle the timer of the buff. You can’t choose to play it into a hard trash pack or boss to line up with other cooldowns short of just standing around waiting, which is not a viable tactic with a timer counting down your run. Prideful in Shadowlands Season 1, for all of the ick it was on Mythic Plus population (especially tanks!), at least had a component of strategy – you could plan a run to maximize the buff and you even had ways to skip it if you really wanted to, which gave it layers of interesting engagement. Now, interesting isn’t always good, mind you, but at least Prideful had options – Thundering just happens to your group and in most PUGs, you’re not going to pre-plan Thundering usage or clear strats and it will just be people touching the tips when they’re no longer feeling comfy with the buff. I don’t think it’s a bad affix per se, just that it lacks that layering of strategy and gameplay that I like most with seasonal affixes. Like almost every first season of an expansion affix, it’s missing that sauce that makes it genuinely fun to engage with and just becomes another thing that the system spits out at you.

My wishlist for Season 2 on Affixes? Deterministic kiss/curse seasonal affix, retire Grievous, give Explosives bigger hitboxes and Quaking a smaller radius, and no healer curse two-combos on affix weeks. I’d wish for Blizzard to consider vastly retuning Tyrannical or even retiring it, but at this point, they’re hitched to it and so I suspect it will stay as-is.

The Dungeon Pool

I love the idea of a rotating, unique per-season dungeon pool in Mythic Plus. It feels really good to have variety over the course of an expansion and I think one big way that WoW can capitalize on the two decades of legacy content in the game is to bring old content into current viability. My biggest takeaway from DF Season 1 is that I really enjoy getting to see old dungeons again in a relevant, modern-tuned format, even when it requires some tweaks and minor changes as were done to this pool.

That being said, we need to talk about the disparity of dungeons.

The Dragonflight dungeons aren’t awful, and I like a lot of them. However, they are modern-modern dungeons, and they make heavy use of layers of interruptible mechanics, trap interrupts, and require a high degree of counterplay. This alone, as presented, is fine to a point – there should absolutely be a skill progression for players to follow and ways for a player to set themselves apart with skill expression via knowing how to counter these mechanics. I would still say there are too many layers of interrupts and things to peel back in the Dragonflight dungeons, but they’re doable and over the season, I’ve personally built a decent skillset around handling them and I’ve seen the PUG environment improve and adapt as I’ve pushed higher as well.

But there is an elephant in the room because of the dungeon pool mixing, and that is the vast gap between the old dungeons and new in terms of interrupts and mechanical soup. Shadowmoon Burial Grounds has like 5 casts total you need to mind – interrupting Shadow Mend, not interrupting the Dominators when they are channeling on their soul slaves, the spider plague, the bat poison, and the spirit’s Death Blasts. Algeth’ar Academy has individual trash packs with 5 interrupts/controls you need to manage – the bridge trash between entry and Vexamus has Surge, Mana Void, Mystic Blast, CC-but-not-interruptible Arcane Rain, and using stuns and other CC on the Axes. While some of these are just damage events that can be managed/avoided, the ideal play is to find a way to lock the pack out of all of these, and it just isn’t that feasible when the game insists on ranged players still having long-CD interrupts and especially when so many interrupts are now talents that are not always deemed optimal in builds. You can chain pull a ton of trash in the older half of the dungeon pool because a pack of 10 mobs usually will need like, 3 interrupts, which can be managed through a lot of non-interrupt disruptions like stuns, disorients, displacements, and the like. When you chain pull a Dragonflight dungeon, ooh boy, your group has to be fucking on top of those controls or else you will fail.

This means that in high keys, you start to feel a huge gap between what it’s like to do a Shadowmoon Burial Grounds versus almost any DF dungeon key. Sure, you can fill your vault on high keys of just Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, Temple of the Jade Serpent, and Court of Stars, but is that actually fun or interesting? In my estimation, no – no it isn’t. The whole point of tuning and balance is to avoid scenarios where one dungeon feels like a free key on almost any key level while another dungeon is a slog at any key level, but this season has some of the biggest gaps between easy and hard dungeons I’ve seen since I’ve played this game. To be clear, I absolutely believe that the issue is that the DF dungeons are tuned too hard mechanically. If you eliminated maybe 2-3 interruptible abilities per dungeon in the DF side of the pool, you could get to a really good spot, I think – because the older dungeons still feel challenging to a point without feeling excessively unfair, where the DF dungeons are just nailbitingly tough on interrupts and failing even one can start a spiral to a scuffed key. And it’s fine if the pool has some diversity of difficulty – it’s fine if there’s a variance for a group, player, or role – but the disparity this season just feels so large as to be unwelcoming. When my Keystone Hero chase closed in on the DF dungeons, I groaned – I had to do a Ruby Life Pools on 18 or higher to get it done, and it took me about 3 runs to get there last week, but I knew if I waited for this week, all the healers would have their computers going through a tunnel, so I took my chances on the runs I could get and got lucky – really lucky.

I think another huge issue is that the failure states for most mechanics in WoW dungeons in general put undue pressure on the healer, who might be playing like an absolute god only to be blamed for the groups’ failure because of dodge-able mechanics. Kokia Blazehoof in RLP is a big example of this – your group as a whole has to bait the add spawns and the boulders properly, and it’s honestly not that hard – stand with your backs to a big open patch you don’t need to use anymore, let the boulders careen away down it and put the adds on the edge of your fire patch to be burned. But if the tank doesn’t hit the add, then it melees the DPS or healer, and the damage spirals, and if the group doesn’t communicate the stacking methodology or rotational direction around the room then you get errant fire, and now a boulder hits the tree right next to you and everyone gets chunked for 60% of their health and there’s just not enough any healer can do to save that once it starts spiraling unless they’re overgeared and slumming it for Valor.

I saw someone propose the idea on Twitter that WoW dungeons need a system for failure states like FFXIV Savage raids, where failing a mechanic does damage, but also afflicts the failing player with a damage-down debuff, giving overeager DPS a reason to properly observe the mechanics and making them pay for their own failures in a way that isn’t just damage or insta-death where they can blame the healer (even if they get globaled and it makes no sense to blame the healer). You can, as a healer friend observed, absolutely tell the DPS who have played a healer at least a little bit by how they mitigate and protect themselves from avoidable damage, compared to the paste-eating DPS who just don’t fucking get it and are a liability, and I 100% agree with the notion. One thing about my play on DPS that has improved the most over the season is knowing how and when to pop my defensives – it helps that Windwalker Monk has, no joke, 4 different defensive buttons and two self-heals that still do damage, which gives me a LOT of options in PUG keys for keeping myself alive and my healer happy, but even on classes and specs with less, there’s still stuff you can do. I’ve started taking my Evoker through the KSM grind as Devastation spec, and I have a self-HoT, a targetable heal, two charges of a flat percentage damage reduction, an instant heal that can be self-targeted, and a cleanse that also does a decent bit of healing that you can use to clear some debuffs off of yourself or a party member. My Marksman Hunter has an invulnerability, a damage reduction, and a heal. My Demon Hunter has a self-only damage reduction, a powerful group damage reduction, and a large amount of self-healing through damage, and so when I see a DPS not live through avoidable and mitigatable damage with their defensive buttons available, I just shudder to think of what it must be like to play a healer main this season.

In short – dungeon pool good, dungeon tuning between eras bad, failure state punishment bad and overly taxing on healers.

The Rewards

I absolutely love the Mythic Plus rewards system, and the changes in Dragonflight add a lot of depth and worth to the mode. The way the Primal Focus system dovetails with the crafting changes, the expansion of the Great Vault and the item level/keystone level changes for rewards, all of it adds up in a really satisfying way. If we look at it in isolation, it’s great, and even in the larger WoW ecosystem, it’s still good. The problem with loot comes down to PvE content outside of Mythic Plus, which is far stingier and more restrictive when it really just shouldn’t be anymore.

In terms of the seasonal loot pool, there is something interesting afoot, however. Throughout Shadowlands, there were little experiments done with how raid loot could be made more valuable, with very mixed results. A couple of the experiments were good (Dinars, the return of class tier sets) and one was so bad that the less we say about it, the better (Shards of Domination), but Dragonflight has settled on something that feels intentional but also doesn’t feel as heavy-handed as Shards – trinket itemization.

Trinkets are one of those oddball things about WoW gearing that creates room for player expression in theory – you might be a Use trinket fan who tries to line everything up to burst windows, or love passive procs because of how they boost your baseline without needing a lot of optimization. In Shadowlands, it was a common-enough issue that the absolute BiS trinkets for folks were Mythic Plus drops, and it wasn’t until Season 4 that this really meaningfully changed (mostly thanks to pulling De Other Side so the Inscrutable Quantum Device was off the loot table), and in Dragonflight, the opposite is now (mostly) true – raid trinkets pull way ahead. Manic Grieftorch is so good for so many specs. Whispering Incarnate Icon punches vastly above item level, especially when you exceed one in the group. There are some exceptional Mythic Plus trinkets as well – Windscar Whestone, Algeth’ar Puzzle Box, and the Ruby Whelp Shell come to mind – but a lot of the absolute best trinkets come from raid, which creates a sort of natural incentive to raid at least a bit, or to do weekly events that give raid caches in hopes of the trinket of your dreams. This is also true with a couple of weapons – Hunters and Evokers both have exceptional raid weapon drops in Neltharax and Kharnalex that offer exceptional performance (although Hunters are getting some Neltharax nerfs in the upcoming patch), so the incentive is there to raid. However, unlike Shards of Domination, the push to raid gear is organic and worth a smaller overall value of power than Shards were, so there’s less of a force to it – the ONLY way to get your ideal Shard loadout and the gear with the sockets to hold them was to raid, where you have reasonably good trinkets and weapons available outside of raid in DF if all you want to do is Mythic Plus, and you might miss out on a margin-of-error level of DPS improvement. Now, of course, in a game as heavily built on player progression and power advancement as WoW is, this matters a lot still, but it’s also not as catastrophic as missing the full 5-shard loadout was in Season 2 of Shadowlands.

Overall, the loot spread is pretty decent in Mythic Plus as far as options per dungeon, with only a few outliers (Shadowmoon Burial Grounds has two total options for Windwalker or Brewmaster Monks, and you’ll likely get both in short order since that key is so easy to run and rerun for loot), and the secondary stat mixes are pretty strong. Any slots you feel aren’t well-served in Mythic Plus can be crafted into quite easily, and the Primal Focus system being available for keys at 11-15 and the Concentrated foci being available at 16 and up gives a Mythic Plus player a lot of access to gear with a ton of replayability, since you can just run and run until you get the thing you want or tire of it. The funniest thing will be next season though, where the majority of trinkets from the Dragonflight dungeons we expect to see are Use trinkets, and I’m sure that will have an interesting ripple effect on the gearing systems, especially if raid trinkets in the next tier stay winning like the ones in Vault of the Incarnates have.

The Community/PUG Experience

One thing that I consistently feel is true about my experience with Mythic Plus is that the community is far more forgiving than you might expect. Now, I know this is the case for me for a particular reason – I run hard early in the season and escape the low-range of keys before they fill with players who are quick to anger and blame their mistakes on others. The later in the season it gets, the higher the range is for bad experiences. I feel like that remains true today. My guildies and friends working on getting Keystone Master are now in the range of keys where people are more openly toxic and awful to each other if things go poorly (and even sometimes when they are just going okay and the timer is still met), and the low-mid keys I’ve been working on with my Evoker are in the range where people just mechanically aren’t that sound yet. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed consistently about Mythic Plus in general – high keys are usually pretty good community experiences because the players who make it there have the experience of failures and broken runs as a part of their journey and they’ve learned more of the mechanics that can make or break runs, while the KSM range keys (12-15ish) can be bad because you have a mix of people who are making effort to learn and those who are brute-forcing their way up the ladder and only starting to hit the points where mechanical failure results in a death/wipe/scuff, and while a fair number of players are adept learners who will let it slide off their backs and get back in with a positive attitude, there is that consistent undercurrent of the WoW community where people just want to rage and avoid accountability to a group for their blunders. This is just my own observation, but it has held true in multiple seasons, especially when I go back on alts and work on lower keys after the season start.

So far, though, in the ranges I’ve been at and the times I’ve been at them, you get a very small amount of toxic behavior and most groups are pretty friendly, or at least quiet and efficient. My experience this season only reaffirms my ideal that the best way to push to Mythic Plus goals is to be there at the start pushing, so that your average key level trends above where the people who get hardstuck for toxicity end up, and once you reach a certain point, you’re mostly free of it. I’m mostly doing 17-19 range keys at this point on my Monk, and I rarely encounter anyone being a dick. The few times I do, it boils down to simple stuff – a lack of communication and a lack of accountability. Some people will just never accept that they might not be the most amazing or even fun to play with and lash out instead of attempting to engage (and that is a social issue that definitely exists outside of dungeons too), but there is definitely a band at the higher-end of keys where those problems largely melt away into being less present. I think, in my opinion and experience, that the higher you push, the more self-awareness you have to have, and so people are more honest about the mistakes they make and more willing to go again and correct the issue or finish the run even if the timer is scuffed. Certainly, the higher my keys have gone, the less I think of myself as a player, but the more constructive that opinion is – it goes from being “I’m pretty good at this game!” to being “There’s a lot I can still learn and improve upon, but I am decent” and I think that’s actually a neat process – pushing keys and getting to points higher than I expected has shaved the edge off of any Dunning-Kruger assumption of extreme competence on my part and led me to genuinely seek to improve my gameplay in a lot of big (and small) ways, like with how I manage uptime, movement abilities, the use of my defensives, and how to contour my offensive cooldowns to ensure less wasted duration or better maximized usage of those abilities.

Generally, summarizing this section, I think the following is true – the community experience in WoW is what you make of it, which means you have an incentive to manage your experience by not rewarding shitty behavior, using ignore and report as appropriate to push the worst players out of your space, but also by being willing to engage with the players you meet, being kind and approachable, and doing your level best to play well while also being willing to admit mistakes and grow for them. That being said, there is definitely a band of keys that increases over the season where groups are more likely to have toxic behavior and issues stemming from that, and while that band grows, it generally doesn’t start until around a +5 or +6 and usually starts tapering hard around 15-16, so if you forever PUG low or high, you’re usually going to have a better experience.

The Future Of Mythic Plus In WoW (And My Remaining Season One Goals)

With Keystone Hero done in time for hell week on affixes, round two, I can sit back and do some reflection on what I’d like to see for the mode in future seasons and what I’ll be doing for the rest of the current season.

I think affixes need a major revisit, period. The more Mythic Plus is seen and played, the more common issues with affixes are, and Blizzard giving an inch in Dragonflight with the removal of a couple of problematic affixes feels like we have more room than usual to ask for, even to demand, change. Tyrannical remains a bad base affix – Fortified weeks can be zerged and even a trash wipe still often makes progress in the dungeon, where Tyrannical weeks just feel awful and a wipe on a boss represents a wasted investment of time. The exceptionally painful part of the current affix system in my view, however, is how most added affixes still complicate trash, so a Tyrannical week isn’t even necessarily a reprieve from hard trash pulls, because now your healer is doing Explosive management, or you have to play carefully with Sanguine and risk buttpulling more stuff, while bosses are often just not affected by affixes in the same way. Affix combos, in particular, need to be better designed and managed to avoid overburdening any single member of the party with too much bullshit – Sanguine being the remaining tank-focused affix is fine enough, but there are a lot of affixes that place undue responsibility on healers, while DPS can so often just ignore most of it and still be okay to a point. I think there needs to be a better variety of failure states in ways that punish DPS for padding or tunneling by reducing their effectiveness momentarily, so that healers aren’t constantly tasked as cleanup artists and DPS have an extra incentive to play well.

I think the modern dungeons need more tuning and some modest tweaks to bring them in line with older dungeons. This is an issue that is going to be interesting in Dragonflight, given that we won’t see these current 4 DF dungeons in the pool again until Season 3 (in theory, at least), and so we will have both another round of tuning and tweaking with the remaining 4 DF dungeons to do but also will have to see how a season on the shelf and the scaling of player power and baseline dungeon values will affect the current DF part of the pool when it rotates back into season. The old dungeons on offer will be even more interesting to see, as even those designed for Mythic Plus often need adjustments to play well in the current season with current classes, specs, and player power. I’m working on a piece now about Season 2 with some speculation and more thought on this, so stay tuned for that.

For me, I still have a few goals for the season.

Firstly, I still want to hit a +20 at least once. Will I farm them for vault loot on a weekly basis? Probably, once I am there. This week might be a bad week to try, but I’m more than likely to try and push my own key up to a 20 and then run whatever the slot machine gives me, which might be bad! – but the bandaid has to come off sooner or later. For the last two weeks my key has been a +19, so it’s not exactly a tough push, although getting 1 key level added to a hard dungeon can be an ordeal!

Secondly, I’ve decided I want this season to be my first with two KSM characters. I’ve start pushing my Evoker through keys for rating using the same methodology I did on my main, so this week is crucial to filling out Tyrannical week keys with just any run I can slam up onto the board before I start to comb through diligently for each upgrade. While I started playing my Evoker as Preservation (because I wanted to see their healing and then because it was very meta as one of THE preferred healers this season), I’ve ended up going DPS because I just really enjoy the Devastation playstyle, and also because a player I’ve been working with to improve in my raid is a Devoker, and so I want to understand the new specs on the block better to be able to offer more direct and focused feedback. The easiest way for me to do that and be able to understand it myself is to play it, and for me, a lot of the best learning of my toolkits I can do in WoW is in these dungeons, so here I am. It is a lot of fun to play, though, and I think that having the perspective of the runs I did on my Monk behind me, I can focus more on the skill with the class and spec, and that makes it perhaps even more enjoyable.

I’ve debated a few crazy goals that I’m not sure I will commit to yet, like pushing 3k rating or even trying for the season top reward, but I do think I’ll eventually try on my Monk to get the +20 dungeon portals done, just for the sake of having them and accomplishing it.

Otherwise, it’s maintenance mode for me, doing less active pushing and being able to expand my focus a bit more outside of Mythic Plus again with the big goals I set for myself largely crossed off, and that’s a pretty good feeling, all told.

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