Blizzard almost, dare I say it, made Season 4 a player-friendly one for the raid audience.
The Season 4 concept that started with Shadowlands (not BfA, which had a legitimate 4th season of new content!) is an interesting one. In an attempt to mitigate the effects of content draught on the playerbase of World of Warcraft, Blizzard made what is, effectively, a greatest-hits season for the expansion. In Shadowlands, this meant a weekly raid rotation of the 3 Shadowlands raids, with one per week being upgraded to have boss affixes (not quite M+ level, just one new mechanic from a generic seasonal-themed pool), higher overall power scaling, and higher item level loot, with rewards for doing the full rotation of raids on Normal, Heroic, and Mythic (a mount, title, and raid teleports respectively). Shadowlands Season 4 was also the experiment point for Mythic Plus dungeon pools being a mix of current-expansion dungeons and old dungeons brought into Mythic Plus, an experiment that resulted in the rotating dungeon pool we had for the first 3 Dragonflight seasons and will have for the first tier of The War Within, at least.
So what’s new in Dragonflight?
Well, since the rotating dungeon pool was the case all expansion, our “new” dungeon pool for Season 4 is just the 8 launch Dragonflight dungeons. This is actually pretty logical, and since Season 3’s DF dungeons were the two halves of the Dawn of the Infinite mega-dungeon, it means players have had a one-season reprieve from 4 of these dungeons and a two-season break from the other 4, which means that the season can, in a weird way, feel fresh. On the raid front, the new season has no raid affixes this time, opting for raw power scaling on the bosses instead. We know now that the raid rotation also returns, but it almost didn’t, which prompted this post.
On Friday, Blizzard announced something that was kind of neat and then pulled it back the same day. Instead of rotating the dungeons every week, the initial plan laid out in the Season notes (I guess it’s a micropatch but otherwise still 10.2.6) was that each raid would be up for two weeks this time, rotating once before week seven of the season opened every raid wide for you to clear. This was a really cool idea that I really liked as both a raid leader and a player. Why?
Season 4 of Shadowlands had one major problem that affected both your average raiding guild that pushes up through difficulties and Mythic-level guilds at the mid-tier – one week is a frustrating amount of time for a raid to be open when you have to relearn parts of it. Sure, none of the raids are new, and this time out we don’t even have new mechanics to learn – it’s just numerically-harder existing content. But Vault of the Incarnates prog was done for my raid team over a year ago, and Aberrus prog was done nearly 8 months ago. Muscle memory and old cues will return and make it not a full relearning curve, but there will still be a refresher needed. Now imagine being a group that is pushing hard to progress and finish the raid in one week, who hits a wall and wipes a bit to some of the challenging bosses of each raid – struggles with Broodkeeper, poor execution on Echo of Neltharion, or hitting the heroic Smolderon wall in Amirdrassil – and you run out of raid time for the week. In the one week rotation model, that’s it – you are now stuck reprogging in 3 weeks to get that last bit of the raid done, but under the two week idea, you had time. You could reclear farm bosses, get your gear level up, and get a second shot at rare-drop trinkets and cantrip weapons to power through the DPS checks (which are likely just numerically easier this season based on tuning notes, but hey), and then smash the wall and finish your progression in that raid before moving on to the next raid. It doesn’t require packing your brain with knowledge of two more raids worth of encounters before cycling back and it keeps the muscle memory warm.
But then, literally the same day this celebrated announcement of two-week raid blocks came out, Blizzard changed their mind, announcing they were going back to one-week rotations, with the plan still being full unlocks at week 7. This sucks, frankly.
The rationale Blizzard gave is that they wanted the content to stay and feel fresh, for it to be a new week every week to keep player interest, and to an extent, I get that. A part of what they think makes the Season 4 concept interesting is the variety, the ability to go to a different place and see different encounters, but the challenge here is that nothing here is new. It’s old content, and sure, not that old and maybe even new to some, but for the loyal active players that are the largest part of the audience wanting a content draught filler, it isn’t new. It’s expressly old content, which is the whole point of having it – low development time, little work needed, just tune it up and ship it out. The raid rotation actively makes it more annoying than it should be, because it removes agency from the players – you can only do the things we tell you to. When discussing the rotation with my raid team, we had interesting ideas about doing a boss count lockout or allowing players to pick a raid per difficulty per week to lock to and progress, but honestly, the two week solution for rotation was a simpler and more straightforward way to address the primary concern and dislike most raiders had for the Season 4 concept – and Blizzard announced it, built hype, then immediately took that hype away in literally less than eight hours. To be fair, it may not have solved everyone’s issues with Season 4, and it might not even have been that good! But at least it was an effort to meet player feedback on how bad the one-week rotation felt, and it feels so incredibly bizarre that Blizzard solved the problem and then unsolved it. I literally cannot understand why they did that, and their announced rationale doesn’t make enough sense to be worth undoing the goodwill that I was seeing (and had for the change myself!).
The thing that baffles me is that they made a lot of good effort to make Dragonflight Season 4 amend the deficiencies that existed in Shadowlands’ version of the concept. The dungeon pool is all stuff coming out of storage! There’s a world-content angle that gives higher item level world rewards, new crafted sparks, and increased reputation gains to close out those Dragonflight reputations! Dungeon difficulty rebalancing aims to make queueable content populated and relevant to a larger base of players! There’s a lot of small tweaks that are quite good here, and this two-week rotation would have really been a nice cherry on top – in all ways, an improvement over Shadowlands Season 4. Yet here we are, a good change undone in the name of non-repetition, which is fine in theory, but I think the thing that also must be said is that WoW is a game that is often about repetition and refinement. We run the same dungeons over and over to perfect our routes, increase the difficulty, improve the rewards. We run the same raid week after week in a normal season to push against harder bosses, increase our power and work towards new goals. Every content loop in WoW is a loop that sees us do a lot of the same things on a weekly basis. In that context, I really struggle to be charitable to Blizzard on this change and reversion, because the entire backbone of WoW is repeatable content with minimal variation. I don’t understand why this is where the line has been drawn, and it doesn’t really make sense given the larger context that decision is contained within.
Otherwise, we know precious little about how exactly rewards and the other structures of Season 4 will be rolling out, and we’re waiting until tomorrow to see – which is also not a very WoW-way of doing a Season, but this is also how things like Dinars were played in Shadowlands Season 4 – hold until the last moment and unveil. So who knows what tomorrow brings?
Kaylriene 