The First Week: WoW’s New Dungeon Scaling, Experienced Firsthand

The dungeon difficulty changes made to World of Warcraft have been interesting, to say the least.

For the uninitiated, the basic rundown is this – in Season 4 of Dragonflight, Blizzard took what used to be Mythic 0 level difficulty and applied it, minus the Mythic mechanics, to make a new replacement version of Heroic difficulty. They then took what would have been a +10 Mythic Plus key, and made that the rough level at which Mythic 0 dungeons now sit (scaled to fit the season, mind you), and then keys start at a +2, with the rough equivalence to a former +11 in terms of scaling, and have kept the existing scaling from that point with the exception of affixes, which are now added at 2, 5, and 10 level keystones. The end result? Dungeons are harder than they used to be in the same branding of difficulty, and the lower-band of Mythic Plus that used to offer transitional challenge no longer exists.

Why did Blizzard do this? Their stated reason is to better align difficulty and provide players with a more interesting experience, as well as making less-used modes like Heroic dungeons and Mythic 0 runs useful to more players, by upping the relative rewards for this content while also making it suitably challenging and less of a faceroll. To players, this has a positive benefit too, actually – the 2-10 range keystones were often simple and as a result terrible teachers of mechanics, so it was possible to scale up the keystone ladder significantly before needing to learn much of anything about the dungeons – healers could cover a lot of mistakes in keys up to the 10 range, where after that everyone individually needs to know and use their personal defensives and play more intelligently, insta-kill mechanics could often be brute-forced in lower keys, and mistakes rarely cascaded into anything near failure. In the new model, the dungeon environment teaches much better – for a queued difficulty, Heroic hits relatively hard and needs some level of mechanical adhesion, Mythic 0 actually has meaningful mechanics again for a change, and keys start substantially higher in the scaling curve, in a way that also solidifies a Dragonflight launch change to make Mythic Plus scaling much smoother (at launch, key scaling for +11 and higher was increased per level relative to Shadowlands and the prior key levels, but now since a +2 is that old +11 level, the scaling is consistent across the board for keystones).

And okay, we’ve talked about all of this before, and we know, right? Dungeons are harder, okay. So what?

Well, let’s talk about that.

The Good

Firstly, as a dungeon enjoyer, I think I need to say that this is a satisfying overall progression change. Heroics and Mythics being harder and more instructive helps teach mechanics better and creates a smoother pathway to progress from Heroic into Mythic 0 and on into keys, where players can actually learn and test themselves against the mechanics in those lower difficulties, receive reasonably good rewards, and then apply those skills and rewards to climb higher. It means the climb from Normal up sees two huge steps with Heroic and Mythic 0 representing much larger increases in difficulty, but I think it better maps to what players used to expect – Heroic dungeons have been Normal + for a long time now, and it feels vaguely reminiscent of how dungeon difficulty used to scale when Heroic was the top difficulty available to players.

Secondly, coupled with the rewards changes made throughout Dragonflight, specifically Season 4 being another 39 item level jump, it makes dungeons a lot more rewarding in general. Heroic dungeons drop last season Heroic raid-equivalent loot, Mythic 0 drops current Normal raid-equivalent loot, and this makes the reward banding for keys feel more aligned in overall difficulty to reward curve. Mythic 0 is now not just a thing you steamroll to prepare for Normal raid or to get your first keys for M+ – it has a valid reason to exist on the progression curve and exists in a place where even mains want to make a stop here, but also and especially alts. It fits better with the overall idea of progressing a character and provides more of a journey to follow along with, which is an intangible thing but nice to have.

Lastly, this has had a perceptible impact on populations within dungeons in the first week, at least. A larger number of low keys are up in LFG at all hours, Heroic dungeon queues are popping, and finding Mythic 0 groups is no longer an incredible chore. You can, generally, find someone doing all of these things at all hours, and for the high-end of keys, there are already and still keys at +10 and higher (+10 being the new +20 and the reward cap level). It is healthy for the game that the queueable Heroic mode especially have people interested and engaging with it, and even guildies of mine who refused to do Mythic 0 dungeons, much less anything higher, are suddenly queuing for Heroics with aplomb and doing those for fun and loot (even given the relative difficulty they used to shun for a certain sense of fear about “Mythic”). In the long-term, queueable modes of content being populated with players is a huge positive for the game, which presents these as primary modes of content to players only for them to rarely, if ever, fill under the old model.

The Bad

Blizzard has communicated this change with their usual poor rollout that assumes you are engaged with WoW while not playing it. In the game, there’s a tiny blurb about an adjustment to dungeon difficulty, but nothing that spells it out at all whatsoever. The assumption is made that you’ve read patch notes, the official blog posts, and articles on Wowhead, but if you haven’t seen any of that, like I would wager a majority of WoW’s playerbase, then you might just roll up into a +2 key thinking it’s an easy stomp and find yourself instead being stomped. I get that the information economy around WoW is crazy robust, but holy shit guys, we need to see actual meaningful communication of these changes to players in the game instead of an assumption they’ll be informed already – because a ton of players just don’t play WoW like that, don’t have the brain poison like a lot of us do. I’ve been in groups even up to +5 already where people assume a +5 is just an easy romp through the dungeon, don’t avoid mechanics, and then are shocked when their ignorance to the mechanics kills them. This is the negative side of that difficulty discussion, because most people who’ve played through Dragonflight aren’t about to reprog from Heroic to M0 into keys – they’re tuned to what a +2 has meant, will find one in LFG, and then will start to learn the hard way (if at all) that their assumption is incorrect. For DPS players, this is even harder, because they bear so little responsibility (outside of playing to an appropriate performance level for their gearing) for much of anything inside of a dungeon run that they’re more likely to blame the healer or just type sassy and irritating question marks into party chat when they fail a mechanics check and get one-shot. And it’s like, no, you are responsible, you need to not bait tornados into ice on Khajin in Halls of Infusion, because the ice explodes and hits for 2/3rds of your health while a DoT is ticking for 100k a second, but the visual feedback on that isn’t there (did you know you can explode boulders and cause damage outside of the LoS mechanic? I just learned that this week!) and there’s no low-level key where you can see that mechanic not kill you for failing – sure, you could do M0, you could do Heroic, and it matters there, but most players who are already in the key grind aren’t going to do that unless they know about the changes already, and the only way they know is if they read outside the game.

Secondly, this system creates an interesting new bottleneck in the gear upgrade system – Drake’s Crests. You can get them from Normal raid and from M0 dungeons, but you also need them to upgrade most gear from low keys – and you can’t get them just doing keys until you cap on Wyrm’s Crests and the automatic reward downgrade kicks in. Coupled with the existing flightstone barrier (you either need a ton to upgrade or have too many, never in between) and gear upgrades to start the season are modestly more annoying. This might very well be a pacing mechanism – a common refrain is that the gear journey in the post-Flightstone world is too short, seeing a lot of players hit gear plateaus early and then grind progressively harder for progressively smaller bits of loot – but it feels kind of meh. Not necessarily bad – my new main Warrior has climbed 33 item levels just this week and isn’t even done for the week yet! – but very meh. Drake’s Crests used to be easier and I think that for a large subset of players in the band I find myself in, that was an ideal scenario.

Lastly, I think that for how the difficulty scales, it feels like Heroic should perhaps be more rewarding. Normal is very faceroll, and while Heroic isn’t super challenging, the increase it has feels like more than a 16 item level increase in rewards is warranted. I suppose on some level that Blizzard doesn’t want to tilt the gear curve so aggressively right now that Dragonflight Season 3 loot in general goes straight into the trash for everyone, but at the same time, under WoW’s modern seasonal model, that’s kind of the idea anyways, so why not just let people swap Heroic raid gear for Heroic dungeon gear and have it be pretty consistently more powerful? I would agree that gear upgrades help this gap a bit, but I think you could nudge the base Heroic dungeon rewards to like 480 item level from 476 and still be in a pretty good spot. The presence of a large amount of 480 gear just for doing world content means that Heroics still kinda end up getting the short end of the stick – they’re harder and more interesting with better rewards, but they aren’t necessarily the fastest way to bring your item level up to par for harder content – adding another potential loophole for players to then skip them and defeat one of the core ideas behind this new scaling.

The Weird

One point here that is neither good nor bad, but has a little of both, is that this change kind of…doesn’t fit the current Dragonflight game right now. What do I mean? Well, it’s this – for the types of players who would do those 2-10 keys and have a good time, there’s nothing that really exists to fill that void in terms of enjoyment, player count, and overall time commitment. You could blast a couple 2s with friends for shits and giggles in the old model, but there’s no real equivalence to that in the new model – you just have this huge hole between Heroic dungeons and the new Mythic baseline experience.

In The War Within, this hole is patched already, and we know how – Delves. Delves have granular scaling difficulty, a 5-player max group size, and are relatively short bits of content akin to stomping out an old +2. When that comes to be, the game will be in a pretty good rewards and progression spot I think, but for now, that absence is keenly felt. Even in my push, I had to gear my Warrior, who was slightly lower on the totem pole at 466 compared to many of my characters who were 470+, and that made wanting to do even +2s on day one an intimidating idea. I got over it and the push is on now, but I stopped for a minute to do the Last Hurrah quest and even LFR so that I could get the jitters out, get my item level up to a comfortable height, and then start slamming Mythic keys. If I had Delves now, that would work well, but instead I had to forge a different path than I am used to – and that’s fine, but it did feel a little strange.

I get that Season 4 is a good foundation for experiments, to build a base to test changes, and hell, in Shadowlands, that led to the seasonal dungeon rotation we have had ever since. I like the idea of using a lower-participation season to test things and see what works, see what breaks, but at the same time, we can only see what happens to overall dungeon runs in a context where there’s no real alternative for players in the band of content that no longer exists. Extrapolations will have to be made, and who knows what assumptions may taint that data? Maybe even my own assumptions about players in that band are wrong – I don’t know for sure! – but I am not a fan of a live experiment where a very real outcome is the displacement of players who may stop or lose passion for the game because there’s just nothing in that range of content difficulty for them at the moment – even knowing that it is a temporary loss of things to do in that range.

Overall, the dungeon changes are an interesting tweak to the existing formula and content distribution of WoW, as well as a signal that Blizzard might be learning a relatively new lesson to them – that in the gameplay-centric modern design of WoW, many players do want some level of challenge that allows them to stretch and use their toolkits more completely. With some better communication about the change and something today that could have filled the content gap left behind for this one season by the loss of those former 2-9 keys, I think this would have overall been a win. Even still, for the dungeon audience, this change signals continuing effort by Blizzard to keep dungeon play advancing, which is a good sign overall – I think so, at least.