Legion’s Mythic Plus Mode - A Replacement to Raiding or an Extra Step on the Gear Treadmill?

Back when World of Warcraft was first released progression was a straightforward path. You completed a dungeon, moved on to the next, and the difficulty increased until you reached the end. The amount of players scaled up in a similar fashion: from 5-man dungeons to 10-man, then to 20-man raids, and finally 40-man. Fast forward roughly 12 years and almost every dungeon and raid has multiple difficulties and sizes.

5-man dungeons have remained largely unchanged since Heroic Mode was added in The Burning Crusade. The release of Mists of Pandaria half a decade later added the Challenge Mode difficulty: timed runs that awarded players with exclusive cosmetics and titles. Challenge Mode continued into the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, with the same idea of being optional content that didn’t play a major part in the gear treadmill.

Towards the end of Warlords of Draenor another difficulty mode was added to 5-man dungeons: Mythic. Labeled with the same title as World of Warcraft’s hardest raiding difficulty, Mythic dungeons dropped gear that was on par with Normal and Heroic raid loot, and the difficulty was tuned to reflect the reward.

Although Mythic dungeons were a fun distraction in Warlords of Draenor, I only ever ran them a couple of times to gear up alts with my friends. Since it was released fairly late into the expansion, my interest had weakened and I felt there was very little reason to continue clearing them on a weekly basis. There was a glimmer of hope that Mythic dungeons would be difficult enough to provide a small-scale group with some sense of progression, but once they were cleared there was no more challenge left.

Blizzard continued the trend of difficult 5-man content by introducing a Mythic Plus difficulty in Legion. Instead of being a static difficulty level, Mythic Plus provides players with scaling content that increases in difficulty up to +15. Regular Mythic dungeons are referred to as Mythic+1 dungeons, their default state. To enter Mythic Plus, players must first obtain a Keystone which drops once per week from any final boss in a +1 dungeon. You take the Keystone to the dungeon it’s for and then insert it into a pedestal at the beginning to initiate the Mythic Plus difficulty.

Mythic Plus dungeons are timed runs that reward you based on how quickly you clear it. Beating the timer will award your party with loot and the Keystone will be upgraded to a higher level. You can still obtain loot if you fail to beat the maximum allotted time, but the Keystone will be depleted and has to be reactivated by inserting it back into the pedestal and finishing the dungeon within the time limit. No loot is awarded at the end of finishing a depleted Keystone, but it will be reactivated and can be used again as per usual.

As the difficulty increases, enemies receive buffs to their damage and health. Special affixes are also applied to dungeons on a weekly basis, with a single one appearing at +4, two at +7, and three at +10 and above. On EU currently, Mythics at +4 and above have the Teeming affix applied to them which increases the amount of trash mobs throughout the instance. At +7 and above, the Skittish affix is also added in, causing enemies to occasionally stop focusing the tank and attack other targets.

Mythic+2 dungeons are a simple +8% increase in enemy damage and health, but my group and I took it far more seriously than regular Mythic dungeons for the sake of beating the time limit. We pulled more mobs than usual and coordinated crowd control to keep them vulnerable, planned when to use long cooldowns like Bloodlust, and made sure to give the healer some time to drop combat and start restoring mana before we pulled more trash.

After clearing all of our low-level Keystones, we tried our first +4 dungeon: Black Rook Hold with the Teeming affix. My group and I felt that Teeming would be a straightforward affix to deal with because it was “just” extra mobs. Unfortunately, the next hour proved us wrong and Black Rook Hold is now a dungeon that we fear and actively try to avoid. Randomly targeted attacks from mobs like Risen Archers and Risen Scouts dealt huge chunks of damage, debuffs that could be ignored and healed through were now urgent priorities to dispel, and rotating crowd control was vital in helping the tank survive through huge bursts of damage even when tanking just a few mobs.

Much like raiding, Mythic Plus requires coordination and knowledge of the encounters down to every trash mob. In Heroic and regular Mythic dungeons, groups can pull entire rooms of trash and nuke them down without an issue. In Mythic Plus however, trash mobs pose a serious threat and learning what each individual enemy is capable of becomes mandatory to progress.

Loot drops are also quite generous from Mythic Plus. There’s the usual randomness involved with getting useful pieces of gear, but each chest awarded at the end of a Mythic Plus dungeon gives two pieces of gear distributed across your party—and they can be traded between members. Unlike the standard Mythic dungeons and raiding, there’s no limit to the amount of loot you can get from Mythic Plus dungeons. As long as you have keystones available and keep beating the time limit you’ll continue to receive loot. Clearing a Mythic Plus dungeon also entitles you to a loot box that appears in your class hall the following week, with the reward scaling depending on the highest difficulty you cleared the previous week.

However, Mythic Plus isn’t a flawless system and there are a couple of issues that may affect its future. For starters, pug groups for Mythic Plus are easy targets for abuse and trolling. Joining a group with the intention of using your keystone may backfire if group members leave because replacements are forbidden. This will deplete your keystone and render it useless unless a group is willing to re-activate the keystone and run it again. This becomes less of an issue with guild groups and friends but for now, mid to high-level Mythic Plus dungeons are best done with players you know.

There’s also the unavoidable fact that Mythic Plus is a textbook example of recycling content. Although affixes can drastically change the instance, you’re still fighting the same bosses, same trash mobs, and looking at the same scenery for each dungeon. This might not be an issue for some players, but clearing through the same dungeons over and over again won’t be as fun as experiencing a new raid for the first time.

For casual players, Mythic Plus is a fun and rewarding small-scale challenge. The task of joining or setting up a raid can be daunting, and there’s a lot of investment required to make raiding enjoyable. Looking For Raid was invented to give every player a chance to experience the raids in their own time but it doesn’t present much of a challenge. For players that want to tackle challenging content in small doses and at their leisure Mythic Plus gives them that option. Thanks to the potentially infinitely scaling dungeons, every player can have something to work towards and a future goal to set themselves.

For the serious player, Mythic Plus becomes an extra step on the gear treadmill that should be taken before raiding. Currently, hardcore raiding guilds are, in additional to running several raid groups, constantly clearing Mythic Plus dungeons with several characters to collect the best possible gear. Mythic Plus gear can scale high enough to compete with Mythic Raid items, so it becomes necessary to repeat Mythic Plus dungeons for gear even if you’re at the cutting edge of raiding.

Mythic Plus can work as a replacement for raiding-style progression, but it can also be treated as another stepping stone for people that want to become raiders. It’s whatever you make of it—and that’s the beauty of a scaling system like this. For a long time, raid gear was far stronger than anything a 5-man dungeon dropped, but with Mythic Plus that’s no longer the case.

In Legion, we’re seeing a shift in mechanics to bring equality to all types of players. Everyone has a chance to obtain powerful pieces of gear whether you play for a couple of hours a week or for a couple of hours per day. But does it devalue raiding? Absolutely not. Raiding will still be extremely competitive, but Mythic Plus has its own set of bragging rights to aim for as well. Rather than say it devalues raiding, it places less importance on raiding as a method of obtaining gear, and it’s a change welcomed by the majority of players including myself.