Mythic dungeons and alternative progression

One of the most interesting tidbits of the Patch 6.2 PTR notes was the one about Mythic dungeons. To quote the notes directly, “Draenor Dungeons now have a new difficulty level designed to challenge even the most hardened adventurers with a befitting increase in reward. Mythic difficulty is geared towards players that enjoy tackling difficult content in smaller groups and is designed to provide an alternate progression path.” We’ve heard this kind of talk before — LFR, as an example, has often been touted as an ‘alternate progression path’ although in practice, it ends up being an adjunct or supplement to progression. I suspect this might be the case with Mythic dungeons, especially with them being on a weekly lockout — a lot depends on how long a group takes to clear a Mythic dungeon, what loot is available and not just its ilevel, either — is it simply going to be ilevel 680/700 versions of the loot that’s already there? Is it going to be random stat epics, like what we get now from satchels and the like?

More important than any of that, however, comes my bigger suspicion. Currently, the legacy of Cataclysm was a rise in 10 player raiding groups, which could complete normal/heroic raids and became a serious rival to (and even replacement for, in many ways) 25 player raids. Some of the biggest progression guilds went 10 player — it was easier to put together a 10 player raid group and keep it rolling, which then saw a decline in 25 player raiding groups. But two changes in Warlords of Draenor changed all that. The first was the rise of flexible raid sizes, first tested in Mists with Siege of Orgrimmar. With Warlords you could raid normal and heroic with any raid size between 10 and 30 players, essentially killing the distinction between small and larger raid groups, unless they chose to raid the second distinction and raided Mythic. The new Mythic raid difficulty was a fixed 20 person group, to allow for a more uniform difficulty across all raids.

I’m not trying to debate how well Mythic works in that capacity. But I will say that it was generally much easier for a 25 player raid to drop 5 players to fit into Mythic than it was for 10 player raids to find 10 more players. This led to a lot of 10 player raid groups, which were raiding into heroic difficulty before the switch, no longer having any access to this hardest of raid difficulties. Many shrugged and embraced the normal/heroic levels of raiding, did a little Mythic pugging or guild alliances, and moved on.

But now consider that 10 person raid that barely fields enough people to make a weekly raid. Does a Mythic dungeon amount to a better use of their time? They can run up to eight mythic dungeons with their group, gearing up and (from their point of view) not having to deal with the hassle of getting a full ten people on board. The smaller the group, the easier it always is to put together, after all. Now, Mythic dungeons may be much harder, but even so it’s not like they’re going into them blind — we’ve seen these eight dungeons, we know how to run them.

This also makes me wonder how important the group composition of Mythic dungeons will be. One of the reasons Mythic raids are 20 player is so the designers could count on groups having a reasonable chance of being able to have certain abilities, and thus, can design their encounters with those abilities in mind. But Mythic dungeons are presumably five player groups — you can’t even count on all four armor types being in a dungeon group, much less that there will be a balance of ranged and melee DPS, or that all Mythic dungeon groups will have a druid or paladin. How strict an alternative to raid progression can Mythic dungeons be with that limitation inhibiting their design? And will future dungeons have to be designed with three difficulties, all based around a five player group? Or will Mythics actually be a larger dungeon size? If so, why even call them dungeons at that point? The past ten years have taught us that dungeon = five players.

There’s a lot of questions to answer before we can herald Mythic dungeons as a solution to anything, really. But they have the potential to keep dungeons relevant longer (especially if their loot improves as expansions progress), to give smaller groups a reliable option for content, and to finally be that alternate progression everyone is talking about. Not making them random matchmaking would go a ways towards this, as well as designing dungeons to not favor (as an example) ranged DPS over melee. There’s a limit to how much sophistication we can get away with in dungeon design with one tank and one healer — I’m curious to see how Mythic overcomes that.