A quick look at the datamined changes for The War Within Season 2 dungeons

World of Warcraft patch 11.1 is on the PTR, and Mythic+ dungeon testing is set to commence tomorrow and continue for 6 weeks. A new patch marks the beginning of a new season, which means the eight dungeons from Season 1 are rotated out and we get eight different dungeons instead — including four from The War Within as well as a brand new dungeon, Operation: Floodgate. Naturally, with new dungeons rotating back into the spotlight again, it’s the perfect time for Blizzard to start dusting off some of those old, less-well-liked mechanics and making them more palatable (or more challenging) for the modern Mythic+ environment, and while we don’t have actual hands-on experience yet, we do have datamined changes from Wowhead.

Here is a quick summary of some of the more important changes, as well as commentary on each.

Cinderbrew Meadery

The list of changes for this dungeon mostly seems to be numeric — reducing damage from some abilities that were too high, amping damage from some boss abilities that were too low, and in one case making an ability that wasn’t an enrage effect be properly flagged as one so that it can be dispelled by classes with a soothe (such as hunters, druids, and monks). There could be new abilities in the works, but Wowhead notes that those would not be able to be identified yet, so there might be more in the works here.

The Rookery

Quick show of hands, how many of us did this dungeon during the story quests for The War Within and then maybe never went back, or maybe only once or twice at best? Same. I revisited it on an alt via a random dungeon queue and even then it seemed remarkably easy. It appears that Blizzard is offsetting this with new mechanics during bosses — Kyrios now has pulsing damage during his rotating laser phase and a plethora of new things to dodge, Stormguard Gorren’s void puddles now last longer (making not using up the whole room a priority), and Voidstone Monstrosity has entirely new features — breaking its shield stuns it for twice as long (so twice the double damage!), but it also summons Void Fragments that, if not destroyed by Stormrider’s Charge, will turn into adds. These are probably some necessary changes to keep this dungeon from being a total walk in the park, so I’m looking forward to experiencing it again.

Priory of the Sacred Flame

A lot of the changes in this dungeon appear to be tuning related, but unfortunately, the one ability many melee were hoping would get nerfed has not received any changes so far: the Consecrate that the trash in the area between the first two bosses lay down is completely unchanged. Sorry!

The minibosses before the first boss that you kill to summon his Trusted Guard received one noticeable change — High Priest Aemya’s Reflective Shield now reflects 70% of damage done. DPS beware! Also, the prior way of handling the fight in normal, where you’d pull first boss Captain Dailcry along with 1 or 2 of his living Trusted Guards and just burn them down despite the 300% health increase, is probably nixed since Dailcry and his Guard now receive a ludicrous 1000% health bonus instead. I’m actually wondering how this will work since after you take out two Trusted Guard, Dailcry catches onto what you’re doing and always pulls together with the third one. Hopefully his base health accounts for this. Dailcry and his Guard are more dangerous, as well.

Outside of that and some tuning changes, the biggest noticeable change is that Sir Braunpyke, the miniboss with the constant ticking damage aura on the entire party, now does less party-wide damage in favor of doing more tank-focused damage. Your healer’s mana bar says thank you.

Darkflame Cleft

My mom always said if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all, but unfortunately I still have to talk about Darkflame Cleft. On top of the fact that several of the most annoying or infuriating abilities are either still present (like the Rank Overseer’s Wild Wallop that punts both players and trash away from it) or even more dangerous than before (such as Explosive Flame no longer being dodgeable and Wandering Candles doing even more damage), this dungeon infamously includes the mine cart escort section where people have to frequently dodge into the darkness to retrieve candles and bring them back to the cart, as well as the infamous fight against The Darkness where if your candle goes out — and it seems like it always goes out with every popular strategy on this fight — you end up getting feared repeatedly every few seconds.

There are no datamined changes to The Darkness, in case you were hoping for that, and the only change to the mine cart escort is a dummy change, meaning we don’t actually know what the change does. I’m hoping just from reading it that it means the whole candle-fetching part has been removed and you can just follow the mine cart, which will still be aggravating in a timed dungeon. Guess we’ll find out when testing on it starts in week 2 of Blizzard’s schedule.

Operation: Mechagon — Workshop

Unfortunately, this time around the chosen half of Mechagon is Workshop, instead of the fun part. Most of the changes center around the first boss and their prior trash. On the trash, the knockback that kept enemies from being grouped up in the Rocket Barrage is removed, so hopefully this trash will remain just as easy to take care of as before. However, Tussle Tonks — the battlebot arena duo boss — is practically a new boss. The previous strategy was for the tank to drag the Platinum Pummeler to the different hammers and knock off its armor, while the DPS focused Gnomercy down until it died, only turning to the Pummeler (which was hopefully unarmored) afterwards.

Now, that strategy is entirely off the table, as the if one boss dies, the other one pulses increasing damage until they both die. There are, however, changes to make that more feasible — the Platinum Pummeler now starts with no armor but gains a stack when it hits 100 energy, and you can remove it with a hammer as always; Gnomercy, on the other hand, has a cast time on its ability that is used if it catches whoever it’s chasing, and it no longer deals AOE damage when venting flames — just in front, where it’s still deadly. The Pummeler also picked up a cleave, and it appears Gnomercy will be dropping mines. It’ll be interesting to see how this gets handled, as previously it was pretty rote.

Theater of Pain

Time to step back into the skeleton pit. Theater of Pain received a lot of less dramatic changes than other dungeons, mostly changes to cast times — things that affect the whole group had their cast time increased, while tankbusters that only affect the tank had their cast time decreased. Also some tankbusters that could be outranged — like Colossus Smash from the first miniboss before the dueling boss — had their range increased to make that impossible. Sorry, clever tanks!

The biggest change to boss mechanics is probably the first boss — they have a move we’ve seen other bosses do, in that when one dies it empowers the others, leading to the last boss being largely empowered. In this instance, when one boss dies, the living ones get a 10% damage boost, and also after using their ultimate ability at 100 energy, they go to 35 energy instead of 0. When two are down, the last boss will have +20% damage and its energy will return to 70 after using its ultimate — meaning they’ll be using it a lot. The new ultimates all do some form of AOE damage (one is just damage over time, one is damage over less time but with void zones, and one is an instant AOE damage hit plus a slow).

The hand/soul mechanic on the lich boss, Kul’tharok, is also slightly less random — instead of the souls running around wildly they’ll now slowly walk towards the boss — but if you mess it up, they now explode for massive damage. Better get to grabbing.

The MOTHERLODE!

It wouldn’t be a goblin-themed season without The MOTHERLODE! There are a ton of numeric changes to trash, but a lot of them seem to be geared around not forcing you to get most of your trash count for the dungeon on some of the frustrating trash in the first and second sections of the dungeon. It remains to be seen if this will actually be successful or if further tuning is needed — the first chunk of enemies have received a variety of nerfs, the second section still seems fine for big pulls, the third one appears to have gotten some nerfs but could still be quite dangerous, and unfortunately the giant uphill section with walking mines and goblins in mechs is mostly the same except for a huge damage nerf to the mechs’ Charged Shot.

As for bosses, the Coin-Operated Crowd Pummeler now appears to only hoover up gold (buffing itself) on a timer, rather than whenever it happens to be near gold, and kicking a footbomb into it appears to remove stacks of its buff. Azerokk has increasingly deadly adds, making it more likely that — rather than CCing them, or just outright ignoring them as often happened — you will now want to actually burn them down. Rixxa Fluxflame appears to have gotten a damage buff, which is fine since she barely qualified as a boss. And lastly, Mogul Razdunk’s tankbuster took a hit, but his spinning Gatling Gun move is deadlier and can’t be avoided by moving out of line-of-sight. It also appears he’s going to jump around more, which will be interesting if he’s a less stationary boss than before.