Sweeping changes to Mythic+ in The War Within Season 2 aim to alleviate frustration and punishment
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There have been lots of changes to the Mythic+ experience already in The War Within, many of which are responses to direct feedback from prior seasons as Blizzard continues working on smoothing out Mythic+ as a full-fledged endgame pillar. Some of the changes so far have been lauded — the Xal’atath affixes seem to have been (mostly) well-received, the fact that Tyrannical and Fortified both exist in high keys means you don’t get wildly swingy experiences from week to week, and Xal’atath’s Guile finally seems to hit the “play the dungeon, not the affix” note that many players have been asking for.
However, as Blizzard acknowledges in a recent news post, there are still some definite pain points that need to be addressed — and the team is making those changes in Season 2 to keep Mythic+ a fun, challenging, and rewarding content pillar.
Mythic+ in Season 1: Failure is too punishing and success isn’t sufficiently rewarding
Common criticisms of Mythic+ this season include
- Players are faced with too many crucial mechanics at once
- Failure is too punishing
- Succeeding didn’t feel rewarding enough for the effort required
- It can be very hard to find pick-up groups as the meta becomes more settled to attempt to deal with these aforementioned problems
A lot of the criticisms, notably, have dealt with how difficult it can be to progress in Mythic+ for people who try to use primarily pick-up groups to progress. Many changes we’ve already seen on the PTR for Season 2 are intended to address this, such as extending cast times on critical enemy spells, reducing spikes in tank health (or telegraphing them better), and reducing the overall number of critical threats per pack of trash.
Rewards also have a number of related problems right now. While 11.0.7 brought some welcome changes on that front, there was still an elephant in the room as far as rewards went: Delves. In previous expansions, players may have used low-level keys to gear up new characters, gradually working their way up the difficulty track. Now, however, Delves awarded gear good enough that many players were jumping right in at Mythic 7, which unfortunately is right when the Challenger’s Peril affix kicks in to make deaths much more punishing. That led to a combination of lack of experience leading to failure, and more punishing failures leading to a toxic environment in which many people were overly selective when recruiting for keys or downright nasty when reacting to failure inside them. This also meant that players who did prefer to use Mythic 2-6 to gain experience and gear found themselves with a shallow applicant pool for keys, leading to a different but equally frustrating experience.
Season 2’s solution: Slower scaling, better rewards, and keeping the hardest punishment to the hardest levels
To alleviate these problems, Blizzard is making a number of sweeping changes to both difficulty and reward structures in Mythic+.
- Baseline Mythic, aka “Mythic 0,” will now reward Champion-track gear (equivalent to Normal-difficulty raids) with a weekly instance lockout. These dungeons will get more difficult as a result, with enemies gaining more health and damage, but this should be an ideal starting place for players looking to learn dungeons in a low-stakes environment.
- Mythic 2 through 10 will now scale health and damage more slowly — 7% of each per level, down from 10%. From Mythic 11 onwards, per-level scaling will remain 10%.
- The rotating weekly Xal’atath’s Bargain affixes will now kick in at Mythic 4 rather than Mythic 2, leaving the two lowest key levels affix-free. Again, this provides low-stakes Mythic+ learning environments, which is always a good thing to have to welcome more folks into the dungeon-running pool.
- Tyrannical and Fortified will now be at Mythic 7 and 10, alternating which one is present at which level each week. Challenger’s Peril is gone… sort of. This will make these mid-level keys much less punishing for failure, since people will still hypothetically be entering into the dungeon pool after gearing up in Delves, allowing them to gain mid-level experience without overly terrible punishments for themselves or others.
- At Mythic 12, Xal’atath’s Guile will take on the old effect of Challenger’s Peril, but it will no longer increase enemy health an additional 10%. This continues to ensure that players who want to progress into higher key levels are playing at the top of their game, but doesn’t just turn every enemy into a giant sack of hit points.
- Lastly, as they usually do, Blizzard has twiddled the levels of at which certain gear tracks start to be available. Notable changes include Hero-track gear being available at end of run in Mythic 6 dungeons, and Gilded crests now being available at Mythic 7 and up.
There is also one change that is aimed solely at the top end of the system, and it’s one I’ve seen high-end Mythic+ players request to ensure that they can stay in their chosen progression system. Once you’ve finished all eight Season 2 dungeons at a Mythic 12 or higher within the timer, your keys will no longer delevel below a 12 due to depletion. If you can time all dungeons at a Mythic 13, the new floor will now be 13, and so on. Also, because all these changes will lead to more and higher keys being run in Season 2, the Keystone Legend achievement being added in Season 2 will be bumped from 2850 rating to 3000. This will make the Enterprising Shreddertank mount even more of a prestige prize for players who truly are pushing Mythic+ at its highest level.
On paper, these changes seem like they’ll address a number of problems at both the low and high levels of Mythic+. Serving two different audiences within the same content like this is definitely a juggling act, but these changes seem like a huge step in the right direction, whether you’re alreading shooting for that 1% title at end of season or just dipping your pinky toe into the Mythic+ dungeon pool for the first time.
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