Midnight Season 3 brings new Mythic+ dungeon pool, shakes up high-end season rewards

Coming early next year, WoW Midnight patch 12.2 heralds the start of the third (and, given the past couple expansions, likely final) content season for this expansion. With the start of a new season always inevitably comes some kind of shakeup to Mythic+ dungeons. You can expect a whole new field of eight dungeons, each of which will get carefully retuned for the modern retail WoW environment and gameplay expectations — particularly older dungeons, and spoilers, one the Season 3 dungeons dates back to Cataclysm. But in addition to the standard season rotation, there’s also a change coming that will likely please folks who like to push their Mythic+ score as high as it’ll go, and especially those who like playing their favorite off-meta specs rather than pursuing whatever the current “flavor of the month” is.

Here’s everything we know about Midnight Season 3, coming in WoW patch 12.2.

Prey picks up new difficulty mode

Despite some difficulties with our velvet-voiced Prey pal Astalor Bloodsworn — more on him in a second — it still seems that Prey, which serves as a seasonal content leg for solo and world content players, will be picking up a new difficulty mode, Agony. No word yet on how this will ramp things up, although this system has continued to be fine-tuned since its release so I’m hopeful it’s not just a return to the “kill for me!” of ages past.

New raid: The Worldcore

It wouldn’t be a new season without a new raid, of course, and The Worldcore is our raid in Season 3. We’ll be pursuing Xal’atath through this eight-boss raid, fighting a combination of Titanic defenses intended to stop intruders (great job there, folks!) and Xal’atath’s lieutenants within the Devouring Host before finally bringing the fight to the lady herself. I have a feeling we’ll also see some special guests; in an interview with Wowhead, Blizzard alluded to the Void energy used to open the Worldcore’s door being important in some way, and asked us to think about who’s missing that we haven’t seen lately.

More Delving with Valeera, plus a new Nemesis

As mentioned at the What’s Next panel, we will continue to get new Delves, although Blizzard didn’t have any specifics to announce about the Delves themselves. However, we did find out about our new Nemesis: Astalor Bloodsworn, whose relentless pursuit of anguish as an energy form to defend Azeroth has evidently warped his mind. On the flip side, we were also told elsewhere that it’s not just as simple as “he’s corrupted and we need to beat some sense into him,” so who could say how this’ll shake out? We did confirm as well that Valeera will be our Delve buddy for Season 3, and that her new series of Curios, as well as the enemies and challenges in the Delves themselves, will be flavored by the fact that Astalor is waiting for us at the end of the road.

End-of-season title changes allow title chase to remain competitive but broaden its scope

Probably the biggest overall change in Season 3 comes from how end-of-season titles are awarded. Typically after a PVE season closes, titles have been awarded for the very top-top of the Mythic+ rankings in your region. For example, in The War Within season 2, you had to be in the top 0.1% of players in your region to earn the title The Enterprising Hero. These titles carry a certain amount of prestige for players who really push Mythic+ key levels and score as their primary means of playing WoW, but typically they’ve been extremely exclusive. Midnight looked at expanding the rewards to award folks who pushed themselves extremely hard, but didn’t manage to make it to the top 0.1%, which is an absurdly small population. In Midnight Season 1, you still had to be in the top 0.1% to become the Umbral Hero, but being in the top 1% at least got you a cool phoenix mount. Nevertheless, these were still fairly exclusive — and, since getting to that level of score often required a lot of pugging, rewarded players who chased meta-favored, “flavor of the month” specs each season.

In the Midnight What’s Next panel at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced two changes:

• An additional tier of rewards: along with the 0.1% and 1% awards, there will be a top 5% placement as well. Looking at the last few seasons as a goalpost, this will probably require getting 3,400 score at a minimum, but means that people who can’t or don’t want to push into the absolute highest range can still get something reflecting their skill, and that’s pretty cool.
• The 1% and 5% achievements (but, notably, not the pinnacle 0.1% achievement) are going to be spec-based — not even class-based, but spec! Now if you really dig a disfavored spec like Frost Mage, you don’t have to complete the Sisyphean task of pushing your score up and trying to be better than most of WoW’s player population; in Season 3, you just have to be in the top 1% or 5% of all Frost Mages in your region. Of course, there’s still the issue of getting into groups as a disfavored spec… but that’s on the community and its perceptions to fix, not Blizzard.

New dungeon pool brings variety, a couple of old reruns, and one dungeon from Cataclysm

So far, Midnight has followed the pattern set in Dragonflight and The War Within for its first couple seasons, with Mythic+ rotations that include  four launch dungeons plus four older dungeons. Midnight Season 3 looks poised to follow the standard pattern for the third season, as well: a brand new dungeon, a couple favorites from the current expansion, and a smorgasboard of older dungeons. This one seems to especially reach across expansions, including pulling a dungeon from all the way back in Cataclysm into the modern era.

Here’s the Mythic+ dungeon rotation for Midnight Season 3:

• Thraegar’s Stand: The new dungeon for patch 12.2, Thraegar’s Stand is a three-boss dungeon and… that’s about all we know about it. The name implies we might learn a little more about the Thraegar, the Azeroth-empowered Earthen who broke free of their Titanic directives in millennia past, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what this one’s about.
• Magister’s Terrace: For a largely linear dungeon, Magister’s Terrace has been fairly well-received in its redesign form — and noted in higher keys for having some very dangerous pulls that inexperienced players might not see coming. Hopefully by now everyone knows not to underestimate the trash after the jellyfish boss… right?
• Maisara Caverns: The other older Midnight dungeon for Season 3, Maisara Caverns had some interesting optimizations both in routing in the first third, as well as how to avoid the long “run back” phase on the last boss if your class was capable of doing so. Not a bad pull, in my opinion.
• The Underrot (Battle for Azeroth): Does it feel to you like we’ve had a lot of Underrot in Mythic+ seasons? One of my guildmates mentioned it, so I went back and counted. Seasonal Mythic+ content started in Battle for Azeroth, and with four seasons in that expansion, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight, and three in The War Within and Midnight, Underrot has only been seasonal content five times, and four of those were during BfA. (The other time was in Dragonflight Season 2.) Anyway: boy, I do not like this place. Not even a little.
• Iron Docks (Warlords of Draenor): Last brought back into a Mythic+ dungeon pool as part of a community vote, Iron Docks is fairly popular for its capability to support extremely large pulls, fun path choices in the first part, and a minimum of jank in the middle with the Iron Star bowling segment. The bosses are no joke, though.
• Sanguine Depths (Shadowlands): Oh boy. This Venthyr stronghold is infamous for bosses that hit like a truck and a gauntlet section at the end that hits like a truck hauling a load full of trucks; the best thing I can say about Sanguine Depths is that at least we don’t have to also deal with the Sanguine affix anymore while running it.
• The Stonecore (Cataclysm): Get ready to break yourself on Ozruk’s body, feel the strength of the earth, and deal with the massive amount of trash in that one big room. You know the one. It’s been a little while since a Cataclysm dungeon saw an update for Mythic+, and this is historically one of the more challenging ones. I wonder if Millhouse Manastorm will still be there? It wouldn’t really be Stonecore without him.
• Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr (Dragonflight): Our final returning dungeon for the season, the sequel to Uldaman sure is a dungeon. The final boss can be a pain if Tyrannically empowered, as his enormous pool of hit points can mean that he has time to consume more and more of the floor in sandy, leaving your team precious little place to stand; there’s also the fireball robot who likes to one-shot people who don’t watch there they’re running, not that I’d know anything about that.

All in all, this is certainly an interesting variety of dungeons. There are a lot of actual caves, which feels appropriate for a patch about delving into the deepest levels of the planet, I suppose. I’m interested to see how Blizzard updates Stonecore, at the very least; it has always been super easy to pull extra trash in the big room leading up to Ozruk — whether it’s because of an uncontrolled sentry running to fetch friends, or simply the fact you were playing a Ret Paladin during that patch where Judgment cleaved with seemingly infinite range and wildly aggressive targeting — and it’ll be fun to see how Mythic+ groups work around that.