Mythic Plus has become one of the popular forms of content in Blizzard Entertainment’s long-lasting MMORPG, but it does have some downsides. Let’s talk about the limitations of Mythic Plus’s current design.
What is Mythic Plus?
Mythic plus is a form of endgame dungeon content that became available during World of Warcraft’s “Legion” expansion. While it has seen changes over the years, in general terms, it allows max level players to go into a dungeon from the current season and experience a new challenge with enemy health and damage scaled up, up to three modifiers added on top of the scaling, and most importantly: it adds a timer to the dungeon. The timer is the most important part of mythic plus and is what makes the mode what it is. The entire point of it all is that your group maximizes the efficiency of each and every pull to do the dungeons as quickly as possible.
Mythic Plus is Good
This article will discuss the limitations of mythic plus, what it’s currently lacking, the type of content it has replaced, and the side effect that its design has had on the player base as a whole. However, it is worth mentioning here at the beginning, that mythic plus is a good mode, overall. It’s infinitely replayable and can easily be some of the most fun you can have while playing retail World of Warcraft. It’s even developed its own passionate and entertaining esports scene as well. The purpose of this article isn’t to trash on mythic plus but rather to have a conversation about the more peculiar and, unfortunately, negative aspects of it.
The Cheapest Form of Difficulty
As mentioned above, the core identity of mythic plus is that it adds a timer to the dungeons. It’s not about completing dungeons, it’s about completing dungeons fast. The point that needs to be made is, when you get down to it, are the dungeons actually difficult or is the timer the only thing making them difficult? If you took five players who had a personal best of a timed +10 and then threw them into a +15, they probably wouldn’t be able to complete it within the time limit, but they would probably be able to complete it eventually. You can look at Classic World of Warcraft to see the impact that no timer on harder difficulty content can have. Good players will plow through it as fast as possible regardless, but you open the gates to lesser skilled players being able to slowly work their way through it, pull by pull.
Again, is the dungeon difficult, or is it the timer? If someone asked you to make your favorite sandwich and gave you all the ingredients to do so, that wouldn’t be a very difficult task, would it? You’ve made that sandwich dozens or hundreds of times (depending on how much you like sandwiches), so making it right then and there with all the ingredients shouldn’t be an issue. What about if they gave you 15 seconds to do it? Not an impossible task, but certainly much harder now than it was without the timer. It’s the exact same task, just one against the clock and one that isn’t. So again, is the dungeon actually difficult, or is it just the timer creating a sense of difficulty? Great players are going to go fast regardless, they always have, so locking harder dungeons (higher scaling) behind a timer gate keeps lesser skilled players from pushing themselves as high as they can in terms of raw throughput requirements. Players don’t run the highest keystones they can complete, they run the highest they can time efficiently. This results in tons of players who are potentially good enough DPS players or healers to complete a +20, never really bothering going past +15 because they know they won’t be able to do it within the timer.
The point of mythic plus is the timer. I’m not suggesting the timer should be removed, I’m just saying that adding a timer is the cheapest way to add difficulty to a task and World of Warcraft could potentially benefit from having dungeons that are designed to be very hard and throughput intensive with no timer. If you need proof of that, look no further than the overwhelmingly positive reception that each of the mega-dungeons have received. The Beta/Alpha/Gamma dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King Classic have also proven that dungeons with higher enemy scaling with one somewhat interesting affix that is at least moderately themed around each specific dungeon, can be fun and challenging for many players, even without a timer.
Boring Affixes
Now that the timer has been discussed, let’s talk about mythic plus's other core feature: it’s affixes. Currently, mythic plus has three affixes. The first one is active on all keys regardless of keystone level, the second one becomes active at +7 and higher, and the third one becomes active at +14 and higher. Originally, mythic plus dungeons had four affixes with each tier activating at +2, +4, +7, and +10, respectively. Players complained about the affixes for years, and it took a while for Blizzard to actually address them and give them the reduced impact they currently have. The core issue of the current affixes for many players is that they feel completely disconnected from the dungeons that players are running. Modern World of Warcraft dungeons have such a complex design with trash mobs that require tons of layered crowd control and interrupts, that throwing a random corporeal being or tornadoes on the ground in the middle of all that just feels unnecessary and, most importantly, out of place.
Another issue with affixes is how highly varying their impact on the difficulty of a dungeon is based on how you play the game. For players who play with a consistent group of four other players and are maybe even in a Discord call talking to each other, the affixes are completely trivialized and add next to zero difficulty to the dungeons. On the opposite side of the spectrum, for players who play exclusively or near exclusively in pick-up-groups (PUGs) with random players, some of the affixes (and particular affix combinations) can be overwhelmingly annoying and make players just not want to play the game that week.
While affixes don’t always succeed in their intended designed purpose of making dungeons more difficult, they do always succeed in making dungeons more annoying for players. When modern dungeons are designed to have so much complexity and so much stuff going on constantly, many players find random things thrown on top of all that to be unnecessary, and to actually detract from the overall quality of experience by muddying everything up and hiding the hard work of the developers who hand crafted a dungeon with a specific vision in mind.
It Places A Higher Emphasis On Abusing The Meta
A meta is the most efficient way to go about doing something. Every video game has a meta, no matter how hard developers may try to avoid it. The bottom line is, there will always be the best way to do something and players will always end up finding it at some point. World of Warcraft is, of course, no different and the iconic staples of the world’s first raiding and competitive PvP arenas have shown the impact of metas over the years. However, no form of endgame content in World of Warcraft has ever shown the power of the meta and the way it can ruin the game for many players, like mythic plus has.
Seasons with “god comps” (meta compositions) have less participation than seasons without a nearly as well-defined meta. It makes sense. The better the balancing, the more players can comfortably play the classes and specializations (specs) they enjoy the most, and the easier it is to get into groups without being discriminated against for playing a suboptimal spec. The game is going to have more positive receptions when players can play the specs they want to play without having to worry about the diehards refusing to invite them into groups because of it not being balanced well.
The race to world's first (RFW) and PvP arenas always require strict abuse of the meta because they are actively competing against other people. Mythic plus's timer encourages players to compete against one another. Who can push to the highest keystone? And who can do each keystone level the fastest? Racing is one of the simplest and most common forms of competition both in gaming and out of gaming. Dungeons were never really a source of competition in WoW before, and as such the meta never mattered nearly as much. Unless one spec was absurdly far behind and comically underpowered, you’d never have much difficulty getting into groups because it didn’t matter. There was no rush to get the dungeons over with and everyone could perform somewhat equally.
Mythic Plus Has Conditioned Players To Not Enjoy Content
This one may sound odd, and that’s because it is. With mythic plus encouraging players to go through dungeons as quickly as possible and being the only form of endgame PvE content that is infinitely replayable with no lockout, over time the World of Warcraft community has developed this concept of getting through things as quickly as possible. There are fewer and fewer players that just want to do content for the sake of doing it and enjoying it. Players have been conditioned to just run through a checklist and do things as quickly as possible. Run a dungeon to get to the next dungeon. Run that next dungeon to get to the one after that. It’s getting to, or perhaps has already gotten to, the point of the average WoW player having lost the ability to just play the game for the sake of enjoying it.
Conclusions
Mythic plus is fun and was a great addition to the game by Blizzard, but there are negative aspects of its design and side effects to its existence. While it has overall made World of Warcraft a better game, it is a shame that it’s almost entirely killed off hardcore dungeon content with no timer; but hey, that’s what Classic WoW is for, right?
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