World of Warcraft Dragonflight season two officially started on May 9 and, only two months after the new season started, players are running higher keys than they did back in season one.
If you take a deep dive into Raider.IO’s leaderboard from season one, you can see that the highest completed Mythic+ key was Court of Stars +29 during a Fortified week. While Dragonflight season two already has two proud groups that have timed +30 Mythic dungeons in Underrot and Neltharus.
What’s curious here is that during the entire duration of season one, which lasted from December to May, no group completed a +30 key, and high-end players in season two are already completing higher keys right now. Remember, the highest completed Mythic+ key in the history of the game is +34 and by the end of the season, we could be looking at a new record.
I believe there is a number of reasons why players are finding more success so early in the second season. First, the gearing process is way faster with Shadowflame Crests and Enchanted Shadowflame Crests, meaning you can sooner hit the item level cap and run the highest keys. Blizzard has removed seasonal affixes, reduced the number of affixes, and tweaked the existing ones, hoping to make Mythic+ dungeons more of a progress journey.
In addition to all of this, pretty much all Mythic+ dungeons are easier and have less lethal mechanics, especially when you compare them to places like Algeth’ar Academy and the Azure Vault in the previous season, which had tight timers, dozens of dangerous trash packs scattered around dungeon, and hard-hitting boss mechanics.
Class-balancing has stayed roughly the same with Blizzard aggressively nerfing and buffing both classes and dungeons early in the season and gradually slowing down as we near the end of the season. But Augmentation Evokers have definitely shaken up the meta and classes like Mages have managed to reach an impressive DPS of 700,000 DPS on a single pull.
This tells me that this season is intentionally designed to be easier than the past one to cater more to seasonal players than “full-time” players. After you wrap up your Mythic+ adventures, it looks like Blizzard hopes you’ll take your break from WoW in Diablo 4. This approach, however, can only harm the game’s long-term health and gradually decrease the playerbase. But hopefully, this is just my take and season three will be a blast.
