World of Warcraft’s been taking some big swings at its difficulty assumptions in recent years—both adding harder solo and open world content in the form of Delves and Prey, while also making the typically hardcore content slightly easier to get through.
Take Mythic+, the endgame dungeon experience that sees players speedrunning high-level dungeons with vicious modifiers for, well, phat loot. Midnight’s latest season saw players chewing through it with relative ease, thanks to both some re-jigged numbers tuning and a different philosophy towards those modifiers.
For example, in lower difficulties, tanks are helped out by Lindormi’s Guidance, which displays a route through the dungeon. Couple that with gearing tracks that’re generally easier to advance on your lonesome, and you’ve got a recipe that results in one of the easiest Mythic+ seasons in years.
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Which is a bit of a problem if you like pushing Mythic+ keys. MMOs live and die on their rewards structure. Even if you’re doing it for the love of the game, it still feels unsatisfying and pointless to do high-level content if you’re not getting rewarded for your trouble, as was the case with this season.
Well, Blizzard’s moved to fix it. In the upcoming patch, high-end Mythic+ players will be getting some unique rewards, per a post on the forums:
“Upon reaching 3400 Mythic+ rating, players will earn a Timelost Saddle (earned once per warband per season). This item can be brought to Lindormi in Silvermoon or the Timeways, where it can be exchanged for a mount of your choice from a curated selection. This includes Keystone Master and Keystone Legend mounts from previous seasons, as well as all new mounts being added to the pool.”
In addition, if you wind up being in the top 1% of Mythic+ players, you’ll get a unique mount all to yourself.
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While this is something of a bandaid fix (if you don’t care about mounts, this isn’t that great of a draw), it does seem pretty savvy from Blizzard. Creating one new mount to add to the game doesn’t seem like that much of a workload, while the Timelost Saddle is making use of models that are already in the game.
It also shows an understanding that the need for long-term grinds are something Blizzard’s keeping at the forefront as it adjusts to its new difficulty philosophy. While the studio usually doesn’t get it right on the first pass, I’ve seen enough reactivity to feel confident the next season’ll have something the sweatiest of gamers can aim for.
