Greetings, time travelers!

It has been quite some time since our last dev diary, but I am pleased to announce that our regular news updates are back! However, instead of monthly releases, we intend to publish updates whenever there is a new release or something significant planned for our community, such as new features and updates to our planned progression.

Today we’ll be talking about the new Mythic difficult system, as it probably has been one of the features discussed the most lately. Before going into details about how it will work, I would like to address how the idea behind the hard modes (now known as “mythics”) originated.

Mythics

Ever since we released our first raid (UBRS, early vanilla) we’ve been constantly experimenting and trying to find new ways to tune content so we can provide an enjoyable experience to as many of you as possible.

Our first approach was to leave content unchanged but instead tune player output, so we lowered player damage and healing performed while creatures kept their original damage values. After listening to the community feedback, we redesigned our tuning method to instead change the creatures while leaving player output unchanged (…except healing! as buffing creature damage can only go so far before they start to… single-hit you).

Then we tried to assert the difficulty: we performed two experiments, in Zul’Gurub and later on AQ40. Zul’Gurub, a catch up (ketchup, if I may) raid, had a medium-light tuning while AQ40 started at peak difficulty and we progressively lowered the numbers as players progressed.

We acknowledge that many of you were unhappy with the AQ40 release as it at first felt really harsh and wasn’t really accessible to everyone as it required prime coordination and gear to be able to successfully complete the encounters – and then with several wipes.

And thus the “Mythic” concept came to be: two difficulties, one favouring a more casual game play and another, favouring the hard core players out there seeking true challenge!

However, as we progressed through the Mythic development, we decided to add a little spice as well: extra mechanics, as to add depth to the encounters instead of just raw numbers. We understand there’s a difference between difficult encounters where one must plan their moves carefuly and stay on their toes and tedious ones that are nothing but… long.

Mythic Rewards: What do we get? Pls no custom loot?!

It may not seem so, but finding appealing rewards for any activity is extremely challenging. There’s a very limited row of things we are able to give that wouldn’t impact the game player in any way but still be appealing enough so people actually do the content we are providing. At the time, loot with an extra enchant that gives a very small push ahead seemed harmless to us and thus the most viable option.

We understand that many of you disliked this approach so we took the time to reevaluate our table of rewards and change things around according to the feedback we gathered from our community.

Therefore, we decided to scrap that idea, there won’t be any of the infamous custom loot you have been talking about lately.

Important updates: how will things work now?

Instead, we’ll have the following:

• The reward NPC will still award you a piece of gear without any custom modifications (the “bad luck” prevention design), the same applies to both the Mythic 5 player dungeons and Magtheridon/Gruul’s lair.
• Our Mythic 5 player dungeons will have enhanced encounters (custom mechanics)
• Magtheridon/Gruul will instead only have increased health and damage (no custom mechanics).

VERY IMPORTANT: Maghteridon and Gruul will receive tuning adjustments according to player feedback and in line with the latest updates, so you should see it jumping from easy to moderately easy in the following update.

Following the changes above, we will be turning our schedule around and instead releasing the Mythic raids before the dungeons, as those won’t have any extra mechanics.

We will be releasing the mythic raids 2nd August.

With the recent changes, we will be delaying the release of the Mythic dungeons that was planned for this week’s update. They’ll instead be released at a later TBA date and will serve as a catch-up mechanic.

Current Heroic Dungeons

We will be lowering the current healing nerf by 20% and creatures will be doing a bit less damage to players now with them being more accessible to all with keys only needing an honored standing to purchase.

The future…

We will discontinue the Mythic system and instead follow the previous design we’ve worked with during vanilla. So you can expect Karazhan to be more in line with how Molten Core & Blackwing Lair was than Magtheridon and Gruul were during their release. Knowledge of the raid will be required and decent geared characters. Full-BiS, perfect comps and every consumable in the game however won’t be needed to clear these.

In other words, raids will have a single difficulty and will get progressively easier as we go through progression.

We have plans to revisit the Mythic system at a later date, as a novelty activity with vanity awards, like pets, for example, among other possibilities that don’t exactly impact the usual venues of progression in any way. But we will cross that bridge once we get there!

That’s all for now! I hope we were able to clear most of the doubts around the new release as well as address the concerns many of you raised the past weeks.

Thanks for being part of our journey and happy hunting!

See ya, time-travelers!