We’ve been paying close attention to the discussion around the Midnight Season 2 dungeon pool. Some of that discussion has focused on returning dungeons with pain points from past seasons, and some has focused on the unique mechanics in the Midnight dungeons. That feedback is useful, and it lines up with the work we do internally when building a season. We want to take this opportunity to share more about how we choose dungeons, how we update them for Mythic+, and what we’ve already done for Midnight Season 2.
Choosing Dungeons
When we begin choosing dungeons for a Mythic+ season, the first thing we look at is which dungeons might fit the theme of the upcoming update. Sometimes that means reconnecting players with a story, character, or place that is relevant to the game’s current story. With L’ura threatening the Sunwell in March on Quel’danas, it was a great time to bring that character back and show the start of her relationship with Alleria in Seat of the Triumvirate. Other times, it is more about shared themes, like the connection between trolls, snakes, and the Curse of Ul’atek. Not every dungeon needs to point at the same story or tone, though. A dungeon like Ruby Life Pools can help the pool feel more varied by giving players a change of pace from the patch’s main themes, as can a dungeon like Skyreach from Midnight Season 1.
From there, we think about the shape of the full pool. Each dungeon should bring something distinct, whether that is its theme, layout, pacing, visual style, or mechanical identity. We want the season to feel varied from key to key, with a strong mix of different places, different problems to solve, and different reasons to be excited about each dungeon in the pool.
Updating Dungeons
Selecting a dungeon for a new season is a big commitment. We need to believe that the dungeon can contribute to the goals of the season, but we also must commit to addressing aspects of the dungeon that didn’t play out well last time it was featured in a Mythic+ season.
Once we know a dungeon is returning, we look at it from a few angles: feedback from its previous appearance, our own experiences playing the live game, our internal playtests, and early discussion during the current expansion beta.
Some older dungeons give us more of a blank canvas. In those cases, our goal is to capture the essence and themes of the dungeon without players feeling like it has become something entirely different. Pit of Saron is a good example from Midnight Season 1. We rebuilt it from the ground up while keeping its core themes, spaces, and mechanics in mind, so it still felt like Pit of Saron.
Every dungeon gets a full creature review. We look at health, damage, ability packages, cast frequency, enemy placement, and how each pull contributes to the dungeon as a whole. The goal is not for every creature to feel the same, but for the dungeon to have a balanced mix of challenges within itself and alongside the rest of the season.
We also look closely at how those challenges are distributed. A mechanic can be appropriate on its own but become frustrating if too many similar asks are packed into the same section of a dungeon. The density of interruptible spells is a good example of something we watched closely in Midnight Season 1, and it is the kind of thing we’ll continue to evaluate when building a new pool.
Boss encounters are reviewed individually. Some bosses already have a strong foundation and mostly need visual polish, tuning, and pacing adjustments. Others need more substantial updates because their mechanics were too complex, did not challenge players in a compelling way, or relied too heavily on players remembering how the encounter worked in a previous season. In some cases, we see an opportunity to lean further into a boss’s core idea, giving returning players something new to engage with while reducing the knowledge gap for players seeing the dungeon for the first time.
Overall Challenge and Feel
Speaking to the discussions around difficulty, the difficulty of dungeons in Midnight Season 1 met a lot of our design goals, and our aim for Season 2 dungeons is that they feel similar overall. One key difference is that we’d like the difficulty of a dungeon to be more evenly shared across the group. Specifically, we’d like the DPS role to factor more strongly into a group’s success.
Tank and healer players often have the most immediate pressure in Mythic+. When something goes wrong, they are usually the first roles asked to solve it, whether that means surviving the pull, recovering the group, or covering mistakes long enough for the key to continue. In Season 1, key success could be too heavily shaped by those moments, while damage throughput and damage dealer execution did not always have the same impact on whether a group timed the key.
In Season 2, you’ll see slightly increased creature health pools, a larger emphasis on skills like target prioritization and damage checks, and some abilities trading raw damage effects for penalties to damage output or mobility. We still want dungeons to move at a good pace. The health changes are there so priority targets, cooldown usage, and damage checks have more room to matter. Tanks and healers will still have plenty to manage, but success should feel more evenly shared across the group.
Midnight Season 2
Before we get into dungeon specific notes, we also want to call out a broader visual clarity update that has been part of recent discussions.
General
- Cone and line abilities have received updated precast visuals to better communicate their impact areas.
Over the years, cone and line attacks have used a variety of visual treatments across different eras of the game. As those dungeons rotate into Mythic+, we want that visual language to be more consistent and easier to read at a glance.
Throughout PTR, we’re introducing standardized cone and line precast visuals that share the visual style of our circular ground target effects and rims. These visuals are intended for attacks that hit instantly, such as breaths or lasers. Charges, projectiles, and other similar mechanics may use different visual treatments with a consideration for travel time of the attack. When a cone or line attack tracks its target during a cast, it will use an edge only variant of the visual, along with an arrow above the target’s head. Vaelgor’s Dread Breath in Voidspire is an example of an ability that would use this treatment.
Dungeons
Below, we’ll walk through each dungeon in the Season 2 pool, call out some of the pain points we saw from previous appearances and discussions, and share some of the updates we’ve made to help it fit this season.
Murder Row
During our internal testing as well as during the Midnight Preseason, we identified the cantina event as a potential pain point in Mythic+, as well as the large number creatures with interruptible casts following the Zaen Bladesorrow encounter. Here’s some examples of the changes we’ve made to address pain points like these:
- Increased the progress contributed towards cantina event completion from successful execution of a task.
- Significantly reduced the loss of progress when failing to perform a task during the cantina event.
- Removed job switching during the cantina event.
- Reduced the total number of caster enemies after Zaen Bladesorrow.
- Removed some casted abilities from Corrupted Warlocks, Trained Fel Hunters, and Felcaster Neophytes.
Den of Nalorakk
During the Midnight Preseason, we received feedback that the pacing of the gauntlet before the Sentinel of Winter could feel frustrating. Additionally, we identified that the Sentinel of Winter’s absorb shield would not scale well into higher Mythic+ keys. Also, we saw feedback that certain RP moments across the dungeon overstayed their welcome. Here are some of the adjustments made to address feedback like the above:
- Adjusted RP sequences to resolve quicker.
- Adjusted the pacing and effects of the winter gauntlet to increase ease of navigation.
- Updated the Sentinel of Winter’s Eternal Winter to no longer grant an absorb shield and to channel for a fixed duration.
- Updated the Avatar of Starvation’s Starvation Effigy to now have a 5 second cast time before afflicting players with its health debuff.
- Updated the Avatar of Determination’s Pulverize to no longer stun the targeted player.
The Blinding Vale
A pain point we identified in this dungeon is the presence of certain boss mechanics that disproportionally challenge pickup groups such as in the Ikuzz the Light Hunter and Ziekket encounters. There are also a few creature packs with an excessive amount of casters. These are some of the changes we made to address these types of issues:
- Reduced the number of Bloodthorn Roots summoned by Ikuzz the Light Hunter.
- Reduced the health of Lightspawn Lashers in Ziekket’s encounter.
- Addressed an issue that could cause players to unfairly fail the Lightbloom’s Essence mechanic in Ziekket’s encounter.
- Updated spawning across the dungeon to reduce the amount of casters found in a single creature pack.
Voidscar Arena
During internal playtests, we felt there was an opportunity to do more with routing and for more engaging mechanics in some of the boss encounters. To that end, we made adjustments such as the following:
- Updated spawning prior to the first boss to make the left side melee-focused and the right side caster-focused, with each side now featuring a miniboss that provides a unique stat buff for players.
- Reworked the Taz’Rah’s encounter with a new set of abilities.
- Designed new abilities for Watchful Harrowers and gave them significant contribution towards completing enemy forces.
- Updated spawning prior to the Charonus encounter to change creature composition and replace the four minibosses with new Domanaar lieutenants, who must be defeated in order to engage Charonus.
- Adjusted mechanics in the Charonus encounter to improve their interactions with each other.
Kings’ Rest
While reviewing Kings’ Rest during our planning of the season 2 dungeon pool, we identified that Shadow of Zul’s damage was exceptionally high and did not scale well into higher Mythic+ keys. Additionally, the lack of checkpoints after each boss along with long sequences of RP scenes hurt the flow of the dungeon when compared to modern M+ dungeons. Additionally, while it was interesting for The Council of Tribes to have a different boss order from week to week, this created situations where some weeks would feel more punishing than others. We also found that Dazar, The First King featured some mechanics that felt out-of-date with modern dungeon boss design. These are some of the changes we made to the dungeon to address these issues:
- Adjusted RP sequences to resolve quicker.
- Switched the Council of Tribes to a fixed sequence: Kula the Butcher, then Aka’alil the Conqueror, then Zanazal the Wise.
- Adjusted the Shadow of Zul’s abilities to fit modern M+ design standards.
- Reworked the Dazar, The First King encounter with a new set of abilities.
Temple of Sethraliss
Certain bosses like Adderis and Aspix presented mechanics in a subtle and inconsistent manner, and Merektha had long forced downtime during Burrow. The gauntlet section prior to the last boss saw issues with bugs and general gameplay flow. Additionally, the final encounter was heavily weighted on the healer while lacking gameplay for other roles. This dungeon was heavily adjusted in terms of both trash creatures and boss encounters to address these pain points. In particular:
- Adjusted Adderis and Aspix to now swap their shields on a health threshold, and their shield now provides damage resistance rather than inflicting damage to the attacker.
- Reworked Merektha’s ability package to improve engagement and changed Burrow so that she now re-emerges after the defeat of her adds rather than on a timer.
- Reworked the gauntlet sequence prior to the final boss to address concerns with bugs and to remove the need for a player to be in “timeout” while energizing an orb.
- Reworked the final encounter to encourage more group participation in the healing of the Avatar of Sethraliss.
- Reworked Cheap Shot on Shrouded Fangs to provide more opportunity for counterplay.
Ruby Life Pools
Ruby Life Pools had many pulls that felt chaotic and cramped, particularly in the first section. Additionally, the flying patrols of Thunderhead and Flamegullet were confusing to navigate around. Pulls across the dungeon often featured fast and frequent casting as well as frequent bursts of unavoidable damage. Additionally, certain abilities were presented in a way that increased the likelihood of “snowballing” mistakes or were otherwise unclear. These are some of the changes we made to address these issues:
- Removed some creature packs from the first section.
- Reworked abilities like Flashfrost Earthshaper’s Tectonic Slam to remove cast bar clutter and bursty group damage.
- Slowed down the ability schedule and reduced the movement forces of Melidrussa Chillworn.
- Changed the patrols of Thunderhead and Flamegullet to occur on the ground.
- Adjusted Kyrakka’s Flaming Embers to no longer apply Infernocore and Kokia Blazehoof’s Ritual of Blazebinding to now mark the targeted player before it casts.
- Changed creature pack composition and adjusted ability packages to simplify the pacing and mechanical asks of each pull