Blizzard recently made some pretty big changes to how mythic+ works, both in the way of loot and how the keys themselves handle. The big points being:

  • Beating the key quickly no longer rewards more loot, rather higher level keys (15+) have a chance at giving more loot. Completing the key in time also provides one extra piece of loot.
  • Keys no longer get depleted, rather downgraded. If you don’t complete the dungeon in time, you get a new random key one level lower. If you don’t complete it at all, you get the same key one level lower.

Now I did not exactly like these changes, to be more precise the change that downgraded keys. In theory, this sounds like a great change: you always have a chance at loot when completing a mythic+ dunegon. For me however, since I’m mostly doing them for the challenge or to get a high key as possible done, it adds a lot of stress to always do a 100% tries for the keys in order to not downgrade them. A depleted key could always be redone and then upgraded once one knew the instance better, not so much when it’s a new random dungeon. It also greatly adds to the frustration of learning the dungeon and affix combo every week, since not getting things right there mean downgraded keys.

The loot change on the other hand has actually worked in my favour since I already tried to do higher level keys and not 3-chesting lower level ones. Though for those who were participating in that, I can understand the frustration.

Now these changes overall were quite odd, in that they seem to punish the people that were actively doing mythic+ content and mostly benefitting the people who weren’t overly interested in it in the first place. Presumably this was an attempt to get more people into doing mythic+, but at the same time the requirements for joining mythic+ groups seem to be more extreme than ever and there seem to be fewer groups up.

Now then, how do the changes feel after a month or so of living with them? Well, still kind of terrible and a downgrade from the old system. I would strongly prefer the option of depleting a key rather than downgrading it, especially since sometimes downgrading is down to one bad pull or an unlucky combo from some mobs. It’s really frustrating at that point to be put, essentially, two dungeons behind from where one was before; especially if one was running a dungeon one was interested in pushing/doing well in at the moment as one then again is at the mercy of luck to get that key again.

The loot change on the other hand, I like but seems to be the more controversial one.

In the end though, the changes aren’t the end of the world. Even the key downgrading at times has proven useful (e.g. Cathedral keystones…) but even at those times it has been somewhat bittersweet as it might have been useful to be able to try it again.