Mythic+ Hero: What Does it REALLY Take to Achieve the Title?

With Season 1 of Dragonflight Mythic+ well underway, some aspiring key pushers and dungeon enthusiasts may be wondering…what is it like to push for the Thundering Hero: Dragonflight Season 1 title? What does it take to secure a place in the coveted top 0.1% of key pushers in WoW?

If you are interested in striving for the seasonal Mythic+ title or beyond, read on for my experience in pushing for the Shrouded Hero: Shadowlands Season 4 achievement and the insights I gained along the way.

Table of Contents

My WoW Background

For a little background on my WoW history, I’ve been a Cutting Edge (CE) Raider for most of my time playing WoW, with my first CE being Heroic Dragon Soul back in the Cataclysm days. For Mythic+ specifically, I only interacted with the system to get my weekly +15 done for the weekly cache in Battle for Azeroth, or to fill up my Great Vault slots in Shadowlands. It wasn’t until Season 3 of Shadowlands that I really started to have the drive to push Mythic+ for score. Since then, I’ve worked on my gameplay and honed my skills on my favorite classes.

In Season 2 of Shadowlands, Blizzard introduced a new Feat of Strength for the top ranked Mythic+ players, which awarded the top 0.1% highest ranked players with the coveted “Tormented Hero” title to wear, based on their Mythic+ score. This concept continued onward, and in Season 3 players could receive the “Cryptic Hero” title, while Season 4 awarded “Shrouded Hero” to those at the top of the leaderboards.

At the end of Shadowlands Season 3, I was approached by one of my really good friends, Equinox, and he asked if I wanted to push Mythic+ with him in Season 4. With Season 4 approaching, I decided it was time to really test my skills and see what it was like to become the best at something in WoW. I’ve played a Rogue as my main – or as one of my main alts – since I started playing during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, so I was very excited to put my skills to the test.

Our Group Composition

For our Shadowlands Season 4 push group, we ran a very different composition than the “meta”. Instead of running the ideal comp that centered around a Blood Death Knight, Holy Priest, Warlock, and Survival Hunter, our group featured a Equinox as our Brewmaster Monk, Naughtymed as the Holy Paladin, Gillick on his Fury Warrior, Xerx on his Fire Mage, and myself (Kubie!) as our Outlaw Rogue.

It is important to note that the ideal group composition for Mythic+ in Season 4 of Shadowlands was probably the strictest I’ve ever seen. However, we did fairly well – ending our push around halfway through the season at ~3015 Mythic+ score, which was about 200 points above the seasonal title cutoff at the time we stopped pushing. After we decided to call it quits, our only hope was that our pushing efforts would still be rewarded with the title once Season 4 concluded.

GROUP COMPOSITION BREAKDOWN

Brewmaster Monk was a bit of a wildcard tank in Season 4. While they weren’t a particularly durable tank class, using the agility-only Cache of Acquired Treasures trinket allowed them to put out an absurd amount of AoE damage whenever it was active. Lacking both a Survival Hunter and a Warlock, this niche setup made up for some of the on-demand AoE damage we were missing due to our group composition. Additionally, Brewmaster Monks provided a variety of utility. Ring of Peace is an excellent tool for repositioning or knocking enemies away from teammates, Paralysis was very handy with dealing with the Hypnosis Bats from the seasonal affix, and Mystic Touch (their class-specific 5% buff to physical damage) gave our Warrior and me a solid damage increase.

Admittedly, Holy Paladin was a fairly weak healing spec in Season 4. While offering decent utility with Blessing of Protection, Blessing of Freedom, and Blessing of Sacrifice, the spec did not bring a lot of damage to the table. Technically speaking, due to our group’s DPS class composition, Holy Priest would have been a much better choice to buff our Fire Mage or Fury Warrior with Power Infusion. However, we decided early on that we would not ditch anybody just for a slightly better outlook when pushing keys. Once we had found our group of five, everybody was free to play whichever class or spec they felt most comfortable on, and we made it work!

Fire Mage was a fairly good ranged DPS in Season 4. They had consistent burst damage whenever their Combustion cooldown was active, giving them many instant cast Pyroblasts or Flamestrikes. Fire Mages were extremely durable due to having three cheat death abilities: Ice Block, Cauterize, and the Podtender trait from the Dreamweaver Night Fae soulbind (since Fire Mages opted for the Night Fae covenant in Mythic+). Additionally, Mages can Spellsteal buffs from various dungeon mobs, allowing them to steal damage buffs that can completely trivialize some fights or mechanics. For example, in Mechagon: Junkyard, spellstealing the Enlarge buff from the Mechagon Renormalizer allowed us to kill the final boss of the dungeon much faster and potentially skip an entire phase.

As previously mentioned, Fury Warriors were quite strong in Shadowlands Season 3 and 4, as they had access to two very powerful weapons (Gavel of the First Arbiter and Jaithys, the Prison Blade). Considering their ability to wear these two weapons and their spec having low-cooldown damage cooldowns (CDs), Fury Warriors had their burst damage available on almost every pull. In a similar way to Mages, Warriors had some cool tech plays in the Shadowlands dungeons with Spell Reflection, which they could use to reflect the Vampiric Claws from the seasonal Shrouded enemies, Nathrezim Infiltrator, if our tank was struggling. There were also several powerful boss and mob casts that could be reflected back towards the enemy, adding a significant amount of damage to the meters if played correctly. Having a Fury Warrior also brought a group-wide 5% attack power buff with Battle Shout, giving our heavy physical damage party composition a nice DPS boost.

Lastly, I was our group’s Outlaw Rogue. Honestly, Outlaw was pretty weak damage-wise in Mythic+ during Season 4 due to the hard target cap of 5 targets on our AoE ability, Blade Flurry. However, Rogue had a ton of advantages for our team. Besides Hunter, Rogue is the only other class in the game with a threat redirection ability (Tricks of the Trade), which helped ensure that our tank could gain and sustain threat quickly (since threat would often be ripped away whenever our Fury Warrior used his CDs). Throughout the history of Mythic+, Rogues have been popular due to our arsenal of crowd control abilities, such as Sap, Kidney Shot, Gouge, and Blind. This ensured that I could lock down a problematic mob if I needed to. What Rogues lacked in heavy AoE damage in Season 4, we made up for in single-target and 3-5 target cleave damage. This allowed me to carry damage for our group on smaller pulls, which helped us keep our fast pace throughout the dungeons. Rogues also have the only AoE stealth available in the game – Shroud of Concealment, allowing us to be able to use damage potions instead of invisibility potions when we had to skip packs of mobs for routes.

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SUMMARY

Overall, our composition was not very optimized or meta, and this struggle brought us to a point where we were unable to push any higher with the classes we were using, purely due to our inability to kill packs quickly enough. However, it is important to note that we still made it work.

Understanding each of our roles, as well as the roles of the other players around us in our group, allowed us to push very high Keystones still, as long as we made the best of what we had in front of us. Our group composition had good synergy between our classes, having all buffs to physical damage available for 3 of our players that dealt primarily physical damage, as well as access to a variety of good utility and crowd control options. But sadly, the higher we went up in keystone levels, the more apparent it became that our damage just couldn’t keep up with groups that ran Survival Hunters and Warlocks.

My Daily Push Schedule

The schedule I had to adopt to be able to push and still make sure I was getting everything done in my daily life was….pretty terrible, to say the least. After a month of playing like this, I had to keep the schedule that I adopted simply because it was what I had gotten used to. Here’s what my schedule looked like:

10:00 AM	Wake up
10:30 AM - 1:00 PM	Morning routine, get coffee, work
1:00 PM - 6:00 PM	Push keys
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM	Dinner break
7:00 PM - 11:00 PM	Push keys
11:00 PM - 4:00 AM	Work

The 10 AM wake-up time was contingent upon how tired I was from the previous day. There were many times where I just slept until 12 PM so I could feel rested enough. On days where I had to raid (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), I would raid from 7:30 PM - 11 PM, and then push keys until around 1 AM. Working as the full-time customer support representative for Raider.IO, I always had work things open to get a little done before we did each key, so that I could stay on top of my daily work tasks. Any big tasks that I needed to get done would be saved for when I solely focused on working after we were done doing keys.

Prior to pushing Mythic+ in this manner, I would get up around 9 AM, do my morning routine, and then split up my work day into two sessions, with a break in between. I would go to bed around 12 AM - 1 AM, and repeat the next day. I had adopted a routine that was more focused on working at night, which I still do today. I found that working at night was more enjoyable for me, and as a lot of my co-workers are EU-based it is easier to coordinate with them when I work early in the morning.

My Pushing Experience

After we all agreed on when to play, and we played each day of the week, it was time to finally get started and push Mythic+. While we did take a day off here or there, we were going at it very hard as each one of us really gave it their all and everybody was committed to our goal of pushing as high as our comp, and skill, would allow.

After about four weeks of pushing, we realized that we were hitting our own limits, and gaining more score became increasingly more difficult. Eventually we hit a point where we would end dungeons with no deaths but were still unable to time them, and we realized that this was likely the end of the road for us, as our group and DPS composition simply did not allow us to progress further.

Coming into this, I had certain expectations of what it was going to be like to play Mythic+ at this level, and while some of them held true until the end, I also learned a lot about myself as a player and a person.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STRESS

The negative effects of gaming for long periods of time are very well documented. In the past, I was the coach for the Heroes of the Storm team No Tomorrow, so I was well aware of what I was getting into. However, I’ve never had to game for such long periods of time myself, and I was worried that I would not be taking good care of myself throughout the experience.

It was for this reason that I paid particular attention to my body while I was pushing. While I didn’t sleep as much as I wanted to, I did make sure that I went on walks pretty frequently. I have a very pretty nature trail near my house that starts on the road and leads into a forest trail, and I would often think about how the previous day’s keys went while walking the trail, getting some relaxation in before each session. Despite trying to keep a healthy mind and body, I would oftentimes still feel exhausted and tired during my time pushing Mythic+, showing me that I needed to devote even more time to keeping myself healthy.

I would say a majority of what I struggled with was the mental stress of actually pushing, which was something that I expected, but it is something that you don’t fully understand until you’re right there in the trenches. I’ve always felt confident enough on my Rogue, but pushing Mythic+ like this was extremely difficult. I had not played her as a main character since the beginning of BFA, and I was very rusty. I switched to her as my main for my raiding guild as well, just to make sure I was getting in as much practice as I possibly could.

For the most part, relearning my Rogue was like riding a bike. I still played my Rogue as an alt throughout Shadowlands, even if Rogues didn’t feel too great to play. Because I was relearning it as my main, while everyone else had been playing their class throughout all of Shadowlands already, I was at a disadvantage. Combined with the amount of utility Rogues have, it turned out to be a double whammy of cognitive load in having to relearn my DPS rotation while weaving in a large amount of utility spells.

There were definitely times where things would fall apart, and they were often my fault. There were a few days where I simply had to call it quits for the day because I was not playing well and was not improving – no matter how much I focused. The couple of times I had to bow out were towards the end of our pushing efforts. I wasn’t seeing any improvement in myself and felt myself getting more and more tilted as the days went by, so I decided it was best for me to stop during those days. My skills with my Rogue were pushed to the limit, and I hadn’t gotten enough time to truly blossom just yet. Sometimes, taking a step back when we aren’t getting anywhere, is the best thing we can do.

The mental strain of pushing Mythic+ was something that I didn’t expect would hit me so hard. I generally handle stress very well, so I learned a great deal from what I put myself through while striving for the Mythic+ Hero title.

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BECOMING A BETTER PLAYER

At the time when I decided to push for the title in Shadowlands Season 4, I thought I knew how to play my Rogue the best that I could. As I explained earlier, I’ve been playing the class for over a decade, and I’ve always felt the most confident that I knew how to play it extremely well. However, there were some pretty significant improvements that I noticed in my own gameplay after pushing so hard to become one of the top 0.1% of Mythic+ players.

The first thing that I noticed was that I was using my offensive cooldowns (CDs) much more efficiently. Generally, in Mythic+, we try to use our cooldowns as soon as they’re up; however, practice and experience taught me that there are situations where I should hold my cooldowns. For my Rogue, the results of learning these small optimizations were pretty staggering compared to how I played before we started out.

I remember going into dungeons like Grimrail Depot, maybe on a +15 or +16, to do my weekly key in a Pick-Up-Group (PUG), and I would seldom be the top DPS during those times. Grimrail specifically was a very good dungeon for Outlaw Rogue – same as Upper Karazhan – and after pushing so hard in Season 4, I would usually be the top damage dealer by a good margin whenever I played in a PUG. This change in performance could all be attributed to simply learning how to better optimize my damage, because I was pushed to my limits in my main group.

The next thing I noticed is that I learned how to make far better usage of my utility spells than I had before. Rogues are a perfect class if you want to learn how to make use of your entire kit, as they arguably have the most robust kit of niche utility spells out of every class. This didn’t just manifest in randomly using Gouge and Kidney Shot more (which I already did), but I also learned to throw out far more Blinds as interrupts, as well finding myself using my Vanish to Cheap Shot more if we absolutely needed me to (Vanish was an important DPS cooldown during Shadowlands Season 4).

This mentality didn’t just help me on my Rogue either. When I would pick up and play one of my alts, I would ask myself, “What is my utility on this class and how do I use it to the fullest extent?” This is something I didn’t really do that often before, as I was just more focused on optimizing my damage. However, with the lessons learned, optimizing my damage became extremely easy on my alts, and, by extension, so did my ability to understand my utility kit and use that as well. Specifically, I would notice myself throwing out Shadowfury more often on my Warlock, as well as using my Demonic Gateway and Demonic Circle more intelligently than I did in the past. This push cycle actually reignited a love for my Warlock, which was my first character I ever made back in 2009.

I also realized that my reflexes for reacting to my environment in the game had improved. I don’t think that I had slow reflexes before, per say, but I know that prior to my pushing experience, I would always find certain situations where I would be slow to react – one in particular that comes to mind would be the knock-back mechanic on Remnant of Ner’zhul in Sanctum of Domination. After doing this, I noticed that my ability to deal with quick-reaction mechanics like this, and my awareness of the things around me, vastly improved – to the point where I wasn’t as concerned with my slightly lower damage output in Fated Raids, as we far outgeared any encounter at this point. Just playing to live was enough, and I had zero issues doing that on any encounter thereafter.

Lastly, I want to talk about something that I didn’t even think about prior to pushing. Playing a Rogue in Shadowlands Season 4 made me realize pretty quickly that my damage was not the most important part of what I brought to a Mythic+ group. Playing a Rogue meant understanding the role I played in a group setting – whether it was using a Shroud of Concealment to skip certain packs of enemies, or using my entire utility kit to make sure a specific target never got its cast off. Rogues play an important role in damage prevention, by making sure key targets do not ever get to cast. Of course, this didn’t lead to me completely forsaking my damage just to be optimal with my utility skills. We still need to do our rotation optimally to do enough damage for high Mythic+. However, it meant that I would sometimes forsake my damage to make sure we didn’t wipe.

Playing at this level really amped up my gameplay in ways that I wasn’t even aware of prior to pushing for Shrouded Hero. I think that this experience will reverberate throughout the rest of my days playing WoW, as my personal standard of my play, as well as my skill floor, has risen to a new level I didn’t think I would be able to achieve.

Group Dynamics

Now that we have discussed the downsides and benefits I experienced from pushing keys for the Mythic+ Hero title, let’s talk about the “culture” I experienced when pushing at a much higher level than I ever did before.

Playing WoW at a competitive level is similar to many other games. However, I think that MMO’s tend to have an interesting social layer on top of those expectations that I wasn’t fully aware of. All the people that I played with in Season 4 of Shadowlands were pretty big into many casual aspects of playing WoW, while also being extremely good at the game as a whole. I would often catch our Mage talking about transmog, or discussing a mount they were working on obtaining. There were so many times where we would just talk about anything that came to mind, and simply enjoyed each other’s company. I think the only negativity I experienced during this whole experience was within my own mind, and it never came from my group members. I have never seen a group of people working towards a competitive goal be so willing to talk through things. Initially, this was a major concern for me, as I knew every one of our players, except for myself, had pushed high Mythic+ in previous seasons already. It can be so easy to blame the new guy when things go wrong, but my worries were completely unfounded.

Equinox was our de facto group leader. Now, Equinox and I have some history. I coached him during a portion of his days as a professional Heroes of the Stormplayer, and back then I saw the potential that he had as a player, even though he’d already reached such a high level. It was such a proud moment for me to see what kind of leader he had become.

Our discussions on our performance were always centered on the lessons we learned:

• Where did we struggle?
  
• Where did we lack in using our utility?
  
• Was there anything that needed to be changed in the dungeon routes to make it easier?
  
• What are our takeaways from how we played?

These questions led to far more productive discussions than the usual yelling or blaming I experienced in previous competitive scenes or groups in gaming. People are far more willing to admit to their mistakes and improve if they are approached in a positive way.

I was impressed with the group that we had put together for this season. Even more impressive was how far we got with none of the top meta picks for the season (e.g., Blood Death Knight, Holy Priest, Survival Hunter, and Warlock). I am really proud of our group; it was a truly illuminating and valuable experience.

Closing Thoughts on My Experience

Throughout this article, I’ve been talking about my own personal experiences. But really, the experience just made me proud of myself for doing so well in something that I’m extremely passionate about. I got to watch myself go from what I see was an average player, to someone who now shows skills that exceed anything that I thought I was ever capable of.

Despite all our efforts, we ultimately missed our goal of achieving the Shrouded Hero title. We managed to push our Mythic+ score all the way up to 3015, and when we stopped pushing, the title cut-off was still about 200 score below ours. As we did our experiment in the middle of the season, players would slowly achieve a higher score than us, and the final cut-off ended up being at 3087 score.

I will admit that, initially, the fact of knowing that we didn’t successfully push to where we wanted to be, really hit me hard. It is natural to feel very, very bad about a failure. However, after that feeling subsided,and I took some time away from my Rogue, I went back to her with a renewed interest and love of everything “Rogue”.

The most enjoyable part of the experience, by far, was playing my Rogue in a totally new way. While I have been a CE raider for quite some time now, going for the highest echelon is something different entirely, and watching myself grow and learn new skills and become even better than I thought I could be, still fills me with pride.

There are some dark sides to it all, however, and I would say my least favorite part of pushing was the strain it put on my everyday life, with the crazy amount of time we put towards pushing. If you didn’t do the math going through the schedule portion of this article – it was anywhere from 8 to 12 hours of pushing a day, for about a month straight. If you know anyone putting themselves through that, keep them in your thoughts; they’re going through it too!

In Dragonflight, I am more excited about the game than ever before. I went into a brand new expansion, a new era of the game, as the best player I’ve ever been. My goals for Dragonflight are the same they’ve always been – to control growing as a person and player, and enjoying the game I love so much. So far, I love Mythic+ in Dragonflight and am looking forward to seeing how far I can push this Season.

Thank you all for walking through my Mythic+ journey with me through this narrative, and I wish you the best of luck in your Mythic+ pushing endeavors in Dragonflight! I hope you are enjoying Dragonflight as much as I am.

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