ADVANCED DF SEASON 1 GUIDES MYTHIC PLUS OPINION PIECE PLAY LIKE THE PROS ROUTES

Play Like the Pros: Dragonflight Season 1 Recap

By Biggerfish — Apr 28 2023 13:45 UTC

Throughout Dragonflight Season 1, Play Like the Pros has brought you the most efficient routes caught on Twitch streams.

With Season 1 coming to a close, let’s recap and rank each of the 8 dungeons by looking at how much our collective knowledge for skips and tech was able to evolve over the last five months. Then, we’ll give a letter grade to each dungeon that sums up our overall feelings about the dungeons and how creative they enabled us to be over the course of the season.

• Algeth'ar Academy
• Court of Stars
• Halls of Valor
• Ruby Life Pools
• Shadowmoon Burial Grounds
• Temple of the Jade Serpent
• The Azure Vault
• The Nokhud Offensive

ALGETH’AR ACADEMY

Algeth’ar Academy had our highest target cap pulls of any of our dungeons in Season 1, and that alone has to be worth a few points. This dungeon featured bosses that started off extremely difficult and were eventually tuned to be more reasonable. Algeth’ar had a fun choose-your-own-buff mechanic with the Dragonflights that was neat while simultaneously giving me some PTSD flashbacks to forgetting to change my secondary stat choice at the start of a run during Shrouded back in Shadowlands.

The dungeon map itself gave a lot of player agency for routing. Right off the bat, we had a fork in the road to go across the bridge to Vexamus or up the stairs to the Overgrown Ancient, which opened up more creative routing opportunities. We saw teams with differing opinions on which pathing was better depending on the affixes or more as an evolution seen throughout the entire season. Being a 32-minute timer, Algeth’ar fell into the category of “Bloodlust on cooldown the whole time so we get 4 Bloodlusts instead of 3,” which isn’t a knock on it because it generally lined up well for 3 of the bosses.

One of the first tricks discovered in Algeth’ar included pulling the Alpha Eagles out of the sky to avoid them slowly dive-bombing in one wave at a time, but that was extremely gimmicky with how they would evade, so we should be glad that was changed. Also, the Guardian Sentry is proof of the theory that if you give players an unskippable, pure single-target mini-boss, they will eventually find ways to snap other mobs onto it.

Altogether, Academy (pun intended) ended up being a fun key that was timed nearly as high as the obvious outliers and had multiple, unique and successful routes – even at the top end of the leaderboards.

COURT OF STARS

Having Court of Stars back, and having it be one of the easiest keys in the season, was like being forced to eat your favorite ice cream every day. For a while it’s great; you feel at home with something so familiar and so palatable, but after a while you start to wonder what a NEW flavor might have tasted like. Even later, you realize the best way to reroll your other keys is to run this dungeon twice as much as everything else because you’re most likely to time it since you already know everything about it. As the season ends, you look back at your Raider.IO Season 1 Recap and you find you ran Court of Stars 51 more times than any other dungeon and it does not spark joy.

That’s my extreme anecdote, but let’s be clear: I absolutely love the idea of bringing back old content and repolishing it for modern Mythic+. For me, the problem is when we bring back content that has already existed in Mythic+, already existed in Timewalking Mythic+, and then we change next to nothing about it while grouping it with 7 other keys that are going to be completely or partially new experiences, therein lies the problem. It contradicts the new approach to eliminating the cumulative “knowledge burden” of Mythic+ by having one key be already solved when the season starts. All that aside, Court of Stars is a quick 3 boss sprint without too many pain points besides almost every mob having a frontal for some reason.

HALLS OF VALOR

I won’t do the “old man yells at sky” bit again about bringing back previous dungeons that have already been in Mythic+, but I felt pain in my heart when this was announced for Season 1, and that feeling never really left as the season went on. Don’t get me wrong – removing the absurd RP downtime, changing some of the tank buster mechanics, and reducing the timer were all great changes…but can we please just never do another 5-boss dungeon in Mythic+ again? You’ve got these poor people murdering 100 wolves, bears, and bulls in a single pull just to have enough time to do 20 minutes worth of boss fights. Converting a 45-minute key into a 37-minute timer was a step in the right direction of modernizing Mythic+, but maybe we could have accepted Halls of Valor for what it was and picked a shorter old dungeon instead. That being said, seeing Echo find a way to innovate a one billion year old key for the MDI finals by dragging all the forest creatures into Odyn’s boss room was still pretty cool.

RUBY LIFE POOLS

Before you skip ahead to look at the grade and get mad, this is based on the FINAL version of Ruby Life Pools, after all the tuning that got us here. RLP, in my opinion, is a masterpiece. 30 minutes is the perfect timer, the bosses are challenging with interesting mechanics, and the routing options are extremely diverse for a dungeon that seems linear at first glance. First there’s the Primal Juggernauts – do we drink an invisibility potion before the key and skip them? Do we kill one and skip something later?

Then, we have Thunderhead and Flamegullet. Most routes killed Thunderhead until a certain key level when Rolling Thunder was too lethal and they would swap to the other side and kill Flamegullet with Bloodlust during his Molten Blood. The spiciest route was to kill neither, and fit the entirety of the Kokia Blazehoof boss fight between her spawn point and where Flamegullet lands.

An honorable mention of routing creativity goes out to the Infused Whelps that popped out of any eggs you stepped on and gave 1 count towards enemy forces so that you could dial any of your routes to exactly 100% by stepping on a specific number of eggs in the first room.

Yes, Inferno was insanely overtuned. Sure, Cinderbolt had to be nerfed by a WILD 50%, but what we ended up with was one of my favorite dungeons in recent years.

SHADOWMOON BURIAL GROUNDS

Shadowmoon Burial Grounds is your local Italian restaurant. The inside is kind of dusty, the chicken parmesan could be a little crispier on the bottom, but you know exactly what you’re gonna get, and it’s like four minutes from your house so it’s fine. Admittedly, there’s some whiplash between using every neuron in your brain on some of the bosses in the new dungeons and then coming back and staring at Bonemaw as he burrows away from you and spams one mechanic for 5 minutes, but maybe that says more about the relative complexity of the game between now and Warlords of Draenor than it does about Shadowmoon Burial Grounds itself.

Unfortunately, this simplicity also made SBG the “Mechagon: Junkyard” equivalent for this season; a highly sought after key but for all the wrong reasons. Being a brand new key to Mythic+, we did have some fun discoveries including jumping around Bonemaw’s boss arena to pull some mysteriously disappearing Corpse Skitterlings, and skipping the entire beginning of the dungeon to take a pack directly onto the first boss as quickly as possible. There were a few choices in the top routes towards the end, but the lack of challenge throughout this key puts a hard ceiling on its grade.

TEMPLE OF THE JADE SERPENT

The oldest of our eight dungeons came all the way back from Mists of Pandaria and got a new coat of paint much like Shadowmoon did. Similar to SBG, Temple of the Jade Serpent is mechanically much simpler than any of the brand new dungeons we got with Dragonflight, but it differs from SBG in the way that it is consistently challenging from beginning to end rather than being a free ride with a couple of make-or-break moments. There is a place in modern Mythic+ for encounters that are more numerically challenging than they are complex, but it would help if it wasn’t a straight line with no options or alternatives. Routing stayed almost completely the same outside of small optimizations like pulling trash through the wall during Liu Flameheart or skipping Xiang and Jiang in exchange for the two mobs behind Wise Mari’s area. Most egregious of anything is that the last pull on this dungeon was never changed despite being an absolute deathtrap.

Issues aside, I still had a lot more fun in Temple of the Jade Serpent than some other keys, and it gets bonus points for the short timer, giving it a small edge over the average ranking.

THE AZURE VAULT

Initially, I didn’t like Azure Vault. I thought it was too punishing for PUGs and certain group compositions due to the sheer number of required interrupts and stops that needed to be coordinated between Piercing Shards and Mystic Vapors, and the bosses all required a pretty high amount of coordination with positioning. That’s still all true, but that was before the ring skipping. Now we’re at the end of the season, everybody is pretty much on the same page about stopping the right abilities, and the routing in this key is incredible. There’s probably more than 10 ways to time Azure Vault on a competitive keystone level, and that’s the perfect situation we like to see in Mythic+. With the little bit of tuning, Blizzard did bring the bosses in line, and a small bump to the timer.

Overall, The Azure Vault is a very satisfying dungeon. I can look past a lot of the problems because you can just as likely find yourself killing frogs to fill out your enemy forces at the end of your key as doing the final two bosses back-to-back. Both methods are viable at a competitive level, which is awesome.

THE NOKHUD OFFENSIVE

The Nokhud Offensive has some great boss design, a cool Dragonriding gimmick, and some interesting trash mobs, but it simply overstays its welcome. There’s a reason that MOBAs and shooter games are moving towards shorter and shorter match lengths; 40 minutes is just way too long. There is no bigger knife in the stomach than wiping on the last boss of Nokhud after sweating through 39 minutes of mechanical bloat. I can only imagine a world where we couldn’t fly directly to the last boss and actually had to fight those insane trash mobs in Nokudon Hold.

Despite the freedom of being able to fly wherever we wanted on the map, we never really saw huge innovations in routing. Boss order stayed the exact same throughout the season, and the only real evolutions with competitive routing were made in the cemetery area to cram together as many arbitrary enemy forces count % as possible. With 30% less mobs around Granyth and the cemetery, I could see this having been a decently fun 32-minute key. In its current Director’s Cut edition, The Nokhud Offensive is a mechanically dense slog that drags on long enough to feel exhausting by the end.

We want to extend a big thank-you to all the pros and collaborators that contributed to the success of this new series aimed towards high Mythic+ key pushers looking to ascend the ranks into that top echelon of Mythic+ gameplay. Numerous pros contributed notes and allowed us to feature their routes over the past few months, so we are extremely grateful for their participation and the tech that they shared with the rest of the community.

For a look-back on all the Play Like the Pros articles of Season 1, please click here.

See you in Season 2 for more competitive routing imports brought to you by Play Like the Pros and your favorite Mythic+ streamers!

About the Author

Biggerfish is a recovering Boomkin who has played WoW for 14 years and has been an avid Mythic+ player since it released in Legion. He mostly tanks, and can be found on most weeknights in the NA Group Finder bricking your keys.

VitaminP (VP) is the Content Manager of Raider.IO and has worked for the organization since the formation of the News Section in November 2018. Although VP is currently focused on pursuing her Masters of Business Administration, she specializes in tanking classes and has loved doing competitive Mythic+ on and off since early Legion.