Players Are Demolishing Midnight: The Numbers Aren't Even Close

[00:03] different. I think Blizzard may have accidentally found themselves in a fairly important crossroads. You see, Midnight is by every measure that matters, and I mean actual measures, the easiest season that WoW has ever had.

[00:20] Yeah, it really is that on paper. But, the easy gameplay isn't really the story here. What's underneath it is. But, I think the first thing I need to talk about is that the evidence. And it's pretty striking. So, in the first week

[00:32] pretty striking. So, in the first week we saw that Mythic +10 keys had a 92% success rate, which really is huge because it's up from under 80% in previous expansions. So, more keys were completed than ever before. Players were

[00:47] getting Keystone Master once a seasonal goal within the very first week. And it's not gotten harder since then, either, because 94% of +10s are now either, because 94% of +10s are now actually done within time. And in just 4

[01:01] weeks, we've seen that more +14s have been completed than in the entirety of the War Within season 1. And that's by design, as well, because Blizzard are still nerfing the outlier dungeons. I mean, just this week, Algeth'ar Academy

[01:15] had its timer increased. Not to mention, of course, the Void Voyage giving access to BIS gear like never before. But, it's not just Mythic + cuz the same's going on in solo content. We don't have the numbers here, but we know it's been easy

[01:29] from day one. The big story here was the Nallius Hall of Fame being filled up Nallius Hall of Fame being filled up within under 24 hours. And that meant that even without gear, people were just able to take him down in a few hours of

[01:41] attempts. That's because the fight is mechanically basic, but he also didn't Then, there's the likes of Nightmare Prey. By the time most of us unlocked that, well, um we we were already kind of out-gearing its difficulty. And then,

[01:55] there's the Tier 11 delves. They're the same, as well. You can more or less out-gear those in just about one setting of playing the game. I mean, seriously, a freshly dinged DPS can just max out solo content right away, basically

[02:10] within one reset. And sure, it's kind of slow without the big weekly levers, but it is entirely possible. And we're even seeing it on weaker solo classes like rogue, where the likes of Nightmare Prey bosses just don't really pose a threat

[02:24] bosses just don't really pose a threat at like item level 200. So, yeah, WoW is definitely trending easier. Though, there's quite the wrinkle when it comes to heroic raid. But, overall, yeah, it's getting easier. Something is changing.

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[03:53] site or domain. So, we've covered a bunch of stats, but what's actually whole bunch of things. It's a new expansion. Class changes have drastically simplified gameplay in many cases, and add-ons lost a whole bunch of

[04:06] their power. So, in order to make all that work, things have got a little bit easier. And none of it's accidental. You see, last year Blizzard posted "Combat for everyone in Midnight." And it outright says that feedback is telling

[04:19] them, or I should say was telling them, that WoW was getting too complex. And if I look and save my own comment section, I think that does absolutely hold up, as well. So, to deal with this problem, Blizzard pruned. Some specs, like say

[04:34] the sub rogue and the arcane mage, probably lost too much in that pruning. And healers are still a bit upset at losing their kicks. But, mostly, from what I'm seeing, players are actually enjoying themselves having fewer buttons

[04:47] and fewer things to track. Say, if you're a DPS player, you can just go full send on the doing damage bit. Now, let's get on to our encounters. They are much easier, as well. Dungeon bosses have only got one or two major

[05:00] to understand. Mob packs have few dangerous casts, and we've got all the time in the world to interrupt them. Delves are almost entirely unthreatening outside of AoE ground effects. And really, it's all quite mechanically,

[05:14] well, easy is one word, approachable is another word. And again, this is entirely intentional, and the most obvious case is with Nallius, cuz he really contrasts with the Nemesis bosses that came before him. In the War Within,

[05:28] we had the Underpin, which was a bit of a gimmick fight, but it was a pretty damn involved one that took a lot of time and experience to actually nail. Then, there was Ky'veza, an absolute torrent of mechanics that just pushed

[05:41] your focus to its limits. Nallius, though, is one kick, some adds, and a DPS check at the end. Now, maybe this is all just because it's the first season. Maybe they want the first season boss to be a bit more gentle. But, fighting him

[05:55] after Ky'veza is, rather obviously, a massive change in vibes. Beyond just mechanics, it's actually in the numbers, as well. This season is clearly what we would call under-tuned in any normal time, and seemingly intentionally so.

[06:11] But, the thing is, we've got the numbers that kind of says it's actually working. they're enjoying the game more like this. Now, I get it, right? It's a new expansion. Maybe there's a bit of a honeymoon period. But, it also reminds

[06:25] me of Dragonflight season 3, specifically with Mythic + because that M+ season was easier than just about any of the others around that time. And if memory serves, people basically loved it. So, it seems, then, that

[06:38] through their under-tuning and their simplifying, Blizzard might have stumbled onto a much, much healthier version of WoW. Now, usually, in online discussion, easier is taken to mean bad. It's taken

[06:54] to mean far worse. I don't think that's the case. Let me explain why. I've literally been playing WoW for over half of my lifetime, a decent bit over half of my lifetime, actually. So, you

[07:06] know what? I've kind of seen a lot of things come and go. Whether we're things come and go. Whether we're talking about Karazhan being a good like entry source of gear in The Burning Crusade, or 10-man raiding in Wrath of

[07:18] the Lich King, one thing that's really clear is that having easier options has just about always been better for the health of the game. I mean, as much as there was many great aspects to the raiding revamp of

[07:31] the Cataclysm expansion, it did basically wall off entire segments of the player base, and uh you may have remembered that that's around the time that WoW sub numbers stopped going up and very much started going down very

[07:46] that every time WoW has walled off gameplay or gear, it has caused backlash. And one of the biggest ever was the Warlords of Draenor heroic wall. Basically, not everyone could keep up with the game getting more and more

[08:00] complicated, which really started taking off around Mists. Because during Mists, our classes were unbelievably goddamn powerful with so much utility and so much in their kits.

[08:13] Now, this obviously caused problems as we went into WoD. WoD being the expansion that basically introduced pruning as a concept to World of Warcraft. So, what this ended up leading to was a

[08:25] funny wee situation, where in WoD, to queue up for a heroic dungeon, you had to get silver in the proving ground for the role you would be queuing. Now, the silver proving grounds were easy, unbelievably easy. Tanks had

[08:40] to do tank things, right? They had to keep an NPC alive. DPS had to hit priority targets, and healers had to react to different types of damage. It very much was basic WoW mechanics. And by basic, I mean basic. These things

[08:52] were a fraction as complicated as WoD's heroic dungeons, but uh that did not matter. Because the thing you may not know is that this was a colossal show.

[09:06] Colossal. And to call it a disaster would be an understatement. It caused insane amounts of damage to an already controversial expansion. And I remember believe it. I literally could not

[09:20] silver proving grounds. And the big argument, the player backlash, was that Blizzard was locking people out of content and out of gear, and that asking for a silver proving ground was, in fact, very elitist of

[09:35] them. Now, it wasn't all that simple. Some classes and specs had a genuinely tough time with all of the pruning, and the proving grounds actually scaled with gear, so you couldn't really out-gear them, which is the usual WoW way of

[09:48] challenge that you haven't been able to surmount. But, the point basically is here, Blizzard put a wall in the the and players were not happy. And that was the first time Blizzard learned a real key lesson.

[10:01] for years have screamed from the rooftops that they actually don't want wild to be a rock-hard game. Not because of some terrible malign Not because of some terrible malign reasons, but actually because they enjoy

[10:16] wild when it's relaxing. They want it to stay relaxing. They want to log in, chill out, get some progress, and have fun. And you know what? It's hardly a shocking thing for people to want from an MMORPG. But in a long-run live game

[10:31] like wild, lessons often don't stick, right? Devs change, context change, expansions change, lessons end up being forgotten. this whole lesson again. And it happened

[10:44] Dragonflight season 4, Blizzard did a hard reset in Mythic Plus. They squished it all down so that a Mythic zero was as hard as a season 3's plus 10. And a plus 10 was the highest level of reward, equivalent to the older plus 20. Now,

[11:00] that led to people being utterly blindsided and upset by how hard these dungeons were. Now, moving on to the War Within season 1, we found a lot more success, but it was still known for at times being goddamn brutal.

[11:15] It seems then that Blizzard realized the mistake, and now we're back here, where plus 10s are once again relatively easy, perhaps just like they were in Dragonflight season 3, the one that I mentioned earlier. People are

[11:29] progressing quickly, they're having a great enough time. That's healthy, but something this time is different. It's better, and it's what made us excited enough about difficulty in wild to actually bother making this video.

[11:42] The last time plus 10s really weren't that hard was back in Dragonflight when you needed to do a plus 20 to max out your rewards. But this time, all you need to do to get myth gear in your vault is a plus 10. So, if gear is your

[11:55] goal, you've just got no reason to push higher. Your weekly 10s and a few tier upgrade your gear and to craft, of course, almost maxed out pieces of gear. level. And if all you're after is a full set of hero gear and a little trickle of

[12:11] myth gear, then the threshold really does end at a relatively low difficulty, so you don't need to push into the rock-hard stuff. Basically, gearing is now fast and easy for everyone, as is upgrading. We've got tons of crests

[12:26] including, of course, the new Nightmare Prey. It's all just insanely fast. I mean, you can cap out on your hero crests within about an hour each week just by doing three Nightmare Preys and a few delves.

[12:39] None of this stuff is by accident, either. As associate game director Paul Kubit told Taliesyn and Evitel that it was just a little bit faster than they were expecting, which means they did expect it to be quick, just not this

[12:52] quick. Now, he said that it wasn't at the high end that the big speed was, but that it was actually in the middle, that it was the average player basically having an easier, faster time reaching their goals. And once they've met those

[13:05] goals, they can go back to housing, try their deck or jewels, or one of the other million other things that wild gives us to do these days. But he did slip in something really, really interesting that could

[13:19] point to wild's future and the gels with what we're seeing in the PTR. Paul highlighted that Keystone Myth, the new 3400 rating Mythic Plus score goal, was actually added late on PTR. And to me, that implies that it's a bit of a

[13:34] reaction from Blizz, that it's their fix for the easy Mythic Plus and the easy gearing. And I think it's a smart one because it gives people something real to aim for. And so far, it looks like it's working. You see, in a way,

[13:46] Blizzard are accepting defeat, where instead of using gear to push people into hard content, they're letting everyone finish gearing without that much of a challenge, at least compared to points in the past.

[13:59] accepting defeat, I think it's actually a victory because players do appear to Now, gearing, of course, still does exist, and it's not going to be going anywhere. It's too important to wild. But this expansion marks a bit of a

[14:13] shift in who it's for. Skilled players will almost skip over gear. It's going to be just that fast. They'll have full heroic gear from plus 10s in just a week improving their skills and their strategies over the season, as well as

[14:28] working their way towards their true BIS. Everyone else can take way longer to gear, but they just won't have to push to super hard content to do so. And yeah, they won't get BIS because they're probably not Mythic rating, but they

[14:41] will be able to get most of the way there over time. And the end result is that difficulty in wild is becoming optional in an interesting way. Now, it's kind of been this way for a while. If you want, you could absolutely skip

[14:54] the harder stuff in wild, but obviously, gear was always so tight to difficulty. What we see here is that, accidentally or not, Midnight is Blizzard's attempt to draw a line where if you want to get sweaty, you can do that, but if you

[15:08] don't want to, you really won't lose out on any of the game or the gear. You'll see all the stuff. Now, there might be a really cool mount or a really cool title that you won't get, but I think that's fine. And what we're seeing with what

[15:23] Blizzard have just added in 12.0.5 is that now, for our PvE content and for Mythic Plus, we basically have the exact same as the Gladiator mount and

[15:35] Gladiator title from PvP. And that, I think, is a near flawless place for Blizzard to be. Because people can get their character feeling goddamn strong. I think that makes

[15:49] people feel happy about their character and happy about their progress, which will then mean they can look at those harder kind of grail goals, like hitting 3400 rating, and actually feel like they can attain it. Now, the whole point is

[16:04] is probably the type of person who always would like some difficulty, so it still will work really well for them. But perhaps the huge difference is that for the people who aren't as interested in that type of difficulty, it is

[16:18] seeming like they're able to get more from their game and experience more of the game, and therefore do seem to be happier. It does seem to be pretty damn happier. It does seem to be pretty damn good. I would say almost flawless.

[16:32] Though there are a few exceptions. Is there a downside? Well, honestly, trade-off is a better word than downside. Basically, even if Blizzard splits up the motivations between player types, there are still lots of things

[16:47] that are shared within wild, right? Class designs affect everybody is one example. Say, sub rogue and arcane mage are shells of their former selves. They're completely gutted of anything

[16:59] that made them interesting. Yet, sub rogue is seeing a hell of a lot of play because it's really strong, and that's led to some frustration from players who just want deeper specs in the game. Now, the other downside comes from

[17:11] Blizzard's motto. That motto being easy to learn, hard to master. Now, obviously, scaling dungeons up makes them harder. You learn mechanics in the lower levels, and then you master them as you go up. You optimize your pulls,

[17:24] your cooldowns, and your defensives, and those things become super important at high Keystone levels. It takes insane levels of skill to push keys at the highest levels because you've got to master every minor detail.

[17:37] But of course, you're doing the same simple set of mechanics the entire way up, which may end up getting a bit boring, but to be honest, if we look at the results from Mythic Plus so far, that just does not seem to be much of a

[17:50] problem yet. Now, the other fear is that faster gearing could, in theory, shorten all, players can kind of skip their way to plus 10s really quick and just get a shitload of gear. That's led to a few

[18:03] interesting things. One of them is that some of the lower Keystone levels are pretty much empty. Though, of course, with the focus in horizontal progression and faster patches, that shouldn't be as much of a problem. Now, obviously, we

[18:17] know that forcing these quick mid-season updates has had very obvious effects in game quality, and that's another pretty major downside. Blizzard is clearly anxious about having any downtime whatsoever in the game, which means

[18:29] eight-week patches, which does mean lots of completely unforced errors. But let's be honest, longer gearing or a harder game probably won't keep that

[18:41] more casual portion of the audience around anyway. And looking at most season, it does seem that gearing getting out of the way is actually welcome to them because it kind of just lets them get stuck into the stuff they

[18:57] Now, on the balance front, I think this also could be a bit of a good direction. We're seeing a much easier game for regular players, a smoother game to play for the higher-end players, and ultimately, the slow death of gearing as

[19:10] a long-term hook for play. If handled right, it could make most players a whole lot happier with the game. And it might pan out just right. Hell, Blizzard have even made sure that rating has got a place in this plan. And

[19:26] that's what gets me to a fascinating exception in all of this. Here's where it gets fascinating. Raid is a total departure from a whole bunch of what we talked about in this video, and the actual statistics bring it up,

[19:40] but I think Blizzard are doing it in a way that actually kind of works. So, M Plus and solo content are easy, right? We've covered that so far in the video. And with that going on, you would expect see raid numbers that kind of match

[19:54] that, right? People just piling into raid and just destroying it. We are not seeing that whatsoever. Heroic Lur is in fact the least killed end boss over the last few tiers of World of Warcraft, and I've got numbers. Four weeks after

[20:09] Nerubar's launch, over 3,700 guilds killed Anub'arak. That's the expansion's first boss. Now, to go to the War Within's final boss, four weeks after Manaforge Omega launched, almost 6,000 guilds had taken down Demansius.

[20:24] numbers. Now, here's the numbers for Lur. In that Now, here's the numbers for Lur. In that same four-week period, only 1,125 guilds managed to take her down. And if we adjust it to account for the later

[20:39] March of the Lich King release, it is still well, well under 3,000. And what's wild is that our fairly casual guild that plays two nights a week, well, we ended up in the top 2,000, which is a complete shock to us. It is

[20:54] unheard of for us. And it's not like raiding itself is any less popular because 10,000 guilds killed Leria and Beleren, which is actually up from the last few tiers. We're actually seeing that Midnight

[21:09] raiding is god damn flourishing. It's just that Lur is an amazing and kind of overwhelming boss. And even better, it's one that Blizzard haven't actually nerfed yet, despite seeing fewer kills. So, it seems they're happy

[21:23] to let people try and climb that wall. I would almost say that the raid team things easier, but I think there's a bit have been planned. Though, there's another memo they probably didn't get,

[21:37] which is gear because outside of tier gear and some trinkets, raid is World of Warcraft. Like, don't even bother. You've got a limited weekly lockout, a tiny chance compared to commitment

[21:55] So, it's weird. Raiding is still a pillar of the end game, but it does feel less like you have to do it. It rather just feels like another option. But, the thing is, if you think about it that way, it actually does fit into this new

[22:08] split gearing paradigm. If you just want gear, then yeah, M Plus and solo content are quick and easy. You can get your character ready. Raiding is basically optional. If you just want to see boss, you've got the story mode. If you want

[22:22] to face off against Lur and get overwhelmed, then, you know what? You're game. And funnily enough, that's why my guild And you know what? We are also living in this world of gearing being really

[22:36] this world of gearing being really rapid. And that's meant something that's actually not happened much before. We killed Lur, there. And because our alts can get started and

[22:49] can get geared fairly quickly, it actually feels like that's a viable way for us to play the game. So, basically, the thesis of this video is that Blizzard have, perhaps accidentally in a few ways, stumbled on

[23:04] what could be a much healthier version of the end game. One where players don't want a ball-busting like level of challenge and just kind of want to log in, play a bunch of content, maybe stress themselves a little bit, but by

[23:16] and large just have fun and get progress. Well, they can do that. They are doing that. The numbers sure do seem to back it up, and it seems a lot of then those of us who want the challenge, well, we can get geared super fast, and

[23:30] we can get right to the juicy bit. And with bosses like Lur, man, the juicy bit is real juicy and real delicious. And now, in the Mythic Plus realm, with what they've done in patch 12.0.5 with the new 3,400 rating thing that basically

[23:45] has just given us gladiator mounts, but for Mythic Plus, yeah, it it seems the Mythic Plusers are going to get that as well. So, you know what? Even for all the chaos, it seems we're getting to our real healthy place

[23:58] for playing WoW at end game. All it took was making the game a lot easier than maybe ever before, but somehow still preserving top end and getting a bunch of rewards right. Yeah, pretty cool. I'm very keen to see how

[24:13] on. And in a world where gearing works the way that it does, and Mythic Flex exists, holy I

[24:25] actually think that could pave the way for the healthiest raiding scene we've for the healthiest raiding scene we've maybe ever seen. Though, obviously, becomes true. Anyway, enough of this design soapboxing. How about we all just

[24:38] sit down and have a lovely chat about the big fish lady and where the hell she is. That's what we're going to do next in this video that's about Queen Azshara, the character who it almost feels like Midnight was designed for,

[24:51] feels like Midnight was designed for, but who so far hasn't exactly been but who so far hasn't exactly been present.