WoW devs reveal how Patch 11.1 could have major impact on players running off meta builds

World of Warcraft: The War Within is set to graduate to Patch 11.1, and the Undermine(d) content update is giving the developer chance to address issues from the expansion’s first major phase. Among those is the Mythic+ landscape, and there’s plenty of potential good news for players.

Mythic+ is naturally one of the most intense activities in WoW, as players race against the clock to defeat increasingly difficult dungeons. The higher the Key that players are running, the less time they have to emerge victorious and the harder the enemies are to kill.

Thanks to that setup, players can be quite selective about who they let into their groups, and that has become more and more true as The War Within has progressed. Equally, even very skilled players have found themselves excluded thanks to their chosen spec or class.

To address their plans for Mythic+ and the wider situation around group finding, we spoke to Ion Hazzikostas about their plans for 11.1 and the future more generally.

Off-meta specs might not be a huge deal for long

Blizzard Entertainment

The player control over who is allowed into a Mythic+ group does place some immediate limitations on what the developers can do to ensure everyone gets to try it out. As Hazzikostas explains, they do have some active ways of addressing these issues.

“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility, and players are right to say that we should do more to make sure that they have options when it comes to finding groups. I think there’s two facets to that.

“One is, of course, ongoing class and spec balancing. We always make active changes to class balance over the course of the season, though I will say we usually prefer to buff lower end performers.

“We do much less to nerf high-end performers mid-season, because that can be very frustrating as a setback if a group or a player feels like they can’t accomplish something they could yesterday.

The arrival of the Undermine(d) content update also gives them a chance to alter how the experience works to lessen the problems with groups, rather than directly altering classes and specs.

“Going into a new season it gives us a chance to fix some of those disparities. A big thing that we do control also is the overall accessibility and challenge posed by the experiences themselves.

“As we’ve discussed, looking at Season Two and Mythic+, one of the reflections from Season One was that because players felt like they needed to start at high difficulty levels to get relevant rewards, success rates were lower than usual, and that puts pressure on the perceived meta.

“It makes players pickier when it comes to forming their groups because they’re worried about not succeeding, and I think having a more welcoming experience there will allow all specs to have more of a chance to shine and get that experience.

“At the end of the day, when they’re applying for groups, they can demonstrate that yes, they have succeeded at this level. Regardless of what class they play or what spec they play, they’re much more likely to find a home.”

The Undermine(d) content update, technically known as Patch 11.1, goes live on WoW servers on February 25, with Season Two activating a week later on March 4.