The Mythic+ dungeon pool for World of Warcraft Dragonflight season two has been revealed. And although there’s still some time separating us from the launch of the expansion’s second season, players will still have the opportunity to get excited early over heading back to some of the game’s legacy dungeons in a future patch.
In season two of Dragonflight, the legacy dungeons coming to the Mythic+ pool are Freehold, Neltharion’s Lair, the Vortex Pinnacle, and the Underrot. These four selections are certainly out-of-left-field to the naked eye, although WoW associate game director Morgan Day explained in a group interview yesterday that the dev team does have a strategy when picking the four dungeons from past expansions that join four current-expansion dungeons in a particular season’s Mythic+ pool.
One of those major driving factors for a dungeon’s representation in Mythic+ is the evolving story of Dragonflight.
After players got to re-experience the Halls of Valor dungeon in the Mythic+ pool for season one alongside Dragonflight’s titan-focused questlines, the story will now shift its focus towards Neltharion and the Black Dragonflight, opening the way for the Neltharion’s Lair dungeon from Legion to accompany the campaign’s themes.
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“In terms of how that pool is chosen, it’s kind of a smattering of ideas and philosophies,” Day said. “We have a dungeon from Legion called Neltharion’s Lair and it also has Drogbar in it, and they’re making an appearance in Zaralek Cavern, so that one felt like a slam dunk. Vortex Pinnacle also feels like it has some interesting story beats and implications to follow-up on.”
Day said it’s “definitely not a coincidence” that story-relative dungeons pop up in the Mythic+ pool. But beyond dungeons that have a purpose in WoW’s greater story, Blizzard also confirmed that some dungeons are selected for the pool based on the player base’s decisions.
“Then there are also some that are just fan favorites,” Day said. “Every time those community threads popped up around like—‘hey what kind of dungeons do you want to see in season 2?’— Freehold was mentioned in every one of those threads. So, being a fan favorite, we just felt like that one needed to be included.”
The forthcoming season of Mythic+ dungeons will include the four Dragonflight dungeons that haven’t been seen in the M+ rotation thus far—Neltharus, Brackenhide Hollow, Halls of Infusion, and Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr. Those dungeons are particularly long and should have lengthy timers attached to them, so quicker dungeons like Vortex Pinnacle and Underrot will be welcome alternatives.
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“We look at the Mythic+ dungeon pool as a cohesive experience, the same way we look at a raid as one cohesive experience,” Day said. “We want to try to make sure that we have coverage in terms of ‘what kind of damage profiles are we asking you to do?’ and ‘what kind of utility are we asking you to use?’. We felt like Underrot had a lot of really fun core WoW gameplay mechanics with interesting dispel profiles, so it really just helped round out that kind of seasonal package of what we had available for the players.”
WoW players will have access to the season two Mythic+ pool when WoW Patch 10.1: Embers of Neltharion launches later this year.
