I just did my first mythic dungeon last night. Here are a few things I wish a casual like myself was told earlier in the expansion

As someone who's played long enough to see many guilds die and lose all of his friends who once played wow, over the years I became very reluctant to do mythics because of the PUG-ing aspect and the horror stories you read on reddit and elsewhere. After stalling at 410 ilvl and failing to get an lfr upgrade a few lockouts in a row, I decided to finally plunge into mythic dungeons because my desire to get over the 410 hump from dungeon finder trumped my reluctance to get into a PUG. That mythic dungeon ended up being the most fun I've had doing dungeons all expansion, and I want to share some reasons I avoided it at first and why all of my reasons for hesitation ended up being rather unfounded:​PUGs are mostly just nice people looking to run contentThe biggest reason I avoided joining a pug is because I log into WoW to relax and escape. Joining a PUG supposedly full of brats and try-hards is far from my idea of relaxing or escaping. It's also been since Mists that I had any social experience in this game (on my own accord, over the years I've just had less and less desire to interact with strangers) so I just got out of the habit of socializing with other players.The reality? Those horror stories you read on reddit and elsewhere about nightmare PUG groups are just extremes. A majority of the groups I joined were just a bunch of friendly people looking for a challenge. Trash humans are the exception, not the rule, so don't avoid PUGs just because you think it's nothing but unpleasant people.​Joining a PUG for Mythic was actually faster than queuing in for LFR (as DPS).Truth be told: another big reason I avoided Mythic was because I assumed the process for preparing was long. I didn't want to log in, spend an hour getting a group together (multiplicative with the fear of joining a group full of turds), to then spend another hour trudging through a mythic dungeon that may not even succeed.The reality: my mythic groups were formed in 15 minutes or less, then their ability to join a PUG alone demonstrated a higher intelligence level than an LFR player, so the dungeon was cleared relatively fast. But in truth the time spent in the dungeon didn't matter because it was fun. I didn't have to worry about half the raid being AFK for a fight or all of the other things that make LFR take forever, because it's just you and four other people who read the dungeon journal, and if you wipe, it's just getting the five of you back in order.So after all these years of thinking Mythics were this long arduous process, I formed a PUG and cleared the dungeon in the time it would normally take for my queue as DPS to pop. And I had much more fun and satisfaction in the process and the outcome.​Low level mythics aren't horribly challenging, they're just on par with what heroics used to be back in Mists.Yes, all of those affixes seem a little scary, but most of them don't kick in until higher keystone levels. I was intimidated by all the affixes, thinking that I would have to learn them all at once or get yelled at and kicked, but that wasn't the case. In the entry level mythics it's pretty easy to just get a grasp on the mechanics, and you don't have to worry about dealing with 3-4 affixes at once. Completing even a Mythic0 wasn't horribly challenging, but it was challenging enough for me to feel a level of satisfaction clearing content I haven't felt in a long while. I don't know what keystone level these dungeons start to break into hardcore territory, but believe me: it isn't the early keystones. Don't avoid mythics just because you think they're hardcore levels of difficulty as you see in the 10+ keys. This next one is the most important one for me:​Mythic Dungeons cure apathy for players like me who don't raid or have a functioning guildTurns out, all of my apathy with this expac and Legion was a result of me not challenging myself *because* of the last two points. It's not that I didn't want to do a mythic dungeon, it's just that I didn't want to go through the process of getting into one and finishing it because of my own misconceptions. I stopped caring about gold, professions, gear, and ultimately, my character, just because I was out of ways of challenging myself without interacting with other people.A night of running Mythics with strangers on my server absolutely revitalized my desire to actually progress and challenge myself as a WoW player for the first time since Mists. Progressing up the keystones forced me to actually put effort into getting the food I needed, so I was leveling cooking and fishing again, it pushed me to progress my essences which had been sitting at minimum levels, by getting tidalcores I suddenly wanted to do JC again, I was running around collecting azerite for that third essence slot... it just made the whole game make sense again! Suddenly I *wanted* to do the content that was in front of me the whole time, but didn't have value to me because my current ilvl allowed me to do open world content easily enough without progressing.​In the end, Mythic dungeons got me back into socializing, back into professions, back into progression, and back into caring about the game. The only reason I'm posting this diary entry is because I know I'm not the only person who was in this position, and if I can help anyone get back into the swing of things by getting them to just say "fuck it" and join a mythic dungeon to see how much fun they are then I would be happy.Mythics really are made for casual players believe it or not, and I hope more people like me take the dive into the game because just a few mythics reminded me why I love WoW. So if you're like me and logging in just to do the bare minimum before running in circles around Boralus, just open up that group finder!