It’s time for a reckoning! It’s widely been reported that The War Within Season 1 wasn’t that great in terms of player engagement. Whether it was the Delves or affixes or the popularity of the expansion, the general sentiment seemed to be that it wasn’t quite a successful season.
Today we’re disproving that. Nightstalker314 takes a deep dive into the stats, specifically how the squish and season lengths very much change the outcome of the run number and completion comparisons. This actually makes TWW Season 1 come out on top for the last two expansions (and probably more as well). And we’re not even looking at the previous season’s stat bloat while Chinese players were playing on Taiwanese servers – but we will!
We will be comparing The War Within Season 1 to all of Dragonflight’s Seasons as well as Shadowlands Season 1. There was a massive decline during the rest of Shadowlands so these seasons are ignored. BfA is also less relevant. There was no reason to farm for more Vault options and the expansion in general had terrible depletion rates. And Legion’s data is even worse than BfA’s. All the data is gathered from Raider.IO.
What Changed With the Squish?
With the start of Dragonflight Season 4, the Mythic+ key level system was drastically cut down. Gearing through drops and vault rewards until then was done from level 2 to 20. Anything beyond that had no further benefit. The lower 10 key levels got removed and all key levels got reduced by 10. Though it was called a “squish” the scaling from one level to the next was mostly untouched.
Comparing Different Seasons at First Glance
When looking at the raw data for the most recent and most popular seasons you might get the impression that Season 1 of The War Within is underperforming. When it comes to the success rates (in time %) the current season is falling behind most of the competition. Specifically, Season 1 of Dragonflight and Season 1 of Shadowlands stand out with more than 36 million completed keys.
Side note: Battle for Azeroth Season 4 also ranks quite high with almost 30 million completed keys. However, it lasted for a huge 38 weeks! And it was propped up by rotating corruption vendors. And endlessly farming Mythic+ keys for titanforged and corruption RNG gear during peak lockdown in 2020. A factor that was completely ignored in a recent sensationalized PC gamer article.
Adjustments for Different Season Lengths
Shadowlands season 1 was notorious for feeling like an eternity (29 weeks). Meanwhile, the first season of Dragonflight was the shortest regular season so far with just 21 weeks. If we now restrict each season to the first 22 weeks, the numbers already shift quite a bit. Dragonflight season 2 loses 2.7 million runs and Shadowlands season 1 drops by 4.5 million. Success rates stay similar since those level out and stabilize towards the end of a season.
What Happens Once We Apply the Squish?
To get an even better comparison we now remove all key levels that would no longer be done with the current model for M+. For Shadowlands Season 1, we remove the first 6 key levels since the gearing cap was reached at key level 15. Those lower keys were usually just mandatory for new characters to breeze through. They rarely dropped below a 90% success rate in several seasons. Run numbers within this range also tend to bloat. This is due to players speed-farming Valor points in Dragonflight Season 1 and all Shadowlands seasons. The old version of the weekly dungeon event (4 Mythic dungeons for heroic raid loot) led to way more runs on key level 2.
Now let’s look at the changes under this restriction. Dragonflight Season 2 and 3 lose a bit more than 7 million runs. Shadowlands Season 1 drops more than 10 million. Dragonflight Season 1 plummets by 45% losing more than 16.5 million runs.
Since the low-level keys were rather easy, the overall success rates for older seasons drop quite a bit once we remove them. Dragonflight Season 3 drops by 2,45%, Season 2 by 4,96%, and Season 1 by a colossal 9,55%. Shadowlands Season 1 is once again the lowest of all but only drops by 5,23%.
Conclusions So Far
So under the same conditions, Season 1 of The War Within comes out ahead in total runs. Even compared to the highly beloved Season 3 of Dragonflight! In terms of success rate, it is now at number 3. Clearly ahead of the first seasons of the previous 2 expansions. Battle for Azeroth Season 1 can also be compared to this more directly since key level 10 was the peak for Vault rewards. But that season was abysmal compared to any other season. It had an overall success rate of 63,51% and just 46,77% for all keys of level 10.
Keeping all of this in mind, the recent season seems to be doing quite well. It’s more like “more of the same” instead of “one of the worst”. And TWW S1 actually makes it to the very top spot. Other factors that have to be taken into account would be:
- The squish was implemented with Dragonflight season 4 but the affix changes only started with this season. So players as well as developers still had to adapt to the new situation instead of seeing a final version of the changes and improvements as we did in Season 3 and 4 of Dragonflight.
- The Hero talents were completely new and also impacted the general progression and learning curve throughout the season, especially when a few specs saw and are still seeing further reworks.
- The reward system got slight changes by making myth track exclusive to key level 10 and above as well as shifting the crest rewards throughout the season and increasing the drop rates towards the end which to a degree even decreased the amount of required runs overall.
More Seasonal Differences in Detail
Looking at the individual key levels for all seasons – according to the adjusted restrictions – The War Within Season 1 is showing the biggest of all spikes at key level 10. This is obviously because it is the lowest level that is required for the highest Vault reward. The myth track rewards in Dragonflight Season 2-4 are split due to the Vault rewarding 1/4 and 2/4. Dragonflight Season 1 and Shadowlands Season 1 see focus on levels associated with older Vault item level breakpoints as well as rating breakpoints for the old upgrade system.
Normalized we can clearly see that Dragonflight Season 3 and 4 were also beloved because there was a lot more participation within the higher key levels beyond 11. Their drop-off level by level is slower than most other seasons while the recent season is clearly falling behind. This is a clear indicator of the grievances high-end players have been showing towards the new system. The massive step-ups due to the new affixes this season from 9 to 10 as well as from 11 to 12 do not feel smooth at all and have been partially addressed with the upcoming scaling overhaul at the start of Season 2 for The War Within.
Another showcase of scaling problems can be seen when looking at the success rates per key level. The curve for The War Within season 1 dropping off from 9 to 10 and even bouncing back at key level 11 clearly shows how important level 10 runs were in this season. The bottleneck for gearing, especially regarding the Great Vault should and will hopefully see some improvement in the future.
Final Words
Overall the first season of this expansion was quite successful and managed to bring a lot more players or rather player characters into the former upper echelons of Mythic+ gearing. A lot of additional factors made it a challenge for players and developers but with the changes coming in Patch 11.1 we should hopefully see improvements to the Mythic+ experience overall. Once the first numbers are out we will evaluate those and inform you about the effects these changes are showing.
This concludes the first part of our in depth analysis for The War Within Season 1. Next weekend we will be looking at weekly numbers and comparing progression. We will also highlight important changes to active character numbers across all regions which might once again surprise a lot of you.
