Four weeks into Season 2 of The War Within Mythic+ is shaping up quite well. Many players have voiced their satisfaction with the general experience and the improved tuning and balancing efforts. But how big is the difference between the start of Season 2 and Season 1?
Using Raider.IO data, Nightstalker314 is once again looking into the metrics. The progression throughout the key levels is reaching a shape that took the previous season several weeks longer. Farming keys for the vault is much easier. Beyond that players push towards higher keys a lot faster and in way higher numbers. But at the highest key levels the differences in dungeon tuning still lead to big gaps in preferences. So let’s look at the details.
Overall Data For The First 4 Weeks Compared
First, let’s look at the raw numbers of completed runs. We can see that the typical pattern of peaks at the most desired key levels is emerging a lot quicker in S2. The basic pattern has already formed in week 2 and is only getting more pronounced. Key levels 6, 7, and 10 see big interest, and even beyond 10 the curve isn’t dropping off that fast. Meanwhile, in S1, most players were still stuck with farming low-level keys to get any kind of progression done.
Completion Rates
The success rates for completed keys also improved a lot more per week for the relevant key levels in S2. The only area where S1 seems to have done better is keys beyond level 12. You have to keep in mind that at this key level range, we saw less than 4,000 runs within the first 4 weeks of S1. Meanwhile, the comparative number for S2 would be above 130,000. It is quite plausible that people were avoiding higher key levels early in S1 and only played them when they knew they had a good chance of timing. The benefit from the Keystone Legend achievement now allows players to risk an over-time key without depletion. So they can keep going just to practice some more until the entire run is finished.
In S2 lower keys also see a better progression curve for quite a while instead of dropping off once the first affix is implemented at key level 4. And the drop-offs at key levels 7 and 10 have been smoothing out a lot better. Key level 10 runs in week 4 are already timed more than 80% of the time. This value would only be surpassed in S1 after 11 weeks. And as of the writing of this article, week 5 for S2 is already showing more than 83% for +10 keys.
The Extreme Differences Between Both Seasons Beyond Key Level 10
Next up, we compare the total run numbers of S1 and S2 per key level. A ratio below 1 means that S2 saw fewer keys per level in the same week. A value above 1 shows the opposite. We only see lower keys above S1 levels in week 4, and that’s due to the dungeon event quest. For key levels 6 and 7, the values are quite close for both seasons, despite S2 showing fewer total runs for each week. And once we get to key level 10, we see a clear dominance of S2 for every week so far.
Beyond this key level, the switch to a logarithmic scale becomes obvious. For the last 2-3 key levels of each week, S2 is outperforming S1 by factors between 18 and 324. The overall appreciation from high-end Mythic+ players for this season is clearly showing within these curves.
A Lot More Keystone Hero (2,500) And Keystone Legend (3,000) Progress
The difference between the 2 seasons is really visible within this rating range. It took 4 weeks to get any kind of progress towards KSH (2,500) done during S1. Meanwhile, in S2 week 1 already had more runs at level 10 than S1 in week 2. And in week 3, the value was already higher than in S1 at any week of the entire season! For key level 11, the comparison is similar. It took S1 until week 8 to get more than 120,000 level 11 runs in 1 week. Meanwhile, this value is the standard for S2 after week 3.
And the dreaded key level 12 is at over 100,000 runs in week 4. The weekly value for S1 would never get close to half of that throughout the entire season and would only peak during week 8 at just under 47,000. Key level 13 (KSH range around 3,000 rating) is seeing a similar scenario where week 4 is also showing more than twice as many keys as S1 would ever see at its peak during week 9, just below 22,000. We really have to look quite far into the data for S1 since the numbers for the first 4 weeks were just abysmal.
Dungeon Performance At The Highest Levels In Week 4
Up until Key level 17, all 8 dungeons were still getting completed. Meanwhile, a +17 key would not be completed in S1 until week 6. We also had ten +18 completions in week 4. And only at the highest key level thus far, not all dungeons would see a completed run.
The success rates in this sheet clearly show why Darkflame Cleft is seen as the easiest dungeon. No matter the key level, the success rate never drops below 80%. But this also comes with a simple explanation. The first 2-3 pulls within this dungeon already decide if people really want to finish a key. So the unknown number of attempted and abandoned runs for this dungeon could be quite high. For the rest of the dungeons, the values are within a decent range. Lower values can be seen as an indicator of the new depletion protection working, or that the keys start to get bricked later during the run, and people still decide to finish them.
Looking at data for older seasons – especially after the official internal rating system replaced the former RaiderIO score – you can see that the in-time percentage curve would always climb close to 90% for higher keys. This could be seen as an indicator for 2 scenarios. Either players would execute their runs perfectly, if they even started them. Or they would make a clear decision to abandon them once problems arose.
Pick Rates
Our final graph can be seen as an indicator for tuning and balancing issues. For the first half of the key level range, the choice of dungeon doesn’t seem that picky. But once we get close to the current ceiling, all new dungeons except Darkflame Cleft are falling out of favor. Meanwhile, the returning dungeons that have seen more than one tuning pass are stable above 13%. This might also be affected by the long-term experience many high-end players had with them during previous expansions, where they would last for several seasons. The MOTHERLODE is proving that it is quite well designed and especially forgiving for a wipe since its runback times are rather short throughout the entire instance.
In Conclusion
This season has seen a really great start and is allowing a lot more players to reach Keystone Master (2,000), Keystone Hero (2,500), or even Keystone Legend (3,000). And if it continues like that, this might be the second-best, if not the best, season of Mythic+ of all time. Currently, the participation numbers aren’t that high, but given that this season will probably run for another 5 months, anyone with a passing interest in Mythic+ should give it a chance and secure some good loot and easy rewards.
Keep in mind that with 11.1.5 – which is most likely releasing after week 7 – all of this might get even better since the new helmet enchants, mirroring the old corruption effects will improve player performance. Until then, item level will only be increasing as well as the keystone ceiling, and probably the overall success rate for most levels. And we will take another look at this kind of data at some point after the patch release.
