The fourth week of Mythic+ in this season saw its numbers getting boosted by the weekly dungeon event. Once again, Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the data provided by Raider.IO.
Given that players had to do 4 Mythic dungeons for the quest, many went right into Mythic+ and brought the number of overall runs up by 4.54%. In addition, the in-time percentage went up by 2.79 points. A lot of low-level keys got farmed for quick access to the heroic loot cache from the quest. But at higher levels we also see continuous growth for total runs. So let’s take a look at the details.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
The weekly dungeon quest usually slows down the weekly drop-offs every time it is up. Early in this season we even see around 80,000 additional runs compared to the previous week and also an increase of more than 30,000 compared to two weeks ago.
More impressive is the jump in timed runs, which went up by more than 115,000. This is lifting the in-time percentage from 80.62% last week up to 83.41% this week.
The focus on different dungeons hasn’t shifted a lot since last week. Cinderbrew Meadery and Priory of the Sacred Flame still see the most keys finished, mostly due to the focus on the Best-in-Slot necklace and trinket. Only MOTHERLODE and Mechagon switched positions. This is also reflected by MOTHERLODE (84,61%) once again being the second easiest dungeon behind Darkflame Cleft (91.56%). The Rookery (83.95%), Theater of Pain (82.88%), and Operation Floodgate (82.55%) follow close behind, both benefiting from a Fortified first week since their trash isn’t as punishing as the bosses tend to be during Tyrannical weeks.
Priory (81.36%), on the other hand, dropped a bit due to its harsh trash pulls just like Meadery (80.55%). Mechagon Workshop (80.75%) is no longer the worst this week, mostly because its trash isn’t as punishing as the bosses.
Split Across All Key Levels
The impact of the weekly dungeon quest is quite obvious within the first 3 key levels. The share of +2 keys went up by 34.5% (~50,000 runs) compared to last week. Key levels 3 and 4 saw similar activity this week, probably from players continuing their keys after their +2 runs.
Between key levels 5 and 7, the number of completed runs drops by around 10% per level. This decline becomes steeper at levels 8 and 9, with drops of 20% and 33%, respectively. Key level 10 remains strong, increasing by 2.89% compared to last week, with over 470,000 runs—making up 25.88% of all runs this week. Nearly half of all completed keys are now level 9 or higher, and 10.35% are at level 12 or above. Overall, higher key levels continue to see steady growth in total runs.
The completion rate jumping by 2.79 percentage points is quite a massive change from week to week. But this general change is only represented at key levels 2 and 7 in the lower key levels. For key level 2 it is obvious since many players just wanted to quickly finish their weekly quest.
Higher Keys Doing a Lot Better
The increase at key level 7 is once again showing the lower impact of the 
Fortified affix compared to level 6. Last week, the drop-off between those two levels still was at 11.09 percentage points. Now it is just 9.13 points. But the biggest impact on the increase in time percentage stems from 80.32% of all +10 runs being timed.
Last week this value was at 72.82% – an increase of 7.5 points. Furthermore, almost all higher key levels see slight improvements in their success rates. As the cherry on top, we saw the first +18 keys being timed for the season. Something that wouldn’t happen until week 7 in Season 1 of The War Within.
Comparing Weekly Performance for All Seasons
Overall, the performance of this season is already quite strong. Be it the more coherent tuning of all dungeons or the faster progress in terms of key levels and in-time percentage. But the one thing that sets The War Within Season 2 apart from all of the previous seasons is the really stable number of keys being completed week by week.
If we look at this season and the last 5 preceding it, a general downward trend becomes obvious. The numbers drop off by rather large margins. This is mostly due to players climbing a lot of key levels early on during the seasons until Dragonflight Season 4 introduced the key level squish.
DF S4 is also a bit of an anomaly since people rushed towards unlocking and upgrading their BIS items with a higher crest cap. And then they instantly switched over to Mists of Pandaria Remix once it started. This is shown by a massive drop-off in week 4. The big fluctuation for DF S1 numbers is due to the impact of Christmas time on general activity within WoW. A big drop-off before the holidays and a major boost between Christmas and New Year.
The Normalized Graph
Normalizing the graph to the first week of each season, we see that so far the number of completed dungeons per week has only dropped by 11.03%. Meanwhile, other seasons see a drop-off between 23% and 42%. To a degree, the rebound for TWW S2 in week 4 is benefiting from a lot of low-level keys being played. An effect that also occurred during DF S3, which also had a dungeon event during week 4. For TWW S1, the effect can be tied to the major affix changes preceding the week in that season.
But the biggest difference from this season to all previous ones is the higher entry point when it comes to tuning and rewards, as well as a much slower progression curve when it comes to enemy HP and damage increasing per level. This got changed from 10% down to 7%. It seems this kind of tuning, combined with the increased rewards from delves is aiming to bring in more players and characters over the time of a season without having the step-up during the first few key levels being too harsh.
In the past, it seemed that there was always an early rush into a season with a big long-term drop-off towards the end. Over the next few months, we will keep an eye on this development for Season 2.
Conclusion and Early Numbers for Week 5
Dungeon event weeks usually give Mythic+ a nice boost, but even without that, this season is already performing much better than the last one, and it’s on track to become one of the best seasons ever.
About 50 hours after the NA reset, week 5 is off to a solid start. Nearly 84% of all keys have been completed in time, with key level 10 making up almost 30% of those runs with an 86% success rate.
However, the total number of runs so far is lower compared to the same time last week. That’s expected—dungeon event weeks, like the one before, usually bring an early surge in activity. This week, run counts are down 20–30% across regions, but that gap often shrinks by the end of the week. We’ll dive deeper into the data next week.
On Sunday Nightstalker314 will be doing a more detailed analysis of the first 4 weeks of this season and comparing it to previous seasons.
