The fifth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and once again Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the data provided by Raider.IO. After a dungeon event week, which boosted the usual metrics, the total numbers have significantly dropped off by 17.44%. The overall in time percentage has also decreased a bit (-1.09 points), and certain dungeons show major issues with the weekly affix combinations. Meanwhile, the overall activity continues to shift towards higher levels. So let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
At the start, this season looked like it was performing a lot better than usual seasons, which see their weekly run numbers decline a lot faster. Last week, Season 2 of The War Within was clearly outperforming every other season, but also benefited from the dungeon event. The week after these events is always like a hangover, where people don’t see as much of a reason to run Mythic+ on so many characters again.
So, in comparison, TWW S2 is catching up with the rest in relative weekly performance since the season started. But it only drops below TWW S1, which had its first dungeon event in week 5. And this momentary disadvantage might already be gone next week. At -26.48% after 5 weeks, the average drop-off in general is quite low. And if we discard week 4 with its event quest benefits, the drop-off between week 3 and 5 was just around 6 percentage points per week.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
During the early hours of the week, it became quite clear that after a dungeon event week, the interest in rushing keys wouldn’t be that high. Roughly 310,000 (from 1.818 million to 1.502 million) fewer keys were completed this week. The biggest losses were within the lower key level, which we will be looking at later. The average in time percentage also dropped by slightly more than 1 point from 83.42% down to 82.33%. While less activity in lower keys is always a factor, the individual dungeons also perform differently from week to week.
The popularity of the dungeons hasn’t shifted that much. Darkflame Cleft and The Rookery have switched positions. The overall split has gotten a bit tighter since interest in Cinderbrew Meadery has gone down a bit. In time percentages have been fluctuating a bit due to the different affix combinations from key level 4 – 11. Darkflame Cleft is still doing well with 90.40%, followed up as usual by the MOTHERLODE with a slight improvement to 85.55%. Priory and Operation Floodgate are just behind with 83.15% and 83.35%.
Dungeons With Major Tuning Issues
With a larger difference, we see Cinderbrew Meadery (79.73%) and Theater of Pain (79.10%). The latter always falls off during Tyrannical weeks due to its 5 boss roster. The biggest impact on the overall success rate can clearly be tied to the terrible effect of the affix combination on the Rookery (-5.30 points down to 78.65%). The dungeon in general seems to have overtuned bosses, which only turn worse during Tyrannical weeks. The Pulsar affix is also harder to handle on each of the bosses, as well as during trash that constantly demands repositioning. A major tuning pass should happen here soon. In last place we can find Mechagon Workshop (78.10%). The range for the success rate across all dungeons isn’t that high in general, but certain instances need another round of tuning.
Split Across All Key Levels
The week after the dungeon event always sees way less participation in lower key levels. Combined with a general shift towards higher keys, the key levels below 10 have all dropped between 12% and 44% in their overall share of the total runs. The comparison for total completed runs looks similar. Key level 10 has gone up in the overall share from 25.88% to 29.74%, but also lost around 24,000 runs. Above key level 10, all metrics have gone up by 5.6x for key level 18, and we also saw the first +19 runs completed. All in all, the focus is shifting more and more towards key level 10 and above. This area is already representing more than 55.24% of all completed keys by now – up from 43.8% last week.
The affix combination of Pulsar and Tyrannical leads to slightly lower success rates for most key levels. Especially dungeons like the Rookery were affected by it, losing up to 10 percentage points once all affixes are active. The drop-off from key level 6 to 7 in general grew from 9.13 points to 9.73 compared to last week.
Meanwhile, the step from 9 to 10 is already positive, going from 80.36% to 82.56%. For key level 10, this means an improvement of 2.24 points compared to last week. At this point, we can say that the focus on level 10 for the weekly vault entries has solidified. Last season, around 33% of all keys were timed on this level during the later weeks. We are quite close to this value in week 5 already. And long-term, the higher keys will clearly see a much larger participation than during previous seasons. Especially as long as players are still working towards their Keystone Legend mount at 3,000 rating points.
Season 2 Is Basically One Key Level Ahead Of Season 1
On a more positive note, S2 is once again vastly outperforming the previous season. If we take the key level split and the percentage attributed to each level and multiply it by the key level, we get a value for the average weighted key level for each week. Long-term, this is an indicator of how much the focus within the key level range is shifting over time. And for now, we will only be comparing the last 2 seasons since both have the new key level squish and similar affix conditions.
The trajectory for the early weeks is clearly similar for both seasons, but TWW S2 is clearly 1 key level ahead each week and might even rise above 9 or even close to 10 within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, TWW S1 never got beyond a value of 8 even months into the entire season. The general difference of around 1 key level can also be seen as an indicator of tuning efforts from the devs. Weeks 4 and 5 once again show the impact of low-level keys on the total average.
Conclusion And Early Numbers For Week 6
Despite tuning problems for certain bosses, all dungeons are still shaping up quite well. The overall progression through key levels isn’t only doing much better but also developing faster than during the previous season. The new 3k rating mount and the associated depletion protection for higher keys seem like a good incentive to lure players into higher key levels. But maybe even participation in low key content should see some basic rewards. Maybe the Housing feature coming in the Midnight expansion can sprinkle some rewards into that content.
As of the writing of this article, ~48 hours after the US reset, the hourly numbers look quite good for this week. For the US and EU region, we see a 9% and 4.5% drop-off, which looks really good. Usually, around 15% per week was the average loss during previous expansions. Key level 10 represents close to 30% of all keys, with more than 83% of keys being timed. But also levels 11 and 12 are each already making up around 10% of all completed keys.
