The sixth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and once again, Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the data provided by Raider.IO. The total amount of completed runs dropped by just 7.18%. The overall in time percentage has also gone down by 1.77 points. This can once again be tied to the changes in affixes, which lead to rough combinations for a few dungeons. But players pushing towards higher key levels beyond the vault reward cap are also decreasing the overall success rate. So let’s look at the details.
Weekly Runs Compared to Other Seasons
Season 2 of The War Within continues to perform quite well. The drop-off from week to week is within the single digits, and after falling behind TWW S1, it is now once again the season with the smallest long-term drop-off at just -31.64%. It remains to be seen if this trend can continue. Overall, S2 is keeping up quite well with S1 in terms of absolute completed runs. For the last few weeks, it has been almost consistently 12-12.5% behind. And if it also runs for 23 weeks, we could see somewhere around 22-23 million completed keys by the end.
In last week’s preview, we could see a regional decline between 4.5% and 9% for the EU and the US servers. With a drop-off of 7.18% – just a bit more than 100.000 in total – this has turned out to be true. It seems the weekly activity is solidified, and the numbers are only going to decrease rather slowly for now. As soon as most players have capped out on mythic crests within the next 4-6 weeks, the numbers might decrease a bit quicker. Not just because people lose interest, but also because alts are saving up on required crests per upgrade level.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
As for the individual dungeons, not much has changed when it comes to preference. The order is the same as last week, and the spread has even decreased a bit. The success rates have almost all gone down – overall by 1.77 points down to 80.55%.
Darkflame Cleft was still the easy choice for vault entries or crest farming at 89.84%. MOTHERLODE is again in second place with 82.91%, dropping by 2.64 points. Operation Floodgate is still doing well despite being a rather new dungeon. 81.41% with a drop of 1.41 points. The Rookery is the only dungeon improving in week 6. Going up by 2.11 points to 80.76%. Fortified being the first affix is benefiting dungeons with rough boss tuning. Theater of Pain at 78.72% and Mechagon Workshop at 78.08% haven’t changed much. Meanwhile, Priory of the Sacred Flame dropped by a massive 6.07 points down to 77.08%. And at the very bottom is Cinderbrew Meadery with 75.80%, having lost 3.93 points compared to last week.
The big problem during this week seems to be the combination of Fortified and Ascendant. Ascendant spawns 10 orbs near your current position that have to be CCed before they finish their casts. Otherwise, all mobs around them get empowered. If you combine this with dungeons that have big and rough trash pulls, it only gets worse. Now you have to manage CCing big mob groups, but also react to these random spawns that might turn big pulls into nightmares. Cinderbrew Meadery, Priory, and MOTHERLODE runs are built around doing big pulls in general.
Split Across All Key Levels
As is becoming standard, each week a higher percentage of all keys is being done in higher key levels. Between levels 3 and 10, the absolute numbers as well as the relative share of the total runs have gone down by up to 17%. +10 runs have decreased by just 18.500 since last week. Their relative share has gone up by almost 1 percentage point to 30.65%. Above key level 11, all total run numbers are still growing by up to a factor of 3 on a weekly basis. Compared to S1 in the same week, we are between 2 and 3 key levels higher with the same metrics. And week 6 now marks the first time that we see more +12 and +11 keys being completed.
57.65% of all runs were done at 10 and above. Therefore, 27% at 11 and higher. The total amount for this specific key range (11 and above) for the last 2 weeks has been almost twice as high as at any week in S1. 377.000 and 383.000 vs. a peak of 200.000 in S1. And compared to the goated Season 3 of Dragonflight, TWW S2 is also surpassing those numbers by now. Back then, up to 364.000 runs per week were done at key level 21 and higher – the same key range before the squish. And this week, we saw the first completed +20 key for the season. The Chinese Team missed the timer by just 21 seconds.
In Time Completions
Given the affix combinations and a shift towards higher keys, the average in time percentage went down. This can be observed for almost any key level, especially the lower ones. A drop of 4 points for key level 4 clearly shows that the 
Xal’atath’s Bargain: Ascendant affix needs some tuning. It was only the 2nd time it was active this season after week 1. Fortified becoming active resulted in a drop of 9.23 points from key level 6 to 7, a value similar to last week. From 9 to 10, the in time percentage increased by 3.74 points. This is once again highlighting the issue of keys in the 7-9 range being impacted a bit too much by Fortified or Tyrannical. In the future, we will be looking at the long-term impact of the rotating affixes. There is still room for improvement.
Conclusion And Early Numbers For Week 7
The season is doing quite well. If we only focus on the overall success rate, it still looks a bit rough. But this is mostly due to high keys seeing more and more runs. These are being completed in overtime more often than in prior seasons. The depletion protection seems to lead to more practice runs that don’t get abandoned before the end. However, the developers should definitely take another look at the affix tuning for lower keys. The entry experience into Mythic+ should not be this rough.
As of the writing of this article, ~50 hours after the US reset, the hourly numbers look really good for this week. For the US region, we see a 3.6% decrease, and for the EU a 2.9% increase, which is quite astounding. It seems that even without a weekly event, interest in M+ isn’t really decreasing. Usually, around 15% per week were the average losses during previous expansions. Key level 10 represents just above 32% of all keys, with 88% of keys being timed. And key level 11 and above have a 31% share of all keys.
