WoW Just Set a Decade-High Mythic Raiding Record, and It Happened in Midnight

Although the mood surrounding Midnight hasn’t been the best, WoW is quietly experiencing a reawakening, with the Mythic Raiding scene boasting participation numbers likely not seen in the past decade. Let’s take a deep dive into Mythic raiding participation for the past six years.

Before we start, a quick disclaimer on the numbers below. I’ve collected the data manually over the past six years for DPS rankings purposes, so they only represent DPS players. They are also not unique characters. If a character kills 10 mythic bosses in a week, they will count as +10, as they’ve logged 10 parses on Mythic during that week. More caveats about the data at the end of the article.

Shadowlands

We’ll start with Shadowlands, which has the furthest-out data I have available, week-by-week. Shadowlands had a strong start, boosted by COVID-19 and mandatory lockdowns worldwide.

However, with Blizzard taking so long to release its second raid, plus general community apathy around Patch 9.1 and Blizzard Entertainment in general at the time, Season 2 saw drastically reduced participation.

Then, with Sepulcher taking another 8 months to release, and players generally uninterested in Shadowlands, Season 3 didn’t see better results.

While exacerbated by issues, both in-game and outside, Shadowlands paints the generic picture of most modern WoW expansions, with a high participation early in the expansion, gradually reducing over time.

Dragonflight

Then comes Dragonflight. Dragonflight introduced a lot of changes to the game in response to the feedback received from Shadowlands. However, despite the changes, Dragonflight failed to capture the COVID-induced hype from Shadowlands Season 1, with Vault of the Incarnates staying in its shadows.

Participation-wise, Aberrus started with a low participation, but gained momentum as weeks went by. Amirdrassil actually surpassed Aberrus, having an overall higher Mythic participation.

Despite its weaker start, Dragonflight changed a lot of the modern raiding picture, with Mythic participation closer between its seasons when compared to Shadowlands. It is also important to highlight that this is likely due to Blizzard adopting the 8-week patch cycle. This change resulted in seasons having better-defined lengths, around 24 weeks each (5~6 months) instead of 7~8 months during Shadowlands.

The War Within

Following in the footsteps of Dragonflight, TWW continued its 24-week per season formula. The main tweak of the expansion was the addition of different “borrowed power” items in minor patches. Namely, Circe’s Circlet, D.I.S.C. Belt, and Reshii Wraps. These items effectively add new tuning knobs to raids, slightly nerfing them over time as player power grows.

With some distance from Shadowlands, Dragonflight’s model continued to deliver good population results for Mythic raiding participation. However, this is likely not due solely to more players playing the game, as in Shadowlands, but rather to a change in the encounter design philosophy.

During The War Within, we’ve seen raid encounter design steadily change from complex, compute-heavy mechanics, generally solved by addons, to simpler mechanics that addons couldn’t solve. An example of this is Stix’s Rolling Ball. Addons couldn’t tell you the path to follow to optimize your garbage collection; they only knew you were in the ball, your growth status, and if there were still priority targets to hit.

These changes, together with a slight reduction in Mythic+ difficulty in later seasons and new gearing sources like delves, which provide hero track loot to more players, lead to more players jumping into Mythic raiding.

The results are stark when compared to Shadowlands and Dragonflight. All three TWW seasons saw more Mythic raiders than in their Dragonflight counterparts, all three reaching participation levels of Shadowlands Season 1.

For the first time since Shadowlands, and maybe in the modern raiding history, an end-of-expansion raid surpassed the peak participation of the first raid tier, with Manaforge Omega reaching a peak of 515k parses during week 8, passing Nerub-ar Palace’s peak of 492k parses during week 10.

While likely due to a mix of factors, the evolving encounter design and philosophy are at least partially responsible for this success. This leads us into Midnight and the Addon-apocalypse.

Midnight

Blizzard gave Midnight the hard task of selling hardcore raiders the death of addons, with the promise that encounter design had reached a point that it was mature enough to support this decision. We can discuss the merits, if they succeeded or not, on a different post, but we can look at the results now.

Another factor in the mix is gearing changes with Midnight. With the addition of Prey, which introduced another vector for earning Champion gear and Hero gear in the vault, gear keeps getting faster with each expansion. However, the largest change in gearing was with Mythic+.

On the surface, not much has changed with Mythic+, with the formula largely unchanged from Dragonflight and TWW. The change is in the difficulty, with Midnight seeing what is likely the easiest Mythic+ season to complete your max-vault keys (+10s). With this change, more players have access to Myth track gear, even without Mythic raid.

This environment culminates in a record number of participants in Mythic raiding, with a record 780k parses recorded during week 10 of Midnight Season 1. While we don’t have the exact data going that far, this is likely the most Mythic parses recorded since Emerald Nightmare, in Legion.

Emerald Nightmare’s “success” was slightly different, fueled by Legion’s enormous hype and being one of the easiest raids in history (RWF famously ended in 18 hours). While Midnight Season 1 does have easy early encounters like Chimaerus, Imperator, and Vorasius, the whole ecosystem now eases access to Mythic raiding. Recent changes, like having Mythic be cross-realm from the start of the season, also contribute to the numbers from The War Within and Midnight.

The Dawn of Midnight’s Mythic Scene

Midnight’s record numbers are best read as four stacked layers. The first is gear-acquisition. Midnight is likely the easiest expansion to gear up, with Prey, Delves, and an easier-than-average Mythic+ season granting easy hero gear, plus myth vault gear.

The second layer is the dismantling of barriers to Mythic raid. With cross-realm and cross-faction being available from day one, region is the only barrier to forming a group. The second part of this layer is the Midnight Season 1 structure, which splits bosses into three raids, meaning three distinct lockouts. This split mimics the already existing Heroic raid structure. Players aren’t worried if their group can’t kill Chimaerus on the first try, as that’s the only boss of the raid. Failing to kill it won’t cost you a week, just your time. Historically, Mythic pug groups usually live-or-die by early attempts, as players get worried about locking themselves to a group that won’t kill the boss they want to kill.

The third layer is the post-addon encounter philosophy, which started to be implemented during TWW and has now reached a more mature status. It isn’t something mastered by Blizzard, as bosses like L’ura still show, but now most Mythic bosses ask players to solve mechanics, instead of solving if they have the same version of a WeakAura.

The final layer is momentum. Despite Midnight not being viewed as one of the best expansions right now, it is still a fresh expansion. Being new in itself attracts seasonal players to try the expansion, if only for a few weeks.

At this time, it is impossible to tell which layer – or layers – carries the most weight. That is a question for week 20, or 60, not 12.

Heroic vs. Mythic Raiding Balance

There are more indicators that show this shift toward more players participating in Mythic raiding. Looking at WarcraftLogs historical data (caveats about it in the next section), we can see that, over time, a higher percentage of recorded parses have been in Mythic difficulty.

Below, you can see the number of parses per difficulty in the final two weeks of each of the past raid tiers. This two-week window is a limitation of WarcraftLogs’ publicly available data, mentioned in the Caveats section below.

The number of players per difficulty shows how much more popular Mythic has become in comparison to Heroic. However, it is wrong to assume this has to do only with improvements to Mythic and Gearing. It is also due to issues that Heroic Raiding has faced for a while and now has been made worse, but that’s a topic for another day.

Minutes Past Midnight

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows. As many are probably eager to point out, there are still a lot of issues and asterisks with the numbers of Mythic raiding in Midnight. The first thing is the kill distribution.

Having a large delta between boss kills isn’t anything new from Midnight, but the differences are staggering given the wider participation. With easier bosses like Imperator, Vorasius, and Chimaerus, we see almost half a million individual parses per boss in the most recent two-week window. Meanwhile, only about 30,000 individual parses for Mythic L’ura.

Below, you can see the number of individual parses per boss in the previous two weeks on WarcraftLogs.

To put it in perspective, for every player earning Cutting Edge in Crown of the Cosmos, 6 are earning it on Chimaerus, and 15 characters are killing Chimaerus for each defeating L’ura. Circling back to the Mythic success layers, this data suggests more players, maybe more than ever, are stepping into Mythic raid, chasing its loot. However, there’s still a large gap between the number of characters earning Mythic: Midnight Falls and Mythic: Chimaerus, the Undreamt God. But perhaps this is a feature, not a bug. As in, having more players participate in the Mythic scene, while still having its completion being challenging, isn’t a bad thing.

The number of parses for Mythic has also been in rapid decline in the past two weeks. Week 12 numbers are 17% lower than the peak in week 10. But it is too early to say if this is a data fluke or actually meaningful. If the decline is real, the likely candidates are community sentiment around midnight (defining it as… mid) and the introduction of Bonus Rolls in Patch 12.0.5. While bonus rolls have been well received by players, they speed up gearing to a point that players end up killing a boss fewer times than before, strictly for loot reasons.

With these, plus the addition of the Omnium Folio in a few weeks, we’ll likely see further decreases in participation for earlier bosses, but higher numbers for latter ones like Alleria and L’ura.

Caveats

The data, sadly, isn’t perfect. While the data is all sourced first-hand from WarcraftLogs, it contains issues, namely four caveats.

The first issue is that it was collected for DPS rankings analysis only, which means it is considering only DPS specs (sorry Tanks and Healers!). However, as we’re always dealing with Mythic difficulty, meaning 20 players, the comparison should be accurate enough to paint a solid picture of reality.

Second is that, unlike Mythic+ data, which is provided by Blizzard, this data is community-sourced. This means that all participation is voluntary, meaning a group that doesn’t record its raid with Warcraftlogs won’t ever be seen. For Mythic raids, however, this isn’t a big factor as logging is very prevalent, if not universal. Note that this isn’t the case for Heroic. Although we will never know the exact number of players who publish logs for raids, it is fair to assume that the percentage goes down with difficulty. That is, most Mythic kills get logged, with the percentage going down when looking at Heroic, Normal, and the lowest at LFR.

The third issue is that data collection was done manually over the past six years, as WarcraftLogs only exposes the data for the previous two weeks. This means that there are likely errors or missing weeks in the data. However, the reality shouldn’t be much different from the picture portrayed by the data.

Finally, the data isn’t complete. As the intention of the aggregation was to look at DPS balance, a couple of weeks were spent looking at Heroic info, with not enough Mythic data available for a clear analysis. I’ve removed these data points, but they are the reason a couple of seasons’ data start in week 3 or later.