The first post-season week of TWW S3 is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. Players tested their Legion Remix characters as well as new ones after the class changes in 12.0. The number of completed runs jumped by 55% compared to the last week of S3. A major nerf to all end-game content also allowed for a much higher key ceiling. But, within the first 2 days, some teams or even single players took advantage of an item exploit to push a lot further than the rest. So let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
Worldwide, the number of completed runs increased by 55.05%. This value is quite close to the increase in activity after the end of Pandaria Remix in DF S4. The graph for the regular regions shows a similar bump from week 13 to week 14 in that season. The regional differences were once again quite substantial. While the four standard regions saw an increase of 64.02%, activity on the Chinese servers only rose by 39.57%.
The global share of Chinese metrics hit a new low point with 33.02%. This is a decrease of more than one third from their high-point of 52.38% in week 15. And while the total amount of runs is on a positive trend, the value only reached numbers that we had seen in week 20. Meanwhile, the rebound on the US servers is at a level of week 15 or 16. The impact of Titan Reforged and TBC anniversary servers in the region is still noticeable. It will be interesting to see if the Chinese players will once again be more dominant in Midnight S1.
Total Runs Across All S3 Dungeons
The split across all dungeons was heavily skewed by the focus on Operation Floodgate above all other instances. It is the closest dungeon to Dornogal if you don’t want to take any portals, and is also considered a perfect instance for massive trash pulls. In addition, Ara-Kara was no longer the least favorite dungeon. Dawnbreaker took that title probably because Skyriding has led to a lot more disconnects from object collisions since 12.0. Players heavily criticize these recent bugs and want to avoid them at all costs.
Since all endgame content had been nerfed massively with patch 12.0, the success rates have exploded across the board. The increase of 7.30 percentage points overall to 94.93% is quite insane. Patch 12.0, with its major changes and consequences, reminds us of patches like 3.0 (Wrath) and 7.0 (Legion). Back then, a major shift in philosophy or upcoming progression systems also led to massive nerfs, which trivialized all content.
Eco-Dome (97.82%) was still the easiest dungeon. Gambit (96.81%) and Streets (96.78%) followed head-to-head. Halls (95.87%) was yet another percentage point behind, but still had some distance to the lower half. Operation Floodgate (93.86%) saw major benefits as the new favorite dungeon and finally stepped up from its long-time second-to-last position. Priory (93.74%) was close behind and did not get crushed by a Fortified first affix combination. The Dawnbreaker (93.16%) probably also dropped in success rate because DCs cost a lot of time. And Ara-Kara (91.10%) was still dead-last, but at least saw a massive gain compared to its miserable rate in all of TWW S3.
Exploits with Unsquished Items from the Mailbox
With 12.0, all current items from loot rewards and in players’ inventories got squished by 560 item levels. But this change overlooked the items still stored up in mailboxes from Timewalking runs in the previous weeks. Some players were able to use this completely overpowered loot for the first two days of the patch. We can’t tell if this was a deliberate effort by these players to avoid looting them, or if they just forgot about them in general. Either way, this allowed teams and, at times, even single players to push towards key levels way beyond 27, up to level 53. For +27, we could only verify a single run as valid. So, for the following analysis, we cut out all compromised runs above key level 23.
Split Across All S3 Key Levels
68.63% of all runs were completed at key level 10 and higher. This value is almost identical to the one in S3’s final week. But all other values have massively shifted. The favorite key level was once again +12, but with a much lower share of 19.06%. The shift after the pre-patch, in general, was towards anything except the standard. Many new characters rushed from key level 2 instantly up to 5 and then toward 7 or 8.
In the higher key levels, +15 saw a noticeable jump. This is yet another indicator of the drop in difficulty after 12.0. Players pushed their first +12 keys after reset instantly towards +15. The key level range from 14 to 20 saw the largest increase across the board. The completed runs for each level increased by a factor of 2.6 up to a factor of 8.35. With the recent tuning changes, teams seem to hit a progress wall because of damage output limitations, such as AoE caps. The damage taken in high keys is a lot easier to survive. A +17 is comparable to a regular +12 before 12.0.
The increase in the success rate happened for all key levels up to +19. Beyond that, sheer motivation to push further led to a lot more keys that weren’t outright abandoned after a wipe. And level 19 was also the first one to see a rate below 90%. For the first 10 key levels, there was almost no noticeable difference from the data, as well as from a gameplay perspective. There were almost none of the usual major drop-offs at level 7 and rebounds at level 10.
Conclusion and Post-Season Week 2 Forecast
Major class changes, a new spec, and super-easy content led to a massive spike in participation. It remains to be seen if the level of tuning at the start of Midnight will stick to a more forgiving level. Content will definitely get a bit rougher again, but a lot of players remember the start of TWW S1. Tuning back then came quite late, and a lot of players dropped out because of that. They have to find a healthy middle ground. And if they don’t match it at release, they should definitely react faster.
As of this writing, 120 hours after the US reset, hourly numbers for the main regions have reached almost identical levels as in the first post-season week. The US and the EU servers are behind by 2.66% and 2.80%. Meanwhile, China seems to be rebounding for longer with an increase of 3.10%. We will examine this further in the next weekly breakdown.
