The third week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. Earlier than usual, we got our first dungeon event week. And as expected, players were a lot more active in completing 4 M+ keys for the quest. More runs in the lower and higher key levels led to a slight uptick of 1.4% overall. The latest hotfixes also brought the dungeons closer to a similar difficulty. Only one outlier needs a few more nerfs. So let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
The increase in global total runs (+1.4%) had once again slight regional differences. On the Chinese servers, the trend was a bit stronger with +2.5%, compared to just +0.6% in the other regions. If we compare this with previous seasons, we see a strong lead in absolute numbers, but a larger decline in relative terms. The complete Chinese data wasn’t available until late into TWW S2.
It remains to be seen if this trend continues, since this season is rather easy. Maybe players dip out earlier and in larger numbers. For Patch 12.0.5, the devs announced new and returning cosmetic rewards for 3,400 rating and the top 1%. This could lead to healthier activity across all key levels towards the end of the season.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
The overall split didn’t shift that much compared to week 2. But, Maisara Caverns, a dungeon that started with one of the roughest tunings, keeps falling behind. It wasn’t that interesting to begin with, unlike Academy, which, regardless of worse tuning early on, provides more interesting loot. Academy has now received two major nerfs, and each one improved the in-time percentage by around 5 points. It dropped from rank 2 to 4 in favorability. The run numbers for these dungeons, though, are rather close together, and over time, dungeons that get farmed for trinkets see lower metrics.
The overall success rate improved by 1.11 points to 89.25%. Pit of Saron (90.96%) was leading this week, slightly ahead of Seat (90.75%), which saw the largest drop-off. Skyreach (90.37%) and Windrunner Spire (90.17%) followed closely. Terrace (89.16%), Nexus-Point (88.78%), and Academy (88.13%) kept the field within just 3 percentage points. And Maisara Caverns (84.67%) remains the sole outlier, with a greater distance to rank 7 than from rank 7 to rank 1. This dungeon is in clear need of a few more nerfs or a timer increase of 1 or 2 minutes.
Split Across All Key Levels
73.58% of all runs were completed at key level 10 and above. A slight increase from last week (71.48%). Key level 10 alone saw a slight decrease in relative share (from 38.04% to 37.38%) and total numbers, though. The shift above is moved towards levels 12 and 13, which provide more crests and the necessary points for 3,000 rating. Beyond this, the metrics compared to the previous week only increased more strongly with higher key levels. 15 +21s completed in a single week are already more than we saw from weeks 1 to 6 in TWW S3. But all of these 15 keys were only done on Chinese servers. The other regions have yet to catch up to their pace. Within the entry key levels, activity increased by up to 24%, which is quite common for a dungeon event week.
The success rate increased across almost all key levels. Levels 13 to 17 show more depleted but still dedicated runs. But overall, the in-time percentage didn’t drop below 80% up to key level 19. Vault runs at key level 10 saw the biggest improvement from 89.28% to 91.89%. Meanwhile, the step up from key level 9 only grew wider. But the biggest gap remained between key levels 6 and 7. The addition of Fortified led to a decrease of 7.5 percentage points. Or, in other words, the depletion rate almost triples at this point in the key progression. This issue has existed for several years now.
Conclusion and Week 4 Forecast
While the total runs will definitely decrease as usual, the performance metrics keep improving. Maisara Caverns should get a second look from the devs, so it doesn’t turn into this season’s Ara-Kara or City of Threads. In week 5, we will see the addition of rewards for 3,400 rating and the top 1%. Early on, the range around key level 16 should see a massive spike in numbers. And towards the end of the season, the usual chasm of apathy below the 0.1% cut-off might not become as wide and deep anymore.
As of this writing, 120 hours after the US reset, the hourly numbers for the major regions show quite split behavior. The US and EU servers are 12% and 9.5% behind last week’s performance, while CN servers are 6.8% ahead. It could be that those players are returning or just increasing their efforts for the new rewards in 12.0.5. Keep in mind that they missed out on the KSM mounts from TWW S2 and S3, while WoW was shut down in China. But that will be part of future breakdowns.
