The fifth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. This week’s drop-off was noticeably smaller. Changes to Halls of Atonement and Ara-Kara, implemented with the reset, had a measurable effect. But the changes had a much bigger impact on the former. The shift towards high-level keys continued with more and more players aiming for the 3,000 rating mount. So let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
Restricted to the four regular regions, the drop-off was just 1.1%. Oddly, the global drop was 1.33% China’s was 1.59%, both slightly higher. This may be due to Chinese server data tricking in more slowly. Compared to the previous seasons, we see a much more stable week-by-week development, despite no active event this week. Maybe a part of the drop-off in the previous week 4 could be tied to the releases of Silksong and a new Path of Exile league. And we have yet to see how the dungeon event in week 6 will shape the numbers.
Including the Chinese data in our global comparison, we can see a trend of Chinese metrics representing almost 48% of all runs. The event may matter less in China, where players jump straight into high-end keys. Meanwhile, in the EU and US, most additional runs in these event weeks happen in the lower key levels.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
Ara-Kara saw slight nerfs, making it marginally more viable, which reduced the overall split. The order has seen some major changes with #1 and #2 trading places. The same happened between #4 and #5, and again between #6 and #7.
The overall success rate (84.50%) saw a decent bump, mostly affected by the impact of the nerfs. Eco-Dome (89.72%) is still the easiest key overall. But Streets of Wonder (87.78%) and Gambit (87.41%) are still rather close. Halls of Atonement shot up from the 2nd-worst dungeon to 86.53%. Th 9.33-point jump came from nerfs to both trash mob damage and required count. And the second factor might be the most important one.
The Lower Half
Dawnbreaker (83.50%) and Priory (83.48%) are still struggling. Many players are still encountering bugs on Dawnbreaker’s gunship section. Priory at least benefited from a Tyrannical first week, which boosted low-key success rates compared to Fortified. Floodgate is not the worst dungeon, but still quite behind with 80.57%. In Season 2, it hovered closer to mid-tier.
The Nerfs to Ara-Kara Didn’t Help Much
Even though the success rate improved by more than 2 percentage points, up to 74.86%, the dungeon is still far behind the rest. The keystone.guru heatmap shows little difference between week 4 and week 5. The bulk of the wipes still happened on the first major pull. And given the short distance from the entrance, this impacts the timer a lot less than in other sections. Halls benefited from nerfs to certain trash mobs. But reducing the overall required count by 10% and increasing the value of certain mobs did a lot more. A tweak to the required trash count o timer might be what Ara-Kara really needs.
Split Across All Key Levels
73.84% of all keys were done at key level 10 and higher. For key level 10 alone, the value of 32.70% actually decreased from last week. Key level 12 has now overtaken level 11 across all regions. Activity on key level 9 to 16 is still higher on Chinese servers in relative comparison to the rest of the world. Especially for keys 11 to 13, where it’s 12.5% to 26.43% higher.
30.10% of all keys were finished at 12 and higher, beyond the affix rotation. Last season, the same stat was just 15.46% in week 5. S3 stays ahead of S2 and S1 regarding the top key levels. Week 5 saw the first finished but untimed +21 key, while S2 and S1 only hit +19 and +16 respectively.
Success Rates have increased for all key levels up to 12. The gap from key level 6 to 7 has shrunk from 8.87 points to 7.7. Meanwhile, the value for key level 10 is 4.51 points higher than for key level 9. A further improvement over the previous week. Nearly 90% of all +10s were timed globally. And this is the global value. For the four regular regions, it was already at 90.88%.
Conclusion and Week 6 Forecast
The upward trend continues, but Ara-Kara should get a second tuning pass. Last season’s tuning was solid across the board, with only minor outliers. Ara-Kara is clearly skewing the metrics, and Operation Floodgate is also worthy of a few nerfs. In DF S3, we also had the best season at the time, and major nerfs for the worst dungeons took until week 10 of the season. The developers, busy with Midnight though, should take some time to iron out the last issues.
As of this writing, 96 hours after the US reset, the comparable numbers are looking good. The major regions are 0.1% to 3% behind the hourly values of the last ID. Surprisingly, activity was slightly power, despite it being a dungeon event week. But the playtest for Fellowship is also active this weekend. Interest in that pure M+ inspired game might have pulled some focus from WoW.
