The fourteenth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. In the previous week, the M+ downward trend accelerated when players switched over to new content. This week, the excessive farming of Rotmire has taken a backseat (-24% kills on Mythic), and high-end players have returned to M+, pushing for the top 1% and above. A drop-off of just 8.87% is clearly below the usual trend later into a season. So, let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
The regional values for week-by-week drop-offs were once again quite spread – just 4.31% for KR, 5.33% for TW, and 6.85% for the US. CN (9.17%) and the EU (10.58%) were the upper extremes. Long-term, the Asian region saw a lower drop-off since week 1. Weekly activity in the EU and the US has dropped considerably over the course of the season. In week 14, these two regions saw 14.82% (EU) and 18.49% (US) of their first week’s numbers. Meanwhile, CN (26.33%), KR (27.17%), and TW (29.73%) are much more stable throughout the season.
Compared to the previous seasons, the four regular regions can keep up with TWW S1 as a fitting comparison when it comes to absolute numbers. But due to the rush towards grinding M+ in week 1, the relative drop-off is much more significant.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
The spread across all dungeons has shrunk a bit week by week. Academy and Spire, as well as Terrace and Nexus-Point, switched positions. Maisara Caverns has held the last spot since week 1. But at least it hasn’t slipped any lower in terms of percentage share. When looking at the reactions to the returning dungeons, Temple of Sethraliss and King’s Rest might be fighting for last place in the next season. Especially, since KR was one of the few dungeons in the history of M+ with a timer beyond 40 minutes.
With an improvement of 0.56 percentage points, the success rates jumped back to 92.77%. Voidbound is one of the easier affixes. Though it can get messy, when the add spawns during moves from trash pack to trash pack and is ignored in the process. Since the success rate constantly improves across a season, it is hard to tell which affix works the best among the top three. But most groups tend to deal quite well with Pulsar. It’s not an add that requires target switching. Coordinating small movements is doable in most situations. The Devour affix can be countered by certain class cooldowns but feels like a bane for healers if the comp can’t provide these.
Split Across All Key Levels
89.07% of all runs were completed at key level 10 or higher. The focus of the relative share shifted towards key levels 8 to 11, as well as 18 and higher. In addition to the new local peak at +16 (4.85%), key level 20 is currently turning into a new spike. For now, a mix of +20 and +21 keys should be enough to secure a top 1% rating. This development is even more pronounced in CN, where we saw 16% more +20s than +19s in week 14. Key level 20 and above was also the only range where we saw an increase in absolute numbers this week. The first timed +25 key in a Maisara Caverns run has now also been joined by a timed +25 Magister’s Terrace in week 15.
So far, no M+ team has managed to get the +24 resilient Feat of Strength, but 2 more upgrades to the Omnium Folio have yet to be unlocked, and 5 weeks are still left within this season. The increase in success rate this week was clearly due to the rotating affix change. Key levels 5 to 11 saw a major rebound from the large drop-offs in the previous week. Increments by 1.13 to 3.80 percentage points were basically the inverse of the Ascendant affix week. Beyond the affix key range, we saw slight improvements, but also a small dip for +20 and +21, -0.14 and -0.18 points. Efforts to secure a top 1% rank led to a few more depleted test runs.
Conclusion and Week 14 Forecast
Unlike during the previous seasons, we have not yet seen a massive chasm within the higher key range. The 3,400 rating mount tokens and the top 1% reward keep motivation going throughout the season. We have yet to see where the token reward threshold will end up in season 2. The devs announced that this value will be subject to change in future seasons.
As of this writing, 120 hours after the US reset, hourly numbers for the major regions are once again dropping a lot. The main reason seems to be a hard pivot towards farming the new DF timewalking rewards this week. It is rather unusual to see the US (-21.04%) fall faster than the EU (-16.34%). But this might also be due to the July 4 holiday in the US. And CN is also losing steam with -24.16%. We will examine this further in the next breakdown.
