The fifteenth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. Once again, Mythic+ took a backseat to another feature that provided more interesting incentives. With the introduction of Dragonflight Timewalking, the developers added rewards costing several thousand Timewalking Badges to the vendor. Since the average player had not stocked up that many over the last few months, a lot of players got busy grinding TW throughout the entire week. M+ metrics fell by 18.18%. So, let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared to Other Seasons
The regional drop-offs should be a good indicator of which regions’ players are more interested in cosmetic rewards. KR (-12.32%) and the EU (-13.13%) seem to care more about continued gearing than collecting cosmetics. On the other end, we have the US (-19.56%), CN (-20.86%), and TW (-22.15%). As a consequence of this, we can also see a lot more new players being added to the M+ leaderboard in week 16 in these regions. A fresh level 90 character now needs gear from M+.
Compared to previous seasons, the end-of-season trend continued. MN S1 stayed ahead of TWW S3, but the other two TWW seasons remain ahead overall. Keep in mind, however, that the tuning was rough, especially in TWW S1, and players could only really start farming later in the season. In TWW S2, we got the Turbo Boost rather late, and by now, a lot of players resent such a late bloating of the Crest grind.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
The spread across all dungeons decreased significantly, mainly because Maisara Caverns saw a sudden boost in popularity and success rate. The order shifted for the other dungeons in the lower half, which are usually quite close in popularity.
The 0.19-percentage-point increase in success rate to 92.96% was rather small. The major outlier, the jump of 1.11 points for Maisara Caverns, boils down to a general improvement across most key levels. More specifically, levels 2 (+1.18) to 5 (+1.36), as well as 9 (+2.71), 11 (+1.11), 13 (+1.86), and 21 (+2.10), improved a lot more. For the lower levels, this might be due to a potential stealth hotfix to the route or a new route spreading widely throughout the player base.
Split Across All Key Levels
Only 86.99% of all keys were completed at key level 10 or higher. This is the lowest value for this split since week 6 of the season. The focus of the relative share clearly shifted away from the 12-to-19 range toward the levels above and below it. Key level 14 only saw 81% of its relative share from week 14, while that factor rose to 138% for key level 2 at the lower end and 197% for level 24 at the upper end. Though there was a major focus on leveling characters and grinding TW dungeons, a good number of fresh level 90 characters already made it into the first few key levels. The total number of runs only increased for key levels 2 (+13.12%) to 5 (+1.80%), as well as level 21 and above.
The overall success rate improved slightly from week 14, but this was not reflected in the affix key-level range. Here, percentages fell by up to 0.70%. The trend was driven upward by general improvements from key levels 16 to 23. Once again, this is an indicator of players trying to secure a 3,400-rating token or the top 1% mount.
Conclusion and Week 16 Forecast
Players want to be kept busy over time, and switching out the M+ grind for a new raid (Sporefall) or adding another expansion to Timewalking helps. In the long run, Timewalking will catch up to the current expansion. The War Within might be added in MN S2 or S3, but we would then also need another feature for variety. Maybe the Labyrinths for Delves (12.1.5) or the unnamed game mode (12.1.7) can provide this.
As of this writing, 167 hours after the US reset, hourly numbers for the major regions have remained rather stable. The BFA Timewalking week doesn’t provide any new rewards, and the fresh level 90 characters from last week need some gear. By now, the US (-2.35%), the EU (-0.44%), and CN (+1.49%) are doing quite well. We’ll examine the details in the next breakdown.
