The War Within’s first season got a very large amount of improvements throughout its runtime. Most of them centered around rewards, crests specifically. Today Nightstalker314 will be taking a look at how all these improvements affected actual runs made during the season. Which ones stopped the bleeding and which ones had little effect? With Season 2 underway and a lot of these changes still in effect, it will be a pretty good indicator of things to come.
General and Reward Structure Improvements
To start, we will be comparing significant changes to M+ for its reward structure and scaling over time with the effects they had on the overall numbers representing player behavior. One of the big issues early in Season 1 was that the developers increased the cap for myth track items from 4 to 6 levels. Therefore, the number of crests required exploded. In addition, your vault no longer gave you anything beyond the first upgrade level for those BIS items. Calculations revealed that – in the worst case – 1075 crests or 90 timed runs above key level 8 were required to upgrade all of your slots to the highest item level.
For the first 3 weeks we can see a clear – but mostly expected – decline in keys being completed. This is then abruptly halted for a few weeks. A major change to the reward structure led to gilded crests starting to drop from level 8 instead of 9. From week 3 to week 4 the total number of runs on key level 9 dropped by 30% (260k down to 180k) while key level 8 run numbers increased by almost 90% (170k up to 320k).
From week 7 to week 8 we can see yet another plateau within the curve. This time the punishing Challenger’s Peril affix got a major adjustment. The run time for each dungeon was increased by 90 seconds once the affix became active. In addition, the in time % for all dungeons up until this point in the season got a major bump. The developers retroactively applied this timer change to all runs so far leading to an increase from 75,4% to 78,6% (+3,2%) which Nightstalker314 could observe through live-tracking these changes to the RaiderIO data.
The Big Change
But all these changes couldn’t really slow down the regular decline in activity. And while players were hitting the overall crest cap for the myth track somewhere around 1075 at week 12, the developers announced a final major change to crest acquisition in Patch 11.0.7 which will also be permanent with the start of Season 2. Once these changes were active you can see the decline slowing down while also being interrupted by the pre-Christmas week drop and the post-Christmas holiday bump. After this, the overall run numbers per week settled around 500k. Quite a low number, but from these changes on lower numbers might be more common due to the reduced effort in crest farming which we will be observing in the final part of this article.
How Crest Changes Affect Your Overall Outcome Of M+ Keys
With Patch 11.0.7 as well as with the start of Season 2 major changes have been made to the crest rewards from M+. Carved Undermine Crests only drop from standard mythic dungeon difficulty, Runed Undermine Crests drop from key level 2 up to 6 and Gilded Undermine Crests drop from 7 upward.
Beforehand the amount of crests was fixed with 12 for a completed run and just 5 when the key got depleted. Now with each key level the amount of crests is increased by 2, starting at 10 and capping out at 20. Depleted keys will drop 4 less crests.
The Average Crests Per Run Increase A Lot
Comparing the data across all key levels for Season 1 before and after Patch 11.0.7 according to their in time percentage we can clearly see that on average all runs have been much more rewarding. We have yet to see how the focus on different key levels will shift compared to the previous model. But once we have enough data a few weeks into the season we will also highlight this.
If we attribute a weighting to each key level equivalent to the split we can see that the average run ended up with 39% more crests. For key level 10 the value would be 52% and from key level 12 upward we see values between 90% and 120% more crests. Especially within areas where depletion is more common, the new changes helped a lot.
If we now compare the old system with the changes in Season 2 in generalized cases we can see certain drawbacks at the lower end of each crest key range. Key level 2 and 7 seem to become less rewarding, but we have to keep in mind that on those levels we now receive crests from an upgrade track that we couldn’t get before.
But in general, the outcome has improved by quite a lot. If we look at the long-term average in time % of most seasons which usually falls between 80% and 90% we get an increase in crests of up to 81%!
In Conclusion
The War Within Mythic+ Season 1 was off to a rough start but through continuous iterations and adjustments the overall quality of the M+ experience was improved. Some of the changes came too late and will only see their full impact in Season 2. The weekly round-ups will continue and we will be highlighting the outcome of further changes and improvements.