The eighteenth week of Mythic+ in this season is over, and Nightstalker314 is taking a look at the weekly data provided by Raider.IO. The third and final dungeon event week drove up activity once again. The number of completed runs increased by 3.96%. Lower levels saw their numbers bloat, while the focus on titles and cosmetics solidified at the higher end. But let’s look at the details.
Weekly Total Run Performance Compared To Other Seasons
The EU servers saw the biggest leap with +10.55%, ahead of the US (+7.75%) and TW (+3.23%). KR (-0.90%) saw a decline, just like CN (-2.09%). Chinese players are usually more ambitious and more active toward the current rating ceiling. But it seems that they are winding down faster below the top key level range within the final weeks.
Compared to the previous seasons for the regular regions, MN S1 almost managed to outperform TWW S1 in week 18. The bump from the dungeon week event is less pronounced than in previous seasons. The overlap with the Turbulent Timeways event devalues the extra box from the 4 M+ runs. Those take a bit longer than 5 Timewalking dungeon runs, which hand out the same reward.
Total Runs Across All Dungeons
The spread across all dungeons decreased slightly compared to week 17. The order also flipped again for ranks 6 and 7. The share for Maisara Caverns has been fluctuating between 11.41% (week 1) and 9.89% (week 6) for the entire season. There have been worse last places in previous seasons with City of Threads in TWW S1. But in earlier expansions, the gap towards the least played dungeon was a bit smaller. Adjustments to Caverns took a while earlier into this season. But once the info of a lower success rate spread, its fate was sealed.
The success rate increased by 0.07 percentage points from last week to 93.72%. This is the highest value for the season so far. The easy affix combination was beneficial. But higher activity in the lower key level range with better success rates was also boosting this value.
Split Across All Key Levels
83.10% of all runs were completed at key level 10 and higher. This value hasn’t been this low since week 4 of the season. The impact of new characters doing low-level keys has been larger than in the 2nd event week this season. This is a combination of leveling alts in Timewalking and then jumping right into M+ in such a week. Given that overall activity is lower, this late into the season, the relative impact is of course higher. But the increase in +2 keys from week 17 to 18 (+12,213) was also significantly higher than from week 9 to 10 (+5,578).
While absolute run numbers increased by 15.68% to 54.81% for key levels 2 to 9, key levels 10, 11, 13, 16, and 22 saw slight increases up to 6.01%. All of these are tied to the vault, 3,000 rating, 3,400 rating, and the top 1%. Key levels 24 (+19.14%) and 25 (+70.37%) were the other areas with any absolute growth. The chasm between 3,400 rating and the top 1% continues to deepen. Key level 19 (-27.95%) fell the most compared to week 17.
All of this is once again more pronounced in China. Lower key level numbers increased by up to 61.23% since activity there is usually super low. And run numbers for key levels 19 and 20 fell by almost 32% compared to the previous week. The slight growth in overall success rate can be tied to the bloat of keys from level 2 to 5. This managed to outperform the slight decline within the rest of the key levels.
Conclusion and Week 19 Forecast
Keeping M+ relevant throughout the entire season without push weeks is next to impossible. But replenishing the lower and mid-level keys with new characters from Turbulent Timeways leveling seems to work out for now. The rating creep for the new top 1% cut-off might only intensify within the next season. As mentioned last week, with such a cut-off you only find out how far the top 1% wants to push themselves. If the devs added another 5% cut-off, for example, that rating cut-off would also only increase compared to now.
As of this writing, 144 hours after the US reset, hourly numbers for the major regions are decreasing compared to week 18. The US (-3.49%) and EU (-6.00%) are keeping up, but China is seeing a major decline in interest with -18.44%. But we’ll examine this further next weekend.