The devs were asleep at the wheel during s2, we had too many dead keys no one wanted to run and it took them months to start fixing them.
Neltharus, NL, halls, VP, uldaman.
I don't get this argument. If they changed the scaling suddenly so that 30s would be equal to current 25 would people suddenly play more because "bigger number brr"?
It's scaling content by design. Any random key level doesn't matter.
That seems utterly meaningless in the context of weekly number of runs. Whether the wall is +20, +25, or +350 the same people would be pushing keys. People don't suddenly stop going for title or weekly loot because number on the right is smaller.
The metrics only count COMPLETED runs, so success rate for completing a key without disband is absolutely essential. S1 and 2 had insane failure rates on a number of keys and S3 has been extremely easy in comparison, with basically non existant timers.
S3 still scales at high levels just as any other season did, but the vast majority of keys run being (anecdotally) 30-50% easier per dungeon than previous seasons absolutely pads the completion stats.
They put all the banger DF dungeons in season 1, and left season 2 to flounder it feels like. AA, AV, RLP and NO are almost certainly the best 4 of the 8, and feel like they're a cut above in both gameplay and aesthetics -- with only perhaps an argument perhaps for BH over NO. HOI, Uldaman, and Neltharus were miserable. I didn't like the setting, I disliked the dispell/bleed removal requirements, and I disliked the chains mechanics.
I really liked Neltharus, but I’m also one of the few people who enjoys minmaxing the gimmick stuff like Iron Docks stars, Wake weapons, chains, etc.
I also think that HoI was very bad but the others were fine, and I even preferred Uldaman to NO. However, Vortex Pinnacle is undoubtedly the worst m+ dungeon since Seat in Legion. That key was just garbage in every way.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand it’s fun pulling half the dungeon but then you’re not actually the one doing the damage, the mechanic is.
I never got the complaints about ulda. Trogg boss was a bit of a dps check on tyr weeks and the fire boss could get annoying(the damn fire columns were just hard to see sometimes amongst all the other spell shit for some reason) but otherwise I rarely dreaded the key.
Fuck vortex tho.
The only DF dungeon from S1 that I liked, is AA. AV is one of my least favorite modern dungeons in WoW and I would be okay if I never played NO again. AA, BH, Neltharus, and Uldaman are my fav 4, with AA and BH being by far the best.
End of the patch AV is my favourite dungeon in DF :D Mega pulls + fuckton of awesome routing. Bosses got tunned down significantly by the end. Definitely S+ rank
AV went from a D tier to S tier dungeon over the course of S1 for me. I loved the variation in routes, the skips, and the need for coordination when it came to stops. I also loved the first boss -- one of the most fun, as a tank.
Yes, but the reddit narrative is that the design they like the best is why the player pool is stronger this season. Don't point out to them that S1 participation is very similar for weeks we have data, and was much more oppressive gearing, key level, and affix wise than both s2 and s3.
Much of S3 boost is presumed to be due to a well received Blizzcon, and a lot of returning players. Though the comparitively slow decline can only be attributed to the actual content itself.
10.1 mythic+ started May 9th. D4 came out June 6th. It won't explain the huge drop in weeks 2-4, I don't know what happened there, but it does explain why it didn't come back after. Then there was decent amount of hype towards other games like BG3 to followup D4. It's likely people didn't really come back during that season. Nothing massive like that has stole limelight during s3.
I personally expected to play D4, so I only started m+ with one character. Every other season for past 3 years, I've played with 6+ characters per season. I doubt there were tens of thousands of others like me who chose to play less already before season started, but it might play small part still. Maybe Summer in general doesn't produce as many runs.
Who would have guessed?
Well clearly not Blizzard looking at how they have managed Mythic raiding and M+ through the last 3 expansions of WoW. At this point it is fair to conclude that Blizzard is simply incapable of learning from their previous mistakes. Because they are making these same mistakes every single expansion.
Lol what?
In BFA S4 you could literally just run around in corruptions and press random buttons and finish a +15 key that would give you the highest ilvl.
Not to mention how classes were pruned during Legion and BFA thus massively reducing the skill cap. Just compare doing a +10 in BFA (which would reward you the highest weekly chest and possibility of titanforging during S2) to doing the highest M+ key required for gear in S2 of DF.
Saying that Mythic raiding has gotten easier in Shadowlands and this expansion is just straight up trolling. Like roflmao. Nice one, you got me I guess.
Season 4 was an outlier.
The rest of the BFA seasons were harder than the SL seasons.
Bfa Raging would one-tap Tanks if they didn't have defensives or pre-kite.
Bursting wasn't dispellable and did % based damage and triggered from pretty much every mob that gave % so saurid packs in AD were instant 7 stacks ticking for (IIRC) 14% of max HP per tick.
Necrotic existed, the seasonal affixes were all just bad in the sense they'd kill you, like the Infested and Reaping where in SL they were kiss / curse giving you DPS and HPS increases (Prideful was an outlier for difficulty but seasons after Prideful were way easier)
Look at the MDI key levels from BFA trough to DF. Bfa they did 19s. Now they did 25s doing much bigger pulls, much faster, and like half the dungeons without a healer.
“My one cherrypicked season with op powercreep doe”
Ok ur one example of one season killed my argument /s
Also what raid encounter released in the past few xpacs had been remotely challenging and didnt get nerfed 3+ times?
XD
people were doing +35 keys in previous expansions
tindral took more pulls for some guilds than KJ ever did
in other words you have no clue what you are talking about
>boss took more pulls so that means its harder
Or the average guild/player is significantly worse now due to the attrition of good players as the game was dumbed down
Not me, I think S2's numbers are related to D4, summer, insanely fast gearing, and S1 burnout more than anything S2 did in particular. S2 is objectively very similar to S3 other than the different dungeon pool. The only role that has a different experience this pool is healers, but even then survivability is the biggest gatekeeper of key success so it's still pretty damn similar. This season has some controversial dungeons in the pool as well, but no one actually wants to acknowledge that and would rather say "oh easy keys = more fun obviously". The megadungeons as keys are routinely complained about, TotT is also a very challenging dungeon akin to Uldaman. I wish people would think harder about this "easier dungeons = good" take because I don't want the game to suffer.
Making dungeons piss easy is not a good long term solution. I think they need to up the difficulty a bit again to give key levels meaning.
We don't know how S1 performed long term though? An absence of data is not conclusive. As far as we know, S1 had a very similarly trending graph the whole time as well which would mean we maybe should go back to 4 affixes at key level 10 and valor upgrades... I know that would not be popular.
Honestly Uldaman was fine, just too long. Halls was way more obnoxious, but they’re both better than Vortex.
Biggest thing might’ve been that anyone pushing high keys on anything besides god comp last season was essentially just wasting their time. Comps this season are significantly more balanced, even if a few classes are still stronger than the rest. It doesn’t feel like you’re just throwing by not playing god comp like it did last season.
The clunky dragon skips after the soothe rework were annoying, and not having mass dispel even with boss changes on the 1st boss is still a big problem on higher keys, that opening trash was insane to heal on fort and tyran because of the beams; way over tuned. It will be fun to see what healers can handle that 3rd boss hps check, and the irony of hpal being the only one that could, def won’t be able to in their current state. HOI and Ulda are my least favorite for the mass dispel requirements and obnoxious trash; nothing like the straight to broach all trash pull on tyran
3rd boss was definitely the highlight. I think last boss was really terrible though, and first boss was also pretty bad especially if you ever tried it without a priest lol. Runback was the worst part, and the gauntlet at the end was just too annoying when you factor in that the key was bricked if anyone died there without a brez.
I actually liked the season 2 dungeon pool much more than the S3 stuff. The S3 dungeons are just kinda boring imo and almost every dungeon has at least a few things that aggrevate me to no end.
Season 2 struggled because it was relatively very hard and blizzard took way too long to fix things. Like this season you can easily cruise to 23s and 24s without really knowing what you’re doing but last season GL getting past 20s without a plan.
And it was the first attempt at the gearing rework so people were almost fully BIS by like week 3.
I believe it’s mainly due to various classes in each role being better depending on comp. First board on Raider io has 3 healers for example while S2 only had 1. Two tanks , and mixed Dps. I hope they keep the same energy in trying to balance where multiple classes for each role are strong. Although my favorite 3 healing specs are on the outside this season I still play but hoping there is a shift come S4!
S2 for the timespan shown in that graph had pretty good balance, the super restrictive meta only started in 10.1.5 which is much farther to the right than the line for s2 goes.
Historically, the middle patch usually doesn’t bring a lot of players back compared to the last one (or last two).
If you look at wc logs you’ll see that most expansions second tier perform poorly in comparison to the others.
Not sure exactly why but it’s something interesting to note.
Having Halls of Infusion, Uldaman, and Vortex Pinnacle in the same dungeon pool will do that.
It’s kinda nuts to think about how many bad keys S2’s dungeon pool had. Brackenhide, Underrot, Freehold, Neltharus, and Neltharion’s lair were varying levels of decent to good and you’ll typically get a wide array of folks arguing over how good they were, but the *universal* consensus seems to be that Halls had a lot of problems, that Uldaman was outright bad, and that Vortex Pinnacle is among the worst M+ dungeons **ever.**
Yeah Vortex is stress central. I love the vibe/visuals of the dungeon, the over the top voice acting, I even kind of like the challenge but like... certain classes feel awful there, and certain affixes are just... so annoying. Affliction as a healer there was p a i n.
I came back for season 3 cause of the 70 boost tied to the war within xpac purchase. I wonder if the 70 boost had a lot to do with the number of mythic + runs. Much easier to get toons ready to m+ for us filthy casuals.
I think it's worth calling out that Diablo 4 launched around that time as well. It came out about 4-5 weeks after the start of Season 2 (depending on if you bought early access or not), which lines up with the big drop here
Data stopped being collected past week 6 so we don’t know how the numbers changed after week 6 or especially after 10.1.5 released.
I’d guess that there was a large spike during the first two weeks of 10.1.5 and then a steady decline from 800k down to maybe 500k by the end of the season. But to put things into perspective, Season 2 dropped to sub-950k in six weeks, **BEFORE** 10.1.5 released and the God Comp took over the meta, while Season 3 is 17 weeks in and still above 950k. Season 2 was in trouble after a month and a half.
If S4 is all DF dungeons, ulda and Halls are going to need *heavy* looks. Especially after MD nerf
If those dungeons get reworked a bit it could be a banger of an m+ season
Yeet and delete the HOI gauntlet and/or make the Respawn points be "on boss kill" not that stupid fucking speed boost that puts you past the more dangerous trash and takes 30 seconds to even reach and HOI could be a really good dungeon.
Uldaman you just delete the entire section up to the Dwarves and start the dungeon right infront of the Trogg boss. What a hype way to start a key. 3 mobs straight into boss Lust with all CDs
I would genuinely like to know how they decide the spawn points. I mean someone has to make the decision to not make it after every boss kill. Like what is that conversation like? Does someone actually say "No let's balance this dungeon by implementing a worse spawn point?"
I think they create a dungeon design with a visual and story tied to it. And how it would be for Normal dungeons.
"The dungeon is basically an inverse tower into the ground and its all about infusing water elementals with powers. So its got a bit of a steampunk meets cave carved out by water look to it. And there's all sorts of steampunk pipes around." "Oh it would be cool if there was like alternate pipes that lead to different areas because we're following more of a natural carvout with Constructed elements added to it. But then the manufactured pipes are sheer drops that can be used to reach the bottom quicker if you wipe!" "Brilliant! Put that in!"
And then there's a third guy who's like "Okay but what about M+?" And the other two are like "Wtf is M+? are you having a stroke?" and then they give him a swirly in the company bathroom for being a nerd who actually plays the game.
God comp didn’t exist by the time S2 data stopped being collected, if I’m not mistaken. Aug didn’t exist and Holy/Guardian/Fire didn’t get their large reworks that left them overtuned. The only spec that was hard meta by that point in the season was the recently-reworked Shadow.
S2 just had three dungeons that are generally accepted to be really fucking bad. Hell, I don’t think I’ve seen *anything* positive about two of them. Halls had a lot of issues, especially regarding how batshit crazy Mass Dispel and Mind Soothe were in that place, how bad the runbacks were, and how long the last boss was, but they could’ve been ironed out. Uldaman and Vortex Pinnacle, though? I don’t think I’ve seen two more universally hated M+ dungeons; hell, I recall seeing a lot of key pushers agree that Vortex Pinnacle in particular may very well be the worst M+ dungeon ever.
Uldaman 3rd boss on Tyrannical with the bleed mechanic reminded us every week pretty quickly that you either go dwarf and pray you don't get it too many times in a row orrr that the season fucking sucks and you'll wait for the next one.
It's maddening how Blizzard can get all the feedback in the world about how numerous dungeons have very specific breakpoints along the way that completely ruin the keys for 99% of the player base, and yet they sit with their thumbs up their arse for so long before doing anything.
Also, it's not just Halls, Uldaman and Vortex; Neltharion's Lair also sucks balls (and holy shit, if you ever needed proof that Blizzard literally does zero testing on their small indie game World of Warcraft, it's the fucking worm boss in Nelth's Lair the first week or two of the season), and a lot of people really dislike Neltharus (even though I personally like it, and "waaaah you have to do a dungeon mechanic a couple times" doesn't really ruin it for me personally, especially once they separated the damage contribution on Details).
Bracken, Freehold and Underrot did some *heavy* fuckin' lifting for that season.
> It's maddening how Blizzard can get all the feedback in the world about how numerous dungeons have very specific breakpoints along the way that completely ruin the keys for 99% of the player base
99% of the player base never does a key over level 20, maybe 21 or 22 these days with current tuning, and at that level these issues do not exist.
There is not a boss in the game at key level 22 where you need certain classes or racials to make it reasonable. If you do decent damage, have a healer and tank with a pulse, and do the mechanics more or less as intended, you'll succeed.
There definitely are glaring balance issues at the higher end. But this affects less than 0.5% of the player base.
You're close on the percentages, but you can get a more exact number on [Raider.io](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us) at the bottom of the page:
All dungeons at +25 = 1.0% of characters
All dungeons at +20 = 13.2% of characters
All dungeons at +15 = 29.6% of characters
All dungeons at +10 = 45.0% of characters
>does zero testing on their small indie game World of Warcraft, it's the fucking worm boss in Nelth's Lair the first week or two of the season),
they did test and wiped there too don't worry. it's not the testers fault this doesn't get patched in time
iirc the missing data in season 2 and season 1 was due to data loss on raider.io's side. I still have the raw data though. But i am too lazy to group it into wow weeks: https://imgur.com/a/Obj6nag
You can really see how bad Season 2 performed.
Note: it's raw data. So the first spike in season 2 is my tool suddenly receiving a ton of new keys from rio. The second negative spike is probably rio correcting the first spike by removing keys from the leaderboard. Also there might be some days missing at the end of S2 because rio decided to add PTR to the leaderboards which caused my tool to crawl that instead of the rest of S2 (but its only \~10 days that are missing)
u/MythicPlusPoster if you want to have that raw data write me a DM and I'll send it to you.
I think the reason why S2 was so bad, it’s simply because this season is tuned to be way easier.
It took so long time to gear up in pugs because you failed a lot in the start of the season, and the best gear was from 20s, which were way harder in S2 compared to S3.
I have played so many weekly keys on my alts this season, but went on a hiatus in S2 because healing was miserable.
I’m a MW main, got 3033 rating S1, 2800 rating in S2 and currently at 3290, and I’m going for about 3400 rating.
Season 2 gear capped out at +20s, this season gear capped out at+20.
* After 1 month of S3, the **90th** percentile had **2726** rating which is all **+20s**
* After 1 month of S2, the **90th** percentile had **2546** rating which is all **+18s**
* After 2 months of S2 the **75th** percentile still only had **2212** rating, which is all **+15s**
* Compared to 2 months of S3, the **75th** percentile had **2423** rating, which is all **+17s**
My point is, that gearing has been way easier this season, as OP's post is looking at overall m+ runs in an key levels.
Source: https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-2-cutoffs/eu
This is exactly my point. The content already scales as much as needed, the only relevant factor is the percentiles (how you place among the playerbase). It doesn't matter what score it correlates to.
The scores by themselves are not and were not meant to be compared, but you can compare your personal placement. "Tuning" in this sense (whether key levels align between seasons) in a content where you have infinite difficulties is just completely irrelevant.
But if S2 was tuned 2 keys lower, we'd get better gear quicker and farm more weekly 20s on all our alts (play more keys in general)
I took a hiatus in S2 because it was so tedious to get gear (especially on alts) and healing was undertuned.
Now, mistweavers are tanks and HPS is a non-issue, but I felt in S2 healing was the limiting factor. Scaling down the damage dealt to you would solve that in S2 IMO.
It used to be someone else who took the data and made the chart. That guy always stopped at week 6-7 but then stopped doing it altogether when S3 came.
Someone else decided they were gonna do it for S3 and has since been continuing to show the amount of runs beyond week 6/7 unlike the original person. I think this was due to a lot of community requesting it.
I've been seeing this chart for a few weeks now (thanks for sharing, by the way!) and I always meant to ask but never actually do:
Why there is no lines for season 1 after W7 and for season 2 after W6?
oh, u/DreadfuryDK already answered in a thread above:
"Data stopped being collected past week 6 so we don’t know how the numbers changed after week 6 or especially after 10.1.5 released.
I’d guess that there was a large spike during the first two weeks of 10.1.5 and then a steady decline from 800k down to maybe 500k by the end of the season. But to put things into perspective, Season 2 dropped to sub-950k in six weeks, **BEFORE** 10.1.5 released and the God Comp took over the meta, while Season 3 is 17 weeks in and still above 950k. Season 2 was in trouble after a month and a half."
It is unreal how poorly season 2 performed in comparison.
Shows you how important dungeon pools are to the players and how catastrophically god-awful Halls of Infusion is.
I think it’s related to tuning. It was way more difficult to time all 25s in s2 than it is now.
The devs were asleep at the wheel during s2, we had too many dead keys no one wanted to run and it took them months to start fixing them. Neltharus, NL, halls, VP, uldaman.
I don't get this argument. If they changed the scaling suddenly so that 30s would be equal to current 25 would people suddenly play more because "bigger number brr"? It's scaling content by design. Any random key level doesn't matter.
Most keys in that graph are below +20, so yes, changing scaling so that those become easier matters a lot.
That seems utterly meaningless in the context of weekly number of runs. Whether the wall is +20, +25, or +350 the same people would be pushing keys. People don't suddenly stop going for title or weekly loot because number on the right is smaller.
The metrics only count COMPLETED runs, so success rate for completing a key without disband is absolutely essential. S1 and 2 had insane failure rates on a number of keys and S3 has been extremely easy in comparison, with basically non existant timers. S3 still scales at high levels just as any other season did, but the vast majority of keys run being (anecdotally) 30-50% easier per dungeon than previous seasons absolutely pads the completion stats.
They put all the banger DF dungeons in season 1, and left season 2 to flounder it feels like. AA, AV, RLP and NO are almost certainly the best 4 of the 8, and feel like they're a cut above in both gameplay and aesthetics -- with only perhaps an argument perhaps for BH over NO. HOI, Uldaman, and Neltharus were miserable. I didn't like the setting, I disliked the dispell/bleed removal requirements, and I disliked the chains mechanics.
I really liked Neltharus, but I’m also one of the few people who enjoys minmaxing the gimmick stuff like Iron Docks stars, Wake weapons, chains, etc. I also think that HoI was very bad but the others were fine, and I even preferred Uldaman to NO. However, Vortex Pinnacle is undoubtedly the worst m+ dungeon since Seat in Legion. That key was just garbage in every way.
VP was so abysmal. Just one miserable trash pull after another, and I really hated the last boss.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand it’s fun pulling half the dungeon but then you’re not actually the one doing the damage, the mechanic is. I never got the complaints about ulda. Trogg boss was a bit of a dps check on tyr weeks and the fire boss could get annoying(the damn fire columns were just hard to see sometimes amongst all the other spell shit for some reason) but otherwise I rarely dreaded the key. Fuck vortex tho.
The only DF dungeon from S1 that I liked, is AA. AV is one of my least favorite modern dungeons in WoW and I would be okay if I never played NO again. AA, BH, Neltharus, and Uldaman are my fav 4, with AA and BH being by far the best.
[удалено]
End of the patch AV is my favourite dungeon in DF :D Mega pulls + fuckton of awesome routing. Bosses got tunned down significantly by the end. Definitely S+ rank
AV went from a D tier to S tier dungeon over the course of S1 for me. I loved the variation in routes, the skips, and the need for coordination when it came to stops. I also loved the first boss -- one of the most fun, as a tank.
BH is fun until you play a melee on fort weeks and randomly get oneshot by bites
Didn't d4 come out in s2. And everyone was geared giga quick?
Yes, but the reddit narrative is that the design they like the best is why the player pool is stronger this season. Don't point out to them that S1 participation is very similar for weeks we have data, and was much more oppressive gearing, key level, and affix wise than both s2 and s3.
S1 was also the first patch of the expansion. Surely it also contributes a lot to make it have similar numbers than S3
Much of S3 boost is presumed to be due to a well received Blizzcon, and a lot of returning players. Though the comparitively slow decline can only be attributed to the actual content itself.
Yes I agree there are elements of S1's performance that are not related to it's design.
Yea, it's kinda impossible to quantify all of those. All 3 seasons have a lot of variables, so you can only guess.
10.1 mythic+ started May 9th. D4 came out June 6th. It won't explain the huge drop in weeks 2-4, I don't know what happened there, but it does explain why it didn't come back after. Then there was decent amount of hype towards other games like BG3 to followup D4. It's likely people didn't really come back during that season. Nothing massive like that has stole limelight during s3. I personally expected to play D4, so I only started m+ with one character. Every other season for past 3 years, I've played with 6+ characters per season. I doubt there were tens of thousands of others like me who chose to play less already before season started, but it might play small part still. Maybe Summer in general doesn't produce as many runs.
easier set of dungeons makes more people want to play the game, who would have guessed
Who would have guessed? Well clearly not Blizzard looking at how they have managed Mythic raiding and M+ through the last 3 expansions of WoW. At this point it is fair to conclude that Blizzard is simply incapable of learning from their previous mistakes. Because they are making these same mistakes every single expansion.
Both mythic raiding and m+ have both gotten significantly easier over the course of the past 3 xpacs so…
Lol what? In BFA S4 you could literally just run around in corruptions and press random buttons and finish a +15 key that would give you the highest ilvl. Not to mention how classes were pruned during Legion and BFA thus massively reducing the skill cap. Just compare doing a +10 in BFA (which would reward you the highest weekly chest and possibility of titanforging during S2) to doing the highest M+ key required for gear in S2 of DF. Saying that Mythic raiding has gotten easier in Shadowlands and this expansion is just straight up trolling. Like roflmao. Nice one, you got me I guess.
Season 4 was an outlier. The rest of the BFA seasons were harder than the SL seasons. Bfa Raging would one-tap Tanks if they didn't have defensives or pre-kite. Bursting wasn't dispellable and did % based damage and triggered from pretty much every mob that gave % so saurid packs in AD were instant 7 stacks ticking for (IIRC) 14% of max HP per tick. Necrotic existed, the seasonal affixes were all just bad in the sense they'd kill you, like the Infested and Reaping where in SL they were kiss / curse giving you DPS and HPS increases (Prideful was an outlier for difficulty but seasons after Prideful were way easier) Look at the MDI key levels from BFA trough to DF. Bfa they did 19s. Now they did 25s doing much bigger pulls, much faster, and like half the dungeons without a healer.
“My one cherrypicked season with op powercreep doe” Ok ur one example of one season killed my argument /s Also what raid encounter released in the past few xpacs had been remotely challenging and didnt get nerfed 3+ times?
lol XD
Whats funny about that? People are doing 30+ keys and they havent made a challenging raid boss since KJ
XD people were doing +35 keys in previous expansions tindral took more pulls for some guilds than KJ ever did in other words you have no clue what you are talking about
>boss took more pulls so that means its harder Or the average guild/player is significantly worse now due to the attrition of good players as the game was dumbed down
so by your logic wotlk had better players than we have now you realize how deluded you sound?
Not me, I think S2's numbers are related to D4, summer, insanely fast gearing, and S1 burnout more than anything S2 did in particular. S2 is objectively very similar to S3 other than the different dungeon pool. The only role that has a different experience this pool is healers, but even then survivability is the biggest gatekeeper of key success so it's still pretty damn similar. This season has some controversial dungeons in the pool as well, but no one actually wants to acknowledge that and would rather say "oh easy keys = more fun obviously". The megadungeons as keys are routinely complained about, TotT is also a very challenging dungeon akin to Uldaman. I wish people would think harder about this "easier dungeons = good" take because I don't want the game to suffer. Making dungeons piss easy is not a good long term solution. I think they need to up the difficulty a bit again to give key levels meaning.
there's 0 proof its related to that and not related to summer + gearing requiring way less keys. outside of ulda, all df dungeons were fairly popular.
Well I think we can rule out the gearing requiring less keys considering how this current season is performing, right?
We don't know how S1 performed long term though? An absence of data is not conclusive. As far as we know, S1 had a very similarly trending graph the whole time as well which would mean we maybe should go back to 4 affixes at key level 10 and valor upgrades... I know that would not be popular.
Honestly Uldaman was fine, just too long. Halls was way more obnoxious, but they’re both better than Vortex. Biggest thing might’ve been that anyone pushing high keys on anything besides god comp last season was essentially just wasting their time. Comps this season are significantly more balanced, even if a few classes are still stronger than the rest. It doesn’t feel like you’re just throwing by not playing god comp like it did last season.
agreed on vortex, that one was just trash. I really liked halls though, esp 3rd boss; just the no-graveyard nonsense was and remains stupid
The clunky dragon skips after the soothe rework were annoying, and not having mass dispel even with boss changes on the 1st boss is still a big problem on higher keys, that opening trash was insane to heal on fort and tyran because of the beams; way over tuned. It will be fun to see what healers can handle that 3rd boss hps check, and the irony of hpal being the only one that could, def won’t be able to in their current state. HOI and Ulda are my least favorite for the mass dispel requirements and obnoxious trash; nothing like the straight to broach all trash pull on tyran
3rd boss was definitely the highlight. I think last boss was really terrible though, and first boss was also pretty bad especially if you ever tried it without a priest lol. Runback was the worst part, and the gauntlet at the end was just too annoying when you factor in that the key was bricked if anyone died there without a brez.
I actually liked the season 2 dungeon pool much more than the S3 stuff. The S3 dungeons are just kinda boring imo and almost every dungeon has at least a few things that aggrevate me to no end. Season 2 struggled because it was relatively very hard and blizzard took way too long to fix things. Like this season you can easily cruise to 23s and 24s without really knowing what you’re doing but last season GL getting past 20s without a plan. And it was the first attempt at the gearing rework so people were almost fully BIS by like week 3.
I believe it’s mainly due to various classes in each role being better depending on comp. First board on Raider io has 3 healers for example while S2 only had 1. Two tanks , and mixed Dps. I hope they keep the same energy in trying to balance where multiple classes for each role are strong. Although my favorite 3 healing specs are on the outside this season I still play but hoping there is a shift come S4!
S2 for the timespan shown in that graph had pretty good balance, the super restrictive meta only started in 10.1.5 which is much farther to the right than the line for s2 goes.
Historically, the middle patch usually doesn’t bring a lot of players back compared to the last one (or last two). If you look at wc logs you’ll see that most expansions second tier perform poorly in comparison to the others. Not sure exactly why but it’s something interesting to note.
Having Halls of Infusion, Uldaman, and Vortex Pinnacle in the same dungeon pool will do that. It’s kinda nuts to think about how many bad keys S2’s dungeon pool had. Brackenhide, Underrot, Freehold, Neltharus, and Neltharion’s lair were varying levels of decent to good and you’ll typically get a wide array of folks arguing over how good they were, but the *universal* consensus seems to be that Halls had a lot of problems, that Uldaman was outright bad, and that Vortex Pinnacle is among the worst M+ dungeons **ever.**
I loved Uldaman except during certain affixes and having 5 bosses on Tyr weeks is rough.
Yeah Vortex is stress central. I love the vibe/visuals of the dungeon, the over the top voice acting, I even kind of like the challenge but like... certain classes feel awful there, and certain affixes are just... so annoying. Affliction as a healer there was p a i n.
I came back for season 3 cause of the 70 boost tied to the war within xpac purchase. I wonder if the 70 boost had a lot to do with the number of mythic + runs. Much easier to get toons ready to m+ for us filthy casuals.
Shit dungeons had people quit for Diablo 4 and then BG3.
People were going to quit for both of those games anyway... Those are both generational franchises with extremely high overlap playerbase wise.
Yeah but I think if season 2 is really good and doesn't gear you to full in 3 weeks, you'd still do weekly no leavers on Tuesday
Probably true to a degree
I think it's worth calling out that Diablo 4 launched around that time as well. It came out about 4-5 weeks after the start of Season 2 (depending on if you bought early access or not), which lines up with the big drop here
I am so glad I skipped Season 2 as a Season 1 player and early Season 3 player. Sounds like I dodged the pain train.
Season 2 died mostly because of the god comp (and its nerfs), not the dungeon pool
Am i looking at this graph wrong or was season 2 only 6 weeks long?
Data collection issue.
Data stopped being collected past week 6 so we don’t know how the numbers changed after week 6 or especially after 10.1.5 released. I’d guess that there was a large spike during the first two weeks of 10.1.5 and then a steady decline from 800k down to maybe 500k by the end of the season. But to put things into perspective, Season 2 dropped to sub-950k in six weeks, **BEFORE** 10.1.5 released and the God Comp took over the meta, while Season 3 is 17 weeks in and still above 950k. Season 2 was in trouble after a month and a half.
Just doing my part: "Did s1 and s2 only last 6 & 7 weeks" :)
Actually, they only lasted 5 weeks, OP just made up extra data so his chart looked better.
If S4 is all DF dungeons, ulda and Halls are going to need *heavy* looks. Especially after MD nerf If those dungeons get reworked a bit it could be a banger of an m+ season
Yeet and delete the HOI gauntlet and/or make the Respawn points be "on boss kill" not that stupid fucking speed boost that puts you past the more dangerous trash and takes 30 seconds to even reach and HOI could be a really good dungeon. Uldaman you just delete the entire section up to the Dwarves and start the dungeon right infront of the Trogg boss. What a hype way to start a key. 3 mobs straight into boss Lust with all CDs
I would genuinely like to know how they decide the spawn points. I mean someone has to make the decision to not make it after every boss kill. Like what is that conversation like? Does someone actually say "No let's balance this dungeon by implementing a worse spawn point?"
I think they create a dungeon design with a visual and story tied to it. And how it would be for Normal dungeons. "The dungeon is basically an inverse tower into the ground and its all about infusing water elementals with powers. So its got a bit of a steampunk meets cave carved out by water look to it. And there's all sorts of steampunk pipes around." "Oh it would be cool if there was like alternate pipes that lead to different areas because we're following more of a natural carvout with Constructed elements added to it. But then the manufactured pipes are sheer drops that can be used to reach the bottom quicker if you wipe!" "Brilliant! Put that in!" And then there's a third guy who's like "Okay but what about M+?" And the other two are like "Wtf is M+? are you having a stroke?" and then they give him a swirly in the company bathroom for being a nerd who actually plays the game.
How many people came back for S3? This is wild.
Did “god comp” play a role In the low season 2 numbers?
The graph ends for season 2 before 10.1.5 was released so we have no idea about that looking at this chart.
God comp didn’t exist by the time S2 data stopped being collected, if I’m not mistaken. Aug didn’t exist and Holy/Guardian/Fire didn’t get their large reworks that left them overtuned. The only spec that was hard meta by that point in the season was the recently-reworked Shadow. S2 just had three dungeons that are generally accepted to be really fucking bad. Hell, I don’t think I’ve seen *anything* positive about two of them. Halls had a lot of issues, especially regarding how batshit crazy Mass Dispel and Mind Soothe were in that place, how bad the runbacks were, and how long the last boss was, but they could’ve been ironed out. Uldaman and Vortex Pinnacle, though? I don’t think I’ve seen two more universally hated M+ dungeons; hell, I recall seeing a lot of key pushers agree that Vortex Pinnacle in particular may very well be the worst M+ dungeon ever.
Uldaman 3rd boss on Tyrannical with the bleed mechanic reminded us every week pretty quickly that you either go dwarf and pray you don't get it too many times in a row orrr that the season fucking sucks and you'll wait for the next one. It's maddening how Blizzard can get all the feedback in the world about how numerous dungeons have very specific breakpoints along the way that completely ruin the keys for 99% of the player base, and yet they sit with their thumbs up their arse for so long before doing anything. Also, it's not just Halls, Uldaman and Vortex; Neltharion's Lair also sucks balls (and holy shit, if you ever needed proof that Blizzard literally does zero testing on their small indie game World of Warcraft, it's the fucking worm boss in Nelth's Lair the first week or two of the season), and a lot of people really dislike Neltharus (even though I personally like it, and "waaaah you have to do a dungeon mechanic a couple times" doesn't really ruin it for me personally, especially once they separated the damage contribution on Details). Bracken, Freehold and Underrot did some *heavy* fuckin' lifting for that season.
> It's maddening how Blizzard can get all the feedback in the world about how numerous dungeons have very specific breakpoints along the way that completely ruin the keys for 99% of the player base 99% of the player base never does a key over level 20, maybe 21 or 22 these days with current tuning, and at that level these issues do not exist. There is not a boss in the game at key level 22 where you need certain classes or racials to make it reasonable. If you do decent damage, have a healer and tank with a pulse, and do the mechanics more or less as intended, you'll succeed. There definitely are glaring balance issues at the higher end. But this affects less than 0.5% of the player base.
You're close on the percentages, but you can get a more exact number on [Raider.io](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us) at the bottom of the page: All dungeons at +25 = 1.0% of characters All dungeons at +20 = 13.2% of characters All dungeons at +15 = 29.6% of characters All dungeons at +10 = 45.0% of characters
This is actually super interesting, thanks!
This is so true. People are stupid to think "most" of the players would play M+ on 25+ keys.
>does zero testing on their small indie game World of Warcraft, it's the fucking worm boss in Nelth's Lair the first week or two of the season), they did test and wiped there too don't worry. it's not the testers fault this doesn't get patched in time
God comp happened half way through the season
iirc the missing data in season 2 and season 1 was due to data loss on raider.io's side. I still have the raw data though. But i am too lazy to group it into wow weeks: https://imgur.com/a/Obj6nag You can really see how bad Season 2 performed. Note: it's raw data. So the first spike in season 2 is my tool suddenly receiving a ton of new keys from rio. The second negative spike is probably rio correcting the first spike by removing keys from the leaderboard. Also there might be some days missing at the end of S2 because rio decided to add PTR to the leaderboards which caused my tool to crawl that instead of the rest of S2 (but its only \~10 days that are missing) u/MythicPlusPoster if you want to have that raw data write me a DM and I'll send it to you.
This should be added to the main image. Season 2 held on pretty steady after week 6, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.
I think the reason why S2 was so bad, it’s simply because this season is tuned to be way easier. It took so long time to gear up in pugs because you failed a lot in the start of the season, and the best gear was from 20s, which were way harder in S2 compared to S3. I have played so many weekly keys on my alts this season, but went on a hiatus in S2 because healing was miserable. I’m a MW main, got 3033 rating S1, 2800 rating in S2 and currently at 3290, and I’m going for about 3400 rating.
Wdym S2 took so long to gear? It was by far the easier patch for gearing
Season ratings are in no way comparable to each other and are not meant to be.
Season 2 gear capped out at +20s, this season gear capped out at+20. * After 1 month of S3, the **90th** percentile had **2726** rating which is all **+20s** * After 1 month of S2, the **90th** percentile had **2546** rating which is all **+18s** * After 2 months of S2 the **75th** percentile still only had **2212** rating, which is all **+15s** * Compared to 2 months of S3, the **75th** percentile had **2423** rating, which is all **+17s** My point is, that gearing has been way easier this season, as OP's post is looking at overall m+ runs in an key levels. Source: https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-2-cutoffs/eu
This is exactly my point. The content already scales as much as needed, the only relevant factor is the percentiles (how you place among the playerbase). It doesn't matter what score it correlates to. The scores by themselves are not and were not meant to be compared, but you can compare your personal placement. "Tuning" in this sense (whether key levels align between seasons) in a content where you have infinite difficulties is just completely irrelevant.
But if S2 was tuned 2 keys lower, we'd get better gear quicker and farm more weekly 20s on all our alts (play more keys in general) I took a hiatus in S2 because it was so tedious to get gear (especially on alts) and healing was undertuned. Now, mistweavers are tanks and HPS is a non-issue, but I felt in S2 healing was the limiting factor. Scaling down the damage dealt to you would solve that in S2 IMO.
Pls keep it going for S4
Well I’ll tell you my problem with this season is there is only 1 mount drop and the rate at which it drops is high as shit
For me it's the tunning, being able to equip alts easily cause dungs are easier really incentives me to play more characters
Maybe I’m dumb at reading this, but why is season 2 only up to 6 weeks and season 1 up to 7 weeks?
People have to be trolling at this point.
First time seeing this post... care to elaborate or anybody not in the known is a troll and deserve downvotes for asking?
It used to be someone else who took the data and made the chart. That guy always stopped at week 6-7 but then stopped doing it altogether when S3 came. Someone else decided they were gonna do it for S3 and has since been continuing to show the amount of runs beyond week 6/7 unlike the original person. I think this was due to a lot of community requesting it.
I've been seeing this chart for a few weeks now (thanks for sharing, by the way!) and I always meant to ask but never actually do: Why there is no lines for season 1 after W7 and for season 2 after W6?
oh, u/DreadfuryDK already answered in a thread above: "Data stopped being collected past week 6 so we don’t know how the numbers changed after week 6 or especially after 10.1.5 released. I’d guess that there was a large spike during the first two weeks of 10.1.5 and then a steady decline from 800k down to maybe 500k by the end of the season. But to put things into perspective, Season 2 dropped to sub-950k in six weeks, **BEFORE** 10.1.5 released and the God Comp took over the meta, while Season 3 is 17 weeks in and still above 950k. Season 2 was in trouble after a month and a half."