Mythic+ Group Comps, Dungeon Success Rates, & Dracthyr Popularity (Week 6)

Week 6 of this 1st Season of The War Within was an odd one. We saw many new world record dungeons, only to have them reverted due to an Outlaw Rogue bug exploit. We saw Elemental Shamans get an oversized buff, causing their damage to skyrocket for…48 hours. All of these interesting situations were a result of Patch 11.0.5 launching with last week’s reset, which is actually the World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration. Make sure you check out the special Anniversary content!

One fun thing that was added to the game with Patch 11.0.5 was new playable classes for the Dracthyr race. That’s right, as of last week your Mage, Hunter, Warrior,
Warlock, Priest, and Rogue can all be Dragons!

So for this week’s Data Dive, we’ll continue to look at the evolution of the top group compositions being used, as well as the dungeon success rates at various keystone levels, but we’re also going to take a look at how many players opted to race-change their existing characters over to Dracthyr, including which classes were the most popular.

Table of Contents

Affixes & Keystone Thresholds

DUNGEON AFFIXES

For a quick reminder, here’s how the Mythic+ Affixes work in The War Within:

NOTE: As of yesterday, the start of Week 7, Blizzard has implemented a nerf to the
Challenger’s Peril affix, whereby the time penalty per death will remain at 15 seconds, but the affix will add an additional 90 seconds to the overall dungeon timer. This nerf appears to have been applied retroactively.

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KEYSTONE THRESHOLDS

The graphs used in our Data Dives to display the most popular group compositions for timed keystones completed all use the following keystone thresholds:

KEYSTONE LEVEL	AFFIXES
+2 to +6	Xal’atath’s Bargain + Fortified or Tyrannical
+7 to +9	All of +2 to +6, and Challenger’s Peril
+10 to +11	All of +2 to +9, and the other of Fortified or Tyrannical
+12 and Up	Xal’atath’s Guile + Fortified and Tyrannical

Most Popular Group Compositions

These graphs show the top 5 group compositions used during Week 6 for timed Keystones at each of the designated thresholds (see above).

The Xal’atath’s Bargain affix for Week 6 was Xal’atath’s Bargain: Ascendant, and the first “Base Affix” added at +2 was Fortified.

This past week, we are seeing a steady increase in Protection Paladins, pretty much across the board. They are now present in the top compositions for almost every keystone range, and both Guardian Druids and Vengeance Demon Hunters seem to be falling out of favour. Protection Warrior still appears to be the go-to tank, especially for higher dungeons, but those sneaky Paladins aren’t too far behind.

Success Rates by Dungeon

We continue onwards with another Data Dive staple, as we examine how often groups were able to successfully time each of the Dungeons available for Mythic+ in Season 1, at various keystone levels. Instead of looking at the same keystone ranges as above, we will now hone in on some specific levels that players may be targeting for rewards.

To illustrate the Success Rates, we use a Box Plot graph.


We wanted to introduce these graphs indicating Success Rate by Dungeon because we believe they can help your dungeon groups make informed decisions. If your goal is to time any dungeon at level +9 or +10 to get Gilded Crests and/or Mythic-level gear, or if you’re trying to get Heroic-level gear at +7, these graphs can help you determine which dungeons will statistically give you the higher chances of success!

WHAT DOES THIS DATA MEAN FOR ME?

If your goal is to complete keystones at +9 to earn as many Gilded Crests as possible or at +10 for Mythic-level Vault gear, then this data suggests that you might want to try and target Mists of Tirna Scithe and The Dawnbreaker for the highest chances of success. Ara-Kara, City of Echoes also looks to have a strong success rate, but you’ll want to take notice of the Whiskers for this dungeon. There’s a lot of variance in success – meaning that if you head to Ara-kara, you have a good chance of timing the dungeon, but you could also have a very rough go, depending on your group. It is certainly not a “free” key in any sense of the word. You may also want to avoid City of Threads and Grim Batol as they have the highest rates of failure at +10 especially.

Keep in mind that, until level +12, each week includes a different Xal’atath’s Bargain affix, so one week’s data may not necessarily carry over. It is, however, a good starting point!

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HOW TO INTERPRET BOX PLOT GRAPHS

The X-Axis shows Time Remaining as % of Dungeon Timer. As 0% means a dungeon was completed, in-time, at the exact timer (00:00:00 time remaining), higher numbers (5% and up) mean that the dungeon was completed with time remaining. The higher the number, the faster the dungeon was completed by percentage of the timer. Dungeons on the left of 0% were thus depleted, and where they land on the X-Axis shows by what percentage of the timer they were depleted.

The box in the middle of each bar shows the Inter Quartile Range, or IQR. This is where the middle 50% of dungeons fall. If the box is small, it indicates that dungeon completion times were very consistent. If the box is large, it means there is greater variability in completion times.

The line in the middle of the box represents the Median Clear Time. If this line is closer to the left of the box, this indicates the distribution is skewed towards slower times, and vice versa.

The Whiskers, the lines that come out of each side of the box, indicate the range of the data outside the IQR (the middle 50% of all dungeons completed). This shows how far the data spreads. If the Whiskers are long, it suggests there is a wide range of dungeon clear times, suggesting the performance varies more. Shorter Whiskers indicate more consistent results, and if they are asymmetrical, it shows that the data is skewed in a particular direction (depleted vs. completed in-time).

Outliers are singular dungeons that fall way out of the range. We have only chosen to show positive outliers, meaning dungeons that were completed significantly faster than the average. Those are represented by a dot, should they exist.

Dracthyr Race Changes & Class Popularity

With the introduction of 6 new playable classes for Dracthyr, we wanted to take a look at how many people opted to race-change their existing characters to Dragons in the first week of the Patch.

A small note on the methodology we used for this data, as unfortunately the character API does not specifically indicate a race-change. First, we took the total number of non-evoker Dracthyr at max level. The character API also does not have character creation date, so we needed to find a way to separate characters that existed prior to the Patch date, in order to indicate those that had been race-changed, and not newly-created characters. We looked at a few ways of doing this, but essentially we ran a number of queries to determine if we had seen a character in the data prior to the Patch going live, and if we had not, we removed that character from the list. We can thus confirm that at minimum the number of race-changes shown in the above graph were completed per available class in the past week.

Interesting to note, by doing these queries, we found one player who has a lifetime total of 81860 deaths on their (now) Dracthyr Mage. This does count all character deaths, so after looking closer we surmised the majority of these were in pvp scenarios such as battlegrounds or arena. Still, that’s a lot of time spent in graveyards!

Insights

From the date the new playable classes for Dracthyr were first announced, to the official launch of Patch 11.0.5, the racial abilities were modified multiple times. This is mostly due to the fact that in their original form, they were so strong that almost anybody who cared about min/maxing would almost feel obligated to race-change. The racial abilities that went live are much more in line with other races.

Wowhead has a great Overview of Dracthyr Racials if you want to take a closer look.

While it is entirely possible that many of the race changes that have taken place in the last week are due to the aesthetic or novelty of a new-ish race (dragons are cool, okay?), we can likely infer that the class breakdown is an indicator of the strength of the Dracthyr racials for certain classes. Priests specifically have always suffered from a lack of mobility and very long interrupt timers, if they even have one. The Glide racial provides an 80% movement increase for Evokers, and a 43% movement increase for all non-evoker Dracthyr. This means that even if you’re not using it as a slow-fall, you can still Glide to increase your basic running speed. Wing Buffet acts as an AoE interrupt, which can be extremely useful on a Priest, despite its long cooldown.


Stay tuned for more Data Dives, coming soon!

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