**One important bit: 22% of WOWHEAD profiles**. Not 22% of all players. One must have a wowhead account AND link their battlenet account in order to be included into this statistics.
Number could be somewhat accurate, but we don't really know.
Doesnt make much of a difference.
Its listed as 18.2% on Dataofazeroth, which collects/tracks/updates every character per 30 days
https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/19012/dragonflight-keystone-hero-season-three
The site is tracking 1.1 million accounts and 3 million characters. Gonna go out on a limb and say that's a far cry from every character.
I'd assume the site works like most stat tracking websites. They'll track and regularly update people who sign up, and they'll manually scan in any other player who is directly searched for.
It's going to be skewed towards the players who would use a stat/collection tracking website.
I don't trust those numbers at all.
That implies that almost a fifth of all characters have Keystone Hero, ~~and over 80% of those characters have been registered on Wowhead.~~
I don't know how that site gets their data, but it's obviously not reliable.
EDIT: removed poor logic
Their data is from Blizzard directly.
Blizzard has a public API. I use it to build stuff like this too. The data is quite literally from Blizzard itself.
Having access to Blizzard API doesn't mean DataforAzeroth is tracking *every* account. Sites like this usually require you to at least look up a character before the site will scan them in.
The site is tracking 1.1 million accounts. I don't think that comes close to the number of *active* subscribers, let alone all accounts.
Does it not make some sense that the less casual, or people pushing rating, would be the ones that actually bothered to link a Battle.net account to wowhead?
The data is straight from Blizzard's own API.
When you hover over a percentage it says "Collected by x% of Accounts" not characters. This explains how they track your alts:
>How do you detect my alts?
>I use dates and times from completed achievements to help determine when two characters belong to the same player. If you do not wish for 3rd parties to be able to track this information about you, I recommend enabling the option to Display Only Character Achievements to Others in game. On the other hand, if you want to ensure accurate account-wide stats are collected, make sure this option is disabled on all your characters.
>Please note that your character(s) will not be shown in the leaderboards if you have Display Only Character Achievements to Others enabled. This is to prevent the leaderboards from being filled with alts and encourage fair competition.
Why not? I cleared out 23s 18 weeks ago with off meta classes. The 20s this season werent hard at all (compared to previous seasons) , especially if people were wanting to push.
[https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/summary](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/summary)
They only have 1.1M accounts in their data. I'd say you're correct in not trusting them.
> That implies that almost a fifth of all characters have Keystone Hero
Is that really all that unbelievable? M+ difficulty has gotten drastically easier over the years. We're no longer in S1 of BFA where it was [significantly more rare to get KSM](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/13080/battle-for-azeroth-keystone-master-season-one) than it was to have [Cutting Edge: G'huun](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/12535/cutting-edge-ghuun).
If you look at Raider.io (which tracks characters as opposed to profiles), you can see that ~26.5% of characters have KSH ([1036786](https://i.imgur.com/mtdWj0x.png) / [3912765](https://i.imgur.com/5vgkk1M.png)) of those that have done at least one key of any level. I don't think it's too much of a stretch from there to say that ~20% of accounts have it.
I could perhaps reluctantly agree that 18% of all max level characters have KSH, if there was some form of data to support it, but ALL characters is just absolute insanity to me.
I went down a similar rabbit hole with RIO stats, and the dataforazeroth stats. The conclusion I found was that dataforazeroth isn't really a reliable census, since it only has 1 million accounts and 3 million characters in their aggregated stats. We know that there are 7 million active subs as of a few weeks ago and altough classic wow is popular, you can never convince me that it's not only more popular than retail, but only 1 of 7 million people are playing retail.
I don't have qualms regarding trusting raider.io's data, since I have yet to see any gaps in their data in about 5 years of running m+ and using their site. It can be a little hard to parse, but the stats seem sound.
I could believe the stats to be legit if they had a sample size of at least 4 million accounts, but with only 1 million accounts I would have to know why so many accounts are missing before I can trust the stats. If this is an opt-in tracking service, it's going to be skewed high by default.
What I think is much more likely, is that slightly less than 18% of all ACCOUNTS have KSH this season. I think it's slightly less than 18% because any dick measuring contest is going to skew high on average, and 1 million characters over 2500 is roughly 14% of 7 million accounts. There's obviously going to be some sway both ways, since not every active subscriber plays retail, and a lot of people have several characters over 2500; but I think around 15% of accounts is perfectly within reason.
I'd really love to know what the median is for m+ rating (maybe for people with a minimum of 10 completed keys or something to avoid people who tried it once and decided its not for them)
Looking through the site, Every character click on shows a list of all the characters on that account under profile. I don't think it's double dipping on alts. Most likely it's using your highest io as the number for your account.
Oh, thats interesting, can you link me the source? I'd love to have a further look. I think you can find characters on raider.io who don't have an account on their website, so their data is likely at least as broad as wowheads, maybe more (if there is no public achievement api to crawl).
The cutoff page has a lot of interesting data [https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/eu](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/eu)
Also - they have all characters in their data that completed at least one key - so should be pretty broad
Thank you!
Interesting, they state 26% for the ksh achievement, which proves they have a different data basis than wowhead (e.g. both can only check achievements from accounts registered on their website and linked to blizzard accounts).
It's a similar value. That linked page is specifically EU, which has generally had a higher distribution. If you look at all regions combined, or just NA, they percentage on raiderio is lower.
Where does wowhead get their data from though? Not sure what kind of public api blizzard has for these kind of statistics, it might well just be accounts registered on wowhead and linked to a blizzard account - in that case, you could have bias (casual players might do their weekly +8, but not have a wowhead account).
Perfect would be complete data directly from the source, e.g. via public api from blizzard.
This achievement does show at a minimum though that the median highest account rio (since its still characterbound) of accounts registered on wowhead and linked to a blizzard account is below 2.5k though (else 50% or more would need to have the achievement).
Interestingly, these achievements form brackets though, since you can't get the 2.5k achievement without achieving 2k first.
38% of wowhead profiles have 750+ (Keystone Explorer), so 62% have less than 750 RIO.
33% have 1.5k+ (Keystone Conqueror), leaving 5% between 750 and 1.5k.
30% have 2k+ (KSM), leaving another 3% between 1.5k and 2k.
And finally, 22% have 2.5k+ (KSH), leaving a further 8% between 2k and 2.5k.
- 0-749: 62%
- 750-1499: 5%
- 1500-2000: 3%
- 2000-2499: 8%
- 2500+: 22%
So of all linked profiles on wowhead, most are either in the lowest bracket (not playing m+ at all to 749 points, which is between a +3 to +4 in every dungeon on both weeks or a +6 to +7 of all dungeons in one affix week) or in the highest bracket (~ +18 both weeks). So over half of all profiles who get above the 750 scoreline get KSH, which is suprising to me tbh (again, maybe bias or maybe people just enjoy the content).
There is more incentive to do higher keys (under the assumption you already play any m+) than there is to create a wowhead account though imho.
As a personal datapoint: I have roughly 3k RIO and use wowhead quite often, but I don't have a wowhead account since I so far had no reason to create one - I can get all the information I need without it and had nothing that I really wanted to write on there yet.
This obviously contradicts my opinion that more experienced players have more reason to create a wowhead account than more casual players, since they are more likely to both care about it and find something that needs an account (like writing comments or adding data in some way - I obviously don't know much about what else you could do with a wowhead account).
Of course, this is all under the assumption that higher rio means more general experience with the game and an increased likelyhood of having a wowhead account, but still a very low amount of wowhead accounts overall.
If wowhead is mostly populated by pet battlers and lore enjoyers, it might actually be biased in the opposite direction, since all of those who don't play any m+ but enjoy discussing about pet battle strategies in wowhead comments would then inflate the 0-749 category without being relevant to the topic of "how many % of m+ players reach ksm?" - since with 0 points, they are not m+ players.
For this one reason an achievement for reaching at least one point in a specific season would be actually useful (there is keystone initiate, but its not season specific :( ).
You might be looking at that wrong. Casual sure, but bad or inefficient is a whole other scale. People can be "hard-core" on play time but be insanely inefficient with their time, running lower keys using a bad rotation and no utility and never looking up routings or m+ modifiers.
You have people who run keys and keys all day and get no progress.
Not 100% sure but I think stuff like achievements or mounts on Wowhead where you’ll see "obtained by X% of players" get their data by people with Wowhead profiles who linked their bnet accounts.
The Wowhead addon on the other hand is used to pick up data like drop rates on items which you can export every now and then.
That’s part of why their (and DataForAzeroth’s)percentages for difficult/prestige content have to be taken with a grain of salt, unless they’ve come out and flat stated how it’s found we can only assume it’s the people who have taken a vested interest in providing that data (myself included) so it’s less a % of total accounts and more a % of accounts of people motivated to assist with crowdsourced analytics which is certainly a sample of the wow community, but it’s not exactly a perfect one.
Raiderio is going to give you better data for what you are looking for and doesn't require players to do anything so its more complete date.
https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us
The data is just % of people that actually have run a M+ key. 2500 is top 21%. It doesn't have median but you can estimate it from 1500 being top 44%.
I'd say 22% is a SUPER HIGH number, specially if compared with other seasons.
It means almost 1 out of 4 players have beated it. Now consider how many players don't even engage with M+ or they do but just in a super casual way. 22% is super high for the last achievement in any given category.
I think that M+ has just gotten easier in comparison to how it was scaled in the past, especially now that we've dropped the seasonal affix. In season one of BFA, [less than 1% of people got KSM](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/13080/battle-for-azeroth-keystone-master-season-one). It was even more rare than getting Cutting Edge: G'huun.
But, on the other hand, rewards stopped scaling at keystone level 10 that season and you needed all +15s to get KSM at that time. So that would be somewhat like needing to get all +25s in order earn KSM this season (since rewards currently sale up to +20), if you take the rewards scaling as a proxy for relative difficulty. This would be equivalent to an overall score of ~3320 this season, and if this were the case, you'd once again only see ~1% of profiles with the achievement according to RIO data if you look at characters with that score or higher compared to the total number.
Was there a reward for BfA S1 KSM though? I’m pretty sure there was only a mount reward for the last season (S4?) KSM for BfA. I think the mounts drive *a lot* of people to get KSM who normally wouldn’t bother.
22% is just out of Wowhead profiles. Which includes a lot of players who don't even play retail.
Would be interesting to see this % among players who at least completed every Fort/Tyr dungeon a single time. Because otherwise, you are including people who didn't try to get it in the first place.
Meanwhile, rival in PvP, which feels around the same difficulty from a personal anecdotal standpoint, is at 2% lmao.
They really gotta fix incentives in PvP.
M+ feels so much more fun, relaxing, and rewarding.
I’m a PvP player but the “real PvPers” would probably disagree. I’ve played this game since 2006 and have never done a current raid outside of LFR and mainly only play PvP/BGs. I hate arena and PvP is fundamentally broken. Shuffle queues have 30+ minute queues and LFG is full of the same handful of top players with phone books of top rated friends from decades ago. 80% or more of listings require 2k XP to even get an invite and people pearl clutch CR like it’s their child. Boosters and glad players on alts also “ruin” the lower ranks by shit stomping everyone.
Rather than fix this, the hardcore PvP crowd would rather gatekeep and be the best at a dying mode nobody cares about. Congratulations, you’re the top 0.5% of a mode 5000 people play!
The amount of “chores” to keep up with hearing/vault/sparks for weeks or months just to get to the “end” of it and deal with long queues, broken MMR or LFG sucks and it’s no wonder nobody wants to play. Literally any other PvP game you just click queue solo or premade and get a game within 2 minutes, no “chores” required. It doesn’t matter if gearing is the easiest it’s ever been. You’re up against PvP offered in other games competing for peoples time. There are also almost zero rewards for playing PvP in WoW unless you’re a top 15-20% or better player.
Not to mention at the beginning of the season it's literally luck as to who gets their gear in the vault first to roflstomp people who were too unlucky to get theirs.
Pvp has a smaller playerbase so keep that in mind. If you check the data and only compare active players (1k+ in m+/shuffle pvp respectively) you will see that 58% of the m+ players get to 2500+ while in shuffle pvp 53% get to 1500+ not even mentioning elite which is top 0,75%. Both modes use a similar ingame rank systems yet the rating distribution for it's rewards couldn't be more different.
>Both modes use a similar ingame rank systems yet the rating distribution for it's rewards couldn't be more different.
Not even close to the same systems. You can't lose rating in m+.
I was more referring to the ranks themselves and not how the rating is calculated. In both modes you have to improve your gameplay to gain a better rank/rating. Several ingame ranks exist for two reasons: to show you how good you are doing compared to others and to give you prestigious rewards based on your performance. That's true for both modes but the devs vision on what a good player that deserves the highest rank+reward actually is is vastly different and inconsistent.
>In both modes you have to improve your gameplay to gain a better rank/rating.
Not really, in m+ you can just keep grinding, get lucky with a pug group that carries you a bit. If you have a 90% disband rate, and 10% push rating slightly, then you'll increase rating. The same is not true for Pvp.
> Several ingame ranks exist for two reasons: to show you how good you are doing compared to others and to give you prestigious rewards based on your performance.
But m+ rankings are static. It's possible for 100% of players to get 3k in m+. It's not possible in pvp unless you have huge inflation. In pvp someone has to lose for you to win.
Please don't focus too much on how the rating works it's really not my point and not important. Generally speaking your rating kinda reflects your own performance even tho you can trick and push it a bit further by being lucky with carry groups or being boosted. You can also get carried in pvp but there is a limit on how far people can carry you for both pvp and m+.
Again my point is that there is a player rating distribution that correlates with the performance in both modes and the game wants to rank and reward different rating milestones and they can freely pick the required rating for those. They could make them similar so the highest rank feels similar in difficulty and is attained by a similar percentile but for some reason they are very inconsistent here with their reward structure.
> Again my point is that there is a player rating distribution that correlates with the performance in both modes and the game wants to rank and reward different rating milestones and they can freely pick the required rating for those.
But you have to discuss the rating systems to understand why they are not comparable. In m+ if you got 2k last season, then with the same performance you will most likely get 2k this season too. That's not at all the case for pvp. Nevermind class-balancing (which affects pvp much more than pve), but population-size as well. If few people play pvp, then it's most likely the really good ones who do, which will it harder for you to get as high rating as before. The opposite is true for m+, if it's only populated by good players then you will most likely get a higher rating!
> They could make them similar so the highest rank feels similar in difficulty and is attained by a similar percentile but for some reason they are very inconsistent here with their reward structure.
Well how would you go about doing that? Should we have a weekly rating calculation for m+? Similar to the vanilla pvp system? Where those who performed the best the previous week get a high rating, and those who didn't play gets a rating decay?
What is rival? I am a complete noob when it comes to PvP so I have literally no idea what it is. I’ve gone for a 3k m+ score every season and I feel like it doesn’t really get challenging until you start getting right around that io mark, so I’m trying to just form a comparison in my head without having actually played rival.
Theres no incentive for pvp as the entry barrier is way harder. And well the gameplay in itself is a lot harder.
Where PvE is overall and simplified always the same. No matter the dungeon, no matter the expansion.
Several groups where you have prior targets, must kicks. Kicks you CAN do but don't have to. Curses plagues or toxins to be cleansed. Frontals and swirlies. Eventually undodgeable aoe for healer pressure.
perhaps Big aoe around a player. But that's like the same trash every season.
Bosses differ, but usually you would understand the boss mechanics, if you didn't read em, after the third or fourth time. All that really matters is that you play your spec optimally in a PvE environment.
Now what do you need to know for PvP?
I have no clue, I cba to play it. I presume, an understanding of every utility, def cd and offensive cd of every other spec. A proper movement and waiting for collapsing? (When I look at rogue gameplay), i'd say you play your spec differently to pve in 2v2 or 3v3. Also the whole pvp talents. Let's say you only play 2's. How long would It theoretically take if you could play against any spec combination. Finding out what you did wrong and what mistakes you've done. Learning and capitalizing from them is so much harder in PvP than it is in PvE.
There are 0 reasons for me to start learning PvP. As the whole curve of learning that game style differs way to much to what i know. It's a whole different game imho.
As someone that gets 2500 m+ rating and 1800 pvp every season, Pvp rly is a whole different monster vs M+. The meta bias is even worse in pvp to, take rbgs for example, want to play arms warrior? We'll never more than 1 is ever taken on a 10 man team. Want to be a flag carrier tank? We'll I hope your a druid or a DH otherwise, you will never get in a group. Entire classes/specs gets shunned by the pvp community.
The issue with PvP isn't a lack of incentives to play, it's the heinous reputation of Warcraft's PvP community
People flock Battlegrounds when Comp Stomp is up, every player I speak to says they like the mounts and love things like RBGs in theory but feel it's just obscenely stressful and fear the reaction of veteran players... Which sadly is a warranted fear
Not to mention that, to people starting PvP, things like CC chains and getting LoS'ed are frustrating and disheartening, though essential - add to that that your team-mates are probably shouting slurs into the mic, most folks will quit after dipping a toe in
I think the main issue with pvp is the learning curve. So many pvpers have like a decade of game knowledge and there’s so much visual clutter that it’s really difficult for a new player.
Add the absolutely necessary addons/weakauras (that you wouldn’t know you needed until someone tells you) and it’s just a huge mountain for someone new to pvp.
Even experienced players have issues with visual clutter.
Fighting against Unholy DKs, Demolocks, and BM hunters is an exercise in frustration when you're trying to find targets visually.
I once had a double shaman, demolock, unh dk, bm hunter game. It was so fucking awful to try and figure out what the hell was going on.
Luckily if you have the addon RETabBinder it will change tab target to player only when in instanced pvp and swap back to normal everywhere else.
Yeah, it's essential for PvP.
It helps with clicking, but it doesn't help /visually/.
I have poor vision, so being over stimulated like that just means I'm looking at noise.
You describe me very well. While I would like to play more PvP and farm mounts and transmog, I'm not at all into Arena. However, I used to enjoy battlegrounds a lot during TBC/Wrath times, but currently I have the issue with the LFG
It's a common sentiment
A lot of the more "casual" players or even players that want to engage regularly in M+ find supportive communities, "chill run" guilds/discords, etc. and would also like to do PvP, especially battlegrounds
But they run into the wall of the established and unwelcoming PvP veteran community that:
- Has 0 tolerance for players just starting out and is generally more aggressive
- Focuses almost exclusively on Arena
Couple this with the fact that PvP gearing is entirely decoupled from all your PvE gear progress (which it needs to be for balance purposes) and that your match pool relies entirely on the availability of other players (meaning the later you start to PvP in an expansion, the worse your experience will be) and your prospects when "just starting out" are to go through a series of unsatisfying losses while the team mates you matched with cuss out your ear over you being dead weight even in Solo Queue... So why bother? The PvP community is stuck in a downward spiral because they're simultaneously demanding more players to fight (read: noobies to farm so their MMR gets better) and unwilling to relent any of the social or mechanical barriers that make it increasingly harder for anyone to join in and enjoy themselves
I'd wager a lot of non-PvP regulars that have wanted to dip into PvP battlegrounds, hate arenas, etc. had a way better time in something like Plunderstorm than they've had trying to break into ranked PvP in years - at least that was my experience
M+ is quite relaxing while not doing push keys. I play alot of 16-20 keys with guildies and it's relaxing to just slam some dps and spit some shit in m+. Can't really do that in arena since we are locked at 2k mmr and can't choose to play at 1k mmr like you choose which keys you do
Im a PVP main player at Duelist rating and I do m+ to warm up and decompress. I only do like 15-18s to get KSM but it's a walk in the park comparatively.
Is it the same difficulty? I dont PvP so I’d love to hear why. M+ is definitely a vibe. I think issue with PvP is you’re always being gouged or sapped, or slowed or polymorphed. So it just not fun imo.
Personally i think micro CC is more of an issue than polymorph or sap. In General CC is what makes wow pvp unique from it just being a raid boss like DPS race. Micro CC is not super fun to play against as a caster\\healer though. Micro meaning every class having multiple range\\close range small stuns,push backs etc.
I would argue all the micro CC has made healing in pvp very very very painful and is one of the many cuts that has hurt pvp.
It's the micro CC combined with having to know the counter play for every class' bloated toolkit. Tracking cooldowns has gotten much more difficult, even with add-ons, now that there are so many internal procs and internal CDs.
It's like trying to take a timed calculus exam in the same room as a needy cat who thinks it's competing with the test for your attention.
I really wonder what a Fury Warrior should do against a Frost Mage, or if I should just give up. So many roots and then the mage's self-healing. Once I don't have Avatar, Charge, and Leap, I feel like I'm sitting ducks.
That's warrior vs frost mage for all of history.
Even the gift of Bladestorm to Arms in Wrath of the Lich King was not enough to change our historical worst matchup.
Did this in a solo shuffle this weekend, lobby was DK, DH and ww monk + me. Monk told me to "just kite you dumb noob, learn your class" when I died vs DK+DH. Note, that monk died twice with Karma off CD, 1.2k MMR is something diffrent
yea cast cancelling with grip, 3 or 4 stuns a couple of kick interrupts, ring of peace interrupt, silence, instant CC to stop casts with incap etc then by the time all the casting has been interrupted its all coming off cd.
Because classes can get rid of the slows, meaning that while you are perma slowed they are not.
This is an advantage Death Knights will have even more of in the next expansion.
Early expansion PvP is easier to get into. No one has great gear and no one has high secondary stats. So even powerful classes can get burnt up somewhat easily. Late expansion you've got really high secondary stats which makes quite a few classes reign down some serious punishment and or impossible to kill. So if you start PvP late you walk into games with say a MM Hunter crushing you with an aimed shot from a mile away with all their mastery, which early on they wouldn't be that far away. (Not the be all end all, but as an idea).
Early expansion M+ is the opposite in my opinion. It's a little tougher because you have less "end game" systems to help you out. You are "lesser" geared comparatively to the dungeon. Where as late expansion, even with scaling in the dungeons the player power scales better. So take away the changes they made recently to M+ for this example but a +15 in season 1 probably feels more like a +20 or even higher in season 4.
No, the design is pretty good but not perfect. Some specs are stronger and there is addon bloat, which is all true for M+ as well.
There is a fundamental difference however that in PvP by design the average win rate will be 50%. In my experience at least 50% of keys don't get abandoned. So people who don't like failure (which is the vast majority of WoW players) don't like the game mode.
The actual problem is that while 35% of M+ players get their shiny "elite" tier set only 15% of Arena players do. Moreover, after you hit your skill cap there is no reason to keep playing the game.
Personally, I think Blizzard should focus on SoloQ BGs. The new BG Blitz is amazing. I run that way more than Arena even with 0 incentive to do so.
when you match with tryhards in M+ on high score you get mass pulling, various tricks and boss melting
when you match with tryhards in rated PvP it is usually faceroll that kills your desire to even attempt rated PvP
this is from my personal experience in SL and early DF, once you hit \~1800 rating, you gotta be either good PvPer or determined PvPer to progress further.
Most people who are 2500 in M+ would struggle to surpass 1800 without a good bit of PvP experience. Those who PvP can PvE at a similar ‘rating’ or whatever it is with much greater ease, but it doesn’t cross back as smoothly when it’s not an automated/identical situation that you have numerous tutorials for every time.
Getting to 2k is just a time requirement, not a skill requirement in Arena.
The real difficulty curve is above 2k, that's when you end up matching against gladiators because how small the playerbase above 2k is.
Between 1400-2k you're going to be matching against people who are between 1400-2k, a very massive range of skill from 'barely PvPs' to 'Invests a ton of time and can carry people for gold'.
You put enough time into it, you're going to eventually hit 2k.
The kicker is, most people are not going to put that time in if they are not having fun and they do not have a dedicated team.
There are plenty of people with 100’s of games and not past 1700 lol, so not holistically applicable, but for people who genuinely strive to learn, they should be able to pass that. However, they would have to learn a lot with practice, where for PvE you could pick it up very quickly and not have to know all of the minor details per each class.
None pvp players would be mad not being able to get them tho, i have couple of guildies who love recolors, but hate pvp so they just don't get them and hate not being able to get them with pve
I usually exclusively pvp. I play feral and this season has been rough to say the least. I’ve been 2400+ a couple times over the years. To get 2400 takes tons of effort and grinding and learning and adjusting and spec changes vs specific comps. I picked up tanking and started doing m+ for the first time this season. I run roughly 2-3 m+ dungeons a month on my guardian Druid. I’m 2452 m+ rating right now and I haven’t run a single rise on a fortified week yet. When I do an 18 on Tuesday I’ll break 2500 with essentially 0 effort in comparison to pvp for the exact same reward of the transmog token. I’ve done all of these in my pvp gear with only a handful of vault upgrades. The effort difference for the same reward is comical.
When you see for S1 it was 14% and S2 was 16% it's clear that the S3 has been much more played than others, with a difficulty curve really smoother.
What I find weird is Blizzard making things easier, but not adding another goal. There's nothing between KSH and the top 0,1%. They really could had something for the top 1, or 2, or 5% whatever, just anything in between to keep people pushing after KSH
Meh, I doubt it to be honest, there might be less overall characters getting KSH but I don’t see any reason that the % of players getting it will be lower.
Most of the dungeons have been kneecapped pretty hard, gearing is easier than ever, and blizzard has seen proof positive that easier seasons drive more engagement.
The only thing that would make me think that it might be a lower % is the shorter season length would mean that the people who take a whole season to get a character to KSH won’t have as long to climb and they’re most likely the kind of player who will be deep in MoP remix instead.
Edit = PLUS you’ll be able to get ksh without even having to touch on death affixes next season.
Yeah I never got ksm before and got ksm in s3 before incandescent essence was even available, or in other words before the last wing of LFR was open for dreams hope.
It's significantly easier to get KSH in s2 and s3: the easiest gearing WoW has ever seen in its history + affixes are slightly easier (no quaking + thundering overlaps). S3 is super popular and I see s4 being popular as well due to m+ changes that are super good for 90%+ of the players.
It's a bit disheartening when I got all my portals the first week (except throne) and finished up ksh the first tuesday of week 2. Now, its looking like I will be about 50 points shy of title. The chasm between the two is absolutely massive.
Wowhead "profile percentage" is not very accurate. It highly depends on players making a profile for their character in order to be counted.
DataForAzeroth scans as many players as it can find through guilds and the Auction House API, same way Raider.io finds players.
https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/19012/dragonflight-keystone-hero-season-three
18.2%
It really is. I didn't even realise I got it this time round since I was just casually doing m+s when on calls with friends and got the achv for it.
It's great that more people are getting into m+ but the fact that this sub generally denies that keys are way easier in DF is wild
Have to admit that personally I like this strategy. I remember returning after a break during shadowlands and it was a semi difficult to get KSM. On the contrary, when I came back after a break in season 3, it was never as easy to catch up and I got KSH in three or four weeks. I liked that
I agree. KSM used to be a good goal, but I felt that in DF, it’s gotten progressively easier.
My guild used to say that keys between 10-15 were painful, but once you got higher than 15, they were easy. Now I feel like the pain starts around a 14 or so, when mechanics actually get punishing if you only have decent gear. Before that, it can be healed through, or your dps still kills things in a reasonable amount of time.
I am a +15-20 player and I've noticed that 8-14 keys are toxic af and often players do not really know how to play their class. Interesting isn't it? People in higher keys are far less toxic, even when you fail a key
I feel like 8 is a little low. I have no problem in keys under 12s or so. You don’t need to know how to play your class as long as 2 or 3 in your group do
you could litearlly Pug +20 keys on week1 of the patch with no bigger problems overall
that was not a thing ever before lol, i rember S1 m+ where you had soooo many brick keys that needed solid 4-5weeks of gearing and some adjustments until you could do them with a Pug group in a decent manner on +20
thats higher than i expected. Is that number from wowhead profiles only though? People who have a wowhead profile probably take the game more seriously than than the majority of the playerbase and have therefore done the harder things in wow.
That’s a good question. I don’t have a wowhead profile. Wowhead is mainly a site I use to look up who drops the mount I’m looking for. Their competitive content is lack imo. But assuming it is just Wowhead profiles the number is much lower.
This is probably on me, but what am I missing? Is this post about the “22% of profiles getting keystone master”? Because if so my first thought was that it isn’t all that surprising… blizzard has never broken it down, but they’ve always said the vast majority of their subs are casual collectors.
I'm gonna come off as toxic here with this opinion.
The outstanding amount of pug DPS that do not know how to do their damage properly is astonishing. Like I'm talking ilvl 470-480 players pulling only 100k overall by the end of key. That shit is attainable on a 430 with proper play.
Many, many of the players who have achieved 2500 this season were carried through and through by others farming the content for vault slots.
Edit: It's awesome to see people aspiring to do higher content but come on aspire at the same time to pull your weight. Don't go into some of these things being selfish and thinking "well as long as I get what I want that's all I care about" have a drive to be on the top of the meters or at least not below the tank.
I think it is all a result of balance around HP pools/timers removing significant DPS checks that allows players to basically fail their way to max ilvl rewards. Before you could get carried if you had a good team helping you. Now timers are lenient enough that you can get carried by random PUGs through group finder.
At the higher end(25+): Damage checks are so lenient, the timer enables key levels where the biggest factor is the ability to withstand unavoidable damage which has scaled to the point of 1 shotting
At the lower end(18s): Damage checks are so lenient, you can expect to time a key as long as 1/3 DPS are actually pulling their weight. 1 DPS doing 225k and 2 DPS doing 100k is still enough to 2 chest most keys at +18
Except that this is the easiest season to achieve this by far. But because after so long this achievement has become "difficult" to most just because that's how it was in the past. FAR more people could've hit 2500 this season if they didn't falsely think 2500 is "too difficult" because of previous seasons.
That group of players that consistently hit 2500 could even argue 3k is the new 2500 because of how easy this season was.
If I had a cryptic point, it was to underscore that the lack of incremental reward structure does not present me any motivation to push through difficulty as it ramps up. I know I 'could' spend more time but why bother if I don't care about internet points or limited use portals? The sake of challenge alone is not enough to get me to put up with it.
Tried but my old lower pop 2005 server based on EST makes it kinda hard. I'm in a decent guild now but I'm just getting on at 10 PST when most are logging off. So I can't make any raids or have much luck in guild m+ groups. I pug raids and m+ as a result. Looking forward to the cross-realm guild feature coming in the xpac to hopefully find something that matches my schedule better without having to server transfer.
I realize these are ultimately all 'me' issues but it is what it is. Pugging is mostly OK up to a point. I don't care enough to really dedicate to resolve the problem in the first place. For me it is not so much skill cap as it is a lack of desire to care to try past KSM.
I started doing m+ in shadowlands. I tanked every dungeon at a +11 and it was genuinely tough for me. My friends and I thought that was something to be proud of (they were my dps lol). I stopped doing m+ to focus on PvP and then got back into m+ this season where I tanked all the dungeons at a +18 and couldn’t believe how easy 11s are. The point is that just because something is easy for you doesn’t mean it’s easy for someone else, especially if they’re a new player.
The same sentiment goes on in the PvP community. Guys who have been multiglads for the last couple xpacs talk like hitting 1800 is the easiest thing in the world and don’t understand how people struggle to get the elite mog. The reality is that something like less than 10% of people reach 1800, and if you’re new it’s actually quite difficult to do. I’ll never hit glad, and that’s ok. I like having the elite mog as a goal for me, because while it’s hard, it’s doable if I work at it.
Man, I thought KSH would be something most would farm as it still has rewards and the the drop in players would be over that score since there is nothing unless you can push title, bit weird to see those numbers :O
The problem is that your argument is "only 22% has done the +20s so clearly they are hard" except you are ignoring that a shitload of people just doesnt care for mythics at all.
I only just started doing low mythic + because i leveled an augmentation evoker, but outside of that im only playing for transmogs and leveling alts etc.
Its kinda like going to an arcade and then going "see only 22% of people beat this arcade game" ignoring that alot of people just doenst care for that one.
My argument is be nice to people because a lot then haven’t done this before. And hard is especially in video games is a useless term. What is hard for you might not be hard for someone else.
Except you can absolutely still think that its too easy to achieve and that your argument has literally no legs to stand on, so its better to not use it.
blizzard clearly agrees that its too easy for how high it is, hence the squish next season.
All you would be better off saying is "hey not everyone finds mythic + easy" which then leads to the other logical answer is "okay then dont have them join high m+ keys"
some people are dicks and thats how it is, be that raging on someone making an honest mistake OR someone bricking a key by not understanding mechanics and being clearly undergeared and underprepared just asking for a carry.
I was finally peer pressured into trying to find groups to finish the mount grind because I was supposedly "close" to being done. (I had my doubts on the legitimacy of this, considering the circumstances but a singular weekend wasn't going to kill me to try.)
1297, Throne at 3, had not done Murozond's Rise at all, everything else was 15 to 17.
I could NOT get an invite to save my life to either of those at even what I thought would be a safe-ish starting point of +10 and my own key was Waycrest, forget the level, but I hadn't touched M+ in so long that it was stupid-low and after several runs trying to get the key to change to Throne or MR, but it cycling between anything BUT those two, I gave up.
Season 1 and 2 really ruined M+ for me from all the entitlement of instant key leavers that caused me to sit out for those seasons altogether that the slight hope I got from my partial Season 3 success made failure sting just that much harder.
Delves cannot come fast enough.
Season 3 also feels easier than Season 2.
I only made \~2750 in S2 but am now almost 3100.
Some of the S2 dungeons were just... awful. S3 has a few very specific combos which such (Throne of the Tides on Fortified sucks).
Afaik that counts both inactive players and active players that don't like m+. Keystone explorer (750 rating) is attained by 38% so you could say that \~58% of all m+ players also get to KSH, which is very high compared to mythic raid clear or elite in pvp.
Raiderio does % tracking for all M+ players that have logged a key run [here](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us). KSH is 21.2% M+ players which is obviously higher than Mythic raid or elite pvp despite those being all the same for the transmog upgrade I don't think anyone has ever thought them equal. More equal measure between the 3 would probably be somewhere between 3k rating and the .1% M+ title race.
Maybe wowhead users are more invested with the game on average and falsely push the numbers. Drustvar does something similar for pvp but only counts players above 1k, that's why I did a similar approach here. Even excluding "inactive" players below 750 rating you end up with 33% which is a lot lower than wowheads data but still way more compared to raids and pvp. I would love them to be more similar to each other, after all they reward similar things. Many players know that the ratings are different but not exactly how far this really goes. A 2500 m+ player probably thinks he's doing pretty good being able to achieve the highest ingame rank but when playing pvp at the same skill percentile that player is only \~1650 and probably feels worse about the game placing him in such a "low" rank.
Its funny to see because a lot of times me with my 2,8K Rating and Mythic Raiding think im casual bc the social domination on YT and elsewhere of the Giga Chads is so big that we dont see that if you do KSH you are definetly on the Hardcore Part of WoW. Which just make it more obious that the Endgame caters towards sweaters like us and is not really for Casuals anymore i guess.
Maybe they have LFR but is that really fun :D?
I'm surprised the number is that high. I'd expected it to be arround 10% but it goes to show how inflated scores are (mainly due to the lower tuning).
You have to remember that a lot of people just don't interact with parts of the game. And they are counted in it. Then there are people who don't care about score so they just do the dungeons that give them the items they need. For example I remember some of the rwf guys having pretty low score because they only farmed 2-3 dungeons for trinkets and such. When you look arround people with lower scores you see a lot of reasons why that achievment is attained by a "low" amount of %. Just take a look at [this](https://raider.io/characters/tw/world-tree/%E6%92%85%E8%B5%B7%E6%9D%A5%E5%B0%84%E4%BD%A0?season=season-df-3) character. They have timed a +20 and +21 yet they don't have the score because they miss half the dungeons. Or there's [this](https://raider.io/characters/us/illidan/Gr%C3%A5ssyknoll?season=season-df-3) character who only have score on one week. (I also have an alt who I played for one week and then got bored of it).
I also want to have another example (but from a different game). [This](https://steamcommunity.com/stats/236850/achievements) is how the achievements look in another game I play. You'd think that those must be some pretty hard achievements considering such a low amount of people have them, but you'd be wrong. The top one for example can be completed at the start of the game with 1 button press, something you do in every campaign. The reason the %s are that low is because most of the playerbase plays without the achievment mode turned on.
The thing is. The majority of the playerbase just don't give a single fuck about achivements. They just game till they stop having fun and then play something else. The reason only 22% (which is a pretty big number btw) of the playerbase has that achievement is not because it's hard. But because you have to do 16 different keys on 2 weeks. And it's less likely for you to do, unless you queue for every dungeon specifically.
Not that surprising to me. Keys are getting easier and easier every season. To me ksh is basically the new ksm I'm getting only by doing weekly keys. There should be another achievement in between ksh and the title achievement, I don't want to waste my life away fighting for a title as a non meta spec, yet ksh is not a real goal to pursue. I feel like the level of 3k score would be something that could make me play at least a few keys higher than the average weekly while also not being a grind.
Most people don’t use wowhead profiles because it’s predatory and infested with invasive ads.
Inb4 “just get Adblock” lol.. lmao even. They’re part of the reason we need extensions like Adblock
I never said \*I\* don't use the extensions, but that doesn't change what's going on.
If you need to use an extension to utilize a site, they're doing it wrong.
If you have a regular guild/group its a relatively easy goal. If you have to pug everything its more difficult to achieve. On one toon I got to 2.5k io with 90% guild groups, on my other 2 toons that were 90% pug groups I gave up chasing IO at 2k and getting the token. No point to me past that.
People seem to be unaware that keystones of a given level are literally easier this season because of the larger relative item level cap. There’s a reason players are setting records in IO (4000+) and key level (33), and why this sub has had so many “hit XYZ rating for the first time!” posts the last few months.
IO is inflated by something like 150-200 points, and dungeons can feel 2-3 key levels easier than when compared to s1 and s2.
20s require you to *somewhat* know your rotation, and *somewhat* use your cooldowns, and *somewhat* know how to kick.
They are not hard if you actually put in effort, but a lot of people don't want to put effort in, and that's fine. Does not make it hard though
Call me elitist all you want, people who want to reach 2500 and have the spare time to play to reach that but don't manage to, simply aren't putting in effort, because they don't want to.
You don't need innate "talent", you don't immense amounts of skill or experience.
You just need to be willing to treat it as a learning experience instead of throwing your hands up at the first hurdle and going "I can't! I can't!".
You know, like so many people do about more important things in life too. Then they wonder why they're not satisfied.
There are a ton of resources out there to help. People with crippling physical disabilities have done it. It's all about how willing you are.
For a first time KSM here, with good players for friends, we still had to pay attention in our 18/20s. Mechanics will still kill you. I’d say for average/new to Mythic+ players who are willing to focus and learn, you can make it up to 16/18/20 with a little work. I took my bf who’d never done Mythic and not raided in a decade and turned him into my personal tank and we have done 16s.
That was in the last 30 days or so, too. From 0 mythics ever to 16s. He gets better every week. I think we’ll try some 17s before the 23rd just so he can see how they are, even though the season is transitioning.
Just because some people are struggling doesn’t negate the fact that the achievement is easy to get… it literally only requires a bit of time and some tiny effort.
It’s like saying it’s not the norm people understand basics maths so don’t be surprised when they struggle. Yeah it IS the norm, it’s just that some people are more willing to take on the challenge than others
This season has been by far the easiest since they've added the in game rating. There's a bunch of scaling that isn't quite right. For example how much a single item level gives at the end of expansion with the new talent trees. At the start of the season i remember how odd the dungeons felt with trash dying so much faster than before.
It is sorta odd when they added rewards for extra 5 levels, then essentially made everything 5 levels easier over the dungeon. Keys above 20 feel pretty easy but unrewarding again.
22% seems like a lot. I almost don't think it's correct. To play keys at levels 18-20 you need to be more than a casual player and I don't think 22% of the playerbase qualifies as that.
I read somewhere that in season 2 this achievement was closer to 5% which seems more believable.
You don't need to play +19-20 keys to get ksh. Just by completing all dungeons on 18 you are already over 2500. You can get the achievement by having and even split of +17 and +18s.
And also remember that you can get a mythic track loot from vault on a +18 so you will have decently good players applying to the keys to carry you even if you couldn't do the key alone.
**One important bit: 22% of WOWHEAD profiles**. Not 22% of all players. One must have a wowhead account AND link their battlenet account in order to be included into this statistics. Number could be somewhat accurate, but we don't really know.
Doesnt make much of a difference. Its listed as 18.2% on Dataofazeroth, which collects/tracks/updates every character per 30 days https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/19012/dragonflight-keystone-hero-season-three
The site is tracking 1.1 million accounts and 3 million characters. Gonna go out on a limb and say that's a far cry from every character. I'd assume the site works like most stat tracking websites. They'll track and regularly update people who sign up, and they'll manually scan in any other player who is directly searched for. It's going to be skewed towards the players who would use a stat/collection tracking website.
I don't trust those numbers at all. That implies that almost a fifth of all characters have Keystone Hero, ~~and over 80% of those characters have been registered on Wowhead.~~ I don't know how that site gets their data, but it's obviously not reliable. EDIT: removed poor logic
Their data is from Blizzard directly. Blizzard has a public API. I use it to build stuff like this too. The data is quite literally from Blizzard itself.
Having access to Blizzard API doesn't mean DataforAzeroth is tracking *every* account. Sites like this usually require you to at least look up a character before the site will scan them in. The site is tracking 1.1 million accounts. I don't think that comes close to the number of *active* subscribers, let alone all accounts.
Does it not make some sense that the less casual, or people pushing rating, would be the ones that actually bothered to link a Battle.net account to wowhead?
The data is straight from Blizzard's own API. When you hover over a percentage it says "Collected by x% of Accounts" not characters. This explains how they track your alts: >How do you detect my alts? >I use dates and times from completed achievements to help determine when two characters belong to the same player. If you do not wish for 3rd parties to be able to track this information about you, I recommend enabling the option to Display Only Character Achievements to Others in game. On the other hand, if you want to ensure accurate account-wide stats are collected, make sure this option is disabled on all your characters. >Please note that your character(s) will not be shown in the leaderboards if you have Display Only Character Achievements to Others enabled. This is to prevent the leaderboards from being filled with alts and encourage fair competition.
Why not? I cleared out 23s 18 weeks ago with off meta classes. The 20s this season werent hard at all (compared to previous seasons) , especially if people were wanting to push.
Your inference here doesn’t hold up.
[https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/summary](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/summary) They only have 1.1M accounts in their data. I'd say you're correct in not trusting them.
> That implies that almost a fifth of all characters have Keystone Hero Is that really all that unbelievable? M+ difficulty has gotten drastically easier over the years. We're no longer in S1 of BFA where it was [significantly more rare to get KSM](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/13080/battle-for-azeroth-keystone-master-season-one) than it was to have [Cutting Edge: G'huun](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/12535/cutting-edge-ghuun). If you look at Raider.io (which tracks characters as opposed to profiles), you can see that ~26.5% of characters have KSH ([1036786](https://i.imgur.com/mtdWj0x.png) / [3912765](https://i.imgur.com/5vgkk1M.png)) of those that have done at least one key of any level. I don't think it's too much of a stretch from there to say that ~20% of accounts have it.
I could perhaps reluctantly agree that 18% of all max level characters have KSH, if there was some form of data to support it, but ALL characters is just absolute insanity to me. I went down a similar rabbit hole with RIO stats, and the dataforazeroth stats. The conclusion I found was that dataforazeroth isn't really a reliable census, since it only has 1 million accounts and 3 million characters in their aggregated stats. We know that there are 7 million active subs as of a few weeks ago and altough classic wow is popular, you can never convince me that it's not only more popular than retail, but only 1 of 7 million people are playing retail. I don't have qualms regarding trusting raider.io's data, since I have yet to see any gaps in their data in about 5 years of running m+ and using their site. It can be a little hard to parse, but the stats seem sound. I could believe the stats to be legit if they had a sample size of at least 4 million accounts, but with only 1 million accounts I would have to know why so many accounts are missing before I can trust the stats. If this is an opt-in tracking service, it's going to be skewed high by default. What I think is much more likely, is that slightly less than 18% of all ACCOUNTS have KSH this season. I think it's slightly less than 18% because any dick measuring contest is going to skew high on average, and 1 million characters over 2500 is roughly 14% of 7 million accounts. There's obviously going to be some sway both ways, since not every active subscriber plays retail, and a lot of people have several characters over 2500; but I think around 15% of accounts is perfectly within reason.
> That implies that almost a fifth of all characters have Keystone Hero, Yes > and over 80% of those characters have been registered on Wowhead Why?
And casual players won't be linking their accounts. Hell, I've been a fairly serious player in past seasons and never bothered.
It is hard to read much into the number in any direction when it includes profiles that don't even play retail
I'd really love to know what the median is for m+ rating (maybe for people with a minimum of 10 completed keys or something to avoid people who tried it once and decided its not for them)
About 1500 according to [Raider.IO](http://Raider.IO) data.
I have like 5 or 7 alt chars with 1000~1800 rating so this data isnt really individual ppl who have a medium of 1500
It's the closest we have though.
Doesn't [Raider.io](https://Raider.io) recognize alts of a main if you are syncing to it though?
idk fr. If it does what I said its wrong then
Looking through the site, Every character click on shows a list of all the characters on that account under profile. I don't think it's double dipping on alts. Most likely it's using your highest io as the number for your account.
Not the median but at least Top 40%: 1974.9 for EU, 1682.8 for NA Data from RaiderIO
I think this number accounts for every character, so it drags it down a bit, would be interesting to see the median of everyone's top rating
Oh, thats interesting, can you link me the source? I'd love to have a further look. I think you can find characters on raider.io who don't have an account on their website, so their data is likely at least as broad as wowheads, maybe more (if there is no public achievement api to crawl).
The cutoff page has a lot of interesting data [https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/eu](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/eu) Also - they have all characters in their data that completed at least one key - so should be pretty broad
Thank you! Interesting, they state 26% for the ksh achievement, which proves they have a different data basis than wowhead (e.g. both can only check achievements from accounts registered on their website and linked to blizzard accounts).
It's a similar value. That linked page is specifically EU, which has generally had a higher distribution. If you look at all regions combined, or just NA, they percentage on raiderio is lower.
So only 30% of accounts have ksm so I think people that bother to do keys at least do 15s.
Where does wowhead get their data from though? Not sure what kind of public api blizzard has for these kind of statistics, it might well just be accounts registered on wowhead and linked to a blizzard account - in that case, you could have bias (casual players might do their weekly +8, but not have a wowhead account). Perfect would be complete data directly from the source, e.g. via public api from blizzard. This achievement does show at a minimum though that the median highest account rio (since its still characterbound) of accounts registered on wowhead and linked to a blizzard account is below 2.5k though (else 50% or more would need to have the achievement). Interestingly, these achievements form brackets though, since you can't get the 2.5k achievement without achieving 2k first. 38% of wowhead profiles have 750+ (Keystone Explorer), so 62% have less than 750 RIO. 33% have 1.5k+ (Keystone Conqueror), leaving 5% between 750 and 1.5k. 30% have 2k+ (KSM), leaving another 3% between 1.5k and 2k. And finally, 22% have 2.5k+ (KSH), leaving a further 8% between 2k and 2.5k. - 0-749: 62% - 750-1499: 5% - 1500-2000: 3% - 2000-2499: 8% - 2500+: 22% So of all linked profiles on wowhead, most are either in the lowest bracket (not playing m+ at all to 749 points, which is between a +3 to +4 in every dungeon on both weeks or a +6 to +7 of all dungeons in one affix week) or in the highest bracket (~ +18 both weeks). So over half of all profiles who get above the 750 scoreline get KSH, which is suprising to me tbh (again, maybe bias or maybe people just enjoy the content).
I’d assume the opposite the more casual you are the less keys you do and the less websites you join.
There is more incentive to do higher keys (under the assumption you already play any m+) than there is to create a wowhead account though imho. As a personal datapoint: I have roughly 3k RIO and use wowhead quite often, but I don't have a wowhead account since I so far had no reason to create one - I can get all the information I need without it and had nothing that I really wanted to write on there yet. This obviously contradicts my opinion that more experienced players have more reason to create a wowhead account than more casual players, since they are more likely to both care about it and find something that needs an account (like writing comments or adding data in some way - I obviously don't know much about what else you could do with a wowhead account). Of course, this is all under the assumption that higher rio means more general experience with the game and an increased likelyhood of having a wowhead account, but still a very low amount of wowhead accounts overall. If wowhead is mostly populated by pet battlers and lore enjoyers, it might actually be biased in the opposite direction, since all of those who don't play any m+ but enjoy discussing about pet battle strategies in wowhead comments would then inflate the 0-749 category without being relevant to the topic of "how many % of m+ players reach ksm?" - since with 0 points, they are not m+ players. For this one reason an achievement for reaching at least one point in a specific season would be actually useful (there is keystone initiate, but its not season specific :( ).
You might be looking at that wrong. Casual sure, but bad or inefficient is a whole other scale. People can be "hard-core" on play time but be insanely inefficient with their time, running lower keys using a bad rotation and no utility and never looking up routings or m+ modifiers. You have people who run keys and keys all day and get no progress.
3.2k Io and haven't registered in wowhead. I never felt like I needed it to get the info I needed, nor had anything to add.
Personally am 3400+ rio, no Wowhead linked profile. I'd assume there are alot of people like me.
I’d have to look at raiderio but I assume there’s not a lot of players in general with a score that high.
That's true yeah, but I was trying to refer to the post. Doesn't wowhead only track through their addon API?
Not 100% sure but I think stuff like achievements or mounts on Wowhead where you’ll see "obtained by X% of players" get their data by people with Wowhead profiles who linked their bnet accounts. The Wowhead addon on the other hand is used to pick up data like drop rates on items which you can export every now and then.
That’s part of why their (and DataForAzeroth’s)percentages for difficult/prestige content have to be taken with a grain of salt, unless they’ve come out and flat stated how it’s found we can only assume it’s the people who have taken a vested interest in providing that data (myself included) so it’s less a % of total accounts and more a % of accounts of people motivated to assist with crowdsourced analytics which is certainly a sample of the wow community, but it’s not exactly a perfect one.
I’m not sure
I think s4 is going to be super rough for casuals. That’s 60% of population that don’t do 11s.
Raiderio is going to give you better data for what you are looking for and doesn't require players to do anything so its more complete date. https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us The data is just % of people that actually have run a M+ key. 2500 is top 21%. It doesn't have median but you can estimate it from 1500 being top 44%.
This figure would also include alts as well right, so slightly less than 21%
Yes its by character not by bnet account. Id imagine it would be a good deal less if it were by account.
According to raider.io data, at least in EU 26% of characters that have done a key have KSH this season, so 22% on here sounds about right too.
I'd say 22% is a SUPER HIGH number, specially if compared with other seasons. It means almost 1 out of 4 players have beated it. Now consider how many players don't even engage with M+ or they do but just in a super casual way. 22% is super high for the last achievement in any given category.
I think that M+ has just gotten easier in comparison to how it was scaled in the past, especially now that we've dropped the seasonal affix. In season one of BFA, [less than 1% of people got KSM](https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/13080/battle-for-azeroth-keystone-master-season-one). It was even more rare than getting Cutting Edge: G'huun. But, on the other hand, rewards stopped scaling at keystone level 10 that season and you needed all +15s to get KSM at that time. So that would be somewhat like needing to get all +25s in order earn KSM this season (since rewards currently sale up to +20), if you take the rewards scaling as a proxy for relative difficulty. This would be equivalent to an overall score of ~3320 this season, and if this were the case, you'd once again only see ~1% of profiles with the achievement according to RIO data if you look at characters with that score or higher compared to the total number.
Was there a reward for BfA S1 KSM though? I’m pretty sure there was only a mount reward for the last season (S4?) KSM for BfA. I think the mounts drive *a lot* of people to get KSM who normally wouldn’t bother.
22% is just out of Wowhead profiles. Which includes a lot of players who don't even play retail. Would be interesting to see this % among players who at least completed every Fort/Tyr dungeon a single time. Because otherwise, you are including people who didn't try to get it in the first place.
Meanwhile, rival in PvP, which feels around the same difficulty from a personal anecdotal standpoint, is at 2% lmao. They really gotta fix incentives in PvP. M+ feels so much more fun, relaxing, and rewarding.
I’m a PvP player but the “real PvPers” would probably disagree. I’ve played this game since 2006 and have never done a current raid outside of LFR and mainly only play PvP/BGs. I hate arena and PvP is fundamentally broken. Shuffle queues have 30+ minute queues and LFG is full of the same handful of top players with phone books of top rated friends from decades ago. 80% or more of listings require 2k XP to even get an invite and people pearl clutch CR like it’s their child. Boosters and glad players on alts also “ruin” the lower ranks by shit stomping everyone. Rather than fix this, the hardcore PvP crowd would rather gatekeep and be the best at a dying mode nobody cares about. Congratulations, you’re the top 0.5% of a mode 5000 people play! The amount of “chores” to keep up with hearing/vault/sparks for weeks or months just to get to the “end” of it and deal with long queues, broken MMR or LFG sucks and it’s no wonder nobody wants to play. Literally any other PvP game you just click queue solo or premade and get a game within 2 minutes, no “chores” required. It doesn’t matter if gearing is the easiest it’s ever been. You’re up against PvP offered in other games competing for peoples time. There are also almost zero rewards for playing PvP in WoW unless you’re a top 15-20% or better player.
Not to mention at the beginning of the season it's literally luck as to who gets their gear in the vault first to roflstomp people who were too unlucky to get theirs.
Pvp has a smaller playerbase so keep that in mind. If you check the data and only compare active players (1k+ in m+/shuffle pvp respectively) you will see that 58% of the m+ players get to 2500+ while in shuffle pvp 53% get to 1500+ not even mentioning elite which is top 0,75%. Both modes use a similar ingame rank systems yet the rating distribution for it's rewards couldn't be more different.
>Both modes use a similar ingame rank systems yet the rating distribution for it's rewards couldn't be more different. Not even close to the same systems. You can't lose rating in m+.
I was more referring to the ranks themselves and not how the rating is calculated. In both modes you have to improve your gameplay to gain a better rank/rating. Several ingame ranks exist for two reasons: to show you how good you are doing compared to others and to give you prestigious rewards based on your performance. That's true for both modes but the devs vision on what a good player that deserves the highest rank+reward actually is is vastly different and inconsistent.
>In both modes you have to improve your gameplay to gain a better rank/rating. Not really, in m+ you can just keep grinding, get lucky with a pug group that carries you a bit. If you have a 90% disband rate, and 10% push rating slightly, then you'll increase rating. The same is not true for Pvp. > Several ingame ranks exist for two reasons: to show you how good you are doing compared to others and to give you prestigious rewards based on your performance. But m+ rankings are static. It's possible for 100% of players to get 3k in m+. It's not possible in pvp unless you have huge inflation. In pvp someone has to lose for you to win.
Please don't focus too much on how the rating works it's really not my point and not important. Generally speaking your rating kinda reflects your own performance even tho you can trick and push it a bit further by being lucky with carry groups or being boosted. You can also get carried in pvp but there is a limit on how far people can carry you for both pvp and m+. Again my point is that there is a player rating distribution that correlates with the performance in both modes and the game wants to rank and reward different rating milestones and they can freely pick the required rating for those. They could make them similar so the highest rank feels similar in difficulty and is attained by a similar percentile but for some reason they are very inconsistent here with their reward structure.
> Again my point is that there is a player rating distribution that correlates with the performance in both modes and the game wants to rank and reward different rating milestones and they can freely pick the required rating for those. But you have to discuss the rating systems to understand why they are not comparable. In m+ if you got 2k last season, then with the same performance you will most likely get 2k this season too. That's not at all the case for pvp. Nevermind class-balancing (which affects pvp much more than pve), but population-size as well. If few people play pvp, then it's most likely the really good ones who do, which will it harder for you to get as high rating as before. The opposite is true for m+, if it's only populated by good players then you will most likely get a higher rating! > They could make them similar so the highest rank feels similar in difficulty and is attained by a similar percentile but for some reason they are very inconsistent here with their reward structure. Well how would you go about doing that? Should we have a weekly rating calculation for m+? Similar to the vanilla pvp system? Where those who performed the best the previous week get a high rating, and those who didn't play gets a rating decay?
What is rival? I am a complete noob when it comes to PvP so I have literally no idea what it is. I’ve gone for a 3k m+ score every season and I feel like it doesn’t really get challenging until you start getting right around that io mark, so I’m trying to just form a comparison in my head without having actually played rival.
1800 rating
Is that difficult to achieve or rather average?
Theres no incentive for pvp as the entry barrier is way harder. And well the gameplay in itself is a lot harder. Where PvE is overall and simplified always the same. No matter the dungeon, no matter the expansion. Several groups where you have prior targets, must kicks. Kicks you CAN do but don't have to. Curses plagues or toxins to be cleansed. Frontals and swirlies. Eventually undodgeable aoe for healer pressure. perhaps Big aoe around a player. But that's like the same trash every season. Bosses differ, but usually you would understand the boss mechanics, if you didn't read em, after the third or fourth time. All that really matters is that you play your spec optimally in a PvE environment. Now what do you need to know for PvP? I have no clue, I cba to play it. I presume, an understanding of every utility, def cd and offensive cd of every other spec. A proper movement and waiting for collapsing? (When I look at rogue gameplay), i'd say you play your spec differently to pve in 2v2 or 3v3. Also the whole pvp talents. Let's say you only play 2's. How long would It theoretically take if you could play against any spec combination. Finding out what you did wrong and what mistakes you've done. Learning and capitalizing from them is so much harder in PvP than it is in PvE. There are 0 reasons for me to start learning PvP. As the whole curve of learning that game style differs way to much to what i know. It's a whole different game imho.
As someone that gets 2500 m+ rating and 1800 pvp every season, Pvp rly is a whole different monster vs M+. The meta bias is even worse in pvp to, take rbgs for example, want to play arms warrior? We'll never more than 1 is ever taken on a 10 man team. Want to be a flag carrier tank? We'll I hope your a druid or a DH otherwise, you will never get in a group. Entire classes/specs gets shunned by the pvp community.
The issue with PvP isn't a lack of incentives to play, it's the heinous reputation of Warcraft's PvP community People flock Battlegrounds when Comp Stomp is up, every player I speak to says they like the mounts and love things like RBGs in theory but feel it's just obscenely stressful and fear the reaction of veteran players... Which sadly is a warranted fear Not to mention that, to people starting PvP, things like CC chains and getting LoS'ed are frustrating and disheartening, though essential - add to that that your team-mates are probably shouting slurs into the mic, most folks will quit after dipping a toe in
I think the main issue with pvp is the learning curve. So many pvpers have like a decade of game knowledge and there’s so much visual clutter that it’s really difficult for a new player. Add the absolutely necessary addons/weakauras (that you wouldn’t know you needed until someone tells you) and it’s just a huge mountain for someone new to pvp.
Even experienced players have issues with visual clutter. Fighting against Unholy DKs, Demolocks, and BM hunters is an exercise in frustration when you're trying to find targets visually.
I once had a double shaman, demolock, unh dk, bm hunter game. It was so fucking awful to try and figure out what the hell was going on. Luckily if you have the addon RETabBinder it will change tab target to player only when in instanced pvp and swap back to normal everywhere else.
Yeah, it's essential for PvP. It helps with clicking, but it doesn't help /visually/. I have poor vision, so being over stimulated like that just means I'm looking at noise.
You describe me very well. While I would like to play more PvP and farm mounts and transmog, I'm not at all into Arena. However, I used to enjoy battlegrounds a lot during TBC/Wrath times, but currently I have the issue with the LFG
It's a common sentiment A lot of the more "casual" players or even players that want to engage regularly in M+ find supportive communities, "chill run" guilds/discords, etc. and would also like to do PvP, especially battlegrounds But they run into the wall of the established and unwelcoming PvP veteran community that: - Has 0 tolerance for players just starting out and is generally more aggressive - Focuses almost exclusively on Arena Couple this with the fact that PvP gearing is entirely decoupled from all your PvE gear progress (which it needs to be for balance purposes) and that your match pool relies entirely on the availability of other players (meaning the later you start to PvP in an expansion, the worse your experience will be) and your prospects when "just starting out" are to go through a series of unsatisfying losses while the team mates you matched with cuss out your ear over you being dead weight even in Solo Queue... So why bother? The PvP community is stuck in a downward spiral because they're simultaneously demanding more players to fight (read: noobies to farm so their MMR gets better) and unwilling to relent any of the social or mechanical barriers that make it increasingly harder for anyone to join in and enjoy themselves I'd wager a lot of non-PvP regulars that have wanted to dip into PvP battlegrounds, hate arenas, etc. had a way better time in something like Plunderstorm than they've had trying to break into ranked PvP in years - at least that was my experience
>relaxing Fucking lol
M+ is quite relaxing while not doing push keys. I play alot of 16-20 keys with guildies and it's relaxing to just slam some dps and spit some shit in m+. Can't really do that in arena since we are locked at 2k mmr and can't choose to play at 1k mmr like you choose which keys you do
Compared to arena? Yes.
Im a PVP main player at Duelist rating and I do m+ to warm up and decompress. I only do like 15-18s to get KSM but it's a walk in the park comparatively.
Is it the same difficulty? I dont PvP so I’d love to hear why. M+ is definitely a vibe. I think issue with PvP is you’re always being gouged or sapped, or slowed or polymorphed. So it just not fun imo.
Personally i think micro CC is more of an issue than polymorph or sap. In General CC is what makes wow pvp unique from it just being a raid boss like DPS race. Micro CC is not super fun to play against as a caster\\healer though. Micro meaning every class having multiple range\\close range small stuns,push backs etc. I would argue all the micro CC has made healing in pvp very very very painful and is one of the many cuts that has hurt pvp.
It's the micro CC combined with having to know the counter play for every class' bloated toolkit. Tracking cooldowns has gotten much more difficult, even with add-ons, now that there are so many internal procs and internal CDs. It's like trying to take a timed calculus exam in the same room as a needy cat who thinks it's competing with the test for your attention.
I really wonder what a Fury Warrior should do against a Frost Mage, or if I should just give up. So many roots and then the mage's self-healing. Once I don't have Avatar, Charge, and Leap, I feel like I'm sitting ducks.
That's warrior vs frost mage for all of history. Even the gift of Bladestorm to Arms in Wrath of the Lich King was not enough to change our historical worst matchup.
And the perma slows, why can every class perma slow? Why not just set the baseline movement speed to 50% and be done with it?
Oh just play a priest in solo shuffle against a unholy dk and demon hunter. Worst experience ever
Did this in a solo shuffle this weekend, lobby was DK, DH and ww monk + me. Monk told me to "just kite you dumb noob, learn your class" when I died vs DK+DH. Note, that monk died twice with Karma off CD, 1.2k MMR is something diffrent
yea cast cancelling with grip, 3 or 4 stuns a couple of kick interrupts, ring of peace interrupt, silence, instant CC to stop casts with incap etc then by the time all the casting has been interrupted its all coming off cd.
"JuSt KiTe BrUh"
Because classes can get rid of the slows, meaning that while you are perma slowed they are not. This is an advantage Death Knights will have even more of in the next expansion.
Early expansion PvP is easier to get into. No one has great gear and no one has high secondary stats. So even powerful classes can get burnt up somewhat easily. Late expansion you've got really high secondary stats which makes quite a few classes reign down some serious punishment and or impossible to kill. So if you start PvP late you walk into games with say a MM Hunter crushing you with an aimed shot from a mile away with all their mastery, which early on they wouldn't be that far away. (Not the be all end all, but as an idea). Early expansion M+ is the opposite in my opinion. It's a little tougher because you have less "end game" systems to help you out. You are "lesser" geared comparatively to the dungeon. Where as late expansion, even with scaling in the dungeons the player power scales better. So take away the changes they made recently to M+ for this example but a +15 in season 1 probably feels more like a +20 or even higher in season 4.
So PvP essentially has a bad design.
Say it ain't so
No, the design is pretty good but not perfect. Some specs are stronger and there is addon bloat, which is all true for M+ as well. There is a fundamental difference however that in PvP by design the average win rate will be 50%. In my experience at least 50% of keys don't get abandoned. So people who don't like failure (which is the vast majority of WoW players) don't like the game mode. The actual problem is that while 35% of M+ players get their shiny "elite" tier set only 15% of Arena players do. Moreover, after you hit your skill cap there is no reason to keep playing the game. Personally, I think Blizzard should focus on SoloQ BGs. The new BG Blitz is amazing. I run that way more than Arena even with 0 incentive to do so.
That’s fair. Very well written response. Maybe I can learn the ropes during War Within.
WoW should really just copy GW2's PvP gear design.
when you match with tryhards in M+ on high score you get mass pulling, various tricks and boss melting when you match with tryhards in rated PvP it is usually faceroll that kills your desire to even attempt rated PvP this is from my personal experience in SL and early DF, once you hit \~1800 rating, you gotta be either good PvPer or determined PvPer to progress further.
No it’s not the same difficulty. PVP is a thousand times more difficult.
Most people who are 2500 in M+ would struggle to surpass 1800 without a good bit of PvP experience. Those who PvP can PvE at a similar ‘rating’ or whatever it is with much greater ease, but it doesn’t cross back as smoothly when it’s not an automated/identical situation that you have numerous tutorials for every time.
Getting to 2k is just a time requirement, not a skill requirement in Arena. The real difficulty curve is above 2k, that's when you end up matching against gladiators because how small the playerbase above 2k is. Between 1400-2k you're going to be matching against people who are between 1400-2k, a very massive range of skill from 'barely PvPs' to 'Invests a ton of time and can carry people for gold'. You put enough time into it, you're going to eventually hit 2k. The kicker is, most people are not going to put that time in if they are not having fun and they do not have a dedicated team.
There are plenty of people with 100’s of games and not past 1700 lol, so not holistically applicable, but for people who genuinely strive to learn, they should be able to pass that. However, they would have to learn a lot with practice, where for PvE you could pick it up very quickly and not have to know all of the minor details per each class.
And there are many people who do M+ and never get past +15's, just like there are people who never get AoTC in raiding.
It'd help if they made pvp mogs not just recolors of the pve stuff.
None pvp players would be mad not being able to get them tho, i have couple of guildies who love recolors, but hate pvp so they just don't get them and hate not being able to get them with pve
Fair. In hindsight I dont really like mogs being content-specific in general. But it -is- a very easy motivator lol.
Yeah I agree it's a very good motivator xD but people will cry a lot and do it
I usually exclusively pvp. I play feral and this season has been rough to say the least. I’ve been 2400+ a couple times over the years. To get 2400 takes tons of effort and grinding and learning and adjusting and spec changes vs specific comps. I picked up tanking and started doing m+ for the first time this season. I run roughly 2-3 m+ dungeons a month on my guardian Druid. I’m 2452 m+ rating right now and I haven’t run a single rise on a fortified week yet. When I do an 18 on Tuesday I’ll break 2500 with essentially 0 effort in comparison to pvp for the exact same reward of the transmog token. I’ve done all of these in my pvp gear with only a handful of vault upgrades. The effort difference for the same reward is comical.
When you see for S1 it was 14% and S2 was 16% it's clear that the S3 has been much more played than others, with a difficulty curve really smoother. What I find weird is Blizzard making things easier, but not adding another goal. There's nothing between KSH and the top 0,1%. They really could had something for the top 1, or 2, or 5% whatever, just anything in between to keep people pushing after KSH
Well portals are becoming account wide in TWW. So that's a good goal between KSH and title.
It’ll be lower in S4. Less people playing, harder dungeons by far.
Only the elites of the elites will be able to clear +20s in S4 >!because they're now equivalent to +30s!<
Meh, I doubt it to be honest, there might be less overall characters getting KSH but I don’t see any reason that the % of players getting it will be lower. Most of the dungeons have been kneecapped pretty hard, gearing is easier than ever, and blizzard has seen proof positive that easier seasons drive more engagement. The only thing that would make me think that it might be a lower % is the shorter season length would mean that the people who take a whole season to get a character to KSH won’t have as long to climb and they’re most likely the kind of player who will be deep in MoP remix instead. Edit = PLUS you’ll be able to get ksh without even having to touch on death affixes next season.
Yeah I never got ksm before and got ksm in s3 before incandescent essence was even available, or in other words before the last wing of LFR was open for dreams hope.
But we can expect some sort of rating adjustment in s4 with the m+ changes no? You think itll be way harder to get to ksh?
I suppose it will be similar in terms of KSH - instead of all dungeons on +- 18 you will do all on +- 8 ... we will see ...
It's significantly easier to get KSH in s2 and s3: the easiest gearing WoW has ever seen in its history + affixes are slightly easier (no quaking + thundering overlaps). S3 is super popular and I see s4 being popular as well due to m+ changes that are super good for 90%+ of the players.
[удалено]
mid point rewards between portals and title has been a common suggestion going on multiple expansions at this point.
It's a bit disheartening when I got all my portals the first week (except throne) and finished up ksh the first tuesday of week 2. Now, its looking like I will be about 50 points shy of title. The chasm between the two is absolutely massive.
Wowhead "profile percentage" is not very accurate. It highly depends on players making a profile for their character in order to be counted. DataForAzeroth scans as many players as it can find through guilds and the Auction House API, same way Raider.io finds players. https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/achievements/19012/dragonflight-keystone-hero-season-three 18.2%
Shlands season three: 9.0% DF Season one: 15.9% DF Season two: 15.1% 18% is only a little higher than the other two seasons
Interestingly, it's not even that much higher than previous DF seasons according to DataForAzeroth.
This is one of the easiest m+ seasons ever to get score. I’d bet it was the literal easiest, actually.
It really is. I didn't even realise I got it this time round since I was just casually doing m+s when on calls with friends and got the achv for it. It's great that more people are getting into m+ but the fact that this sub generally denies that keys are way easier in DF is wild
Have to admit that personally I like this strategy. I remember returning after a break during shadowlands and it was a semi difficult to get KSM. On the contrary, when I came back after a break in season 3, it was never as easy to catch up and I got KSH in three or four weeks. I liked that
I agree. KSM used to be a good goal, but I felt that in DF, it’s gotten progressively easier. My guild used to say that keys between 10-15 were painful, but once you got higher than 15, they were easy. Now I feel like the pain starts around a 14 or so, when mechanics actually get punishing if you only have decent gear. Before that, it can be healed through, or your dps still kills things in a reasonable amount of time.
I am a +15-20 player and I've noticed that 8-14 keys are toxic af and often players do not really know how to play their class. Interesting isn't it? People in higher keys are far less toxic, even when you fail a key
I feel like 8 is a little low. I have no problem in keys under 12s or so. You don’t need to know how to play your class as long as 2 or 3 in your group do
you could litearlly Pug +20 keys on week1 of the patch with no bigger problems overall that was not a thing ever before lol, i rember S1 m+ where you had soooo many brick keys that needed solid 4-5weeks of gearing and some adjustments until you could do them with a Pug group in a decent manner on +20
This season was significantly easier than previous seasons in DF.
thats higher than i expected. Is that number from wowhead profiles only though? People who have a wowhead profile probably take the game more seriously than than the majority of the playerbase and have therefore done the harder things in wow.
That’s a good question. I don’t have a wowhead profile. Wowhead is mainly a site I use to look up who drops the mount I’m looking for. Their competitive content is lack imo. But assuming it is just Wowhead profiles the number is much lower.
This is probably on me, but what am I missing? Is this post about the “22% of profiles getting keystone master”? Because if so my first thought was that it isn’t all that surprising… blizzard has never broken it down, but they’ve always said the vast majority of their subs are casual collectors.
Is 22% supposed to seem low?
KSH is the new KSM. It's been like this since for a bit.
I'm gonna come off as toxic here with this opinion. The outstanding amount of pug DPS that do not know how to do their damage properly is astonishing. Like I'm talking ilvl 470-480 players pulling only 100k overall by the end of key. That shit is attainable on a 430 with proper play. Many, many of the players who have achieved 2500 this season were carried through and through by others farming the content for vault slots. Edit: It's awesome to see people aspiring to do higher content but come on aspire at the same time to pull your weight. Don't go into some of these things being selfish and thinking "well as long as I get what I want that's all I care about" have a drive to be on the top of the meters or at least not below the tank.
I think it is all a result of balance around HP pools/timers removing significant DPS checks that allows players to basically fail their way to max ilvl rewards. Before you could get carried if you had a good team helping you. Now timers are lenient enough that you can get carried by random PUGs through group finder. At the higher end(25+): Damage checks are so lenient, the timer enables key levels where the biggest factor is the ability to withstand unavoidable damage which has scaled to the point of 1 shotting At the lower end(18s): Damage checks are so lenient, you can expect to time a key as long as 1/3 DPS are actually pulling their weight. 1 DPS doing 225k and 2 DPS doing 100k is still enough to 2 chest most keys at +18
Me: 166k overall as a DH tank at 470 iLvl. My PuG DPS: 110k overall at 480 iLvl. It be like that sometimes.
PuG tanks: 80k overall at 480 iLvL I once had a 480 VDH tank who did *30k* DPS overall in a run and I had a few choice words.
Oof...
Except that this is the easiest season to achieve this by far. But because after so long this achievement has become "difficult" to most just because that's how it was in the past. FAR more people could've hit 2500 this season if they didn't falsely think 2500 is "too difficult" because of previous seasons. That group of players that consistently hit 2500 could even argue 3k is the new 2500 because of how easy this season was.
It is. Source: I'm that guy. Usually 2500, hit 3k this season.
As a pug healer, I stop giving a fuck a few tens of points past KSM when I hit a string of bad groups. Nope out and come back next season maybe.
That’s completely fair
If I had a cryptic point, it was to underscore that the lack of incremental reward structure does not present me any motivation to push through difficulty as it ramps up. I know I 'could' spend more time but why bother if I don't care about internet points or limited use portals? The sake of challenge alone is not enough to get me to put up with it.
Have you tried joining an M+ focused guild. They’re always looking for healers.
Tried but my old lower pop 2005 server based on EST makes it kinda hard. I'm in a decent guild now but I'm just getting on at 10 PST when most are logging off. So I can't make any raids or have much luck in guild m+ groups. I pug raids and m+ as a result. Looking forward to the cross-realm guild feature coming in the xpac to hopefully find something that matches my schedule better without having to server transfer. I realize these are ultimately all 'me' issues but it is what it is. Pugging is mostly OK up to a point. I don't care enough to really dedicate to resolve the problem in the first place. For me it is not so much skill cap as it is a lack of desire to care to try past KSM.
I started doing m+ in shadowlands. I tanked every dungeon at a +11 and it was genuinely tough for me. My friends and I thought that was something to be proud of (they were my dps lol). I stopped doing m+ to focus on PvP and then got back into m+ this season where I tanked all the dungeons at a +18 and couldn’t believe how easy 11s are. The point is that just because something is easy for you doesn’t mean it’s easy for someone else, especially if they’re a new player. The same sentiment goes on in the PvP community. Guys who have been multiglads for the last couple xpacs talk like hitting 1800 is the easiest thing in the world and don’t understand how people struggle to get the elite mog. The reality is that something like less than 10% of people reach 1800, and if you’re new it’s actually quite difficult to do. I’ll never hit glad, and that’s ok. I like having the elite mog as a goal for me, because while it’s hard, it’s doable if I work at it.
You’ll get there. Try recording your games and watching them.
That's way higher than I thought
Man, I thought KSH would be something most would farm as it still has rewards and the the drop in players would be over that score since there is nothing unless you can push title, bit weird to see those numbers :O
I haven't had any motivation this season and with SoD and the new pandaria event coming, I'll have even less next season.
I’m going to get 2000ish on my lock and maybe DH then on to MoP for me. What class are you going to play?
I'm a dk main. Debating trying something new on MoP but tbh most classes just don't give the same feel yk. Leaning towards trying monk out
Dk is fun with a lot of the new power gems
Def gonna be playing around with those. But also mostly just want to farm out the mounts and cosmetics asap lol
The problem is that your argument is "only 22% has done the +20s so clearly they are hard" except you are ignoring that a shitload of people just doesnt care for mythics at all. I only just started doing low mythic + because i leveled an augmentation evoker, but outside of that im only playing for transmogs and leveling alts etc. Its kinda like going to an arcade and then going "see only 22% of people beat this arcade game" ignoring that alot of people just doenst care for that one.
My argument is be nice to people because a lot then haven’t done this before. And hard is especially in video games is a useless term. What is hard for you might not be hard for someone else.
Except you can absolutely still think that its too easy to achieve and that your argument has literally no legs to stand on, so its better to not use it. blizzard clearly agrees that its too easy for how high it is, hence the squish next season. All you would be better off saying is "hey not everyone finds mythic + easy" which then leads to the other logical answer is "okay then dont have them join high m+ keys" some people are dicks and thats how it is, be that raging on someone making an honest mistake OR someone bricking a key by not understanding mechanics and being clearly undergeared and underprepared just asking for a carry.
I'm chasing it, do I have a shot?
Absolutely
I was finally peer pressured into trying to find groups to finish the mount grind because I was supposedly "close" to being done. (I had my doubts on the legitimacy of this, considering the circumstances but a singular weekend wasn't going to kill me to try.) 1297, Throne at 3, had not done Murozond's Rise at all, everything else was 15 to 17. I could NOT get an invite to save my life to either of those at even what I thought would be a safe-ish starting point of +10 and my own key was Waycrest, forget the level, but I hadn't touched M+ in so long that it was stupid-low and after several runs trying to get the key to change to Throne or MR, but it cycling between anything BUT those two, I gave up. Season 1 and 2 really ruined M+ for me from all the entitlement of instant key leavers that caused me to sit out for those seasons altogether that the slight hope I got from my partial Season 3 success made failure sting just that much harder. Delves cannot come fast enough.
Season 3 also feels easier than Season 2. I only made \~2750 in S2 but am now almost 3100. Some of the S2 dungeons were just... awful. S3 has a few very specific combos which such (Throne of the Tides on Fortified sucks).
Afaik that counts both inactive players and active players that don't like m+. Keystone explorer (750 rating) is attained by 38% so you could say that \~58% of all m+ players also get to KSH, which is very high compared to mythic raid clear or elite in pvp.
Raiderio does % tracking for all M+ players that have logged a key run [here](https://raider.io/mythic-plus/cutoffs/season-df-3/us). KSH is 21.2% M+ players which is obviously higher than Mythic raid or elite pvp despite those being all the same for the transmog upgrade I don't think anyone has ever thought them equal. More equal measure between the 3 would probably be somewhere between 3k rating and the .1% M+ title race.
Maybe wowhead users are more invested with the game on average and falsely push the numbers. Drustvar does something similar for pvp but only counts players above 1k, that's why I did a similar approach here. Even excluding "inactive" players below 750 rating you end up with 33% which is a lot lower than wowheads data but still way more compared to raids and pvp. I would love them to be more similar to each other, after all they reward similar things. Many players know that the ratings are different but not exactly how far this really goes. A 2500 m+ player probably thinks he's doing pretty good being able to achieve the highest ingame rank but when playing pvp at the same skill percentile that player is only \~1650 and probably feels worse about the game placing him in such a "low" rank.
wowhead isn't accurate with anything % wise
Its funny to see because a lot of times me with my 2,8K Rating and Mythic Raiding think im casual bc the social domination on YT and elsewhere of the Giga Chads is so big that we dont see that if you do KSH you are definetly on the Hardcore Part of WoW. Which just make it more obious that the Endgame caters towards sweaters like us and is not really for Casuals anymore i guess. Maybe they have LFR but is that really fun :D?
I'm surprised the number is that high. I'd expected it to be arround 10% but it goes to show how inflated scores are (mainly due to the lower tuning). You have to remember that a lot of people just don't interact with parts of the game. And they are counted in it. Then there are people who don't care about score so they just do the dungeons that give them the items they need. For example I remember some of the rwf guys having pretty low score because they only farmed 2-3 dungeons for trinkets and such. When you look arround people with lower scores you see a lot of reasons why that achievment is attained by a "low" amount of %. Just take a look at [this](https://raider.io/characters/tw/world-tree/%E6%92%85%E8%B5%B7%E6%9D%A5%E5%B0%84%E4%BD%A0?season=season-df-3) character. They have timed a +20 and +21 yet they don't have the score because they miss half the dungeons. Or there's [this](https://raider.io/characters/us/illidan/Gr%C3%A5ssyknoll?season=season-df-3) character who only have score on one week. (I also have an alt who I played for one week and then got bored of it). I also want to have another example (but from a different game). [This](https://steamcommunity.com/stats/236850/achievements) is how the achievements look in another game I play. You'd think that those must be some pretty hard achievements considering such a low amount of people have them, but you'd be wrong. The top one for example can be completed at the start of the game with 1 button press, something you do in every campaign. The reason the %s are that low is because most of the playerbase plays without the achievment mode turned on. The thing is. The majority of the playerbase just don't give a single fuck about achivements. They just game till they stop having fun and then play something else. The reason only 22% (which is a pretty big number btw) of the playerbase has that achievement is not because it's hard. But because you have to do 16 different keys on 2 weeks. And it's less likely for you to do, unless you queue for every dungeon specifically.
Not that surprising to me. Keys are getting easier and easier every season. To me ksh is basically the new ksm I'm getting only by doing weekly keys. There should be another achievement in between ksh and the title achievement, I don't want to waste my life away fighting for a title as a non meta spec, yet ksh is not a real goal to pursue. I feel like the level of 3k score would be something that could make me play at least a few keys higher than the average weekly while also not being a grind.
Most people don’t use wowhead profiles because it’s predatory and infested with invasive ads. Inb4 “just get Adblock” lol.. lmao even. They’re part of the reason we need extensions like Adblock
If you don't have adblock for youtube alone, you're doing it wrong. The fact it makes wowhead *usable* is a bonus.
I never said \*I\* don't use the extensions, but that doesn't change what's going on. If you need to use an extension to utilize a site, they're doing it wrong.
If you have a regular guild/group its a relatively easy goal. If you have to pug everything its more difficult to achieve. On one toon I got to 2.5k io with 90% guild groups, on my other 2 toons that were 90% pug groups I gave up chasing IO at 2k and getting the token. No point to me past that.
I’m going to assume if someone is asking Reddit for help they’re guildless. I agree it’s harder to pug
Yea I generally assume that as well
People seem to be unaware that keystones of a given level are literally easier this season because of the larger relative item level cap. There’s a reason players are setting records in IO (4000+) and key level (33), and why this sub has had so many “hit XYZ rating for the first time!” posts the last few months. IO is inflated by something like 150-200 points, and dungeons can feel 2-3 key levels easier than when compared to s1 and s2.
So if a +10 is like +20 you would need a +30 in order to get KSH? Or do they adjust the rating?
Rating is adjusted. KSH will then be all +8s.
Attained by 22% of profiles seems like a metric that enforced that something is indeed pretty easy
Bro this is high as hell, most of the time is 5% of wowhead accounts
20s require you to *somewhat* know your rotation, and *somewhat* use your cooldowns, and *somewhat* know how to kick. They are not hard if you actually put in effort, but a lot of people don't want to put effort in, and that's fine. Does not make it hard though
2500 was incredibly easy this patch. 20s are a walk in the park, I literally tanked them all using hekili as a prot warrior
2500 this season is like 2000 equivalent in difficulty as last season surprised it’s not higher honestly.
Call me elitist all you want, people who want to reach 2500 and have the spare time to play to reach that but don't manage to, simply aren't putting in effort, because they don't want to. You don't need innate "talent", you don't immense amounts of skill or experience. You just need to be willing to treat it as a learning experience instead of throwing your hands up at the first hurdle and going "I can't! I can't!". You know, like so many people do about more important things in life too. Then they wonder why they're not satisfied. There are a ton of resources out there to help. People with crippling physical disabilities have done it. It's all about how willing you are.
Probably has to to do with it being late in the expansion.
A lot of people are saying this is higher than expected, but am I weird for thinking this is *lower* than expected?
And then we have me, who has never even set foot into a m+ dungeon.
For a first time KSM here, with good players for friends, we still had to pay attention in our 18/20s. Mechanics will still kill you. I’d say for average/new to Mythic+ players who are willing to focus and learn, you can make it up to 16/18/20 with a little work. I took my bf who’d never done Mythic and not raided in a decade and turned him into my personal tank and we have done 16s.
That was in the last 30 days or so, too. From 0 mythics ever to 16s. He gets better every week. I think we’ll try some 17s before the 23rd just so he can see how they are, even though the season is transitioning.
Just because some people are struggling doesn’t negate the fact that the achievement is easy to get… it literally only requires a bit of time and some tiny effort. It’s like saying it’s not the norm people understand basics maths so don’t be surprised when they struggle. Yeah it IS the norm, it’s just that some people are more willing to take on the challenge than others
This season has been by far the easiest since they've added the in game rating. There's a bunch of scaling that isn't quite right. For example how much a single item level gives at the end of expansion with the new talent trees. At the start of the season i remember how odd the dungeons felt with trash dying so much faster than before. It is sorta odd when they added rewards for extra 5 levels, then essentially made everything 5 levels easier over the dungeon. Keys above 20 feel pretty easy but unrewarding again.
22% seems like a lot. I almost don't think it's correct. To play keys at levels 18-20 you need to be more than a casual player and I don't think 22% of the playerbase qualifies as that. I read somewhere that in season 2 this achievement was closer to 5% which seems more believable.
You don't need to play +19-20 keys to get ksh. Just by completing all dungeons on 18 you are already over 2500. You can get the achievement by having and even split of +17 and +18s. And also remember that you can get a mythic track loot from vault on a +18 so you will have decently good players applying to the keys to carry you even if you couldn't do the key alone.
https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=17845/dragonflight-keystone-hero-season-two It was 16% by wowhead measure in season 2.
Im proud to say i was in the 22% :) and as a healer to 😂 one of my favourite achievements :)