Keystone Heroes: The Newest Way to Improve your Mythic+ Gameplay

With a few good push weeks still ahead of us before the end of the season, this is a great time to start looking at tightening up your Mythic+ gameplay to reach any goals you’re striving for. Whether it’s the Keystone Master achievement, unlocking all the portals for the dungeons, or aiming for a personal best IO score, we all have room to improve.

Enter Keystone Heroes! This new tool has been developed by Gerrit Alex. Keystone Heroes breaks down your Mythic+ logs into easy-to-read graphics that illustrate areas of improvement. To use Keystone Heroes, all you need to do is log your combat to Warcraftlogs, and the rest is plug and play!

While examining past performance is essential to improving gameplay, combat log analysis has a reputation for being a time-consuming process with a steep learning curve for beginners. Fear not! Keystone Heroes is here to save the day by giving you quick insights into your gameplay and tracking your progress as you gain more experience.

Today, I’ll be outlining a few of my favorite features of Keystone Heroes. For a full rundown of the site and its various tools, click here.

Map View

The first thing you’ll see when you pull up a log is a map view of every single pull that was made and, more importantly, WHERE it was pulled. The map shows the point where combat started so you can see where patrols were pulled; this can be particularly helpful if you’re reviewing someone else’s logs or trying to generate a MDT path out of a run that went particularly well.

Map of Mists of Tirna Scithe giving a pull by pull breakdown.

At a glance, the map will also visually show important information such as:

• Bloodlust timings
  
• When and where players used invisibility
  
• Handling of Seasonal Affixes such as Awakened Lieutenants
  
• Dungeon-specific mechanics like Kyrian Weapon usage in The Necrotic Wake and Spires of Ascension, or Venthyr Lantern Activations in Sanguine Depths

Just below the map section is the “Affix Impact'' list, which shows how your group handled specific affixes. For example, the image below shows a breakdown of exactly how many explosives were handled correctly, and how many explosives each played destroyed.




A lot of the time, we may justify getting hit a few times by easily avoidable yet tedious affixes such as Volcanic or Storming. However, seeing how much damage and subsequent healing has totaled up by the end of the dungeon can really put things into perspective. Keep track of your damage taken from your “problem affixes'' and look for ways to improve your numbers in future runs!

Events

The “Events” Chart is easily my favorite feature that Keystone Heroes has to offer. Using the “Next Cast” column, you can take note of places where you left important abilities on cooldown for too long (it will even automatically calculate if you could have gotten extra uses in!).

Proper cooldown usage is perhaps one of the most commonly overlooked things that can take your Mythic+ play to the next level. Sometimes, players get so obsessed with holding cooldowns for the “optimal” time to use them that it leads to an overall DPS decrease because of so much lost uptime. This tool can also be useful to evaluate utility spell and defensive usage, as these are often heavily underutilized.

A detailed breakdown of every single action done by the group

You can see in the events listing above, Sessa (hey that’s me!) missed an entire full cast of Divine Toll and Darlyne missed a cast of Fury of Elune. Meanwhile, both Gromrar and Gnomepwn used their Trueshot and Hunt almost immediately after coming off cooldown to maximize their casts. It will even keep track of certain utility casts like Sauryn missing 7 casts of Capacitor Totem!

If you are looking to improve your performance in a specific dungeon, using the Events Chart and Cooldown Management tab in conjunction with the timestamped map can allow you to better plan your cooldowns for future runs.





As a tank, a feature I particularly appreciate is the indication of how much time is spent out of combat both before and after each pull. When running with a premade group and trying to optimize pathing on your own, we often optimize percentages and the pulls themselves but forget that downtime also adds up across an entire key.

More to Come

I cannot emphasize enough how excited I am that a log analysis tool dedicated to Mythic+ finally exists. Keystone Heroes is an exceptional website and proves that you don’t need to become a pro at reading logs to benefit from analyzing your past performance.

To keep up with Gerrit you can follow him on Twitter or support the continued development of Keystone Heroes through Patreon. New features have already been added since its launch in early January and he has plans to release even more functionality (he’s even added new features in the time it took me to write this article!).

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Links

• NEW: Public Beta - Raider.IO Recruitment System
  
• Set up Raider.IO Stream Widgets
  
• Set up Raider.IO Discord Alerts
  
• Download the Raider.IO Client
  
• Follow Raider.IO on Twitter
  
• Support Raider.IO on Patreon
  
  
• Check out Keystone Heroes
  
• Join Keystone Heroes on Discord
  
• Support Keystone Heroes on Patreon
  
• Follow Gerrit Alex on Twitter

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