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World First Mythic +20 of TWW Season 2 Claimed!
🚨 Have you heard the news?! 🚨
The World First +20 of The War Within Season 2 has been claimed by Chinese players 大人间失格, 凯旋之咩, Jeannelin, 小红爪萱萱, and 炮哥哥来了 in
The MOTHERLODE!!The MOTHERLODE!! is one of the dungeons we expected to see as the World First +20 of the Season given that it’s one of the highest-pushed keys on the Leaderboard, preferred for its low difficulty relative to the rest of the Season 2 dungeon pool; we did not expect a +20 quite this soon, however:
See instead: Relative difficulty of dungeons at all keystone levels
Unlike Season 1 of the expansion, which didn’t see a Mythic+ 15 keystone timed until Week 3, the World First Mythic +15 of Season 2 was actually timed in Week 1. In fact, both the World First +16 and +17 were timed in Week 2, the World First +18 timed in Week 4, and the World First +19 timed just three weeks ago in Week 5:
When the World First timed +15 was secured in Week 3 of Season 1, we even speculated that we might not see a +20 that Season since the World First +15 squad was already quite geared by that point with an average item level (ilevel) of 630.52 out of a possible 639 points. Although we did end up seeing +20s timed in Season 1, it took all the way until Week 15:
Now in Week 8 of Season 2, we’ve already gotten the World First +20…a whopping 7 weeks earlier than in Season 1. Just this week, we saw the last of the eight different Affix combinations before they cycle back around again, and yet here we are with a +20 already completed. Furthermore, groups have quite a bit of item level to accrue before the competition gets truly fierce, with the top EU team currently sitting at an average ilevel of 669.0 out of a possible 678 pts of ilevel that can be accrued in Season 2. This means that the EU team has about 9 ilevels to attain before they are fully maxed out for keys this Season, while the top CN team completed their World First +20 while sitting only about 4 ilevels behind the maximum possible.
As Kira mentioned in the clip above, he believes that his team’s +17
Operation: Floodgate would be rank 1 if they simply had the ilevel that the CN teams can currently attain.Blizzard API Restrictions for China
If you are unfamiliar with Netease, Blizzard’s publishing partner in mainland China, learn about Blizzard’s API Restrictions.
For example, in comparing the top world +17 Operation: Floodgate runs, we can see that the CN team sat at an average of 669.52 ilevel at the time, whereas the EU team sat at 665.40 ilevel, creating a gap of approximately 5 ilevels.
Does gear make that big of a difference in pushing the highest keys in the world? Absolutely, it can. However, that’s not to say that the innovations we’ve been seeing from these formidable teams in China are not noteworthy or adapted by EU and NA teams alike. Throughout the Season, we’ve seen many strategies and skips emerge directly from CN teams that have been copied as soon as they were discovered on DouYu – a popular CN streaming platform.
So, although gear certainly plays a role in the numbers game of Mythic+ and what is possible through optimizing routes/skips, cooldown management, and pure gameplay/execution, it’s hard to accurately predict how high keystones will go, as we are still relatively early into Season 2. We’re not even anywhere near the Mythic+ Cutoffs for Seasonal titles just yet.
When teams are evenly matched on the Tournament Realm or when they've had nearly a full Season to get all their best-in-slot items, that’s when things really heat up. We’re bound to see some fierce competition in the upcoming Mythic Dungeon International (MDI) of TWW Season 2, streaming LIVE on weekends from May 2 until June 1 (peep the Time Trials Leaderboards HERE). The MDI recently adopted the format seen in The Great Push tournaments, thus becoming a bonafide key-pushing tournament alongside the speed-running element necessary to optimize the time provided for each team to push their keys as high as possible. That said, we expect to see MDI teams compete in fashion more similar to the live retail Leaderboard.
Read more on the Official WoW Esports Platform on Raider.IO
How high will we see keys pushed up during the MDI? Will it be higher than on live servers? What classes and specs will we see? Currently, the most popular specs in keystones +15 and up on the Leaderboard might give us some hints…at least for what group composition we might see in the higher keys of the MDI. The early speed-running keys may see different comps that are better optimized for big dangerous pulls.
With a prize pool of $300,000 (USD), we hope to see some serious key pushing from all these talented international teams in the MDI. Tune into Warcraft on Twitch or YouTube for the action starting on May 2, 2025, and tune into our LIVE MDI Coverage for all the updates!
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About the Author
VitaminP (VP) is the Content Manager of Raider.IO. VP holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration and has worked for Raider.IO since the formation of its News Section in November 2018. VP specializes in tanking classes and has loved doing competitive Mythic+ on and off since early Legion.
About the Editor
Gogogadgetkat has been playing WoW since late BC, and has been the GM of her guild Propaganda since its creation in 2014. As a career healer, Kat has a number of CEs and old-school heroic kills under her belt, all on a variety of healing classes and specs—she’s a serial altoholic! In addition to Mythic raiding and a little Mythic+, creating safe, inclusive spaces in gaming is her longtime passion; Kat has been an admin for the Perky Pugs community since late BfA, and is also a founding council member and the Executive Director for the DEIBAJ initiative VISAGE. She is excited to bring her wealth of experience and love of writing to the Raider.IO team.
