Who’s talking? The information comes from YouTuber Bellular, who in turn has analyzed data from “Warcraft Logs” or “Raider.io”, for example. Bellular has been publishing interesting analysis videos on the current state of various MMORPGs for years, with World of Warcraft being mentioned particularly frequently.

In one of his previous videos, Bellular had already picked apart the raid numbers on mythic raids, but those only affect a small percentage of characters. Now he has turned his attention to the more accessible variants of raids – the normal and heroic raids.

Normal and Heroic Raids: Participation plummets by over 66

What is Bellular comparing? Bellular looks mostly at the numbers from the normal and heroic raids from the last few patches, but sometimes makes reference to old expansions like Legion. He looks at how many active guilds defeated the first boss of each raid and then how many of those guilds later defeated the final boss within the same raid tier. The absolute numbers indirectly indicate the loss of players – because it shows a clear decrease.

It’s noticeable that Castle Nathria is off to an extremely impressive start. This was one of the most successful raids of all time from this perspective, even eclipsing the Legion raids.

• Castle Nathria (patch 9.0) had a whopping 48,419 guilds that completed at least the first boss “Shrillwing” on “normal”.
• 39,509 of these guilds also managed to kill the final boss “Count Denathrius” on normal, which is 81.60%.

• In Sanctuary of Domination (patch 9.1), only 21,649 guilds defeated the first boss on normal.
• Of those, 17,757 guilds made it to Sylvanas and defeated her on normal as well, a whopping 82.02%.

• In the Mausoleum of the First on Normal, 14,393 guilds were still at the first boss and defeated it.
• Of those, however, only 9,798 guilds still came up against the dungeon master, just 68.07%.

The numbers for the heroic variant of the raid speak a very similar language, the drop in participation is about the same, as this graph shows:

Where does the player decline come from? On the one hand, some player attrition is normal over time, but in Shadowlands it was particularly drastic between patches. There are a number of reasons for this, all of which are intertwined:

• Shadowlands had long content droughts between patches.
• Shadowlands had an extreme amount of mandatory systems that characters had to “slog” through if they wanted to be fit for the endgame.
• The sheer amount of systems was confusing and caused frustration.

The fact that the final boss kill was much less frequent in the Sanctum of the First might additionally be due to the fact that the Sanctum was particularly hard and had some strong blockades along the way. Especially fights like Anduin or Halondrus or even the dungeon master itself were difficult. There were many mechanics that made a raid fail immediately if just one person made a mistake. That alone might have broken some raid groups.

What is not included in the data? Note that the data does not yet include the current – Season 4 – after all, it’s only a few weeks old. However, Bellular himself tells us that he’s having a lot of fun with the current – Season and that it’s easier to get started. The whole – Season feels “more rounded” and better than the previous Shadowlands patches.

Whether this will ultimately lead to a better score, however, remains to be seen. Usually patches only manage to dampen the departure of players a bit and not to attract new players again. That usually only happens with the release of a new expansion.

Last but not least, it must also be said that the number of raid guilds can only be used to derive a player count to a limited extent. Many casual players probably never get into the raids or, if at all, only see the LFR variant of them. World of Warcraft supports many different play styles and the hunt for better equipment and harder fights is not interesting for everyone.

Still, the data naturally shows a trend that we can hope Dragonflight can break. After all, the beta has started there, so more players can get their own impression of the next WoW expansion.