I’ve been reading, with interest, a lot of narrative around the relative difficulty of Amirdrassil, specifically Tindral and Fyrakk. I’ve heard from quite a few different sources that this is being percieved as one of the hardest raids ever – and have seen a few attempts at looking at data to quantify that difficulty. However, these have largely been based on flawed data/methodology, at least in my opinion. So, I wanted to have a go at some analysis of the difficulty of the raid within the context of previous tiers, to maybe give some perspective to the discussion. I’ve tried to be clear about the limitations/decisions involved in my own analysis, outlined in the methodology and context section at the bottom.

This will be a long post, which I realise isn’t for everyone – and you may disagree with some of what I say. That’s completely fine, please do challenge my assumptions or assessments below.

Everything I’m comparing is based on the state of each tier, up to and including week 15 of that tier. Mostly, I’m looking at week 15 itself, which for Amirdrassil is the reset week just gone, but will outline where trends differ significantly in earlier weeks of the respective tiers. However, it’s worthless trying to compare week 15 of this tier to the end of another tier.

So, let’s get down to some data. Simple but revealing, absolute kill numbers on late tier bosses as of week 15 in each tier:

Final and penultimate boss kills as of week 15

We can see that there are fewer kills on both Tindral and Fyrakk compared with the two previous Dragonflight tiers – but these numbers are not significantly different to tiers from previous expansions. In overall kill numbers, Nighthold, Antorus, Eternal Palace and Nathria are all broadly comparable, while Tomb and Sepulcher have far fewer kills as of week 15. It should be noted that these are the absolute kill numbers, which is dependent on the player base – obviously, more players should translate to more kills, and the number of players spikes at expansion launch, then depletes as the expansion progresses. You can see this, to an extent, as a trend in the data, though certainly as a far smaller, secondary factor to raid difficulty when looking at these later bosses.

I’ve produced two further visualisations which somewhat control for this by looking at the percentage of guilds who have killed the penultimate boss or achieved cutting edge compared with the total mythic raiding population. That is, the percentage of guilds who’ve killed the last or second last boss compared with the first boss.

Percentage of mythic raiding guilds achieving cutting edge by week 15

Percentage of mythic raiding guilds killing the penultimate boss by week 15

Interestingly, on this metric, Tindral and Fyrakk are both relatively middle of the pack compared with previous tiers. This still isn’t a perfect comparison – not all guilds who kill the first boss have ambitions of clearing deeper into the raid, and this is likely to be especially true for expansion launches, but it does give an indicative idea, roughly accounting for the proportion of guilds actively raiding in what should be a reasonable like-for-like comparison between tiers.

So I've made one further attempt to control for the larger casual mythic raiding population in some tiers: the percentage of guilds with access to a boss who have killed it. For example, in the current tier, as of week 15, 2003 guilds have killed Smolderon, while 987 have killed Tindral, meaning that 49.3% of guilds with access to Tindral have killed it. Of those 987, a further 489 have killed Fyrakk, meaning 49.5% of guilds with access to Fyrakk, have killed it.

Percentage of kills by guilds with access

* Note: I’ve included Anduin here, because it was a true outlier at this point of Sepulcher. The only case, at week 15, where a mid-tier boss is a far larger proportional barrier than the penultimate boss.

From this perspective, Tindral does come out as a bit harder than the average penultimate boss. Fallen Avatar (44.2%) and Stone Legion Generals (48.8%) are the hardest at this point in their respective tiers on this metric, but Tindral is just behind them. What we see to compensate, however, is a far greater percentage of guilds who have reached Fyrakk achieving a kill on it. In other words, Tindral is a slightly tougher barrier than the usual penultimate boss, but once guilds are through it, they’re not generally getting unduly held up by Fyrakk.

And finally, a visualisation which I found helpful to understand the relative difficulty, CE-achieving guilds so far, by week:

Cutting edges achieved by week

I don’t really love this visualisation in most ways, it’s too busy to discern individual raids easily. However, I haven’t cut it down because it gives a lot of visual clarity on the trend, especially the bright red line for Amirdrassil compared with the average. In terms of CEs achieved so far, this tier is far from an outlier on the scale of Tomb or Sepulcher (or, indeed, Uldir or Emerald Nightmare on the other side). In fact, it has a CE curve broadly similar to Eternal Palace, Antorus and Nighthold – and truthfully isn’t too far removed from Vault.

Conclusions

The difficulty of Tindral is being overhyped as of the current tuning of the boss. It’s a harder than average penultimate boss for Dragonflight, but isn’t a crazy outlier historically. As it stands, the rate of guilds earning cutting edge is essentially normal.

Possibly the reason for it getting so much attention is due to the absurd difficulty of the boss during RWF and the high number of pass/fail mechanics it still includes. However, after the various rounds of nerfs, it's actually dying at a pretty healthy rate week-on-week, which has accelerated massively since the nerfs. 248 kills in week 9, 449 in week 10, to 987 in week 15. Post-nerf it's actually dying at about the same rate as previous penultimate Dragonflight bosses, it's just happening 4 weeks later because of the timing of those nerfs.

Nobody can really predict how this tier will unfold from here. My guess is that we’ll see another round of nerfs to Tindral and Fyrakk before the end, possibly shaving some of the pass/fail mechanics off Tindral specifically. I should add that, despite my assessment that Tindral isn’t now an outlier in terms of difficulty, I don’t believe it’s an especially healthy boss for the game.

Finally, to say, I partly wanted to post this to encourage the guilds still working on Tindral, or soon to come to it, to not get discouraged by how it’s being discussed. I’ve seen some of the narrative around the difficulty of the boss here and on /r/wow has caused people either early in, or soon to start Tindral progress to feel prematurely defeated and pretty much give up before they really begin. It’s still a hard boss, will take work and will make demands of your whole raid team, which is quite correct for a penultimate mythic raid encounter, but after the successive rounds of nerfs, it’s far from an unkillable monster. If your guild killed the penultimate boss in previous Dragonflight tiers, they can kill this one too.

Methodology, limitations, and context

I generated this data and the visualisations, using the raider.io public API, a Python script and Excel. Specifically, I’ve captured the number of kills on every boss each raid week, from the launch of the mythic raid to the removal of CE, for each tier between Emerald Nightmare and Amirdrassil (which is all of the data available on rio). I’ve intentionally excluded four tiers from this analysis:

• Emerald Nightmare – this was an exceptionally easy tier, including it simply messed up the scale for the visualisations, without really adding any meaning. For context, on week 15 (which was actually the final week of that tier), there were 8251 guilds with kills on the first boss (Nythendra), 3650 on the penultimate boss (Cenarius) and 3484 on the final boss (Xavius). This means by week 15, a whopping 42.2% of guilds had achieved CE, from those who’d started – compared with the next highest, Aberrus – 13.4% and Sanctum – 10.5%.
• Trial of Valor – this was a 3 boss raid which lasted for 30 weeks, crossing two other raid tiers (half of Emerald Nightmare and all of Nighthold). It doesn’t really compare to other raids, so has been excluded.
• Crucible of Storms – this was a 2-boss raid which only lasted for 9 weeks, overlapping with the end of Battle of Dazar’alor. This was notoriously difficult, many guilds didn’t attempt it, and being a 2-boss raid, it doesn’t really compare with other tiers for the purpose of this analysis.
• Shadowlands fated - the re-release, on a rotation, of three previously defeated raids, was just a bit too odd to deal with, which I didn't feel would result in any meaningful comparison.

There are some minor limitations with how the data was generated. I haven’t made any attempt to deal with time zones or region, so for example, a kill in EU late on Tuesday might be counted into the next week in the dataset. This should have a negligible impact on the data/conclusions drawn overall.

I have no personal agenda here. I’ve progressed this tier, have CE, and have been surprised by some of the strength of the narrative. Ultimately, I just like data, was curious, and saw some people being unduly discouraged when they needn’t be. Keep your chin up, ask for help if you need it, and kill the boss.