Raid numbers prove WoW Dragonflight isn’t ‘dead’ but it wasn’t ever alive to begin with

World of Warcraft Dragonflight was presented to players as the “beginning of the third era” and an expansion that would return the game to its glory days. Although many players love Dragonflight, the stats tell a different story.

According to a Sept. 6 Reddit post that uses raid data from Raider.IO—namely boss kills—Dragonflight as an expansion isn’t dying, but it never really was popular in the first place.

Every WoW expansion goes through the same life cycle: its release and an initial surge of players, a gradual decrease in population, and a resurgence of players to a lesser extent whenever a new season starts. In the case of Dragonflight, the expansion never saw a sudden increase in players like Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands experienced during their first seasons.

Further looking at the numbers, we can see that BfA and Shadowlands managed to retain more players than Dragonflight, but these two expansions also saw a rapid decline in the number of bosses defeated from season one to season two. 

Another interesting statistic that came out of this is that Dragonflight raids, especially Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, have a higher completion rate when compared to the past two expansions. The most likely reason for this is the raid difficulty. While Shadowlands, for example, had Sepulcher of the First Ones—a historically quite demanding raid that had an 18-day-long Race to World First—Aberrus was intentionally designed to be easier and more accessible to regular players.

So, what does all this mean for WoW? 

Dragonflight is an expansion that redesigned talent trees, introduced Dragonriding, and removed plenty of time-gated content, but it doesn’t look like it was enough. BfA and Shadowlands pushed players’ patience, leading to many resorting to other games.

This phenomenon was particularly prominent during the content draught from Shadowlands Patch 9.0 to 9.1, and it seems that the community was reluctant to come back to the game after all this. The future of WoW remains to be seen, and all we can do is hope players have a change of heart.