WoW players say Dragonflight season 2 is most unbalanced meta ever—and data agrees

World of Warcraft Dragonflight season two is one of the most unbalanced seasons in the history of the game. There’s no secret, there’s no debate, and there’s even a swath of data to back up that claim. 

In a post to the WoW subreddit earlier today, a user by the name of AttituteAdjusterSE shared a graph featuring data from WoW stats site Mythic Stats. In that data was a complete breakdown of how many of the top 2,000 Mythic+ runs in a given week featured the most popular group composition at the time, and in Dragonflight season two, that number hit its all-time peak, with over 90 percent of the top 2,000 Mythic+ groups using the game’s most optimal group comp. 

This season, the best comp in WoW was discovered midway through the season, just after the release of Patch 10.1.5. The community-named “god comp” wasn’t even playable prior to this patch, considering the crux of the comp is Augmentation Evoker, a spec that wasn’t added into the game until just last month. 

Prior to it getting nerfed last week, the top 2,000 Mythic+ runs were almost exclusively featuring the god comp, which has a Guardian Druid as its tank, Holy Paladin as its healer, and a combination of Fire Mage, Shadow Priest, and Augmentation Evoker to round things out in the DPS role. 

That comp is still extremely popular, and a quick look at the timed run leaderboards on WoW stats site Raider.io will confirm it’s going to go down as the definitive comp of the season, if not the expansion. Ninety-two of the top 100 timed Mythic+ runs this season feature the God Comp, according to Raider.io, meaning a level of stagnation unlike any other has hit World of Warcraft in a major way. 

“Got to 3.2k [Mythic score] this tier and stopped pushing,” a commenter named Timely-Common8936 said in the thread. “One of the worst seasons in terms of class balancing by far.”

Related: WoW streamer explains why ‘god comp’ ruined the Mythic+ meta after Patch 10.1.5 changes

For reference, no team comp had even cleared the 80-percent threshold before this comp broke the 90-percent plane, according to the data compiled by AttitudeAdjusterSE via Mythic Stats. Furthermore, Dragonflight had been on pace to be the most balanced expansion in the game’s history as there had been few weeks where the most popular composition at the time was even eclipsing the 40-percent mark. 

“It is pretty impressive how we went from one of the best seasons balance-wise to what is quite clearly the worst one,” another commenter named LeOsQ said. “There were very few things in S1 that weren’t ‘viable’ (and absolutely everything was viable if you just wanted to do 20’s, the worse classes/specs just made it harder).”

And frankly, that’s how game design should work. Players should absolutely have the freedom to try what they want, even at the highest levels of the game. In a perfect world, there are no penalties for not playing what’s optimal. But video game balancing is never perfect, and right now, WoW’s meta is far from it.