Blizzard Is Reviewing WoW’s Top 1% Mythic+ Rankings After Boosting Complaints
Ion Hazzikostas said the review will cover Season 1, and the new title and mount have not yet been awarded.
Blizzard is reviewing the World of Warcraft Season 1 Mythic+ rankings for players who reached the top 1% through paid carries, and the associated rewards have not yet been granted. Game director Ion Hazzikostas said the team is examining the rankings and will share how the review was handled, along with its final results.
The reward was introduced during Midnight‘s first season, which ended on August 11. Players who reached the top 1% were due a title and the glowing red-and-black Umbral Ashes bird mount. The associated achievement is named Umbral Champion: Midnight Season 1. Unlike comparable high-end PvP rewards, the Mythic+ cutoff was based on a percentage of players rather than a fixed rating.
Blizzard has not said when it will publish the audit’s methodology or findings. The team is still deciding how to identify boosted characters and which of them should be removed from the pool eligible for the top 1% rewards.
That design created a moving line. Every successful carry could place another player below the reward threshold, which made boosting especially controversial among people pushing their own keys. Hazzikostas said Blizzard is conducting a thorough review of Season 1, while he and associate game director Paul Kubit indicated that the rewards were popular and will continue to be part of the game.
The end of the season became a stressful race for players near the cutoff. One player described reaching the top 1% and holding the position for only five minutes in a Reddit post about the final push. That player also said the cutoff was rising by roughly two rating points per day and that many +21 groups were asking for payment from potential invitees.
A separate discussion about the dynamic cutoff captured the split reaction. Some players wanted a fixed rating that would not change throughout the season. Others argued that a percentile adjusts for differences in dungeon difficulty, since a score that is reachable in one season may be out of reach in another.
Past Blizzard guidance indicates that some carries paid only with in-game gold can be legitimate when they are organized through specific guilds or individuals. Real-money transactions remain prohibited under WoW’s rules, as outlined in Blizzard’s policy on organized in-game services. Blizzard has not previously treated every gold-paid carry as grounds for removing rewards when the transaction did not involve an EULA violation such as piloting or account sharing. Excluding every boosted character, regardless of whether the transaction used gold or real money, would go beyond that earlier approach. The audit’s methodology will determine how broadly Blizzard applies the new review.
Resilient Keys and past PvP rewards add to the boosting debate
Resilient Keys also enter the discussion because their retry structure gives groups repeated chances to complete a run with limited downside. That can make them useful for services built around pushing a customer’s character up the ladder.
World of Warcraft has faced a similar reward debate in PvP. Arena rewards in The Burning Crusade used percentage-based ratings before Blizzard moved toward flatter values around Mists of Pandaria. A 50-win requirement was also introduced as Blizzard tried to make boosting harder. Mythic+ now has its own version of that tension, balancing open competition against the risk that purchased runs distort the rankings.
Why the percentage cutoff became difficult to hold
Blizzard’s reasoning was that a percentage-based threshold would keep top-end players active as scores climbed throughout the season. A flat target, such as reaching 3,400 rating, can give players a clear stopping point once they reach it, while the 1% system keeps the final places in contention until a season closes. Data tracked by Raider.io suggests the result was more complicated. Mythic+ participation reached about 5.2 million during Midnight’s first season, compared with about 2.5 million during the first season of The War Within, but the drop-off near the finish was steeper in Midnight.
Only 12.3% of players were still running Mythic+ dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, compared with 16.8% at the same stage of The War Within’s first season. Both percentages stayed fairly steady during the final six weeks, which points to a large portion of the player base leaving the race well before the season concluded.
Class balance narrowed the path to the top 1%
Group composition added another obstacle. Most Mythic+ keys at +20 and above, the range tied to the top 1% reward, used some combination of the same seven specializations. Those were Guardian Druid, Unholy Death Knight, Devourer Demon Hunter, Mistweaver Monk, Augmentation Evoker, Restoration Shaman, and Retribution Paladin.
The gap was especially clear among tanks. Raider.io recorded Guardian Druids in 518,467 dungeons at that level across the season, while Blood Death Knights appeared in 7,635. That represents an approximately 67-fold difference. Since many high-level keys were completed repeatedly by the same players, the difference also represented a much smaller pool of players reaching the highest difficulty with less popular specializations.
Kubit said players should not feel forced into one meta specialization near the 1% mark. Lead encounter designer Andrew De Souza offered a more forgiving comparison, saying roughly 99% of players can reach Keystone Myth at 3,400 rating with any group composition, while the top 1% sat around 4,000 rating.
Blizzard also says its dungeons are built with different classes in mind. Altar of Fangs contains poison and curse mechanics that can naturally favor a Shaman, but the encounter team considers how those enemy packs function when a Shaman is not present. The goal is to let certain classes excel in specific situations without turning them into mandatory picks.
Spec-specific rewards are being considered for later seasons
Blizzard is now considering specialization-specific top 1% cutoffs, but the system will not be used in Season 2, which is already underway. Hazzikostas raised the possibility in a PsyBear interview and said the details remain open, including whether each specialization would still use a top 1% threshold.
For now, the Season 1 rewards remain on hold while Blizzard reviews the rankings. The final decision could determine how the game handles paid carries and high-end Mythic+ competition in later seasons.
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World of Warcraft: Midnight
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