You activate a run by slotting a Mythic+ Keystone into the Font of Power at the dungeon entrance, then beat the timer. Time it and your key upgrades; miss it and the run still completes but your key drops a level. Completing a dungeon hands you a fresh key for a random dungeon in the pool, which is what keeps you cycling through all eight across a season.
Normal and Heroic dungeons are fixed difficulty with no scaling. Mythic+ is where the scaling health-and-damage modifier kicks in, climbing with every keystone level. Past a certain point the gap between levels is execution, not gear, which is the whole reason we push as a group.
Season 1 runs a fixed pool of eight: four brand-new Midnight dungeons and four returning legacy dungeons. There is no mid-season rotation swap, so the routes consolidate fast and Keystone Master is a steady grind rather than a moving target. Notably, Pit of Saron is the first Wrath of the Lich King dungeon ever pulled into the Mythic+ format.
The old rotating affix grab-bag (Storming, Volcanic, Sanguine, and friends) is gone. Midnight layers a tight set of seasonal affixes onto fixed keystone breakpoints, so once you learn the ladder it is the same structure every week, only the weekly Xal'atath flavor changes.
| Breakpoint | What Turns On |
|---|---|
| +2 to +4 | Lindormi's Guidance — the onboarding affix. It highlights an optimal pull path through the dungeon and, crucially, disables the usual death-penalty timer reduction, so newer players can learn a route without a single wipe bricking the key. |
| +5 | Xal'atath's Bargain — the weekly seasonal affix layers in. This is the rotating flavor that changes how each week plays. |
| +7 | Fortified or Tyrannical — the trash-vs-boss scaling split returns. |
| +10 | Both Fortified and Tyrannical active simultaneously. This is where pulls get genuinely punishing. |
| +12 | Xal'atath's Guile — deaths now subtract 15 seconds each. Sloppy play has a hard, visible cost from here up. |
The chest at the end of a timed run scales its item level with the keystone level, so higher keys raise both your immediate payout and your crest income. Crests are the upgrade currency you feed into your gear to push it up its track, and the higher your key, the higher the crest tier you bank.
On top of direct drops, your weekly Mythic+ runs fill the dungeon row of the Great Vault. Running a spread of keys across the week gives you the best choice of vault rewards on reset day, so even outside of a push night, getting your eight runs in matters.
Mythic+ rating is the season-long score that gates the title rewards. The three milestones everyone aims at are Keystone Master (the achievement-and-mount tier most people target), Keystone Hero (the recolor and a meaningful step up in difficulty), and Keystone Legend (the high-end push title). Rating comes from your best timed run in each dungeon on each of the two affix sides, so a clean spread of times across all eight beats grinding one dungeon into the ground.
Assign interrupts before the pull, not during it. Most bricked keys are a missed kick on a caster pack, not a damage problem. Decide who covers what and call it.
Route to the affix, not against it. On a Bargain week, plan your big pulls around when the weekly mechanic helps rather than fighting it. On a Tyrannical week, save lust and big cooldowns for bosses.
Use the Lindormi's Guidance bracket to learn. No death penalty on +2 to +4 keys means low keys are free practice. Run a new dungeon there until the route is muscle memory before you bring it to a timed push.
Press your defensives. From +12 up, a defensive used on a known hit is worth more than any extra global of damage, because the death tax is brutal.
Bring a group, not five strangers. This is the honest one. Coordinated kicks, lust timing, and route calls are worth more than any single player's parse. Find a regular four — that is what the Discord is for.