The last subscriber count Blizzard published for World of Warcraft was 5.5 million, in November 2015. Five years earlier the game had passed 12 million. On the 2015 earnings call the company said it would stop reporting the figure, and it hasn’t released one since. Every WoW player count you see online today is an estimate.
What stays public is character data. Raider.IO, the community site players use to look up each other’s Mythic+ ratings and raid progress, keeps season-long figures for both. They can’t tell you how many people play. They do show, in exact numbers, how quickly the field thins out as the content gets harder.
Every figure below was taken from Raider.IO on October 14, 2026, eight weeks into Midnight Season 2, which started on August 18. The season is still running, so the shares will keep moving until it ends.
Characters, not people
Raider.IO’s Mythic+ figures count characters with a rating this season. A player who runs dungeons on three alts counts three times, and someone who only raids or plays solo doesn’t count at all. The raid figures count guilds instead, so a kill by a pickup group never shows up. Raider.IO also tracks Korea and Taiwan and has no data from China; this piece sticks to US and Oceania and Europe.
Neither set is a census. Both are good at one thing: comparing how many characters or guilds reach each step of the same ladder.
Mythic+ in numbers
Raider.IO lists 671,840 characters with a Season 2 rating in its US and Oceania region and 940,596 in Europe, 1,612,436 in total. The factions are close to even, with Alliance characters at 51.8% of the US and Oceania total and 50.1% of Europe’s. Ratings come from the season’s eight dungeons: five from Midnight and three returning ones, Ruby Life Pools, Temple of Sethraliss and Kings’ Rest.
Blizzard ties the season’s rewards to fixed rating milestones. Here is the share of characters past each one:
| Rating | Reward | US & Oceania | Europe |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,500 | Venomous title | 64.8% | 68.3% |
| 2,000 | Breath of Blight mount | 57.4% | 61.4% |
| 2,500 | Insidious Venomstone cosmetic | 46.3% | 50.9% |
| 3,000 | Breath of Ruin mount | 23.1% | 27.1% |
The sharpest fall comes between 2,500 and 3,000, where the share roughly halves in both regions. Of the characters that have Breath of Blight at 2,000, 40.2% in US and Oceania and 44.1% in Europe have also reached 3,000 for Breath of Ruin. At the other end, 27.1% of US and Oceania characters and 24.2% of European ones are still under 1,000.
The very top of the ladder works by percentile rather than by fixed rating. These are the current lines:
| Bracket | US & Oceania | Europe |
|---|---|---|
| Top 25% | 2,960 | 3,016 |
| Top 10% | 3,220 | 3,317 |
| Top 1% | 3,660 | 3,729 |
| Top 0.1% | 3,892 | 3,922 |
The top 0.1% earns the Venomous Hero title. Right now that bracket holds 672 characters in US and Oceania and 941 in Europe. The top 1% gets the Venomous Champion feat, with an exclusive mount promised in a later patch. Both rewards depend on where a character stands when the season closes, so today’s lines are a snapshot, not the final cutoff.
Europe is ahead at every step. Its shares run 3.5 to 4.6 percentage points higher at each milestone, and its percentile lines sit 30 to 97 points above those in US and Oceania. The data doesn’t say why, so any explanation for the gap is a guess.
Raiding in numbers
The season’s raid, The Venomous Abyss, has eight bosses. Heroic Ula’tek, the final boss, first went down on August 21, three days into the season. On Mythic, Liquid took the world first on September 3, 16 days in, after 307 pulls. The table shows how many guilds have killed each boss, sorted by Mythic kills:
| Boss | Heroic guild kills | Mythic guild kills |
|---|---|---|
| Nek’zali the Soulcoiler | 15,901 | 5,159 |
| The Lost Explorers | 15,313 | 4,523 |
| Entombed Sentinels | 15,648 | 3,580 |
| Vashnik the Malignant | 15,292 | 3,126 |
| Sszorak | 14,283 | 1,983 |
| The Twin Fangs | 13,228 | 1,319 |
| The Coiled Altar | 11,771 | 359 |
| Ula’tek | 8,397 | 228 |
Heroic holds on to its guilds. Ula’tek has died to 8,397 of them, 52.8% as many as the 15,901 that beat the first boss. Mythic doesn’t: 228 guilds against 5,159, or 4.4%. For every guild with a Mythic Ula’tek kill, about 37 have a Heroic one.
The Mythic wall is the seventh boss: The Twin Fangs has fallen to 1,319 guilds and The Coiled Altar, the next fight, to 359. That’s a 72.8% drop between two neighboring bosses, against 11.0% at the same point on Heroic.
Part of that gap is logistics rather than skill. Mythic difficulty in The Venomous Abyss needs exactly 20 players, while Normal and Heroic scale for groups of 10 to 25. A Mythic guild has to fill all 20 slots with people who can show up on the same evenings, every week, for as long as progression takes.
Where carries come in
The rewards most players chase sit in the middle of these tables, not at the top. Breath of Ruin at 3,000 rating means timing high keystones over and over with four other people, and eight weeks in, fewer than three in ten rated characters in either region have it. A Mythic raid kill means a 20-player roster on a fixed schedule.
Players who can’t give the game that many fixed evenings still have the in-game Group Finder for pickup groups, or a paid WoW carry. A boosting service such as WowVendor runs a carry in one of two ways. You either play your own character alongside a team of professional boosters, or a booster plays it for you. In the second case you can follow the run on a private stream.
Raider.IO’s season cutoffs page shows where your own character stands against the current lines. For most players the useful benchmark is the top 25% line, not the 0.1% one that concerns fewer than a thousand characters per region.
