I play Falei, an Enhancement Shaman on Zul'jin EU, and the first week of Midnight Season 2 taught me something the game itself never bothered to mention: hitting the item level the game says you need for a Mythic+2 doesn't mean anyone will actually let you in one. I sat there fully eligible by the numbers, got declined from four groups in a row, and ended up going through a Mythic+ carry just to get a foot in the door while the season's ilvl expectations were still this inflated.
Here's the part that actually annoyed me. The game's own queue requirement for a +2 is 235 item level — that's the real gate, the one built into the system. What's not built into the system is that basically nobody applying that gate is a pug leader in week one or two of a new season. I checked what I was up against before giving up on it entirely, and the practical floor sat closer to 245 for the same +2 keys, climbing toward 255 for +7s and 265-plus once groups started pushing +10. None of that is a Blizzard number. It's just what happens when three hundred people are all trying to fill the same four group slots at the same time, and every single one of them is worried the fifth person in their party is the reason the run falls apart.
Why Season 2's Fresh Gear Curve Makes the Gap Worse Than Usual
This isn't a permanent state of Mythic+. It's specifically a week-one-and-two problem, and Midnight Season 2 has a particular reason it's biting harder than normal right now. Patch 12.1 opened its Heroic and Mythic 0 pool on August 11, a full week ahead of Season 2 itself going live on August 18, which sounds generous until you realize what it actually gates you into: Champion-track gear, and not much past it. Hero-track loot and anything higher is genuinely scarce in that opening stretch, so the population walking into keys on day one is bunched up in a fairly narrow ilvl band — everyone's close to the game's stated minimum, almost nobody's comfortably above it, and pug leaders respond to that uncertainty by raising their own bar instead of lowering their standards.
It's a strange kind of logic once you sit with it. The tighter the gear spread across the population, the more paranoid the filtering gets, because a leader can't tell a genuinely capable 240 from someone who's going to eat every mechanic and burn the key. So they default to padding the number, and the padding compounds — one group wants +10 over the stated minimum, the next one sees that listing and sets their own bar even higher to look more serious by comparison.
Group Finder in Midnight Season 2's Opening Weeks Isn't Built for This Much Competition
Every character in the population reset to zero rating and zero season-specific gear on the exact same day, all competing for the same handful of tank and healer slots that keep any group moving. That's not a new-player problem — I've run every Season since Midnight launched, and this is just what the sheer volume of a simultaneous reset does to Group Finder. My first three applications got auto-declined before I even got a whisper back. The fourth group accepted me, then fell apart on the second pull of Den of Nalorakk because the tank pulled a pack nobody in the group had actually seen tuned for Season 2 yet.
That's when I stopped trying to out-wait the population curve. A bought Mythic+ run skips the part where I'm competing against everyone else's inflated expectations of what "ready" looks like this early in a season — you're not gambling on whether this particular pug leader trusts your gear score today, you're just running the key.
Mythic+ Pug Requirements Come Back Down Later in Season 2, Just Not on Your Timeline
Give it a month, maybe six weeks, and this entire problem mostly resolves on its own. Gear spreads out, more people clear +10s, the population that's actually geared for higher keys stops competing directly with everyone still catching up, and pug requirements drift back down toward something closer to what the game actually asks for. That's cold comfort if you're trying to build Great Vault progress or push rating in week one while the season's still fresh and the mount everyone's chasing hasn't lost its shine yet. If your applications are getting declined despite meeting the number the game itself set, that's not a reflection on your gear — it's just what the first couple weeks of a new Mythic+ season look like from the DPS or tank queue, and it's worth knowing you don't have to sit in it.
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