By now, boosting in World of Warcraft has become a regular occurrence and you can’t turn around without seeing at least one invite in your calendar or chat whisper. Boosting is where one player pays gold to other, high-ranked players, to complete a run without them to get gear, achievements, or cosmetics. You’d think boosters would know how to do it properly by now, but one group who hijacked a Mythic+ run has failed miserably.
On July 27, DonkeyExpensive6989 opened up about their recent Mythic+ experience on WoW’s subreddit. Just like you and me, they wanted to push high-end keys and listed their +20 Neltharion’s Lair key on the Looking for Group. Everything was going smoothly and they even took in one Mage to blast their way through the run, but then, the key holder, who only wanted to time it, accepted three players with 3,300 rating.
This is where everything went south—the party leader was passed to one of boosting players, and they kicked the poor Mage. Soon after, the trio invited a new player, Frost Death Knight who hadn’t timed a single +20 dungeon.
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The situation only got worse when they reached the dungeon and started it—the Frost Death Knight was only doing 20,000 damage and missing most of the encounters. To make it even worse, the boosters who were paid gold to breeze through this iconic Legion dungeon missed the timer, resulting in worse loot and no rating.
Most WoW players would have found the act of kicking the Mage a red flag, but when you’re doing keys alone and you really want to get that sweet, sweet rating, you accept the fact that people are ruthless and doing what’s best for you might not always be the nicest thing.
I had a similar experience during Dragonflight season one, where I applied to a Temple of the Jade Serpent run and unknowingly ended up boosting a Retribution Paladin who was chilling at the dungeon entrance pretty much the entire run. Unlike the Frost Death Knight, the Paladin got pretty loot and dungeon rating.
Again, boosting is quite normal by now in WoW, but when you’re paying a pretty penny for it, you want to get your money’s worth. In fact, boosting is not against Blizzard Entertainment’s terms of service, but advertising it via chat is. World First raiders are actually using boosting to pay off their hefty race debts which can reach unimaginamble sums.
I’d say boosting in WoW isn’t such a terrible and game-ruining activity, although it’s quite harming when you’re pushing challenging content and you end up picking a boosted player who can’t perform basic boss mechanics. Currently, Blizzard isn’t doing much about this and I don’t think we’ll ever see the devs heavily tackle boosting, especially because this would completely kill Race to World First and reduce the number of guilds who can enter it because they simply can’t afford to buy all necessary consumables and gear. Still, avoid large parties applying to your run and even, if necessary, double-check the players using Warcraft Logs or Raider.IO.
