Events
Loading
The Weekly Route: Fortified, Teeming, Quaking, and Infested
Welcome to the RaiderIO Weekly Route! This series will provide you with a plan of attack for each dungeon that is tailored to the week’s new affixes and Infested pattern.
Let’s start by briefly covering the affixes that are active this week: Fortified, Teeming, Quaking, and Infested.
The combination of Teeming and Fortified means that trash pulls are bigger and deadlier, but you'll also need to find ways to make ambitious pulls work to beat the timer on higher keystone levels. Quaking is a brutal addition to the mix that can strike at the wrong time and turn a close call into a devastating wipe. Hard boss fights like Galvazzt and Overseer Korgus are also dramatically harder than most Fortified weeks with Quaking raising the throughput required from your healer to Tyrannical levels, though the fights should still be over much faster without all that extra health.
Quaking's impact can be minimized with the proper tools and adaptations. Unlike the tooltip suggests, Quaking does not occur at random times throughout the dungeon – instead, there is a hidden timer where every 20 seconds, there is a chance that a Quake will occur. Tracking this time period using a WeakAura like this one will remove the element of surprise from the affix – you can time your shrouds and your pulls such that they don’t get punished by the quakes and you can anticipate when heavy incoming damage will combine with a quake to require a defensive. For some more information and tips on dealing with Quaking, I’ve made a short video guide:
DISCLAIMER: Blizzard applied a large set of dungeon hotfixes on Dec. 14th, and the effect of these changes aren't incorporated into this week's routes.
For each dungeon, there are two different Mythic Dungeon Tools (MDT) routes available – a “Basic” route and an “Expert” route. The Basic routes follow a few restrictions: they don’t feature massive pulls, they don’t require special class abilities like Shroud of Concealment to facilitate skipping mobs, and they don’t require the use of death skips. They also don’t require you to leave anything crowd controlled for too long.
The expert routes, by contrast, were designed for a specific team composition: Brewmaster Monk, Discipline Priest, Havoc Demon Hunter, Balance Druid, and Rogue (multi-spec). Each of these specs brings unique abilities, and there are strategies in these routes that rely on having them – for instance, our Motherlode Peacekeeper Strategy uses Ring of Peace, Shining Force, Distract, and Stealth!
If you’re a coordinated team, even if your composition isn’t the same as ours, you should start with the Expert routes and remove pulls/skips that you can’t do. If you need help making any such for your team's strengths and weaknesses, ask me when I'm streaming or get in touch with me using any of the contact info in my RaiderIO Profile!
Click on a Copy Route link for any dungeon to copy the MDT string for that route, so you can then paste it into the the "Import" window of your Mythic Dungeon Tools addon and get the route for yourself! Each of these routes contains annotations about how to do each pull and which enemies to crowd control, where to Bloodlust, etc. The annotations and drawings make these routes take a few minutes to Share using MDT’s in-game share function, so consider clearing them before sharing with your group-mates!
This is a relatively tough week for Atal'Dazar. The staircase after Vol'kaal, for instance, is difficult on any Fortified week. With the extra Teeming enemies and the danger of Quaking in such a confined area, that pull becomes brutally hard. To mitigate this, the routes are designed to line up your second Bloodlust of the dungeon with this area.
Atal’Dazar is comprised primarily of medium difficulty packs that don't gain any new enemies with Teeming, so meeting the increased enemy forces requirement is challenging - you need to pull more packs than normal. The bosses are thankfully very straightforward and none of them present an especially elevated risk with Quaking.
Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.
Freehold will likely be this week’s easiest dungeon – the crew that’s joinable this week is the Cutwater Corsairs, and joining them removes the Cutwater Harpooners, which are the dungeon’s most dangerous trash. During previous weeks, my routes have instructed you to delay joining the crew until most of the enemy forces are dead, but this week we're joining the crew as soon as possible!
Eudora and Raoul are the active captains – the hardest pair, in my opinion - but since it’s Fortified, they shouldn’t be too threatening unless Quaking strikes at a bad time. In our expert route, it’s actually Harlan Sweete who becomes MUCH more threatening than usual with Quaking thrown into the mix – since you’re shrouding past the pack of enemies defending him, you have a very small amount of space to stack the Cannon Barrages while not murdering each other with Quaking.
Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.
In the wise words of Snapxd, “I’m retired from Kings' Rest this week.” To be fair, he says that almost every week. Kings' Rest is one of those dungeons where both the trash and the bosses are hard. Even on Fortified, Quaking will be a lethal threat during the first, third, and fourth bosses. The Shadow of Zul during Quaking is also a dicey proposition, as are the Kings and Queens and many of the pulls on the bridge to The Council of Tribes. Compounding this, Aka’ali the Conqueror’s Debilitating Backhand applies Shattered Defenses to the tank, which has a “fun” interaction with Quaking that usually involves your group using a battle rez. Basically, the whole dungeon sucks. We try to mitigate the worst of it with a few Rogue skips in the Expert route but it feels like treating a gunshot wound with a band-aid.
The Basic route winds up way over on enemy forces since the dungeon is so linear and “no skips” is a requirement. I’d highly recommend adding some skips to that route if you’re comfortable doing so – unfortunately, the most deadly packs in this place are also the hardest ones to skip.
Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.
The Infested pattern is quite favorable in Shrine this week – it allows our Expert route to pull big, something which is not always true, and which is vitally important given how much health you need to get through to time a key with Teeming and Fortified active. Quaking isn’t notably difficult on any boss fights ever since Vol’zith the Whisperer’s Whispers of Power ability was changed to reduce maximum health rather than prevent the target from being healed above a percentage of their health. If you’re using the Basic route, you’re also going to have to deal with problematic enemy forces like the Living Current and the Guardian Elemental – in some cases these can present more of a threat than bosses, so don’t be afraid to use Bloodlust on the pulls that include them.
Read more on Shrine of the Storm Dungeon Abilities.
I play Horde, so both the Basic and Expert routes for this dungeon use the Horde pathing. They also both skip the problematic pulls after the first boss that contain Irontide Raiders – on Fortified, their Iron Hooks will mess you up! However, since it’s Teeming you’re going to be pulling pretty much the rest of the dungeon, so good luck!
Siege also features an, uh, interesting game mechanic where there are enemies that will die when you get close to them but will only give you credit if you had tagged them with a damaging ability before they died. The Basic route features a large margin of error – you can miss eleven of the marked Scrimshaw Gutters and still meet the enemy forces requirement. If you use the Expert route you can only miss three without having to add more Bilge Rat Buccaneer’s to the route.
Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.
For those of us who push high keys, Temple of Sethraliss is well known to be a dungeon best completed during Fortified weeks due to it’s difficult and time consuming bosses. Unfortunately, the introduction of the Quaking affix causes the difficulty of bosses like Galvazzt to approach Tyrannical levels.
Thankfully, this is one of the dungeons where our Expert route is least impacted by Teeming – some of the pulls have a few more enemies but we don’t have to add a bunch of new pulls like we do in most of the other dungeons. The basic route, by contrast, suffers from the dungeon’s relatively linear design, and ends up pulling almost 20% more enemy forces than needed. If you can add some skips like the ones from the Expert route, you’ll find the timer to be a lot friendlier.
Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.
Motherlode is often considered to be a key best pushed during Tyrannical weeks, but my team has had a lot of success in this dungeon even during Fortified weeks. I attribute this to our innovative strategy of picking up almost all of the enemy forces we need before the first boss, and using displacement effects to force Mech Jockeys to pilot Mechanized Peacekeepers that aren’t normally pilotable. If you want to try it out for yourself, check out the Expert route for this dungeon!
The Basic route gives you a more mainstream option – you’ll be pulling enemies from every part of the dungeon and you won’t need to execute any tricky skips (messing those up accounts for most of our Motherlode depletes).
No matter which route you use, this dungeon is doable but requires much more concentration and coordination on each trash pull than the average BFA dungeon.
Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.
The Underrot is a great dungeon for this week. Like Temple of Sethraliss it’s considered to be a good dungeon for Fortified weeks, but unlike Temple the problem isn’t that any of the bosses are too hard, it’s that the first boss has a very high DPS check when the boss has millions of extra health. This means that Quaking isn’t the pseudo-Tyrannical in the Underrot that it is in Kings' Rest or Temple. In fact, the only boss made noticeably harder with Quaking is the last boss if a Cleansing Light overlaps with a Quake.
The Basic route does pull some challenging Blood Trolls near the start of the dungeon, and the trash in Cragmaw’s room can also present a challenge, but there are no pulls that Teeming turns into a nightmare.
DISCLAIMER: With the release of 8.1, the Expert route Shroud skip will no longer work, as Blood Troll Matrons now have Truesight and see through stealth. Instead, this should be performed as a death skip.
Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.
Quaking is the big threat in here. The prison is full of tight hallways that make it problematic during trash, the first and fourth bosses have damage patterns that can easily become deadly when a Quake gets involved, and the third boss often requires the group to clump up in a corner of the room – a Quaking pentakill waiting to happen! That affix can even present a problem during the second boss if one strikes during the stun that occurs halfway through the fight – so be sure to be spread before that goes out!
The good news is that the route isn’t too impacted by Teeming – you’ll mostly be making the same pulls with a few extra enemies in them, and luckily many of the enemies added by Teeming are the easiest ones to handle.
Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.
Quaking is brutal in the narrow confines of Waycrest Manor, and Teeming means you’ll have to go out of your way to pick up the required enemy forces. One small mercy is that the Infested pattern is relatively benign this week, but on the balance Waycrest looks to be one of the tougher dungeons this week. With Teeming active, you need 82.7% enemy forces before you can go down to Lord and Lady Waycrest’s room.
For this dungeon I’ve forgone the Expert/Basic paradigm and I’ve instead created a route for each different potential open door from the start of the dungeon. The difficulty of these routes lies somewhere between the Basic and Expert levels – there are no skips but there are some large pulls, although my team will likely end up pulling even larger than the routes suggest in a few spots. If you like the Basic routes for the other dungeons, take these and tone the bigger pulls down – if you can handle the pulls from the Expert routes, instead turn up the heat and combine some of the smaller pulls in these routes.
Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.
Dratnos is a Rogue main who raids with US 21st <Parse Culture>. He loves playing all three Rogue specs and pushing high keys with his friends Jason, Mischief, Wafflesauce, and Zattack. In addition to creating guides on YouTube, he streams on Twitch, where he likes to review his friends’ logs. He’s also a Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Competitor and host of the podcast Allied Strategies.
Let’s start by briefly covering the affixes that are active this week: Fortified, Teeming, Quaking, and Infested.
The combination of Teeming and Fortified means that trash pulls are bigger and deadlier, but you'll also need to find ways to make ambitious pulls work to beat the timer on higher keystone levels. Quaking is a brutal addition to the mix that can strike at the wrong time and turn a close call into a devastating wipe. Hard boss fights like Galvazzt and Overseer Korgus are also dramatically harder than most Fortified weeks with Quaking raising the throughput required from your healer to Tyrannical levels, though the fights should still be over much faster without all that extra health.
Quaking's impact can be minimized with the proper tools and adaptations. Unlike the tooltip suggests, Quaking does not occur at random times throughout the dungeon – instead, there is a hidden timer where every 20 seconds, there is a chance that a Quake will occur. Tracking this time period using a WeakAura like this one will remove the element of surprise from the affix – you can time your shrouds and your pulls such that they don’t get punished by the quakes and you can anticipate when heavy incoming damage will combine with a quake to require a defensive. For some more information and tips on dealing with Quaking, I’ve made a short video guide:
The Weekly Routes
DISCLAIMER: Blizzard applied a large set of dungeon hotfixes on Dec. 14th, and the effect of these changes aren't incorporated into this week's routes.
For each dungeon, there are two different Mythic Dungeon Tools (MDT) routes available – a “Basic” route and an “Expert” route. The Basic routes follow a few restrictions: they don’t feature massive pulls, they don’t require special class abilities like Shroud of Concealment to facilitate skipping mobs, and they don’t require the use of death skips. They also don’t require you to leave anything crowd controlled for too long.
The expert routes, by contrast, were designed for a specific team composition: Brewmaster Monk, Discipline Priest, Havoc Demon Hunter, Balance Druid, and Rogue (multi-spec). Each of these specs brings unique abilities, and there are strategies in these routes that rely on having them – for instance, our Motherlode Peacekeeper Strategy uses Ring of Peace, Shining Force, Distract, and Stealth!
If you’re a coordinated team, even if your composition isn’t the same as ours, you should start with the Expert routes and remove pulls/skips that you can’t do. If you need help making any such for your team's strengths and weaknesses, ask me when I'm streaming or get in touch with me using any of the contact info in my RaiderIO Profile!
Click on a Copy Route link for any dungeon to copy the MDT string for that route, so you can then paste it into the the "Import" window of your Mythic Dungeon Tools addon and get the route for yourself! Each of these routes contains annotations about how to do each pull and which enemies to crowd control, where to Bloodlust, etc. The annotations and drawings make these routes take a few minutes to Share using MDT’s in-game share function, so consider clearing them before sharing with your group-mates!
Atal'Dazar [back to top]
This is a relatively tough week for Atal'Dazar. The staircase after Vol'kaal, for instance, is difficult on any Fortified week. With the extra Teeming enemies and the danger of Quaking in such a confined area, that pull becomes brutally hard. To mitigate this, the routes are designed to line up your second Bloodlust of the dungeon with this area.
Atal’Dazar is comprised primarily of medium difficulty packs that don't gain any new enemies with Teeming, so meeting the increased enemy forces requirement is challenging - you need to pull more packs than normal. The bosses are thankfully very straightforward and none of them present an especially elevated risk with Quaking.
Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.
Freehold [back to top]
Freehold will likely be this week’s easiest dungeon – the crew that’s joinable this week is the Cutwater Corsairs, and joining them removes the Cutwater Harpooners, which are the dungeon’s most dangerous trash. During previous weeks, my routes have instructed you to delay joining the crew until most of the enemy forces are dead, but this week we're joining the crew as soon as possible!
Eudora and Raoul are the active captains – the hardest pair, in my opinion - but since it’s Fortified, they shouldn’t be too threatening unless Quaking strikes at a bad time. In our expert route, it’s actually Harlan Sweete who becomes MUCH more threatening than usual with Quaking thrown into the mix – since you’re shrouding past the pack of enemies defending him, you have a very small amount of space to stack the Cannon Barrages while not murdering each other with Quaking.
Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.
Kings' Rest [back to top]
In the wise words of Snapxd, “I’m retired from Kings' Rest this week.” To be fair, he says that almost every week. Kings' Rest is one of those dungeons where both the trash and the bosses are hard. Even on Fortified, Quaking will be a lethal threat during the first, third, and fourth bosses. The Shadow of Zul during Quaking is also a dicey proposition, as are the Kings and Queens and many of the pulls on the bridge to The Council of Tribes. Compounding this, Aka’ali the Conqueror’s Debilitating Backhand applies Shattered Defenses to the tank, which has a “fun” interaction with Quaking that usually involves your group using a battle rez. Basically, the whole dungeon sucks. We try to mitigate the worst of it with a few Rogue skips in the Expert route but it feels like treating a gunshot wound with a band-aid.
The Basic route winds up way over on enemy forces since the dungeon is so linear and “no skips” is a requirement. I’d highly recommend adding some skips to that route if you’re comfortable doing so – unfortunately, the most deadly packs in this place are also the hardest ones to skip.
Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.
Shrine of the Storm [back to top]
The Infested pattern is quite favorable in Shrine this week – it allows our Expert route to pull big, something which is not always true, and which is vitally important given how much health you need to get through to time a key with Teeming and Fortified active. Quaking isn’t notably difficult on any boss fights ever since Vol’zith the Whisperer’s Whispers of Power ability was changed to reduce maximum health rather than prevent the target from being healed above a percentage of their health. If you’re using the Basic route, you’re also going to have to deal with problematic enemy forces like the Living Current and the Guardian Elemental – in some cases these can present more of a threat than bosses, so don’t be afraid to use Bloodlust on the pulls that include them.
Read more on Shrine of the Storm Dungeon Abilities.
Siege of Boralus [back to top]
I play Horde, so both the Basic and Expert routes for this dungeon use the Horde pathing. They also both skip the problematic pulls after the first boss that contain Irontide Raiders – on Fortified, their Iron Hooks will mess you up! However, since it’s Teeming you’re going to be pulling pretty much the rest of the dungeon, so good luck!
Siege also features an, uh, interesting game mechanic where there are enemies that will die when you get close to them but will only give you credit if you had tagged them with a damaging ability before they died. The Basic route features a large margin of error – you can miss eleven of the marked Scrimshaw Gutters and still meet the enemy forces requirement. If you use the Expert route you can only miss three without having to add more Bilge Rat Buccaneer’s to the route.
Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.
Temple of Sethraliss [back to top]
For those of us who push high keys, Temple of Sethraliss is well known to be a dungeon best completed during Fortified weeks due to it’s difficult and time consuming bosses. Unfortunately, the introduction of the Quaking affix causes the difficulty of bosses like Galvazzt to approach Tyrannical levels.
Thankfully, this is one of the dungeons where our Expert route is least impacted by Teeming – some of the pulls have a few more enemies but we don’t have to add a bunch of new pulls like we do in most of the other dungeons. The basic route, by contrast, suffers from the dungeon’s relatively linear design, and ends up pulling almost 20% more enemy forces than needed. If you can add some skips like the ones from the Expert route, you’ll find the timer to be a lot friendlier.
Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.
The MOTHERLODE!! [back to top]
Motherlode is often considered to be a key best pushed during Tyrannical weeks, but my team has had a lot of success in this dungeon even during Fortified weeks. I attribute this to our innovative strategy of picking up almost all of the enemy forces we need before the first boss, and using displacement effects to force Mech Jockeys to pilot Mechanized Peacekeepers that aren’t normally pilotable. If you want to try it out for yourself, check out the Expert route for this dungeon!
The Basic route gives you a more mainstream option – you’ll be pulling enemies from every part of the dungeon and you won’t need to execute any tricky skips (messing those up accounts for most of our Motherlode depletes).
No matter which route you use, this dungeon is doable but requires much more concentration and coordination on each trash pull than the average BFA dungeon.
Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.
The Underrot [back to top]
The Underrot is a great dungeon for this week. Like Temple of Sethraliss it’s considered to be a good dungeon for Fortified weeks, but unlike Temple the problem isn’t that any of the bosses are too hard, it’s that the first boss has a very high DPS check when the boss has millions of extra health. This means that Quaking isn’t the pseudo-Tyrannical in the Underrot that it is in Kings' Rest or Temple. In fact, the only boss made noticeably harder with Quaking is the last boss if a Cleansing Light overlaps with a Quake.
The Basic route does pull some challenging Blood Trolls near the start of the dungeon, and the trash in Cragmaw’s room can also present a challenge, but there are no pulls that Teeming turns into a nightmare.
DISCLAIMER: With the release of 8.1, the Expert route Shroud skip will no longer work, as Blood Troll Matrons now have Truesight and see through stealth. Instead, this should be performed as a death skip.
Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.
Tol Dagor [back to top]
Quaking is the big threat in here. The prison is full of tight hallways that make it problematic during trash, the first and fourth bosses have damage patterns that can easily become deadly when a Quake gets involved, and the third boss often requires the group to clump up in a corner of the room – a Quaking pentakill waiting to happen! That affix can even present a problem during the second boss if one strikes during the stun that occurs halfway through the fight – so be sure to be spread before that goes out!
The good news is that the route isn’t too impacted by Teeming – you’ll mostly be making the same pulls with a few extra enemies in them, and luckily many of the enemies added by Teeming are the easiest ones to handle.
Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.
Waycrest Manor [back to top]
Quaking is brutal in the narrow confines of Waycrest Manor, and Teeming means you’ll have to go out of your way to pick up the required enemy forces. One small mercy is that the Infested pattern is relatively benign this week, but on the balance Waycrest looks to be one of the tougher dungeons this week. With Teeming active, you need 82.7% enemy forces before you can go down to Lord and Lady Waycrest’s room.
For this dungeon I’ve forgone the Expert/Basic paradigm and I’ve instead created a route for each different potential open door from the start of the dungeon. The difficulty of these routes lies somewhere between the Basic and Expert levels – there are no skips but there are some large pulls, although my team will likely end up pulling even larger than the routes suggest in a few spots. If you like the Basic routes for the other dungeons, take these and tone the bigger pulls down – if you can handle the pulls from the Expert routes, instead turn up the heat and combine some of the smaller pulls in these routes.
Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.
Links
- Find Dratnos on RaiderIO, Twitch, Twitter, or Youtube
- Download Domesto’s Quaking WeakAura
- Download WeakAuras Addon
- Download the Mythic Dungeon Tools Addon
About the Author
Dratnos is a Rogue main who raids with US 21st <Parse Culture>. He loves playing all three Rogue specs and pushing high keys with his friends Jason, Mischief, Wafflesauce, and Zattack. In addition to creating guides on YouTube, he streams on Twitch, where he likes to review his friends’ logs. He’s also a Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Competitor and host of the podcast Allied Strategies.
Loading
