This week's affixes are Fortified, Bolstering, Quaking, and Shrouded!

Bolstering will slow you down quite a bit in some dungeons, though several of the Season 4 dungeons offer fairly small pull sizing that should minimize the impact of the affix. There are a few pulls in the older dungeons to look out for in which some fairly small enemies apply bolstering stacks even though they wouldn’t generally trigger on-death affixes if they were designed today. Quaking presents a problem in the narrow hallways of a few of the dungeons as well, especially Grimrail Depot.

These routes have 0-1 skips that require invis pots (or shroud, or in many cases other possibilities exist too!).

Grimrail Depot [back to top]

It’s very tough to maintain a good spread for Quaking during some of the pulls in the train cars, especially if your group is very melee heavy. Try your best to plan ahead for the next Quake and consider pulling packs back so that you can spread on both sides of them. Bolstering is mostly a non-issue in this dungeon, aside from the Grom’kar Hulk, which you should focus damage into to avoid it murdering your tank with some stacks.

Iron Docks [back to top]

A few nicely hidden Shrouded mobs are off to the side and noted in this route! MDT now also features the ability to plan out the Iron Stars and what they’ll hit - use this as a guideline but note that you can miss a few mobs and it’ll be fine!

Tazavesh: Streets of Wonder [back to top]

Lots of extra Shrouded neutral mobs have been added to this dungeon - grab these during RP for stats and profit! We’re now recommending the left path instead of the right one after first boss - this is a great way to get a ton of Shrouded buffs very quickly, and to focus on a few dangerous enemies at once instead of a bunch of them!

Tazavesh: So’leah’s Gambit [back to top]

There’s now a shrouded neutral pirate in the cave just after you kill the first boss! We’re now offering two routes, one of which skips Zul’gamux and the annoying Guardians. Zul’gamux’s stats are definitely valuable for the later bosses, so if you’re pushing high keys you’ll likely wish to mix and match and fight Zul’gamux but not the Guardians, but at lower levels the lethality of Zul’gamux in this dungeon in particular is often not worth worrying about!

Mechagon: Junkyard [back to top]

Junkyard has a weird mechanic where the Hard Mode robot will fly over one of the three bosses and move around after you kill a boss. The annoying part is that this rotates weekly but is different in different regions. Several pulls in this dungeon will present a Bolstering challenge - don’t be afraid to pull more slowly if you can’t assign your damage proportionally - Shock Bots only hit three targets anyway!

If our predictions of the Hard Mode’s weekly flight paths are correct, both EU and NA players should be able to use the Gunker First route this week.

Mechagon: Workshop [back to top]

The last pack of this dungeon is now skippable with Shroud or Invis pots, so we’ve adjusted our route to suggest this. You should still feel free to skip earlier in the dungeon if you’d prefer, such as Zul’gamux or the packs in the sewer, or of course simply pull the whole dungeon and avoid worrying about skipping anything at all!

Lower Karazhan [back to top]

After several nerfs to this dungeon we’ve come back in and re-tooled down to a single route. This route doesn’t use any skips aside from dying after Zul’gamux to get back to the start of the dungeon and head to Moroes.

There are a lot of options in this dungeon, and you can very profitably make use of Shrouds or Invis pots! If you’re playing with a consistent group, we’d recommend adding some trash elsewhere and skipping the Maiden hallway entirely. You can also consider if you’re interested in areas like the Kitchens or the spider area! Our route, however, is an attempt to avoid going super far over count while also only using Shrouds or Invis pots when the upside is tremendous, and we’ve found that in Lower Karazhan in particular, groups are often looking for a relatively straightforward plan. The death skip after Zul’gamux avoids going way over 100% count but otherwise we’re just grabbing packs that are directly in our way, while also doing Moroes -> Attumen -> Maiden to optimize Shrouded stacks for Maiden, traditionally the boss that groups prefer being most powerful for.

Upper Karazhan [back to top]

It’s a good idea to skip the two Damaged Golems near the start of the dungeon - you’ll almost never need the count from them and you can walk through the middle of the carpet to avoid both of them, or use a gateway to be sure nobody accidentally pulls one. We also recommend using Invis pots to skip to the chess event at the end of the dungeon and avoid some very dangerous enemies that also aren’t needed for Enemy Forces count.