This week’s affixes are Fortified, Bolstering, Storming, and Thundering. It’s a moderately nasty week for pushing, especially if you have trouble with Storming, as the Bolstering/Fortified combo adds a lot of lethality and time to the trash of the dungeon. If, however, you’re pulling one pack at a time and blasting through some weekly keys you will find it to be not so bad!

Our routes focus on being easy to execute and making good tradeoffs between skipping the worst enemies while not requiring complicated strategies that are likely to fail in less coordinated groups. For instance, we recommend skipping the fire dragon upstairs in Ruby Life Pools, and flying in to the last boss of Nokhud Offensive without pulling any trash, but don’t advocate any shroud or invis pot skips. There are also some annoying patrols that we generally prefer to pull rather than risk coming into the middle of combat later.

Check out our Play Like the Pros series to see some routes that are being used by teams pushing higher keys if you’re ready to take the next step!

Ruby Life Pools [back to top]

The trash in this dungeon has tanked some moderate nerfs over the season but is still quite deadly - look to health pot or defensive if you’re getting low in the area before the 2nd boss, as there’s often nasty damage hitting the whole group and so your healer might be overextended! This is doubly important if any Bolstering stacks land on any of the big mobs! Similarly, it’s common to bolster the AoE casts at the end of the dungeon, which can pose a huge threat!

Nokhud Offensive [back to top]

We advocate a skip into the last area of this dungeon by flying in from the south and aiming for a channeling mob on a hill to the left of the path. This is very easy and reliable to execute once you know where it is, but you should make sure your group is familiar with it before starting the key!

Bolstering is often not a big problem here, as the mobs that get Bolstered naturally aren’t actually that deadly to the group - the tank may sometimes have to watch out though!

Azure Vault [back to top]

Our route includes most of the enemies after the first boss, but some groups prefer to skip these enemies and instead let some (or all) of the early Shrieking Whelps’ casts go off. This can make pulls more efficient but also requires more coordination, so modify the route as suits your group!

Storming can be quite painful in this dungeon as there are a LOT of ground effects that it can combo with to kill you, so try to look out for those and consider proactively soaking tornadoes as a tank!

Algeth’ar Academy [back to top]

These affixes do not stop you from starting with a massive bloodlust pull in the tree area, though the last few enemies alive will deal large amounts of damage! The timer in this dungeon is often one of the nastiest as you start reaching keys where you’re running into the timer at all, so look for ways to combine pulls to speed your run up! You can also save three Skitterflies for the first boss and bring them in with the boss.

Look out for the small eagles as they DO Bolster!

Halls of Valor [back to top]

Our route includes some small pulls of enemies like Ebonclaw Worgs that may not be efficient at higher key levels. Consider cutting or modifying these pull if you’re confident you don’t need the space for the boss encounter! In general, this dungeon will require you to make a few double pulls in order to beat the timer if the key level is close to your damage - we have recommended a few ways to do this in our route.

Court of Stars [back to top]

Since the last boss’s nerfs, the second boss is often the best place to make sure you have all of your cooldowns and lust for, especially with Grievous active. Be sure to stack up well to avoid stray imps!

Starting with a big pull into the docks is a great way to get lust on cooldown, but you can easily substitute this for a slightly easier to pull but harder to kill set of enemies just outside the door of the first building. This will also net you slightly less count than the docks area would, but you can make up for this later on if needed. Your strategy always needs to adapt in the later part of this dungeon anyways - just remember that you need to be at 93.7% before the last boss area!

Shadowmoon Burial Grounds [back to top]

Void Spawns are very dangerous enemies - there’s one that’s sometimes pulled near the start of the dungeon that you should really try to avoid, even if it feels bad to wait a while for it to go away. Only pull the two void spawns at the end of the dungeon, and focus one down quickly!

You’ll need to find an enemy or two off the standard path to get your count to full - our route suggests one patrolling Exhumer (often pulled anyway) for this but you can cut this enemy if you accidentally pull anything else earlier.

Temple of the Jade Serpent [back to top]

The end of this dungeon is NASTY with a tough boss into tough trash pulls into another very tough boss. The good news is that the second boss has been nerfed to the point of being relatively easy now, so you can often make it to the end of the dungeon with all of your battle rezzes intact and a bit of room for error.