We’re entering the last Fortified week of Battle for Azeroth’s Season One, and the RaiderIO Weekly Route is here to equip you with a strategy to defeat each dungeon!

The affixes active this week are Fortified, Sanguine, Grievous, and Infested.

This is a challenging week - many pulls are made much more difficult by some or all of the affixes, but the boss encounters are also problematic due to Grievous acting as a pseudo-Tyrannical. Compounding matters, many of these affixes also interact with each other in annoying ways - Grievous and Sanguine mean that a party member stepping in a pool of blood for even a fraction of a second will cause them to require immediate healing to avoid stacking up a serious DoT, and Infested enemies will drop Spawns of G’huun and Sanguine pools simultaneously that can combine to make preventing new Infestations that much harder.





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: Blood Death Knight, 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, Peacekeepers in The Motherlode can be activated using a combination of Shining Force, Death Grip, and Stealth! Every skip in these routes features a full explanation if you mouse over the corresponding number.

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]

Atal’Dazar is a relatively easy dungeon this week. Grievous is a problem in a few places in here - Reanimated Honor Guards, Toxic Saurids, and Vol’kaal are all likely to stack the dot on much of your party. Careful positioning is also important when fighting Saurids - be sure to not stand so that they’ll heal with Sanguine once enemies begin to die. Watch out when you’re trying to soak blood pools to kill Gilded Priestesses - they blend in with Sanguine pools!

Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.

Freehold [back to top]

Though the dungeon is still one of the easier ones this week, Freehold will pose a few challenges to your group. The foremost among them is Grievous bosses - Eudora and Kragg will both conspire to nuke random members of your group and if they aren’t quickly healed up they will begin to bleed out and dramatically increase the HPS requirement of those fights. Luckily, Freehold is a very open dungeon, so Sanguine should be a minimal problem except perhaps if you decide to pull Irontide Ravager pulls back on to the narrow bridge to avoid the infested critter.

Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.

Kings' Rest [back to top]

Kings’ Rest is a nightmare this week. Sanguine will be tough in the confined corridors, especially in combination with the area denial abilities of so many enemies in this place. Grievous will make Spit Gold and Severing Axe into Tyrannical-level problems, and King Dazar is arguably more difficult than on most Tyrannical weeks with Quaking Leap applying the DoT to the whole group while the tank also demands focused healing from the Blade Combo.

Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.

Shrine of the Storm [back to top]

Sanguine Shrine is an exercise in discipline - there are many narrow corridors and packs of small enemies, but with some planning you can engineer the pulls such that everything gets fought out in wide open spaces where blood pools are unlikely to cause a problem. Be especially careful to not pollute the area where the first boss spawns with Sanguine! If your composition isn’t capable of interrupting every cast from Galecaller Faye you will really feel it this week with Grievous - if you know you’re going to have to miss a kick, try to line it up with a Reinforcing Ward being active so that you can mitigate some of it.

Read more on Shrine of the Storm Dungeon Abilities.

Siege of Boralus [back to top]

As usual, our Siege of Boralus routes are based off the Horde pathing and will require some modification if you’re Alliance.

It’s a pretty good week to head to Siege - the bosses are hard but their damage patterns aren’t too badly exacerbated by Greivous. The trash pulls are full of little enemies that will drop annoying Sanguine, but they’re also fought in wide open spaces where you should be able to manage it. If you end up keeping the Ashvane Spotter alive for a prolonged time to help kill future enemies, note that you can intentionally drag it into Sanguine if you need to heal it up!


Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.

Temple of Sethraliss [back to top]

The Temple of Sethraliss will re-open in a few weeks. For now, if your group is pushing its limits, you’ll find Temple to be the hardest check as Grievous Galvazzt is a disaster. It’s the hardest boss you’ll fight this week by far, in fact it’s likely harder than Tyrannical Galvazzt, which also happens to be the hardest Tyrannical boss in terms of DPS/HPS checks. If you’re brave enough to venture in to this place, be warned that the Static-charged Dervishes are also very tough on Fortified/Grievous and should be taken slowly - they also drop five stacks of Sanguine each, and Infested Dervishes do not Spawn G’huunies.

Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.

The MOTHERLODE!! [back to top]

You’ll find the timer in here to be very unforgiving this week. This is true on any Fortified week, but this combination of affixes will slow down your pulls further. Mechanized Peacekeepers sometimes stand still for ten seconds casting a sequence of abilities - you need to be extremely vigilant in preventing these enemies from ever touching a Sanguine pool or else this cast sequence can see one heal from almost dead to full health.

This week’s infested pattern is full of Mech Jockeys - be sure to let these pilot nearby Peacekeepers - when they do, you no longer have to deal with the Regenerative Blood component of infested, you’ll just need to kill Spawns of G’huun when the Peacekeeper dies.

Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.

The Underrot [back to top]

You’re really going to feel the 8.1 changes to this dungeon this week. The first few packs, which are no longer skippable, put out high damage aimed at random or all members of your party, which will create a Grievous problem, especially with that incoming damage also buffed by Fortified. For this reason, you may be best served by lusting this trash rather than holding it for the first boss, who is one of the bosses in the game least buffed by Grievous. By contrast, the second boss can be a sizeable Grievous challenge during Tantrum, so be sure to use your second lust on that fight!

If you’re looking for a thorough guide to the entire dungeon check out this video:



Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.

Tol Dagor [back to top]

It’s not a great week for Tol Dagor - you’ll need to lean on the strength of the cannons to carry you through this place on higher keystones - luckily, the Expert route skips as much trash as possible to do just that! The bosses are likely to be your biggest problem if you can make good use of the cannons on the trash - especially The Sand Queen and Overseer Korgus, which both feature high damage in a pattern that will likely cause Grievous to compound the problem.

Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.

Waycrest Manor [back to top]

We continue to split our Waycrest routes by open door rather than route difficulty - this week’s have landed closer to Basic in terms of skips, but closer to Expert in terms of pull sizing. They also feature a Rogue trick that’s explained fully in Last Week’s Article.

In terms of difficulty, Waycrest is brutal this week. Small corridors mean Sanguine will hurt, and many of the bosses are extremely challenging with the introduction of Grievous, featuring either heavy spikes of damage on random group members like Lady Waycrest or bursts of damage to the whole party like Soulbound Goliath. The Heartsbane Triad even does both! The Infested pattern is mercifully forgiving, but that isn’t enough to bring this dungeon into the top or even the middle of the pack this week.

Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.