It’s the last week of Battle for Azeroth Season One, and the RaiderIO Weekly Route is here as always to give you a starting point in your efforts to reach your goals for this season!

Let’s start by briefly covering the affixes that are active this week: Tyrannical, Bolstering, Explosive, and Infested.

The bad news is that this week is pretty close to the worst combination of affixes imaginable. Bolstering and Explosive prevent you from pulling more than a handful of enemies at the same time, and then Infested punishes you for doing that and force you to split individual pulls into even smaller components. So you’re pulling all the trash at slower-than-Fortified-week speed, AND Tyrannical is active so the bosses take extra time too. Many dungeons have pulls or encounters that have specifically punishing interactions with either Bolstering or Explosive as well, and in some casts both at the same time!

Since this week’s affixes are both ones that restrict your options when pulling, it’s especially important to have a big toolbox so that you can still find good pulls to make. Check out this guide to Bolstering to pick up some tips for how to pull with the Affix active, and some other tricks to defeat it!







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.

For this week in particular, the routes often have pulls circled that will be executed in multiple parts to play around this week’s affixes. Be sure to not blindly pull all enemies that are circled with the same color - read the notes attached to each pull and make sure that everything you’re doing makes sense in the context of Bolstering and Explosive!

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 isn’t an especially brutal Explosive dungeon - the primary challenge that this week will present in here will instead come from Bolstering slowing the route down and forcing you to assign your damage proportionally in several pulls that contain enemies with dramatically different amounts of health. All four bosses have adds active for some but not all of the fight - do your best to minimize the amount of time that these adds are up and be wary of Explosives spawning at that time. Priestess Alun’za in particular may require you to deviate from your usual strategy if it involved Crowd Controlling adds as they spawn - you’ll probably be better of just killing them to remove the Explosive spawn point.

Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.

Freehold [back to top]

NOTE: The “Basic” route displays only 99.62% enemy forces completion due to a Mythic Dungeon Tools bug that incorrectly assigns Freehold Shipmates half of the enemy forces that they actually award.

There are a few pulls in Freehold with “Lieutenant” enemies that are immune to Crowd Control and have more health than their friends - of these, the Irontide Enforcers in particular are most likely to pose a Bolstering threat, since many of them cannot be pulled by themselves. Explosive is also a problem at times in this place - such as when Irontide Crackshots are blasting away at you from the back lines, or when adds spawn far away from you during the Harlan Sweete encounter. Other than that, the affixes shouldn’t be especially problematic in this dungeon, and the active Captains are the easiest combination: Raoul and Jolly.

Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.

Kings' Rest [back to top]

Kings’ Rest is hard this week. There are a number of problematic infested pulls, especially those in the burial chamber after the Golden Serpent encounter, and those on the bridge leading to The Council of Tribes. Bolstering adds its own challenges, both in that chamber and, very irritatingly, in the form of low-health Spectral Headhunters in a pull on the bridge. The Expert route attempts to solve this problem by skipping that pack and the ones surrounding it, but this skip is challenging to execute and also means that the rest of the dungeon is required for enemy forces. Furthermore, the Embalming Fluids, which normally represent an opportunity to claw back some of the timer by pulling seventeen enemies at once, cannot be done as quickly this week due to Explosive, and Bolstering to a lesser extent. The Trash is a problem in many parts of the dungeon, and the bosses are their brutally hard Tyrannical versions, and to cap it all off, many of the boss fights include adds which will create an increased Explosive threat in situations where you are already stretched very thin. This is not a dungeon for the faint of heart this week.

Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.

Shrine of the Storm [back to top]

This is the worst week imaginable for Shrine of the Storm. The dungeon is comprised almost exclusively of pulls that are very hard because of Bolstering (such as the mini-boss encounters), and pulls that are very hard because of Explosive (such as the huge Animated Droplet or Tidesage Initiate pulls). There are multiple bosses that are very hard because they are Tyrannical and often feature multiple targets spawning Explosives, and there are awkward Infested enemies that will confound your attempts to combine similarly sized enemies into a single pull. The tight timer forces you to throw caution to the wind and attempt to weave together a tenuous set of pulls that all require very delicate execution to avoid bolstering an enemy to oblivion or nuking your party with ten simultaneously spawning Explosives. Shrine of the Storm is brutally difficult and orders of magnitude more difficult than any other dungeon this week.

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.

This dungeon is an exercise in risk and reward this week. To beat the timer, our Expert route is built around an ambitious strategy of Bolstering an Ashvane Spotter to mythic proportions, and then using that Spotter to one-shot almost all the enemies in the area. The route skips much of the trash in the first half of the dungeon, jumps ahead to a Spotter, then returns to clear out Bilge Rats with it. The Spotter is then kept alive through to the final boss, where it’s used to one-shot all of the Tentacles during the fight - this is tricky because a misplaced shot can kill the friendly engineer before it gets the chance to repair the cannon, an error which will force the fight to be reset.

The other challenges with this strategy come from Explosive orbs, which will continue to spawn from the Spotter and other enemies and which are not damaged by her artillery, and from the enemies which aren’t damaged by it, such as Ashvane Commanders. Our plan for the final Ashvane Commanders of the dungeon is as follows: pull all of the enemies in the room, then Mass Entangle the pack, which will not affect the Commanders, who can then be separated from their friends to prevent Bolstering and Explosive problems. This strategy saves a bunch of time but it is very challenging to execute and is only recommended if you are trying to defeat a keystone at a level where the timer is too tight for more cautious pulls.

Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.

Temple of Sethraliss [back to top]

Temple of Sethraliss is one of the dungeons least impacted by Explosive and Bolstering, as it naturally features smaller pulls of similarly sized enemies. The primary difficulty of this week lies in the boss encounters - as is tradition, we will mention Galvazzt as an especially difficult fight that is no joke on any Tyrannical week, but the fight that you’ll want to pay extra attention to is Adderis and Aspix, with Explosives spawning underneath the non-active boss, something that may be a problem especially if your composition is melee-heavy or they spawn at a hectic part of the fight. If your group can manage the Tyrannical components of this dungeon, however, this is one of the dungeons least buffed by this week’s brutal affixes, and this is one of the few Tyrannical weeks on the calendar where it is a more appealing Keystone to receive than many others.

Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.

The MOTHERLODE!! [back to top]

This dungeon is a test of your group’s ability to assign its damage proportionally to the health of the enemies present. If you can manage the pulls in the Expert route which include Mechanized Peacekeepers, Addled Thugs, and Mech Jockeys by doing damage to them at a ratio of roughly 5 to 4 to 3, you’ll find the dungeon to be relatively easy. If you can’t, you’ll end up bolstering the healthiest enemies to a very dangerous level that will at best consume extra time and at worst destroy your group. Other than the Bolstering threat, you’ll find Tyrannical and Explosive to be at their least deadly in this dungeon, with its relatively easy bosses and relatively small pull sizes.

Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.

The Underrot [back to top]

This is not a bad week at all for The Underrot - none of the bosses spawn extra Explosives, and the few pulls with awkward infested enemies or dramatically different health pools can be cleanly solved with Crowd Control. Be particularly careful when pulling trash from Cragmaw the Infested’s room - if you follow the Route religiously, you may end up pulling enemies that have wandered quite far from their mapped location, and can therefore spawn Explosives farther away than you can manage while they’re running to you. Be ready to adjust your plan for the room on the fly based on the exact location of the enemies it contains.

Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.

Tol Dagor [back to top]

The problems of this week are best answered by the Heavy Cannons in this dungeon - our Expert route avoids pulling many enemies until this point in the dungeon, then backtracks and grabs the required enemy forces, pulling them to the cannons to be easily killed regardless of how many stacks of Bolstering they pick up along the way. Be wary while executing this strategy of Explosive Orbs, especially if your composition is melee-heavy and cannot easily kill them without being exposed to the kill zone of the cannons. If this is going to be a problem for you, pull enemies more slowly into the cannons.

Since it’s a Tyrannical week you are very likely to want access to all four buffs provided in The Brig area, but the Expert route skips pulling any enemies on that floor. To get those buffs, you can pull whichever enemies are guarding their cells, or your group’s Rogue can actually grab them all by themselves, without any help, regardless of which cells they’re in. Check out this video to see exactly how this is done:



Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.

Waycrest Manor [back to top]

You can defeat Explosive this week by using the narrow corridors of Waycrest Manor to your advantage! Pull enemy packs to previous rooms, and you’ll avoid taking any Explosive damage from the start of the pull since you’ll be out of line of sight from where the enemies were initially. Bolstering, unfortunately, is obnoxious in multiple parts of this dungeon, as there are numerous pulls featuring enemies with disparate health pools. Especially annoying are the Infected Peasants, which are found alongside Devouring Maggots with much less health and which also spawn three maggots apiece when slain.

If, when approaching Raal the Gluttonous’ room, you find yourself blocked by a closed door, you can either adjust the route to clear the hallway to whichever door is open, or you can use this Rogue trick described in a previous edition of The Weekly Route to reset the boss and open all of the doors to the room.

Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.