RETAIL
CLASSIC ERA
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RETAIL
CLASSIC ERA
WRATH

Shadowlands Season 4: What to Expect on Raider.IO



The final Season of Shadowlands is upon us! Season 4 will be officially launching as soon as servers come up this morning, and with it will be coming quite a few changes to WoW’s end-game PVE content. Blizzard is using the Season to experiment with new approaches to revitalizing Raid & Mythic+ content, so in many ways this may be a teaser of things to expect to see later in Dragonflight as well.

Read the official Season 4 content update notes and preview from Blizzard.

Continue reading to see how Season 4 changes are going to show up on Raider.IO:




Table of Contents





Fated Raid System



The new Fated Raid system is the biggest experimental part of Season 4, and it is something we are very excited about! Blizzard has come up with a unique way to ward off the end-of-expansion blues, by giving us what are essentially Affixes inside all 3 Shadowlands raids! That’s right, we’re headed back into Castle Nathria, Sanctum of Domination and continuing our adventures in Sepulcher of the First Ones, for bigger and better rewards!

On Raider.IO we will be treating each Fated raid as a brand new instance with its own progression tracking. However, defeating an encounter in a Fated raid will also provide credit towards killing that boss on the non-Fated version of that same difficulty. This is a matter of convenience, since the Fated versions will be more difficult, and this way guilds can fill out their previous raid kills more easily.

Find all of the Leaderboards here:

Fated NathriaFated SanctumFated Sepulcher
MythicRankingsRankingsRankings
HeroicRankingsRankingsRankings
NormalRankingsRankingsRankings



Fated Raid Schedule


Each week, one of the 3 Shadowlands raids will be the Fated Raid and they will each be Fated for a single week in rotation. When a raid is Fated, it is only available in the Fated mode. However, the other 2 raids will be available in non-Fated modes at that time (until all of them become Fated at the same time, later in the season).

The rotation begins with Castle Nathria being Fated. You can follow along with which raids are Fated on our front page, and when the next raids are due to become Fated:




Raid Progression Tracking for Fated Raids


Our standard rules apply for defeating raid bosses as a guild – to earn guild progress for a given difficulty you will need to have at least a certain number of players from your same guild in the raid. These numbers for each difficulty are:

  • Mythic Difficulty: 11
  • Normal & Heroic Difficulties: 8


Race to World… Fated?


As this is a unique and new Season of raid content, we have no idea what to expect regarding progression and the Race to World First Fated Raids! We know there's a lot of guilds excited to try their hands at the Fated Raids, but we might be seeing some new names on the Leaderboards. We'll be following along with the excitement and keeping you updated on our RWF Coverage page! We'll provide updates and analysis as guilds make their way through each of the 3 raids on their Fated difficulties for the first time. Additionally, unlike the standard raid releases, Mythic difficulty will be available from Day 1 with the Fated raids, so the Race starts today!

Check out our RWF Fated Raid Coverage to keep up with the Fated Raid action!





New Mythic+ Season: SL Season 4



As with each new Season, we will be adding the new Mythic+ Season to the site. This will be available everywhere you would expect to see a new season: player profiles, guild profiles, leaderboards, recruitment, etc.



New Mythic+ Dungeon Rotation



As part of the experimental nature of Season 4, Blizzard is changing up the dungeons that are available for Mythic+. This season will have a total of 8 dungeons available from a selection of dungeons across 4 different expansions: Shadowlands, Battle for Azeroth, Legion, and Warlords of Draenor.

The community was given the opportunity to vote on which dungeons from Warlords of Draenor to include in this season and... unfortunately that went about as well as expected, giving us both Grimrail Depot and Iron Docks... two brutal dungeons from that expansion.



The other 6 dungeons are all of the “Mega” dungeons from the previous 3 expansions: Tazavesh (Gambit & Streets), Operation: Mechagon (Junkyard & Workshop), and Return to Karazhan (Lower & Upper).



Season 4 Weekly Route



The Weekly Route will return shortly after the launch of Season 4! The various tools that support the creation of the Weekly Route are being updated, and we anticipate being able to have the Weekly Route available during this first week of Season 4, but not right at the start. Keep your eyes out, as we’ll have it to you as soon as possible! It will be available on the front page as well as announced on our Twitter.



Raider.IO Addon



Our plan for the start of Season 4 is to have the current Fated Raid as the “active raid” showing on the Raider.IO in-game Addon, but we do intend for it to show all raids later down the road.



Questions or Feedback? Let us know in our Discord!