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The Weekly Route: Tyrannical, Bolstering, Explosive, and Reaping
Welcome to the RaiderIO Weekly Route, the series that provides you with a plan of attack for every dungeon, tailored to the challenges of this week’s affixes.
Let’s start by briefly covering the affixes that are active this week: Tyrannical, Bolstering, Explosive and Reaping.
This weeks affixes dramatically slow down the pace of every dungeon. With Bolstering and Explosive active, you won’t be able to realistically pull more than a pack or two at once, and in some dungeons you may even need to use Crowd Control and pull half a pack at a time to avoid these affixes giving you trouble. While you’re forced to take your time with the trash, the bosses are also going to be marathons due to Tyrannical. This is one of the weeks where Reaping is going to feel like a breath of fresh air - a brief thirty seconds in which you don’t have to worry about Explosive and Bolstering - although in order to have any hope to defeat higher keys in time, you’re absolutely going to have to bring Reaping into the next trash pull (or boss) as it’s one of the few ways to do multiple things at once this week.
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, often call for advanced pulls and skips. Sometimes, these skips require specific classes like Death Knight, Demon Hunter, or Rogue (a few Routes are now including skips that work best with two rogues!) - but often they can be done by many different group compositions, just in slightly different ways. Every skip in these routes features a full explanation if you mouse over the corresponding number.
If you’re a coordinated team, 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 the COPY MDT IMPORT STRING button and you’ll be able to paste that string 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!
You can pretty comfortably pull Atal’Dazar without ever wanting to fight more than six enemies at a time, which is a pretty safe number given Explosive is active, so you won’t lose too much time in here splitting pulls in half. Watch out for Bolstering Skyscreamers when pulling them with Saurids - it’s very easy to do, but it’s actually not the end of the world if it happens. Skyscreamers are a relatively low threat even Bolstered, so it’ll cost you some time but it’s unlikely to wipe you.
As the metagame has shifted away from Death Knights, our Expert routes no longer plan to take control of an undead enemy and kill it after Yazma to avoid the final Reaping wave. Our Expert route now uses a strategy of killing Yazma, then rushing to the middle pack of the dungeon and finishing off the last few Enemy Forces in the form of the four Saurids in that pack.
Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.
The good news in Tyrannical Freehold this week is that Eudora is the friendly captain this week! The second boss is therefore in the easiest configuration available, though we’d still advise clearing trash until lust is back up before engaging it. This dungeon is also a pretty tame Bolstering experience - there are very few pulls that force you to fight enemies with dramatically different amounts of health at once, and one of the biggest offenders, the Trapper pull, has been nerfed so that the Rats no longer bolster.
This is also a fairly light Explosive dungeon, as most enemies are medium-sized and you never really need to pull more than six or seven at once to beat the timer. One place to take caution is the Harlan Sweete encounter - if you’re Crowd Controlling the adds that spawn far away from your group, make sure that somebody is watching and sniping any Explosvies that spawn at that location. Overall, this is an excellent keystone for this week!
Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.
You’re going to feel Bolstering and Explosive in a few spots in Kings’ Rest, but for most of the dungeon the small size of the pulls will keep them in check. The worst Bolstering enemies are the Minions of Zul - if you’re not careful and you kill them while fighting a pack in the first boss’ room, you’re very likely to wipe.
Explosive and Bolstering are going to slow down your group’s path through Mchimba the Embalmer’s room - but you’re likely to be under some time pressure if you’re doing this key at a high level, so you’ll need to split the Embalming Fluids into as few pulls as possible - we’ve set the bar at two pulls in our Expert route, and three in our Basic route, but depending on the composition of your group you may have to do this room more slowly.
After you’ve done all this work dealing with the affixes on trash, you’re still going to have to kill the notoriously difficult Kings’ Rest bosses with Tyrannical active - and you’ll also have to watch for Explosives!
Like in Atal’dazar, our Expert routes used to plan for a Death Knight to take control of an undead enemy and kill it after King Dazar to avoid the final Reaping wave. We now no longer make that assumption, but it remains a powerful strategy if your group includes a Death Knight, and you should rework the Route to use it (check out our early Season 2 Expert routes for some ideas on how to do this).
Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.
Some enemies in Shrine of the Storm no longer bolster on death, such as the skeletons that surround the Ritualists after the second boss. This is a welcome change that allows these packs to be included in our Expert route where before we’d be inclined to skip them. Unfortunately, most of the big Bolstering problems in this dungeon arise from the fact that Tidesage Initiates bolster, and this hasn’t changed. This means that any miniboss pull is very sketchy unless you have a plan to kill the initiates outside of bolster range, or you have very disciplined priority damage. Our Expert route’s solution is to skip pretty much all instances where this might be a problem, including the very first room of the dungeon. For one of these skips, you’re going to need to do a death skip even if you have a Rogue in your group, although you can do it with shroud if you have two!
Both of our Routes plan to skip the final Reaping wave by killing a pack of Abyssal Eels after Vol’zith the Whisperer. Our Expert route also plans to skip the penultimate Reaping wave by triggering it during a death skip.
Read more on Shrine of the Storm Dungeon Abilities.
As usual, our Siege of Boralus routes are based off the Horde pathing and will require some modification if you’re Alliance.
Since this week is so rough, we’re using a full-on Ashvane Spotter strategy in our Expert route, as we feel that this is the best hope to complete this key at a high level within the timer. Note that this strategy is very difficult to execute well - here’s how it works! We’re skipping straight to the final Spotter of the dungeon after killing Dread Captain Lockwood, then we’re bolstering the heck out of it and using it to kill the rest of the enemy forces and Reaping waves of the dungeon - as well as tentacles during the Viq’goth encounter. The Spotter won’t damage Ashvane Commanders or Bilge Rat Demolishers so make sure you have a plan to prevent those enemies from getting super-bolstered. Mass Entanglement is a great tool for this if your group includes a Druid.
This strategy means your healer will not be able to drink once you engage that spotter - although you can sacrifice them to the spotter after killing Hadal Darkfathom and they can release right there, out of combat, and get a drink! Another important thing to watch out for is the friendly engineers on the last boss encounter - these guys do take damage from the Spotter, so you’ll need to make sure you don’t hit them with any of its shots! It is possible to hit the tentacles that are holding the engineers without hitting the engineers themselves, you just need to make sure to not hit the middle of the tentacle’s hitbox. Make sure someone is watching the Spotter for Explosive spawns as well - it can often be far away and easy to miss!
Whether or not you use this strategy, you’ll also have to deal with annoying Bolstering pulls near the start of the dungeon - our Expert route features some very CC-intensive solutions to this, while the Basic route instead relies on using priority damage to minimize the impact of the affix - you can mix and match these strategies depending on your group’s composition.
Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.
Temple of Sethraliss is the dungeon where Bolstering and Explosive are the least impactful to the trash-clearing experience. You’ll never need to pull more than a few mobs at once, and there are only a few pulls with enemies that have health pools different enough to cause a Bolstering issue - and those are among the easier pulls in the dungeon anyway! The problem as always in here is the bosses - Tyrannical Temple will never be an easy key, largely due to the difficulty of the third boss. This week, take extra care during the also-very-difficult first boss encounter - Explosives can spawn under the inactive boss and you’ll need someone watching for them! Explosives are also likely to complicate the normally quite easy final fight of the dungeon - especially if you’re playing a triple melee composition.
Our Expert route plans to skip the final two Reaping waves - the first by triggering it during a death skip, and the second by triggering it as the final boss encounter finishes.
Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.
Bolstering Motherlode is a test of your group’s ability to split your damage proportionally among the enemies you’re fighting, based on their health pools. In our Expert route, we’ve found the most efficient pulls to be those in the first part of the dungeon, including as many Mechanized Peacekeepers as possible. This means there will be many pulls with huge disparities in health - although we’ve done our best to avoid the worst of this, especially when it comes to Off-duty Laborers, which we’ve planned to take out all on their own while the bigger enemies are Crowd Controlled.
The good news is that the bosses in this dungeon aren’t that bad, even with Tyrannical active, so if you can prioritize your damage well when fighting the trash you’ll have dealt with the biggest threat this week in the Motherlode.
Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.
The Underrot is a great choice for this week! With a few slight adjustments to normal Routes, namely removing all Underrot Ticks from the plan, you can pretty easily avoid ever having a Bolstering problem, and you also never really need to pull more than a handful of enemies at once, so Explosive will rarely get out of hand.
One tip we’ve found to save half a minute or so in this dungeon is to head into the tunnel to the last boss as soon as possible - it’ll be active a second or two after the last Reaping wave spawns, and by having the whole group jump in you’ll be able to get the entire wave to teleport down with you and group themselves up neatly to be AoE’d - potentially even while engaging the boss to save more time!
Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.
If you’re an adherent to our Expert Tol Dagor routes, you’ll be used to the Heavy Cannon strategy by now! It still works this week - Bolstering only slightly increases the amount of time it’ll take, although Explosive will be a factor you’ll have to deal with, as the cannons do not damage Explosives!
This dungeon is also an exception to our rule for the Basic routes that no specific classes or abilities are required - the route is designed for a group with either a Rogue or a player with items from their profession that can open the doors. If you don’t have access to either of those, the dungeon is extremely linear and you should just pull the enemies that are in your way and avoid any that aren’t!
Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.
Bolstering Waycrest is much less daunting now than it was before Patch 8.1.5 - Devouring Maggots no longer bolster on death, so you’ll be able to pull the hallways around the Banquet hall much more quickly and safely than before! Hounds and Toads still bolster, so we recommend careful use of Crowd Control and/or priority damage to avoid bolstering their bigger friends when you engage these enemies!
Watch out for Explosive spawns when fighting the long Tyrannical boss encounters in here - especially Raal, who creates a bunch of adds spread all around the room that can spawn Explosives.
Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.
Dratnos is a Rogue main who is competing in the MDI with his friends on the team Pawsitive Cattitude. He’s also an Officer in the Hall of Fame guild Poetry Club. He loves playing all three Rogue specs, and creates guides to them along with other content on his YouTube channel. He streams on Twitch, where he recently had some footbomb difficulty during an MDI time trial run. He’s also a Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Competitor and host of the podcast Allied Strategies.
Let’s start by briefly covering the affixes that are active this week: Tyrannical, Bolstering, Explosive and Reaping.
This weeks affixes dramatically slow down the pace of every dungeon. With Bolstering and Explosive active, you won’t be able to realistically pull more than a pack or two at once, and in some dungeons you may even need to use Crowd Control and pull half a pack at a time to avoid these affixes giving you trouble. While you’re forced to take your time with the trash, the bosses are also going to be marathons due to Tyrannical. This is one of the weeks where Reaping is going to feel like a breath of fresh air - a brief thirty seconds in which you don’t have to worry about Explosive and Bolstering - although in order to have any hope to defeat higher keys in time, you’re absolutely going to have to bring Reaping into the next trash pull (or boss) as it’s one of the few ways to do multiple things at once this week.
The Weekly Routes
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, often call for advanced pulls and skips. Sometimes, these skips require specific classes like Death Knight, Demon Hunter, or Rogue (a few Routes are now including skips that work best with two rogues!) - but often they can be done by many different group compositions, just in slightly different ways. Every skip in these routes features a full explanation if you mouse over the corresponding number.
If you’re a coordinated team, 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 the COPY MDT IMPORT STRING button and you’ll be able to paste that string 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]
You can pretty comfortably pull Atal’Dazar without ever wanting to fight more than six enemies at a time, which is a pretty safe number given Explosive is active, so you won’t lose too much time in here splitting pulls in half. Watch out for Bolstering Skyscreamers when pulling them with Saurids - it’s very easy to do, but it’s actually not the end of the world if it happens. Skyscreamers are a relatively low threat even Bolstered, so it’ll cost you some time but it’s unlikely to wipe you.
As the metagame has shifted away from Death Knights, our Expert routes no longer plan to take control of an undead enemy and kill it after Yazma to avoid the final Reaping wave. Our Expert route now uses a strategy of killing Yazma, then rushing to the middle pack of the dungeon and finishing off the last few Enemy Forces in the form of the four Saurids in that pack.
Read more on Atal’Dazar Dungeon Abilities.
Freehold [back to top]
The good news in Tyrannical Freehold this week is that Eudora is the friendly captain this week! The second boss is therefore in the easiest configuration available, though we’d still advise clearing trash until lust is back up before engaging it. This dungeon is also a pretty tame Bolstering experience - there are very few pulls that force you to fight enemies with dramatically different amounts of health at once, and one of the biggest offenders, the Trapper pull, has been nerfed so that the Rats no longer bolster.
This is also a fairly light Explosive dungeon, as most enemies are medium-sized and you never really need to pull more than six or seven at once to beat the timer. One place to take caution is the Harlan Sweete encounter - if you’re Crowd Controlling the adds that spawn far away from your group, make sure that somebody is watching and sniping any Explosvies that spawn at that location. Overall, this is an excellent keystone for this week!
Read more on Freehold Dungeon Abilities.
Kings' Rest [back to top]
You’re going to feel Bolstering and Explosive in a few spots in Kings’ Rest, but for most of the dungeon the small size of the pulls will keep them in check. The worst Bolstering enemies are the Minions of Zul - if you’re not careful and you kill them while fighting a pack in the first boss’ room, you’re very likely to wipe.
Explosive and Bolstering are going to slow down your group’s path through Mchimba the Embalmer’s room - but you’re likely to be under some time pressure if you’re doing this key at a high level, so you’ll need to split the Embalming Fluids into as few pulls as possible - we’ve set the bar at two pulls in our Expert route, and three in our Basic route, but depending on the composition of your group you may have to do this room more slowly.
After you’ve done all this work dealing with the affixes on trash, you’re still going to have to kill the notoriously difficult Kings’ Rest bosses with Tyrannical active - and you’ll also have to watch for Explosives!
Like in Atal’dazar, our Expert routes used to plan for a Death Knight to take control of an undead enemy and kill it after King Dazar to avoid the final Reaping wave. We now no longer make that assumption, but it remains a powerful strategy if your group includes a Death Knight, and you should rework the Route to use it (check out our early Season 2 Expert routes for some ideas on how to do this).
Read more on Kings’ Rest Dungeon Abilities.
Shrine of the Storm [back to top]
Some enemies in Shrine of the Storm no longer bolster on death, such as the skeletons that surround the Ritualists after the second boss. This is a welcome change that allows these packs to be included in our Expert route where before we’d be inclined to skip them. Unfortunately, most of the big Bolstering problems in this dungeon arise from the fact that Tidesage Initiates bolster, and this hasn’t changed. This means that any miniboss pull is very sketchy unless you have a plan to kill the initiates outside of bolster range, or you have very disciplined priority damage. Our Expert route’s solution is to skip pretty much all instances where this might be a problem, including the very first room of the dungeon. For one of these skips, you’re going to need to do a death skip even if you have a Rogue in your group, although you can do it with shroud if you have two!
Both of our Routes plan to skip the final Reaping wave by killing a pack of Abyssal Eels after Vol’zith the Whisperer. Our Expert route also plans to skip the penultimate Reaping wave by triggering it during a death skip.
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.
Since this week is so rough, we’re using a full-on Ashvane Spotter strategy in our Expert route, as we feel that this is the best hope to complete this key at a high level within the timer. Note that this strategy is very difficult to execute well - here’s how it works! We’re skipping straight to the final Spotter of the dungeon after killing Dread Captain Lockwood, then we’re bolstering the heck out of it and using it to kill the rest of the enemy forces and Reaping waves of the dungeon - as well as tentacles during the Viq’goth encounter. The Spotter won’t damage Ashvane Commanders or Bilge Rat Demolishers so make sure you have a plan to prevent those enemies from getting super-bolstered. Mass Entanglement is a great tool for this if your group includes a Druid.
This strategy means your healer will not be able to drink once you engage that spotter - although you can sacrifice them to the spotter after killing Hadal Darkfathom and they can release right there, out of combat, and get a drink! Another important thing to watch out for is the friendly engineers on the last boss encounter - these guys do take damage from the Spotter, so you’ll need to make sure you don’t hit them with any of its shots! It is possible to hit the tentacles that are holding the engineers without hitting the engineers themselves, you just need to make sure to not hit the middle of the tentacle’s hitbox. Make sure someone is watching the Spotter for Explosive spawns as well - it can often be far away and easy to miss!
Whether or not you use this strategy, you’ll also have to deal with annoying Bolstering pulls near the start of the dungeon - our Expert route features some very CC-intensive solutions to this, while the Basic route instead relies on using priority damage to minimize the impact of the affix - you can mix and match these strategies depending on your group’s composition.
Read more on Siege of Boralus Dungeon Abilities.
Temple of Sethraliss [back to top]
Temple of Sethraliss is the dungeon where Bolstering and Explosive are the least impactful to the trash-clearing experience. You’ll never need to pull more than a few mobs at once, and there are only a few pulls with enemies that have health pools different enough to cause a Bolstering issue - and those are among the easier pulls in the dungeon anyway! The problem as always in here is the bosses - Tyrannical Temple will never be an easy key, largely due to the difficulty of the third boss. This week, take extra care during the also-very-difficult first boss encounter - Explosives can spawn under the inactive boss and you’ll need someone watching for them! Explosives are also likely to complicate the normally quite easy final fight of the dungeon - especially if you’re playing a triple melee composition.
Our Expert route plans to skip the final two Reaping waves - the first by triggering it during a death skip, and the second by triggering it as the final boss encounter finishes.
Read more on Temple of Sethraliss Dungeon Abilities.
The MOTHERLODE!! [back to top]
Bolstering Motherlode is a test of your group’s ability to split your damage proportionally among the enemies you’re fighting, based on their health pools. In our Expert route, we’ve found the most efficient pulls to be those in the first part of the dungeon, including as many Mechanized Peacekeepers as possible. This means there will be many pulls with huge disparities in health - although we’ve done our best to avoid the worst of this, especially when it comes to Off-duty Laborers, which we’ve planned to take out all on their own while the bigger enemies are Crowd Controlled.
The good news is that the bosses in this dungeon aren’t that bad, even with Tyrannical active, so if you can prioritize your damage well when fighting the trash you’ll have dealt with the biggest threat this week in the Motherlode.
Read more on The MOTHERLODE!! Dungeon Abilities.
The Underrot [back to top]
The Underrot is a great choice for this week! With a few slight adjustments to normal Routes, namely removing all Underrot Ticks from the plan, you can pretty easily avoid ever having a Bolstering problem, and you also never really need to pull more than a handful of enemies at once, so Explosive will rarely get out of hand.
One tip we’ve found to save half a minute or so in this dungeon is to head into the tunnel to the last boss as soon as possible - it’ll be active a second or two after the last Reaping wave spawns, and by having the whole group jump in you’ll be able to get the entire wave to teleport down with you and group themselves up neatly to be AoE’d - potentially even while engaging the boss to save more time!
Read more on The Underrot Dungeon Abilities.
Tol Dagor [back to top]
If you’re an adherent to our Expert Tol Dagor routes, you’ll be used to the Heavy Cannon strategy by now! It still works this week - Bolstering only slightly increases the amount of time it’ll take, although Explosive will be a factor you’ll have to deal with, as the cannons do not damage Explosives!
This dungeon is also an exception to our rule for the Basic routes that no specific classes or abilities are required - the route is designed for a group with either a Rogue or a player with items from their profession that can open the doors. If you don’t have access to either of those, the dungeon is extremely linear and you should just pull the enemies that are in your way and avoid any that aren’t!
Read more on Tol Dagor Dungeon Abilities.
Waycrest Manor [back to top]
Bolstering Waycrest is much less daunting now than it was before Patch 8.1.5 - Devouring Maggots no longer bolster on death, so you’ll be able to pull the hallways around the Banquet hall much more quickly and safely than before! Hounds and Toads still bolster, so we recommend careful use of Crowd Control and/or priority damage to avoid bolstering their bigger friends when you engage these enemies!
Watch out for Explosive spawns when fighting the long Tyrannical boss encounters in here - especially Raal, who creates a bunch of adds spread all around the room that can spawn Explosives.
Read more on Waycrest Manor Dungeon Abilities.
Links
- Find Dratnos on RaiderIO, Twitch, Twitter, or Youtube
- Download the WeakAuras Addon
- Download this Reaping WeakAura to track the affix.
- Download this WeakAura to show if Reaping will come from the current pull (requires Mythic Dungeon Tools to also be installed)!
- Download the Mythic Dungeon Tools Addon
About the Author
Dratnos is a Rogue main who is competing in the MDI with his friends on the team Pawsitive Cattitude. He’s also an Officer in the Hall of Fame guild Poetry Club. He loves playing all three Rogue specs, and creates guides to them along with other content on his YouTube channel. He streams on Twitch, where he recently had some footbomb difficulty during an MDI time trial run. He’s also a Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Competitor and host of the podcast Allied Strategies.
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