With World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, one of the primary sources of endgame content is the Mythic+ system. For those unaware, Mythic+ keys provide a further challenge to dungeons, providing a timer and requirements to meet in a dungeon before completion.
One of the primary features of Mythic+ dungeons is the affix system, a set of additional mechanics that rotate weekly and provide a further challenge to the dungeon. These mechanics can radically change a dungeon, making what was once easy extremely hard and vice versa.
This week has proven to be a relatively relaxed one, especially compared to the previous affixes of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands so far which were dominantly more difficult. This is also the first time where every affix – save Prideful – was one that was already in the game.
Since veteran players didn’t need to learn new affixes and adapt their strategies to them, that alone made the included affixes significantly easier to manage. However, even if one were to step into a Mythic+ dungeon for the first time this week, they would find a much easier challenge than before.
The active affixes this week are Fortified, Sanguine, Quaking, and Prideful. Prideful will be active every week as per the seasonal affix, but given that much of the community feels this affix actually makes dungeons easier, it certainly fits into our current topic.
Fortified is one of two weekly rotating affixes as well, paired with Tyrannical. On Fortified weeks, dungeon trash mobs are significantly empowered. On Tyrannical, dungeon boss mobs are empowered instead, which is often much more troublesome.
Sanguine causes most enemies to leave a puddle of blood behind when they die. When a player stands in this puddle, they’ll take heavy damage that can swiftly kill them, but the damage immediately stops if they step out. Quaking causes players to all periodically have an AoE aura around them that can damage other players, as well as interrupting spell casting.
These affixes are extremely easy to handle with simple positional awareness. The greatest issue present is that Sanguine heals enemy mobs if they stand in them, so tanks need to move them. Players can find this troublesome for ranged mobs that naturally don’t move, but otherwise, it’s easy to deal with.
Quaking is almost completely negated by not standing on top of your allies, and while it can provide some issues for caster classes having their spells interrupted, melee will notice almost no change other than needing to ensure they aren’t going to damage each other.
Overall, it’s an extremely easy week compared to previous weeks in the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. If you’ve been waiting to push some keys up, this week presents an excellent chance to do exactly that.
