Below is our weekly WoW advice for January 21-28. For the week starting January 28, visit the previous page.
Get ready to raid
This week Ny’alotha launches in Normal and Heroic difficulties. These difficulties allow flexible group sizes and cross-server grouping, so you should be able to find a party in the Looking for Group tool if your guild isn’t raiding. The instance entrance is at the west end of Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria.
Start this week with a full five bonus rolls to use on the new raid, plus the two new ones that are available for pickup at the weekly reset. Use the first five, hearth out during a break, and buy the additional two for seven bonus chances at Ny’alotha raid gear.
For more on Ny’alotha, Mythic and Looking for Raid difficulties start next week. Your goal should be to get as close to a full clear as you can for azerite farming and for better-quality and Corrupted gear.
The new Mythic plus season begins
This week marks the start of Season 4 for Mythic plus, wiping the slate clean of your previous raider.io scores and letting you banish thoughts of troublesome Emissary mobs in dungeons forever.
The new affix is Corrupted, which places four obelisks in each dungeon. Clicking on the obelisk takes you to a shadow realm. This mimics the real dungeon, and is the place in which you fight a mini-boss and its additional friends. The spot where you kill the boss creates a portal to that point in the real dungeon.
Mythic keystones drop by four this week, so when you open your weekly chest, you’ll get a key four levels below the highest difficulty dungeon you ran last week. If you didn’t test Corrupted on the Public Test Realm, it’s worth exploring a lower key: the new affix is present on all dungeons level ten and up.
Strategies to best use use these obelisks will develop throughout the season, but for now your goal should be to complete one level-15 Mythic plus dungeon this week: that's where the gear level you’ll get from next week's chest will max out (at item level 475.)
After that, because this week's end-of-dungeon gear is capped at item level 445, don't run anything above a +6, except to set your strategies for later. If you want/need to farm item level 445 gear, spam Mythic plus level 6 dungeons this week. Just remember they’ll feel like last week’s level 10s in difficulty.
New Mythic plus dungeons debut
Two new Mythic plus-difficulty dungeons will begin this week: the Operation: Mechagon Junkyard (outside areas) and Workshop (inside areas) are now available in Mythic plus. Many of the bosses have been nerfed, so they're easier at low Mythic than they used to be on plain old Mythic.
Hard Mode is not available in Mythic plus, but continues to be available in plain-Mythic difficulty.
If you’re farming for Vision of Perfection Azerite essence upgrades for your Heart of Azeroth neck, either dungeon can drop them in the end-of-dungeon chests, and this is a great way to wrap up that work. Vision’s proc rate received a buff with patch 8.3, so it’s performing well for many classes.
The rings that drop in both dungeons are best-in-class for many characters due to their heavy stat allotment and mini-set effects when you're wearing two. Check to see whether that’s the case for your class and specialization, but for most, Mechagon keys are worth doing this week, even with gear capped at 445.
Keep up that Horrific Visions farming
If you did your maximum six Horrific Visions last week, you can only obtain one legendary cloak upgrade from them this week. If you failed any last week, you can catch up this week, with a maximum possible cloak level of 7.
You’ll still want to farm the maximum Coalescing Visions by doing the daily mini-assaults and the biweekly major assaults, however, as starting with cloak Rank 14, it will take up to six (!) runs to complete the objectives to level up your cloak.
Get your craft on
This week marks the beginning of the new crafting recipes dropping from Lesser Visions and invasions. If you have a crafting (rather than gathering) profession, farm the recipe for the Void Focus in those places, then learn it immediately: the other patterns won’t drop until you do. Then continue farming until you get the patterns for your professions, including all crafting professions and Cooking.
Learn those, then farm for ten Void Focus Splinters, which you’ll need to create the Void Focus used for crafting. You’ll get a quest to turn in at Wrathion in the Chamber of Heart. Then when you complete that, you can start collecting Shreds of Insanity from the new raid to learn how to create Heroic and Mythic level gear. You can now make Normal raid-level gear.
Other fun things to explore this week
- Get a cute new mount: If you plan to subscribe to the game for the next six months, consider changing your subscription to a six-month one so you can get the frankly adorable Squeakers mount, which includes the best /mountspecial animation in the game.
- And a wasp mount: The Malevolent Drone wasp mount drops from the Corpse Eater rare monster in Uldum, so keep an eye out and kill him when you see him.
- Farm alpacas: This is a good week to farm the alpaca mounts in Uldum as well. Make sure you have one Seaside Leafy Greens Mix in your bags in the event you spot the Elusive Alpaca in that zone. The Friendly Alpaca eats seven Gersahl Greens, which you can pick in advance alongside the river in Uldum (they show up on herbalism radar). Mollie, the final alpaca mount, is a drop from the rare Dunegorger Kaulok.
- Tackle the Heroic Darkshore warfront: This becomes available this week and features item level 460 gear, but Blizzard’s notes say they will be active for warfronts that start after this week’s reset goes live. That means it’s too bad for Alliance players, for whom Darkshore is live now.
- Scrap unnecessary Azerite gear: If you’ve picked up any unneeded Azerite gear in the past week—such as item drops from new areas since patch 8.3—you can now scrap them to receive Titan Residuum.
- Defeat the new world boss: Check your world maps to see which world boss in UIdum or Vale you can kill for a shot at 445 gear with potential Corruption effects.
Check out our weekly WoW advice for January 14-21 on the next page.
