Sharing with you tips and what weakauras that helped me get my Keystone Master (KSM). If you are unfamiliar, this is an achievement you can get for completing every current mythic plus key at a 15 higher in time. It gets you the Sintouched Deathwalker mount and the ability to upgrade your new mythic plus gear to 220 with Valor. The current version of Keystone Master is going to be available until the end of Shadowlands Season 1.
0:29The first thing that I learned is to pick your push week carefully. This does not mean that you cannot run keys in other weeks and indeed you should for practice and sometimes it’ll work out. What I was finding is that some weeks, we would just either deplete every key or just crawl through one for the weekly vault and then give up for the week because it just was not happening.
Do not be too hard on yourself if you discover this, it’s probably not you. It is very likely to be the week, especially if it is the difficult affixes. What I have found is that Fortified is almost always going to be easier than Tyrannical and I basically never tried too seriously to push in Tyrannical weeks because it was that much harder. Fortified is still dangerous but it tends to be faster and therefore just easier to beat the timers. I ended up doing six of my eight timed keys within just one good Fortified push week.
1:18 Next, I would recommend considering taking a look at mythic plus only builds and legendaries for your spec. This might sound obvious but at least for me for a while I was convinced that I could just make do with my rating legendary and the comfy talents. You change because other things are probably better. There is probably someone out there that could get the KSM with any talents in the book but life got a lot easier for me when I just kind of read through a guide, switched to Flash Concentration and some different talents. It doesn’t mean that you need to follow a guide to the letter but at the very least read what different people are saying about what to take in Mythic Plus specifically. And then try it out to see how it feels for you.
2:04Do not neglect consumables. Give yourself the best chance for success by using food, flask, oil or stones. Runes I consider optional. I barely used Runes because they are very expensive and they go away when you die but they will help if you have them.
2:39 Something that was massively helpful for me- mythic plus specific weakauras. Three in particular which are a big deal for me. First one is helpful for anybody during Shadowlands season one and this is specifically about Prideful, Prideful Tracking. It’s going to help keep track of trash percentage for you but most importantly it will alert you when you are in combat with enough trash to spot a Prideful. And it’s going to turn a nameplate red if killing that creature will push you over the edge. If you have sound on, it will also make a witch tackling sound when you engage trash that will spawn Prideful. Very useful if the group has lost track or if you had to pull something extra. An alert like this can help your group remember.
Next weakaura is the Quaking Cast Tracker, just for quaking but it was life-saving for me as a caster during quaking week. It is going to give you a big alert when your quaking ring spawns. It will give you an exact timer of how long you have before the quaking finishes. And then as you are casting a spell, the text will be green if your cast will finish before the quaking. It will turn red if the quaking is going to interrupt your spell which means you should stop casting immediately. Getting kicked by quaking can be devastating especially if you’re healing and this really helped turn around my gameplay on quaking weeks.
Third weakaura is the Flash Concentration (with meowing). It is a Holy Priest thing and it is specifically for the Flash Concentration legendary. I was having issues with my stacks falling off so what I did is I had this Flash Concentration weakaura and then I added a sound cue to make the sound “meow” when my Flash Concentration buff has five seconds or less at five stacks. Different roles and specs may want different alerts for different mechanics but the key takeaway here is if you are struggling to keep up with a class mechanic or a buff up time, consider adding a weakaura with a sound cue to remind you.
5:11Speaking of sound, if you do not already and if you feel you could use some help, try playing with game sound. There are a lot of sound cues for casts. There are boss voice lines that are paired with mechanics that can kind of help you internalize and learn when to dodge. Overall having game sound on helped me improve my awareness.
6:03 Be smart and proactive with your stuns, interrupts and anything that can stop a cast. The number one thing that I found would differentiate a smooth group from a disaster is stopping dangerous casts from trash. There’s no super fast way to teach you exactly what each and every dangerous casts are. But as you do keys, you are going to learn overtime what’s really dangerous. A good group is going to assign interrupt priorities and rotations but if your group hasn’t done that it’s still super helpful for you to personally know what to watch for and stop.
6:39 If you find yourself frustrated and kind of struggling to improve but you’re not quite sure what to work on in particular, consider recording your gameplay and then watching it back later. You do not need to buy any software, you can do this for free with OBS. A desktop standard gaming PC should be able to record at like 720p 30fps just fine while you’re playing. And watching your gameplay back is going to show you things that you may not have known that you were doing. And it’s really good for highlighting areas of your gameplay that you might overlook that need work.
7:22 Stop saving your cooldowns for the next key. Of course you want to save cooldowns for a boss or a tough trash pack. Overall the best thing you can do is just get them off as many times as possible which means stop holding on to it so long especially two minute cooldowns. Two minutes is very short and we’ll be back before you know it so just use it on the first trash pack and the following trash packs and then the boss. The time and the mana that you are going to save from being proactive with your cooldowns may very well come in handy later.
7:56 If you always run with the same people and you are stuck, consider trying a PUG. Pugging is never really going to be as reliable as running with a steady group but it can expose you to different routes, methods, strategies that you hadn’t considered and it is absolutely possible to time keys and pugs. Doesn’t mean you’re leaving your friends forever but you might learn some new tricks that can help you out in your regular group. Even if you got friends, there’s no harm in joining pugs when they are not around just to see how other people do things and get more practice so that you’ll play better whenever you play with your friends again. Aim for groups with a similar raider io to yours if possible and look for keys that you know you need more practice on.