Tormented is the new affix coming to Mythic Keystones in the patch 9.1

It’s time for a new seasonal affix in Mythic keystone dungeons! We’ve dealt with Sire Denathrius and learned to live with our Pride, so now it’s the Jailers’ time to shine as we move into Shadowlands patch 9.1. The new Tormented affix will see four of the Jailers’ lieutenants appearing in any Mythic keystone dungeon that’s at level 10 or above.

Defeating these powerful lieutenants will award players an Anima cell similar to the ones found in Torghast, allowing you to choose a powerful new modifier to your character. However, if you choose to ignore them, they’ll buff the final boss with their own potentially deadly auras. These include slowing player characters, increasing the physical damage they take, just extra damage going out, or reducing the healing that you receive.

Skipping these guys is definitely not recommended though. The Anima powers they’ll be offering up are looking pretty powerful. There are versions of some of the more notorious affixes from keystones — like Necrotic and Bolstering. Finally, you’ll be able to make the enemies you fight feel the wrath of Necrotic. On top of the keystone affix powers, there is also a bigger selection of powers that are closer to what we’ve seen from Torghast already. Things like self-heals as you stand still, silencing or stunning enemies the first time you attack them, or pulsing damage when there are five or more enemies around you are available from these Anima powers. There’s even a power that makes your group take less damage when your tank dies, giving you enough time to throw a battle resurrection out — hopefully.

It’s also looking like the different lieutenants will all be dropping the same Anima powers for the week. So you won’t have to worry too much about your run being sunk by bad RNG from the powers you got. The powers themselves are also role locked so what a tank gets won’t be the same as what a healer gets — which will make the tank happy that they can’t accidentally choose something that increases their mana returns.

Tormented feels like Awakened

If you’ve read the description of Tormented and are feeling a sense of deja vu, you’re not alone. It feels very much like the Awakened affix from the final season of Battle for Azeroth. That affix saw you fighting emissaries of N’zoth in his Shadow realm — only instead of giving you bits of his power, you could use them to skip groups of problematic trash enemies — while any of the emissaries that you didn’t fight would show up and need to be killed during the last boss.

Of all of the seasonal affixes from Battle, I’m glad that they chose Awakened as their template. While I’ll always miss Bwonsamdi’s Reaping power for the fun of watching hordes of ghosts come to fight you again, Awakened made the dungeons the most interesting. All of a sudden I could choose to skip that one super annoying pull that always killed my group, or choose to flex my bear muscles on the last boss extra hard by choosing to fight them with multiple emissaries up.

Currently, in Shadowlands keystones, the big strategy for these high-level keys comes from executing a route through the enemy forces so that the manifestations of Pride that you create are right in front of the harder bosses. With these new lieutenants being spread out over the dungeon we’ll get to come up with a bunch of new routes that ensure we kill them all for Anima powers as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a route through De Other Side that has you kill all four lieutenants before fighting one of the bosses just to make them as easy as possible. Even with the extra running around that might be worth it.

Overall this looks like it’ll be a very fun and engaging affix for keys this patch. I’m really looking forward to it — and I’m even more looking forward to not having to worry about a Prideful spawning in the middle of a pull because I forgot to check what percentage we were at.