Nerub-ar Palace Severed Strands raid buff will be available next week, but you can start collecting Nerub-ar Finery this week

Once you’re done marveling at all the verticality in Nerub-ar Palace, The War Within‘s first raid, you might be left to wonder: how am I actually going to beat all these bosses?

Over the past couple of expansions, Blizzard’s approach to raid balancing has been what you might call data-driven: essentially they’re watching at all times to see what completion percentages look like on a certain timeline, and if certain bosses are proving to be roadblocks, they get nerfed… eventually. For The War Within, it appears they’re returning to a strategy that we first saw in Uldir back in Battle for Azeroth, providing a sort of “progressive nerf” by way of a new buff, Severed Strands.

What does the Severed Strands buff do?

Severed Strands is a stacking buff that provides 2.25% increased healing and damage per stack while inside the raid, stacking up to a max of 18% after completing its associated quest eight times — a tiny amount below the 20% cap Morgan Day initially revealed in an interview.

How do I get the Severed Strands buff?

Getting this buff requires obtaining Nerub-ar Finery, which players can get as drops in raid starting with the October 8th reset. You can acquire eight of them per week, but the quest The Finer Things  (obtainable right inside the Nerub-ar Palace entrance) requires 16 of them, meaning you can gain a 2.25% damage and healing buff every other week (the first one will be available as early as October 15th). You get Nerub-ar Finery by killing raid bosses on any difficulty (including LFR), and the 2.25% damage and healing bonus is Warband-wide.

Note that if you miss a week, or only collect seven this week, it’s okay: you will be able to get enough to catch up next week (or the week after, or the week after that). Nerub-ar Threads has a currency maximum of eight for the first week, limiting the number of drops — but it will go up by eight every week. Missing out on Nerub-ar Finery drops won’t put you behind forever, and you can catch up whenever you want to.

We haven’t really seen this kind of thing in a raid since Reorigination Array in Uldir, which was a passive tied to Azerite Armor from the raid that would buff your secondary stats every three bosses killed. It’s interesting to see Blizzard placing the “nerfing” of the raid back into players’ hands again, essentially saying that as long as you can kill bosses you should get credit towards Severed Strands in some capacity.

Originally published July 17, 2024; updated October 9, 2024.