Castle Nathria

One of the biggest changes made in our current patch (11.0.5) was that Blizzard went back and made it so Shadowlands raids were easier to solo.

Shadowlands Season 4 continues, and this week's Fated raid is Castle Nathria, so it's time to go beat up Sire Denathrius and the rest of castle's inhabitants for higher ilevel loot.

Shadowlands Season 4 starts on August 2 and there are a host of incoming features -- new Mythic+ difficulty dungeons, for example -- but one of the most novel and intriguing is the Fated affixes coming for Shadowlands raid instances Castle Nathria, Sanctum of Domination, and Sepulcher of the First Ones on a rotating system.

If you've done any raiding in Castle Nathria, you probably know who Rendle is, and there's such a thing as rubbing it in, Blizzard.

On June 1, Blizzard made an adjustment to Mythic Sire Denathrius, which isn't amazingly notable, but when you consider that Castle Nathria has been out since December 8, 2020 and Complexity Limit killed him that same month, it's interesting to see tuning changes this far into the life of the raid.

Valor Points have returned to address the difficulty of gearing up in Mythic Keystone dungeons by letting players upgrade gear — but even with these changes, quite a few World of Warcraft players were concerned by the relative paucity of loot drops in raids.

If you've been running Mythic+ or Castle Nathria, you've probably noticed that the Anima drops have pretty slim — just 35 Anima per boss kill in Nathria or full clear of an M+ dungeon.

Sire Denathrius is out, and all of Castle Nathria is finally available to players who primarily raid through LFR -- and I find that kind of strange.

Okay, complete disclosure here -- I loved how easy it was to gear up by the end of Battle for Azeroth.

Right now, we're in the thick of the hunt for World First in Castle Nathria -- by the time you read this, we may even have a winner.