If you have any alts started for Shadowlands, or a desire to have some, this week’s event was purpose-built for you. With the current Sign of the Warrior buff active, there hasn’t yet been a better time to get alternate characters off the ground and running. It’s hard to overstate just how useful it is.

Both the general buff to drops and the major quest for the week are huge jumpstarts to the speed of gearing. They don’t help as much at the lower end where gear drops are already fairly numerous and you can run as long as you want. When you climb up to higher difficulties with lockouts, the bonus drops become a huge boon, and you get to those difficulties with fewer runs thanks to more numerous lower drops.

Shadowlands World Buff Explained

The first half of the event is a permanent world buff active for the duration of the week. Like all cycling weekly events, you don’t need to collect this buff or go out of your way. It will be passively affecting all of the relevant content without you doing anything. In the case of Dungeon events, this buff causes the final boss of each dungeon to give an extra drop. Usually the drop rate for low difficulties is 1-2 pieces per boss, so this still hovers between a 12.5-25% increase in loot depending on how lucky that run already was. 

On higher difficulties where bosses might not drop an item for anyone in your party the value climbs. Naturally Theater of Pain sees less benefit with 5 bosses, and Mists of Tirna Scithe sees more because it only has 3 naturally.

Importantly, this extra drop is always from the existing loot table. You aren’t getting access to every dungeon’s loot with this extra drop, so spamming Tirna Scithe will only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll have covered all the slots you can with loot from that dungeon and will need to move forward. It also doesn’t apply to Mythic+. The wording for the buff is specifically that final bosses drop an extra piece of loot, this is Blizzard being a bit sneaky as Mythic+ bosses technically don’t drop loot at all, the ‘challenger’s cache’ does. Unfortunately, once you finish an M0 sweep on a given character, the world buff will be out of value for you. 

You should make sure if you’re an enchanter to run that sweep for the extra epic drops though; even if you don’t need the drops directly they represent more crystals that are hard to get your hands on.

Getting Guaranteed Heroic Nathria Drop

In addition to the world buff, Caretaker Kah-Toll outside of the Great Vault in Oribos offers a reward that is useful for all but the very luckiest players or hardcore M+ pushers. The Great Vault is located in the Hall of Holding on your map, and you’ll want to knock out this quest on all of your characters this week. As you can see above, the objective is completing 4 dungeons on Mythic. The reward is a guaranteed Heroic Nathria drop. This is from Nathria’s loot table, though it isn’t clear yet if Denathrius and the Stone Legion Generals are included as the listed ilvl is 213 like the other bosses.

The fastest, easiest way to complete this quest is to run Mists of Tirna Scithe 4 times. If and only if your characters have absolutely no use for M0 gear, I’d recommend doing this. Mythic+ runs do count, so if you already play a lot of M+, then run your keys as normal and you’ll get a nice piece of Heroic Nathria loot waiting for you after a few dungeons. If your characters still need M0 loot then there’s no reason to look for the quickest route to completion. You’ll get the cache regardless, so it saves you time to run whatever M0’s you intended to anyway and cover any deficit with Tirna Scithe. 
If you’re looking for drops and speed, I would recommend Mists of Tirna Scithe, Halls of Atonement, the Necrotic Wake, and Theater of Pain though the fourth dungeon is pretty much whatever you like. Theater of Pain is the recommendation despite being comparable in length to the other remaining dungeons because it has 5 bosses and therefore more loot for a similar length run. Whatever route you choose, you’ll turn the quest back in to Kah-Toll when you’re done and be rewarded with raid loot. With only one week of Heroic available before this quest, there’s a very good chance this is an upgrade for you.