The heavens burn, get some ointment!
Halion is a different ball game. Something I don’t think many guilds were expecting, or prepared for. The rumors abounded that he was EZ mode, a quick walk in the park, easily dispatched. And then after the Ruby Sanctum was released, word started to trickle out about trash you had to actually CC (horrors abound!) and mechanics that couldn’t be steamrolled in the usual sense that we were accustomed to. OS 2.0, this was not.
The trash just by itself I could write a blog post on. If you’re not using some good ol’ fashioned crowd control, you will get stomped by the Commander packs. Basically, the way you handle trash is this:
- Assaulters get pulled aside by one tank and saved for last. They cleave, so dps and heals cannot stand in front of them.
- Invokers need to have dedicated interrupters on them. Their blast waves hurt. Focus these down first.
- Commanders need to be CC’d the duration of the pull. Start the pull by having a druid Hibernate one at range, and then grab the Assaulters and Invokers as they rush over. have druids keep Hibernate up.
We wiped a few times on trash because we got careless and thought we could AOE faceroll it down. Don’t make the same mistake.
Baltharus the Warborn
Mark this guy before you pull, since he has a mechanic of making copies of himself. When he attacks a tank he puts a stacking debuff on the tank that reduces the healing you take and increases the damage Baltharus does. And then, to top it all off, he has a Whirlwind where he’ll attack much, much faster. Combined with the debuff, you could be in trouble. Strategies I’ve seen recommend a tank swap on Whirlwind, but honestly it didn’t give me too much trouble. I was okay just using a cooldown.
OT picks up copies, dps stays on the marked one, everybody wins.
Saviana Ragefire
The easiest of the three mini bosses, for sure. Have a Rogue equip Anaesthetic Poison and you completely negate the enrage mechanic to point where you’ll ask “did she ever enrage?” If she does get an enrage off, she’ll splash crazy fire AOE on your raid and probably kill them all. When she goes up in the air, spread out. If you’re MTing and get hit with the Conflagarate, have the OT pick up Saviana until the effect wears off.
General Zarithrian
We did not do this guy correctly, at all. I tanked him by where he stood, Anafielle picked up adds. Once my stacks got to three and I had 60% of my armor gone, I just taunt/bubbled to clear my stacks and hold him. Then the second time I called for Ana to grab him but died before she could. Adds swarming everywhere, dps ignoring them for some odd reason. I get brezzed, pop back up, start grabbing adds. Trying to encourage dps to kill them, but someone shouts “BURN! NO TIME!! AAGGHHHH” and I die on the inside.
I continue to grab adds, eventually tank swap with Ana, and with about 20 adds up and half the raid dead he drops.
The way this should be done is tanks swap at about two stacks of the armor debuff, and ranged burns down adds immediately. Because the adds are casters, they don’t need to be tanked, per se, just controlled. Playing taunt tennis with the dps will suffice.
Anyway, once we stumbled through that fight it was time for Halion.
Yes. Halion.
First things first, I split up my tanks, heals, and dps into two groups: Fire Team and Shadow Team. Mostly this plays out in P3, but it’s important to be prepared.
This guy’s got three phases of fun. The first phase the Fire Tank grabs Halion and positions him so his side is presented to the raid like a juicy steak. People take care not to stand in front of or behind the boss, standard dragon rules apply. Especially with a scorching flame breath.
Meteors will come down on spots marked with a pulsing orange rune, making a giant flaming X much like Marrowgar’s coldflames. Don’t stand in those. There’ll also be a debuff called Mark of Consumption which stacks as time progresses and it is not dispelled. The person with the Mark has to run out of the raid and drop it as far as they can.
At the 75% mark, Halion disappears into the Twilight and the raid should follow through the portal. Because of the way phasing works, if you click the portal while close to the middle, you’ll immediately aggro Halion upon transitioning. So, be sure to run to the wall next to the portal, then click it, so you won’t aggro on entry. Get yourself in position and engage, as you want to keep Halion dead in the center if possible.
There are no meteors in the Shadow world, but there are two spinning orbs along the perimeter of the battlefield. Every 30 seconds they’ll create a beam which will invariably kill anyone standing in it. As the tank you have the most important job of the fight here, with the success of this phase resting on your shoulders. You need to spin Halion so that the beams will always pass diagonally through his body, giving your raid a safe spot to stand in.
The way I did this was level my camera off, and try to keep the orb behind Halion visible over his right side. That way the left was generally clear for melee. Something I found (thanks to Purraj for suggesting it) very helpful was turning on RP walking so that I was turning the boss at the same speed that the orbs were revolving.
Rotating is rough on your raid because they need to constantly stay moving and be always cognizant of where the beam could be. If they get trapped by the beam they might end up in front of Halion’s face or tail, and that’d be trouble.
In phase two, there is also a shadow version of the Marks of Consumption for the raid to deal with. Don’t let someone get trapped by a beam while dropping off their mark.
Once you hit 50%, portals will open again and a Halion will appear in the physical realm. Fire Team goes through the portals and the Fire Tank picks him up. At this point, there’s a “corporeality timer” up at the top of your screen. You want that number between 40% and 60%, though preferably on 50%. Your two teams just need to, like Stalagg and Fuegen, keep their dps balanced and not let one side surpass the other.
In phase 3, Meteors, Marks, and Beams continue apace. Just keep dps consistent, sweat like you’ve never perspired before, and eventually you’ll get him down.
Ultimately, this fight is all about the shadow world and rotation. We found that was the hardest part of the fight. Once I stopped screwing up rotating (honestly, something about me and dragons that need to be moved just does not mix at all) and got a good pace going, we went from wiping at 30% to easily killing him.
Good luck in there, it’s no cake walk!
Armory Feed
@Anafielle
2 July 2010 at 12:40 pm #
How in the world do you come up with these blog post titles?
@Rhidach
2 July 2010 at 12:48 pm #
A refrigerator covered with magnet words.
Grats on your kill. Our 10-man team (we only raid 10-mans) got him on Wednesday (server 2nd, huge accomplishment for us!)
I like the RP walking tip for the tank in the Shadow Realm. Here’s another for tanking in the Shadow Realm:
1. Everyone gets positioned on Halion’s back left leg.
2. Shadow Realm tank postions Halion in middle so the orb beam bisects Halion’s head (as mentioned above).
3. However, the position of Halion should NOT be perpendicular to the orb beam, instead Halion’s head should be at a 45 degree angle to the orb beam (closer to the orb beam on the tank’s right side). This provides a large space for all the other raiders to be far away from Halion’s tail swipe and the orb beam.
This positioning will also prepare you for Heroic mode when there are 4 orbs and 2 beams.
Edit – I just reread your post – I think you said what I suggested with the beam passing diagonally through his body.
@Rhidach
2 July 2010 at 12:52 pm #
Grats! We scored the server first ourselves on 25man, which is nuts. Kinda. Sorta. … Not really.
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Wow how are your screenshots so crystal clear! /envy
@Rhidach
2 July 2010 at 1:35 pm #
I have my graphics settings just about all the way up. I agree, it surprises me how smooth they look!
Ok, stupid question here, but what is RP walking? I’m not recognizing that option at all (and being at work means I can’t check my game settings ;) )
Theres a walk button. For me its the delete key, its handy for movement fights grobbulus etc.
Grats on your server first. I’ve only done it on 10-Man last Thursday as my 4th raid after 3 months out of the game and it was a lot of fun :)
I don’t even want to think of the chaos of a 25-Man with all the movement involved in this fight (note, not fun for Holy Paladins ;p).
The trash pulls were fun too, we were surprised by the cleaves and fire/bump aoes but all in all I don’t think they are so hard. You just need tanks that know how to work together and position mobs correctly. cc is not more necessary as it is in all of LK (sadly).
Thanks for all your posts Rhidach, they are as always informative and entertaining.
Dreaming’s last blog ..Back in Business
We pretty much followed your strats word for word when we went in last night on 25 man. Everything seemed to work fine (getting CC up on the commanders was killing us on those trash pulls, but not doing it killed us quicker), with the exception of General. We ended up having to burn Hero, all CDs, and even have healers help DPS early on, just so we could kill him. Using ranged on adds was going really slowly, and we were getting overwhelmed at 50% or so. This fight nearly had me ripping my hair out in frustration.
Halion, in comparison, seemed really easy, although we didn’t get him down. Our issue wasn’t the rotating or anything (most of the time), but instead, getting through the transition to p3 with our tank alive. Either he’d end up dying to regular damage (not enough heals) or the heals in the shadow realm would die early to the cutter.
One thing I did note during our attempts was that, we had designated a position for the shadow tank to start in when he pulled in P2, because it would put the cutter just to his left when it started up the first time. After 4 or 5 attempts, we started noticing the cutter starting in a completely different spot, which wiped the raid in record time as it popped up directly in the middle of everyone. So either it starts in different spots eventually, or it was bugging out on us. /shrug
I think, in large part, the reason we didn’t kill him last night was that we spent 2 hours just getting to Halion (that was with multiple wipes on trash because people weren’t taking it seriously, as well as numerous AFKs which were driving me up a wall).
I think the best thing to walk away from this comment with is that, yes, this dungeon is as much a wakeup call as Ulduar was to Naxx raiders. This instance is hard. The trash is hard. The bosses are hard. It is most certainly not faceroll like ICC is these days.
Brilliant, thanks for that, we downed it ten man last night. Whilst we don’t generally have 25man gear, we are doing icc heroics (9/12) but for the ten man version we didn’t need to cc anything. We also have no “tranq” for the enrage on drake boss, but we one or two shot everything except halion.
We were having trouble with him until we changed the strat and one shot it. What we did was:
Tank in shadow listened and turned on rp walking
Tank in shadow listened and put the orb over halions shoulder
This is the key part. For phase two, we only had melée dps go down. They were the group that would be dpsing in shadow realm phase three so in phase two we had, in the fire realm: 1 tank (me). 3 ranged dps. We didn’t do anything except dance with each other in phase two whilst the guys in the shadow realm did their thang. In the shadow realm was: 1 bear tank. 2 ret pallies. 2 holy pallies. 1 resto shaman. Thus worked because enrage was never an issue and it takes some stress off the healers, with less people down there taking damage less people to stuff up on laser beams.
Phase three hits and one holy pally comes back up to fire realm and we dps him down. One of the ranged is going from fire to shadow realm to maintain the balance and win.
So thanks for ur advice! And sorry for writting a blog post in ur comments!
Ps. We cleared the place in 1.5hours firsttime in. The other group took over 3hours and did it completely different.
@Rilgon
5 July 2010 at 6:47 pm #
Have a Rogue equip Anaesthetic Poison
no no no no NO NO NO
Using Anesthetic as a Rogue is such a hilariously massive DPS loss that suggesting this is about as bad as suggesting a Hunter use Aspect of the Wild.
Hunters remove Enrages. Period, end of story, kick your Hunters if they’re too bad to do so. Saviana is basically a easy version of Flamegor.
Rilgon Arcsinh’s last blog ..The State of the Scope
@Rhidach
5 July 2010 at 10:36 pm #
Normally I would agree on anything that maximizes dps, but this is a miniboss and if you’re not killing it because of what poison the rogue is using you’ve got a different issue. Moreover, anesthetic poison means you never see the enrage happen because it’s squashed immediately. A hunter casting tranq has to react to the enrage, which leaves room for error. We can err on the side of caution this fight.
I can’t speak for 25 man, but 10 man trash certainly does not require CC.