Ten of one, half-score of the other

I had forgotten how much fun 10man is. And no, that isn’t sarcasm, last night’s ICC-10 was the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a while.

25s is all business for me (I can’t help it, I’m too focused on the success of the raid to really ever enjoy myself), but 10s is where I let down my hair. So to speak.

Last night was the first time in a long time I’d managed to get “Team Alpha” together for an ICC run. We initially were going to go and bang out some more hardmodes, and hopefully catch up to the much-more progressed Bravo Team. Unfortunately, the OT didn’t show, so Cendra got on his 232-geared Druid tank and we still went through the first three hardmodes. We opted to skip Saurfang’s hardmode, because the general consensus was both Cen’s Druid and the healers weren’t equipped to handle a frenzied Saurfang mashing up some bear paste.

As we were headed towards Princes to maybe get the guild first heroic kill for that (our 10s are woefully unprogressed, as you can see) the OT logged on. We did a quick roster shuffle with Gulliveig dropping out, since he was having router issues. Cendra got back on his hunter, and Nordic came in to OT.

We then proceeded to one-shot heroic Princes.

It was a little hairy, with Princes being one of those fights that is markedly harder on 10man than 25. The room stays the same size, and you have to cover orbs that spawn throughout the width and breadth of it with fewer people. Rather than having one pet class watching each corner of the room, I had one on each half. A little too close for comfort!

Having two melee for the attempt made it a lot easier. Rather than a pack of floor-huggers-to-be scattering like cockroaches when the kitchen light is turned on, I had to worry about two Rogues breaking in opposite directions every time Valanar went to do an empowered vortex. Indeed, tanking Valanar is a pretty boring affair. I mostly spent the encounter just watching other people and agonizing over perceived eventual demises that would be visited upon them. And judging when possible to get the Heart of the Crusader debuff up.

We then plowed through heroic BQL, Festergut, and Rotface until we reached Putricide. The goal was to put away an actually meaningful hardmode kill, and match Bravo Team in the tennis game we call competitive progression. It was about an hour before end time so we’d have to move fast.

It’s a pretty hectic fight, to say the least. But a lot of fun. There’s so much crap going on you’ll find your head spinning.

We did about six attempts, getting it to 27% our last try. The biggest thing we need to work on execution (obviously) considering this fight is like an execution ballet.

What usually did this in was diseases being passed to the wrong person, or hitting one person in melee, then another immediately, throwing off the order. We got six solid attempts in, making progress each time. Despite having to call it, we’re all pretty pumped for future attempts and will probably end up downing the sucker on Sunday.

And then the 264 Unidentifiable Organ will be mine. Oh yes.

We’ve got the power

Imagine my surprise when I read the leftovers of the Twitter Q&A from Friday and saw that our world had suddenly been turned upside down. Well, that might sound a bit dramatic, but what was announced was a tectonic shift in the play style of the Paladin class. Right now, as it stands, we just throw abilities at the boss while attempting to sync cooldowns and maximize output.

To say the least: Boring. Overly simple as well.

Something had to give and I’m glad to see that we’re finally getting that much-needed complexity that many of us have been clamoring forever for.

All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:
An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

969 is dead and rightfully so. We’ll be shifting to using a more priority-based system in Cataclysm that builds on using abilities when the payoff is at its apex. For example, say Crusader Strike builds Holy Power for us, then we would do some normal attacks, mix in CS, and build HP to 3. Once Holy Power is maxed out, that’s when we would pop Holy Shield for a longer damage reduction “break” (which begins to make sense of GC’s assertion that you would only use Holy Shield once a minute or so, it becomes much more manageable when there’s a clear point to use it).

Or, you could opt for casting Inquisition and going for a threat boost (probably more useful for trash or farm content?). In any case, choices! And priorities! We’re not just doing A, C, B, D, A, E, B, C, etc, anymore!

Has it been properly conveyed how excited I am about this system yet? I realize this is a weird reverse of Rogue combo points, where we’re stacking these on ourselves, but I am sure in the end it will be just the tonic class needs.

Likewise, this GC quote from this weekend is pertinent:

We felt like we needed to add several new spells to the paladin rotation, including making Holy Wrath a real part of the rotation. With all of those changes, we thought it was hard to justify having a mechanic to choose your Judgement when you were already choosing your Seal and Aura. It’s just a different model. If anything at the moment I’m worried that we made paladins too complex and might have to reign it back in a little. We’ll see when players can try it out in beta.

Yes, wait and see! After the long time we’ve spent wallowing in “easy mode”, erring on the side of complexity is not a bad thing. Just go with it.

Lastly, I would like to /sign the suggestion given by many on the official forums, as well as by Rohan and Sucidal Zebra: rename Holy Power to Zeal. Holy Power is an undeservingly lame moniker for something with so much potential.

Art for the sake of awesome art

I first saw Vidyala’s artwork on Anea‘s blog (whichever one of her many sites she was operating at the time, haha) and I was immediately struck by how great it was. At the time, I was looking for a new header image for Righteous Defense. Something other than Graccus, that stalwart TCG character. Something of my own that couldn’t be forced down with a C&D letter one day.

So I hit up twitter, and asked if anyone knew someone taking art commissions and Vid (of Pugging Pally fame) dm’d me back in short order offering her services. I took her up on it and I am so happy I did. As you can see above, I have definitely gotten the deal of a century. I’m pretty sure Italian princes used to have to pay small fortunes to get this kind of quality back in the day.

I’ll stop before I get accused of flattery.

In any case, if anyone is wondering the meaning of the new banner above, it’s a drawing of yours truly standing before a burning block in Stratholme, looking all righteous and “defense-y”. Fitting, I would say.

If you’re looking for someone to do an art commission of your character for a blog, or what-have-you, I cannot recommend Vidyala enough (you can find her email address on her about page). The whole process was a joy to proceed through, and Vid was very patient with my many, many tweaks and requests. She took my bizarre and vague description of what I was looking for, and turned it into the amazing banner that now adorns the top real estate of this blog. All in all, I could not be more satisfied with the process or the final result. Thanks Vid!

Prot tree is dead, long live the prot tree

On the official forums, someone asks a question about a few talents. Ghostcrawler gives up that Improved Devotion Aura is dead, Eye for an Eye’s new incarnation is dead, and then just lets the cat out of the bag:

I’m going to regret saying this, but the paladin trees are the most changed in the game. There are only a few of the current beta talents that survived the, um, cleansing.

Well then.

3 trends you can see in our “new” tree

I did one pass with wow-tal.com this morning and came up with this selection of talents. A complete waste of time, though, because our tree is obviously a work in progress. Everything is subject to change. Yet, there are still some trends you can see through the fog of war.

1. A radically different Consecration

Consecration on the beta server right now lasts for 15 seconds and has no cooldown. You drop it in one place, then can move and drop it in another immediately. Old one disappears, new one comes up. Then, the talent Hallowed Ground increases the duration by 15 seconds and damage by 15% for 1 point, and 30 seconds/30% for 2. A 45 second Consecrate.

Basically, the ability shifts to almost like a harmful aura than an actually ability in a rotation. I think this is a good change for sure, especially once you consider point #3 of this post. It’s shifting to more of a “fire and forget” ability. Moreover, even if the 45 second duration doesn’t stay, it’s obvious what the new path they want Consecration to take is.

2. Clickable Ardent Defender

This was probably one of the biggest complaints masochistic Paladins like yours truly leveled at Ardent Defender in the past, that it was automatic. At the beginning of Ulduar, we begged Blizzard for a second cooldown and instead we got the grotesque god-mode that has hung over our class ever since.

As of this latest build, Ardent Defender is now an on-click ability. Finally, some reactivity. Nonetheless, I sincerely doubt this is anywhere near the final version of this ability. Especially since 35%-0% seems too small a window to have for AD, you’re either going to misuse it or miss using it.

I’m still heartened that we’re being trusted with activating our own cooldowns now.

3. Many more buttons to push

Holy Shock, Crusader Strike, Exorcism. Those are three new single target abilities we’ll be juggling next xpac. Well, probably not Holy Shock.

The talent Improved Exorcism returns to us our precious instant Exorcism, though it’ll be a tad late if Hand of Reckoning retains its damage component. And Improved Crusader Strike… removes the cooldown entirely. Um. I can’t imagine this’ll will persist through later builds, unless it’ll be a lingering stupid trap for Paladins that think spamming a physical damage ability is a good idea for threat.

The biggest downside of all these buttons is a severe case of GCD-lockage, which will hamper us with attempting to throw out helpful abilities like a Hand of Freedom, a BoP, a self-Holy Shock in a pinch, whatever.

I would advise against obsessing too much about the tree and spending more than necessary (like I did) trying to finesse a spec with Righteous Vengeance (this will be must have, mark my words) and other major Prot talents. Next build may see a radical shift in talent placements and cost that will change the picture completely. Save your energy for then!

Bonus: What the hell is happening to Holy Shield?

We are going to turn both Holy Shield and Shield Block into short cooldowns. A short cooldown is an ability that you don’t save for an absolute emergency (like Shield Wall) but we also don’t want it to be on such a short cooldown that it feels maintenance-y. It’s a tricky number to get right, but something in the 30 sec to 1 min zone feels about right. Then you might use Holy Shield one GCD instead of SoR or you can choose to save it until the next big boss attack.

Sigh.

I mourn for my armor webbing

Was just looking over the engineering changes post on MMO-Champ and was a little annoyed by what I saw. For one (and this is my largest complaint) the armor gloves tinker is going from a straight stat boost to a on-use proc.

While 1500 armor is a pretty sexy chunk of protection, I’d rather that be always up than an extra cooldown. I’m all for extra cooldowns, for sure, but… I feel the need to gripe.

Also I don’t see any rocket boots listed, which is a shame. I’ve yet to work the courage up to swap those into my tank set and they’ll soon (well, relatively speaking) be gone.

Lastly, the Cogwheels and Hydraulic pumps thing looks interesting but if I had to bet I’d say it’s just a way to customize an engineering-only trinket so they only have to make one. A +stam empty shell with two sockets, one of each kind. Which basically means we’ll probably be making an avoidance stat stick with this and this. Good starter, but ultimately a yawn-fest for sure.

Hopefully things pan out to be a little more exciting.

What have I come home to?

Last week I had an amazing vacation and it’s somewhat disappointing to be back at work and in the routine again. However, I do have raids this week to look forward to, so that’ll dull the pain a bit.

I feel like I missed a lot in the week I spent over in Buffalo, what with the Real ID crisis and the 31 point debacle. There’s really not much I can say about Real ID that hasn’t already been said, and a week ago at that, so I’ll keep mum. Not to mention the matter is “settled” so to speak.

As for 31 points, and locked trees, I am very much in favor of this change. First and foremost because it can help remove one of the plagues of the Paladin class, that we’re too powerful at baseline. If they divide up healing, damage taking, damage dealing and lock each specialization up behind that faded out wall from levels 10-70, then that gives the developers a lot more room to make up more powerful in our spec without the risk of a Ret Paladin having too much survivability, or a Prot Paladin being able to toss more than three heals.

It’s also for the best that they’re using the redesign of the talent trees to get rid of the stupid point dumps that no one used and were primarily a noob trap. Like Ghostcrawler said:

[Players] were also given ample opportunities to make mistakes, what we call “traps.” A forum-savy player may know which are the dumb talents nobody takes or which are the mandatory ones that might at first glance seem too bland to take. But why have “choices” that are just there for new players or people who just want to swim against the stream just to be different? We’d rather have actual legitimate choices, which we feel like we can offer by having a stable of fewer good talents.

A prot tree missing Stoicism or Divinity, or only having 1 rank of Spiritual Attunement would be a good thing. As fun as it is for all of us to be in the know and cluck our tongues at those who don’t understand why Reckoning isn’t as much threat as Crusade, there’s no real benefit to having a series of “stupid traps” in the talent system.

It’ll also be interesting to see which talents don’t make the cut in the shuffle. Our tree is very top heavy, has a lot of good stuff, talents that I can’t see living without. Obviously I can, but at a glance I feel like a kid being asked to donate some of my old toys to Goodwill. Everything north of Blessing of Sanctuary feels like some epic Transformers figure.

Can’t wait for the next beta build.

So, how about some other blue posts I missed over the week? First, concerning that worst debuff ever:

[Forbearance] will be reevaluated.

I hope by reevaluated, GC means “taken out back and bludgeoned to death with a dirty toilet seat.” There is no excuse to keep this glorified band-aid any longer in game, with the touch up that so much of everything else is getting. Even if it means each spec only gets one Forbeance-inducing ability anymore, like Holy gets LoH, Prot Bubblewall, and Ret Divine Shie–no that’s a terrible idea. In any case, it’s time for a more polished mechanic than “you used x cooldown, now y and z are locked out for 2 minutes.”

Re: block,

Without defense gear any longer and with no block rating on gear, you’re probably at ~5% block, which is way too low. We need base block to be higher, but we still haven’t fully decided if that’s something all characters get or just warriors / paladins, or just tanks, etc.

I’m assuming by “all tanks” he’s also referring to the DK absorb mechanic and Savage Defense? Otherwise I’m a bit confused. Right now I’ve got 11% block (mostly from Defense), with 30% from Holy Shield, and 30% from the occasional Redoubt. I wonder what the final “base” number they’ll settle on will be. I have no idea what would “feel right” at this juncture, since 30% damage reduction can be very powerful if you’re getting that too often.

Lots of speculation about lots of changes. Let’s hurry up and get that next beta build so we can get a better idea of what we’ll all be working with this fall, eh?

Lastly, big thanks to Anafielle for posting in my absence and keeping some of the cobwebs away! I hope she’ll continue to post in the future, and I request you all shoot puppy dog looks her way to ensure that.

Threat Decay and the end of the world

Rhidach is on vacation. This week’s guest posts brought to you by Anafielle!

The Cataclysm news continues. GC posted a few times recently on threat generation, tricks & MD, and the possible introduction of a threat decay. Check out the whole string of blue posts – they’re all worth a read.

On threat, one of the changes we’re considering trying out is to have threat decay pretty rapidly. The idea is that a tank should never be able to get so far ahead on threat that they can AFK for the rest of the fight. It might sound like a nerf, but really the intent is to make sure that the tank’s job is never done — that what you do will remain important. [...] The tuning wouldn’t be such that if you missed a couple of swings that the warlocks would pull aggro. The feeling would be more that you have to still make decisions with regard to threat generation throughout the fight.

Furthermore, we are exploring the threat generation of Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade being temporary. That way it would still be useful for initial pulls or when adds join the fray, but wouldn’t be a crutch to keep tank threat consistently high throughout a fight. (Source)

OK, guys, let’s calm down and take a look at this. Ghostcrawler is basically pointing out two undeniable truths of raid tanking and threat generation today:

• Tricks and MD are capable of (mostly) replacing the threat of a disconnected / debuffed / AFK tank.
• Threat generation near the middle and end of some fights becomes easymode due to a huge threat lead. This is especially obvious if the DPS target switches a lot, or if you are being consistently tricks’d.

I’m not sure how you can disagree on either of these points if you’re a tank with omen installed.

Threat problem? What threat problem?

Case in point: Deathwhisper HM Phase 3.

If you’ve ever seen her solo tanked, you have witnessed something that (in my opinion) should not be possible. The tank in this strat is producing zero threat thanks to Touch of Insignificance. 100% of his threat generation comes from rogue tricks and hunter MDs. Solo tanking DW is one of the weirdest feelings I’ve ever had – you’re basically a meat shield with zero threat generation. A non combat pet with 60k HP could do your job. Huh. Sounds like fun.

This Deathwhisper strat made me think very, very hard about how much my threat generation matters on other fights where I’m being tricksed AND producing threat.

What are you talking about? There’s no threat problem.

I’ve rarely seen a raid get threat capped by the MT. Does this happen more in more progressed guilds? I don’t play in a top 100 world raiding guild, but I do play in a guild that’s a solid 7/12 ICC 25 hard modes. Our DPS are no slouches, but with correct threat management they stay below the MT without much trouble at all.

Can you remember a lot of fights recently where you ended up miles ahead on omen? Does your threat generation still matter at the end of a fight? Could you stop doing your rotation for a while and still hold threat? There are fights where that answer, for me, is yes.

The last major meaningful threat decision I made near the end of a fight was to hit Holy Shield and then pick up my nice cold beer. You know I wasn’t producing any threat because I had to take my face off the keyboard to drink. Mmm, Magic Hat #9 – an excellent decision.

Wait for 5 sunders and then DPS the boss!

I think GC was pretty clear about the problem he’s trying to solve. He is NOT talking about making establishing threat more difficult or painful. He is NOT talking about short term threat. He’s talking about eliminating a very, very specific problem – huge threat leads which emerge on a lengthy fight.

Having a slow threat decay makes sure that your job is never done — that you can’t get so far ahead of everyone that hitting Shield Slam at the right time becomes irrelevant for the rest of the fight. If you are already an awesome tank you probably won’t notice a difference. [...] You won’t suddenly notice a massive drop because “decay kicked in.” But you’ll never be able to get so far ahead of everyone else that there is no possibility of them catching up even if you do nothing. (source)

I think it would be really interesting to have to work to keep threat on the boss after the DPS has switched off for a while and switched back on. A small threat decay would work this in nicely without affecting our threat generation in any other way. I like the idea. (Commence the stoning!)

To be honest, I’m more interested to see what they do to Tricks / MD. I think that they’re the larger problem right now.

Anyways, it’s a blue post about a mechanic they haven’t even put in the Cataclysm beta yet. Take it with a grain of salt.

The Off Tank in a Tanking Corps

Hello, readers of Righteous Defense! Anafielle here. You might recognise me from my constant spammy twitter feed, my presence in most of Rhidach’s recent screenshots, or my frequent comments on the blog – I am Rhidach’s fellow tank, the off tank for Enveloping Shadows’ 25 man raids, and the MT and RL of our guild’s “second” 10 man. Rhidach is on vacation for the week, and he had a sudden lapse in sanity and asked me to “off tank” the blog for him.

As the off tank for Enveloping Shadows, I will now subject you to my lengthy thoughts on… off tanking. Please direct all complaints to Rhidach! :D

Am I A Main Tank or an Offtank?

I sat down to edit my Twitter bio the other day (obviously an action of great importance to my life) and as I started to describe what I do – “Off tank for Enveloping Shadows” – I started to wonder… does that really cover it? What exactly do I do in my guild? Should I say co tank? Second tank? Main tank? All these terms seem flawed in some way.

I usually end up describing myself as a main tank, and the offtank for Enveloping Shadows. Does that make any sense at all?

Two of the tanking blogs I respect most have dealt with this topic at length – Almost a full year ago, Wrathy described a tanking corps without a Main Tank. More recently, Gravity posted on the term off-tank and why it has little relevance to today’s tanking corps.

Not all of us off tanks have the opportunity to be a part of a tanking corps like that. I’ll describe a little of my history, before my time with Rhidach’s guild.

The Quiet Typical Offtank

When I first learned how to tank, in my old guild, I had a main tank who was also the raid leader. He was very much in charge and very much in control of everything in this raid. This is the guy who marks every trash pull carefully. I never, ever ran in to pull a group of mobs – he started every pull. It was almost a shock to me to learn that most guilds chain pull and the OT pulls as much as the MT does.

My off tank experience pre-ICC had mostly consisted of taunt trades, taunting adds, tanking the “less hard” boss, twiddling my thumbs for half the fight, or disgustedly putting on a DPS set for a single tank encounter.

To be fair, this made perfect sense at the time – I was extremely new, and for much of WOTLK he was teaching me how to tank, and I was messing things up in spectacular ways. I wasn’t in a position to be sharing roles with someone who had nine years of experience through two different MMORPGs, and who was also the raid leader to boot.

I educated myself though, and to be honest I think I educated myself (and still constantly educate myself) with a care that borders on obsession. He, for example, never really understood my love of having multiple gear sets, and I always had to be quietly careful with my threat set on farm bosses so as not to pull off him.

Case Study: The Festergut First Tank

Festergut (with my old guild) marked a change in how I viewed my traditional role. I remember hitting it for the first time, and my MT told me to take the boss first. “Oooh! Is this because my threat is good? I know we’ll have trouble with the enrage.” I was always pretty proud of my threat, and I thought my MT might have handed me this boss so I could take advantage of the damage buff. Nope, he went on to say, he just didn’t trust anyone else but himself to tank the third inhale. In other words, he didn’t trust me. Pretty silly since both inhales are, well, exactly the same.

It was a blow to my confidence. But hell, I was going to take advantage of a fun fight where I got to tank first, position the boss, and DPS with a cool damage buff. I was going to do it exactly right with the extent of my knowledge of my class and the encounter. I put on my slow threat weapon just like I’d learned, went behind the boss when I wasn’t tanking, and popped my wings with care. I watched my survivability and scoured the logs, and carefully adjusted my gear for threat as I could without sacrificing armor. It was one of the coolest moments in my tanking career when my old MT pointed out disgustedly on vent that I was beating half the DPS, and we needed to move hero post-tank swap to boost my damage. When we finally killed him, I was extremely pleased with myself.

Now that was a kind of off tanking I’d never, ever done before.

Being The Offtank in Icecrown Citadel

From my perspective, ICC brought all kinds of new toys to the table. I might be alone in this, but Plagueworks has always been my favorite ICC wing as the off tank. From positioning the boss on Festergut, to slime tanking Rotface, to riding the abom on Putricide, Plagueworks gave me interesting and challenging things to do – arguably more interesting and more challenging, in the first two cases, than what the boss tank is doing. I can’t be alone in feeling this way. When I came to Rhidach’s guild, he and I were both used to slime kiting on Rotface – we used to roll for it, and the loser had to tank the boss.

Sure, off tanking BQL is boring, but it’s fascinating for me because it’s one of the only boring encounters the off tank gets. And the gear requirements on BQL make it interesting in an entirely different way.

I have a limited amount of experience tanking. I don’t know much about the raids that came before Naxx. I’d be curious to know whether the readers of this blog think that ICC is more interesting to tank than the raids that came before it – in my experience, it certainly has been.

A New Guild, A New Role

In retrospect, I think the change in my perspective has less to do with what I was tanking and more to do with the environment I’m tanking in right now, with Rhidach and our guild Enveloping Shadows.

In Rhidach’s guild, which I joined about 2 months ago, I find myself in a guild where I am definitely a member of a tanking team. Even if it’s a tanking team of two! Rhidach and I play the same class, we read all the same blogs and websites, and we both keep ourselves very well informed on tanking strategy and theory. He might be the raid leader as well, but I always feel open to speak my mind about a strat or talk about who is better suited to what role. We switch up the roles often. We’re both equally suited and fairly equally experienced with all the different tanking roles that ICC requires of its tanks.

There have even been rare times when I’ve found myself with more knowledge of a strat, or knowledge of a different strat, that he has then used with success. With Rhidach gone this week, I’m fully prepared to take the lead – and several months ago I would have been in a panic about doing that.

Off Tanking as part of a Tanking Corps

For me, the term off tank doesn’t mean “the tank doing the easier jobs.” It’s a description of my role in the raid with regard to Rhidach’s role – he’s the main tank, I’m the off tank. I choose this role from the position of a tank that is part of a team.

I think of the terms Main Tank and Off Tank as a description of our roles in the raid, not of our roles in that specific encounter. Even if he’s the one tanking adds, or if I’m the one taking the boss first, I always think of him as the MT and me as the OT. I like it when a raid is organized and someone’s the leader. I like to have a good idea of who’s in charge and, while I’m perfectly capable of main tanking, when he’s around I’d much prefer it be him.

It’s also fun and amusing to watch him stress out.

So I wear the label I set on myself with pride. I’m a main tank and an occasional raid leader, but I’m the off tank for Enveloping Shadows. Off tank in a 25 man raid is the position I choose for myself and the label I apply to my role, and it makes me happier than anything else in this game.

Now, it’s time to main tank my 10 man raid tonight…

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!