Monday, March 30, 2015

How Not to Wipe on Blackhand's Crucible LFR

The Blackhand fight is, at least on LFR, a somewhat more frantic rush than Imperator Mar'gok's careful hierarchy of add destruction and not standing in one of a million things. It's not a short fight, exactly, but each of the three phases feels like a fairly simple and quick boss fight, but one that can potentially subject your raid to attrition, which is why the third phase - in which the area fills with dangerous damaging areas and people start to take heavy damage - becomes the real challenge of the fight. Effectively, making it through phases one and two is how you beat phase three - which perhaps sounds like a tautology now that I'm looking at the sentence I just typed, but there you have it.

So: How Not To Wipe:

Hold On, Partner!:

One of the easiest ways to make a mess out of the fight is accidentally pulling the boss before the whole raid is there. Blackhand patrols a large area that opens up very soon after you step off the elevator to reach him - and that means that it's common for players to wander out into the arena while other raid members are waiting for the next elevator as they had missed the previous one.

There is a safe little foyer - just sit tight right there and let the raid assemble. Blackhand will sometimes cross rather near the edge of the circle, so stay the hell back!

Falling Stuff!:

You can die on phase one. Mainly this happens if you stand in a slag bomb and then get hit by Massive Demolition. Best advice I can give is that the tanks should be moving him in a circle quickly so that you can leave the bombs behind. Don't stand in the arrows, don't stand in the bombs. Don't stand in the big brown swirls (and avoid the little ones if you can.)

Tanks and Snipers:

Phase two I think is probably the easiest one to survive on LFR. But you should know that if you get fixated by a siege tank, you need to run it over the mines that Blackhand tosses out in order to blow off the armor and also give a temporary debuff that makes it much easier to take the siege tanks out (it actually lasts long enough that if the DPS is paying attention, it won't live long enough for it to fall off.) It seems you can get away with leaving the snipers alone, but if you're melee, let yourself get knocked back by his slam on the tank (red circle) and take out about six of them before jumping down.

Danger Zones!

Phase three is a mad rush. Really the tanks just need to be good about pulling the guy around in a  big circle. If you get bombs, run them to the center, or if that's not an option, run them to behind the group. Save Time Warp/Hero/Lust/Ancient Hysteria for this phase if you can. You will run out of space eventually, but if enough people survive the first two phases, you should be able to take him down without too much trouble.

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