The Halls of Blood wing of Hellfire Citadel is actually more or less the "Orc wing" of the instance. All the bosses are (or at least used to be) Orcs. As we push on, we'll be fighting primarily demons (though I expect Orcs will still make up a lot of the trash.)
The trash here is mostly self-explanatory and not terribly difficult. You'll have some long hallways to fight through, but typically with small and sparsely-placed mobs, so it's not the BC-style trash gauntlet you might expect.
Hellfire High Council:
I'll abbreviate the three bosses in this council fight to Dia, Gurtogg, and Blademaster, as that's probably how you'll do it in the raid. Tanking these guys is fairly simple - there's no tank-swap mechanic, so instead you'll just have one tank pick up Gurtogg and Blademaster and the other grab Dia. I don't know that Dia's particularly dangerous (I was tanking the other two) but she does have some kind of damage-reduction aura, so you'll want to tank her away from the other two bosses.
A lot of this fight depends on the rest of the raid.
Gurtogg should die first, as he stacks up a permanent max-health reduction on everyone. He will stack up an acidic wound debuff on the tank as he attacks. However, he'll occasionally fixate on a random raid member. That person should book it (seriously, people in my raid were just letting him wail on them, which is bad for them and for the tank.) You want to get as much distance from Gurtogg as you can during the fixate so that you have time for the acidic wound debuff to fall off.
Blademaster will throw swords at random people and he'll occasionally split into different mirror images. I believe all the images need to die before he comes back. They can't really be tanked, so just dodge the blades they throw (there will be an arrow to indicate where they're coming from) and help out the DPS in taking them down.
Finally, Dia, who you'll be attacking last, does one major raid-wide thing, which is putting a mark on various targets and then casting Reap, which causes them to spawn a void zone where they're standing. Raid members with this mark should run to the edge of the room to drop them off. She'll also summon giant voidwalker beast things that will float across the room. I think you just don't want to be in their path (think Onyxia's Deep Breath.)
This is one of those fights that gets simpler as it goes and is not terribly hard.
Kilrogg Deadeye:
This is the only one we wiped on (though we came close on Gorefiend.) It's more or less a battle of attrition.
The job of the tanks is actually quite simple. Apparently we did it wrong, but I don't know if it made all that big a difference. We just had me tank the boss while the other tank picked up big adds. Apparently you're supposed to swap on the big adds, but oh well.
The big challenge with Kilrogg himself for a tank is making sure you get your active mitigation ability up before he does Shred Armor, otherwise you'll get a stacking debuff that increases damage done. However, if you're comfortable with active mitigation, this shouldn't be too hard. Simply bank resources so you always have one available. As a Paladin, I'd always wait until I had five Holy Power before I used Shield of the Righteous so that I could quickly get the one HoPo I needed if I had a Shred Armor coming. If you can tank Rukhran in Skyreach properly, you can manage Kilrogg.
The raid is responsible for making sure you don't get too many big adds. Part of the reason this fight will last so long is that adds need to be prioritized. Normal-sized Orcs will rush toward the blood circle to get turned into berserkers. DPS needs to make sure they die before they do. Kilrogg will also fling blood at random players (there's an arrow to indicate its path, which I assume means that you don't want to stand in the way,) which will spawn a blood pool and a little blood add that needs to die.
Some of the normal-sized orcs will jump directly into the blood circle, not giving you time to kill them. So you will occasionally have to pick up big adds.
Finally, Kilrogg will occasionally create three little runes for Visions of Death, which will detonate after a while if people aren't standing on them. Those who do will be transported to a vision of their own demise and have to fight off demons in another room. As a tank, I didn't experience this, so I'll have to talk about it when I do the DPS impressions.
Overall, Kilrogg's a pretty long endurance fight.
Gorefiend:
Gorefiend is also largely about adds. He has two distinct phases.
During the main phase, he'll melee the tank and eventually mark players and the current tank with Shadow of Death. When this gets applied, the other tank should taunt and the first one should prepare to get sucked into Gorefiend's stomach.
Inside, there will be a number of adds to kill, but tanks should focus on the big, hostile one. Interrupt its casts and DPS it as best you can. When it reaches something like 50%, you'll want to run to the center of the stomach room to be transported back into the main room. Pick up that add again and kill it.
While not tanking the boss, you can help kill adds.
After a while, Gorefiend will run out of energy (runic power?) and he'll begin Feast of Souls. During this phase, he'll take extra damage, so DPS will pop Hero/Lust and do as much damage as they can to him. In the meantime, tanks should spread out and intercept the little glowing souls that shoot toward the boss. You'll take a bit of damage, but intercepting these will prolong the phase, allowing your raid to kill him more quickly.
As I understand it, tanks should only get Shadow of Death once per main phase, so you'll have plenty of time for the debuff to wear off as long as both tanks are kept alive.
Dem Bloody Halls:
Perhaps the overarching theme of this wing is that you're totally in the hands of your raid. Each of the fights is rather simple to tank, and you won't be moving around all that much. There are lots of adds, but only a few actually need to be tanked. If I recall correctly, we'll have two weeks of this and Hellbreach before we head on over to the third wing, then another two weeks before wing four and another two weeks before taking on Archimonde himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment