Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Sire Denathrius - LFR Tank Perspective

 The "Audience With Arrogance" wing of Castle Nathria is now open on LFR, meaning the whole raid is out for those of us with trouble getting out guilds started on stuff to see the conclusion of Shadowlands only current raid.

I've now tanked this on my Paladin and Death Knight.

This one-boss wing is just the final fight with Sire Denathrius, and given that fact, it's not shocking that there's a lot going on.

You can certainly brute-force you way through a lot in this fight, but there are a couple things that will make it a lot smoother if you understand them:

First off, there are three phases, with a transition period between phase 1 and 2.

Phase 1 begins with the Sire placing four stacks of a debuff on everyone in the raid. He'll periodically do a cone attack aimed at the tank that will remove one stack from anyone it hits and spawn an add for each person it hits. These adds should be burned down with AoE.

Now, I believe that you need at least one stack of this by the time the transition phase begins, so you'll want to have one tank taunt when the other one is down to one stack - though that might be just a thing for higher difficulties.

Over the course of this phase, a quarter of the room will periodically be covered in nasty stuff, so you need to run him around the room - you lose space to work in, but as long as you get him to 70% before you run out of room, you'll be ok.

At 70%, the transition begins. He'll toss everyone back to the edges of the room, and you'll all be slowed depending on how many stacks of the debuff you have. You're also silenced, so if you activate a speed boost right before this starts, it'll help a lot. You need to run to the boss and get out of the big donut-shaped AoE. Approaching him clears the debuff stacks, but if you don't reach him, you won't be protected from the massive fall damage that you'd take when you plummet down to the depths of the castle.

Now, phase two starts.

Tanks will need to juggle Denathrius and Remoria, his sword. Denathrius has a narrow cone attack that will damage and debuff the tank as well as anyone it hits - including adds. Meanwhile, Remoria has a stacking bleed debuff that will necessitate a tank-swap periodically. One key to tanking in this fight is that the boss (or the flying sword) will teleport to whoever has threat on them. Periodically, Denathrius will do a big AoE around him. However, if you're on one of the points of the cross-shaped arena, you can easily run through a soul-mirror to get to the other side of the room, getting out of the AoE (and Denathrius will blip over to you.)

Tanks can aim the cone attack at the adds on these points or to adds that are inaccessible from melee - dps should focus on taking down all the adds (I think).

Remoria will occasionally do something called Massacre, which creates many overlapping lines around the room that you'll need to dodge, as she'll then slash along those lines, hitting anyone in the path.

Once you get him to... I want to say 40% or so, Denathrius will take up Remoria and create nasty aoe around the soul mirrors, so you'll need to get to the center of the cross platform.

Taunt-swaps are pretty conventional here. You'll want to tank him near enough to an edge that people can get out of his big aoe circle, but not so close that anyone can be knocked off the platform. Massacre and the bleed will continue in this phase. The main thing is you have less room to work with and there's a sort of enrage timer enforced by the fact that he'll periodically cover a third of the space in nasty red anima goo, similar to the first phase. If all three thirds are covered, you're basically going to die (we had a 1% wipe thanks to this on my DK).

Looting Remoria off him, you can place the sword at the tower where the captured Naaru from Sanguine Depths is hanging out, and it turns out that Denathrius' soul is now trapped in his sword, which is then being "reformed" by Z'rali. If you are also caught up on the Torghast story quests, you'll immediately get another quest that has Bolvar get another vision into Torghast. Turning in the sword and talking to Bolvar both give you 1250 anima, so if you want to knock out your weekly anima-collection quests easily, you can save the latter for next week (though you'll have to wait for a cool and interesting cutscene.)

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