Tanking Guide to The Lurker Below

[Orokosaki]

Tanking Guide for The Lurker Below in Serpentshrine Cavern


Overall Strategy:
-The Lurker Below is a two phase fight, where the phases repeat on a set timer until the boss is dead. Phase one consists of the Lurker himself, then during phase two the boss despawns and is replaced with 6 Coilfang Ambushers (Ranged adds) and 3 Coilfang Guardians (Melee adds).

Boss Abilities:
-“Spout” This ability is on roughly a 45 second cooldown. Starting from the current target, Lurker will cast a spout of water that moves in EITHER direction and makes a full 360 degree rotation around the circle. The spout itself hits VERY hard and will almost surely kill anyone other than the tank if they do not avoid it (The easiest manner to avoid the spout is to simply drop into the water and let it pass over your head). In addition to the damage it does, if you do happen to survive the spout, it knocks the player back well away from the fight (Sometimes upwards of 100 yards). The lurker also spouts immediately following every phase two, so the raid needs to be ready to dive underwater as soon as phase two ends.
-“Whirl” This ability is used VERY frequently during phase one and hits for around 5,000 damage, the whirl will affect anyone standing in melee range at the time. He will whirl immediately after every spout, as soon as he emerges from every phase two, and also 5 seconds after every geyser (Which will be explained next). If you are standing on the inner edge of the platform, the whirl will knock you to the outer edge instead of the water. Also, if you stand on the very outside edge of the platform, you should be able to avoid the whirls altogether (This is important to minimize raid healing, especially while learning the encounter).
-“Geyser” This ability hits for roughly 3,500 damage and also has a knock-back aspect to it. The targeted player and anyone within a 3 yard radius will all be knocked back (Much farther than the whirl knock-back) this is combated by spreading the raid out as much as possible so geyser only affects one person.

Phase One:
-The fight starts when the boss is fished up from the pool inside the ring. The main tank needs to immediately grab him and begin building threat quickly.
-It’s important to note here that as long as ranged DPS stay out of melee range, they do NOT need to watch their threat as it is impossible for them to pull aggro on the boss (However, they can still pull aggro on the guardians).
-Melee DPS needs to be careful of their threat, and depending on the healing in your raid, they may need to watch their boss timers and back out to the edge of the platforms to avoid taking damage from the boss’ whirl ability.
-The raid needs to spread out as much as possible during this phase, possibly sending some ranged out to platforms to avoid clumping. This is especially important when it comes to the main tank healers, because if the geyser targets one of them (Or someone standing too close to them) and knocks them all back together it could spell disaster for the raid.

Phase Two:
-When the boss submerges a total of 9 adds begin swimming towards the raid. 6 of these are Coilfang Ambushers (Which will stay on the outer 3 platforms, 2 on each one) that have around 26,000 hp and randomly target players to attack. These mobs also have a multi-shot that hits for around 3,000 on multiple targets. It’s very important that your ranged DPS get on these mobs as quickly as possible to minimize the damage they do to the raid. Meanwhile, 3 Coilfang Guardians spawn on the inner platform and must be dealt with immediately. They have roughly 60,000 hp, a very nasty cleave (Which will one shot a cloth wearer), and a powerful melee attack that can hit for upwards of 3,000 on tanks. These mobs need to be tanked or crowd controlled as soon as they emerge or your healers will certainly die.
-Phase two lasts one minute, so these adds need to be dealt with VERY quickly. Once the tank has the first guardian under control, melee will burn it down while the ranged DPS takes care of the ambushers. The off tank needs to be in position to break the crowd control on the next mob so the DPS can immediately start attacking when the first one dies.
-As you’re learning the encounter it is possible that the third add will still be alive as phase one begins again, if that is the case, the mob will need to be dragged underwater by the tank so as to avoid the spout that comes the second the boss re-emerges. Also, be very careful as a raid because as soon as the lurker re-emerges he will whirl and then immediately spout.


Tanking Tips:
-As for which gear to wear, avoid frost resistance gear (You shouldn’t be taking spouts) and choose Devotion Aura over Frost Resistance Aura as well. As a main tank, effective health gear is the best course of action on this fight. If you are off-tanking this encounter, you will want to drop some avoidance/mitigation in favor of aggro-oriented gear since you will not be getting steady rage.
-When it comes to positioning, there are two things that can really impact your raid in a positive way. Number one; make sure that you use the platform area in front of the pillar as your tanking position. This way, if you do happen to take a spout, you will be knocked back into this pillar and not 100 yards away where you are worthless to your raid (In no way does this make it okay to ever take a spout though, it is just to be used as a fail-safe). This positioning will also place you very close to the position that the first guardian emerges, so you will be ready to tank it immediately.
-The second positioning trick for a main tank on this fight may sound odd, but I promise you it will help. Tank the lurker from inside the water on the inner ring of the platform. Yes, you will take the scalding water damage every tick BUT you will not be knocked out of melee range on whirls (Which means that the number two person on aggro won’t take the random hit) and your healers will be able to reach you from slightly farther away. The only thing to note here is that there are potential line-of-sight issues if you don’t communicate well with your healers while positioning, so be sure to swim around before you first pull to get a feel for where you can and cannot stand.
-There are a couple times during the fight where rage will become a factor; the first of which is when the boss is spouting (Since you shouldn’t be taking any damage during this time) and the second of which is when phase two first begins. To combat the lack of rage during spouts, simply stop using Shield Block and only use heroic strike if you have a full rage bar.
-As for making sure you have rage at the start of phase two, this is the ideal time to use your bloodrage ability. Also, you can coast a little on threat at the end of phase one if you are far enough ahead of the melee to build rage for the Guardians.
-When tanking the guardians themselves, make sure that you do NOT re-position them unless you have to since melee can and will be one-shot by the cleave if they take it. These mobs are stunnable and disarmable, so make sure that you are using your cooldowns of each.
-The last thing to make sure you do as the main tank is to be in the water waiting for the lurker to re-emerge. As soon as he does, taunt or shield slam to ensure you are top aggro or else his initial spout will start from a different location and most likely cost you some raiders.

Tank Drops:
-The “Mallet of the Tides” drops from this boss. This is easily one of the best threat-generating tanking weapons in the game and will be worth spending DKP on to replace either the The Sun Eater OR King’s Defender. Post patch 2.3 this weapon will have a fairly large chunk of expertise rating, which should provide a substantial boost to your TPS while providing the Stamina and Defense rating of an effective health weapon.
-For our fuzzy friends, the Boots of Effortless Striking are a great set of tanking boots if you are above the armor cap, or are just looking for a little more aggro in a given situation.
-Lastly, for those of you that are able to masquerade as DPS from time to time, the Bracers of Eradication are a fairly notable upgrade to the DPS plate bracers from Gruul’s Lair and will last you until you are into Tier 6 content (At least from a PVE standpoint).


-If anything is missing from this guide, please let me know and I will do my best to update it, also if there are any further questions on the encounter, I will be more than happy to address them as they are voiced.

**EDIT** Item links were added

[Cowofdoom]

There are some tricks that make this fight very easy.

The first of which is to tank in the water. If you tank standing in the position mentioned in the guide, you will eat every whirl and get knocked back. Since you're already taking the dmg from the water from standing in the puddle, you can take a few steps forward and actually be in the water while tanking (back against the platform ring). This makes staying in range very easy, since the whirl will only knock you up onto the ring (not out of range), and you can drop right back in. You don't have to worry about the spout (as MT), since you're already in the water. My healers say they don't have any LOS issues, so no problems there. At that point, just make sure someone is calling out to get in the water for everyone else as soon as the boss does his emote (sometimes the timer is off, but the emote is always right).

Second, sheep the melee adds for the whole fight. What we do is (we have a warrior OT and a feral druid OT) have the MT and 2 OTs each tank one of the melee adds for about 5 seconds or so to establish aggro, then we have all of them sheeped. I'll usually mark them after the sheep are up, so there is no confusion. If a sheep breaks, it goes straight to the tank that had it at the beginning. It just gets re-sheeped. If those adds are sheeped for the whole fight, they do not respawn and do not need to be killed till after lurker is down. If we happen to be short a mage, we tank and kill 1 melee add every fight and keep the other 2 sheeped.

[Selini]

We do it slightly differently.

We use either a warrior MT or myself on the fight, usually I'm 2nd to taunt if the first one drops.

We try to stick 3 ranged dps on each island, 2 mages on 2 islands is important. The rest of the ranged are told to pick a random island.

Pre dive phase we just dps as normal, we did try doing the strat of tanking in the middle but healers had LOS issues so we ditched that one. At spout both tanks (yup we had two tanks at his head incase the first dropped) would jump in and get whirled out on to the platform.

Dive phase, we stuck the MT on the add to the left of the tanking spot on the inner ring. Then 1 prot tank would go to one island and build aggro on the add we would sheep for the entire fight, 3 sunders max. The druid tank (myself) would take the island on the right of the tanking spot and a mage would sheep the add on the inner ring close to there.

When the first add on the inner ring would hit 25% or so I'd move from tanking the adds on the island to tanking the sheep, ranged would finish off the island adds while I still had aggro.

Melee would focus on the inner ring adds, takes a bit of timing and can be tricky with low melee but ranged should help nuke after islands are clear. It's not surprising for me to jump into the water at spout with an add still on me because we ran out of time :)

We tried sheeping all adds for the entire fight but that strat didn't work for us if the tank didn't have aggro and it popped out of sheep and teleported away! (Slow mages ftw :))

On some tries we had our MT fishing so I would grab aggro on Lurker whilst he requipped weapons and such, then he would just retaunt. I also found it useful to taunt Lurker when the MT hp was getting dangerously low - sometimes that meant my death since healers weren't awake, so making a macro announcing you will taunt is a good idea.

About melee on the fight, most of the time they just took the whirl damage, we stuck a dedicated resto shaman on the melee just chain healing all the time. :)

[Snum]

We are trying to get this fight down. We made good progress last night, be still need to figure out what is best for us on phase 2.

Which leads me to the sheeping the melee adds...... If you sheep those 3, and keep cc'ed the whole boss fight, no more of them come during the next phase 2?

[Temig]

We are trying to get this fight down. We made good progress last night, be still need to figure out what is best for us on phase 2.

Which leads me to the sheeping the melee adds...... If you sheep those 3, and keep cc'ed the whole boss fight, no more of them come during the next phase 2?

You'll need to kill them but you have save your healers some healing by sheeping 2 of them while you kill one and then having your tanks break them just before the previous one dies to get some threat so your DPS can go to town on it.


Also, in terms of the tanking position. My guild never had the MT taking dmg from the water constantly. The MT would stand on the platform. Just before the whirl (assuming your using DBM this is REALLY easy) the MT can move forward into the water (or, as I got accustomed to doing, jump at Lurker) and just get whirled back onto the platform. If the MT is lagging this won't work so well obviously but if the MT places himself with his or her back facing the torch near the tanking position that will stop them from getting thrown entirely off the platform and they should remain in Lurker's melee range. Jumping into the water and diving under a bit a few seconds prior to spout is also recommended.

The rest of the fight really relies on your DPS. Either they'll get the adds down quickly enough or not. Not is obviously not a good situation to be in ;)

[maddfez]

If one of the nine adds is still up in some fashion during a later submerge, it will not 're-pop.' We learned the fight sheeping two adds and keeping them CC'ed the whole fight. Our OTs will build some threat on them so if the sheep breaks it bee-lines for someone that can take the hits, but it makes the fight pretty simple if your dps isn't quite there yet.

Actually we're still doing this now and we've got 25 seconds of down time each submerge after killing the first seven adds...why mess with something that works?

[Kyliard]

I suggested the strategy pf sheeping the melee the entire fight to my guild. They decided not to attempt it fearing that we wouldn't have any CC on the islands for the ranged adds and thought we would need another hunter or 2 for CC.
Can you give me your typical raid makeup so I can present it to them.
Oh we only got him to 44 %

[Irellman]

We use the MT (myself) and 2 other tanks to pick up the melee adds. I run to my left and pick up one, another tank gets the one across from the tanking position, another gets the one to the right of the tanking position.

Adds on the island are dealt with by sheeping one and burning the other before moving onto the CC'd add. This is done by the 3-4 ranged DPS on that island.

For the melee adds, my target is DPS'd first (by our rouge and possibly a feral druid) and is normally down in 30 secs. I move on to help DPS the add to my right with the rest of the melee. After about 40 secs the island adds should be down and the islands closest to the other adds burn them.

I run back and get into the water at 10secs to emerge and the adds should be gone by 5 secs to emerge. This means the rest of the raid has 5 secs to compose, return to position and prepare for spout.

Tackling the adds only becomes a problem if DPS start to die. Bringing 7 healers and at least 3 with group heals for your first few kills definately helps (there is no enrage timer). Anyone dying to spout pays the repair bills ;-D

[Kavtor]

Unless you're hard pressed for DPS, I'd not sheep through the add phase. You should have enough DPS to kill all the adds between the phases, with time to spare. You can keep the CC in our back pocket, in case things go wrong.

The biggest thing to remember when tanking through the spouts, is to make sure you've got enough rage to get shield block up just before the spout ends. Many of our healers will be moving back into position, so it's a bad time to risk taking a crushing blow.