Originally Posted by Aliena
Hello and welcome to the Firelands Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about Shannox, the first boss in this new raid instance. All info up-to-date as of patch 4.2., and some aspects of this encounter might become different or even irrelevant in the future.
We defeated this fight with 3 tanks, 7 healers and 15 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well. For instance, this could've easily been done with 6 healers, and potentially 2 tanks.
Shannox is a fire elemental hunter that paths the main area of Firelands. Yeah, the one with all the trash. Once you clear a certain amount of trash packs, Shannox will yell an emote and start walking in circles around the main area. He's accompanied by two hounds, Riplimb and Rageface. Riplimb can be tanked, while Rageface will kinda just run around and eat people.
All three enemies have an enrage, and your goal is to get both Riplimb and Rageface to die when Shannox is at about 30% health, or as close to that as possible. Both hounds should die at about the same time, as Shannox will enrage as soon as one of them bites the dust. Bringing Shannox below 30% before his dogs die is not recommended, as they also have a mean enrage.
Upon engaging Shannox, your raid members should be spread out, with your main tank and offtank standing on top of each other and keeping the boss turned away from the raid and the melee should stack up behind the boss. Shannox can NOT be taunted, so it's imperative that your maintank and your offtank are first and second in threat at all times. Everytime Shannox uses Arcing Slash, which is a 120 degree cone cleave, he'll inflict Jagged Tear on his current target.
Jagged Tear inflicts stacking dot damage every few seconds and lasts for 30 seconds, so every 8 stacks - or whatever number of stacks your healers are most comfortable with - your main tank needs to let the offtank pass him in threat. Once the offtank acquires 8 stacks, the main tank needs to take over again, rinse repeat.
Your third tank's job is kiting Riplimb, whose main ability Limb Rip also inflicts Jagged Tear. How does the third tank get to drop his stacks, you ask? Easy. Shannox continuously throws out traps on random raid members. Some of them are Immolation traps, and look basically like a hunter's immolation trap. The other kind of trap he uses is Crystal Prison trap, which look like they have a miniature crystal inside. Both kinds of traps will arm after 2 seconds, so everyone in the raid needs to always be watching their feet.
I found having your camera horizontal instead of using birds' eye view makes seeing traps a lot easier. Both kinds of traps can detonate when either a player OR one of the hounds steps on them, and that's the whole trick to it. Your Riplimb kiter needs to be on the lookout for Crystal traps and kite the hound over it. That way, Riplimb will be trapped long enough for the offtank to reset his stacks of Jagged Tear.
While the Immolation Trap deals a lot of damage, it's not the end of the world if a raid member steps on it. The crystal traps on the other hand will encase a raid member until the crystal is defeated, and it has several million health. Not only that, since a triggered crystal will act as a solid block, you might line of sight the tank healers from the Shannox tanks, and tank deaths are very hard to recover from on this fight.
It's important to communicate newly spawned crystal traps on ventrilo, so your kiter has an easier time luring Riplimb over one.
The good news is that if you understand how to tank Shannox and Riplimb, the rest of this fight is very simple. The only other mechanics you have to deal with is Shannox' Spear Hurl and Rageface's eating of raid members.
Spear Hurl will always land near Riplimb and is easily identified by the meteor-animation followed by rings of fire it leaves on the ground. The rule to this ability is to never stand in the meteor area and to never stand in any of the firey-looking parts right after. Basically the same as always, stuff on the ground in this encounter is always BAD.
Rageface is fairly easy to deal with. He'll run around and fixate on a random raid member for a while. He does hit fast, but he doesn't hit terribly hard, so just make sure to assign at least one healer to look out for his current threat target. He also has an ability called Face Rage, where he'll fixate on a target and deal a LOT of damage. This is broken if Rageface takes 45000 damage in a single attack - or 30000 in the 10-man version. To make sure no raid member dies to this, you should have your healer macro "Face Rage" into their raid frames and make sure to keep a good team of ranged attackers on him at all times.
Again, your target is to kill both hounds at roughly the same time, which should be when Shannox is at about 30% health. Your melee should be on Shannox himself at all time, while your ranged team's DPS should be split up among the dogs.
For each dead hound, Shannox will inflict 30% more damage 30% faster, so with both of them dead you're looking at a 60% increase in both damage and attack speed. At this point, it's recommended to add a cooldown chain to the usual tank rotation, so make sure you communicate things such as Shield Wall, Pain Suppression, Hand of Sacrifices, etc.
This is a clear burn phase, so Bloodlust, Heroism or Time Warp should be reserved for Shannox's enrage. His spear throw turns into an ability called Magma Rupture after he enrages and will now also cause every raid member to take 40% more fire damage, so it's even more important not to stand in any of the little fire eruptions after this point. If you keep executing a good cooldown chain, Shannox should go down pretty easily. As always, good luck and have fun!
I've attached footage of the whole encounter, so you can see how we dealt with the various mechanics in detail.
