Beth'tilac

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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 Beth'tilac, one of the first encounters you come across in this new raid instance. This guide is up to date as of patch 4.2, but some details may become incorrect or even irrelevant in the future.

Beth'tilac is a two-phase encounter - for the first phase, you'll have to split up your raid into two teams and deal with a lot of adds, while the second phase is a stationary burn in which you have to kill Beth'tilac before raid damage becomes overwhelming. We defeated this fight with 2 tanks, 7 healers and 16DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well. Less healers, for instance.

For phase 1, you'll need a team consisting of 1 tank, 2 healers and about 3-7 DPS that's assigned to deal with Beth'tilac herself, who upon the start of the fight will retreat to an upper platform. The rest of your raid stays downstairs and takes care of the various adds that Beth'tilac will summon. The amount of DPS that can join your upstairs team to fight Beth'tilac herself is dependent on how many DPS you need downstairs to deal with the adds in a timely manner.

Preferably, you'll want your AoE DPS downstairs, while single target DPS is better suited for upstairs.

As soon as you engage Beth'tilac, she'll retreat upstairs and barrage the raid with AoE damage until people join her on her web. Shortly after, a lot of Cinderweb Spinners will appear. If taunted, they'll drop to the ground. They don't deal a whole lot of damage and target random players. When you defeat them, the strand of spidersilk they descended on will turn into a vehicle that your raid members can click to reach the top of the web and fight Beth'tilac.

Make sure that your tank is the first person to climb up and that at least one healer follows right after. This should be communicated on vent, and DPS should wait until both tank and healer secured a line.

Once on Beth'tilac's web, there's some AoE damage that goes out, but your downstairs team will not have to deal with any more AoE damage until Beth'tilac is by herself again. Tanking her is easy, and the only thing your upstairs team has to look out for are meteors that come down on random raid members and will deal significant damage. Fire remains on the ground where they landed, so don't stand in it.

Beth'tilac will continuously lose energy, and once her bar hits zero she'll start channeling an 8-second spell called Smoldering Devastation. Anyone remaining upstairs when the cast goes off will die - yes, even through bubble, so don't even try. While she's casting this, every person upstairs needs to jump back down through the hole in the middle of the web and join the downstairs team.

Once she finishes her Devastation cast, Beth'tilac will go back to dealing AoE damage to everyone downstairs and sending more Spinners into your raid, so repeat the same thing you did last time: Kill the spinners and take the vehicles back up. She'll cast Smoldering Devastation three times before permanently joining your raid downstairs, so you'll have to repeat this pattern until then.

While your upstairs team is busy repeating this cycle, your downstairs team has to deal with two more types of adds - Cinderweb Drones and Cinderweb Spiderlings. The Spiderlings will move towards the Drones and should they come close, the Drones will eat them and gain an attack buff as well as health back, so your goal is to kill the Spiderlings before they reach the Drones.

The Spiderlings will always come from the Northwest, Northeast and Southeast corners, which leaves the Southwest open for your downstairs tank to drag the Drones to and tank them. Your AoE DPS should be split up into 3 groups to take care of the approaching Spiderlings from each direction. If you have hunters available, or other classes capable of AoE slows, you should utilize them to maximize the time you have before the Spiderlings reach the Drones.

We assigned 3 DPS to each corner, but you might need more or less depending on the DPS your raid is capable of. All other DPS remaining downstairs should focus on killing the Drones. If a Drone does not die by the time his energy is depleted, he'll join Beth'tilac upstairs and siphon her energy, giving you less time to DPS her.

There'll be a constant stream of adds throughout phase 1 even while your upstairs team temporarily re-joins you, so always make sure to kill all adds in a timely manner. Until new Spinners appear, your upstairs team should help out with any remaining adds.

Finding a balance of DPS for all the adds as well as the upstairs team is half the battle of the first phase. By the time Beth'tilac completes her third Devastation, she was at about 80% health for us and we still managed to kill her, but getting her lower in phase 1 would certainly make phase 2 easier.

Once Beth'tilac descends after her third Devastation, no more adds will spawn. If you have any adds remaining though, take them out as quickly as possible. Beth'tilac will cast Frenzy on herself periodically until she dies, and with each stack of Frenzy she gains, she'll do 5% more damage which applies to her normal hits as well as her pulsing AoE damage.

This sets a soft enrage timer - the shorter this phase is, the better. Other than that, this is a tank-and-spank phase. The tank that picks her up at the start of the phase should drag her to the middle of the room and the rest of the raid should stack up at her tail end. No one should remain within 10 yards of her current tank, as he'll stack up a debuff called The Widow's Kiss which makes him deal damage to others within 10 yards.

The Widow's Kiss also stacks up a healing debuff, and after a while, he'll barely be able to be healed at all. At this time, your offtank should taunt Beth'tilac while your main tank runs out of the raid to reset his debuff.

If needed, make good use of Bloodlust, Heroism or Time Warp during this phase, and set up a chain of raid cooldowns such as Power Word: Barrier, Rallying Cry, Divine Guardian or Tranquility as her Frenzy stacks get higher. Tanks might also want to utilize self-cooldowns towards the end of the fight.

That's all the tips I have for Beth'tilac. As always, good luck and have fun! I've attached footage of the whole encounter in case you want to see how we dealt with the various mechanics in detail.

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For those guilds that have the gear this encounter can "cheated" by only sending a tank and two healers up top. This gives all your dps time to ensure the adds are killed properly. When she hops down it just becomes one long burn phase.

My guild worked on this boss a bit last night and our best attempt got the boss down to 12%. We kept all dps on the ground level to ensure the adds died in an orderly fashion, but we found that we just didn't have the DPS to burn the boss from 99.5% starting in phase 2. I suggest guilds send up 3 melee to the top (preferably rogues, enhance shamans, and fury warriors) so that you can burn her down enough in phase 1 to help out in phase 2. We also found that lusting at the beginning of phase 2 ensures better coverage overall since our healers went OOM by about 25% when we were initially burning lust at about 35%.

To give a general idea of what my guild's gear level is we are averaging about 361-362 right now. We're a guild that was 5/13 in 25 man at launch of the patch.

For 10m guilds:

Our guild found this fight ridiculously easy. Our biggest problem was the stupid tank (me) kept falling down the hole in the middle of the web. Most of us had 361-363 ilvl, and the guild had done 5/13 in 10m. But we also had two backups, one healer and one DPS.

We sent up a bear tank and enh shaman with a disc priest atonement healing. Got the boss to 78% by the time the burn phase started. She came down and ate one spiderling, but we still got the burn. All in all, it was the shortest learning curve for us. That was, at least, until we came on here and read the Shannox guide and all the comments.

(10 Man) Tip for All us Warlocks for this fight!
"Theres a great advantage of being a Warlock during this fight (that is.. if you're fighting ontop of the web) after you've gotten yourself up the first time, you can then put a teleporter down and then easily just teleport yourself back up when its time :D"
(I posted this earlier on the Video itself! but thought it might help others later if it was posted here aswell, as for i got a decent numbers of positive response! n_n! Goodluck!)

We killedher yesterday. We moved 2 healers, 5 melee DPS and 1 tank up the web (5man) andhad little difficulties with this fight.

The raidshould aim to get Beth’Tilac to phase 2 with about 70% HP. Damage will quicklyramp up in phase 2 which makes healing extremely hard at the end.

Theassignments to 3 different corners worked wonders. We had raidmarks up in everycorner and assigned 3 (Ranged DPS) to all corners. Make sure to havestuns/slows ready in every corner. There is a good guide with screenshotsavailable at http://www.25man.com/firelands/bethtilac. Worth a shot to check it out. It get frequently updated.

We had issues with the 10man version of this yesterday, as the spinner's random damage kept overwhelming us when leaving them alive - slowly, more and more spawned.

On the flipside when we tried to taunt them down and kill them, the mix of the tank having to move around and the DPS lost that way meant the downstairs team ran into issues with DPS.

Is this just a pure DPS problem?

The healing... the horrible, horrible healing... But fun!!! Loved this encounter! We three shotted it (we don't count our first attempt though, somehow the tank up top took fall damage when coming back down and died), and it feels just right for a normal mode encounter. We sent up one melee DPS, one healer, and a tank. I would suggest NOT sending up a holy paladin as the only healer -- there's AoE damage up there and it's a bit much to cover. While it is possible, it's much easier to do with a class with more AoE healing capabilities.

Ok, from all the comments I'm reading this encounter should be one of the easier encounters. My guild was only 11/12 when the patch hit because we formed later so our average item level of raiders that night was around 359. Is this too low for this encounter?

The problem we kept running into was we would kill a spinner, and another would spawn right in its place. We killed possibly 8 of them and they just kept spawning. Is this correct or no? About 30 seconds after our "upstairs" team got up there the drone spawned. So we were dealing with the spinners, a drone, and the spiderlings all over the place.

I also noticed that ONLY a form of taunt (Hand of Reckoning/Deathgrip) would bring the spinners down. We had some DPS on spinners that would DPS them and they would just sit there on their string. After they died, no vehicle dropped.

Does this sound bugged or are we just doing it wrong?

Thank you for the replies in advance

The no vehicle drop thing makes sense, but the spinners to almost no melee damage, so if each of your tanks taunt one and then like a plate DPS taunts the other, those should be sufficient for your 3 people to go up top (a tank, a healer, and 1 DPS, probably the plate DPS).

We then had 4 DPS on the ground and we divided up the priorities. We had 1 ranged on spinners full time, his job was to make sure they were dying as they spawned, and only if there weren't any to get the drones. The other 3 DPS were assigned to spiderling duty then drones. If spinners were out of control and spiderlings were under control, then I would float and help with spinners. Doing a lot of damage to beth'talic herself in this phase isn't a huge deal, and you guys probably have more than enough gear for it.

The tricky party is going to be making sure to kill the spiderlings that spawn right as beth drops for phase 2 before they get to her. Killing these befor finishing up any other spinners or drones should be your DPS's top priority. If beth is ~80% when phase 2 starts, you should be fine. My guild is better geared than yours, but we started at 97% (spiderlings hit beth) and still killed it the first time we saw phase 2 with no deaths. If you guys kill the spiderlings before they get to beth so she doesn't heal, you should have no problew getting her dead at your gear leve. Just be sure to start using whatever raid cooldowns you have at about 30%, so aura mastery, priest bubbles, AMZ, tranquility, etc.

Alright, thank you for the information, I believe one of our problems was definitely add control. Unfortunately we were also sending up 2 DPS as opposed to 1. I realize now this was a big problem and one of the reasons we were having so much trouble with the adds.

We will give her another run for her money. Thank you again for the information Aggathon.

I'm not sure if I missed it somewhere along the way, my 10man group will be heading into FL in a few hours for the first time, and I was wondering, do all the spinners have to be killed? Or just the ones you taunt down to get the strings?

@Stern

The spinners will come down off of their webs when they're taunted, and they switch from just spamming the acid bolt thingy to melee swings combined with acid bolts. Either way, they don't hit hard and can be tanked by anyone in the raid. The trick is to make sure enough of them die while still keeping up with the Drone damage.

also, I posted earlier that this fight was just too easy. Upon doing the fight again with two other guilds, I realize that we might have just gotten lucky with who was assigned to who for DPS. If you are reading these posts and thinking about your group taking on the fight, put some good thought into who would be best in which role, be it ranged AoE'ing, or focus firing spinners, etc.

In one group I went with, we decided that one DPS was to go upstairs on the first of the three mini-phases and blow all cooldowns, because for the 2nd and 3rd he just stayed down and helped DPS spinners.

I guess it depends on how strong your DPS are.

We're sort of undergeared, like 357-59, and we seem to be getting up to 30 frenzies in 10man. And sometimes our tanks will just die. Sometimes it's in the beginning of the phase and our tanks would just die.

Does it sound like we might be undergeared for this? We are executing everything just fine. DPS ranges from 15k-18k.

I have been noticing that issue to on the 10 man area. Those that are in 10 man normal gear simply aren't able to generate sufficient DPS to actually kill the boss. All things aside, top end players playing absolutely perfect could easily kill the boss in 359 gear, the problem is those people have been farming heroics for months and aren't in 359s.

Right now the DPS quota for this encounter seems a bit too steep for people who would be entering a normal mode encounter after having cleared normal mode tier 11. You have no room for mistake. You can't let the boss heal at all. You have to get them down a fair amount, like 30%, before the final phase.

I would actually not be surprised to see this encounter get a nerf in 10 man normal very soon. I think it's a little overtuned for those that would only have normal mode gear but not everyone can do over 20k single target DPS in just 359s. I'm not one to point out issues in content difficulty lightly but I believe this one is currently overtuned for 10 man normal based on what 10 man normal raiders would have coming out of tier 11 normal modes.

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Originally Posted by Quinafoi

I have been noticing that issue to on the 10 man area. Those that are in 10 man normal gear simply aren't able to generate sufficient DPS to actually kill the boss. All things aside, top end players playing absolutely perfect could easily kill the boss in 359 gear, the problem is those people have been farming heroics for months and aren't in 359s.

Right now the DPS quota for this encounter seems a bit too steep for people who would be entering a normal mode encounter after having cleared normal mode tier 11. You have no room for mistake. You can't let the boss heal at all. You have to get them down a fair amount, like 30%, before the final phase.

I would actually not be surprised to see this encounter get a nerf in 10 man normal very soon. I think it's a little overtuned for those that would only have normal mode gear but not everyone can do over 20k single target DPS in just 359s. I'm not one to point out issues in content difficulty lightly but I believe this one is currently overtuned for 10 man normal based on what 10 man normal raiders would have coming out of tier 11 normal modes.

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Right on, I thought so too, for some reason 10man always seems a little harder, never any room for mistake. I knew we might be undergeared when around 30 stacks of frenzy tanks are getting hit for 110k lol.

We were able to get Beth down to like 78 at best before phase 2.

After fiddling around with this last night in one of our 10man groups, we decided that our main problem was the add control during phase 1. So we changed our tactics.

We had 1dps + tank + healer go up top until the first smoldering devastation and then only the tank + healer for the remainder of phase 1. Everyone else stayed down at the bottom killing adds.

She dropped down in phase 2 at just under 90% health, no adds up to heal her and we just burned her down. It was a close finish, but we did it. This approach seemed a lot simpler than trying to split our dps in 10 man, because the adds were really proving problematic. Admitedly the group slightly overgeared the encounter, with everyone in at least 359 across the board and a few 365, 372 and 379 pieces here and there as well, so a lower geared group might struggle with the P2 burn phase from 90%.

We tried this on 25 man last night, and I wasn't happy with our dps split. We had 2 tanks of course, and 7 healers, that leaves 16 dps. What are suggestions for splitting the dps? Our raid is mainly 359 ilvl and we were carrying a couple of low dps.

And a specific question for spinners, we had a single range dps focus on them, but do they do less overall damage if they're all brought down to the ground asap instead of range dps taking them out while hanging?

Ranged DPS | Spiderlings -> Spinners -> Drone
Ranged DPS | Spiderlings -> Spinners -> Drone
Melee DPS | Spinners -> Drone -> Spiderlings
Ranged DPS| Spinners -> Drone -> Spiderlings
Ranged DPS| Spinners -> Drone -> Spiderlings

Above is how I set our DPS' individual kill priority. This minimizes raid damage by prioritizing spinners, once they're dead we have three DPS (see above) switch to the drone. They were successfully burning the drone before its energy reached zero. Initially we started with drones->spinners, we found that we were able to keep up with the adds, thus we changed it to spinners->drone to save healer mana for P2 - After spinners go down raid dmg is minimal while they burn the drone.

Slowly, but surely, we began to get ahead of the adds (probably because we had 5 DPS down low, instead of 4). We had the final drone @ 50% when the final spinners dropped. Thus we sent up one of our "Spinners->Drones->Spiderlings" (melee) DPS to the top in the FINAL P1 energy depletion of Beth'tilac to knock off a solid 5-6% before we got our final devastation. Initially we sent up a DPS during the FIRST energy depletion, but we found that that ultimately put us behind on adds and we had to play "catch up" the remainder of the encounter.

We have not downed Beth yet (primarily due to raid time constraints) - our attempts with this strategy resulted in multiple sub 20% attempts. I'm confident that once we get more expience in healing P2 we'll have our kill. I hope this helps someone!

We did this encounter Sunday night. Our average gear levels are probably 360-365. After fidgeting with duties of the raid, here is what worked.

Tanks: DK, Warrior
Healers: Sham, Druid, Disc
DPS: Hunter, Mage, Warlock, Enhance, Boomkin

I had the Hunter killing spiderlings, the mage killing drones, and the boomkin killing spinners, and if there were no spinners, floating around helping wherever. The druid and disc priest stayed down below to heal them. Warrior tank stayed down below.

DK, enh shaman, warlock and myself (r. sham) went to the top.

I can't attest to what was going on down below, but what I do know is that a drone never came up to the top of the web, and when we descended for the 3rd smoldering devastation, there was one lonely spinner dangling on his web at about 10% health. All the other adds were dead.

The boss came down at around 68% health. We used heroism at around 30% health, and i think she had about 20-22 stacks of Frenzy at this time. When she was at around 1 million health, one tank died, but the other was quick to pick her up. She fell over a few second after that - I'm sorry - I did not think to check what her Frenzy was at.

I haven't uploaded the logs yet for this week, but I can when I get home and will link them here for anyone interested.