Heroic Beth'tilac

[Aliena]

Hello and welcome to the Cataclysm raid guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about heroic Beth'tilac. I'll assume that you're familiar with the normal version of this encounter and will only go over what changes for the hard mode. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 7 healers and 16 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well.

Heroic Beth'tilac has 99 million health and there aren't terribly many new mechanics. In fact, the hardest part about Beth'tilac is the soft enrage set by the increasing stacks of Frenzy she gains in phase two. When just learning the encounter, it may prove impossible to survive beyond about 35 stacks of Frenzy, which gives you roughly 3 minutes to kill Beth'tilac from the start of phase two.

To make this easier, you should make sure to put some damage on Beth'tilac in phase 1 - this will require a different raid split into an upstairs and downstairs team than you're used to.

We send up one tank, 2-3 healers and 4-5 melee DPS everytime Spinners come up while everyone else remains downstairs for the entirety of the fight. This typically lets us start phase two with around 80% of Beth'tilac's health remaining (obviously this will get better as your raid acquires better gear). Regardless, 80% is a good number to shoot for to still beat the soft enrage timer.

While your upstairs team faces no changes on the web, your downstairs team will have a few new mechanics to battle in phase 1.


Our raid positioning for phase 1 is as follows:
Healers and ranged DPS remain in the middle of the room. The tank is positioned on the Drone tank spot, far away from all three Spiderling spawn points. Our "blockers" (more on those a little later) are close to the Spiderling spawn points but still in healing range of the raid stack. Our secondary blockers are a little ways outside the raid, but a lot closer than primary blockers.

All adds have more health than they do in the normal mode, requiring more raid DPS to keep up. The adds don't stop coming in phase 1, so it's imperative you split your raid up smartly to kill everything in a timely manner. The general add DPS order is Spinners > Spiderlings > Drones.

You should split your ranged DPS into 3 different teams of two that take care of Cinderweb Spiderlings as they come in - one team for each spawn point. You want to make sure to have sufficient slows for each group of spiderlings, so that they don't make it towards the middle of the room and get eaten by Drones. That's why Hunters, Mages, DKs and any other classes capable of AoE slows are well-suited to the task of bringing down Spiderlings. Usually our teams consist of a hunter or a DK and a shadow priest or mage. These team members also act as the "blockers".

Blockers are used to deal with a new type of add in heroic mode called Engorged Broodling. Broodlings are very fast moving adds that cannot be slowed and spawn on all three sides much like Spiderlings. Once spawned, they'll fixate on a random player and run towards him. Upon reaching the fixated player - or any other player standing in their way for that matter - they'll explode and spawn a poison puddle on the ground that slows and deals AoE damage.

Our blockers explode the broodlings outside of the raid stack. Most often we have a DK and two hunters assigned to be blockers, with shadow priests and mages as backups should a primary blocker miss a Broodling.

The primary blockers are typically somewhat close to the add spawn points - though they make sure to stay in healing range of the raid stack - whereas the secondary blockers hover fairly close to the raid stack, but not quite in it. That way, puddles should never spawn right in the raid, and that's what matters.

You should assign at least one, if not two healers to full-time concentrate on healing the blockers, as they'll take huge damage spikes in quick succession. Even after Devastations, where Beth'tilac is AoE'ing the raid, blockers don't get a break and will require extra healing.

Any DPS that isn't assigned to blocking and Spiderlings needs to concentrate on Drones. Drones aren't a particular threat, but your tank needs to make sure to keep them in a spot away from all three spawn points, so no Spiderlings ever reach them, and they need to die in a timely manner as you never want to have more than two up. In the heroic encounter, Drones will occasionally Fixate on a random raid member and chase them down. Their damage is decreased, but they'll only be hitting that target for 10 seconds.

The fixated raid member needs to run towards the Drone tank spot as soon as he notices he's fixated, to avoid that the Drone accidentally gets into Spiderling reach. It's worth noting that Hunters can and should feign out of the Fixate, as they're most likely assigned to Spiderlings and Broodlings and definitely don't want Drones near them.

When Spinners are out, they need to be taken care of as soon as possible by all DPS not assigned to Spiderlings and Broodlings. The DPS from the upstairs team will be there at the start to help out, but once they go back up, your downstairs team needs to finish off the remaining Spinners as they deal a lot of AoE damage. Even your Spiderling team members should chip in DPS on Spinners whenever they can.

Other than that, phase 1 is the same rinse-repeat as it is in normal. After three Devastations, Beth'tilac will descend and phase 2 starts. It's imperative that no spiderlings are up when phase 2 starts. Should any spiderling get in reach of Beth'tilac, she'll heal 10% of her health, which is basically a raid wipe.

To make sure no Spiderlings get eaten, all DPS needs to temporarily switch to kill them. Once Beth'tilac descends, you should only have one Drone remaining and it should be close to death. All DPS needs to be on Beth'tilac herself from this point onward, the remaining Drone will die to cleave damage eventually.

We have our Drone tank pick up Beth'tilac as she lands and he will usually use a defensive cooldown while the Drone is still up. Beth'tilac has no stacks of Frenzy at the start of the phase, so tank damage is still low. Our offtank is positioned next to the main tank in phase 2 and remains ready to taunt Beth off the main-tank when she uses her kiss ability.

The rest of the raid is stacked up on Beth'tilac's bum. We assign a raid cooldown rotation ahead of time, which is vital to outliving Ember Flare coupled with Frenzy. This rotation will vary depending on your raid setup, but I'll give you the one we used when we were learning the encounter:

At 20 stacks, we used Bloodlust. At 22 stacks, we used a Spirit Link totem. At 24 stacks, we used Rallying Cry. At 26 stacks, we had all three priests use Divine Hymn, including the shadow priests. At 28 stacks, we used another Spirit Link totem, and at 29 stacks a third totem. At 31 stacks, we used Divine Guardian. At 32 stacks, we used Tranquility as well as Power Word:Barrier, which can actually span 2 Ember Flares. After that, we used whatever was left. We used to have Aura Masteries in our rotation too, but they do not actually seem to reduce the damage dealt.

Again, phase 2 is a soft enrage phase and completely dependent on having enough DPS and staggering raid cooldowns to outlive Ember Flare and Frenzy. In this phase, we had 2 paladin healers assigned to tank healing, 4 healers on the raid, and a disc priest floating between raid and tank healing. As Frenzy stacks higher, our floater switches to consistent tank healing, and tanks themselves have a defensive cooldown (such as shield wall, pain suppression, guardian spirit, etc) active for most of their tanking time past 20 stacks of Frenzy.

Once you figure out a good DPS split to deal with adds and get Beth'tilac to 80% in phase 1 and you have enough defensive cooldowns to outlive phase 2's soft enrage, Beth'tilac shouldn't prove too hard. Good luck and have fun! I've attached footage of the whole encounter so you can see the encounter in more detail.

[shaun2312]

Youtube fail

[Icemash]

Yes, seems to be a problem with the video loading at the moment.

[Motark]

Is there any major difference for the 10man version of this?
Maybe only 2 sides of fixating spiders or something?

[Aliena]

Should work now. Alas, I dunno about 10-man. =(

[Serbian]

Looking forward to see more of your Heroic guides, hopefully in close future.

[Belaqua]

One thing we found to work quite nicely is having a mage upstairs just before her smoldering devestation using mirror images, she will attack the images and not bombard the raid until the tank gets back up. Our spiderling/broodling combo was 1hunter/1healer per spot, as a single hunter can solo them quite easily - also leaves a few more dps for drones or upstairs. We have 3 hunters and 3 mages in our setup so granted this might not for everyone.

[Deelok]

Hi Aliena thx for all your guides, in particular this one was way better than the other ones i found around ;D
we've been working on this boss for a couple of nights and at the start we tried a tactic like the one you're describing but we found out we needed almost all the melees we had downstairs for taunts: our prot warrior can taunt a lot of spinners but often has range issues, so we have the retris downstairs for most of the taunts. to get 5-6 melees upstairs would be almost impossible to us if we want spinners to be taunted quickly (if we dont we seem to get a lot more raid damage not to mention the stuns), and a mix of melees-casters wouldnt have a good optimization of the buffs... anyway apart all these details, how does your guild handle the taunts?

[krilz]

Is there any major difference for the 10man version of this?
Maybe only 2 sides of fixating spiders or something?

The heroic version works the same as the 10-man normal version except broodlings will only spawn from the side where spiderlings are spawning.

[Outbackjack]

We'll be working on this one next week; post-nerf are their any significant changes to the mechanics of this fight (10 man)?

I can't watch the video at work, does the stun (Fiery Web Spin) from the Spinners happen immediately when the cast starts? Or is it like some of the Nerubian mobs from WotLK that webbed you slowly and then you became fully stunned after the cast/channel was finished? Also, do they stop the stun after they are taunted to the ground?

[Shambells]

After working on this boss in 10 man for a few nights, I can safely say that the exploding broodlings are the hardest part of this encounter. When I was researching the fight for my raid I saw them mentioned, but I cannot stress to you enough how hard they make this fight. We haven't yet made it to p2, so I can't say much for it, although it does just look like a dps race. The downstairs team just gets roflstomped. It's not ho-hum oh look a broodling yawn. It's broodling oh crap another already? Constantly spawning bombs of death, I don't think you can take two consecutive bombs on the same person, without some serious heals. Did I mention constant broodlings? We have a hunter and a mage trying to alternate, we're going to drop a melee tomorrow night and try it with 3 ranged (on the bombs), because it feels like the only thing keeping us from killing this boss is our bomb exploders dying.

[Zindrazil]

For 10 broodling control, my guild initially tried using a single rogue using various tricks to soak damage. It worked okay, but it usually required near constant attention from a healer and our rogue was effectively doing no damage (he could occasionally through out a fan of knives to help kill the little ads, but he never got much up-time on the drone). Ultimately, we ended up falling behind on drones just before P2 (plus our up-top team was pretty behind schedule).

I'm actually thinking of trying a different strategy tonight. Instead of sending the holy pally up top to heal, I'm thinking of sending the resto shaman up and having the holy pally soak broodlings. Hopefully this will prevent us from falling behind on ads. As of right now, I can't really find a problem in doing this, apart from putting a little more strain on our resto druid.

[Outbackjack]

I've got a supplemental video (another tank POV) for the 10 man version of the encounter. We're also using a Rogue with a crazy spec to absorb the Broodlings, although our remaining floor DPS is still able to handily take down the Drones as they appear. The healing does get pretty crazy, I'll agree with that.

I wish I had a better view of the Broodlings for everyone but as the tank I had to chase the spinners around quite a bit, its fun but quite a chore.

[Destruyen]

we use a lock and hunter for broodlings on 10 man, but we used to use a resto druid solo soaking them before quitting the game. for our first kill we sent an arcane mage up for the 1st and 3rd times upstairs to dps along with me (bear) and a resto shaman.

last week, we 2 healed it with a pally and priest and sending up a rogue and ret pally to dps upstairs and a lock/hunter to soak broodlings.