Quick and dirty write up on the first 4 bosses in 10m Vault (with obvious druid bias)

[Darksend]

I was writing something up for the druid guardian guide thread but it was impossible to do that without making a general boss write up as well, so if you see something that is specific to druids I just missed taking it out and moving it, but some of those may also apply to warriors rage being what it is now (just substitute ability names).

This is going to be entirely based off 10 man and will be very tank centric since I never heal or DPS (hence why it is a quick write up and not a full guide)

Stone Guard

Disclaimer: Having killed the first 4 bosses now I can say that the first boss is overtuned (read as: WAY to much hp), especially when you consider it is not just the first boss of an instance but of an entire expansion. This does not make it unkillable, as evidenced, but it does make it a marathon not a sprint and as a tank there is a situation where you can think it is ok to be lazy for a second, unfortunatly that is the exact moment you need to be even more alter, you need to always being aware of which boss you are taunting next. Keep this in mind.

Disclaimer 2: On 10 man, only 3 of the 4 bosses are present. This weeks combo was Jasper/Jade/Amethyst. Any combo including Jade is a going to be especially rough on healer mana because the AoE does so much raid damage.

Pre-Pull:

• The bosses have energy bars, if there is another guard within 12 yards of a boss he will gain energy. The opposite of this is if no boss is within 12 yards the boss will not only not gain energy but will also take 90% less damage
• Jade/Jasper/Amethyst/Cobalt Petrification: The boss which is empowered provides 90% damage reduction to a corresponding element (Nature/Fire/Shadow/Arcane), allowing you to counter the their abilities, both the explosion (see below) and the secondary ability they are putting out (Nature AoE/Fire Chain/Shadow Pool/not actually sure what cobalt does but I believe it is a arcane land mine debuff). There is a stacking component to this which reduces move speed, and if the stack reaches 100 you are permanently out of the fight (just like the 2 trash mobs)
• Jade/Jasper/Amethyst/Cobalt Overload is a raid wide AOE that happens when a boss reaches 100 energy and does massive elemental damage depending on which boss is doing it. Eventually something will explode or you either perma-petrified, not to mention you will be doing 90% less damage. The goal is to make the empowered add explode because that explosion will be reduced by 90%.
• Jade Shards: A nature AoE that happens throughout the entire fight, damage reduced by 90% while Jade is empowered
• Fire Chain: Connects 2 people with a fire chain that will deal massive damage when to far apart (but no damage at all when they are near each other), but being apart is the only way to remove it. During Jasper empower is the time to run away as the breaking damage will be reduced by 90%
• Shadow Pool: Amethyst will place shadow pools under people the entire fight, but because all the empowers cause a slow you really need to be on you toes to move out of it in time. During Amethyst empower it is safe to stand in them at their damage is reduced by 90%
• Rend Flesh: Massive bleed damage on the tanks, all the bosses can apply this but it does not stack and cannot have 2 stacks on a single tank

The Pull:

One tank will always grab 2 of them and the other tank will pick up the third while you wait for the first empower. For purposes of simplicity the tank with 2 bosses with be Tank A and the tank with 1 boss will be Tank B (note: this designation is constantly changing during the fight). At this point one of 2 things can happen.

If either of the bosses in the 2 stack empowers:

• Tank B will taunt the empowered mob at 50 energy and become Tank A

If the add being solo tanked empowers it gets a bit more complicated:

• Tank B needs to instantly taunt either of the other 2 bosses, which one does not matter just do it quickly
• Wait a bit until the non-empowered boss in the 2 stack hits 50 energy
  • the first tank taunts the empowered boss back

In both cases, Tank B will have a single boss with 50 energy and Tank A will have one boss with 50 energy and another boss with 0 energy (the one that just exploded).

The Rest of the Encounter:

After that the fight will continue as normal in a "set" pattern, and that pattern is that an add cannot empower twice in a row. This limits the the possibilities to 2.

• The single boss gets empowered
  • Tank B taunts the boss that just exploded (will always be the one with 0-10 energy depending on the delay between explosion and the next empower)
• A boss already in the 2 stack gets empowered
  • Nothing changes, tanks keep what they have
    • If this happens 2-3 or more times in a row and you are Tank B, this is where the fight gets very tedious. You are basically doing nothing for minutes of the fight at a time but keeping up your defenses. Right now that is your only job other than keeping track of what to taunt when your boss finally does get empowered.
• In rare cases, it may line up in a way that the second (non-empowered) boss in the 2 stack will explode shortly before or shortly after the empowered one
  • Simultaneous taunt across the room and swap non-empowered bosses. Tank A stays Tank A and Tank B stays Tank B but what you are tanking has changed.
• That is literally the entire fight for tanks: making sure you taunt the right thing and move out of pools if one should spawn under you.

Notes:

• The main source of damage on the tanks is the Rend Flesh so you are basically a giant damage sponge trying not to die.
• The most effective time to use your cooldowns is while Jasper is empowered.
  • While Jade is empowered the AOE damage is reduced by 90% so healers are already focusing on the tanks more
  • While Amethyst is empowered the damage from the pools is reduced by 90% meaning there is more leeway with moving out of them, allowing healers to finish that big cast on you
• Since they share HP and when you are only tanking 1 thing that particular one tanks 90% less damage always use berserk or <insert appropriate Tank DPS cooldown for each class> when you are tanking 2 things, preferably 2 things during jasper (caveat: late in the fight you are tanking one thing and healers are oom and you need lots of rage income then anything goes).

[Darksend]

Feng the Accursed

Disclaimer: You will want to curse blizzard's UI team for this. You have all probably encountered the bug while leveling or doing dailies where you cannot click on things, be they mobs or NPCS or random things like quest pickups, and even things like feasts and jeeves. Well ... that bug can randomly effect this encounter and make it so the tanks are unable to click on the crystals which can lead to a wipe. Because of this both tanks must know how to use both crystals.

Disclaimer 2: Because of the last boss you may feel you are doing the fight properly and just need a little more DPS or a little more gear on your healers as my raid did when in fact you are missing a key mechanic, which I will talk about while going over phase 2. Know the fight can be done skipping this mechanic but it makes it much much more difficult.

Before I get into what the boss does just be aware there are 2 crystals that only tanked spec players can click on (I will go into how to use them later but for now it is enough to know they exist and what they do)

• Nullification Barrier (I will refer to it as the shield or the immunity as well)
  • Places a barrier on the ground which makes everyone inside immune to magic basically
  • It is channeled so do not jump or move once placed, because of this make sure to place it in the right spot but if it is not people need to come to you
  • Long (not sure exact numbers ~60 seconds) cooldown so you will not be able to get every epicenter, draw flames, and velocity
• Shroud of Reversal (I will refer to this as spellsteal)
  • Channel on a friendly target, when they are hit by an ability the boss uses, you gain a single use of that ability
  • While someone is under the effects of barrier you cannot steal something they are hit by
  • Shorter cooldown (~30 seconds) that begins when the stolen ability is used

This is a 3 phase fight and they will always be in the same order.

• Lightning
  • Healers and Ranged DPS will want to stop as soon as you get on the platform while the tank drags the boss to the far end of the room
  • Gains the following abilities
    • Lightning Lash
      • Stacking DoT the tank puts on the tank every 10-15 seconds, lasts 20 seconds
    • Lightning Fishs
      • Frontal cone stun, casted, shoots a ball of lightning stunning anything in its path, need to face the boss away from the raid
      • DO NOT TRY RUNNING THROUGH HIM, it does not work and you will get stunned. He does not track while casting it so the best way to counter it is always be max melee range and strafe to one side.
      • Almost always cast instantly after epicenter ends or very shortly after, occasionally will use one additional time between each epicenter
    • Epicenter
      • Raid wide AOE that does more damage the closer you are to the boss
      • Causes everyone hit by it to have a 75% chance to miss
      • As a tank, if you can convince your healers to spam heal you, you can stand directly on him and get a massive vengeance spike

• Fire
  • Bring him to the center of the room and the entire raid stacks in melee range
  • He loses all 3 abilities and instead gains the following
    • Flaming Spear
      • Fire version of Lightning Lash
    • Wildfire Spark
      • Debuff placed on a random player, drops a flame patch when ends
      • Run to the edge of the room, but really just make sure to get out of the raid
    • Draw Flames
      • Takes the wildfire sparks on the ground and pulls them into him to buff himself
      • For X attacks afterwards he will do a 50K raid aoe when he attacks
      • Note: The patches actually move when this happens, so do not be in a direct line between a patch and the boss, we just had everyone run through the boss and stand on the tanks

• Arcane
  • If you enter this phase with more than 20 stacks of draw flames you will be dealing with it for 3 or more velocities which the healers just cannot keep up with mana wise, you need to enter cleanly
  • Bring him to the center of the room while the ranged (note: this only works out perfectly in 10 man) evenly spread out around the circle (the one with 8 perfectly spaced out runes on the outer edge of it)
  • He again losses all 3 previous abilities and gains the following
    • Arcane Shock
      • Arcane version of Lightning Lash and Flaming Spear
    • Arcane Resonance
      • Places a debuff on a random player that explodes (rather quickly at that) for massive AoE damage
      • Base damage of X to debuffed player if no one additional is hit by it, for each person hit however the damage is X+10K to each person hit, or if the entire raid is stacked X+90K to the entire raid
      • If properly spread out (again only in 10 man) this will never splash except right after arcane velocity
    • Arcane Velocity
      • Opposite of epicenter, the closer you are the less damage you take
      • Collapse on the tank and use raid healing cooldowns when barrier is not up
      • Because of resonance you will want to move out before the channel ends, ~2 seconds left, or it will probably be an instant wipe if one goes off since you will already be low from velocity

The Crystals:

• Nullification Barrier
  • It seemed to me that the tank who uses the shield will clear his own dot in all 3 phases but even if the other tank is in the bubble he will not have his stack cleared, almost like a passive benefit for being the tank with the shield, but this could be wrong it was just something I saw out of the corner of my eye
  • Phase 1
    • Use to negate Epicenter
      • Cancels out both the damage and I believe the 75% miss debuff
    • Epicenter is longer than the shield so let the first tick or 2 hit so healers can heal while it is up rather than playing catch up on the last tick while having to deal with the tank taking damage again
    • Always make sure the other tank has agro while using the barrier or he will lightning fists the raid and cause them to move
  • Phase 2
    • Use to negate Draw Flames
      • This is the ability my raid did not know could be negated this way, and really cheeses the fight. Originally we were using the shield after the boss had stacks to negate the 50K explosions
      • The proper way to negate this is to stand on the boss as he is casting draw flames and channel the shield and the boss will not gain stacks at all, allowing you to completely skip every other one, negating much more raid damage than the way we had been using it and this also lets you enter phase 3 with only ~5 stacks instead of the almost 20 or more we had been getting, there really is not much in between
    • Whether you should use it on the first and third or second and fourth is entirely dependent on raid DPS
      • the goal is to use the shield a second time then push phase 4 before the next draw
  • Phase 3
    • Use to negate Arcane Velocity
      • Since the entire raid is collapsing on the boss anyway to lessen the damage just pop it where you are tanking, maybe take a step or 2 into the boss
    • Since resonance can go out so shortly after the velocity, it is again beneficial to wait a tick or 2 to use it so it can catch that explosion if someone is late getting out

• Shroud of Reversal
  • Can steal ANYTHING the boss does, with the exception of draw flame (but I have a theory on how it can be done I just have not had a chance to test it)
  • If used correctly it is both a huge DPS boost and saves a ton of healer mana
  • All Phases
    • The safe way to use this ability is to always channel it on your co-tank and take the dot, it will last 45 seconds on the boss and may or may not stack I have not tested that
  • Phase 1
    • How to stun the boss
      • After the epicenter that is absorbed by the shield, immediately channel on your co-tank
      • Have your co-tank intentionally get stunned by lightning fists
      • When the boss begins to cast the next epicenter you can stun him both canceling the cast but also using epicenter's cooldown
      • In this way your raid will have the barrier up for every single epicenter
    • You can also steal epicenter
      • standing right on top of the boss this was doing about 95K a tick and gave him 75% miss chance
  • Phase 2
    • If you channel on a person who gets the spark, when they drop the patch you gain the ability
      • I tried doing this but I did not see any damage being done but this could have just been a weird "no one" situation where the combat log does not actually know who is doing the damage
      • If this works this will probably be the best use of the spellsteal
    • My theory is that if you have someone stand in a direct line between a flame patch and the boss while draw flame is being cast and you are channeling on them when they get hit by the moving patch you may gain the draw flame ability, if that worked that would be awesome.
  • Phase 3
    • This was so hectic that I did not really have a chance to test how stealing resonance works
    • When stealing velocity, after the boss is done channeling run as far out as possible before casting it to maximize the damage it does (about 75K a pulse when I was standing at the edge of the platform)

[Darksend]

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder

This boss is one hell of a dps check. We did it flawlessly only to hit enrage with 19 million HP left (his enrage is an instant AOE raid wipe, you literally go BOOM after 6 minutes). We realized our dps were doing 21-18 million damage for the whole fight and so we had a priest go shadow and got it with about 20 seconds left.

Raid comp becomes 2 tanks 2 healers 6 DPS. We had 2 shadow priests and ele shaman for emergency offspec heals however (including my symbiosis giving the shadow priest a tranq).

The only agro during this encounter is during the first 10 seconds of the fight. (p.s. DO NOT CHARGE HIM, you will end up 15 yards away from him unable to hit him and he will voodoo doll a DPS instead of a tank and you will wipe)

• Voodoo Doll
  • The boss will pick his main agro target and 2 random raid members to link them
  • This is basically spirit link totem without the HP equalization, any damage taken by any target will be mirrored to the other 2, this includes shadow bolts coming from the spirit realm and the attacks the boss does to the tank that bypass absorption mechanics
    • You will have a learning curve of a few attempts where a tank will take a massive damage spike and a DPS doll will die, but what most people probably will not realize till it happens to them is it works both ways
      • The adds in the spirit realm all targeted the healer while he was linked with me and spam bolted him, that damage mirrored to me and finished me while I was low already.
  • You can BoP the tank and since voodoo doll is a fixate he will not change targets, this will negate melee damage on the tank and no melee damage will be mirrored to the other 2 dolls
  • He will stay fixated on his current target until banishment happens or a doll dies
    • If a voodoo doll dies, he will pick 3 new targets, which if the offtank is in the spirit realm is a raid wipe
  • I originally thought the offtank needs to taunt before banishment happens to make sure they are the new fixate, but it is possible that ONCE THE FIRST FIXATE HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED (on that charge attempt I talked about he fixated our elemental shaman so it is not based entirely on spec) that it will only fixate tank speced players. Either way you lose nothing by playing it safe and taunting a few times while you are not tanking.
  • Gear for avoidance and mitigation over HP, while doable with a bear tank I had to severally change my gear and even used mastery and armor elixirs over a flask (I recommend all tanks do this)
    • as mentioned above he has specific attacks which completely bypass shields and absorption mechanics so classes based on those or based on self healing such as DKs and the new druids are severally weaker
      • I know people are going to say now "SEE LOOK DRUIDS ARE NOT AS GOOD" or "X CLASS CANNOT TANK THIS", I killed this as a bear druid so obviously that is not true and I am not saying that

• Spirit Totem and the Spirit Realm
  • There is a second plane to this fight, the spirit realm
  • Up to 3 people within the purple circle around the totem will be ported to the spirit realm when the totem is killed
    • One must be a healer
    • those with voodoo doll cannot be ported
    • One thing to keep an eye on is the banishment timer, this will mess you up something bad if you kill a totem as banishment goes out
      • We learned this the hard way when banishment happened just a second before the totem died and the healer next to the totem was one of the 2 new voodoo dolls and the 2 DPS were ported in with no healer
  • Once inside you have 30 seconds to kill anything you see, if you do not leave in time you will die instantly
    • There is no way out, you only gain access to the ability to leave once you have been healed to 100% life, at which point you gain a special UI button (think shado-pan monastary final boss or if you still have your ultrixion macro around) which when pressed will port you back to the normal realm
  • Heal cast in this realm place a buff on anyone they heal that increases crit haste and mastery by 4% and it stacks.
    • It lasts for 30 seconds and persists in the normal realm so healers make sure to refresh it one last time right before you all leave
    • Oh and healers feel free to just spam away with your biggest most expensive heals while in the spirit realm, as part of pushing the button to return to the normal realm you also are returned to 100% mana
  • The spirit realm adds are constantly spawning 1 at a time throughout the entire fight, they are not waves ("OH LOOK TOTEM SPAWNED that must mean new adds spawned in the spirit realm," no that is not how it works)

• Banishment
  • This is how the tank gets into the spirit realm
  • When banished you will see a special target only you can see and attack
    • You can still see the other adds and attack and kill those
    • You get ported out as soon as your special mob dies, you do not need to be healed to full and press a button
      • if you fail to kill it in 30 seconds you die instantly much like dps if they fail to get healed to full and click the button
    • Because of this the best strategy is to leave the mob at 10% then go help clean up any extra adds down there then go back and kill it with 4-5 seconds left, this is a balancing act

• At 20% he goes crazy (50% haste 20% damage increase) and the totems stop spawning meaning both healers will be in the normal realm for the majority of this burn
  • Warrior tanks are great for safeguard if it lines up so they are not fixated sub 20
  • This is a great time to use BoP (hand of protection, paladin ability)
  • You need to just do as good a job as possible in the spirit realm leading up to this because it you try to stop boss DPS to clear out adds down below you risk missing enrage. On the flip side if you have to many adds up then healers need to heal the raid when they really need to focus on just the 3 voodoo people

[Darksend]

The Spirit Kings: This is the boss I mentioned earlier, it is 4 phases in a random order (the same one may or may not always be first we killed it third attempt and it was always the same one first). This boss was clearly a one tank fight from the first pull, we may have even 2 healed it but that is probably not needed unless you are really undergeared (which if you killed the spiritbinder you will not be).

One ability from each king will persist through death, so be aware of this while reading through this writeup.

The first king is Qiang, the cleaving boss. The raid needs to stack on the tank in front of him (not sure how many are needed but this did not hamper us as we had an all ranged raid, 1 melee may be allowed to stand behind) to split his damage (again do not charge in COUGH*DARKSENDISBADANDGOTONESHOT*COUGH). His ability however, Annihilate, is the opposite and needs to be avoided at all costs, and as soon as you see it casting you need to run through him and get behind him (he does not track while channeling so this includes the tank). The persistent ability is officially called flanking orders but it is more appropriate to refer to it as the phalanx of death. He will summon a line of warriors that marches together across the room and you simply need to move around it, even in the hecticness of phase 4 this is fairly easy to avoid as they move rather slowly.

The next one can be random so I will describe what I feel is the hardest order: Meng, Zain, Subetai.

Meng has 2 stances, one is when were damage him and the other is a damage reflect proportional to his rage bar. During this reflect phase (cowardice) he does not attack the whole time, he usually runs around like a chicken with his head cut off. He switches phases when he fills his rage, or insanity, bar. This happens gradually over time but also he casts an interruptable spell called crazy thoughts. You can skip interrupting this during cowardice phase to get out of the reflect phase if people are trigger happy and do not notice they are killing themselves. His persistent ability is Maddening shout, make sure to group up when you see this coming. This ability makes everyone go hostile to each other. To counter this each person needs to take 40K damage. An easy answer is having mages use a single or two arcane explosions or tanks use a single instant AOE, do not go recklessness bladestorming please, your raid may think its funny once but expect a raid kick if you continue doing it. This is a fairly easy ability to nagivate on its own but the next to guys do abilities which require the raid to spread out quite a bit which is why it becomes complicated. Make sure to call out if you are out of the group kiting something and need to be single targeted. Name plates make it obvious when this has been broken.

Neither of these 2 do much damage, and now that I think about it the next guy doesn't either, Zain.

Zain does random target interruptable (although it does not require a strict rotation unless he is the last guy and healers are low on mana) aoe shadowbolts, and does almost no damage to the tank himself. He also does an instant cast chain shadow, chain lightning with an 8 yard bounce and no depreciating damage. His persistent ability summons a small orb that needs to be kited around the room and eventually killed in an out of the way place. It does a 10 yard pulsing 20K aoe every second while alive and when killed drops a poll out of which more adds will spawn that also need to be kited.

The final guy actually does decent damage, and is also very annoying. His name is Subetai.

Subetai does a random direction volley (so you cannot face it away from the raid and auto avoid it) that shoots 3 times, the first has a very wide arc for low damage, the arc the shrinks and does a little more damage, then shrinks again and hits for a lot of damage. The size is so small and the delay between shots so long (not to mention the time before the first shot during which he telegraphs where he is going) even if you move the wrong way from the first one you should never get hit by the third one. He also has a rain of arrows which if it hits you puts a spike in you which stuns the victim and needs to be killed, this is needless dps loss both in the form of the stun and the HP of the spike so stay spread out, it also does same damage which needs to be healed. His persistent ability is pillage, yet another reason to stay spread out. He will charge a random target and "steals" the gear from everyone within 8 yards, reducing damage and healing, as well as armor, of the afflicted by 50%. This is also very heavily telegraphed as there is a large delay between the charge and the actually pillaging.

All 4 are insanely easy on their own it is how your group handles grouping up and spreading out rapidly and randomly that determines how easy this fight will be.


More to come if my guild downs the next boss this week.

[Superworm]

Good information! We successfully defeated the first 2, but Garajal was too much a dps check for us. Also when we tried 2-healer composition, if a healer got voodoo-dolls 3 times in a serie, he will run oom, and it was a big problem for us. Maybe we will have better luck next try.

[Fetzie]

According to a bluepost, the enrage timer has been "fixed" on Garajal. Looks like 8 minutes (and 3 seconds) should now be the correct hard enrage, making the boss easily killable with 3 healers.

[steveh]

Fetzie, do you have a link for that blue post? My guild was trying this last night (around 14 hours ago) at 6 mins (+7 seconds) was the enrage for us. We only did a few attempts at 2 heals, but were hoping to just 3 heal it due to our group and available 90s.

[Fetzie]

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder will now cast Final Destination correctly.

Can confirm later though, when we raid again.

[Ion]

Can confirm later though, when we raid again.

Pretty sure it was still 6m last night for us as well...it wasn't very difficult to beat even w/our shitty gear, though.

[Squishei]

Similar to other mechanics, Sebutai's pinning arrow will only choose ranged targets if there are 3 or more people at range. Additionally, pinning arrow is a stun and things like a mage's blink, and hunter's bestial wrath will remove it. (although for the Mage, he will carry the arrow in his shoulder for the rest of the fight). Makes the phase significantly easier especially if you have had the Mad King already.