Heart of Fear - Blade Lord Ta'yak

[Lore]

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Heart of Fear raid guide. My name is Millennía and today I am going to take you through the Blade Lord Ta'yak encounter on 10 man normal.

This is a 2 phase encounter that requires 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 DPS. The boss has 150.4 million health with an enrage timer of approximately 8 minutes. This is an execution based encounter with a small DPS check because of the bosses stacking damage and haste buff which he gains every 60 seconds.

This buff is called Intensify and it increases Ta'yaks damage and haste by 5% per stack and like I said, he gains 1 stack every 60 seconds so you want to push him to phase 2, which occurs and 20%, as quickly as possible which is why we opted for a 2 healer and 6 dps set up.

Before you pull you want to take positions on the right or left side of the room and spread out. There are 2 reasons for this. One is because of the ability Wind Step. With Wind Step, the Blade Lord will teleport to a random player and apply a bleed effect to them and any other player within 10 yards that ticks for a moderate amount of damage every 3 seconds for 30 seconds.

The other reason you want to be spread out on one side of the room is because of Tempest Slash. The boss will slash the air and send a tornado out to the position of a random player at range which will rotate on the spot and deal damage to anyone hit by it and knocks them back.

Unseen Strike is one of the key abilities in this encounter. The boss will mark a person and disappear. After 5 seconds he strikes that person doing a massive amount of damage and knocking them back. The damage is shared with everyone that gets hit so you will need to group up when he marks a player and share the damage together to minimise the individual damage of the attack. If you use boss timers such as Deadly Boss Mods then you can group up when Unseen Strike has 5 seconds on the timer so when the boss marks a person, you are already stacked and ready.

This picture depicts how our raid handled the space in the room. We only had 5 Unseen Strikes so our raid started off on the right side of the room with the tanks and melee on the Green marker and the ranged and healers spread 10 yards apart at the light Blue area.

After 2 Unseen Strikes we moved to the middle of the room and placed the boss on the Red area of the map with ranged and healers spread out around the middle which is depicted by the Pink circle.

After another 2 Unseen Strikes here we moved to the left side of the room and placed the boss on the dark Blue marker with the range and healers spread out around the Brown area.

On the left side we get just 1 Unseen Strike here before the boss transitions into phase 2. It is worth mentioning that you can remain in the left side of the room for 2 Unseen Strikes if necessary but only one is preferred before the transition into phase 2.

The reason you need 2 tanks is because of Overwhelming Assault. This is an ability used on the tank that deals damage and increases their damage taken by Overwhelming Assault by 50% and this stacks. Our tanks swapped at 2 stacks of Overwhelming Assault but a cooldown was needed to reduce the large damage spike of the second hit.
At 20% the boss will move to the middle of the room and drag the raid into him and carry everyone to the right side of the room in tornadoes. You can not do anything until the tornadoes drop you off and at this point I recommend that you use healing cooldowns and healthstones to get everyone topped off as best as possible.

At this point the boss is on the other side of the room and he will be constantly sending tornadoes down 3 different lanes in the centre of the room so you need to run up to him while dodging the tornadoes. If you get hit by a tornado then you will get picked up and taken back some distance before being dropped off.

The raid will be taking damage every second during this phase so you need to get to the boss and stack up behind him for AoE healing.

After some time the boss will move to the other side of the room and you will have to go through the process of dodging tornadoes to get to him again.

It is important to note that you can't avoid the action of tornado dodging because if you move in to the wind blowing on either side of you then you will get pushed back until you move out of it again.

This is a very difficult healing phase because there is so much movement involved so raid cooldowns are essential as well as any individual defensive cooldowns that are available. Some of my recommendations include having a druid spec Heart of the Wild and using Tranquility when they reach the boss to help top people off, Holy Paladins can spec Holy Avenger and try to store 5 Holy Power to use after being dropped off by tornadoes to quickly heal people. On that note, Holy Paladins with the Darkmoon healing trinket should not use Light of Dawn in this phase if their trinket procs because the spell effect will prevent people from seeing incoming tornadoes.

We personally used Bloodlust after the first Unseen Strike so we could burn as much health of the boss as possible to minimise time in phase one which in turn minimises the amount of Intensify stacks the boss gets before phase 2. Your team can use Bloodlust or Heroism when it suits you best but this is what we found to work best for us.

[Zellviren]

Good to hear an Irishman!

You mentioned the enrage (eight minutes), then went on to talk about the stacking "soft enrage"; does he have a hard enrage in P2?

[Millennía]

Good to hear an Irishman!

You mentioned the enrage (eight minutes), then went on to talk about the stacking "soft enrage"; does he have a hard enrage in P2?

Yes - when he hits hard enrage he gets a significant damage increase which destroys your raid in a matter of seconds

[steveh]

One strategy point that I've seen many groups do is to have the dps and healers "ride the wind" on the sides of tornado alley at 12% of the boss' health and let the tanks (and dots) finish off that last 2% before he switches to the other end of the room at 10%. This lets the raid get a major headstart in heading down the alley to finish him off. Tanks usually can make an entire trip alone with some self-heals and CDs. This strat is not required for downing normal mode depending on your group composition, but it does make that last 10% much easier especially when first learning how to dodge tornados.