Dragon Soul Bosses Impressions and Strategy

[Burlacher]

Hello MMO. I have taken the time to write up the following to give everyone an impression of how i felt in the PTR killing these bosses as well as strategies used to kil them. I have killed all 8 bosses (bugged Madness to 7%). At the bottom I have linked to Spine and Madness of Feathwing videos was apart of.
Please feel free to comment!

Note: Madness of Deathwing will not be included in this list as it was not officially available and it seemed to be way broken missing mechanics.
Note 2: Spine of Deathwing strategy my group did differently so I am going to leave that out as well for strategy part.
Note 3: These are all my impressions and my thoughts.

ALL BOSS ABLITIES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Boss Difficulty Scale from Hardest to Easiest
1. Spine of Deathwing
2. Hagara
3. Ultraxion
4. Warmaster Blackhorn
5. Warlord Zon'ozz
6. Morchuk
7. Yorsahj
Best New Mechanic: Heroic Will on Ultraxion
Most fun fight: Tie between Ultraxion and Warmaster Blackhorn
Most RNG fight: Yorsahj
Most frustrating Mechanic: Lightning phase on Hagara
Most Healer Intensive fight: Spine of Deathwing


Morchuk:
-Simple Tank and spank with aoe every so often

-Tanks taunt at 3 stacks

-When the crystal orbs spawn, send 3(5 for 25) players to go stand next to it to take damage. Once done, stack back up.

-He summons falling rocks which you use to LOS him and his black goo, simply run behind them and /dance for 20sec
-When Rocks disappear stay out for a few seconds for his stomp, then go back in

-Rinse and repeat
-20% health – soft enrage

Yor'sahj:

-Stack up and dps him. Summons 3 random orbs. Priority kill list is as follows
1) Purple
2) Green
3) Yellow
4) Blue

-Black and Red don’t matter cause those two you should be leaving up.

-Basically you have to deal with mechanics that are left up.

-Hard Combinations - (because a higher priority one was killed)
1) Green and Blue - AOE and mana drained healers
2) Yellow and Blue - Super tank damage, minor aoe and mana drained healers
3) Green and Yellow - Super damage (use CDs)
4) Green and Red - Have to stay spread for splash damage but stacked to split damage.
-Positioning will be very hard. ( Worst possible combination because purple is killed)

-Whenever you have black you have adds that just target random people and do random damage thats very miniscule, you AOE them down.

-Red is light aoe damage and you should be stacked up.

-Repeat RNG till death

Warlord Zon’ozz:

-Have 3 ranged stacked on one side and 3 range stack on otherside.(one ranged group for 10man)

-Boss spawns orb in direction he is facing, face him toward the first range group.
-Melee and healers off to the side.

-After orb spawns, spin boss so he faces other range group. Melee and healers stand behind boss.
-After orb bounces off of range group, the melee and healer group move TOGETHER to intercept the orb.

-The orb bounces back to first range group. Range group bounces orb one more time.

-Melee and healers GTFO of the way and tank kites boss into the orb.

-Stack up on boss EVERYONE and aoe heal and pewpew

-Spread back out when its over. Tank faces boss toward 2nd range group. After his 2nd frontal cone, tank runs through the boss so boss faces group 1. That way in case he is late the orb will hit one of the 2 range groups.

-If it hits first group, rinse and repeat, if it hits second group, melee and heals rotate and repeat like its first group.

Rinse and repeat GG

Hagara:

-Normal Phase:

-Tank run out of Focused Assault

-Ice lance people stand 3 yards away from people.

-Tomb people run next to each other so you are tombed near eachother for EZ mode cleave damage aka BLOW THE TOMBS UP

-Random silences – dispel please

Ice Phase:

-4 crystals spawn on outside. Rotating wall moving clockwise follows us. Keep moving together in a group and blow up crystals as we move.
-After 4 crystals dead – pewpew boss more.


Lightning Phase:

-2 Adds spawn and 8 totems.

-Range /heal stack toward middle melee near adds

-Kill 1 add near totem and obtain lightning debuff, spread debuff too other totems. It uses raid members as chains. DO NOT STAND IN THE SWIRLY CIRCLE OF A TOTEM.

-When all totems lit, more pew pew

When engaged Boss goes like this
Normal Phase  Ice Phase  Normal Phase  Lightning Phase  Repeat till death

Ultraxion:

-2 tanks (what 2 tanks in DS, wtf?) – Raid Stacks

-When Hour of Twilight is cast, use your Heroic Will button except for the current aggro tank
-Current aggro tank pops a few CDs to survive as well as 2 other players

-When Fading light is cast on aggro tank and other members, those people use Heroic Will Button right before the cast finishes.
-2nd tank taunts when first tank gets the Fading Light before he pops his Heroic Will.

-After each Fading Light, everyone watch aggro as no threat is generated for 10sec

-Rinse and repeat till dead

-Healers get 3 buffs throughout fight that spawn when boss hits “x” percentage, 1 healer for each buff so only 3 healers get buffs(2 healers per buff in 25man)
-Red Buff – Alexstrasza – 100% more healing done for rest of battle (recommended for bubble happy Disc Priests
-Green Buff – Ysera – All healing done duplicated and distributed evenly to the raid (recommended for resto druids for HOTS)
-Blue Buff –Kalecgos – 75% mana cost reduction + 100% haste buff (recommended for Pallies and Shamans)






Warmaster Blackhorn:

-2 tanks again

Phase 1:

-Split range into 2 groups – even dps

-2 big adds jump down and each must be tanked by a tank, each have a stacking debuff. Kill them

-Harpoons shoot drakes in the skies on each side of the boat to pull them into ranged dps range
-Range dps MUST BLOW THEM UP.

-You will see purple circles on the ground.
-For large purple circles aka Twilight Onslaught , the entire raid must stack in it to split damage and avoid the ship being damaged, pop a raid defensive CD
-The ship counts as 1 person soaking damage

-Little circles, 2-3 closest people should stand in them when possible to soak damage
-Not a big priority if u miss them but we will see how fast or slow the ship dies.

-3 waves of the 2 big adds and the 2 drakes

Phase 2:

-Range stack loosely in corner of the ship to focus Gariona(the big drake) down.
-Fire is spread out through the entire ship as long as Gariona is alive, so kill ASAP

-Take boss to opposite end

-Tanks taunt at 2 stacks
-Boss does frontal cone which can be moved out of by tanks

-Range and healers stack up

-Pew pew boss down with aoe

-Boss gets stronger as his health lowers.


Spine of Deathwing Kill

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...eo-(Full-Kill)

Madness of Deathwing Full Fight

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...(Entire-fight)

Edit: yorsahj is not officially easiest

[Brownprobe]

Good work burl! I think the strategy we used for spine is pretty acceptable tho, it works better than what other people did.

[Deleted]

very nice writeup, this will help our group alot, thank you!

[Burlacher]

thanks guys! im glad this information will be able to help you

ill be updating for spine tomorrow once i down him 25man

[rijn dael]

nice writeup

[Burlacher]

just made some edits for 10 v25man attempts

[Deleted]

How many fights are 1 tank fights (10 man)? Yor'sahj, Warlord Zon’ozz, Hagara. How about the 2 last ones?

[Brownprobe]

All of the 10 man fights with the exception of ultraxion and (depending on your strategy) spine of deathwing are single tank.

[Burlacher]

^ what he said ^^ all depends on strategy

Yorsahj is also suppose to be 2 tanks but is bugged

[Googolplex]

If 'Heroic Will' is the best new mechanic, it sounds like a terrible patch

[Deleted]

All of the 10 man fights with the exception of ultraxion and (depending on your strategy) spine of deathwing are single tank.

How the **** did Blizzard think when they designed this? Most 10 man guilds got 2-3 tanks, they will have to reroll dps now i guess.

[Braindwen]

All of the 10 man fights with the exception of ultraxion and (depending on your strategy) spine of deathwing are single tank.

Plenty of debuffs on Blackhorn that I wouldn't want to stack on one tank. Assuming it's tuned even remotely well, your average group will be two-tanking him.
Didn't Morchok have an armor debuff as well? I didn't actually test him so I can't say for sure. (it says tanks taunt at 3 stacks in the OP as well).
Ultraxion is actually single-tankable with a little luck and solid execution by the tank. Probably very unreliable though. It relies on setting your threat to the second highest threat with taunt after you fade back in, so you'd need to time Heroic Will to end just after fading light, and taunt immediately after. DPS would then have to avoid over-aggroing in the 10 seconds you're doing 0 threat.
Lastly, there's room for a second tank on Hagara if they actually fix focused assault to not be rangable, as taunting during that makes it much more survivable. It's still 1-tankable, but a second tank wouldn't feel worthless.

(for Zon'ozz) Tank faces boss toward 2nd range group

I assume the ranged group is far enough back to avoid the frontal cone attack for this? Either way, it's quite possible for the tank to bounce the orb back to the group even while facing the boss away, just run back to it when it's spawned. It kinda hurts, but small cds like Barkskin, AMS, or equivalents will always be ready for it to take the brunt of it. Doing this, you can have the group set up: Tank-Boss-Melee------Ranged. It hits tank first, then ranged, melee, ranged, melee, and so on until you want to hit him, at which point melee step aside. No worries about the frontal cone, and very little movement/coordination required.

Though I'm sure just about any strategy will work for Zon'ozz, provided people are on their toes and bouncing the orb into him. And, while I'm not 100% sure, if 25 man has a beefed up orb that isn't eatable solo, this could be a 10-only strat.

[Burlacher]

you make great points brain

however i am updating each boss as needed for 25man. 25man warlord we havent done yet and morchuk is being done today

[Malefic]

All of the 10 man fights with the exception of ultraxion and (depending on your strategy) spine of deathwing are single tank.

I've seen your video, did you guys consider the possibility of simply making him do a barrel roll and throwing the extra Amalgamations off his back? That's what we were doing at least.

Solo tank, kill 3 corruption tentacles. Make him do a barrel roll. Then kill the 4th. 1 then respawns, and you only have 1 amalgamation up.

[Pasture]

I hope that the heroic modes will allow you to run a normal group composition.

I'm sick of heroic modes mandating you drop a healer / tank or both. Design them around the same raid composition as the normals.

[Brownprobe]

I've seen your video, did you guys consider the possibility of simply making him do a barrel roll and throwing the extra Amalgamations off his back? That's what we were doing at least.

Solo tank, kill 3 corruption tentacles. Make him do a barrel roll. Then kill the 4th. 1 then respawns, and you only have 1 amalgamation up.

Honestly we didnt know that barrel rolls would drop the adds when we were doing it. We assumed that barrel rolls were just something to avoid and stacked melee and ranged on different sides to avoid it. We didn't watch any live streams or read any strats from other people on any of our kills, we all agreed figuring it out on our own was more enjoyable. But, I still like this strat better. Our melee would have an amalgamation in the back to work on after the front one was low, so no dps went to waste. Otherwise we would have had to have people stop dps whenever the amalgamation got low if it did t have it's 9 stacks. Then if we dropped a tank for a dps, there would just be more down time. Doesn't seem efficient.

[destia]

We did Ultraxion with 1 tank, didn't kill it but the only problem was DPS.

[Trifande]

any further updates?

Thanks for the post btw , quite informative!

[Dougall]

very good infos

[Trifande]

how would one go about doing Ultraxion with 1 tank on 10man? I've not attempted the fight yet, but some of my guildies that have are saying that the when the tank gets Fading Light (~ every 15secs ?) someone will die if the boss is not taunted by an OT. How would you handle this?

I also suggested having a fulltime kitty that taunts momentarily when needed but was told that the uptime of the OT as DPS would be very low because the OT has to taunt ever 10-15 secs. Is this true?