How do you beat Shade of Xavius at mythic 10+ w/ Tyrannical, with one healer?

[oodle]

I tried doing this and it seemed impossible, had to get our ret dps to swap to heals to 2 heal and beat this guy.
Our dps is not low, 3 of us all 880's doing well over 400k. Our healer is a pretty geared and skilled holy priest, but feed on the weak just hits so insanely hard that its unhealable.

Imo he is one of the hardest tyrannical bosses in the game. Pretty much none of his abilities are avoidable. He targets dps with his spells and they hit like a truck.

At +10 this is how insanely powerful his abilities are and what they can possibly hit for.

His Nightmare Bolt hits for around 2.2 million
Feed on the Weak hits for over 700k damage per second for 5 seconds, for a total of 3.5 million
Apocalyptic Nightmare hits everyone for 2.2 million when he reaches 50%. Also buffing his damage by an extra 5%.


Induced Paranoia is the only move dps can avoid and it is easy if you know what you're doing while maintaining dps as a melee class.
How can a single healer manage this?

[Xart]

You just don't do the instance at all on Tyrannical. The last boss is way to brutal and especially with a healer that doesn't have a damage reduce cd such as holy priest.

You best bet is to stack heavy self cd classes and serverly overgear the rest of the instance just to have a chance at last boss.

[oodle]

Well people did say this all the way back in beta.

Honestly you need to use defensive cooldowns (hopefully immunities as well). If your group lacks in defensives and external defensives you are not going to kill it

I guess you would have to form a group that can spam defensives. As a Demon Hunter, I had a small advantage. 12% magic damage reduction as a passive. Metamorphosis is a full heal and blur has a 1min cd and it quite good. Hunter in the group just got destroyed when he was targeted with feed the weak more than once.

[Svisalith]

Kill it faster (2x old war / deadly grace on all DPS and tank) and coordinate defensives well. Plan your defensives so that they'll come up again ASAP and you get the most life-saves per fight while being able to survive two consecitive mechanics. Some night elves to shadowmeld casts which completely cancels them is pretty good, 1-3 combat resses will help you a lot in the case of bad RNG and the few bad classes.

Artifact level and ilvl helps a lot since they give HP per level to DPS, i have like 2.6m HP now

[oodle]

Kill it faster (2x old war / deadly grace on all DPS and tank) and coordinate defensives well. Some night elves to shadowmeld casts which completely cancels them is pretty good, 1-3 combat resses will help you a lot in the case of bad RNG.

Oh interesting that shadowmeld cancels it. Could've got the night elf hunter to also use that. Will remember that in future.

[connor778]

I did a 2 chest +12 DHT. Just need to use CDs and immunities like iceblock, bubble, cloak of shadows, AMS, etc.

Either don't do it +10 or higher or make sure that the group you're running it with is capable of doing the final boss.

[Svisalith]

Oh interesting that shadowmeld cancels it. Could've got the night elf hunter to also use that. Will remember that in future.

Shadowmeld cancels so much stuff, drops combat whenever so that you can eat/drink/prepot etc. It's really good and many high skilled nelfs use it 100x a day.

Nelf hunter should be easy - they can feign death the first mechanic, turtle the second one, feign the third, shadowmeld the fourth etc. If they really get every mechanic in a row for the whole fight then you can combat rez them and laugh at how easy it made things for everybody else

[Zubacz]

When you push higher keys, you need a bit of luck. Some keys are just dead keys. For example, we found some instances are not doable on Fortified (Nerthalion's Lair above 12 or so, because of the scorpions, Vault, unless you skip the first miniboss), more are not doable on Tyrannical (DHT last boss, Halls Hyrjya, Eye of Azshara last boss). Court of Stars is not doable at all above 12. As you get more gear you can push higher, but it will always be those instances which will cause trouble, because the given boses or mobs scale to do ridiculous damage.
My advice, avoid those keys. If you are doing 10s or higher, you probably have a dedicated group, so just do another key and hope to be more lucky.

[demonyaa]

I tried doing this and it seemed impossible, had to get our ret dps to swap to heals to 2 heal and beat this guy.
Our dps is not low, 3 of us all 880's doing well over 400k. Our healer is a pretty geared and skilled holy priest, but feed on the weak just hits so insanely hard that its unhealable.

Imo he is one of the hardest tyrannical bosses in the game. Pretty much none of his abilities are avoidable. He targets dps with his spells and they hit like a truck.

At +10 this is how insanely powerful his abilities are and what they can possibly hit for.

His Nightmare Bolt hits for around 2.2 million
Feed on the Weak hits for over 700k damage per second for 5 seconds, for a total of 3.5 million
Apocalyptic Nightmare hits everyone for 2.2 million when he reaches 50%. Also buffing his damage by an extra 5%.


Induced Paranoia is the only move dps can avoid and it is easy if you know what you're doing while maintaining dps as a melee class.
How can a single healer manage this?

He is one of the hardest bosses with tyrannical, that's a given.

Everyone needs to be on top of their game, avoid all avoidable damage and use a WA for Nightmare Bolt and Feed on the Weak:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...view?sle=true#

Festering Rip needs to be dispelled instantly and Apocalyptic Nightmare needs to be healed through.

The DPSers in this fight need to fully understand that they need to avoid all avoidable damage and mitigate Nightmare Bolt and Feed on the Weak otherwise people will die.

Goodluck.

[Raiju]

The main issue if you are making it to 50% smoothly is not letting the boss get stacks - some are unavoidable but prio moving him so his near oneshot abilities do not become oneshots.

[Ehrenpanzer]

When you push higher keys, you need a bit of luck. Some keys are just dead keys. For example, we found some instances are not doable on Fortified (Nerthalion's Lair above 12 or so, because of the scorpions, Vault, unless you skip the first miniboss), more are not doable on Tyrannical (DHT last boss, Halls Hyrjya, Eye of Azshara last boss). Court of Stars is not doable at all above 12. As you get more gear you can push higher, but it will always be those instances which will cause trouble, because the given boses or mobs scale to do ridiculous damage.
My advice, avoid those keys. If you are doing 10s or higher, you probably have a dedicated group, so just do another key and hope to be more lucky.

What a well designed system huh? Its almost like there were hundreds of us pointing this kind of basic shit out during Beta.... but fuck it, players are retards, what do we know......

[Leenaleena]

We did it once some weeks ago. Think it was 11 with almost 2 chests (we wiped once on trash and once on third boss). I suppose our group composition was just really good for it: bear tank, shadow priest, ww monk, some dps I can't remember and me on disc priest. The dps guys all had sufficient self CDs to deal with the Nightmare Bolt onto them, I could heal against 'Feed the Weak' just fine, used Pain Supp as self CD when I got the Nightmare Bolt (made sure to keep targeting the boss so I'd see who he'd target for the bolt) and bubbled for the 50% hit underneath the boss. Went painlessly and in one try.

I do however understand that a holy priest struggles majorly. I seriously cannot fathom how anyone would be masochistic enough to run as holy priest on 10+ Mythics. Literally NO damage reduction CDs, no real on the move utility, much less any useful CC (apart from a one minute disrupt on Chastise). The only way I could see that it might work would be to use GA as self CD and pray that every dps has CDs of their own to deal with FeedtheWeak/NightmareBolt/ApocalypticNightmare.

[tratra]

When you push higher keys, you need a bit of luck. Some keys are just dead keys. For example, we found some instances are not doable on Fortified (Nerthalion's Lair above 12 or so, because of the scorpions, Vault, unless you skip the first miniboss), more are not doable on Tyrannical (DHT last boss, Halls Hyrjya, Eye of Azshara last boss). Court of Stars is not doable at all above 12. As you get more gear you can push higher, but it will always be those instances which will cause trouble, because the given boses or mobs scale to do ridiculous damage.
My advice, avoid those keys. If you are doing 10s or higher, you probably have a dedicated group, so just do another key and hope to be more lucky.

you are wrong but ok. Its not doable with your group, doesn't mean its not doable at all. Get a better group or say out "its not doable with my own grp". My grp is definitely capable of doing anything you said of the above. And also this week we ran NL +12 +2 chests on tyranical, so I don't know what you on about, just get more gear and get better at the game.


To the OP, you can use several tactics one including having someone going out of range etc. Typically you need people with high lvl weapons and loads of HP + cd's. Its very doable, if you are wipping badly on it then ok try him again at a later time, you need more gear more AP and better players?

[Deleted]

He is doable, I did him 2 times on 12 2 weeks ago but everyone has to be aware of what's going on and the healer has to watch the debuffs. For example everyone has to be aware that his shadowbolts cause the silence/stand-together effect and that way nobody should ever get silenced. The debuff has to be dispelled ASAP and the healer should not be healing whoever is low after the shadowbolt, instead focus on whoever gets feed on the weak and powerheal through that, there is no other damage aside from the shadowbolt, feed of the weak and the aoe at 50%, so healing people back up has time.

If you still can't beat him then you have to come back later with more gear/AP, also I don't recommend using old war for him, instead just use prolonged power because the HP boost is often the difference between getting one shot without defensive CDs and not.

[Kaizenberg]

Did this on 11 and 13 this week on my RShaman, didn't have to much trouble. Some tips:

1. Despite being a spell caster boss he melee's surprisingly hard. Keep the tank high on health so you have time to react to his casts. The tank should use cooldowns as you tend to the party.

2. Feed The Weak announces who he will cast it on but he doesn't actually change targets. Quickly target the player and start pumping heals into them.

3. At 50% Xavius does a short animation and spikes the entire party with unavoidable damage. Everyone should use some sort of mitigation here or self-healing to help stabilize the party. He will shortly Nightmare Bolt / Feed The Weak after so its important to have everyone relatively stable. Use a group Healing CD here.

4. Personal Responsibility. DPS need to be aware of the current stability of the group and decide if they need to use their personals or not during Feed The Weak. If the entire group is low it's probably smart to immune it whereas if the entire party is healthy you can should assume your healer will get you unless called out otherwise.

5. Bring at least one battle rez, shit happens.

[Deleted]

you are wrong but ok. Its not doable with your group, doesn't mean its not doable at all. Get a better group or say out "its not doable with my own grp". My grp is definitely capable of doing anything you said of the above. And also this week we ran NL +12 +2 chests on tyranical, so I don't know what you on about, just get more gear and get better at the game.

I agree with the "undoable" point, because you can push most stuff to 15 with the gear you realistically can acquire up until now, but your example doesn't work. He said NL on Fortified, not Tyrannical, which makes Pelters and Scorpions a real pain to deal with.

[Grimbold of Skullcrusher]

You just don't do the instance at all on Tyrannical. The last boss is way to brutal and especially with a healer that doesn't have a damage reduce cd such as holy priest.

You best bet is to stack heavy self cd classes and serverly overgear the rest of the instance just to have a chance at last boss.

What, I dunno, but seriously DHT on 10 with Tyrannical is kind of breeze. We did it many times - composition was usually prot warrior, resto druid, unholy DK, a rogue and hunter... You just need to manage your defensive and offensive cds properly for the last boss and use prepot, health potions and all the shit like you usually do in raids. That last boss is hard, but nowhere near the difficulty of the last boss in CoS with Tyrannical for example...

[faithbane]

I tried doing this and it seemed impossible, had to get our ret dps to swap to heals to 2 heal and beat this guy.
Our dps is not low, 3 of us all 880's doing well over 400k. Our healer is a pretty geared and skilled holy priest, but feed on the weak just hits so insanely hard that its unhealable.

Imo he is one of the hardest tyrannical bosses in the game. Pretty much none of his abilities are avoidable. He targets dps with his spells and they hit like a truck.

At +10 this is how insanely powerful his abilities are and what they can possibly hit for.

His Nightmare Bolt hits for around 2.2 million
Feed on the Weak hits for over 700k damage per second for 5 seconds, for a total of 3.5 million
Apocalyptic Nightmare hits everyone for 2.2 million when he reaches 50%. Also buffing his damage by an extra 5%.


Induced Paranoia is the only move dps can avoid and it is easy if you know what you're doing while maintaining dps as a melee class.
How can a single healer manage this?

Feed on the weak is the only "killer" ability you need to worry about but its not the healers fault its the dps if they are dying...Frost DK AMS, Ret bubble, mage ice block, rogue cloak, are some of the abilities that will completely cancel the feed. also unholy AMS, lock self heal + health stone, hunter defensive, war defensive, are all strong enough to make that 3.5M manageable. There are probably very few specs that doesn't have the defensive to survive it but the real probably is your dps going derp derp it seems like.. And even in you lose 1-2 guys, if you have a dk, lock, druid, shaman, hpriest with leg, you have the BR options available.lusting at 50% and saving CDs for second half would also help.

[Zubacz]

you are wrong but ok. Its not doable with your group, doesn't mean its not doable at all. Get a better group or say out "its not doable with my own grp". My grp is definitely capable of doing anything you said of the above. And also this week we ran NL +12 +2 chests on tyranical, so I don't know what you on about, just get more gear and get better at the game.

I did Realm First Mythic 15, so I would say I am at least decent at the game. Nerthalion's Lair on Tyrannical is easy. What I mentioned is NL on fortified. My group is far from perfect, but we have decent gear. The examples I mentioned are all either 1-shot mechanics or just unhealable. Maybe nowadays with the 910 legendaries and slightly better gear, you can add 1 to the numbers I wrote, but that's about it.

I agree with the "undoable" point, because you can push most stuff to 15 with the gear you realistically can acquire up until now, but your example doesn't work. He said NL on Fortified, not Tyrannical, which makes Pelters and Scorpions a real pain to deal with.

If you have a specific group, for a specific instance and spend days on RNG and trial and error, then yes, I guess it's all "doable". But for all intents and purposes, your good group pushing 15 will consider the examples I mentioned to be "dead keys".

What a well designed system huh? Its almost like there were hundreds of us pointing this kind of basic shit out during Beta.... but fuck it, players are retards, what do we know......

Yeah, I guess fixing the "undoable" 5-mans is not their main priority atm. I just hope they look into it before they expand Mythic + in the coming patches. Would be pretty annoying if the dead keys just stayed dead.

[OrcsRLame]

When you push higher keys, you need a bit of luck. Some keys are just dead keys. For example, we found some instances are not doable on Fortified (Nerthalion's Lair above 12 or so, because of the scorpions, Vault, unless you skip the first miniboss), more are not doable on Tyrannical (DHT last boss, Halls Hyrjya, Eye of Azshara last boss). Court of Stars is not doable at all above 12. As you get more gear you can push higher, but it will always be those instances which will cause trouble, because the given boses or mobs scale to do ridiculous damage.
My advice, avoid those keys. If you are doing 10s or higher, you probably have a dedicated group, so just do another key and hope to be more lucky.

While I agree in principle that those bosses are the hardest, there are a lot of tricks that can be done on them and certain classes handle them better than others.

Hyrja for example, as a paladin tank I'd be confidant of living through 5 Shields of Light without switching sides. You start on Eye of the Storm side, (the bubble scales with mythic+ level now) and you side swap until you're sure the next Eye of the Storm will wipe you, then you stay on the Sanctify side till the end of the fight. On a 15, through SOTR and Seraphim the first Shield would hit me for around 2-3 mil. Easily survivable if I'm topped. The next one I'd eat with SOTR, Eye of Tyr and Guardian. Magic BoP the third one, Ardent Defender the fourth, and taunt-bubble the 5th. As long as everyone lives and dps is good, you should be able to kill the boss with that strategy.

Wrath of Azshara actually becomes quite easy if you 2 heal it. So long as you keep tornadoes out of melee, there's no soft enrage or ramping damage, so you just need to live till the end. You need around 400k HPS for the whole fight to deal with incoming damage on a 10. On a 12 that goes up to about 466k. Of course, having good execute dps or dps that have extreme survivability helps a ton. Fury warriors are actually broken on this fight, due to the stacking damage execute trait. On a long fight, a geared Fury warrior can sustain well over a million dps.

Advisor Melandrus is quite hard, but not impossible. I actually watched Method do him on a 14 just a couple weeks after mythic EN came out, so in current gear you could do him on a 15. You have to cheese the Blade Surge. He always targets people that are at range over people in melee. You can use that to your advantage by having all but 1 person stack in melee, and you rotate out based on the CD of movement abilities. Have a mage blink the first one, then a druid displacer the second, etc. If no one takes any avoidable damage, you should have a pretty good idea of when you cannot survive Slicing Maelstrom with regular healing. That is when you start rolling out the personals and healer cooldowns. Also not a terrible idea to second pot prolonged power.

Shade of Xavius is the hardest boss imo. There's very few good options for handling this fight other than have more immunities and have more health. A prot paladin does excel on this fight due to magic BoP, sac, and Hand of the Protector. Using stam flasks and potions of prolonged power can really help, since all his damage comes in huge bursts onto 1 target.

Concerning Fortified, there are ways to deal with trash. For the scorpions in Nelth's, you only need to kill 2. At worst you can CC the trappers and burn lust + damage pots on the first one, then healer/personal CDs/damage CDs on the second. Also helps immensely if you stun/disorient/knockback the Frenzy as the scorpion will not recast it for a very long time. In Vault, I agree that Glaviyanna Soulrender is OP, but she's not totally impossible to deal with. As long as you coordinate ALL of your CDs for the moment she starts to deal damage in meta, you can kill her. Helps a lot if you have a resto shaman for spirit link. Alternatively, she can be skipped with a hunter pulling her into east bumblefuck and feigning while the rest of the group runs by, or you can invis pot.

I do agree these are all vastly overtuned compared to the alternatives, especially since they require some rather specific comps in some cases.