Melee DPS on Will of the Emperor

[mstg]

How do you dodge the boss's attacks? And is it really important to get the extra 500k damage?

[Inthrall]

I've found the easiest way to get this is to save a speed boost CD and use that to reliably get out of the way of his attacks. The 500k isn't too important, but it does add up. If you get 3-4 off during a fight, you've done over 1% of his total HP, making the fight that much easier.

[Nurabashi]

Just look for the animation the boss has. I see a lot of people having trouble with this, and I don't understand. It's extremely simple to dodge. Honestly, 500k isn't the biggest thing, but it does help overall. I would aim to dodge all of them. As an Enhance Shaman, I have access to Ghost Wolf form + Spirit Walk, which makes my life a lot easier in terms of dodging.

I say just practice it on LFR (What I personally did), and understand what the radius of the actual strike will be.

[Anxt of Detheroc]

Well, there are a couple of ways you can do it. Firstly, you can move with a gamepad such as a Belkin n52te. Secondly, you can use the W, A, S, and D keys to move your character out of the way. Thirdly, though not recommended, you can use the arrow keys in a similar fashion to the W, A, S, and D keys. Finally, at least for the ways I can think of, you can hold both mouse buttons down to move forward, moving your mouse to alter the direction in which your character moves.

Hope that helps!


In all seriousness, just look for the slicing animation, and move away. If he raises his leg, move out of his melee range. Otherwise, just dance around it. It takes some practice and a bit of luck to get it right sometimes, but a free 500k dmg is nothing to sneeze at. You should try to do it whenever possible, particularly if you are the tank. Since the DPS will spend a large part of the fight on adds, you can make it go much more quickly by dealing that extra damage.

[Sesshou]

Its not worth tunneling on dodging and making a complete mess out of your rotation. You should be able to dodge nearly all of them while still managing a decent job on your rotation. If you are sitting on the boss, you should easily end up with 10+ opportunistic strikes, I think I usually get ~14 but itll depend on your kill time as well. You shouldn't need a speed boost either except maybe if he does the stomp and then his next attack arc is centered in the direction you ran out in which is fairly rare.

As for how, the way he holds his weapon (or his raised foot) telegraph the arc of his attacks. Alternatively there are blue sonic boom looking things that will telegraph it as well that appear ~half way up his model.

[sarasun]

It also helps your healers to dodge it.

As to how to do it, i think it just takes practice. Ironically, i learned it while dead in LFR. I pulled aggro on the boss when he spawned (both tanks went on the same boss) and for some reason no one Brezz'd me. A full 6+ minutes of observing it did it for me ^^

[Rullis]

Tilt your camera upwards and look down on his head. Easy peasy tidi-do.

[dennisdkramer]

How do you dodge the boss's attacks? And is it really important to get the extra 500k damage?

You wont beat the boss if your melee dps are getting hit by this consistently. Its not a hard fight to heal, but its not that easy.

If you're bad at dodging it, don't sweat it - putting melee dps on add duty the whole fight is fine.

[Murderdoll]

I typically have trouble getting myself into a spot where you run out for a stomp or a center, then get stuck on the outside for the last 2 attacks, sometimes missing the buff. Its fairly annoying. We leave our melee on the adds untill we start to burn him, the uptime of ranged vs the 500k attack the melee MIGHT get, its not a huge deal. Guess it just depends on your raid composition and how many melee you have.

[Lolhammy]

DBM points which direction you should run.

[rzzr]

I think you need to dodge a few at least for the stacking debuff. He does his move every 20 seconds when his bar fill up and the defuff if he hits you ( -10% armor stacking up to 10 times) lasts 30 seconds so it will be harder on healers if you keep getting hit.

[Trigg]

wow i didn't even know the 500k ability was available for anyone other than the tank. Shows how usless some people are in LFR, i'm generally within the top 5-6 dps as a tank on that fight in there lol.

OT: the swings (at least in LFR) have a big "dust" radius around the boss of where the damaging areas are. Granted this is only visible when the damage gets done so useless to use as a que to move, but after doing it continously, you figure out where the areas are going to be and it becomes prety easy to get out of the way of all of them. The only ones i sometimes have troubl with are the aoe one, if i run too far out he yanks me back in, and the forward one since you have to run through him and he's got quite a large hit box (plus im generally a fair bit away from him ready for the aoe one).

[Serb]

I personaly zoom out my camera and watch boss animation: if it's side attack (left or right) boss will put his weapon above one shoulder and move the same leg lil bit backwards. So let's say weapon is on the left shoulder and left leg is lil bit behind>run to that side! Easiest way to determine safe spot (for me atleast) is to look at red circle/ boss hitbox on the floor. So if it's left side (that I've described) you just move on the left hakf of that circle , taken you are infront of the boss.
If it's frontal attack , again it's easy to spot it and all you need to do is to run trough the boss and stay @ the back , since it'll be 180 degrees hit.
And if he lifts his weapon above his head and lifts one foot , simply outrange it , since it's gonna be 360 degrees hit with ~8-10 yards if I'm not mistaken.

I practiced a lot in LFR on my various melee alts and it worked out really well , you'll get used to it quickly. Try to save some sprints / leaps etc for some dodgy ones since they might happen and you shouldn't have problems .

Hope this helped.

PS:Tried to simplify it but tbh after re-reading what I wrote , I'm not sure myself if it's simple enough!

[Nadev]

As they do the attacks, you can see crescent shapes detailing the general direction of their strikes. Obviously the outward radius is bigger but run under his legs or something once you see where he's gonna hit.

[hasslehoof]

birds eye PoV before he gets a full energy bar, move behind where the sweeping blue line is, if there's no line move a few yards away from the boss, press the extra button

it's pretty easy if you do what I said above, I play a dk so I have no mobility cds (death's advance 30% lol) and can normally avoid every single attack with ease.

[Moozhe]

The quickest way to learn the dance is to play as a tank in LFR.

Each ability in the combo is based on the direction of the current tank. Every time the tank moves between abilities, you have to take the tank's new position into account. The boss will pick one of 4 moves randomly, the only thing consistent is that he will not repeat the same move twice in a row.

If you consider that the ~30 yard radius around the boss is like a clock, and that the tank is standing at 6 o'clock, then then moves will hit these areas:
- Left Slash will hit from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock clockwise, so the tank would have to strafe left to at least 7 o'clock to avoid the slash.
- Right Slash will hit from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock clockwise, so the tank would have to strafe right to at least 5 o'clock to avoid the slash.
- Forward Slash will hit from 3 o'clock to 9 o'clock clockwise, so the tank would have to move forward through the boss past the boss' hitbox to avoid the slash.
- Stomp will hit roughly the inner ~15-20 yards of the clock, so the tank would have to move out to at least the 20 yard mark to avoid the stomp.

Basically if you're standing on the tank, then for each move you only need to either strafe left, strafe right, move forward, or move backward. You don't want to be too far from the boss or it will take too long to run forward through him. After every stomp you want to immediately run back in case a forward slash is next.

So if you are standing on the tank, avoiding a left slash only requires running about 5-10 yards to your left at most. However, if you're not standing on the tank and you're standing 10 yards to the tank's right, then you now have to move 15-20 yards in that same amount of time. I suggest marking the tank and stacking on him after each ability. You can't rely on following the tank, you need to start moving on your own by using your eyes. But you will have the ability to stay as close to the tank as possible and even if you're not on top of him you can still make a note of where he is as a point of reference for where the next ability will hit.

[Symph]

wow i didn't even know the 500k ability was available for anyone other than the tank. Shows how usless some people are in LFR, i'm generally within the top 5-6 dps as a tank on that fight in there lol.

Tanks are actually one of the best DPS for this fight because they are the only ones who are guaranteed to just sit on the boss the whole time. Yes melee can get the ability too but you have to actually be in there to dodge every swing. Meaning if you're still killing adds and the first one goes through, then you move in to dps the boss and dodge the next 4. Even though you didn't actually get hit by any of them, you're still going to miss out on 500k (1 mil on Heroic) even though you spent time doing most of the dance. Obviously there is movement from adds to the boss as well and a lot of it depends on your difficulty and raid size.

Anyway as someone mentioned, the best way is to just do LFR and practice.

[Mctriple]

What works best for me is different than the typical tips of watching for blue lines or where his weapon is. Maybe I'm just slow at this, since everybody else seems to get it with one of those two.

What I do is this. First, know the circular stomp. That's easy, since he raises his leg and arms up. Second, know the frontal attack. That's also easy, since he pulls his weapon back into his stomach. I had trouble at first primarily with his side attacks and knowing where the attack would be relative to him, since his side changes a bit. I found that just going to where his stomach is facing worked best for me for both of his side attacks. Since then, I've had no trouble dancing. Good luck!

[Reaped]

best way for me of dealing with it was to just zoom all the way out, can see everything then

/console cameradistancemaxfactor 6

[Squirl]

I just completely ignore his animation and only look for the blue lines. The stomp doesn't have blue lines, but you'll learn that one pretty quickly. For our first kill, I used Burst of Speed. That's just a crutch, but it helped me learn. You'll also want to stack on the tank so you don't end up with a really long distance to run as the boss shifts to face the tank.

Practice in LFR if you really need it.