Cho'gall, Chieftain of the Twilight's Hammer Clan

PHASE ONE

Cho'gall has a universal, stacking debuff called Corrupted Blood that serves as one of his most basic, avoidable, and yet complex mechanics.

Corrupted Blood has a number of phases:
Corruption: Sickness
Corruption: Accelerated (DISPELLABLE)
Corruption: Malformation
Corruption: Absolute

Please observe these abilities.

Aside from Corrupted Blood, Cho'gall himself has a series of abilities he uses during the encounter:

Conversion - Basic mind-control that causes affected players to channel a spell into Cho'gall called Twisted Devotion Methods of dealing with this will be addressed later.

Cho'gall will infuse himself with Fire/Shadow elements, causing him to generate these abilities:
Flame's Orders - Cho'gall Orders the Flame to come to his aid. Adds 20,000 fire damage to each melee swing and spawns Fire patches.
Shadow's Orders- Cho'gall Orders the Shadow to come to his aid. Adds a shadow damage AoE that hits everyone in the room to Cho'gall's melee attacks.

Cho'gall also applies a debuff called Fury of Cho'gall that lasts for 45 seconds. This requires your tanks to exchange primary threat upon application. (30,000 physical AND 30,000 shadow). Also the debuff applied increases all physical and shadow damage by 20% per stack.

Amidst these abilities, Cho'gall will also summon additional mobs called Corrupting Adherent

Corrupting Adherent Abilities
Depravity (CAN AND MUST BE INTERRUPTED; Bugged tool tip 0yds= 500000)
Sprayed Corruption - (Note this ability is a cone)
Corrupting Crash
Spilled Blood of the Old God
Festering Blood

PHASE TWO

Cho'gall will continue to use Fury of Cho'gall on his primary target as well as some new abilities:

Corruption of the Old God
Darkened Creations (Four in 10 player, Ten in 25)
Darkened Creations cast an ability called Debilitating Beam


The Strategy

OK. So how do we defeat this monstrosity!?

To start, phase one is the longer portion of the fight and luckily the easiest. The biggest priorities of this phase are as follows:

  • Interrupt/CC Conversion targets, ensuring Cho'gall NEVER receives the Twisted Devotion buff
  • DPS/Healers cannot get Corrupted Blood
  • Tanks swap/position the Corrupted Adherent's accordingly.
  • Killing Corrupted Adherent's and interrupting their Depravity spell.


Basic positioning:
Cho'gall should be tanked and kited (fire) around the room as sparingly as possible, he hits hard and the slightest adjustment in healers could cause a tank to die. When Corrupted Adherents are not up, dealing with Conversion is the biggest priority. First of all, the ranged dps and healers, aside from 1-2 designated tank healers, should be grouped up. This basically allows any fire mages in the raid to immediately use Dragon's Breath on any Conversion targets in the pile. Focus Shear/Counter Spell macros should be designated for the healers not on the group in the case they get targeted with Conversion. Conversions in melee should be dealt with using Kick/Blind/Mind Freeze/Strangulate.

Corrupted Adherent Positioning
There is no disadvantage in tanking the Corrupted Adherent on top of the boss aside from it's aoe upon death. However this is easily avoidable. One thing to note for the tanks is that the Corrupted Adherent is using a cone ability and should be faced at an angle that isn't toward melee, the main tank, or the ranged/healing group.

Corrupted Adherent's also cast an ability called Depravity. This MUST be interrupted. It is a 1.5s cast.

Around 20% the Corrupted Adherent should be moved away from the melee group, ideally back along the path of fire Cho'gall has dropped, and killed. Cho'gall will also periodically spawn Congealed Blood with Festering Blood from the puddles dropped by the Corrupted Adherents. Ranged should promptly aoe them down with the use of hunter traps and rings of frost to slow them.

This is literally all of phase one. Tank swaps with Fury of Cho'gall, dealing with Conversions and killing the Corrupted Adherents. Ideally only the tanks should have Corrupted Blood in phase one.

The biggest complications of this phase/strategy are as follows:

-When grouping for Conversion, the ranged need to be aware of the Corrupted Adherent and whether or not it is casting a Corrupted Crash. If anyone is hit by Corrupted Crash, you gain Corrupted Blood

-Corrupted Adherent Spawn timers in correlation to Fury of Cho'gall. Cho'gall will apply the debuff onto his primary target just before the Corrupted Adherent Spawns. This means that the individuals tanking the Corrupted Adherent be the one receiving 20% increase physical and shadow damage.

Once again the most important aspects of phase one.
  • Interrupt/CC Conversion targets, ensuring Cho'gall NEVER receives the Twisted Devotion buff
  • DPS/Healers cannot get Corrupted Blood
  • Tanks swap/position the Corrupted Adherent's accordingly.
  • Killing Corrupted Adherent's and interrupting their Depravity spell.

Phase Two

Important aspects:
  • Kill Darkened Creations
  • Healers be aware of Corruption:Acceleration on targets above 25 Corrupted Blood. It is dispellable.
  • Almost everyone will have Corrupted Blood at this point, meaning there will be a lot of Corrupted:Sickness procs occurring. This means ranged, and hopefully melee, must be 5 yards apart or you will pick each other off.
  • Higher Corrupted Blood = More damage taken from Cho'gall's Corruption of the Old God aura.

At 25% Cho'gall becomes fully corrupted by the Old God. He will stop casting Conversion and spawning Corrupted Adherents but instead spawn Darkened Creations. These creations will channel Debilitating Beam on the raid.

Darkened Creations do not need to be tanked as far and have only about 200k hp. Killing them is the biggest priority because ignoring them massively hinders dps/healing output as well as generates Corrupted Blood stacks at an alarming rate.

Phase two really has very little additional mechanics. The raid damage is steep and will be very erratic because of the variances in Corrupted Blood stacks.

Phase two priorities recapitulated:
  • Kill Darkened Creations
  • Healers be aware of Corruption:Acceleration on targets above 25 Corrupted Blood. It is dispellable.
  • Almost everyone will have Corrupted Blood at this point, meaning there will be a lot of Corrupted:Sickness procs occurring. This means ranged, and hopefully melee, must be 5 yards apart or you will pick each other off.
  • Higher Corrupted Blood = More damage taken from Cho'gall's Corruption of the Old God aura.




A little edit note on Corrupted Blood with tanks. Death removes any stacks of Corrupted Blood. In the instance to extend the life of some tanks, it may be good to soul stone them prior to phase two. Immune effects such as Ice Block and Divine Shield will not remove your Corrupted Blood stacks.