Warmaster Blackhorn 10M strategy and notes

[braeldiil]

My guild, which is a pretty typical 10-man casual progression guild, just finished Warmaster Blackhorn. This was a bit of a wall for us, so I spent a lot of time reading the various strategy websites. These all ended up being fairly useless, as they had missing information, wrong information, and used 25-man strategies that seemed to work badly on 10 mans. So I figured I’d collect some accurate information and then discuss our strategy for the fight.

Phase 1:
There are a lot of moving parts in this phase.

Twilight Drakes: There are six of these. They do no damage directly, only throwing small twilight blasts at the ship. They have 1.1 million hp, and can only be damaged when close to the ship. They come in pairs of two 60 seconds apart. When all 6 die, phase 1 ends.

Twilight Barrage: These are small swirls on the deck of the ship. They deal 210000 shadow damage, split among all targets in the swirl (including the ship as a target). However, if a player takes damage the ship does not, so the ship takes either the full 210k or nothing. You get one blast every 13 seconds from each active drake - a drake goes active after he drops off his melee add, and continues shooting until he dies.

Melee adds: Each drake starts by flying in to drop off a melee add. These have 3.4 million hp each. They come in pairs of two, 60 seconds apart. You need two tanks, one for each add. There are two types, Dreadblades and Slayers. Each has a stacking debuff, so the tanks need to trade off on each wave. The Dreadblades have a cone attack, so point them in a safe direction. They will occasionally charge a random player – they prefer ranged, but they will charge in melee range if there is no one at range. The charge is marked with a line of circles on the deck, and everyone on the path will get hit.

Twilight Onslaught: This is a giant swirl on the deck. It’s the same as the Barrages, except it’s a much bigger hit – 800k. It happens every 35 seconds. The ship will always take some damage from these.

Twilight Sappers: Every 40 seconds, a drake will fly in and drop one of these guys off. They have 340k hp. They hit the deck, go invisible, and start running for the back of the ship. About halfway down the hull, they become visible, and you kill them. If they reach the back of the ship, they explode for 800k damage against the ship and players. They can be stunned, slowed (but not rooted), deathgripped, etc.

The Ship: The ship has three functions in phase 1. First, it has 4.6 million hp. If it dies, you wipe. It takes damage from Twilight Barrage, Twilight Onslaught, and Sappers. Second, the harpoon guns pull the Twilight Drakes in. This allows players to dps them. The harpoons last for 22 seconds, and it takes the harpoon guns 13 seconds to reload. Finally, the ship does 4k dps to each active drake with the deck guns.

Myths about this phase:

Myth 1: You need to soak the barrages. This is untrue, and can get you in a lot of trouble by killing your dps. If you kill at least one drake on every harpoon cycle, soak all the Onslaughts and kill all the Sappers, you can ignore the Barrages completely and make it to phase 2. You’ll soak a couple by accident, but there’s no reason to intentionally soak any of them unless you screw up somewhere else.

Myth 2: Everyone needs to soak the Onslaught. While you have to soak each Onslaught, you don’t need the whole raid. Seven is doable, and eight is actually quite safe. You can significantly help your dps by letting someone sit and tunnel, rather than running.

Myth 3: All dps should switch to the sapper. This is a dps killer. You have at least 10 seconds to kill the sapper – that’s before any slows, lifegrips, knockbacks, etc. Put 2-3 people on sapper duty, and let the rest of the dps focus on the other mobs.

Myth 4: The ship stops taking damage in phase 2. Not quite true. While the Barrages and Onslaughts stop, if a Sapper is active (including the drake flying in, but he’s not on deck yet) you can still lose the ship. So clean up that last sapper.

Phase 2:
There are a lot fewer things going on in this phase. You have any leftover mobs from phase 1, usually melee adds, possibly a sapper. Then you have the new stuff.

Goriona: This is the big dragon. She flies in to drop off Warmaster Blackhorn, then hangs out near the ship. She has 13 million hp, and flies away at 25% (so roughly 9 million damage). Only ranged can hit Goriona, and they have to be in the front starboard (right) section of the ship.
Twilight Flames: These are purple circles that Goriona casts on the ship. They hurt, so you have to move out of them. These stop appearing when Goriona flies off, and eventually fade.

The Ship: The guns on the sides of the ship go into rapid fire when Goriona comes in – the ship’s captain yells to concentrate all fire on the armored dragon. The ship does 100k dps to Goriona.

Warmaster Blackhorn: He has a stacking debuff, so the two tanks will have to swap him back and forth. He has a shout that hits everyone, and will interrupt spellcasters within 10 yards. He fires a cone attack at a random player that hurts and stuns players and must be dodged. Finally, he gains 1% damage for every percent of life lost. At the end, the tanks will need rolling cooldowns to survive.

Myth 1: You should max burn Goriona. The ship guns are going to massively outdamage you. There’s not much to gain from a bloodlust or other long cooldown here. Ranged should do the best they can, but dodging stuff and saving cooldowns for low-health Warmaster is much more effective.

Our Strategy:
Phase 1:

We tackled the fight with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 melee dps, and 4 ranged dps. We started with the tanks and melee dps towards the back of the ship, with 3 ranged on the left rail and 1 (arcane mage) on the right. If you don’t have an arcane mage, put your best burst dps here. One healer was on each side. We completely ignore the Twilight Barrages (the little swirls), as they don’t do enough damage to the ship to matter with this strategy.

When the drakes make their initial run in to drop off the melee adds, the ranged dps on the left rail dot up the one that passes over them. They then work on melee adds for a few seconds until the harpoons go out. The tanks get the two melee adds close together for cleaves, and the melee all work on them. As soon as the harpoons fire, the ranged all switch to the drakes on their side.

About 5 seconds after the harpoons fire, the first Onslaught will hit. Most of the raid stacks up – the arcane mage and the tank who’s handling the Dreadblade stay out. As soon as the Onslaught hits, everyone runs back to their initial positions to minimize charge damage. The 3 ranged on the left should easily kill their drake, and switch to help on the right drake. We might kill both drakes, but worst case should be ~15% life on the left drake.

A word on the arcane mage’s role here. He needs to do two big bursts here, 1 minute apart. On the first one, he should have a weakened drake, so he should only use cooldowns with a recycle of 1 minute or less. On the second drake, he goes max burn. It works out to ~35k dps for the first burn (over 20 seconds), and ~50k dps on the second one. To optimize his burst, he doesn’t ever stack for Onslaught.

When the first drake dies, one melee add should also be down, with the second in trouble. The sapper lands here. We have our DK tank deathgrip him back from the door, and the melee dps and 1 ranged from the left rail handle him. We then finish off everything from the first wave, stacking for the Onslaught when it happens.

Second wave goes much like the first. 3 ranged dps on the left kill their drake, then try to help out on the right side. The arcane mage on the right goes full burn and nearly solos his drake. Melee handle the sapper that lands with two drakes harpooned, and works on the melee adds. Usually, 1 melee add is up at 25% when the third set lands.

Third wave is also similar. Again, the 3 ranged on the left smash their drake. The arcane mage has shot his wad at this point, so his drake will fly away and have to be harpooned again. He gets killed as soon as he gets pulled in on the 2nd harpoon. The melee adds will probably still be up when the last drake dies and phase 2 starts – just have the melee dps kill them and ignore the Warmaster for a moment.

Phase 2:

The ranged dps all line up at the front right of the ship, in an “L” shape. This gives some room to dodge the circles and cone attacks. We use the boards on the deck as guides. Blackhorn is tanked 10 yards behind the ranged, with all the melee dps and healers behind him to try and pull the cones away from the ranged. The ranged work on Goriona, though dodging attacks is always more important than damaging her. No one damages the Warmaster till Goriona flies off.

Once Goriona is gone, we move Warmaster to the center of the ship, and spread out in a ring around him. Casters want to be just outside the range of the interrupt (10 yards), which takes a little practice. This gives you the smallest distance to run to clear the cone attack if he aims at you. After that, it’s just a matter of dpsing him down while dodging the cone, with cooldowns and lust/warp towards the end of the fight.

[Bianconeri]

Yes this should help anyone struggling. I'd also like to add that ranged/melee dps is crucial here as in the first two weeks we just couldnt kill it with a setup of enh shaman/mm hunter/arcane mage/fury warr/combat rogue. Once the Enh shaman went resto and the hpala went boomkin, it was a complete faceroll for us and tbh today we can't believe we wiped on it so much. So yeah a minimum of 3 range will help alot.

[Javster]

We got a late start this tier and got our first few looks last week. Have been looking for a solid 10M normal strategy for 2 weeks now with no luck. This post was exactly what I was looking for.

Quick question though. I read somewhere where each tank will take turns solo tanking the melle adds. This keeps them together and tight for cleave damage and lets the "resting" tank help deal with the sapper and soak up some barrages here and there. Does that make sense?

[Tradu]

We got a late start this tier and got our first few looks last week. Have been looking for a solid 10M normal strategy for 2 weeks now with no luck. This post was exactly what I was looking for.

Quick question though. I read somewhere where each tank will take turns solo tanking the melle adds. This keeps them together and tight for cleave damage and lets the "resting" tank help deal with the sapper and soak up some barrages here and there. Does that make sense?

We always have the tanks alternating mobs, so A takes Dreadblade, B takes Slayer, then for the next one A takes Slayer and B takes Dreadblade etc.

And as was said, this fight gets significantly harder with less than 3 ranged. Combat rogues, moonkin, spriests, non-frost mages and locks are the DPSes I'd say are best for this fight, so if you have those available, use them.

I would say you're wrong about not having to focus Goriona, because as soon as she is dead, the fight is pretty much a joke.

Depending on which ranged you have, they should DoT up both drakes and humanoids(drakes have prio).

During P1, tank the humanoids on top of eachother, get into the Onslaughts and kill the Sappers before they blow up.

During P2, ranged and healers should stay 11-15 yards away from the boss, while still dodging fire, so they can easily run out of Shockwave, and don't get hit by the AoE silence.
Apart from that positioning is pretty irrelevant(as long as the ranged DPS are in range of both the boss and Goriona, obviously)

Spec specific tips:

Moonkin:
As a moonkin, I can get both DoTs on both drakes during the initial drop, then I DoT up the humanoids and get into Solar Eclipse if I'm not already. After that, I just keep DoTs on everything and fill with Starfire(don't use Starsurge or Wrath). Stay in Solar Eclipse for all of P1, use Treants for the first Drakes, and Starfall for every set of drakes.
You can use Mushrooms to slow the Sapper if you spec into Fungal Growth.
During P2, keep DoTs on both Goriona and Blackhorn, while focusing Goriona. Use a normal rotation for this phase.

Resto druid:
Heal people, drop an Efflorescence under every Onslaught. Use Treeform and Tranquility during P1 if needed.
P2, don't stand in Shockwave, heal people. If the tank damage gets really high, pop Treeform again(it should be ready by now). If the raid is about to fall over, use Tranquility, which should also be ready again.

Arcane mage:
You should be able to pretty much solo one drake, but that shouldn't be necessary, because the others should be DoTing the drakes as well. Just go apeshit on the first drakes, do a burn without cooldowns for the 2nd drakes and do another real burn for the 3rd drakes. You can easily regen your mana while no drakes are up, so don't worry much about spending loads on bursting the drakes.
You can use Slow on the Sappers, but it shouldn't be necessary. If you're specced into Nether Vortex for some reason, it'll get applied automatically.
In P2, focus Goriona until she flies away, then switch to Blackhorn. Use burn phases as you usually would. Use Blink to get out of Shockwaves.

Fire mage:
Keep Living Bomb on both drakes and 1 humanoid, apply the first Bombs during the initial drop, and then just refresh them after they blow up. Get a Combustion on the second-prio Drake during the first and third sets(if you don't have the 4P). If you have an Impact procc when a Sapper is up, use Fire Blast to stun it. Use Blast Wave to slow the Sapper.
IN P2, keep Living Bomb on both Blackhorn and Goriona, but focus your direct attacks and a possible Combustion on Goriona. Use Blink to get out of Shockwave.

Retribution paladin:
Kill the crap out of the humanoid adds, and if they die quickly, feel free to help on the Drakes. You can stun the Sappers with Hammer of Justice.
In P2, smash Blackhorn in the back and don't stand in Shockwave. Use Hand of Sacrifice on the tanks if necessary.

Sub rogue:
Singletarget the humanoids. Stun Sappers with Kidney Shot.
P2, poke Blackhorn in the back, and if you're really lazy, use Shadowstep to not get hit by Shockwave.
(You should really go combat for this fight, though)

Combat rogue:
Bladeflurry the humanoids, enjoy the stupidly high DPS. Stun the Sappers.
In P2, slice Blackhorn to ribbons.

Frost DK:
Singletarget the adds, slow the Sappers.
P2, freeze the Warmaster's testicles off.

Blood DK:
Alternate adds, use your cooldowns when you feel like it/to make healing you easier.
P2: taunt rotate at whatever amount of stacks works for you and your partner.

Thats the specs I've done the fight on, feel free to yell at me if I made any mistakes(the rogue and DK ones are quite short, because I've not done the fight all that many times outside of LFR on those. Melees have a really easy job here, but you may feel kinda useless if you aren't a combat rogue, because melee are much more limited in terms of what they can do on this fight)

[Sanji]

wtf is this normal ?

[braeldiil]

With respect to Goriona:

I'm not saying you should ignore her. The ranged should definitely be focusing on her. The thing is that the ship is going to absolutely wreck her. In 10-man, the ship will easily outdamage your raid, no matter what you do. Given that, the difference between a max burn with all cooldowns and regular sustained dps is 5-10 seconds. You'd much rather have those cooldowns when warmaster gets low. So do your regular dps on Goriona, and save the big cooldowns for later in the fight.

By the same token, dodging the stuff on the deck absolutely has to take precedence over killing Goriona.

[Tradu]

With respect to Goriona:

I'm not saying you should ignore her. The ranged should definitely be focusing on her. The thing is that the ship is going to absolutely wreck her. In 10-man, the ship will easily outdamage your raid, no matter what you do. Given that, the difference between a max burn with all cooldowns and regular sustained dps is 5-10 seconds. You'd much rather have those cooldowns when warmaster gets low. So do your regular dps on Goriona, and save the big cooldowns for later in the fight.

By the same token, dodging the stuff on the deck absolutely has to take precedence over killing Goriona.

Your ranged should be doing about as much DPS as the ship(if you have 3 ranged, that is), so it doubles the speed at which Goriona goes down. I still say using CDs to get her down should have prio, because after she dies, you hardly have to move and thus increase your DPS a lot, and healing is a joke after she dies, because the raid damage is on a timer, and other than that there's only the tanks to worry about. If the tanks are dying in the gear that most "average" normal mode guilds should have available by now, either the tanks or the healers aren't using their CDs properly, and it shouldn't be the DPS' responsibility to make up for that. Also, you would usually only get room for 1 set of CDs if you save them for when Goriona is dead, instead of 1 for Goriona and 1 for Blackhorn(this is with the average 2-3 min cooldowns)

If you mean REALLY long cooldowns like the Warlock guardians(only example I can think of, and with the T13 bonus I'm not even sure if they're that long cooldowns anymore), I totally agree that they should be saved for low health, but "normal" cooldowns should be used whenever you can, and getting an additional set of cooldowns in is more important than saving them(and even if you saved them for low health, by that time they would be up again anyway)

[braeldiil]

Pre nerfs, it took roughly 9 million damage to drive goriona off. The ship is doing a bit over 100k dps, so by itself the ship runs her off in 90 seconds.

Lets assume the ranged can do 100k dps on normal rotation. That means she leaves in 45 seconds. Great, that helped a lot.

Now assume we blow cooldowns and add 50% to the ranged damage - all the way to 150k dps. Should be a big difference, right? Nope. It only drops 9 seconds, to 36 seconds.

Or assume your ranged has some trouble - constantly running from flame circles and the shockwave. They spend so much time running that they lose a lot of their damage, a full 50%. Even with only 50k dps from your ranged, she still flies off in 60 seconds.

To add to that, the ship is going to get 5-10 seconds of dps in while the dragon is flying in, before the ranged get set up and going. That shrinks the differences even more.

As a ranged, I would expect all my 3 minute cooldowns to be down for Goriona, anyway. We dot the first set of drakes when they fly over, and kill them with normal dps. We blow cooldowns on the second set to make sure they go down fast. Since each set is 1 minute, they should be cycling back up shortly after we run Goriona off.

[Tradu]

Pretty sure you could get a 3rd set of cooldowns if you use them for first, Goriona and then again for Blackhorn himself. As a boomkin, my treants have to attack Blackhorn for their "Goriona" use anyway, though, so the only real cooldown I can use for Goriona is Starfall(which is definately best used on cooldown, and especially when there's 2 targets in range)

[Javster]

Just wanted to thank the OP for a great guide. We dropped Blackhorn this past Saturday night using this strategy. Took us a few tries, but we got him. Our ranged DPS was pretty low for this fight. I was having a hard time understanding why, since our DPS is normally not an issue. Looks like the constant target switching and moving for onslaughts were taking a toll. I'm sure over time people will catch their stride on this fight.

Next up Spine!

Thanks again.

[Spikedriver]

Twilight Drakes: There are six of these. They do no damage directly, only throwing small twilight blasts at the ship. They have 1.1 million hp, and can only be damaged when close to the ship. They come in pairs of two 60 seconds apart. When all 6 die, phase 1 ends.

False. The drakes can be hit when they sit at range by hunters. I do it everytime. You have to be right up on the edge of the ship and directly across from the drake for it to be in range. But you can get an massive jump to get them down quickly.

We assign 2 ranged for this part, 1 on the left and I usually cover the right. Its not uncommon for me to get my drake down on the first harpoon and run over to the other side of the ship and drop the other drake while its at range.

[Holy]

My casual 10 man guild also had a lot of trouble with him, but luckily we got him down before any of this 'decreased health and damage' noise.

We just straight up ignored Gondria. It made it so much easier for casters to avoid shockwave.

[Deleted]

My 10 man team are actually gonna be trying him for the first time tonight, so thanks for the guide Will point it in our raids direction.

[Deja Thoris]

The tactic is fine and all but with 6 dps you can (should) kill the first elite before the drakes even show their face - at the very worst shortly thereafter.

We always kill the dreadblade first because he cleaves. In this way we work down the adds and leave one dragon up at the end. The boss doesn't spawn until the last dragon dies so it allows you time to position and top off the raid. Another thing you completely neglected to mention is raid cooldowns. Most tank 4 sets can be used in the big barrages and the damage reduction is more than noticable. Set up good CD rotations for big barrages and it will make progress easier for the people struggling with progession.

[Muliercula]

wtf is this normal ?

Yes it is 1010

[Javster]

The tactic is fine and all but with 6 dps you can (should) kill the first elite before the drakes even show their face - at the very worst shortly thereafter.

We always kill the dreadblade first because he cleaves. In this way we work down the adds and leave one dragon up at the end. The boss doesn't spawn until the last dragon dies so it allows you time to position and top off the raid. Another thing you completely neglected to mention is raid cooldowns. Most tank 4 sets can be used in the big barrages and the damage reduction is more than noticable. Set up good CD rotations for big barrages and it will make progress easier for the people struggling with progession.

The first dreadblade was going down fast, the melee adds didn't pose that big of a problem. We had our combat rogue focus on them 100% while our frost DK would deathgrip and ice-chain the sapper. It seemed our ranged was having issues with their dps. We switched to 2 healers and downed him the first try. The extra dps was helpful. After going through our logs for the night, I noticed not everyone was switching over to the sapper. I have to make sure everyone has a target-sapper macro since people were complaining about not being able to see him. We were rotating Divine Guardian & Spirit Link Totems on Twilight Onslaught, but the Onslaughts weren't putting out that heavy a damage anyhow. To be honest, damage wasn't bad at all on this fight until the last 30 secs. On the kill our melee (tanks included) were dead as well as our healers. Last 3 standing were a shadow priest, arcane mage & hunter.

The main concern with using this strategy was as listed above. One drake has to die on each harpoon cycle, sapper must die every time. I would position the two elites on top of barrages whenever possible to buy us some soaking room as well. We did try another tanking strat I'd read somewhere, where one tank would tank both elites each wave. This would let the "resting" tank soak up barrages and help out on sapper duty. That seemed to work fine as far as tank damage was concerned, but since we weren't getting any further (our ship was blowing up) we gave up on that tactic.

Overall, it's my favorite DS fight so far. So much craziness going on that is get's the blood flowing.