Another raid week, another new boss. This time it is a brand new type of raid boss, a PVP zerg. If you ever ran Magister's Terrace in BC, you should be familiar with this style of fight. However, this is the first time anything like this has appeared in a raid instance.
It appears this fight relies somewhat on luck of the draw. Some of the NPCs you have to fight are just downright nasty, while others are merely annoying. You will face a group of the opposing faction. It will be a random combination of classes and they will use all of their PVP abilities. This includes everything, like CCs, interrupts, totems, etc. They also are way faster than any humans in reacting to things. For example, if you totem stomp the shaman just instantly throws down another one. PVP rules all apply for CCs and diminishing returns, so it is very difficult to keep them under control for any length of time. Also, they will even dispel each other. Similar to real PVP, the plate DPS classes are disgusting. The warrior and ret pally both deal insane damage and if those two decide to kill a clothie, there is almost nothing you can do about it.
The general strategy is going to be to CC the healers and kill the DPS, or to CC the DPS and kill the healers. We tried both ways for a while and seemed to have more success killing the healers. We decided the best course of action was to kill the resto druid first, as he kept getting off his instant HoTs before we could apply CC. We then burned him down while trying to keep the other healers under control. I was purging him when I could, especially when the resto shaman gave him an earth shield. We worked our way through the healers and then started on DPS.
To help control the DPS we assigned a few teams to certain ones. We actually found our prot warrior MT could control one pretty well by himself. Taunt works, but as soon as the debuff wears off they will lose aggro. We had him and another of our warriors spec prot and put vigilance on each other. They then would taunt one of the dangerous melee DPS and get it away from everyone. They would then rotate between taunts and stuns on their target to keep them as under control as possible. So taunt a few times until they went immune, then shockwave, concussion blow, charge, and then back to taunts. This controlled 2 of the melee DPS and was a huge help. On one of the other dangerous DPS we had a tag team of a DK and a resto druid. They would rotate between death grip/chains of ice/taunts and cyclones to control another.
The overall key to this fight is control. It is not easy and required alot of coordination amoung a couple of people. I think the more we do it, the better we will get at working together in this more Arena style. It was a very satisfying kill and frankly I had a lot of fun doing it. Was nice that it was not just a faceroll too. How you handle the fight will depend on what combination you draw and what your raid makeup is. This fight required me to use all of my tools, rather than just standing still and chain healing. I was constantly watching my aggro indicator to know if I needed to ES myself and run. I was using Wind Shear whenever I saw the Warlock start to Hellfire to stop him. I was hexing, purging, and even throwing out frost shocks or an earth bind when I saw something chasing a clothie. You need to be on your toes and able to react to a dynamic situation to succeed.
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This is by far the toughest we have seen come out of ToC. As an elemental shaman I had to use every CC ability I had and still maintain dps on the Champion we were taking down. Great fight tho, I will be posting on my blog www.shamantavern.blogspot.com later today on this encounter from a Elementals view point. Check it out if you have time.
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