Twin Val'kyr

Well, I am a week late with this post because we had a bunch of regular raiders out last week which caused us to cancel a raid and wipe on Faction Champions with some friend ranks. Last night we went in with our regular group and cleared them in a few attempts to get to Twin Val'kyr. Our server was still undergoing maint as hour into raid time and even when it came up lag was terrible which set us way back for the night, so I did not get to see Anub yet. I assume we will kill him on Thursday and I will have a post about that as well.

So Twin Val'kyr is a fight where you have to worry about your "polarity". There is a dark boss and a light boss. There are also 4 portals in the room that give your character a polarity when touched. To DPS a boss you must have the opposite polarity of them. For example, the group on the right side of the room is the dark group and is tanking and DPSing the light boss. The tanks want to position them near the portal in the front of their side that is the opposite color they are assigned, so they can switch easily for vortex.

I assigned 2 healers on each tank and they stick with their group. We then had the 3 raid healers just choose a color to be and stand in the middle of the arena. From there, I could reach the entire raid. I mostly stuck with chain heals.

This fight is not very difficult, and I believe we 3 or 4 shot it. It is just getting people used to switching colors when they need to. A couple of our wipes were due to terminology used on vent when communicating what people needed to do. Here is how to deal with their abilities.

Balls of Light/Dark - These balls spawn and randomly move about the room. If one touches you that is your same color, you start to stack a buff on yourself. When the stack reaches 100 you get powered up and do double damage for a short time. It is nice, but it is a big DPS loss to ever go out of your way to collect them. Only bother if it is literally right next to you. Balls of the opposite color explode and do 12k damage to anyone within 8 yards. You have to keep an eye out, as several hitting you together can gib a non-tank.

Twins Pact - One of the 2 bosses will start to cast a heal called Twins Pact. This will heal for 20% and you cannot let this go off. The issue is they will put up a shield around themselves to prevent interruptions. You must do 250k damage to the shield before the 15 sec cast of Twins Pact happens and get off an interrupt. This is similar to the KT shield from Tempest Keep. You want all DPS to switch over to whichever twin is casting the shield. Ideally, the other color group will have time to switch colors and contribute, but even if they don't they can do toss in some DPS to help. We settled on yelling "DPS BLACK" or "DPS WHITE" over vent to keep this clear. We wiped twice because we would confuse people by saying "Switch to black" which can mean either DPS or switch your color. Ooops.

Vortex - One of the 2 bosses will start to cast vortex. This will either be Light Vortex or Dark Vortex. This will do a pulsing AOE that will easily kill someone if they are not the same color as the vortex. So when the Dark Vortex happens, everyone (including the tank) must click on the dark portal if the are not already dark. At that point the tank would then run to their original color portal in the front of the room and wait for the cast to finish, they would then switch back to their original color and resume tanking, dragging the boss back to the original tank position. The rest of their group needs to also switch back. We went to using the term "ATTUNE BLACK" or "ATTUNE WHITE" to make it clear what people needed to do.

Overall, not that difficult once you have seen it once or twice to grasp the color switching mechanic. It probably sounds more complicated than it is.