Friday, January 25, 2008

New Bosses

Last week was quite industrious - The Endless downed Void Reaver again, and beat The Lurker Below to a fishy pulp as well. Both fights are reasonably fun, essentially tank and spank with extras, and no ridiculous crap that randomly wipes the raid.

Void Reaver makes things interesting by firing Arcane Orbs at random players, which sail out and explode for around 5000 damage in a 20 yard radius, and silence for 6 seconds. Running away from these is the best option, as they don't track - they land where the player was when the orb was launched. Deadly Boss Mods has an excellent warning for this - the targeted player gets a skull over their head, and automatically says a warning message. The tricky thing is that there will be multiple orbs in the air at once, so fleeing from one may lead you into the path of another. Keep alert and watch where you're running - remember that you can always run backwards if there are several landing in your immediate area.

The Lurker Below is a little more tricky - his spout should be avoided by diving in the water, and the adds must be dealt with quickly before he surfaces. One thing I did notice is that when in the water, it's possible to swim down deep enough to keep shooting. Of course I had a pretty great group with a resto shaman and a shadow priest healing me constantly, but that allowed me to continue dpsing hard pretty much the entire time. Another thing I learned is that when the adds swim to the islands, they don't become "active" until they finish their little walk. One sauntered right over my Freezing Trap, stopped just on the other side, and started attacking us. Make sure that trap is right at their destination point. It's also good to pop a Misdirection on whoever is tanking the Coilfang Guardian closest to your island, to make sure that they don't go wandering off and hit squishies.

It's quite amazing how quickly raid performance improves once people start getting the hang of a fight. The first few Lurker attempts were a mess - people were getting spouted all over the place, adds were sprinting off and killing healers, and the Coilfang Frenzys even respawned halfway through an attempt and completely chewed our faces off. Every attempt was an improvement though, and soon people worked out where they needed to be and what their roles were, and soon the Lurker was fish food. Grats.

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