Tank Hard!

Allow me to introduce my dear friend, the second boss of Blackwing Lair, Vaelstrasz the Corrupt. Vael pops up a couple other places in the game (LBRS and UBRS) where he is friendly and helps you out, but when you see him in BWL it’s a different story.

First, a quick rundown of BWL lore. BWL is the home of Nefarian, son of Neltharion. Netharion was the leader of the Black Dragonflight and, like most of the dragons in WoW lore was a pretty cool dude. But then he went all emo and started listening to Thursday and My Chemical Romance and he probably got some tatoos of a rose with a tear or something and he changed his name to Deathwing. He convinced the other Dragon Aspects to lend him a part of their soul so they could make a weapon to destroy whomever they were all fighting at the time (demons iirc). But Deathwing is a sneaky bastard and he wasn’t actually trying to kill demons; he had gone batshit crazy and was going to try to kill the other Aspects. He was the only one who didn’t contribute any of his power so he was full strength AND he had some of the power of all the other dragons and they were all weakened. But the other dragons figured it out in time and curbstomped Deathwing. He went into hiding and hasn’t been seen since. He presumably is wearing black thick rimmed glasses and tight jeans and is badly in need of a haircut.

Neltharion/Deathwing had a couple kids, notably Onyxia and Nefarian. Nefarian inherited his father’s hatred of humanity and the other dragonflights. Inside BWL he is doing a little bit of genetic engineering trying to combine the different dragonflights into a Chromatic Dragonflight that will be under his control. The plan is to rally the Black Dragonflight and use them plus the new Chromatic Dragonflight to strike back and destroy the other dragonflights that beat up his dad. The other dragonflights kinda know what is going on and they understandably want to stop it. Vaelstrasz is part of the Red Dragonflight and is kind of a big deal and he tracks Nefarian to Blackwing Lair. But Vael gets whooped by Nefarian and when you encounter him he is at 30% health.

There is a cutscene before the encounter starts and Nefarian does a little speech where he tells you that he beat up Vael and now Vael is corrupted and is going to serve Nefarian by killing your raid. Vael tries to fight the corruption and tells you to gtfo. Right before the encounter starts, as his final effort before the corruption takes over, Vael gives your raid a buff called Essence of the Red to help you kill him. The buff lasts for three minutes and it restores 500 mana per second to mana users, 50 energy per second to rogues and cat druids and 20 rage per second to warriors and bear druids. It means you basically have infinite mana/rage/energy.

Vael, like most dragons has a frontal cleave and frontal cone fire breath attack but this one adds a stacking DoT on the tank. He also has a flame buffet that will hit everyone in the raid for around 600 every 3 seconds. So raid healing is a huge deal in this fight. But since the healers have infinite mana, it isn’t too hard to spam what would otherwise be mana intensive party heals. He also has a debuff that he will randomly put on 1 member of the raid called Burning Adrenaline. Burning Adrenaline increases damage done by 100%, increases attack speed by 100% and makes all spells instant cast. After 20 seconds the person with BA will explode killing that person and everyone around them. BA can’t be removed by anything (including pally bubble, iceblock and cloak of shadows) and Vael can and will cast it on the tank.

You would put your raid on one side of the boss and the tanks on the other side. If anyone pulled aggro, the boss would cleave and it would chain to everyone on that side and kill a bunch of people and then he would flame breath and kill anybody left standing. One of the most impressive things about Vael is how quickly he can wipe a raid. Back in the day an aggro pull or early tank death meant that Vael would wipe your raid incredibly fast. We are talking 40 people alive to 0 alive in less than 5 seconds.

The space behind the dragon was left clear for people with BA. When someone got BA, they would sprint to the back of the dragon and then DPS like mad until they exploded safely away from the rest of the raid. If/when the MT got BA, then the second tank would run next to the MT and the healers would all stop healing the MT and start healing the OT. The idea was that you would let Vael kill the MT before BA killed him so that he wouldn’t explode.

Even though Vael is at 30% when you walk into room, you still have a long way to go. The tanks have infinite rage, but threat can still be an issue since rogues and dps warriors have infinite energy/rage too. Casters generally didn’t have a problem with threat because more mana for them does not correlate to a huge dps increase like it does for druids/rogues/warriors. The key was having the dpsers stay below all the tanks, not just the current tank. Once Vael was below 20% though, the OTs could go to Battle stance and start dropping full rage bar executes on the boss which would generate plenty of threat.

This fight was THE dps race on vanilla wow. Everyone loved being able to put out huge numbers. Burning Adrenaline was a great mechanic that was gauranteed to kill the person it was cast on but it gave you the consolation of a HUGE damage burst before you died. The “enrage” timer was basically the 3 minute duration of Essence of the Red and it was pretty tightly tuned. A guild that had been clearing MC and was playing well would beat the enrage timer, but if your dps was off their game or healers were letting people die, then you were going wipe no matter how good your gear was. It was a gear check and a skill check at the same time. Lots and lots of guilds shattered on Vael. He was the guild killer of vanilla WoW.

A lot of people hated the Vael fight and I never really understood why. If was definately one of the hardest fights in BWL and its placement as the second encounter of the instance meant it was a major stumbling block. But the hard fights are the fun ones IMO. And Vael was very hard. The mechanics were unique, especially after Molten Core, it was a dps race and a skill check. It was a relatively short fight and was very intense the whole time. It was just a great fight.

Fun fact: when BWL was first released, if you didn’t kill Vael within an hour of the first time you engaged him he would automatically despawn for 12 hours and iirc, you couldn’t move on to the next boss without killing Vael so if you didn’t get him within that hour then you were screwed.

The attunement for BWL is very very easy by modern standards. When you head up to the doorway for UBRS, if you keep going past down the hallway there are some mid-50s elite mobs. One of them is called Blackrock Quartermaster (or something close to that). You kill him and he drops an item that starts a quest. The quest is to go kill General Drakkisath in UBRS and touch the orb behind him. Once you do that you are attuned to BWL. Get yourself back outside the UBRS portal and head all the way to the end of that hallway and you will see the Orb of Command and you can put your hand on it and you will be teleported into BWL.

The only hard part of the attunement is finding someone with an UBRS key. With 10 people you can clear UBRS in about 20 minutes. If there is someone who has done the fights before and can explain them, then you can do everything in BWL with 15 people. You will need Onyxia Scale Cloaks for your tanks if you want to do the three drakes and your whole raid will need those cloaks if you want to do Nefarian, but those are easy enough to get since Ony can be killed with 5-10 people (less is possible but it takes a while).

When you zone into BT you start in the sewers and work your way up to the first boss, High Warlord Najentus. Then you climb out of the sewers and into a big courtyard with Supremus at the end of it.

After Supremus your enter the foyer of BT and then there are a couple different paths you can follow. The foyer is dark and foreboding and is dominated by a huge Dark Gaurdian statue. On the right is Shade of Akama and on the back right is the way up to Teron Gorefiend. Akama’s room feels a little evil and is just right for a fight against his imprisoned soul or whatever the hell the shade is supposed to be. Teron’s area has a martial feel to it which is fitting for one of the most famous deathknights around. If you head to the back left of the foyer and then take another left you go down into the dark, dank basement which feels perfect for a crazed fel orc like Gurtogg Bloodboil.

On the near left side of the foyer you can go up to Mother Shahraz (after you kill the other bosses) through the Den of Mortal Pleasures. Lots of concubines and comfortable furniture and scantily clad statues as you make your way up to Mother. After Mother Shahraz you go through the Grand Promenade, which isn’t anything special but does contain the greatest trash mobs ever: the Random Laser Beam 1-shot Robots otherwise known as Promenade Sentinels. Then you enter the Chamber of Command where you fight the Illidari Council. These guys have a pretty neat room, and it is kinda fitting for them, unfortunately the boss fight that takes place in there is probably the most long and boring fight I have ever done. After Council you head up to the Temple Summit where you fight Illidan himself. The Temple Summit is a very neat area and just might inspire an “I can see my house from here” moment.

But in a zone that is really well designed and very aesthetically pleasing, the area around Reliquary of Souls is still able to stand out. When you go to the back left of the foyer and take a right instead of the left down to Gurtogg, you will find the Reliquary of Souls. This is may be the most unique fight in all of TBC. To get to the boss you need to fight your way through a short gauntlet. Its not as bad as the Supression Room or the soul crushing Fankriss tunnel, but it is the same idea - tanks run in and round up the mobs until they get to a stopping point and then every does AOE and when everything is dead you keep going forward because they respawn incredibly fast behind you. When my guild does it we stop 3 times to AOE before heading down the final ramp to the boss. After the third AOE you will get out of combat for a couple seconds so you can stop and drink before the boss comes out.

The area has an airy, wispy type of feel to it while being dark at the same time. There is a lot of bright blue shining through cracks in the floor and walls. I can’t even think of how to describe it and still do it justice.

During phase 1 of the fight you are against the Essence of Suffering. This poor fella has an aura that affects everyone in the room which reduces healing by 100%, reduces armor by 100% and reduces defense by 500. Sounds like fun right? It gets better - he doesn’t have an aggro table. Instead he ‘fixates’ on the person closest to him for 5 seconds at a time and at the end of those 5 seconds he will do a new range check and target the person closest to him but if that person happens to be the same guy as last time, he won’t change targets at all. Thankfully he only hits for about 1k - 1.2k during the normal part but every 60 seconds or so he enrages and starts hitting a lot harder and a lot faster. For the enrage we have a rogue take the fixate and then use evasion and after 15 seconds the enrage ends and we put a regular tank back in there. Since the aura reduces armor by 100%, anybody can tank him, but a big health pool on a druid or a lot of block value on a warrior makes life easier. Phase 1 is pretty easy once the tanks get a feel for it.

Phase 2 is the really hard part of the fight. In phase 2 you fight the Essence of Desire. Desire has an aura that increases healing by 100%, but everytime you do any damage to the boss, 50% of it is reflected back at you and it periodically reduces your maximum mana until 160 seconds into the phase you end up with zero mana. Because of the mana drain it is a huge dps race which means your threat has to be incredibly good. But that’s ok because you stacked block value like crazy for phase 1.

Doesn’t sound to bad yet does it? Well here comes the fun part - Desire is a pure caster mob and given the chance she will chain cast and never melee, but she only has 1 spell that is chain castable and if you can lock it out, she will stop casting and start to melee. That spell is called spirit shock and it is a 1 second cast that does 8-9k damage and disorients the target for 5 seconds. If she casts it on the tank and it isn’t interupted, that tank will get disoriented and the boss will deaggro and go kill someone until the disorient wears off. You have to set up a rotation for rogues to kick every single spirit shock.

To make it harder to interrupt the Spirit Shock, the boss has another ability called Rune Shield that absorbs 50k damage and increases cast speed by 100%. Mages can spell steal the shield the instant it comes up. It helps their dps a lot because they can nuke hard without killing themselves while the have rune shield. But relying on the mages not lagging or reacting fast enough is tough so we have felhunters with devour magic on autocast ready to eat the Rune Shield.

The other big ability in phase 2 is called Deaden. She will cast Deaden on her current target every 30 seconds and if it lands, it increases damage taken by 100% for 10 seconds. Deaden is reflectable and the tank needs to reflect it because a 100% damage increase on the boss will go a long way in helping your raid beat the mana drain. One of the big problems is that rogues with a twitchy finger might accidentally kick a Deaden instead of a Spirit Shock and that leads to two problems, a) your raid doesn’t get the damage increase and b) that rogue now has kick on cooldown so he can’t interrupt the next Spirit Shock.

As a tank in phase 2 rage management is everything. You need to put out huge threat numbers but still have enough rage spell reflect. I don’t shield block anymore on this fight. The boss only hits for 3-5k so crushes hit for around 4.5-7.5k which isn’t too bad and the rage you save from not using shield block makes a huge difference because you can dump all of that rage into threat generating moves instead. A lot of things have to go right to get out of phase 2 cleanly - your rogues need to interrupt every spirit shock and never a deaden and you need to reflect every single deaden and you need to generate a ton of threat so the dps can burn the boss down before they all go OOM.

Phase 3 is generally thought of as easier than phase 2 but only because it isn’t as dependant on every little thing going right. But it is just as much of a dps race as phase 2, if not more so. That means that the tank needs to put out huge threat numbers again. In phase 3 you fight the Essence of Anger and everyone in the room gets hit with the Aura of Anger which does shadow damage every three seconds and it starts at ~100 damage and increases by ~100 every tick. It also increases your damage dealt by the same amount of damage it does. So by the end of phase 3 people are doing enormous amounts of damage but they are also taking tons of damage. While that is happening the boss is hitting the tank kinda hard (5-6k) and he will be doing a frontal cone ability called Soul Scream which is a two part ability that he will cast every 10 seconds. The first part is just regular shadow damage, about 3k, but it also has a power burn component which will really mess you up - for every point of rage you have, the burn does 100 damage. So if you have a full rage bar when the boss does a soul scream, he will hit you for 10k. Since he does pretty significant melee damage and there is pretty significant aoe damage from the aura, it is really really hard to use all of your rage so full rage bar power burns are not uncommon.

Before they changed it in the last patch, a warrior could “change stances” from defensive to defensive to dump their rage right before a Soul Scream but that isn’t possible anymore - thanks for “fixing” that one Blizzard. If you don’t kill him fast enough in phase 3 then the aoe damage will destroy your raid. But since everyone also is increasing their damage over the course of the fight, the last 15% go waaaay faster than the first 15%. It is pretty common to have the aura ticking for around 3.5k when you get the first kill.

Unlike a lot of the fights in TBC, Reliquary has totally unique mechanics and the nature of the fight makes it very very intense. Add in a very cool looking area and boss and you get one of my favorite fights in WoW.

As all tanks know, you always strive to perform to your maximum potential when tanking raid bosses. As such, you should always be flasked or elixired up. [Flask of Fortification] is great when learning new encounters due to persistence through death. [Elixir of Major Agility] coupled with a Guardian Elixir are the typical tanking Elixirs.

For the most part the only debate is whether to go for the +250 hp and 10 health regen every 5 seconds from [Elixir of Major Fortitude], or the 550 armor from [Elixir of Major Defense]. I have always been partial to [Elixir of Major Defense], and I feel it is worth investigating which it makes more sense to use.

First we need to understand how armor affects physical damage reduction. From the Elitist Jerks thread, for level 73 raid bosses, the damage reduction formula looks like this:

Taking that and plugging in typical level 70 armor values, we have:

Armor DR Damage Difference
12000 50.08% 2496 51
12500 51.10% 2445 49
13000 52.08% 2396 47
13500 53.02% 2349 45
14000 53.93% 2304 44
14500 54.80% 2260 42
15000 55.64% 2218 40
15500 56.45% 2178 39
16000 57.22% 2139 38
16500 57.98% 2101 36
17000 58.70% 2065 35
17500 59.40% 2030 34
18000 60.08% 1996 33
18500 60.74% 1963 32
19000 61.37% 1932 31
19500 61.98% 1901 30
20000 62.58% 1871 29
20500 63.15% 1842 28
21000 63.71% 1814 27
21500 64.26% 1787 26
22000 64.78% 1761
So what does this tell us? Well, in my opinion, I feel the added damage reduction outweighs the added health. Some would say that the added 250 health would help you survive the burst from a boss. I would contend if a boss is coming within 250 points of bursting you down, that you are undergeared for the encounter in the first place.

You can also look at it in terms of Effective Health. At almost any reasonable combination of health and armor, [Elixir of Major Defense] will grant you more effective health than [Elixir of Major Fortitude]. The higher the ratio of hitpoints to armor, the more effective health you will gain. The only time you would gain more effective health from Fortitude is if you have substantially more Armor than health (like 6K more).

In the end, it likely all comes down to personal preference and ease of obtaining these Elixirs. They realistically are very close in terms of benefit. The ability to take more raw damage, or the ability to mitigate more. If you are a follower of the Effective Health doctrine, then you would go with Defense. If you are worried about getting burst down, you would go with Fortitude. Perhaps each Elixir is better suited for certain encounters. At any rate, as a tank, you should always be looking for ways to improve your tankability, and you should always be potted up during raids. So do those dailies, befriend an Alchemist and always have a steady supply on hand!

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I like the idea of what Bizzam did with the run down on how to tank all of the ZA bosses and I think I will go through of all the tips and tricks I know for tier 5 and maybe even tier 6 bosses. Bizzam covered Hydross already so I will skip that one and go straight on to Lurker. I want to focus on what the tank needs to do more than a whole overview on the strategy of the fight.

Lurker has 3 main abilities that he uses in phase 1 and he melees for somewhat high damage on the MT. The first ability is called Whirl and it will hit everyone in melee range for 3k or so and do a knockback. Geyser is a random secondary targetting spell that hits for 3.5k and does a 10 yard knockback to the target and anyone near the target. Spout is on a strict 45 second timer and it will pretty much kill anyone who screws it up. It does a ton of damage and has a huge knockback. If the damage doesn’t kill you, then the scalding water as you swim back to the raid will.

There are three platforms on the outside of the main ring in his room. In phase 2, adds will spawn - 2 archers on each of those outside platforms and 3 warrior mobs on the inner ring. Basic strategy is to kill the archers on the outside while you CC or tank the warriors on the inside and then you kill the warriors. After a certain amount of time or after all the mobs are dead Lurker will reappear and it is back to phase 1.

Everyone who has been into SSC has surely had someone accidentally fall into the water at some point and they will tell you that the fish in the water don’t mess around. They are elite and they will mess you up real fast. But if you clear the trash on the platforms above Lurker’s pool, then the water takes on an effect called Scalding Water and it kills all the fish. So if someone falls in after clearing the trash they don’t get attacked by fish anymore but they will take 500 damage every 3 seconds from the scalding water until they get out. Thats not really a big deal to heal through so the tank just jumps right in and the healers have to heal through a little extra damage.

Back in the day when the top guilds were learning the fight, it wasn’t obvious that clearing the trash killed off the fish, so a lot of the top guilds just did the fight with the fish in the water so you couldn’t stick the tank in there. Which meant the tank was up on the platform and could get knocked back by whirl and geyser which meant you needed to have another tank #2 on threat.

From the MT perspective, this fight is pretty easy. You just hang out in the water and try not to move. The only dangerous part is that whirl and geyser can sometimes knock you out of line of sight from your healers so after a whirl or geyser if you notice that the rhythm of healing is broken or if your healers say something like ‘omg you are out of line of sight!’, then you are probably out of line of sight. You can fix it but moving forward a bit and jumping. For phase 1 there really isn’t anything else to it. The OTs can just dps their little hearts out and wait for phase 2.

When phase 2 happens the adds spawn at the same spot every time and your raid leader should assign tanks to those spots. My guild sheeps the warriors and puts tanks on the archers to keep them from multishotting everyone. When doing that I like to stand on the spot where the warrior will spawn and hit it with a concussion blow before jumping to the outside platform. That way it won’t go one-shot some squishy before the mage finishes casting sheep. When you are tanking the warriors, you will want to stand on the very edge of the ring with the mob facing the outside because can cleave and kill people. It also helps to yell at anyone who gets too close.

The moment Lurker comes back up after phase 2, he will start to spout again so it is crucial that the MT be in the same spot as always so that spout happens in a predictable way. If the tank is out of position then Lurker will start his spout in a wierd place and will catch a lot of people off guard. If you are tanking a warrior that isn’t dead yet when phase 2 ends then you need to be ready to jump into the water to avoid spout even if the warrior is beating on you. They will hamstring the tank which makes it even more important that you are standing on the edge already since you won’t be moving quickly. If you have to go into the water with the warrior, you need to be ready to pop your cooldowns to stay alive because you will probably be out of line of sight of your healers until the spout passes by and you can get back on top.

Its a pretty simple 2 phase fight from a tank’s perspective and if you are lucky you will be rewarded with one of the best tanking weapons in the game - [Mallet of the Tides].

Well, it’s about a week late in posting, but another personal note on another first kill for our guild.  Last Sunday, we dropped Hydross on our 2nd night of attempts.

In all honesty, we would have downed this guy on our first night had I not missed one important piece of information.  During the transition from one phase to the next, I was under the assumption that it was a total and complete aggro wipe.  This is not the case, it is only a partial aggro wipe.  I am not sure of the exact mechanics, but know that it is not a 100% complete aggro wipe.

I was tanking Nature, so our Frost tank would initiate aggro.  Since I was going to pick it up after the transition, I mainly focused on conserving rage and making sure debuffs were applied.  I did not concern myself with building threat (again, I assumed complete aggro wipe).  When we transitioned to poison, every time, Hydross would be line it for someone, often going back across into Frost, spawning more adds, and ensuring a wipe.

I kept chalking it up to too many dots, or overaggro.  I did not realize that it was my fault in not having built up any threat before the transition.

After the 6th attempt of the night, I finally realized that the transition was not a complete wipe.  On the next attempt, I concentrated more on building threat with the frost tank during the first phase.  Upon the transition, Hydross stuck to me like glue, as expected.  That was the first strong attempt we had and we got him down to 40%.  Unfortunately it was late and we had to call it a night.

The next time we saw him, we were better prepared and we took Hydross down with zero deaths.  Ahhh, I love it when a plan comes together!

We used a hybrid resist prot paly to tank 2 - 3 of the adds and AoE’d them down during each transition.  An additional frost resist tank grabbed 2 frost adds during frost phase and 1 nature add during the poison phase.  This worked very well for us.

Some tips for our readers!

Tip #1 :  I learned this one the hard way.  The transition from phase to phase is NOT a complete aggro wipe, so make sure you are always building threat.

Tip #2 : Some of the strangest things can aggro him after the transition, ie, for us it was a Searing Totem.  Tell your shammies to keep ‘em in their pants because it could cause a silly wipe.

Tip #3 : Use a weapon swap macro to swap to dual wield when you are not the focus tank in order to generate more rage.  Just make sure you swap back to your sword and board before you take over tanking!

Tip #4 : Get your guild to start working on resist gear early!  This stuff is pricey and takes a while to accumulate.

Tip #5 : You can back Hydross across the transition line, but if you find you need to move quickly, strafe run instead of turning your back to Hydross.  Strafe running is very important as you can move full speed yet still block and parry.

Do you have any tips to add to taking down Hydross?