Secrets of Shadowbolting

Everyone stacking up outside as raids got ready to go.

The gauntlet on the way to Flame Leviathan

Accidental pull of Flame Leviathan before we managed to heal up and figure out what we were doing

Getting ready for the next attempt..
I was able to do this fight on 2 different vehicles – motorcycle and passenger on a Salvaged Demolisher.

Motorcycle
This one is pretty easy. Find the target Flame is chasing, speed burst to get in front of flame (button 3), Drop tar in front of flame (button 2). Dart around flame back behind him – stay away from the sides where he has big flame spouts coming out. Fire Sonic Burst (button 1) when in range while tar is on cooldown. Once Overload circuit hits you need to be heind Flame looking for the parachutes of people getting hurled off the top. Once you collect a passenger, hit First Aid (button 5) to heal your passenger. Meet up with a friendly Demolisher to drop your passenger back off.

Demolisher Passenger
This should be ranged dps/healers but not hunters as they will not have enough range for the first target. You have 5 buttons as well. Your driver controls where you go, if you have picked up Pyrite bottles, you can throw these at Flame when you face him (button 2) this is your ranged attack. You don’t want to run out as you need these Pyrite bottles for your emergency boost of speed (button 4) should Flame chase you.If you are in melee range, you can toss fire on him (button 1). This is very dependent upon your driver as you only have a cone in the front of the vehicle in which to fire. If you are low on pyrite make sure you grab some more that has been shot down (button 3). Once you’re ready to be launched, hit button 5 to load yourself and get your driver to toss you up.

**note if you updated your DBM/boss raids this will emote say something about getting thrown eg “Throw me!”**

Once you are up on Flame, you are locked in place. Immediately in front of you is a Turret with about 60k health I believe. At this time I do not think I could target another turret. Once you hit it, you immediately draw aggro and it starts hitting you though not very hard. Once your turret is down you can TAB target the next one until that one is down. Once all the turrets are dead flame will go into Overload Circuit. The turrets have electric sparks coming out of them at this time. Once this pops you have about 2 seconds to move yourself before the parachute hits. Aim BACKWARDS from him as much as possible as you take a LOT more damage if you land in front or on the sides.Once you have maneuvered yourself a little, a parachute pops out and you float to the ground for a friendly motorcycle to pick you up and drop you off at a demolisher to repeat the process.

Got him on attempt 4.

The new “you don’t loot your own badge” is weird but kinda cool. It works it’s way through the raid giving you your badge after the first person loots.

Yes we have managed to kill Sarth 3 drakes. No, Last night was not one of those attempts. For whatever reason, (new tank, too many people dead, MT squished etc etc) between the 2nd drake landing, AOEing adds, Twilight Torment and the 3rd drake landing is when it all goes to the crapper.

On certain fights when the waves were nice, Tenebron was down before Shadron landed. Adds dropped pretty quick.We just were not getting Shadron down as much as in the past and thus were unable to stay alive long enough without someone important (healers/tanks) squishing. Expensive night….

It goes something like this…

This you may be able to still get through.

This means dead.

We had 3 locks, each one of us in a different spec. H is 0/53/18 spcced heavily into demon buffs and fire damage and runs with an imp, T is 0/52/19 and runs with a felguard and I’m affliction in a 53/0/16 build. H and I have pretty similar gear, T is a bit behind us.

I find it interesting comparing the spells we use and the differences in each of them. My fire damage is lower than the demo/detro locks so I focus more on shadow…but they hit a lot harder….some of the largest parts of our damage come from the AoE of the adds and staying alive. It was entirely possible to fluctuate between 2700-5700 dps in any given fight based on
1. when we wiped
2. how much AoEing we had done
3. if we were alive or dead and the raid was still going

21 wipes is a lot. We eventually took out Vesperon and just downed the first 2. I’m saving these numbers for comparison…and because I’m curious how the spec changes in 3.1 are going to affect everything…..We shall definately be finding out sooner rather than later…..

Last night we took a trip through sunwell. This is really one of the prettiest instances I have seen. Lots of very nice scenery. We varied from anywhere between 18-25 people throughout the raid, all of us were 80 and 25 man geared. This was not an easy instance. We were able to brute force a few fights but we still had some serious wiping on Felmyst and the twins…and now for the pictures and commentary

The first bit of sunwell is massive amounts of trash. Doing this as 80 was fairly painless – just AoE down. Each pull was 5-7 people, the priests would keep casting renew on themselves so we had to either burn them first or have people on top of that to spell steal. I can see how obnoxious this was at 70. There’s pats, adds and all sorts of stuff going on and a TON of trash. What took us 20 minutes (we stopped to summon people in a few times) would have easily taken an hour or more in 70 gear.

The first boss is kind of a tank and spank times 2 and here we got lucky. I was the first one ported into the shadow realm and while as a 70 you may not be able to pull threat off the guy inside, as an 80 affliction warlock it’s pretty easy. We had no tank in there and we didnt have any healers initially so it’s pretty easy to figure out what happened. Kalecgos’s inside form died, Vuur got squished and we learned to put a tank in there and keep them up. We dropped them both pretty close to evenly and he was down.

See? Happy dragon. we saved him.

We cou;ldn’t save this one though. Brutallas beat her up and we just had to watch.

He looks like burning. We kind of had an idea what this fight was like. Our druid tank with her 40k health was ready to go and our DK back up tank was also ready to go.

So. Our druid tank squished due to Stomp (Deals ~20,000 damage. Reduces the effective armor of the targets hit by it (only seems to hit the tanks) by 50% for 10 secs. Removes Burn debuff if the target has it. ) and then taking a Meteor Slash (Deals 20,000 Fire damage split between enemy targets in a cone in front of the caster (as of 2.4.1, unlimited range). Increases Fire damage taken to all targets affected by 75%. Stacks to 100, duration 40 secs. ).

Fight goes like this. Druid pulls and everyone goes DPS happy. Druid Tank squish, Vuur squish. Brez tank while Dk holds him. Druid tank is back on top. Druid gets squished. Mage squishes. Druid tank is brezed (we had 5 battle chickens and 3 trees at this point). Druid taunts. Meteor slash, Druid squished. Hunter squish. Dk picks up. druid brezed. meteor slash, druid squish (yes that’s 4 tank squishes – druids are not good with 50% armor reduction). Brutallus is at about 10% here and we just burn him at this point.

Felmyst pops up at this point and goes flying around

This was a very busy fight and we had at least 5 wipes here. Basically Felmyst comes down and is a tank and spank. Occasionally people get either encircled in a purple sphere and the raid needs to get away from them or people get some nasty poisons on them that need to get mass dispelled. Phase 2 fel goes into the air and targets a couple of people who then start trailing noxious green vapors that skeletons pop out of. The people with the poison need to get away from the raid until the target swaps. Skellys need to be burned fast as then Felmyst takes a breath and covers 1/3 of the floor with cloud poison. If you are in it – you get mind controlled and gain insane haste, damage and other nasty things. The raid has to kill those people MCed and stay away from the 2 breaths. Fel then lands and can be burned again. We had some serious issues at first staying out of the mist and figuring out where it was landing. I was squished by a mind controlled ret pally and rogue…

Once we got Fel down, we picked up our dead and continued on.

We didnt know this at the time, but this staircase and the whole way to the twins is a gauntlet. Most mobs are from the front but you will get some adds from the back as you go through.

All I saw was people killing things. I figured it was safer to stay back and just AOE. I still don’t know exactly what that pull looked like.

We just AoEed everything in sight. 5 battle chickens, 1 mage, 1 warlock, 2 ret pallys and a couple rogues made short work of them.

It was quite a long gauntlet and I kept getting distracted by the scenery and the background.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the twins are right through that door.

There is a very small platform to stand at up on top. Our ranged was supposed to stay up there and as we’re almost ready to go our tank falls down and starts up the event. Needless to say this was wipe 1.

I was learning how to warlock tank the fire chick and where to move. I ended up getting a dedicated druid on me and was wearing my naxx frost resist gear for the extra stam as affliction is pretty squishy.

After a few attempts we were down to about 16 people and were getting eaten alive by all the damage and debuffs due to such a low number of people. By this point in time I had learned to kite the fire chick in a circle and ensure I got shadow damage to remove the fire debuff. We found out that even at level 80, 18 stacks of Flame Touched -( A stackable debuff causing 300 Fire damage every 2 seconds. Stacks up to 20 times or a maximum of 6000 per 2 sec. Can only be removed by being hit with Shadow damage from either Twin. ) on a squishy lock really hurts and can be a bit tough to heal through.

We’re either going back tonight after Naxx or attempting again next week. Now that we have seen a lot of the bosses we have a better understanding of strategy and what we need to do to get beyond this point.

So I’m a photoshop addict – I really enjoy it and as everyone else was changing their signatures for the guild forums, I decided to make my own. This works for now but I have a feeling I’ll be changing and updating it as time goes on.

So Distinct Advantage had a guild header contest for the web page. I didn’t win, but this was my submission I created in about 30 minutes.

So no, we do not store dragons in our guild vault, but we do store dead Sarth +3d. After wiping all monday we tried again last night. Took a 5 minute break a few attempts in and downed him the next try.

In other news, my DK is at tanking levels again. I was very excited about that. I’ve now tanked VH, Nexus, UK, HoL and my biggest weakness is packs of adds and not knowing when people do knock backs :O. I’m getting better though. Practice makes perfect and if people follow the kill order, they don’t pull off me.