Secrets of Shadowbolting

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.