U mad bro?

I bet this isn’t what Dae had in mind when he gave me these.

So I’m fairly excited about Firelands. A new twist on daily content, the resolution of storylines from the beginning of the game, the chance to crush the boss that tore apart my Vanilla guild…oh and there’s that sweet new legendary. Actually, that’s probably the most important part. Getting me loot. At the guild’s expense. I mean, that IS why the guild is called Hachiberi Fatali, right? It isn’t? OK, who spiked my mouth wash this morning?

Liberi Fatali News

-Group 1 downed Atramedes after I wrote up most of this. 10/12 baby!

-Group 2’s swinging back into action. Gone are the all night wipefests on Omnotron. *sniff* THEY GROW UP SO FAST.

-There are 14 bosses in Ulduar. We killed 13. Andra needed 4 frags. We got 1. HACHI SMASH. (Ulduar runs will be continuing for the foreseeable future, so please for the love of god stop making me run with idiots that facepull Mimi)

Hachi’s List

-Join us for PvP on Fri/Sat! I promise, while I think of everyone else on my team as meat shields, I won’t treat you as such. Often. Contact Tif or Demon for approximate times.

-Recruiting a ranged DPS, with preference for the cloth variety. Please forward any potential recruits to an officer or to our shiny new apply now button at the top of the page!

Hachi Taught Me Everything I Know: Zul’Gurub? More like Zul’Whatever: A Treatise on the Long-term Viability of Zul’Gurub Real Estate Development and Economic Growth of its Surrounding Environs

Seriously look, lakeside property!

Hachi loves the trash here! Not cause it’s easy (like Lubu /obligatory cheap shot), but it’s unique (unlike Lubu). So why do people have such nightmare tales about this dungeon? Mostly, it’s because you haven’t run with me to save your collective asses, but partly, it’s the difficulty of the bosses. Actually, they’re really easy; the strategies are just a little technical. It’s a good thing, though, because pain will teach you how to raid.

Let’s start with the trash. No, not the kind that has medical waste that you root through for needles. The kind that introduces basic fight mechanics to you piecemeal. The first is some troll chick with a bone in her nose next to a cauldron. She teaches you how to interr-OH HAI GAIS ITS RIOT-upt. GOD DAMNIT RIOT. Right. So she teaches you to interrupt, which you’ll need for the first boss. Once she’s down, the cauldron becomes clickable. Hit it, run down the poison gas (not the last time I’ll tell you to do something suicidal) and kill the adds that you’ll aggro at the bridge. Quick AoE spam and you’re done. Move down to Mograin’s Halloween costume (giant tiki mask) and have the ranged stay spread. The mask pulses an AoE on one person, that person needs to stay away from everyone else. Down the next bridge is another troll with a cauldron. This one introduces toxic links. Again, ranged stay spread. If you’re far enough apart enough, the links will break as soon as it starts. Otherwise, spread as soon as it picks targets. The links do damage as long as its active, with extra damage as soon it breaks. Faster you spread, better your chances of survival. The cauldron will turn active for all your poison neutralizing needs. Hit that and pull the next two mobs out of the boss room. Make sure to keep the cauldron buff active and dodge the poison puddles. The last mechanic to avoid is the poison spray.

Venoxis

Seriously guys, this can’t be normal, who spiked my mouthwash for real?

Easily the most technical fight in ZG. By this point, you’ve encountered pretty much every mechanic save two. Tank him near the initial platform and keep him pointed away from the rest of the group. Everyone needs to keep interrupts on the channeled damage spells. A few seconds in, he starts drawing a poison maze on the ground. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Do NOT touch the walls of the maze. Looking at it top down will make it nearly invisible, best way is at an angle. The maze is the SAME every time. Ranged should be spread before the maze starts or else you might get stuck with Lubu and then he will explode all over you. You’ll want to be very careful with the maze, as poison puddles go down throughout the fight and grow over time. Last mechanic for the ground phase is his poison spray. This always goes on the tank, so keep the boss pointed away and dodge it before he finishes the cast.

The links can be fairly difficult to deal with if you don’t position yourselves properly. Ranged should stay in the back half of the room. Usually this means the links will break as soon as it pops for minimal and DR-like damage. Problems typically occur if it picks the melee (it will never pick the tank though). Be sure not to stay near any of the narrow portions of the maze or else you’ll flood it with poison and you’ll be stuck.

That’s phase one. Easy, eh? Phase two is where he throws you a bone. All the puddles disappear and he stops doing anything other than channeling three slow moving poison beams. Just out run them and you’re done. Soon as he hops back down, blow your DPS cooldowns (great time for hero too). You’ll get a few seconds of increased damage while he sits stunned. After that, it’s back to phase one all over again.

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Wipe the green goo off yourself, exit the room and head up. Go right at the fork then up the ramp of rolling rocks (or Demon-death machine). Soon as someone pulls the troll at the top, the rocks stop falling so if you seem to have a magnetic connection to the rocks, you may want to wait until it’s over. Afterwards, you have about 3 pulls remaining to the next boss that will take all of two minutes. Unless you’re stupid. But you’re not stupid right, you’re reading my blog. Group next to the cauldron. Tank pulls, DPS rush the cauldron then attack the mobs. This will do roughly 60% of their health in damage and freeze them. Be sure to back away from the cauldron after or you’ll pull the patrol. Despite these being a copy of the rather difficult mobs in ZA, the cauldron makes short work of them. Remember each mob can only be frozen once (unless it’s a mob that “levels up,” in which case you can kill it with another freeze after it stops being immune). Pull the patrol on raptors and do the same thing. Then pull the two mobs guarding the boss entrance and the one by the second cauldron and guess what. Freeze em again. Isn’t it fun being overpowered?

Mandokir

Ding? This isn’t Everquest

So like I said before, I’m going to tell you to get killed some more. No really, if you want to beat this fight, you’re going to die. Multiple times. Like the nights we go into RBGs. If you get hit with decapitation, that was supposed to happen. There is no way of avoiding it except through immunity effects…and in this fight, living is the STUPID thing to do. Everyone other than the tank will get hit with it at regular intervals. Once you’re down, a ghost will come over and res you at full health and increase your damage and healing done as well as damage taken. Slams and bloodletting are the other two abilities that may kill you here. And bear with me here…but you may want to let those abilities kill you. The faster you die and get ressed, the more stacks of the previous buff you gain. So DON’T dodge slams (large conical AoE ground effect) and DON’T heal all the way through bloodletting (which actually is A LOT less damage than you’d think, does half of the targets current health each tick, meaning it starts quick but slows significantly). Now obviously, you can do the fight the normal way and handle these properly, letting deaths only occur through decapitate. That’s certainly viable. If you follow my suggestion (and honestly, who would? You’re only reading my blog) try to die near one of the ghosts to minimize time dead.

Alright so that sounds easy…until you add in the raptor. This little bugger has a taste for ectoplasmic entities. That’s right. He eats GHOSTS. HOW BADASS IS THAT?  Problem is, ghosts are your buddies meaning  you can’t just let them die so you can tell that hot chick at the bar about the time you saw a raptor eat a ghost (you can totally say you saved a ghost from being eaten by a raptor but then she’ll get confused). The raptor can be stunned or slowed, so do one and wail on it until he collapses into a pile of bones. Something to keep in mind here is that if the raptor kills a ghost in transit to ressing someone, that person will not get another ghost and will stay dead unless you have a Bres waiting. The soft enrage for this fight occurs when either the raptor eats all your ghosts or you use them up by dying (part of the reason why I advocate the previous strat, less time for the raptor to eat the ghosts, but only do one person dead at a time or you’ll wipe easy). Frenzy occurs at low health but it’s very easy to deal with.

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More trash! Go back down to the previous fork in the path where you’ll find a bunch of immune mobs around one non-immune mob. Focus fire her down and the other mobs become attackable. Slap em silly with interrupts to prevent them from transforming. AoE them down for a quick win. At the next fork you have two options. Go up for the optional boss or go left to die multiple times in the fire (and then watch as your healer dies trying to reach you). I won’t go over the optional boss because A. it’s an hour and a half before raid and I’m lazy and B. if you seriously can’t run when you have an arrow over your head or when BLIZZARD’s UI tells you to, you don’t belong in troll heroics. So make your way through Frogger 10.0, laugh at Flaeta’s expense, and keep heading north to the panther boss. Guarding the entrance to that boss’s temple is another tiki mask. This one just spams AoE at the entire group, so feel free to sidle up next to your healer and grab her ass. Won’t matter, unless she’s slapped you with a restraining order. TIF! IT WAS KUR! Ehm. Make your way up the temple then go down in it. SHUT UP PERVS! THE SEX JOKES ARE OVER! Pull the troll and his two panther buddies, another pushover group. At the bottom of the stairs is the only group you really have to worry about in this entire dungeon. It requires…CC. Whoda thunk? Best bet is to keep at least one of the heavy melee mobs CC’ed and another of your choice. Just remember to keep out of the whirlwind or else you’ll end up very dead with more cuts than an emo kid.

Kilnara

Tears of blood? Wonder where those come from… OK, I’m really done with sex jokes now

Another kitty boss! Sorry, these kitties aren’t going into the food this week. Start by being grouped relatively close to the boss. This accomplishes several things. First, someone is always in range to interrupt tears of blood, a really nasty AoE. Second, you can dodge the shadow wave much easier if you just run through to the other side before it casts. Third, it keeps panthers near the tank to pick up. So, the first two just described mechanics that (seriously) require no more explanation. Stop being bad Lubu. Last mechanic to worry about this phase, outside of the panthers, is a magic debuff that REALLY hurts. That, or Tif is still beating me up for grabbing her ass. Could be both.

The panthers are the part that will leave your healer crying, screaming, gnashing their teeth like some crazy guy out of the Bible. There are four groups. There are four ways to wipe to death by kitty. How many you pull from each group is dependent on how strong both your tank is at picking up and holding them (as well as mitigating the damage properly with cooldowns) and how well your healer can keep up with the damage. If you really wanted to, you can pull one cat at a time to make the fight real simple. I would not recommend pulling more than one full group of panthers at a time, however. Things to keep in mind here include keeping an eye on the boss for both the tears and the shadow wave while burning the panthers down as quick as possible. The slower you pull panthers, the slower you need to bring down the boss’s health. At 50%, all remaining panthers wake and start treating you like a squirrel.

Hopefully you got to 50% without panthers. If you did, congrats! If you didn’t, your healer probably won’t be coming to your Christmas party this year. This is a straight burn phase. Previous mechanics stop and she instead gains a stacking damage buff as well as vanishes at regular intervals. Once she reappears, she’ll start wailing on a single target for a bit before coming back to the tank. You should be in the clear by this point.

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Just a little more to go. Come back out the temple and swing right. You have two options here. Just tank the snakes and burn them, or kill the troll guarding the cauldron in front of you, hit it for the buff, then do exactly what I told you to do already, but noooo, you want to be special and do it the “proper” way (seriously, just burn them, going for the cauldron isn’t worth the time). Head up the path, dodging mobs like gold beggars in SW, until you find a bunch of zombies with two witchdoctors and an ice cauldron. Have the tank rush these while DPS hit the cauldron repeatedly, applying the freeze to as many mobs as possible (ONLY single target, direct damage abilities will apply the freeze). Watch for the witchdoctors as they die, they release ghosts that will chase you and cannot be stopped. If you’re running with Mins, you’ll actually probably be safe, since he dies to those first. At the top of the ramp are two berserkers, freeze em and bag em.

Zanzil

Teaching kids to dip their fingers in strange liquids

This fight is probably the second easiest after Mandokir. The three cauldrons in front of you are the same as all the ones you’ve seen throughout the instance. The tank should bring the boss closer to the green cauldron than the others. Throughout the fight you’ll have to deal with a line of fire he projects that is ONLY ever directed at the tank. Don’t stand behind him. That and his interruptable casts (that don’t hit for jack) are the only two things you need to worry about from the boss himself.

You have three cauldrons to worry about: red, blue, and green. These correspond to his three different phases. These occur in any order and repeat after each one has gone off once. Use red when he summons his swarm of Justin Bieber groupies…or rather zombies. You can make do with one person using the cauldron; three will tear them to shreds. Stack on the tank if you have the buff to make quick work of them. Healers, remember you may want to cleanse the debuff once zombies are down, it does damage to the person with it as well. Blue is simple. One person runs to grab the buff (preferably ranged) then hits the berserker, causing it to freeze. All DPS switch to it and blow it up. If the add is still alive, he will start chasing someone. Pretend you’ve become me for 5 seconds, running from your adoring, STD-infused fans. A little advisory on the blue cauldron buff. Like I said before, only direct attacks will trigger the freeze. If you use a channeling effect or DoT, not only will you not freeze the add, it will still consume the effect. The last cauldron is the simplest of all. If he lets a big one rip, haul ass and hit the cauldron. All cause you didn’t think to bring that gas mask.

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It’s the final stretch. 5 mobs are all that stand between you and glory. Between hordes of naked women throwing themselves at your feet or utter humiliation. Or…well you’ll get a crystal out of it. Maybe. I wasn’t overly dramatic was I?

Head back down the ramp, avoid all mobs and take the first bridge on the right then loop down left. If you read last week’s blog (you DID read it didn’t you?) you’ll recognize the two mobs at the bottom of the temple. It’s the level up mobs! Take em down one by one like before. Once you get up the temple, you’ll see a berserker on each corner. You only need to take down three, one in the back, two in front. These berserkers are simple. They’ll randomly pick a person to body slam and leave behind a 100% damage void zone. Spirits will start spawning out of it. The berserker should be tanked in the void zone if possible with everyone outside of it. Keep the spirits down as they hit for a hefty 20-30k a hit, more if you’re sitting in the void zone. These work exactly the same as the berserkers for the next fight.

Jin’do

Your healer makes a great spirit magnet

While not as technically complex as Venoxis, this boss can still be a nightmare. Problems will arise in phase 2, if at all. First phase is extremely easy. Stay out of the anti-magic bubble until he starts casting shadows of Hakkar. Run in as soon as that happens, it will reduce damage taken by 90% as well as casting speed, so minimize time inside the shield to whenever shadows is active. At 70%, he switches over to phase 2.

Phase 2 is the fun part. At this point, Jin’do despawns and three chains each protected by a shield pop up. Everyone should remain on or near an active shield (but not everyone on one, it’s not an orgy). The tank needs to go pull one of the berserkers up until it casts body slam. The slam needs to hit one of the shields to break it. If you weren’t sitting on a shield when you got slammed, you just dragged on the fight that much longer. Ideally what will occur is that after the shield goes down, the DPS will destroy the berserker then shift to the chain while the 100% damage debuff is active on it. It may be beneficial to not pull the next berserker until the chain is dead or nearly dead. The longer the berserker is up, the faster it hits, so while you COULD allow the berserker to stay up long enough to body slam a second time, there really is no point in doing so since berserkers have a fairly quick respawn timer. Break all three shields and burn down the chains to end the fight.

Of course, that’s not the end of it. If that was all there was to it, this fight wouldn’t leave me with PTSD due to spending two hours on it. What complicates phase two is shadow crashes and the spirits, making stacking on the shields a bit more difficult. The spirits are particularly nasty. They’ll follow a healer around like Lubu with a kidney candidate. These hit like a truck so 2-3 adds can easily take down a player who is inattentive. Keep one of your ranged on these at all times to keep down the adds, otherwise your healer will be cursing your name as 15 spirits are bearing down on her.

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That concludes this week’s raid guide. Please don’t make me do this again. ; ;