Monday, November 26, 2007

Rage Winterchill & Friends


Difficulty: 2/5 Shields
Extra Gear Requirements: Prioritize Stamina over Block Value, followed lastly by avoidance.
Protection Paladin Loot: Hammer of Judgement (trash)

Hyjal trash is fairly diverse in that the composition of the waves changes from wave to wave. Deadly Boss Mods gives a heads up as to the composition of each wave before it arrives, which lets you adjust your strategy to increase your chance of success. Live it up, Hyjal is where you earn your keep. Here are the types of mobs you'll face before Rage Winterchill.

Ghouls: These come in packs of 4 or more, and are just free damage. They don't hit for anything significant. When they're low health they'll often run off to cannibalize other fallen ghouls. This isn't something you need to worry about.

Cryptfiends: These spiders have a ranged attack which shoots a few small bugs at you. This doesn't do any damage as far as I can tell, and once they do it once or twice they'll move into melee range. As far as I'm concerned, these are more free damage for you.

Abominations: These do heavy melee damage and have some minor disease cloud (just like WC3) damage. The main thing to worry about here isn't their melee damage so much as it's the knock-down effect they have. This will plant you squarely on your ass for ~3 seconds and your avoidance will go to zero. This is the number one thing that Insta-gibs hopeful Paladin tanks starting Hyjal, as you'll eat every hit from every mob while you stand back up. Instruct your OTs to pull Aboms off of you. You should never tank more than 1 at a time if you have the other adds, while other tanks can tank 2-3 aboms at a time as long as they aren't dealing with other adds. On the run in, pop a Free Action Potion for 30 seconds of stun immunity while the Abom tanking is sorted out.

Necromancers: These are Humanoid (grr..) casters that have a painful shadowbolt and a summon ability which spawns a skeletal raider to be dealt with. Melee should be tasked to dealing with these. Sheeps and fears will help minimize their damage until DPS is ready to finish them off. On pulls in which there are multiples of these, do not Rambo in and get yourself killed. Ask shaman to place a grounding totem, hunters to place a snake trap, or better yet, have a warrior go first and spell reflect the shadowbolts. If you're the first to aggro them, Divine Shield and run right into the middle of the pack. Start casting Holy Wrath and right before it lands unclick Divine Shield. This will get all of the Undead (everything else, basically) on you while the Necromancers are picked up. Major style points for pulling this off.

Banshees: These are undead casters with a magic immunity shield. I never expect to tank these really. Once they on me I generally let the melee tank them with interrupts etc. They're non-lethal, and really just more of an annoyance.

About Rage:
Tanking Rage Winterchill is akin to tanking a heroic boss. His damage output is minimal, and he generally stops melee'ing you to cast things. When he does Death n Decay, he channels this and does zero damage to you, and this also applies to his frostbolt. Tank him right where the Alliance Footmen are, and collect your free loot and your BT attunement. This guy is a big "grats on killing Kael" gift.