The Angry Dwarfs

This article is part of a series of Ulduar guides that focus on rogues and other melee classes. You can find the links to the other guides in the introduction post.

This guide is not a general strategy guide for the encounter. While you may find bits of an overview, it’s only here so the melee classes know what will happen. If you need a full strategy guide, you can check out Tankspot’s Project Marmot, as they have lots of awesome strategy videos.

Of course, if you have any comments (including, but not limited to different strategies and differences from 10 to 25-man versions), feel free to use the comment form below and post them. I’m only a dwarf and I can make mistakes.

Also, feel free to repost this to your guild’s forums if you find the guide useful, just be sure that you abide to the Creative Commons license and provide my name as an author and a link to my site.

Note: as this is a vehicle fight, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a melee class or not. This will be more of a general guide than the next ones. Also Tankspot unfortunately doesn’t have a video for it yet.

Flame Leviathan

As you enter the instance into the Staging Grounds, you can see all types of different machinery scattered around. Everyone should find one that they like, and there should be enough of them for everyone in the raid – 2 of each type or 5 of each in 25-man version.

When you start the encounter by talking to the NPCs, the vehicles become active and you can enter them – they’re just like the ones used in Lake Wintergrasp, with a few different details. It does not really matter who gets into which one, you just have to know one thing – the health pool of the vehicles depends on the driver’s items iLevel. So if you have one person geared with mostly Naxx-10 gear, and one with mostly Naxx-25, the latter one should do the driving and use the machine first to get the HP boost. How to know your gear’s iLevels? Either look on Wowhead or Armory, or you can install an addon called RatingBuster, which is awesome and you should have it anyway.

Salvaged Siege Engine – driver

You are the “tank” for now. The important thing is to not to waste your Electroshock and Steam Rush abilities and leave them when you are in trouble. The Electroshock deals quite a low damage compared to everything else, so wasting it on mobs is generally not a good idea. Also there is a huge bug present – you can fall through the floor if you use Steam Rush while on a slope. We did that once and we had to wait until the Siege Engine respawned.

Salvaged Siege Engine – turret

The Siege Engine passenger’s job is to shoot everything that moves until it stops moving. You have two abilities for that (an anti-air rocket and a cannon), and an additional one, which shields your whole vehicle. Save the shield for when you are in trouble, otherwise focus on shooting things. Targetting can be a bit tricky, especially if your driver is moving around, but you will have enough practice on the trash mobs before the boss.

Salvaged Demolisher – driver

You’re the main assault force here. As above, shoot stuff until it’s dead, and stay out of trouble during that. Do know that you have two types of ranged attacks – Hurl Pyrite uses ammo and leaves a stacking DoT on the target – it ticks for nice amounts of damage, so it should be refreshed before it drops. Targetting while in this vehicle is a bit annoying, as you have to turn the whole thing around. You can also shoot your passenger onto the boss to let him stun him for a while, but we’ll talk about that later.

Salvaged Demolisher – passenger

You’re the ammunition loader for the vehicle. Grab barrels of Pyrite with your grappling hook to replenish the demolisher’s resources, use the speed boost if the boss is following your vehicle, and be sure to load yourself into the catapult to let your driver shoot you when the time is right. In the meantime, focus on igniting the tar with your cannon and shooting stuff.

Salvaged Chopper – driver

The most important ability of the Chopper is dropping tar. It will stay on the floor for a while and slow mobs down, and it can be ignited by the Demolishers cannons, making it deal damage. Other than that, ride around and stay out of trouble. In the boss fight, you will also have to drive around and pick up people that are catapulted to take out the Flame Leviathan’s turrets and deliver them back to their Demolisher.

The Iron Dwarf army

You can start the instance in two ways. Talking to Lore-Keeper Norgannon activates the orbital defenses of the boss, so he will start on the hard mode unless you destroy the towers. Talking to Brann Bronzebeard sets the easy mode on from the start.

After you start the encounter, the vehicles will become active and you will be able to use them. Before you lies a whole army of Iron Dwarfs, waiting for you to come and destroy them. So, go and do exactly that. :]

There are a few types of mobs here. If you encounter a big Ulduar Colossus, be sure that your Siege Engines are close and ready to use their interrupt if they start casting their Ground Slam ability, as that does some nasty AoE damage. Rest of the mobs you should just kill with whatever weapons you like.

You’ll also find two types of buildings here – the small towers are spawning endless amounts of Iron Dwarves, so they should be destroyed as you drive through. Destroying the big towers is optional, and leaving them intact enables the hard mode of Flame Leviathan, unless you started the instance with talking to Brann. Each tower that is left adds additional things that can happen in the boss encounter, and also increases the boss’ HP pool by 50% each. This buff actually stacks, so with all four of them the fight gets quite longer, and there’s a lot less room to manouver due to the orbital defense systems.

As you advance through the gauntlet and reach the Flame Leviathan’s arena, you can use the repair platforms placed on the sides to repair your vehicles (don’t do this if you want to do the Unbroken achievement) – you just drive through them to get your HP back to full. There is only one more pack of mobs to kill, and shortly after that the boss enters the area through the large doors in the back.

Before engaging them, make sure that you have the right people as the passengers of the Demolishers. While you can theoretically switch during the fight itself, it is very likely that the players will die, so it’s not really recommended and should be avoided.

The boss itself

Right after you’re done with the last pack, your Choppers should immediately drop the tar in front of the doors and you should ignite it with cannon fire. This starts the damage on the boss when he breaks through the door and activates the encounter.

At all times, the boss will follow one of the Siege Engines or the Demolishers. The person driving that vehicle should kite the tank around the room (trying to be near the walls most of the time), ideally dragging him through the ignited tar on the floor – it slows the boss down and deals nice damage as well. One tricky thing is the corners – try to use your speed boost while turning (this is harder for a Siege Engine, as their Steam Rush is basically a charge – their passenger can use the shield just when turning), because the boss will cut the corner and he has a good chance of reaching you with his Battering Ram.

All free Siege Engines should be around the back of the Leviathan, ready to interrupt his channeled AoE spell (called Flame Vents) with their Electroshocks. There’s no reason to try and define the order of the interrupts, as the Electroshock will be off cooldown before the next one, so just use it on the boss as quickly as possible. Also before the boss changes targets, be sure to stay back for a moment (or even turn around and scatter in different direction about 5 seconds before the switch), so that he doesn’t turn around and immediately ram you.

Choppers can try to do some damage with their Sonic Horn, but it has a lower range than the Flame Vents, so you have to be really careful with that, as the choppers are very delicate. Your main job is to keep the tar on the floor, ideally on the path of the boss, and then your second job is to pick up people thrown to kill the turrets.

Demolishers need to stay in the back to avoid unnecessary damage from Flame Vents (unless the boss targets you – then you kite him like a Siege Engine would), and just shoot the boss with what they can. Shooting with your main cannon works well, but the Hurl Pyrite ability leaves a stacking DoT on the target, so try to keep it up. In order to do this your passenger needs to keep shooting down pyrite barrels from the air and grabbing them.

Killing the turrets

Throughout the fight, the boss is gaining stacks of “Gathering Speed”. When he has about 5 stacks of it, you should throw a player (or more) from the Demolishers on the boss – they have to destroy the Leviathan’s turrets, which will reset the buff and stun him for a while.

Be sure that you choose right people for this job. Once you’re on the boss (I’m talking 10-man here), you have one turret in your melee range, and other at some distance. You cannot move from one spot to another, so you need to throw either two melee classes, or one ranged dps. If they can also heal themselves, it’s awesome, but being there does not deal too much damage.

On 25 man there are 4 turrets to kill, we generally do it by using 3 casters and one healer (he can reach all 3 of them). Another thing to remember is to time the throwing. You don’t actually choose where the player will land, so if you throw two at the same time (or shortly later) there’s a good chance that one of them will miss the boss and die on the floor. Just wait with catapulting the next person until the previous one has landed succesfully.

After all of the turrets are dead, the boss is stunned, and the people that were on top of him are dropped on the floor. The Choppers should be on the move to pick them up and deliver them back to their Demolishers – do it fast, as being outside of a vehicle in this fight for too long (too long being more than about 10 seconds here) is not a good idea at all. Meanwhile, the rest of the raid uleashes damage on the boss, and later resumes the standard kite, shoot and interrupt cycle.

The shinies

After a while he will be dead, and we rogues can grab some nice stuff from him. In the 10-man version he drops [Pyrite Infuser] ( a very nice trinket with lots of hit rating and an Attack Power proc), and also a [Kinetic Ripper], which is not bad, but not that great either. Still you might want it if you need a fast offhand and you didn’t have any luck on the Webbed Deaths in Naxx. On the 25-man version we can get [Mechanist's Bindings] and [Rising Sun].

Additionally, if you kill him on 10-man with some towers up, you’ll get Emblems of Conquest instead of the Valor ones, and you have a chance to get [Twirling Blades] if you leave all of them. On 25 you have a chance to get the best main hand (unfortunately again it’s a fist weapon) – [Golden Saronite Dragon], and leaving the towers working increases the amount of badges you’ll receive from the boss.

Oh, and if you have an engineer in the raid, don’t forget to scrap the Leviathan’s remains – you’ll get a nice amount of Saronite Bars, Eternals and other engineering supplies (including a chance for some of the expensive vendor parts for the chopper mount).

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