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 some overview, it’s only here so the melee classes know what is going on. 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.

XT-002 Deconstructor

Guarding the entrance into the Antechamber of Ulduar you will see XT-002 practicing in the Scrapyard area. Unlike Razorscale and Ignis, this boss is not optional at all and needs to be killed if you want to progress further. It’s a pretty straightforward fight which drops some quite nice gear for us, but first you have to deal with two trash packs on the sides of the room.

The trash packs are pretty easy – you just need to remember that the two Parts Recovery Technicians cast the annoying Defense Matrix ability that reduces your damage to laughable amounts, so they should be stunned or kited out of the shell by your tanks. After they are dead it’s really simple – just kill everything else and watch the XB-488 Disposalbots, as they explode when low on health dealing a bit of AoE damage.

Rinse and repeat on the other side, let your engineer dismantle the corpses for some vendor trash and prepare for the boss himself.

Positioning

In our raids we usually tank the XT-002 facing the stairs in the middle, with raid split in two to three groups in the room (we usually keep them spread out and fall back to the healer when a Tantrum comes) and melees tending to themselves behind the boss. You can see details of the positioning on the screenshot below.

One note – in our raids, we only offtank the Pummeler’s in the marked spots on the 25-man version – in our 10-mans our main tank tanks them and the boss just fine. That makes it possible for our second tank to go and do some damage with a dps offspec, but if you’re a melee dps that likes to do AoE damage, you need to be aware of not pulling the adds.

As a melee dps be sure to activate your distance finder (using DBM it’s /distance, Big Wigs doesn’t have any means to activating it manually as far as I know) and set it to 10 yards – if you don’t have a lot of melees you should spread around the back and the sides, so that there’s no other players in a 10 yard radius. That makes it sure that you’re the only one taking damage from the Light Bombs, so you don’t have to run away and can keep dpsing.

Update: on our recent kills, we use a different positioning, as shown on the screenshot below. The same rules apply as above – split your ranged and spread them around, but this time, the tank takes the boss to the side (doesn’t matter which one) and positions him between two scrap piles. This disables these two piles from spawning any adds at all, and you have more time to handle what spawns from the distant ones – making the fight much much easier.

Phase 1

In this phase you will be dpsing the boss until he gets to the 75/50/25% mark. The boss, besides hitting the tank, does three abilities:

• Light Bomb, which is dot on you that deals damage to you and everyone in 8 yard radius – if you’re lucky and have enough space around you, you can stay and dps, otherwise run out to an empty space or get rid of it with Cloak of Shadows.
• Gravity Bomb – this ability does not deal damage immediately, but after 9 seconds it will explode, pulling everyone within 12 yards and dealing quite a lot of damage. Obviously it’s a bad idea to pull a healer to you, and even worse to do that to the tank, so just as with the other bomb – either run away to a safe spot or Cloak it.
• Tympanic Tantrum – this is an AoE that will damage everyone in the raid for a fair amount of damage that needs to be healed through (especially if there are people with either Gravity or Light bombs). As a rogue, just stay on the boss and use your Feint to save your healers a bit of work. They will most certainly appreciate it.

As a bit of advice – we only tried that once so far, but if you’re doing the boss on the hard mode (that is enabled by killing his heart), you do not want to Cloak the Gravity Bombs at all, as they leave a nasty void zone on the floor.

Phase 2

The second phase begins with each 25% of damage to the boss. He will shut down for 30 seconds and his heart will pop out. Everyone should go all out on the heart – the damage you do on it is increased, and the XT-002’s HP will go down by the amount you deal to his heart.

Be warned though – if you destroy the heart completely, the boss will enter hard mode, healing up to full health (with his HP pool buffed at that) and gaining a significant damage buff. If you don’t want him to do this, be sure to stop the dps before the heart goes down.

During these 30 seconds, the boss will summon three types of adds from the scrap piles on the sides of the room. After the phase finishes or just before (that depends on which pile the adds are spawning from), all dps including melees should break off and help clearing them. The adds that are summoned are completely random.

• XM-024 Pummeler (looks like your typical mechanical mob) – these will be picked up by the main tank or the offtanks and left alone. You can dps them down if you want to, but they should not pose a large threat to anyone. Be aware that they have a frontal cleave as well as a 10 yard AoE, so better keep out of the way if you can.
• XE-321 Boombot (again, your typical big walking bomb) – melees should keep out of them, as they explode for nasty amounts of damage, usually killing anything that’s close. They will be dealt with by the ranged dps, possibly when they are close to the Scrapbots – they kill them when they explode and it’s not only useful, but also an achievement.
• XS-013 Scrapbot (small adds coming in large groups) – these need to be killed before they come in melee range of the boss. If you allow them to come close, XT-002 will heal himself for 1% of his health for each Scrapbot he can reach and consume. They can and should be slowed by your mages and hunters, but any dps that sees them close should run to them (being aware of not running close to Boombots or Pummelers) and help killing them – especially if the ranged dps are busy with another pack.

When the 30 second stun wears off, the boss goes back to the first phase again. Clear off the remaining adds and return to dpsing the boss.

Another thing which is nice to be aware of – if you do enough damage to the heart, it’s possible for XT-002 to enter another heart phase almost immediately, skipping most of the Phase 1. While this is usually a good thing due to less Tantrums and Bombs doing raid damage, be sure that you’re on the ball with clearing the Scrapbots – you definitely don’t want him to get his HP back up. Also it’s very possible to kill him while he’s still in the last heart phase.

The Shinies

After you finish playing with the big robot, you get a chance to grab some of his fancy toys. Unfortunately it’s not much, but hey, it’s always something.

The 10-man version drops [Treacherous Shoulderpads] and [Fluxing Energy Coils] (currently the best in slot bracers, at least for Combat) if you can manage doing the hard mode.

25-man version got only one item for us, but it’s the [Golem-Shard Sticker] – a very nice offhand dagger and a solid upgrade if you’re not doing the hard modes yet.

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