The Angry Dwarfs

Rather than updating the first post, I’ve decided to make a new one, because it’s easier to keep them at a right article size that way. In this part, you can find more detailed tactics for Faction Champions and Twin Val’kyr encounters.

For tips and tricks on the two previous fights, you can check the first part of this guide – it has been updated a bit since the posting.

Faction Champions

This fight is so random. If you have the right raid setup, and the Champions spawn with an easy enough setup as well, this can be a piece of cake.

• Kill the totems. Make a macro for it, make your melees right click them, make your tanks right click them, make your resto druid moonfire them, but you need to kill the totems.
• Dispel, dispel, dispel. If you have a dispel button and a free GCD, you should probably press that very button.
• The enemy NPC’s are not tauntable at all, making it a little bit harder to control the melee ones.
• Note that you still can taunt the warlock and hunter pets – on one of the tries I’ve left one of them attacking me all the time for free rage – as a tank they don’t do a lot of damage to you, but will still run away so be sure to taunt them back.
• The most sure-fire way of killing them for us was to kill one of the healers )while keeping the two melees and the other healer under CC), then kill both melees (keeping one of them and the other healer still under CC), then finish off the other healer. At that point you’ve practically won.
• Which healer to kill first depends on what you get and what you have. There are two spots for their healers. If one of them is either a resto druid or a paladin, and the other one is a priest or a resto shaman, you should probably CC the paladin/druid and have everyone kill the other one first. If you have for example a druid and a shaman, and you don’t have a warlock to make CCing the druid very simple, you should CC the shaman instead and kill the druid first.
• Next will be their melee dps. Take out the most annoying one first – their annoyance is ranked like this: rogue > warrior > paladin > shaman > deathknight. After you’ve killed them both, you have just eliminated the thing that can most likely kill you pretty fast.
• After the melees are dead, kill the other healer. After he goes down, start killing their ranged dps, again with the most annoying ones first, which will be: mage > hunter > warlock > shadow priest > boomkin.
• Did I mention killing the totems and dispelling things yet? Yes? Then I will do it again, because it is VERY important. Kill the totems and dispel things (especially the paladin bubbles).

On a side note, the Faction Champions have a strange threat mechanic that can be possibly used to tank them, but while I’ve been able to confirm that it does indeed work, it’s not that easy to use (as they were still running for the casters), so in the end we just went and killed them with normal tactics. I’m including that link though just in case someone is interested.

Val’kyr Twins

We’ve spent a lot of time on this encounter trying out various strategies, until we found one that works. Well, actually there is also another one that works as well, the door tanking one – but as it requires a lot of luck and nothing else, I will neither use it or recommend it. This one is easy enough.

A bit of explanation of the positioning diagram above (and yes you can click it for a larger version).

• Both tanks take a dark or light portal each, aggro the bosses and position them with their backs to the center of the room, making some space for the melees to live in.
• Melee dps should be using dark or light portals (not all the same one), and attack the right boss for the debuff they have.
• Dark and Light soakers – these two ranged DPS will each take a different debuff and attack the respective boss, while making sure they grab all the orbs of their color that are going towards the tank and melee groups. You don’t have to be too zealous in doing this, but it helps a lot for the people in the center of the room to not be spammed by random colored orbs.
• Caster DPS and healers – take a debuff and stand next to the other portal – as in, if you’re going to stand near the light portal, you take the dark debuff.

This positioning makes it easy for everyone to switch dps to the shielded Val’kyr if needed, and lessens the amount of orbs in the center. And now, off to the fight.

• There is one new mechanic in the heroic mode of this encounter, and it’s called Touch of Light/Darkness. It causes AoE damage to people around you and disappears if you change your debuff color. So go and do that. Remember that especially if you are a soaker DPS, you probably want to change back to your previous color afterwards. This ability is never cast on tanks.
• Dodge orbs if they are not in your color. This is very important, because otherwise it’s a big chunk of damage. If you are surrounded by wrong orbs, of course it’s better to run through one rather than getting exploded by all of them, but in most cases it should be easy enough to just move out of their way. Don’t finish that cast (especially if you’re a dps), just move. It’s a bit more tricky for the melees and tanks, but unfortunately they have to do it as well.
• While grabbing orbs that are in your color, please be sure that you are not doing it close to the other colored people. That’s especially important for the two soaker DPS – if there’s a light orb close to the dark tank, let the tank dodge it rather than run into it and make the tank take the completely unnecesary AoE damage.
• If one of the Val’kyr shields itself, everyone need to switch and DPS it. The shield can take more damage in heroic mode, so if you have Heroism availaible, you might want to save it for this ability. Same goes for trinkets and other DPS cooldowns.
• When one of the Val’kyr does the shield, the other one hits for a lot and really fast – this is a good time for that tank to use his defensive cooldowns and to get more healing on him.
• While switching colors for the Vortex ability, remember that you need to switch back after. Also, be careful while running to a portal – there are two of them for a reason, so don’t make everyone run to the same one and then all die because there just happened to be a few wrong colored orbs on the way. Switching a color is not a reason not to dodge orbs.
• If you get the positioning right, and then can dodge orbs like pro dodgeball players, then the fight is not that much harder than the normal mode.

And that’s it for now. Right now we are still working on Anub’Arak, so the next part will probably come soon. See you next time!

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