by Rich Maloy
Halion, the Twilight Destroyer. Three phases, good loot and a huge scale-up in difficulty on heroic mode. It’s a good fight that requires paying attention throughout the entire 8-minute enrage timer, in which one death can mean a wipe, especially on heroic. There’s no 30 percent buff incoming, so you either learn it and beat it, or you don’t and fail. For our part, as enhancement shaman, there are a few tricks we have up our sleeves.
Positioning
Of course, for any positioning you want to follow your guild’s guidelines; never be the lone jerk running around doing his own thing. (That’s what battlegrounds are for.) The #1 rule of positioning on Halion, for both regular and heroic modes, is back foot. He has a huge parry zone that I’d estimate is nearly two-thirds his body length. Parries cause parry haste, which instantly kill tanks, which causes wipes. Wipes make raid leaders angry. Angry raid leaders make people cry. Don’t make people cry. Stand far back on his back foot and don’t force a parry; this gets dicey in phase two, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.
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by Matt Low
Now that you’ve taken down the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel on normal mode, what’s next? The heroic versions of the bosses, of course! You’re ready for the next step. Plus with the 30 percent buff active, you’ll have a bit more breathing room and leeway. This week, I’ll give you a quick walkthrough on all of the bosses in terms of healing expectations.
Except maybe the Lich King. Haven’t quite solved him yet, and the guy is worth a post of his own in the future.
Lord Marrowgar
I like to utilize a triangle setup on this boss during his Bone Storm phase. By placing the raid in three isolated groups apart from each other, you’ll make the old bone lord travel more. The more he travels, the more time he eats up during this phase when he isn’t destroying someone. Group your tanks as one unit and divide your raid (and healers) evenly into two others. Your tanks won’t be in jeopardy, anyway.
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by Jim Dalton
Icecrown Citadel has been out for eightmonths now, and with the availability of i264 emblem gear and the 30 percent zone buff, it’s become accessible to raiders with a wide range of experience. Some players have downed the bosses 100+ times on various alts, and other players may be just starting out.
Regardless of your experience level, there are always interesting tricks about the fights that people learn over the course of time. Here are 32 of them.
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by Chase Christian
In order to bridge the gap between Icecrown Citadel’s release late last year and Cataclysm‘s eventual launch in months, Blizzard released a short raid instance to give raiders something to do until Deathwing breaks through. Ruby Sanctum is a transitional raid, which ushers out our major conflict with the scourge and introduces us to our new threat-dragons. Specifically, our red dragon allies have been assaulted by the Twilight Dragonflight, and it’s our job to go clear out their pad before Alexstrasza comes home and gets really mad.
With just a trio of mini-bosses and some scattered mobs to clear, the instance looks pretty sparse when we first enter. However, once we’ve cleared out the trash, Halion appears to stomp on us. He looks a bit like a melding of a catfish and a dragon, but mostly dragon. I’m fairly certain that Blizzard’s art department hired a team of pre-school girls to choose the color palate, and so we’re faced with a pink and purple dragon who’s apparently supposed to be a pretty serious threat. Right. That’s our color, and we’ve come to take it back.
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by Matthew Rossi
The first thing to talk about in Ruby Sanctum are the trash pulls. As a DPSer, you really just need to know what the kill order is and to stick to it, but I also suggest to be aware. Remember Ulduar on the way to General Vezax? Yeah, it’s like that. There most likely will be CC, and it’s a bad idea to Whirlwind/Bladestorm in the middle of it. So pay attention and use your abilities responsibly. As a tank, you should likewise watch your AoE threat moves and make sure only to break CC when you need to. Make sure to use Charge to get right back on the Charscale Invoker when it punts you, and in general, use your stuns and silences to keep the casters locked down as much as possible when tanking them. If you’re tanking the Charscale Commanders, pull them out; don’t let them use Rallying Shout. There’s no reason to let a five-or-so-mob trash pull get a 25% DPS increase.
Once you get done with the trash, it’s on to the mini-bosses.
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by Matt Low
The 3.3.5 patch brought us the final raid instance before Cataclysm strikes Azeroth. Halion, a fairly large Twilight dragon, has invaded the Ruby Sanctum. Naturally, the job falls to us to try to repel him and and the rest of his followers. Before you get to engage Halion, you have to deal with Saviana Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn and General Zarithrian.
There’s also the trash, which has crippled and stalled many pickup raids (and some guilds).
Quick trash tips
Use any form of crowd control, if you feel it’s necessary. As an example, druids can easily Hibernate dragons. If you need to, have them sleep the Invokers (the spellcasters). I find the Invokers’ AoE explosive abilities are quite annoying. Strong group heals will be needed to counteract this if there are loose Invokers running around.
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by Joe Perez
As you enter the sanctum, you will see the lush green setting of a mountain valley. As you look around, you can see the fallen bodies of the red dragonflight defenders laying limp and lifeless. In their place are the agents of the black dragonflight.
Baltharus the Warborn
This big fella resembles one of the drakonids we used to see summoned by Nefarian in Blackwing Lair and that we can now view standing guard in front of each respective chromatic portal in Wymrest Temple. As a healer, he has a few tricks up his sleeve that you need to be aware of.
Blade Tempest Baltharus spins his blades with fury and causes all those around him to take damage. This ability inflicts 70% of weapon damage to everyone within 15 yards every second for four seconds. It is like a giant whirlwind. Be ready with a Nature’s Swiftness and a Chain Heal, because melee will take a lot of damage in a very short period of time. Being prepared to snap a fast heal off can help save them from some untimely deaths.
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by Messiah
The Ruby Sanctum is a raid added in with patch 3.3.5 that contains three mini-bosses and a final dragon boss called Halion. The raid is very much like Obsidian Sanctum (OS) with several smaller bosses around one main boss all in one chamber.
The raid is tuned for Icecrown Citadel (ICC) geared raiders and will be difficult for anyone that does not have at least the first several wings of ICC defeated.
The first three bosses are all relatively simple, much the way the drakes in OS are. Therefore just a simple rundown of how to fight them is provided, before we move onto the main event, the Halion fight.
Baltharus the Warborn
Baltharus has several main attacks and creates duplicates of himself when he is lowered to 75%, 50%, and 25% health. His abilities are as follows:
Blade Tempest – Hits everyone in his front arc for damage from his weapon.
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by Dawn Moore
In the guide I’ll be covering Halion, as well as the three mini-bosses you’ll have to defeat before you can face him. I will also examine priest appropriate loot in the instance and compare it to a few pieces we’ve seen in Icecrown Citadel.
Mini-bosses
The three mini bosses in Ruby Sanctum aren’t much to worry about, to be honest. Just like the three dragons in Obsidian Sanctum, surviving the brief encounters only requires that you know what to expect.
Baltharus the Warborn As a healer all you need to do is hang back and spam heals on the tank. What you heal with doesn’t matter too much, just expect the damage to be a bit spiky. There is a knock back ability Baltharus does, but you should be at range so it won’t matter too much. At 66% and 33% (50% on 10-man) Baltharus will clone himself and the clones will need to get picked up by the off-tanks, and at that point you’ll need to start healing the off-tanks too. Again, it doesn’t matter how. Baltharus has an attack called Blade Tempest where he spins his weapon around and does a pretty hefty sum of damage to your tanks (and any DPS standing in front of the boss.) It will get worse if any players with the Enervating Brand debuff are in range of the boss, which they may well be if you’re in a pug, so be ready to toss out a priest cooldown if things look dire.
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by Rich Maloy
This week we’ll use the 25% buff and power-clear the rest of the instance.
Rotface
Regular and Heroic Another fight where Heroism off the start is the best way to go. The oozes come out faster the lower his health gets, so my theory is to get as much damage on target early on. At the end, things are hectic and too much damage is lost as too many people are running around or dead. You can pre-pot here to have another Potion of Speed available to use later on in combat. An early Hero makes cooldown management easy; use at the beginning and then again at every opportunity.
Festergut
Regular When to Bloodlust depends on how long the fight lasts in your group. When we were first starting this fight, we would use BL about five seconds before the second Pungent Blight late in the fight to help the healers through the raid-wide damage increase. But if you’re tearing through this on regular, then an early Hero may be your best use. Don’t time your fire elemental with a late Hero or he won’t get used; just bring him out early and let him have his un-lusted fun.
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