[via OutDPS]

This encounter is the glock-block encounter designed to test your guilds’ hunters’ kiting skills, as well as your healers and tanks and everything else. Doing this fight feels like rolling a boulder up a ski jump- that last 3% takes more work than the first 20%. Haven’t kited in a while? Read on for the complete hunter’s guide to the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter!

The Encounter

This fight has a soft enrage timer. Saurfang gains blood power as the fight goes on, and will eventually become unhealable. You’ll notice that he has an energy bar that stacks at the same rate as his blood power buff- when this bar hits 100, he casts a mark of the fallen champion on someone. This is kind of like the opposite of a holy paladin’s beacon; causing his melee attacks to hit the market target as well as the tank. If the marked person dies, they return 5% health to the boss.

Blood power is generated a variety of ways- the ones we need to deal with are through his blood nova and his summoning blood beasts. Blood nova has a 12 yard radius, and will generate blood power for every person in that radius. Blood beasts will generate points for Saurfang every time they hit someone. They can not be AOE’d effectively, and can get a buff called scent of blood when they spawn that slows people around them and makes them basically immune to shadow damage.

The Plan

This fight is about one thing: doing as much DPS on the boss as possible while causing as few stacks of blood power as possible. There are a variety of ways he gets these buffs that we can’t control, however we can control the ones generated by blood beasts and the blood nova.

Blood nova:

• On ten man, you will have enough room to ensure that no more than one person gets hit with this at a time.
• On 25 man, you do not have enough room for this, but do have enough room to ensure that no more than two people will be in range of a blood nova at a time.
• You must have a range showing addon that will tell you how many people are within your nova radius, and endeavor to minimize that number.

Blood beasts:

• 5 spawned on 25 man, 2 on 10 man.
• The melee DPS on the boss will have to ensure that no AOE damage is done to blood beasts when they spawn.
• Ranged DPS need to kite the beasts and single target them down as efficiently as possible.
• Roots are worse than snares, because a rooted blood beast will attack the highest aggro target in range, but a snared beast will try to attack its kiter.

Hunters are awesome at taking care of this job. For this fight, a SV build will get you more mileage, mostly because a higher percentage of our DPS ignores armor and none of the beasts will have armor debuffs. Also because frost traps, in addition to providing us with some control, will often proc extra lock and loads that will not reset the internal cooldown on lock and loads procced via black arrow.

How To Kite a Blood Beast

Open with a distracting shot and explosive shot, then drop a frost trap (if you didn’t drop it before the spawn) and back up. Once the beast has tripped the trap, disengage toward the “bottom” of the map (where you came from before the fight), firing a concussive shot as soon as the beast clears the trap aura. Assuming all ranged are single targeting beasts, this might be enough. If not, once the beast is within maybe 10 yards, start strafing along the wall (continuing to fire instants). Kiting 101 here- strafe so that you never get the “target must be in front of you” message.

As soon as your beast is down, scan the floor for any remaining beasts- prioritize any that look like they caught up to their kiter. Distracting shot should be off cooldown now, so use it if needed. Otherwise, kill shot and explosive shot. When you’re done, try to get back to your original position. If your raid is doing it right, you won’t have moved too far. If you did, try to find some place with a few people to share a blood aura with as possible and dps from there until you can disengage back.

It’s very important to note that in addition to avoiding boss powerups, you have to continue to do massive single target DPS on Saurfang. He has a lot of health, and many ways of regenerating it.

Mark Of The Fallen Champion

This debuff sucks, no doubt about it. If your healers’ HPS get outrun by the boss’s DPS when Saurfang is at 1%, he’ll get 5% health back as soon as one of his targets dies. One strategy that works (for now) is to have the second person who gets the mark run off the back of the platform (where you got off the boat)- when they die, they don’t give saurfang his health back. I expect this won’t work forever, though. If your raid uses this strategy, be prepared to disengage off the platform if you get the mark.

Cooldowns

Most raids will call heroism/bloodlust when Saurfang frenzies at 25%. With my luck, he always summons a pack of beasts almost immediately after. Save your cooldowns and potions for this. It’s a long fight, but you really need to kick butt when he enrages. If there are beasts up, use your extra DPS to finish them faster and get back to the boss.

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Tags: blood beasts, blood nova, blood power, deathbringer-saurfang, how-to-kite, Hunters, icc, icecrown-citadel, kite, kiting, kiting blood beasts, mark of the fallen champion, pve, Raiding, strategy, tactics, world-of-warcraft, wotlk, wotlk-guide, wow, wow-guide, wrath-of-the-lich-king