Thursday, August 27, 2009

Not one, but TWO.. Val'kyr?

I thought I'd hate raidleading, I really did.

To be fair, one large part of it didn't exactly tickle my fancy; the bit where you tell people to sit out. That's never fun. However, bossing people around during a fight is just, you know, awesome. It's almost like having 24 Belfips that you need to micro-manage. The first time I didn't think much of it, but yesterday I realized I was starting to enjoy it.

We stepped back into the Crusaders' Coliseum again last night for the new boss: The Twin Val'kyr, Fjola Lightbane and Edyis Darkbane. It's probably my favourite fight so far in the new raid. The mechanics are interesting, and it's a very technical fight, which means you're not just standing there pushing the same four buttons. I love it.




It's very tough to explain the tactics without having you see it for yourself, but I'll do my best. There's four portals, two light and two dark. Right clicking either will give you either a Light Essence buff, or a Dark Essence one respectively. With the Light Essence, you deal increased damage to dark targets (Edyis Darkbane) and less damage to light targets (Fjola Lightbane). You also absorb light damage done by Fjola. The Dark Essence does the opposite.

Apart from the portals, there will also be little orbs of concentrated light and dark floating around. Collecting the dark orbs with the Dark Essence buff gives you stacks of a Powering Up buff. Once you reach 100 stacks you start dealing 100% more damage, however collecting any light orbs with the Dark Essence buff blows them up, dealing damage to people in a small radius. Again, the opposite happens for people with Light Essence.

It all sounds easy so far, split the raid into the two essences, collect and avoid orbs, and pewpew. Fortunately, it's not just that. Every 45 seconds they use an ability which requires all the raid to think on its feet and react accordingly.

The first is an aoe pulse, dealing light or dark damage every couple of seconds. The raid needs to see which of the twins is casting it, and change their Essence accordingly. If Fjola Lightbane is casting it, for example, you switch to Light Essence.

The second ability is a massive heal. It's interruptible, sure, but you need to crack the shield first. Depending on which twin has the shield the raid again needs to change their essence to maximize damage and break the shield, which takes 250k damage to get rid of.

Some little tips from what I've seen:

Even though the twins share their health pool, you still need to split the raid, mainly for the shield. It takes a couple of seconds to switch essence and get in range of the twin, so you want to balance out the dps.

You're best of staying next to a portal of your opposite essence, so that you don't need to run too much to change if needed.

Healers don't really need an essence except for the aoe pusle ability. They can, instead, take the essence opposite of what the rest of their group is and help get rid of the opposite essence orbs.


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