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Hey there, this is your Pal Pallie and welcome back to Git Er Raid. We're heading through
heroic Siege of Orgrimmar and next up is the heroic version of the Galakras encounter.
If you really really hate shamans, your hatred of them will grow a hundred fold after this
encounter. As always with a heroic guide, I'll be speaking mainly to things that have
changed for the heroic version and then additional strategy points to worry about. The footage
here shows us 2 tanking and 2 healing the encounter.
So what's different for heroic here? Well the one mechanic change is pretty easy to
deal with. Just about every wave of adds also spawns this Grunt over here that attacks your
own friendly NPC demolition crew. If they are allowed to beat on your demo crew long
enough, they'll kill them and the process of opening up the towers will have to start
from scratch. That is a big setback so you'll have to handle it.
All you really need to do is station a couple of dps up here near the tower and blow up
this add quickly. You can also heal your demo crew so don't hesitate to have a healer pop
up here and get them stabilized if you have a little bit of downtime between waves. I
was one of the demo crew protectors along with my warlock buddy here. Warlocks are nice
for this duty as they can put their portal up here and just zip on up when its time.
Big Big note on who you assign this duty of protecting the demo crew to. If anyone involved
is also on the tower team killing the bosses at the top, you'll have to substitute someone
to protect the crew on the right side tower while the left side tower is being stormed.
So for example, I was part of the tower team so when we killed the demolisher, I went up
into the tower to do my thing. Our warlock went over to the right side tower and he was
joined by our shadow priest until we were all done with the left side tower. The point
I'm trying to stress here is that the right side tower crew needs protected while your
tower team is doing their thing in the left side tower. Don't forget!
So that really is it for major mechanics changes. Why did I say you'll hate shaman after this
fight? Well they are really really detrimental to your raid. They were before on normal mode,
but even more so now. They will cast chain heal a lot more often, drop healing totems,
and their normal surge attack also hurts decently. They are super top high priority now if they
weren't already. The first thing dying in a wave with a shaman has to be that shaman.
You still have to manage the Bonecrushers and prevent their fractures but everything
you have should be thrown at the shaman. Even start calling out a rotation for interrupts
on these buggers, they are that annoying.
From here, let me just discuss whats going on while you are killing add waves and towers.
Phase 1 basically. As I said, lock down shaman. And in case you don't remember, please beat
the crap out of the shaman. Did I mention that the shaman....ok, ok, you get the point.
Beyond that, the bonecrushers obviously have some priority because of the aoe damage they
do plus the fractures. Be sure to leave yourself at least 3 different ways to interrupt fractures
as a full one going off on heroic can cost an NPC at least half its health.
Stuns and knockbacks are required, not regular old interrupts so use things like deathgrips,
hunter explosive traps that are glyphed, typhoons, fist of justices from paladins, charges from
warriors, etc, etc. You still need to have interrupts handy for the shaman but if you
have enough of those and you are looking for what talents to pick on this fight, its helpful
to have an extra stun or knockback for a fracture. Remember as well, you'll lose your tower team
while they are doing their duty so make sure your ground team has enough to handle bonecrushers.
Next up, lets talk towers. How many people you'll need for the tower is going to entirely
depend on the dps you send up. You have to at least send a tank and a healer. We sent
2 dps so we left behind a tank, healer and 4 dps to handle the adds on the ground. In
general, when deciding who to send, go for classes that are stronger in single target
versus aoe. But, of course, if you have to pick someone else because say your shaman
is terrible at NOT getting punted of the tower, then pick more raid aware players. The hope
is that you'll be able to kill the mini boss soon after he or she does his first knockoff
maneuver. So it was myself as a hunter and a ret paladin coming up with our tank and
healer team.
Oh bonus note for you disc priests out there. Ours found that if you atonement heal through
this add over here on the tower, the heals actually can bounce all the way down to the
ground team.
Anywho, back to the towers. The last thing I'll mention is something you may already
know from normal mode. These mini-bosses hit your tank fairly hard. The guy in the left
side tower isn't too bad. But the hunter boss in the second tower is redonkulous. Be prepared
for this. We even made the call to have myself and the ret paladin save our big dps cooldowns
to kill that hunter boss off before she got done doing her little Muzzle Spray thing because
she hits so hard. Save a pain suppression or hand of sacrifice or something like that
just in case you have to survive longer than that with this mini boss.
Thats all there is to phase 1 but for completeness' sake, I want to take a minute to go through
a little play by play so you get a feel for how the fight is supposed to flow. First add
wave is out, protector team kills grunt then everyone focuses down the bonecrushers and
cleaves it all down. 2nd add wave is out, kill the shaman ASAP, protector team kill
the grunt and maybe a healer needs to go top off the demo crew. 3rd wave is the poison
mini boss. Focus her down and kill her off. There is a 3rd grunt out now too although
it wasn't clear to me whether we had to kill it off because the tower was already at 100%
complete but we did anyway. Kill the mini boss before the demolisher. Kill demolisher
and send your tower team.
While your tower team is heading up, you get a wave of drakes. Easy peasy. Next wave of
add is the crusher mini boss. This is where it can get tricky on your healers. There is
a lot of damage from the boss plus a lot of flame arrows going down PLUS the drakes in
the air are randomly hitting your raid. Do whatever you need to in order to survive here.
This was a common place for us to lose a person or two and then probably end up wiping. It
abates once the tower is down and the cannon guy clears the skies but it wouldn't be a
terrible idea to send your tower team healer back down to help downstairs once the tower
mini boss is dead. Its just such a intense part of the fight.
So tower team kills stuff, in the meantime you should've been watching the right side
tower and keeping that demo crew happily working away. And did I mention locking down shaman?
Cannon guy clears out drakes. And soon its time to head up the right side tower. BUT,
hang on. You might want to help the ground team just a little bit on clearing out a few
of the adds that are up. Even delaying for 20 seconds or so to put some damage into everything
might help them catch up before you head on up. You'll have to time this section out based
on your dps. We delayed about 30 seconds and killed off the shaman in this group so that
the ground team could clean it all up before the next wave.
The next tower is routine, just make sure to watch the tower tank here as I mentioned
before. Timing-wise, you ideally want to bring down Galakras as you are finishing off the
2nd protodrake wave. If you get another wave of adds beyond that, that one contains two
shaman and thats a real *** to deal with. So send a person up the left tower and be
prepared to start phase 2.
So phase 2. The dragon is down and he's spitting fire. Here is a super important tip that you
shouldn't ignore. The friendly NPCs in this fight are a HUGE amount of dps for you IF
make them engage. In our kill of this, the NPCs did more than 33 million damage to Galakras
himself. With a health pool for the boss being about 210 million, 33 million is a large chunk
of damage. To that end, the first thing the tanks should do upon entering this phase is
drag the boss near the NPCs and get them attacking. Once that is accomplished, you can go into
your strategy for dealing with flame orbs and such.
So there isn't anything different from normal mode on this part of the fight except everything
obviously hurting a bit more. If you downed Galakras on normal mode with no strategy here
at the end, it wouldn't surprise me. But here you'll need to work something out. The main
mechanic to strategize around is the flames of galakrond. Basically, you have to soak
the orb as in normal mode. But you get a stacking dot on you. This hurts a lot more on heroic
so you personally can probably only take 3 stacks without stressing your healers. So
the goal is to set up some sort of rotation of people soaking the orbs such that enough
people will soak and diminish the orb but without people getting insane dot stacks.
We took the strategy of personal responsibility. Essentially, everyone would watch out for
their own stacks and move into the orb to soak it while those with high stacks stood
out. To set this up, you'll want a few people to not take any of the first few stacks or
at least stagger getting them. So I took a couple stacks, then stepped out and when they
fell off I got back in there. Our disc priest didn't get any stacks until others got to
3 and started stepping out. If you need to formalize this and draw it up for people,
you can, but we just sort of winged it here essentially.
Another valid strategy is to set up two camps. If it was the left side camp's turn to get
stacks, everyone who got the beam on them would go over there to make sure the ball
went that way. Then after 3 stacks, it was the right side camp's turn. Kite the ball
to that side. Whatever you got to do. We also found it good to pop *** later in this phase
to benefit both healers and dps in the last part. If you are properly soaking orbs, it
only should get hairy at the end here when the boss' stacking buff gets super high. Thats
the time for *** and rotating raid CDs. Just hang on for dear life until the end and you'll
get it!
So kill some shaman and his buddies, don't allow your demo crew to die, and try to get
a clean execution on pushing the second phase as well as soaking flames of galakrond. Those
are the keys to the kingdom to downing this encounter. Thanks for watching and please
comment, like and or subscribe to the video if you found it helpful and....have a good
one!