Warmaster Blackhorn (10 man, semi-rant)

Is it me or is this encounter frustrating to heal as a resto druid?

Raid damage seems to be very spikey (people getting hit by adds, soaking small purple twirly things etc.). We only wiped for a hour so far on this boss - never saw phase two - so it might have to do with people not having experience and getting hit by avoidable damage. Anyway, I'll ask to be on tank healing duty next time and see how it goes.

There is alot of avoidable damage. If people are spiking, its more likely that they are being charged by the adds or standing in the patch of Blackhorn's shockwave.

If its the adds, you can see little icons blinking in a path towards the area they are about to charge a second or two before they do charge. So you can move.

Blackhorn also turns to face his shockwave target, The further back you are, the less time you have to really move. Just like the Raptor boss in ZG, his area gets bigger the farther you are from the boss. Most people just stack up behind him and shift when he turns. This cuts down a ton of un-welcomed damage.

Thank you for the quick answer, I'll come back to this topic when I have a bit more experience on the fight then. :-)

Oh and by the way... nice forum ;-)

Thanks <3

I posted a video of my view healing it if you want to take a look. The biggest obstacle is getting dps not to tunnel vision. After wiping last week, I respeced and reforged a bit.
This site is a great resource, and its just starting

Teh

I didn't find this fight very hard... as other said, the raid is probably taking unnecessary damage. Once they learn to stay out of stuff, it will get easier.

(And you'll get so Spine and wonder why oh why you didn't roll a more bursty class... but maybe that's just me.)

Indeed it was a matter of getting used to the fight. Thanks everybody for the replies.

I just had my first night working on this encounter last sunday. We nearly got to the 2nd phase but one last little swirly while we were all in a big one blew up the ship.

My main issue was trying to figure out if the person near me was going to actually make it to the little swirly or not while I was making my way there below max health; If they didn't make it I died. I think I'll just not run to a small swirly if I'm not a max health first. I think we didn't have such a DPS priority on the drakes (we only run with a max 2 ranged DPS (10 man) because of our guild comp) that that was exacerbating the small swirly issues.

same here, not many rangeds... 2 just like you
I was thinking on asking the Hpriest to go Shadow (stay on 2 healers) for this (big swirl+dispersion = win), more people to safely kill the dragons, and more ranges to get little swirl things
If it helps, make your melee also kill the drakes, it makes less little swirls appear

Laurind wrote:

(big swirl+dispersion = win)

Be careful with this. The boat shares the damage with the raid, so while the shadow priest will survive taking the hit alone, I suspect that the boat may still take a fair bit of damage.

Has this been tested to prove the the boat doesn't take any damage using this tactic?

not really, only saw a bunch of Spriests on LFR do it without dying (it does more dmg in than 10man) , really have no idea if the boat soaks more the less people there are
I'll try to find it out

You can pretty much ignore the shadow bolts on LFR and the ship still won't die. Which is not the case on normal

yeah, the point of that was the priest not dying, and I learned the hard way not to stack on big shadow bolts, noone does, and you always end up dying.
I know Deterrence doesn't work also.