Heroics too hard, eh?

Long post warning!

As I mentioned previously, our first raid is coming up on Saturday the 8th. There seemed to be some uncertainty as to where we should start; Some people say Blackwing Descent is the best place to begin, others say Bastion of Twilight or Throne of the Four Winds and so on.

So I did some research and was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of mechanics in each encounter. Every raid boss is much more complex than you expect - thought Putricide was complicated? You haven't seen anything yet...

Video contains NSFW language.

Click through to read on.


The Omnitron Defense System is one of the first two bosses in Blackwing Descent (the other being Magmaw). My research has led me to believe that out of the three main raids, this boss would be the best place to start difficulty wise.


The ODS (or Tron Council) is four construct-type bosses who all share the same health pool: Magmatron, Toxitron, Arcanotron and Electron. To begin with, only one of the constructs are active, but shortly after the encounter begins another will join the fray and the first will shut down temporarily not long after that.

This cycle continues around all four: one shuts down shortly after a new one activates. So far it's pretty simple, right?

Each of the four trons have three unique abilities that every raider needs to be aware of - that means a total of twelve potential hazards that your group needs to know how to handle. Add a (fairly generous) enrage timer and you've got yourself a toughie... and this is potentially the easiest encounter I've come across.


I'll be posting a more in-depth guide to the raid encounters in the near future, but I can give you an idea of how we'll be tackling these sorts of complex problems:


The golden rule for any scenario in Cataclysm is survival. If you can survive in an encounter long enough then you can emerge victorious (excluding enrage timers, but more on this concept another time).

In order to survive you need to be able to avoid as much unnecessary damage as possible - to do that, you need to know what the boss is capable of and how to handle it. Using ODS as an example, each of the unique abilities is a situation that requires raiders to react. The raiders need to know how to react to each one, so at the moment their encounter "How to react" lists look like this:

1. Flamethrower
2. Incineration Security Measure
3. Barrier
4. Poison Protocol
5. Chemical Bomb
6. Poison Soaked Shell
7. Arcane Annihilator
8. Power Generator
9. Power Conversion
10. Electrical Discharge
11. Lightning Conductor
12. Unstable shield

ur doin it wrong

As you can see, it's a lot to memorise. So how do you get an entire raid to deal with all of these situations? We need to simplify these if we can:

First, abilities 3, 6, 9 and 12 on the list above are all handled the same way and are very easy to predict - all raiders, including tanks, have to stop attacking when a shield goes up.

Abilities 2 and 10 are more or less unavoidable.
Abilities 1, 5 and 11 are avoidable for the most part and have very obvious visual cues.

Ability 4 summons adds that need to be burned, 7 needs to be interrupted often and 8 is actually a buff for anyone who stands in it.

It's still pretty complicated like that, so we also need to take out the need to memorise each ability and condense the encounter down to a set of rules, like so:

• Do not attack shields (3,6,9,12)
• Avoid any obvious danger, but stand in the blue zones (1,5,11 and 8)
• Interrupt whenever you have the chance (7)
• Burn adds fast, preferably at range (4)

Of course, these rules aren't enough to prepare you to one-shot the encounter on your first attempt at it. Healers and tanks tend to have additional rules to follow, but more on that another time.

So rather than trying to get your raid to memorise twelve different abilities and how to react to them, we've condensed them down to for rules on how to react to certain visual cues. Assuming your raid gets the hang of following these rules and avoiding most of the unnecessary damage, the only thing left between you and your victory is to deal out enough damage to down the boss before the enrage timer goes off.

Bear in mind that the outline above is just a quick (HA!) example of the ODS fight - believe it or not there's actually more to it. I'll try to have a more comprehensive guide up in the next few days, but nothing will ever be a proper replacement for knowing the mechanics yourself.

-Ahzae, Lord of the Trifling Surprise Exam