Tanking Razorscale/25

After a couple of weeks of killing Razorscale I think I understand the fight well enough to write about tanking it. This is the first tanking intensive fight you're likely to see in Ulduar, and it's a lot of fun. We currently use three tanks on Razorscale. After gear gets a bit better you can problably get away with two. Any tanking class can handle the fight fine, the primary problem is very quickly picking up 2-3 adds. Note: the fight was retuned a bit after last week, it seems there are more adds now.

Summary

• One tank on north adds, one tank on south adds, one tank on Sentinel
• Kill Watchers first, off-tank Sentinels somewhere out of the way
• Everyone DPS Razorscale when she's on the ground
• At 50% a tank has to pick her up quickly with taunts, then kite her facing away from the raid
• Tanks taunt off each other to avoid Fuse Armor stacking debuffs

Phase 1: adds

Every thirty seconds or so 2-4 mole machines will come out of the ground containing several mobs. The typical spawn is 3 machines. Two machines will contain 2-3  Guardians and Watchers each. One machine will contain a single Sentinel. Looking straight down on the playfield there's a circle drawn on the ground. The Sentinel, if it spawns, always spawns at exactly 3 o'clock just on the edge of the circle. The other adds spawn a bit further east outside the circle, somewhere between 1 o'clock and 5 o'clock.

One tank should pick up spawns from 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock (the north side); a second tank should pick up spawns from 3 o'clock to 5 o'clock. A third tank should pick up the Sentinel if it comes. The mobs materialize in the playfield and then the tank has one or two seconds to pick them up. It's a bit tricky because the mole machine itself is a physical object you can't run through, so if you're on the wrong side of the machine (or worse, stuck inside it) you may have a hard time with the pickup. For feral druids Swipe is your go-to move for the first attack, or maybe a Glyphed Maul. For Sentinels I just use a ranged attack to pick it up; Faerie Fire or taunt. It helps to know where your healers are, because if you miss then that's where the add will be going.

Once you have your mobs it's very important to bring them to the right spot. The north tank should pull the Guardians + Watchers back to the north, the south tank to the south. It's tempting to bring them together so everyone can AoE, but splitting them apart seems to help the DPS focus on targets and avoid some chain lightning. The Watchers are by far more dangerous than the Guardians. Make them the first DPS target and try to interrupt their Chain Lightning casts. If you're cat DPS, save your combo points for Maim. If you're a bear tank, use your Bash. The Sentinel is also dangerous, because it whirlwinds. A third tank should pick the Sentinel up and bring it somewhere safe for your ranged DPS to kill. Right where it spawns can work fine. Of course all through the fight you need to avoid the blue fire on the ground. And be sure there's no blue fire right behind the adds your tanking, lest you get your melee DPS killed.

Phase 2: chained dragon

The adds are all a distraction from the real target, the dragon. Every couple of minutes enough harpoons will be available to drag Razorscale down. The moment she comes down it is essential all DPS goes on her, ignore the adds. Guardians and Sentinels can safely be off-tanked for a long time, and hopefully the Watchers are dead. Unless you're tanking a Sentinel even the tanks should drag their adds over to Razorscale and help DPS her.

You want to get Razorscale down to 50% on her second landing: for Naxx/25 geared groups it's just barely possible. After her first landing she'll take off again, doing a Wing Buffet knockback and then breathing fire in front of her (to the west, 9 o'clock). You can Feral Charge after the Wing Buffet to get back in the middle if you want, but if you're tanking you really want to get back in position for picking up the next set of adds.

Phase 3: unchained dragon

Once Razorscale gets to 50%, she'll break free from her chains, Wing Buffet, and start running around chaotically owning people. This transition is the moment of crisis for the tanks, the pickup is difficult and essential. Unfortunately at the exact moment she breaks free she also knocks all the tanks far away, so it takes some swift action to pick her up correctly.

The Sentinel tank should pick up Razorscale at 50%; he's least likely to have any adds on him when she lands. If that's your role, then when you're dpsing her go ahead and get in front of her at about 51%, ready for the pickup. That way when she Wing Buffets she'll knock you to the west, away from the rest of the raid. Go ahead and shift to bear form before she breaks free and be sure you have plenty of rage. Also taunt her early, before she breaks free, to give you plenty of threat.

The moment the Wing Buffet goes off immediately Feral Charge back in. Taunt again as soon as you can. She may still run away from you, but hopefully she'll come back soon and be facing west, away from everyone else. There's still a few scary moments where she's out of melee range. All DPS must stop on her the moment she breaks free to help you get aggro. They should also use any cooldowns to shed aggro: Feign Death, etc. The DPS should kill the remaining adds while the main tank gets control.

Once you pick up the dragon the fight is still not over. She hits hard, 25k-30k melee hits, and the healers have to adjust accordingly. The tanks need to be on point and respect the tanking rotation, the healers need to know who's going to have aggro before they take damage. And she's dropping blue fire on the ground and occasionally taking a Deep Breath over everything in front of her. It's essential to keep her faced away. I also found it helped to constantly kite her in a path, just to stay out of blue fire.

Finally, the main tank challenge is her Fuse Armor debuff on the tank; each stack reduces armor and movement speed by 20%. Given her high melee damage even two stacks is awfully bad for the tank, and a third is probably lethal. So it's critical to have multiple main tanks trading aggro on her with taunts. Since there's three tanks go ahead and taunt off each other after you get the first Fuse Armor debuff. No need to wait for two: by the time the third tank gets one the first tank will be clean again.

One final note, the enrage timer on this fight is pretty tight, for my guild we killed her once 20 seconds after the enrage (ouch) and once 5 seconds before. Once she enrages there's no point in trying to tank her in a conventional way, she will one shot anyone she hits. Your best bet is to range kite her. Our fast-thinking Hunters helped save the day with a 40 yard Distracting Shot + Deterrence for 5 seconds of tanking. I've also been able to buy a couple more seconds by getting as far away as I could and range taunting her back. You won't last long this way, but if she's almost dead then a few more seconds can make for the kill.

Comments

[Karthis]

Nice write-up, Flyv. It's an interesting fight to kitty-dps as well, particularly during the add phase. I'll do a write-up at some point.

[Frostbeard]

Yeah thanks for the write-up. I only touched on the very minimal things myself. I think I saw the debuff had about a 10 second timer.