Reliquary of Souls and the Feral Druid

Good night for my guild last night; two progression kills. We took out Reliquary of Souls on our first really focussed night and then had a first kill of Mother Shahraz for dessert. The Mother fight isn't that interesting, but RoS is quite a workout for a feral druid. I still don't quite know what I should be doing there.

Reliquary of Souls is the fight where Blizzard says "druids aren't warriors or rogues". The encounter requires special rogue and warrior abilities that we just can't do. In Phase 1 you really need rogues with Evasion to tank the enrage parts. In phase 2 you really need a warrior main tank to spell reflect the Essence of Desire's Deaden ability back on her. Phase 2 also requires that the Spirit Shock be interrupted and, as always, the druid spell interrupts don't work on raid mobs. And while a druid can tank phase 3, the Essence of Anger's Soul Scream ability does a mana-burn like thing on your rage bar so that a bear's amazing rage generation is actually a liability.

So for RoS I mostly end up just doing straight up cat DPS. Even so, there's a few druid tricks that are helpful.

First off, before you encounter the boss you have to run a little gauntlet of light hitting mobs. They're no big deal but it helps to have a feral druid tank them (bear form, cat gear). In phase 1 we make pretty good fixate tanks; switch to bear when you get fixated and dodge enough attacks and you can hold at least two rounds of fixate. And once phase 1 is over Rebirth is a big help; inevitably someone died during the fixate phase and you can fix it. I used the battle rez pretty much every other attempt.

Going into phase 2 is like a bit of relaxation; there's really nothing we can do but a cat DPS rotation. The fight is a DPS race, though, so go all out. One mistake to avoid; don't shift out of cat form to drink a health potion towards the end of phase 2 because you may well not have enough mana to shift back to cat form. And watch your own health, 50% of the damage you're doing is reflected back on you. If you get a couple crits in a row you may want to slow down a bit. At least LotP helps your whole party heal itself.

Phase 3 is where you can get clever as a bear. At the very start of phase 3 our warrior MT got initial aggro. Then I taunted off him, then he taunted back off me, giving us both the Seethe debuff. Seethe gives its victim 2x (or 3x?) threat, just perfect for the main tank to build a threat lead. Just be sure you're standing on the MT in bear form when you do the taunt handoff, then don't attack until Seethe wears off. Even being careful I got myself killed at the start of phase 3 a couple of times, need to work on that. That rage-burn (Soul Scream) is really nasty, I wonder if I'd be safer in cat form?

Reliquary of Souls is quite a crazy fight, Blizzard clearly put a lot of time into creating unique game mechanics for an unusual encounter. Sadly some of those mechanics really require warriors or rogues and there's not a lot of call for druid cleverness in this fight. But we can't always be the hero, and between Leader of the Pack and Rebirth we have plenty of reason to be in the raid.

(As for Mother Shahraz, that fight is just a straight tank-and-spank. I went DPS, and honestly the hardest thing was having the shadow resist gear. Offtanking's even simpler; you're just standing there to split the Saber Lash. If you get the Fatal Attraction then just use Dash and run the hell away from everyone. Other than that stand there and shred her and you win.)

Comments

[Fathul]

Will Maim interrupt spell casts in phase 2 if you're wearing the S3 or S4 gloves? I ask because once we reach RoS I'd prefer to handle as many interrupts as I can and let our rogues do their thing.

[Flyv]

That's an interesting question, Fathul. A bit of searching suggests the answer is yes: see this Elitist Jerks discussion. The tooltip on the gloves reads exactly like a rogue's Kick, too, which makes me optimistic.

Season 3 gloves are not hard to get either, just 900 arena points, no rating requirement. And Maim is awfully easy to use; not even a cooldown unless you count the combo points.

BTW, spell interrupts confuse me. I understand why Bash and unenhanced Maim don't interrupt raid bosses; they're not really spell interrupts, they're a stun and an incapacitate. But I've never understood why Feral Charge doesn't work more often to interrupt spells since the tooltip indicates it's explicitly an interrupt. Apparently it does work against Shade of Aran, something I've never tried before. Of course Feral Charge is hard to use because it requires distance. Even if it does interrupt Reliquary the fight is such a DPS race we can't really afford to wander away to do an interrupt.

[Kal]

Hey Flyv - nice article.

On RoS phase 2, I've never used the maim simply because it screws up the rotation for the rogues/warriors. In a pinch you probably could do it, but I've also heard that the VG/BG gloves are somewhat bugged and only work on players and a few select mobs. I don't think I'd want to chance it.

I've tanked P3 before - on our progression kill. Druids actually do really well here, in that they can powershift to bear and lose all their rage (and then quickly gain most of it back) It took me a try to get this down, but once I did it worked out really well. The hardest part about it is making sure you have a GCD available to shift, which means a lot of mauling but not a lot else. Nowadays we just have our prot pally do it, since they take so much less damage than the druid does.

Also, the seethe mechanic may not be what you want to do. It increases the threat by the entire raid to 200%, not just the taunting people.

[Flyv]

Thanks for the comments, Kal. I tried the powershifting in phase 3 the first time but had a rough time getting it right. Will take some practice. And you're right that the handoff may be a mistake with Seethe. Odd that the entire raid gets a 200% threat increase. You'd think that'd be a no-op, except of course you could have your DPS lay off and let the tank get a 2x as fast head start.

BTW, I tested it last night and feral charge does work to interrupt the Spirit Shock in phase 2. Not very practical to use if you're DPSing, but nice to know that it does work. Shame the S3 gloves' interrupt might be bugged, that'd be a shame. I really wish there were a PvE way to get gear with that interrupt effect.

[Kal]

Yeah, the soul scream takes a bit of practice to perfect for rage dumping. I found that you have to do it about .5 seconds before the scream is going to hit. Once I started doing this reliably, I never missed a beat - and this quickly became one of my favorite things ever to tank. It's stressful as all getout, but the reactionary nature of this made it a lot more of an interactive fight, especially as a feral.

You can just have DPS lay off and get a big threat lead. The problem there is that most of the DPS can be alive early on, so laying off then isn't necessarily as good. Plus, a lot of the threat and the damage done is backloaded, so it may not buy you much.

At least in WotLK maim will properly interrupt. :)