Mogu'shan Vaults Complete!

After weeks and weeks of working in Mogu’shan Vaults and getting stuck on the roadblock that is Elegon, Shadow Rising finally killed him and the Will of the Emperor Wednesday night.  Congrats guys!

Gone, Gone, Gone Elegon!

I honestly don’t see why this guy isn’t the final boss of MSV, lol.  But I was excited that we killed him in our second attempt of the night!  The raid has to be near-perfect in executing all aspects of this fight to beat the enrage timer, which we were 40 seconds away from in our kill.  I won’t go through much detail on the fight and Khizzara has a great post about it here, but I’ll summarize a couple of things that we did.

Phase 1 - We quickly pushed Elegon to 85% while only getting two Celestial Protectors up.
Phase 2 – We had Adoe, Zug, Wok and Van on the left side of the room to dps down the Energy Charges, while Sorak, Shadeey, Lyss, Slice, Zarm and I took down the Charges on the right.  We managed five waves of Charges, giving us a 50% damage bonus against Elegon.
Phase 3 – We brought all the Cosmic Sparks to the center console and once the platform came back, Wok took Elegon while I grabbed the Sparks and used Holy Wrath to stun them and had the dps finish them off on the platform.

For the second cycle of Phase 2, we went with only four waves of Charges to make sure that we had enough time to dps Elegon in the burn phase.  We saved our Bloodlust for the burn phase and as our raid team fell one by one, we finally killed Elegon with only Wok, Van, Sorak and me left standing.  Whew!

Elegon dropped the 2-handed sword, Starshatter, and I got lucky with my Elder Charm bonus roll and looted the 1-handed axe, Elegion, the Fanged Crescent.

SR Breaks the Will of the Emperor

The Will of the Emperor fight is a much easier fight than Elegon, I think it took us 4 or 5 attempts while Elegon was like 50-60 attempts or something like that, lol.  The fight is all about add management and the tank’s ability to Dance with the Bosses™.

There are three types of adds that spawn throughout the fight and should be prioritized in the following order:

Emperor’s Courage – these medium-sized adds spawn from either the west or east side of the room and focus on a tank on the opposite end.  If they reach a tank, they will place a debuff on them that will slowly cause the tank to be immobile.  These adds should be dps’d from behind, as the huge shield they carry prevent all damage from the front.

Emperor’s Strength – these large-sized adds spawn halfway between the sides and the center of the room.  They can be essentially tanked by anyone, as they do no melee damage to whoever has aggro on them.  These mobs perform a circular smash in front of them, which is visible on the floor and should be avoided, otherwise you will be hit for a high amount of damage and stunned for a couple of seconds.

Emperor’s Rage – these smaller-sized adds spawn in the north side of the room and will fixate on a random raid member.  These adds are affected by all forms of CC and only do moderate damage.

After a minute and a half from the start of the fight, the two bosses, Jan-xi and Qin-xi, appear and must be picked up by the tanks immediately.  Jan-xi and Qin-xi both share a health pool, so the dps can attack either, no matter where you are in the room while controlling the adds.  We took towards the southwest and southeast corners of the room, to give room for the dps and healers and to avoid the bosses’ attacks.

Each boss will perform a Devastating Combo, where they will swing their weapons in arcs.  They will swing in arcs to their left, right and in front of them.  Every time you are hit by an arc, you will not only take massive damage, but also get a 10% armor debuff that stacks.  Both bosses will also do a Stomp during the Devastating Combo, which will do damage and stun anyone around them for a couple of seconds.  Both bosses will do five arc swings/stomps during Devastating Combo and are random.  From what I saw last night, the boss will generally perform an arc swing to the left or right first.

If you manage to “dance” with the boss successfully, you will gain an extra ability called Opportunistic Strike, which gives you a special button in the middle of your screen.  You can only use it once and it will instantly do 500,000 to the boss.  It’s important to get these as much as you can as it will help the dps tremendously.

During the fight, the room will fill up with Titan Gas, which will do AoE damage to the raid and increase the damage of the adds and bosses.  It will also increase the damage of your melee dps and tanks, so this is a good time to pop all defensive and offensive CDs as well as Bloodlust.  This will last for about 20 seconds and will happen four times, with the last one remaining in the room until the bosses are killed.

Since Wok and I were on Jan-xi and Qin-xi the whole time, it was important that we got as many Opportunistic Strikes as we could.  The first few attempts I did horrible, only managing 1 or 2 Strikes per attempt, while Wok was killing it with 5 and 6.  We had a really good attempt where we both had 5 and 6 strikes and I think I managed to get off 7 on our kill.

So, MSV is finally complete!  Now we can work on getting our mantid on and get us a Grand Empress Shek’zeer kill in Heart of Fear!