Bastion of Twilight

**Vrakir** Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:41 pm

Hello and welcome to the Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about Halfus Wyrmbreaker, the first boss you'll encounter in this instance. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 6 healers and 17 DPS, but similar raid compositions may work just as well. This encounter has a 6 minute enrage timer.

As soon as you walk up to Halfus' room, you'll notice several dragonkin around him that you can interact with. The available dragons change from week to week, and you'll need them to defeat Halfus, cause he doesn't fight alone. As soon as you pull him, a Proto-Behemoth will come to his aid. Halfus' and the drakes abilities change depending on which dragons you have available.

Storm Rider allows Halfus to cast Shadow Nova. Nether Scion gives Halfus a Frenzy. Slate Dragon gives him a long stun. Time Warden allows his Proto-Dragon to cast Fireballs. Whelps give the Proto-Drake a Fire Breath. Always enable all three drakes over the course of the encounter to counter these abilities and do additional dramage to Halfus, no matter which you have up.

Shadow Nova deals moderate damage and knocks every person in the raid back. Its cast is pretty much instant, but this is where the Storm Rider comes in. Releasing him from his cage will cause him to be mind-controlled by Halfus and attack your raid, but it will also make his Shadow Nova interruptable.

Releasing the Time Warden will also cause him to be mind-controlled and attack you, but it'll greatly slow down the speed of the Behemoth's fire balls which makes them easily avoidable, in turn making your raid take a lot less damage. Lastly, releasing the whelp cage will - yep, you guessed it - cause them to be mind-controlled and attack your raid, but will also reduce damage done to your raid from the boss & drakes.

So, what's the plan here? You should release the two most menacing dragons straight away - in our case Storm Rider and Time Warden - and have your tanks secure them. We had our main tank tank both Halfus and the Time Warden and our Offtank took care of the Storm Rider. Ranged DPS then took down the Storm Rider while melee DPS stayed on Halfus to interrupt Shadow Nova. It's a good idea to set up an interrupt chain if you have a Storm Rider.

When the first dragon died, we released our third pick, the whelp cage. There's no need to actively kill the whelps, they don't do much damage at all. Keep them in cleave range and they'll die eventually. At 50% Halfus gains another ability that he'll use every 30 seconds - Furious Roar.

Furious roar will execute 3 stuns in quick succession. You're able to move a little between each stun, but you're NOT able to use any abilities. You can and should move out of fireballs between stuns. Your tank should have a cooldown up before every furious roar or he's very likely to die during it. After the stuns, Halfus will immediately cast Shadow Nova which must be interrupted.

To do this, mages can blink the last tick of Furious Roar and counterspell or you can use things such as Hand of Protection and PVP trinkets. Set up a rotation and make sure to only break the third stun, if you do it earlier you'll just get stunned again.

It's a good idea to use Bloodlust after the dragons are dead but before you hit 50%, when all DPS are focusing on Halfus as that should give you the maximum amount of DPS on him. Until the gear level rises, you're likely to need it.

That's all the mechanics to this fight. I'll attach a video of the full encounter so you can see how we handled the various mechanics. As a note, when we defeated this encounter we were not yet aware that we cannot use cooldowns between Furious Roar ticks, so that resulted in multiple tank and some DPS deaths and ultimately almost cost us the fight here.

The enrage timer is somewhat harsh if your raid is still undergeared, but if you execute the encounter correctly, it's definitely doable. Good luck and have fun!

**Vrakir** Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:42 pm

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about the Valiona and Theralion encounter, the second fight in this new raid instance. We completed this encounter with 1 tank, 3 healers and 6 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well.

As soon as you enter the dragonkin room, you'll see Valiona to the right of you and Theralion to the left. You only ever fight one dragon on the ground at any given time, but while one dragon is grounded, the other one will annoy you with abilities from the air. Roughly every 90 seconds, Valiona and Theralion switch ground and air positions, and with that their abilities change as well.

You want to start out by attacking Valiona, and as soon as you do so, Theralion will take off into the air. Let's go over the abilities you're faced with in this phase. The first ability you'll notice is Theralion firing little shadow missiles at random raid members. These deal damage to everyone within 8 yards of the targeted person, so it's important that the raid stays spread out... at least until Valiona uses her first ability, Blackout.

Blackout is a Magic debuff she'll put on a random raid member. It lasts 15 seconds, absorbs 75000 healing on the target, and, when it gets dispelled or expired, it'll deal around 350,000 damage. This damage is split between all raid members in a small radius around the target, so whenever Blackout happens, everyone needs to stack up on Valiona's tail and you should have a designated raid member dispel it as soon as enough people are in range to split the damage.

If you stay stacked up for too long, Theralion's shadow missiles will wreck you, so the Blackout stack needs to be executed quickly. No slacking! Valiona's second ground ability is Devouring Flames, which works much like her counterpart in Grim Batol. 3rd boss in there, I'm sure you know it. When she starts casting this, you cannot be anywhere in front of her face. It has a 2.5 second cast and the breath has a huge radius. To improve your chances of not getting hit by it, have people spread out close to Valiona to decrease run times. Lifegrip, Body&Soul, Rocket Boots and any movement enhancing effect obviously helps too.

If you absolutely cannot make it out of the breath, run straight backwards. The breath deals less damage the further away you are from Valiona. In this first phase, you'll be phased with 2 blackouts and 2 breaths. Shortly after the second breath, the phase transition will start and Theralion will execute his second air ability, Dazzling Destruction. He sure sounds like the epitome of draconic masculinity, I know.

Dazzling Destruction will spawn about 6 pink swirly circles on random raid members, two at a time. After a short amount of time, a missile will the middle of the swirling circles and should anyone get hit by them, they will find themselves in the Twilight Zone. This is a phased area away from the encounter. You shouldn't ever be down here unless you're trying to do an achievement, but if you find yourself in the Twilight Zone by accident, avoid the small pink balls on the ground and quickly navigate your way towards a slightly bigger, pink, clickable portal. If you click it without hitting any of the balls, you should make it back to your raid without dying.

Once Theralion finishes dazzling your raid with his destruction, he'll land and you'll now have to face him directly, while Valiona will hover in the air. In this phase, you should split your raid into two different groups, a ranged and a melee group. This is to counter the first of Valiona's flight abilities, Twilight Meteorite. This puts a purple arrow on a random raid member, and 3 seconds afterwards it'll deal about 150,000 damage split between raid members within 8 yards of the originally targeted person. If you make sure to be stacked, it's easily healed through.

Theralion's first ground ability is Fabulous Flames - did I mention his incredible masculinity? Fabulous Flames will put a purple void zone at the feet of a randomly targeted raid member. Typically, this is directed at your ranged pile, so as soon as you catch Theralion turn around to look at ranged, start moving. You should have a designated direction your ranged pile moves into for Fabulous Flames, as getting split up could mean a death if Twilight Meteorite is going out at the same time.

His second ground ability is Engulfing Magic, this is also usually directed at a random ranged raid member. The person that receives Engulfing Magic will do twice the damage or healing they usually do for 20 seconds, but will also deal damage equal to their DPS or healing to everyone around them. As soon as the debuff goes out, the targeted person has to run out of their raid pile and cast from afar, but make sure they don't run into the same direction that the ranged pile moves into to drop their Fabulous Flames. If unavoidable, cease casting and when all dots/hots ticked off, rejoin the ranged pile.

There's one framerate issue with Engulfing Magic - it procs everytime a damage or healing spell of the targeted person procs, so for dot and hot classes, this is multiple times per second. That can easily kill their framerates, so we had resto druids stand out of the raid for the entire phase 2 to avoid them not being able to move out of the ranged in time.

The last ability you'll encounter in phase 2 is Valiona's Deep Breath. If you were an avid raider during Sunwell times, you're probably quite familiar with the mechanic as it works just like Felmyst's Fog of Corruption. Valiona will do an RP yell and will slowly cover a random third of the room in purple flames. She'll do this three times in succession and anyone getting caught in the fire will enter the Twilight Zone. If you get caught, same concept. Avoid pink balls, find pink portal.

Ideally though, the raid should stand towards the middle of the room during this phase, so they can easily adjust their position to either side and don't get caught in the flames at all. Having someone call out on vent where the flames are going also helps for the visually challenged and easily distracted. Her deep breath happens about 2 minutes into phase 2 and marks the phase change. Afterwards you will once more be faced with Valiona's ground phase.

This cycle repeats with one small difference: On Valiona's second ground phase, she consistently got off three blackouts instead of two. The third blackout will happen during Dazzling Destruction - that's the pink swirly things on the ground that teleport you to the Twilight Zone - so your raid needs to be ready to gather up in one spot during that time.

That about covers the Valiona and Theralion encounter. I've attached footage of the whole fight so you can see how we dealt with the various mechanics in detail. Good luck and have fun!

**Vrakir** Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:44 pm

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you everything you have to know about the Ascendant Council, the third encounter in this new raid instance. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 6 healers and 17 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well.

The council is a three-phase encounter and you face a total of 5 opponents. In the first phase, you're up against Ignacious, a fire elemental Ascendant Lord, and Feludius, an ice elemental Ascendant Lord. In the second phase, you face off against Arion, who's an air elemental Ascendant Lord and Terrastra, an earth elemental Ascendant Lord. In the third phase, all four entities combine into an Elementium Monstrosity, which combines all four elements in one.

While the first two phases require near perfect execution, the third phase is definitely a soft enrage DPS test. As soon as one Lord in both phase 1 & 2 hits 25%, you'll trigger the next phase, but you want to make sure both Lords are equally low before doing this each time, as the Elementium Monstrosity starts out with a combined amount of health of all four lords. In short, getting all four Lords as close to 25% as you can gives you the best chance of defeating this encounter.

Ignacious and Feludius will be your first opponents, and as you can probably tell as soon as you engage them, their abilities are meant to counter each other.
Ignacious should be tanked on one side of the room, surrounded by a tank and melee, while Feludius should be tanked away from the raid, with ranged raid members loosely spread out across the room.

This is because of one of Feludius' abilities - Glaciate, which deals Frost damage to your entire raid but deals less damage the further away you are from him. As such, your ranged raid members should be assigned to DPS him while your melee are safe on Ignacious.

You'll soon notice that each Lord occasionally puts a debuff on random raid members - Feludius has Heart of Ice and Ignacious has Burning Blood. These deal increasing damage to the target but are very vital to the fight, as they give nearby raid members a buff that increases their damage done to the opposing Lord. Players with Burning Blood should make sure to run through the ranged raid members to give them increased damage on Feludius, and players with Heart of Ice need to join the melee pile to give them increased damage on Ignacious. These can be dispelled, but you should give it 10-20 seconds before doing so.

Heart of Ice is especially important whenever Ignacious is about to cast his most devastating ability - Aegis of Flame. This gives him a shield that absorbs a million damage and he'll start channeling Rising Flames, which deals increasing fire damage to every raid member. To interrupt Rising Flames, his shield needs to be burned down asap. Letting too many ticks of rising Flames go off can easily result in a raid wipe. If needed, have ranged help out with the shield, but make sure they go right back to Feludius afterwards so you bring their health down equally.

Ignacious will also occasionally leap at a ranged target, which knocks everyone around the impact point away. On his way back to his tank, he'll leave a trail of flame on the ground. While I always preach not to stand in the flames, this one is actually USEFUL. This is why: Feludius has a Waterbomb ability, which basically looks like small water missiles flying through the air. When they hit a raid member, he'll get a Waterlogged debuff which reduces movement speed.

Running through Ignacious' flame trail clears the waterlogged debuff and NEEDS to be done by everyone affected. Shortly after casting the Waterbombs, Feludius will cast aforementioned Glaciate, and any player that still has a Waterlogged debuff at that time will get frozen in an ice block and take extreme amounts of damage. This is healable, but it's not something you want to happen.

Feludius' last ability is Hydrolance, which deals big single target damage to a random target and should be interrupted. Make sure your ranged raid members and the Feludius tank watch out for this. Ignacious' last ability is Flame Torrent, which is a channeled cone AoE spell that deals major damage. To counter this, don't be in front of his face unless you're the tank.

To recap: In phase 1, interrupt Rising Flames by burning down the Aegis,power up your raid members appropriately by running near them when you have a debuff and clear Waterlogged debuff by running through the flame trail. Once you get one Lord to 25%, the next phase will trigger. It's vital that both Lords hit 25% at about the same time.

Phase 2 will greet you with Arion and Terrastra, which also have mechanics that counter each other. Ranged raid members are more effective on Arion, as he likes to teleport around the room, so leave your melee on Terrastra. As soon as the fight starts, Arion will summon a cyclone that'll move through the room and Terrastra will summon a gravity well. Hitting the cyclone will give you a sort of levitate, while standing in the gravity well will give you a grounded debuff and clear your levitate.

Both of these are very important as both Arion and Terrastra have very devastating ultimate abilities that deal about 100k damage. They'll alternate in casting these about once per minute. Terrastra has Quake, which can be countered by getting Levitate from the cyclone and Arion has Thundershock, which is cancelled by getting grounded from the gravity well. If you don't have the right debuff at the time either of these are cast, you're very likely to die. The wells and cyclones are summoned in random spots around the room and like to move on top of each other, so make sure to get the appropriate debuff early. They always alternate in their casts - so if you just survived a Quake, get grounded to survive the impending Thunderstorm.

There's one exception to the "get the debuff as soon as possible"-rule, and it's called Lightning Rod. Arion will randomly bestow 3 players with this debuff, and they'll have a yellow arrow over their heads. Players with Lightning Rods need to get out of the raid immediately and hug a wall away from anyone else, since Arion will cast Chain Lightning at anyone affected with Lightning Rod after 15 seconds. If any Lightning Rod is still near people at that time, you'll probably have a few deaths.

If you have Lightning Rod and it comes down to having the choice between being near anyone else or not getting your appropriate grounded or levitate debuff, always leave the raid. You can survive a Quake or Thundershock, but if you're firing off a Chain Lightning in the raid, there will be deaths.

Almost as important is Terrastra's Harden Skin ability, which makes him deal double damage and take half damage. This cast can and should be interrupted whenever possible, but if you fail to do so, have your ranged help out on Terrastra to burn his shield down. Lastly, Terrastra will occasionally cast Eruption, which will look like a few spikes burrowing in the ground, and after a few seconds the spikes will impale anyone still in the area for about 50k. Melee should be aware of this, although it's not the end of the world to get hit by it.

Again, the goal in phase two is to bring both Lords to 25% at the same time. If you execute this right, your Elementium Monstrosity should rise up with about 25% health left, which translates to approximately 18 million health.

Phase 3 is the burn phase and any kind of bloodlust should be saved for this. The Monstrosity will consistently spawn water puddles at his feet that kinda work like Defile on the Lich King, except the puddles expand when the Monstrosity stands in them, not your raid members. Aim to keep the Monstrosity towards the middle of the room so your casters don't have to consistently move to keep up with it. The middle area will be covered in puddles at the end, but that way you get the most DPS on it.

Throughout the whole phase, the Monstrosity will use Electric Instability, which is basically a chain lightning that deals more damage the longer the phase goes on. Eventually, your raid will just die to this, so you need to kill the Monstrosity before Electric Instability becomes overwhelming.

It has two more abilities that it'll use occasionally - Lava Seed and Gravity Crush. Lava Seed looks like little flares of fire hitting the ground, and shortly after they do so they'll explode in a little fire patch. This is the bad kinda fire. Don't stand in it.

Gravity Crush will lift 3 players up into the air and trap them in a gravity bubble. They cannot act during this and will take major damage in the bubble, so healers need to concentrate on them. When released, they'll fall to the ground and also take fall damage when they hit it. It's easy to let people die in this but important not to, with current gear level you need every bit of DPS you can get.

If you have enough DPS to defeat the Monstrosity before your raid collapses, it's more or less a tank&spank phase. This might sound like a complex encounter, but since the abilities all play off of each other, it'll be a lot easier once you engage it. Good luck and have fun!

**Vrakir** Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:45 pm

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about Cho'gall, the fourth encounter in this new raid instance. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well.

10-man Cho'gall has 33.5 million health and is a two-phase encounter. While he has an intimidating number of abilities, the fight is actually fairly straightforward. The entire fight is based around a Corrupted Blood Mechanic that works similarly to Atramedes' sound bar. At the start of the fight, a Corrupted Blood meter will pop up in your UI, and getting hit by any of Cho'gall's or his minions' abilities will increase your corruption.

Depending on how much Corrupted Blood you accumulate, different things will happen. At 25 stacks, you get a magic debuff that greatly accellerates your stack gain. This can and needs to be dispelled. At 50 stacks, you periodically get a debuff called Sickness, that'll make you vomit onto any raid member in a 5 yard cone in front of you. At 75 stacks, you grow a tentacle that will cast Shadow Bolts at your raid members. At 100 stacks, you're immune to any healing but will deal 100% more damage.

The goal in the normal encounter is to keep your stacks as low as possible throughout the whole fight. When you trigger phase 2 at 25%, Cho'gall will activate a spell called "Corruption of the Old God", which deals shadow damage to every raid member every 2 seconds until he dies. This spell will deal more damage the more stacks of Corrupted Blood you have, and each tick of it will cause you to gain 1 stack of Corrupted Blood.

As you can see, phase 1 is all about keeping the fight controlled and avoiding as many of Cho'galls abilities as possible, whereas phase 2 is a burn phase, a race against Corrupted Blood stacks.

Let's go over Cho'gall's phase 1 abilities. As soon as you engage him, he'll switch into a stance called Flame's Orders. Cho'gall will switch between this stance and another stance called Shadow's Orders throughout the entire phase 1. While in Flame's Orders, Cho'gall's melee hits will deal an extra 20,000 damage and he'll spawn little fire puddles all over the room. Fire is bad news, don't bathe in it. Make sure your Cho'gall tank receives a lot of healing during Flame's Orders.

Shadow's Orders will cause Cho'gall to omit 3 pulses of a Shadow AoE spell. This seems to hit harder the more stacks of Corruption people accumulate and your healers need to be prepared for it. He'll switch stances approximately every 20 seconds.

The reason you need two tanks for this fight is Fury of Cho'gall - this is cast on his main threat target, deals 60k damage and greatly increases shadow and physical damage taken for 45 seconds, so when a tank is afflicted by Fury, the other tank should taunt off of him fairly quickly to minimize the chances of tank deaths.

The next ability you need to watch out for is Worship - this will mind control 2 random raid members. Worship can be interrupted by any stun, scatter, silence or fear effect and the sooner you do so, the better. While your raid members are mind controlled, Cho'gall will stack up a damage buff called Twisted Devotion. Each stack gives him 10% increased damage, and this stacks up to 20. To counter this, we had everyone stack up on Cho'gall for most of the phase, so everyone could be interrupted quickly by abilities such as Shockwave, Scatter Shot, Psychic Scream and many more.

The only exception to the stacking up is whenever Cho'gall summons a Corrupting Adherant. This happens approximately once per minute, and as soon as the add spawns, your raid should spread out to avoid getting hit by the add's Corrupting Crash ability. Corrupting Crash looks like a little shadowy swirl on the ground, and a few seconds after the swirl appears, a missile will hit its center. If anyone is still in it by the time the missile hits, they'll take damage and increase their corruption stacks by 10.

Make sure that all your DPS switch over to kill an Adherant as soon as a tank has it secured. If you're the tank, make sure to face adherants away from your raid members. If you play a class with an interrupt, make sure to interrupt their Depravity ability, which is a raid wide shadow AoE with a 1.5second cast time. The adds NEED to be killed as soon as possible. If an add is still up by the time Cho'gall casts Fester Blood - which happens 40 seconds after an Adherant spawns - the add will gain a Shadow AoE ability that will pretty much wipe your raid.

Of course, those aren't the only gimmicks the Adherants have. Upon their death, they'll spawn a black puddle on the ground that won't disappear until you hit phase 2. Standing in a puddle will deal damage and increase your Corruption, but even worse is that everytime Cho'gall casts Fester Blood, 5 little slimes will spawn from each black puddle. Yes, each. That means if you've killed 4 adherants, you will have 20 slimes coming to eat your brains.

Of course, getting hit by the slimes will increase your Corruption too, so you want to avoid that. We dealt with this by killing all Adherants next to each other at the entrance to the room, so the slimes would all spawn in the same general area and had to travel a long way to get to us. Applying a frost trap or slowing them down through other means is also almost essential. On the first two slime spawns your ranged DPS will likely be able to take the slimes down by themselves, but on later waves melee DPS might have to help them out with Fan of Knives spam or other AoE abilities.

Controlling adherants and slimes is key to this phase, and if you manage to take them all down in a timely manner and without increasing corruption stacks by much, you're well on your way to defeating this encounter.

When Cho'gall's health hits 25%, you'll trigger phase 2. Any bloodlust or time warp effect should be saved for this phase. He loses most of his old abilities but he does retain Fury of Cho'gall, so your tanks need to keep taunting off of each other whenever that happens.

As mentioned before, he'll activate Corruption of the Old God, which will increase your Corruption stacks by 1 every 2 seconds and deal increasing damage. This is unavoidable, and each raid member needs to keep a close eye on their stacks. Any raid member hitting 25 stacks NEEDS to be dispelled as soon as possible, and any raid member closing in on 50 stacks needs to face away from anyone else to avoid vomitting on them.

Of course, since you'll take increasing shadow damage, this also acts as a soft enrage timer. Eventually, your healers just won't be able to keep up. Additionally, as soon as you hit phase 2 and every 30 seconds afterward, Cho'gall will summon 4 tentacles called Darkened Creations. These will channel a beam on random targets that reduces damage and healing done by 75%, deals damage and increases Corruption, so they need to be killed immediately.

To quickly wipe them out, designate a DPS leader and have all other DPS assist him on his target. When the tentacles are down, DPS can attack Cho'gall again. This cycle will repeat until Cho'gall dies. Make sure that no one vomits on any raid member, and if you have sufficient DPS and healing and keep controlling the fight, Cho'gall should go down. I've attached footage of the whole encounter in case you'd like to see how we dealt with the various mechanics in detail. Good luck and have fun!

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