OutDPS!

I’m going to start writing Ulduar fight guides from a hunter perspective. First up- Ignis. Oh man, I hate his trash. It’s more challenging than the boss itself. First up, you have two fire elementals that will give the raid flame herpes. The only way to get rid of this is to run to the water in the room below- conveniently located right next to a room full of trash that either charges randomly for over half your life, or spits fire whirlwinds that chase you up the stairs and launch you hundreds of feet into the air if they catch you.

Consider this a skull-check. Your skull must be this thick to continue playing warcraft.

Once you clear the trash and use the water to clean the flame herpes, you are at Ignis himself. This encounter is complex for everyone but hunters. The boss will do a fair bit of raid damage with flame jets, which also lock casters out of casting for 8 seconds if they don’t stop casting. He’ll scorch the earth in the direction of the tank, and will call up adds. He occasionally grabs someone and put them in his crotch pot.

The hard parts of this fight are execution. If you’re learning it as a group, remember that there’s no enrage timer. Just keep adding healers until you win, and then start replacing them with DPS until you start to lose again. That ratio (healers per DPS) will from here on in be called the “Euripides Factor”, and will be a quantifiable measure of awesomeness of a raid group. Lower is better. My guild’s EF was 1 the day we got him down the first time. Yay us.

The off tank needs to pick up the adds and stand them in the scorched earth until they get 20 stacks of heat, and become molten. He then runs it through the water so it becomes brittle and can be killed by any hit over 5000 damage.

Healers need to heal the tank and off tank, as well as the raid damage and whoever’s in the crotch pot. Not an easy job. They, like all other casters, need to make sure they don’t get spell locked from the flame jets.

Our guild uses a four corner tanking strategy where the main tank will face Ignis away from the center of the room, one corner at a time. All ranged DPS other than hunters need to watch for that spell lock, and some of them (mages especially) need to listen for their off tank yelling “Brittle on X” into their ear, and then go and one shot an add without stepping on a fire. If the mage gets spell locked or crotch potted, there needs to be a backup.

It’s not a hunter though! That’s right, we’re arguably the highest DPS in the game, but I’ll be damned if we can reliably do a single shot that reliably does more than 5k. I’ll do crits over that, sure, but a mage can do it pretty much on demand. I have to pound away for a good 5 seconds sometimes, when a mage can just be like “Oh, 5k crit? Sure, hope you got tickets to the gun show! <bang> … OOM guys.”

This means that as hunters, our only jobs are to:

1. DPS the boss
2. Not stand in the fire
3. Continue to have no spell lockable DPS abilities
4. Yell frantically “I’m in the crotch pot” when we’re in the crotch pot
5. Roll on rogue gear

Easy peasy. We’ve been doing this since the game was launched ;)

Next up, Razorscale!