OutDPS!

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Well, Freya is one of the more annoying encounters. She has a metric arse-load of trash that respawns after a little while. To be honest, the boss herself is a bit of a pushover. It’s her adds and trash that make this take so much time. Here’s my guide for playing a hunter on the Freya encounter.

To start with, I’m only writing about the normal mode kill. To that end, the first thing you will be doing is clearing some mini-bosses so they don’t help Freya out. They are called Elder brightleaf, Elder Ironbranch, and Elder Stonebark. Leave any of them up, and Freya gets much harder (like Sarth and his drakes). They are all pretty easy and each drop an emblem. I’m going to go over them quickly:

Elder Stonebark is the easiest one to get to. In fact, we often pull him several times while clearing the first few trash pulls. He needs two tanks, and for hunters, our only job here it to keep up our DPS. One of his abilities reflects all melee damage, but don’t pull your pet out. The faster your pet can help absorb the charges of petrified bark, the faster your rogues can jump back into the frey. Non BM hunter pets are ideal for this mechanic because, as you know, they hit like a toddler (fast and weak) and can have 20k HP buffed. you may see your tanks running around kiting him, and hear curses in vent about fists of stone, but we’re hunters! We don’t care about that stuff! Just so long as we don’t pull agro.

Elder brightleaf is in the purple area to the back left. He’s a tank and spank that has to be moved out of beams of light. If you stand in them, I think you take damage. At least that’s what my drill sargeant told me, so I never tested it out.

Elder Ironbranch is to the back right, and he impales people randomly. You will tank and spank him, but have to quickly DPS the roots impaling whoever he targets. If you’ve done Kara, this will be a familiar mechanic- it’s precisely like demon chains from Illhoof.

I’m not going to go over trash tactics here- chances are there will be a fair bit of single target DPS though.

Now, you have the elders down, and you have enough room to fight Freya. Here’s how this fight works: there are two phases. Add phase and boss phase.

Add phase:

When you pull her, you’ll get 6 waves of adds. They must all be taken down before you can kill Freya herself. This is because she heals herself for an absurdly large amount, modified (attuned to nature) by the number of these adds you’ve killed. While you’re taking these out, you need a tank to hold Freya, but she won’t do much damage. Also, throughout the whole fight including this add phase, she will summon a tree called Eonar’s Gift, which has to be cut down immediately or else it will heal all enemies for a whole lot.

There are three types of waves of adds. The order they come in is one of each in random order, then another one of each in another random order. They spawn once a minute, so if you’re not finished a wave before the next one, try to catch up.

The add groups:

Detonating lashers will chaotically run about and reset agro. You can pull it, but you can’t easily keep it. Thus, many groups keep everyone grouped up around the tank. The hard part is that whenever one of them dies, it does an AOE. If too many die in the same few seconds, the healers will lose people. Normally you will have a few specific people AOE until they all have about a third of their health left, and single target them slowly enough for your healers. Having the right healer classes here is very important. Paladins, for example, have a very rough time.

The Ancient Conservator is a large single mob with a lot of HP. His conservator’s grip prevents everyone (except melee players who happen to be taking out a tree) from doing anything unless they do it from underneath a mushroom. He also casts nature’s fury on people which will cause them to do pulsing damage to everyone in a 10 yard radius. Since we’re all clustered under mushrooms, that’s likely to be a fair few people. Luckily, deadly boss mods will warn you and put a skull over your head if you’ll wipe the raid by staying put. Just run out into the open if this happens and wait for it to stop.

The elemental adds are the most annoying, so I saved them for last. You need to kill them all within 12 seconds of each other or you get to do them all over again. Get them all down under execute range (20% or so) before finishing them off. We assign targets to groups, but expect people to judge their targets well. One thing that’s mandatory is a set of three macros on bar you can easily reach with /tar ancient, /tar storm, and /tar snap. This combined with deadly boss mods’s health frames should make this easy.

• The ancient water spirit charges about tidal waving people. He has the least HP and armor though.
• The storm lasher does lightning attacks, but is pretty much a tank and spank
• The snap lasher is the fun one. Every attack on him gets him one charge of hardened bark closer to one-shotting the tank. You will have to stop DPS on him for 4 seconds to let the stacks reset once they get too high. On 10 man, this also slows him so he can be kited, but not on 25 man.

Boss phase:

Now that all 6 waves are down, Freya’s heal over time is out of the picture and you can go to work. She’s a simple fight.

First and foremost, always take out Eonar’s gift when it spawns. You should have a macro for targeting it, and get god at picking it out from the crowd and the forest. It will randomly spawn within 20 or 30 yards from her, so be ready to run into range if you have to.

Next, while DPSing Freya, she will cast green, glowing roots under people. These will stick around for a few seconds and then explode, knocking people back and doing large amounts of damage. She needs to be moved out of these by the tank, and you need to stay in range without standing near them.

That’s it! She’d be one of the easiest fights in here if it weren’t for her adds.