Hunting Auriaya!
June 11, 2009Today I’m going to go over the Auriaya fight. She’s supposed to be some sort of librarian, and is affectionately known as the “crazy cat lady”. Your first responsibility is to create a macro that will /say “My cat’s breath smells like cat food” every time you feign death.
Now, once that’s ready, your goal here is to beat the rogues on DPS and not wipe the raid.
First up, the trash. You will have to clear at least one pair of storm tempered keepers, and preferably two so you don’t accidentally pull one later when you’ll really regret it. These guys are easy but you have to know their gimmick. They spawn charged spheres every so often that can not be allowed to reach the other one, or else the wonder twin powers will be activated. This is not easy to heal through, but luckily the spheres have low HP and can be rooted. Typically I get one GCD on them (not a black arrow), and then wait for kill shot to be usable. If all your DPS hits them at the same time, that’s all it takes. Because of this mechanic though, you’ll probably be asked to misdirect one of the keepers onto a tank fairly far away.
Now the other gimmick with these guys is that if one of them dies, the other one gets separation anxiety, which will also kill a tank. Get one in execute range, then switch DPS to the other. Switch back to the first one after killing the second one.
Once you handle these goofs, you’re onto the boss herself. The hardest part of this boss is actually someone else’s problem (how often have I said that in these guides, by the way? Isn’t it awesome to be a hunter?). The initial pull can and will wipe the raid if you don’t do it right. Your tank will pull and quickly strafe around a corner and nobody will be in line of sight of Auriaya or her jumpy cats.
Once they pull, you have to kill these sanctum sentries quickly because each live one gives strength of the pack to the boss, which makes her hit much harder. Single target focus DPS with a kill order is the goal here. From minimum range though, or else you risk getting killed in a variety of interesting ways. If you can’t safely get to minimum range and are watching your log tell you how much better you’re getting at polearms, then volley and cross your fingers the the nobody else in the DPS group sucks.
Once these adds are all down, the fight goes into a cycle. Basically, this cycle is really important and requires a lot of skill. From other people. We hunters just sit on our duffs, avoid void zones, and DPS.
Basically Auriaya will summon a feral defender with 9 lives. Each time you kill it, it leaves behind a void zone and reduces it’s raid damage. It’s best to kill it at least a few times because that will greatly reduce the fairly heavy load on your healers. This stupid cat bounces around the raid madly applying DoTs, interrupts, and stuns. Luckily, he is stunnable so a perfectly valid and common strategy is to taunt him somewhere relatively safe (away from the raid, next to a wall) and stun him there to finish him off. This way, he’ll leave his permanent void zone somewhere other than under the tank. We, of course, like to do things the fun way, and just move the boss whenever we kill the cat.
This leads me right into her next interesting mechanic- sonic screech. Basically it divides a buttload of damage out to everyone in it’s range, which is a cone in front of her. This should hit as many people as possible, or else the tank will get one shot. Yes, that’s right. We’re supposed to be soaking damage for our tank in this fight. So keep an eye on tank health and your health, and use a health pot, racial heal, warlock cookie, or whatever you can if it looks like your healers are inundated and won’t be able to get to you before you die.
Now here’s the annoying mechanic. She will regularly fear you, which depending on void zone placement and density, can be a lot of trouble. Most raids insist on a tank that can ignore fears (and ideally interrupt her next attack, sentinel blast), and often have fear wards or tremor totems up to reduce the raid damage for this.
Your most important job after the fear is not to get off that steady shot she interrupted, it’s to get back in front of her so she doesn’t one shot the tank with her screech.
Lastly, to make up for continually interrupting our sniper training, she spawns ridiculously large amounts of very low HP swarming guardians on people periodically. They do a fair amount of damage if they’re not taken care of, so use the opportunity to get in a volley or two, but not at the expense of your boss DPS. I volley until BA or exposive shot is available and then interrupt myself to use them.
That’s the Auriaya in a nut shell! Now go forth and top meters!
euripidesoutdps
jurgwena
M
lemli
eidotrope
I’ve found hunters work well to do the initial pull. Place down a trap (I usually use immolation trap) in her path, then run back to the raid and misdirect to your main tank or whomever u want to take the most initial burst. Feign death when the trap is triggered. Not as necessary now with the nerfs to pounce, but still makes for a nice clean pull.
If you’re misdirecting, what’s the purpose of the trap? The whole pull is linked, so once a tank has agro, the job is pretty much done.
I was thinking about misdirect, but unless I’m mistaken, tanks’ ranged pull abilities will have the same range as ours, and since their final position is quite close to where the puller has to be, the only difference would be us moving out of line of sight or them.
I place the trap down ahead of her, run back and cast MD on the tank and hide out with everyone (including the tank) out of los. The trap agro is MD’d to your tank. Once the trap is triggered I then fd. At this point the tank is the only person on the agro table. The cats don’t pounce and everyone just comes running up to your raid aimed at your tank.
I see, so you place the trap in her path, and nobody pulls directly. Smart :)
Well my tank insists on pulling himself, and to be honest, I’ve never seen him make a mistake and he has never been pounced here. I’ll remember your trick though.
I’ve always been the one to do the first pull. But to my glory, I have always done it perfectly and not wiped the raid. If we DO wipe because of how hard the crazy cat lady hits when all four kitties are up, I always make note of “Yeah, we may have wiped…But wasn’t that pull GLORIOUS?”.
I also don’t see the point in the other commenter using a trap. /shrug
My guild seems to love MD pulls, so the other hunter and I are always the ones initiating encounters. It’s kinda fun.
lol, the first time we fought crazy cat lady, it was late and we had no idea how the mechanic worked. We thought we had to kill all the lives of the cat as soon as it spawned. I think that’s how you activate hard mode. As soon as we wiped (and we got like five, six cat lives down), we realized, and then came back in and immediately killed her.
She drops a bow. I am a Dwarf, I do not use bows.
I’m no dwarf, but I passed on that bow because the other hunter with us had arrowsong, and I have envoy of mortality :)
If you can spare the dual spec, BM does pretty competitive dps here, and requires much less hassle. Just pop BW whenever she’s about to fear and you (and your pet) can just plant your feet 5-6 yards in front of her and pew-pew from the same spot for the entirety of the fight.
I don’t know… I get ridiculously high numbers as SV on this. The fears cost me less than 3% DPS compared to my high water mark. Beast master spec with my gear caps out at around 15% lower than my spec.
Also, BW is on a long cooldown, and she casts fear two or three times a minute.
Our core ten-man has repeatedly dropped Auriaya by ignoring the Feral Defender. It just gets off-tanked while we focus-fire on the big girl.
We’ll be using that strat on our 25 this weekend.
Leaving 9 stacks of feral essence means feral rush and feral pounce will risk one shotting your cloth healers.
Our guild has tried many ways of pulling this fight. Used to use traps but found boss and 4 kittys didnt all come up at exact same time. now use sacrificial pet with pheonix CD up. all 4 kittys + boss react at same time. all raid hides behind pillar stacked and MT ad OT’s grab boss and kittys. count to 3 and 4 hunters drop explosive traps and volley and all dps AoE. kittys down in few secs, and easy part of fight begins.
We also ignore feral defender, just AoE adds and this generally kills defender once in fight. Tank then moves cat lady about 10 yards and faces her away from void zone and fears normally run people away from it.