OutDPS!

Northrend beasts is the first encounter in the new Trial of the Crusader instance. We one-shot it yesterday, and I figured I’d write up what I learned.

First and foremost, the neat thing is that at this point in the game, there’s few easily accessable strats, guides, and videos. This is progression on a boss that nobody’s farming yet. As more concrete guides are written, I’ll update this post with links to wowhead and any new strategies or abilities that come forward. [Edit 11 Aug: we know more about this now, so I'll be updating it soon with any little bits of missing info]

You enter the arena through the east door. You’ll know it’s the right one if the “hall” (more of a covered parapet, really) leading to the door is lined with horde and alliance badge vendors. Once in, you start the event by talking to the only NPC in range. Forgot his name, of course.

The fight has 3 separate boss fights, and you don’t go out of combat between them. If you end a fight with a snobold chewing on your face and half the raid out of mana, you’ll start the next fight that way.

Gormok the Impaler

This is the first fight. It’s easy, but has three twists; one to make melee mad, and one to make ranged mad, and one to make tanks mad.

• While you’re tanking and spanking, he randomly summons snobolds that will leap at a random player and try to see what the inside of their skulls look like. These will stun you and push back your casts as long as they’re on your shoulders, so can be deadly if they choose someone important. Ranged (and hunters in particular) need to have a keybound macro to “/tar snobold”. They need to be taken out before you work on the boss.
• Melee have to watch out for staggering stomp which hits all players within 15 yards like a truck, and delivers an 8 second silence to boot. Just run out like you do for Emalon, or at least stop casting like you do for Ignis.
• Tanks get a 30 second stacking bleed debuff called Impale that will force the tanks to switch. We swapped out at 3 stacks.

Acidmaw and Dreadscale

These guys are a hoot. They come in while you’re still prying snobold off your healer’s face and start running amok. We took out Acidmaw first and then focus fired on Dreadscale, however there’s an achievement for killing them within 10 seconds of eachother. Anyways, you fight Acidmaw until they burrow, and then watch where they come out. The tanks switched at that point. We found that having a hunter’s mark on your primary target made it easier to follow them while they were burrowing.

• Acidmaw needs to be tanked facing away from the raid because his acid spew will quickly wipe your raid. On top of it, he drops slime pools that are like Grobbulus’s sprays so the tank needs to kite him out of them making it safe(r) for the melee. He has a paralytic poison debuff that can only be cleared by taking a tick of fire damage from the burning bile debuff from Dreadscale. This can be instantly applied to the one person with a bite at least, and might be spread by the AOE spray.
• Dreadscale casts the afformentioned burning bite and grants you the bile debuff, as well as a molten spew attack to players in front of him, so keep him faced away from the raid. He also spits fire, and enrages once you kill Acidmaw.

Icehowl

This guy channels an arctic breath cone of cold effect that freezes you and does a metric buttload of damage. If you get unlucky and he does it right after rearranging the raid’s positioning to suit his needs, you’d better hope your healers are not OOM. He also whirlwinds all melee fairly often. If he targets you for his headbutt after throwing the raid at the wall, run out of his way. You’ll have a speed buff to help this along. If anyone fails at getting out of the way, instead of him dashing himself against the wall and getting stunned, he goes into a frothing rage that can be dispelled by tranq shot.

That’s it for the Northrend Beasts encounter! Short fight, no trash, good loot. What’s not to love?