A Resto Druid's Guide: Razorscale

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This encounter has three distinct phases: 1. The air phase, 2. The harpooned phase, and 3. The Oh shi-, she's free and moving around, get a tank on her, this is totally like that part in the new king kong movie with Jack Black where the monkey's on the stage and all chained up but then totally breaks free and JB and everyone in the theater is like oh shi-! phase.

The fight typically goes: Phase 1 -> phase 2 -> phase 1 -> phase 2 -> phase 3 -> dead -> loot -> win.

You start the encounter by speaking to one of the dwarf dudes, who then readies the harpoons and starts the encounter. Mole machines burst out of the ground, and adds start to rush the raid, while Razorscale flies ominously above you.

As a resto druid, what do you need to know?

Phase 1: First of all, spread out. If you have Deadly Boss Mobs installed, you can type /distance (or /range) to get a 10 yard radius going. It will tell you who is within 10 yards of you - if you see someone listed there, get away from them! The Wardens (a type of add) do a chain lightening effect that jumps from person to person, inflicting increasing damage each time.

Secondly, look where you're standing. Classic case of "don't stand in the fire." She'll put patches of fire on the ground after casting Devouring Flames. The fire will be blue. It is not a buff. It is not warm and cozy. It will kill you in approximately 2 seconds. Don't stand in it.

Thirdly, and most immediately concerning, are the Fireballs and Devouring Flames she'll throw at various people in the raid. She does this every couple seconds. If the same person gets hit twice with no heals, it's likely they're going to die. Devouring Flames does 9-10k damage and leaves that blue fire on the ground. Fireballs do 12k damage. Ouch. And I have definitely seen on more than one occassion people die because they got hit twice and healers weren't quick enough.

This means you have to be at the ready with your now new and improved go-to spell, Nourish! Regrowth can also work well, especially with the extra insurance of the hot behind it, but is a little bit more of a risk due to the lengthier cast time. You can do this a few different ways:

1. Cast Nourish as soon as you see a DPSer take damage. Yeah, it'll be mediocre with no hots, but at least you know you'll get a heal on them .
2. Cast Nourish, followed up by one LB. Therefore, if they get hit again in the next ~9 seconds, you have the hot on them for a ticking buffer, plus your second Nourish will heal for more. This involves using two global cooldowns and more mana.
3. Hot up random people and throw WG around. LB everyone you can. Nourish when you're able to and hope it'll be buffed by some of the hots out there. =P

I use a mixture of numbers one and two, with a couple regrowths in there as well. Number three would probably be my method of choice before 3.1, when I had a huge mana supply to burn. ^^ Not anymore - conserving mana is certainly something to consider.

During all this, you have adds running around left and right. Keep out of the way of Sentintels - they are the Wood-Chipper-Extreme of this instance. You don't want your bark whirlwinded into 1000 pieces.

So this whole time, while you're healing through Fireballs and not standing in fire, avoiding adds, etc, the dwarves are busy readying four different harpoon guns. One by one they'll become ready. Once they're ready, you can click on them in any order, at any time to activate them, and once the last one is activated, Razorscale is pulled down to the ground.

If your raid leader has you on clicking duty, she/he is a nubface. Focus on healing, not clicking.

Phase 2: Harpoons ahoy! Razorscale will come down facing the stairs, where you initially came in. The entire raid wants to be behind her, because she does a massive breath that will easily wipe the raid. Phase two is easy mode for trees. The only thing you have to watch out for is extra adds that might be hanging around and doing a bit of damage. To be honest, I dpsed during this phase. Moonfire, biotch! Take it! BAM!

After some time, she'll take a deep breath, get all agitated, and break loose, flying up into the air again. Back to Phase 1! You do phase 1 for a while, then phase 2 again, then maaaaybe phase 1 one more time if you're dps isn't super fabulous, and then phase 2, and THEN:

Phase 3: She breaks loose of her chains, but doesn't fly back up - she's pissed now. It's personal. She's going after you on the ground. The tank gets aggro and moves her so she's facing away from the raid. She'll put a stacking debuff on everyone that increases fire damage taken.

For trees, this becomes a typical tank and spank similar to Gluth. You'll have two people tanking her, each one taunting when the other has 2 or 3 stacks (they not only get the increased fire damage debuff, they also get a sunder armor debuff. The sunder armor debuff is why they switch on and off). The tanks take a LOT of damage (remember when you first did Patchwerk? And you were like holy shit this is a lot of tank damage? Yeah. It's like that.), so make sure you've got all your hots rolling on the tank with aggro.

Phase 4: Phat lewts!

[Bracers of the Broodmother]

Note: there are a couple achievements you can aim for on this fight, but there's no official hard mode that you can activate.

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