So the first few times through H SFK we skipped Commander Springvale (third boss; upstairs right after the dining room boss). Well, we tried him, wiped to adds, didn’t come close to downing him, and moved on. Then someone told us the strategy, and we refined it farther, making it easy.
First, clear the room he’s in. Then, go clear down the ramparts, at least the three guys + pat. You can even go all the way and then come back when you’re done, if you’re in a guild group or expect people to stick around.
Next, have a tank who has some sort of speed boost. A druid works great, the bonus speed in cat form can give a big head start. Also some dps who can CC are valuable but not required.
If you have cc’ers, have them stand by the door to the ramparts. The tank stands at the other door. Mark CC targets. Have the dps apply cc. Roots, Shackle Undead, and Repentance work on undead. As soon as the ccs go out, the tank taunts the boss and runs downstairs, through the dining hall, through the kitchen, and to the courtyard.
While he’s doing this, whoever was doing crowd control run to the ramparts and jump off into the courtyard. Be sure to jump through the right side!
Everyone meets back in the courtyard. The tank keeps the boss pointed away from everyone else so that his aoe shadow breath stuff doesn’t hit. Stay out of the death and decay.
If one or more of the adds comes with him, get the adds down fast. Interrupt the adds as much as possible. Unholy Empowerment is the ability that you want to interrupt. It lets the boss stack additional Word of Shame stacks on people. These are not dispellable and will just kill you dead, or your healer’s mana and then you. They remove 5% of the targets MAX health per 3 seconds – not something you can heal through.
They may fix him so he leashes, in which case you’ll want to cc one add, burn the other, then burn that add, then stay on the boss til more adds come in, but if you don’t have strong dps this will be tricky.
We have tried this with a heroic leaping warrior but he was not fast enough. Misdirection would work well. A combination of Dark Flight and Heroic leap might also work. A well timed life grip could also succeed. Pally and DK tanks probably can’t pull this off. Some other form of kiting might work though.
The strategy we used twice (the only times we killed the boss) had 2 tanks. So, if you have 2 people in the group who can do it, and a healer willing to try it…
* Tank 1 sits in the entrance door the boss room. He has to pick up the adds.
* Healer goes to the end of that corridor (where the stairs start).
* The second tank goes downstairs.
The final setup would look something like this:
______door
______tank1
________|
________|
tank2___heals
(the underscores are supposed to be spaces)
Tank 1 pulls, drags everything in the doorway, tank 2 taunts the boss and runs off with him out of line of sight of tank 1, where the DPS kick the shit out of him (the boss, not tank 1). The goal of this strategy is to keep the adds from healing him, and the “enrage timer” is the healer’s mana. It felt much, MUCH easier to me than the regular strategy (CC and kill the adds), and I managed to heal 2 tanks (one of them with 1/4 boomkin gear) until the boss died.
I’ll bookmark your post just in case I get there again without 2 tanks… (And OMG I didn’t know you could skip him!)
Yeah, you can just walk right past him. The other bosses are not skippable (maybe you can skip number 2) but Springvale doesn’t care if you leave him.
Your strategy sounds interesting, the main problem I think would be someone getting out of line of sight..
You can bypass #2 by taking the ramp instead of going indoors. 2 and 3 were bypassable in the old design too.
That is a great trick. Keeping the buffing adds agroed on someone else and out of sight of him inspired.
Will have to look for places to use that on other fights perhaps.
Kiting make sthe fight downright easy, but many tanks probably can’t pull off the speed needed. We never tried having the tank jump off the ramparts into the courtyard. I expect that will reset him or bug him so we never tried it.
Using Cat, Dash, and FFF the puller never actually gets hit. So ANY druid could do it even if they are heals or dps. I get to the courtyard with plenty of buffer for the boss to get taunted off.
Our group did this with me healing as a holy priest. We had the dps wait in the courtyard, and I shackled one of the adds and shielded myself (for the Body and Soul runspeed buff).
The paladin tank taunted off of me and then I shielded him, and we just traded run speed boosts back and forth on the way to the courtyard.
We got the acheivement associated with this boss this way 🙂
Gromdred is available tomorrow (Fri) by 7, and saturday (earlier if needed) if anything is planned. Let me know!
We probably will need you; we’re heavy on plate wearers but short on people so, plan on being there.
Did this last night with a druid tank. Ice trap was the only CC we had for undead so I trapped both adds after the pull, they despawned and it was a cake walk after that. Glad to get the achievment before this is “fixed”.
Last night we did it with Analogue doing the pull as a cat with entangling roots and a pally repenting the other. The first time the boss agroed the pally and despawned when he jumped off the wall. The second time Analogue threw in a FFF on the boss too and it worked great.
I will be there then
We did this with shackle ftw.