Warlock guide to surviving Trial of the Crusader
September 29, 2009 – 3:14 amPosted by: gmaxwell
Every week Blood Pact serves you up a dish of warlock delight. Chock full of juicy chunks of detail, smothered in lashings of class specific tips all topped off with a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands of mage tears.
This week I’m rounding off the Trial of the Crusader guide with the last three bosses; Faction Champions, Twin Val’kir and Anub’arak. A more diverse trio of boss fights you will be hard pressed to find. As with last week I aim to bring you the flavor of the fights with some insight into how they look through a warlock’s eyes. Again, I’ll be linking only a selection of the loot from the overly complex table. This week the Horde drops for normal mode.
Faction Champions
This will be one of those fights you either love or hate. If you haven’t done it before, and don’t know what it’s all about, then I suggest you have a look through a full strategy; such as those on WoWWiki or Wowhead. There’s a huge amount of detail to the fight most of which is pretty irrelevant when you boil it down to your role. If you are leading the fight for the first time then be ready for a headache in assigning everyone their responsibility. If you’re not leading then listen to what you need to do and go for it.
Now, assuming you have at least looked through a guide you will know that this is a PvP styled fight against either 6 (10 man) or 10 (25 man) player-style NPCs of the opposing faction. If you dislike PvP then do not worry, although many of the game mechanics of PvP are at play (diminishing returns for example) the bosses are still reasonably predictable and manageable. You certainly don’t need to go out and get yourself any PvP gear.
As a lock, your role in this fight is either going to come down to damage application or mitigation. If it’s damage application for you, then you need to know who is the current target at all times. There is no point trying to burn a load of them down with area effect spells because of Champion’s Aegis which means they only take 25% damage from AoE spells. Applying heavy damage from the start makes a big difference so be ready for a Bloodlust or Heroism to be coming your way early.
The first target is likely to be a healer, burning them to a crisp as quickly as possible is the key to making the rest of the fight easier from there. You can throw in fears and Death Coil if you like as they will interrupt casts. Generally it’s better to leave the interruption up to the melee classes however, as fear takes too long to cast (costs too much DPS) and Death Coil will just make everyone have to move. You’re there to nuke, so revel in it and let those others do the fiddly stuff.
Should your raid lead call for you to get involved in the fiddly CC stuff as well there is quite a bit you can do. In normal mode they all forgot to bring their PvP trinkets — so fear will sit on most of them for good while as long as 
they haven’t been feared recently and nobody clears it from them. You can go so far as to make macros like the following and key-bind them for use at good moments within your rotation or while finding the next target.
/cast Fear
/shoo
/y Tell Belt, he’s next!
/targetlasttarget
Obviously not all the lines of that macro are required but feel free to edit as you see fit. You can also banish the warlock’s pet which can be pretty worthwhile. In our raids we kill the pets after the healers as they die very quickly and it eases things up a bit, but banishing works if you get it biting your behind.
One of the juiciest targets for warlock crowd control is the resto druid. His healing is really quite powerful which makes him a common first target but if a warlock gets a hold on him he can be effectively removed from the fight and dealt with at the raid’s leisure. Chaining Fear three times, which will diminish from a decent duration to essentially an interrupt, then swap to Banish (who doesn’t love banishing trees?) for another three. There you can either throw a Death Coil or Shadowfury if available and start again. He’ll still get out some instant cast HoTs but they can be stolen from the target, so all good.
Beyond that it’s a matter of survival, so keep your Circle up and use it as required (escaping a whirl-winding warrior or clearing snares), use your PvP trinket or Every Man for Himself and be aware of when you get aggro (often when one targets you the others will assist them). Your healers should be able to deal with it but be ready to move or maybe cast Howl of Terror if they come for you.
Pet choice is a little more fluid for this fight, the imp is great for the stamina and Destro locks will probably want to keep theirs. Felhunters are very handy to have around and as a Demonic Pact lock I find they are just about as good for uptime. The Felguard is great for damage and the Intercept is also fairly handy.
Faction Champions loot
- 10 man – Sunreaver Disciple’s Blade, Fetish of Volatile Power, Sunreaver Magus’ Sandals
- 25 man – Sandals of the Mourning Widow, Shroud of Displacement, Belt of Biting Cold
Take a minute to have another look at the loot. There are some very nice things in that box.
Twin Val’kyr
This is quite possibly my favourite fight in the instance. I’ve always liked the shared health-pool concept and all the other fight elements make this encounter really work for me. Four things to look out for:
- Portals that buff you with Light Essence or Dark Essence.
- Concentrated Light & Concentrated Darkness. These are little orbs of light and dark that float about and either buff or damage you.
- Light Vortex & Dark Vortex. This does a load of damage to everyone with the opposing buff.
- Shield of Lights & Shield of Darkness. A bubble on one of the bosses that absorbs damage protecting them while they cast a heal.
Once the Val’kyr enter the arena four portal-like things pop up around the room — two next to the bosses and two closer to the instance entrance. These closest to the entrance can be clicked without starting the fight. Essentially the raid splits into two; one with the light buff and one with the dark. There is no particular reason to be on one side or the other so go ahead and let out your inner-warlock and go to the dark side.
The whole fight is about the opposites of light and dark. Fjola Lightbane is essentially a creature of the light so being dark-buffed means you do more damage to her. The opposite is true for Eydis Darkbane. So if you are dark-buffed you want to be on the side that is damaging Fjola.
The orbs will hurt or buff you depending on their color – opposite color to your buff means damage to you, the same color means a stacking buff which when it reaches 100 gives you a haste boost. On the whole these can be ignored, but if you take too many of the wrong color you will need to watch your health until it’s recovered. This mechanic means you have to pay closer attention to your health so you don’t Life Tap at the wrong time.
The vortex is pretty nasty and so you want to ensure that you have the correct buff to match the color of vortex being used. If you do then you will take no damage from it and actually gain more stacks of Powering Up. If you don’t, then get over to a portal to swap over for the duration of the buff then swap back. All this moving about means Demonic Circle can be handy but as there’s hardly a time where you can’t DPS you might lose as much in setting it up as you gain from using it.
The Light damage in the fight is actually fire, and the Dark (unsurprisingly) is shadow damage. Bear this in mind if you do find yourself light buffed with an incoming Dark Vortex as you can use Shadow Ward in a pinch.
The final thing to look out for is the boss bubbles (Shield of Lights & Shield of Darkness). When one of them gets this then they are about to heal themselves for 20% of their health pool (now 50% in heroic). You need to burn this down quickly so that someone can interrupt the heal. If the bubble is on your current target then just keep nuking. If it’s on the other target then swap quickly. You can also change buffs to boost your damage but unless this can be done very quickly it’s often not worth the time lost – just get with the damage as soon as you can.
Twin Val’kyr loot
- 10 man – Sandals of the Grieving Soul, Illumination, Darkbane Amulet, Looming Shadow Wraps, Lightbane Focus
- 25 man – Cry of the Val’kyr, Mystifying Charm, Dark Essence Bindings, Skyweaver Vestments
Anub’Arak
They say that after a nuclear war cockroaches will “inherit the Earth”, well, if Anub’arak is any measure then nerubians are looking good for Azeroth. No matter what we do to this guy, he just won’t stay dead.
The first two phases of this fight are fairly straight forward. Phase one: the boss is up front and you need to do a load of damage to him. There are adds that join the fight and will be off-tanked. Your raid may call for you to kill some of these but may also just look for all damage to be done to Anub. Phase two: The boss is underground sticking spikes up through the surface and little adds start scuttling about the place. This is time to clean up any adds, starting with the Burrowers. The Swarm Scarabs shouldn’t be tanked so if you can’t handle having one hit you then kite it (again, Demonic Circle can help). It looks like Anub will wipe his debuffs when he burrows but DoTs remain, so pile them on before he digs.
If you are being pursued by Anub’arak in phase two then you need to get onto a patch of Permafrost. These are formed by bringing down the Frost Spheres floating above the room. You may be asked to help DPS these things but as they are constantly moving (out of range) they are not great for casters to deal with. If you have a hunter then they can do the job more efficiently.
So you alternate back and forth between phase one and two a few times until you have brought Anub’arak down to 30% health. At this point you enter phase three. No more burrowing and (normal mode) no more adds. The big deal in this phase is his new ability of Leeching Swarm. This will take 10% of your health and give it back to Anub. This then becomes a big DPS race to finish him off before your healers run out of mana.
As you may have guessed the DPS race is easier if the raid has less health – the more health you have the more he heals and the more damage is required. He will never leach less that 250 health so it is still possible to die from this effect but the less health you have the less damage you take. Many guilds look to keep people’s health low to manage the healing he takes, others heal like crazy and put the strain on the DPSers to overcome the healing he takes. Both methods are viable but on hard mode current DPS levels will struggle.
Leeching Swarm has a significant impact on warlocks. If we don’t have a nice health pool to play with then before long we don’t have a mana pool to play with. It’s important to enter phase three with a full mana pool so you minimise the number of times you have to Life Tap. Keep an eye on your health, if you get a big heal then tapping will not only give you a mana boost but also take your health down again without healing Anub. You may also want to think about down-ranking Life Tap for those OOM moments.
Anub’arak loot
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