Hellfire Assault is the first boss of the Hellfire Citadel (HFC) raid. It is waves and waves of mobs you need to defeat, or else they will kill you and the cannons you brought to blow down the gates of the citadel.

It starts with a miniboss that runs away at 50% health, and adds spawn that are siege engines, hulking berserkers, felcasters (that turn into terrors at low health), engineers, and I guess grunts. There are some things to note with these as the lead:

1) If you leave the siege engines up for long they do a fair amount of damage to your raid or to your cannons. If one of your cannon dies, you wipe. So, siege engines need to die.

2) If you don’t kill hulking berserkers quickly enough, too many will spawn, and your tanks won’t be able to deal with their stacking damage. Your tanks will die and you will wipe. So, hulking berserkers need to die.

3) Felcasters can cast an aoe spell that does moderate damage to the raid. It can be interrupted or healed through, so it’s not that big of an issue unless you have tons of them up. But that won’t happen, because once they go to low health they morph into terrors. These terrors do huge aoe damage to the raid and must be killed quickly otherwise you will wipe. So, when they become terrors, they need to die.

3) Engineers will sometimes repair your siege engines, forming a green line between themselves and the engines. This makes it take longer for you to kill it. So, the repairs need to be interrupted.

4) If there is anything else, it’s grunts, which aren’t important unless they go after non-tank members or after the cannons. So, these need to be picked up by the tanks or directed to the tanks.

5) You don’t really have the leisure to get any of these adds down slowly. There isn’t really time for a breather. If you do, you will get overwhelmed with one type of add or the other, or else some add will kill your cannon and cause a wipe.

6) The pattern is always awhile into fight, siege engine spawns, then waves of 1 berskerker and multiple adds spawn (including 3 felcasters at a time), then siege engine, then waves of 1 berserker and adds. This will go on till the end of the fight. There are 4 types of siege engines, and it will cycle through them.

This is how I lead this fight:

I usually fill up to about 20~25 people, with 4~5 healers and 2 tanks. The general idea is to do massive aoe, but with priority targets. The raid will always focus the siege engines when they appear, or else focus the hulking berserkers when they are up. I give my tanks the responsibility to put a skull mark on the lowest health berserker (if there is more than one), so everyone knows which berserker to focus on when there is no siege engine. I ask 4 people to volunteer to do pure single target damage. I call these 4 people my single targeters, and they are always on the skull, regardless of what anyone else is doing (otherwise berserkers tend to get out of hand). The only exception to this is when terrors spawn, then my single targeters also switch to terrors. While they are felcasters, I allow them to get down to low health together from aoe and cleave, at which point they become terrors. I designate one of my single targets to always put an x mark on one terror at a time, and the entire raid drops everything else they’re doing to focus any x down. I set up a healer cooldown rotation to use as needed for crisis times like when several terrors spawn at the same time.

Therefore, it’s basically raid on siege engine or skulled berserker when no siege engine is up, but aoe and cleave as much as possible at all times. Single targeters on skulled berserker whether or not siege engine is up. When terrors are up, the entire raid, including the single targeters, switch to terrors and kill them asap, coupled with healer cds. There is one time I deviate from this: when the cannons on the side come out that do direct and devastating damage to the cannons. Then I ask everyone to completely stop their aoe and purely single target down that siege engine. Once it is dead, everything goes back to normal aoe with priority targets. This is to avoid felcasters becoming terrors during that phase and causing people to direct to their damage away from the siege engine and kill it too slowly.

Other than that, I ask that anyone who sees a green line to help interrupt the engineer casting repair (though I often end up doing it myself). I also ask two hunters to take responsibility of the two slopes up to each cannon, and to misdirect adds to the tank if any straggler adds are trying to make it to the cannon or are focused on non-tank members. I also ask one person or each hunter to be in charge of the ammo pack that the defeated siege engines drop.

As for the miniboss, I have heroism from the start, and burn the boss down to 50% health before first siege engine spawns, calling out how many percent to go to push people on.

Lastly, this fight is really about motivating people to do huge damage at all times. There is no time when people can slack off on doing as much damage as they can. I make it clear from the getgo that damage is incredibly important, that I want people to pad the meters as much as they can… I do my best to get their blood pumping. Then, during the fight, I call out the priority targets as needed, call out for stop aoe for the specific siege engines, call for interrupts, for ammo packs, etc. as needed. But whenever I can, I remind people of their need to do huge damage. I push them on the miniboss by telling them how much more they have to do. I remind them after a siege engine is down that now is a great time to pad those meters by aoe-ing the adds. I emphasize the importance of getting the side siege engines down asap by calling for stop aoe, we need to kill this as soon as possible with no distractions! Sometime before half the fight is over, when we are getting things down on schedule, I tell people I’m impressed, that our damage is looking good, in order to give people a morale boost and make them want to dps harder. There are obviously other things to do as a raid lead, but for this fight the aspect of motivating dps stands out to me.

I’ve one shot this fight 2 times in the 7 days or so I’ve been able to raid since the raid came out, in complete PUGs. Both times pretty much implemented the above strategy to the tee. Then, when suddenly the fight’s over, I can joke about how anticlimactic that was, or boast about how great our dps is.