Iron Reaver is the second boss of the Hellfire Citadel (HFC) raid. It is a huge machine standing in the middle of the room and consists of two phases. The first phase has the Iron Reaver on the ground, fighting against your raid, and the second phase has the Iron Reaver in the air, dropping fire and bombs on the ground for your raid to avoid or kill. The transition between the phases is on a timer, so it’s possible to finish killing her in phase 1, before phase 2 ever happens. Possible, but not likely unless you’re mythic geared.

During the ground phase, Iron Reaver puts fire on the ground, puts dots that do splash damage on players, and does a few abilities that do aoe damage (some that are lessened with distance, one that isn’t). There are some things to note as lead:

1) The raid needs to spread out to avoid the splash damage from unstable orbs. With everyone spread out around, it’s easy for people to be out of range of healers. Healers not being in range to heal is one of the biggest issues of this fight.

2) Barrage and Blitz are simple abilities, but people can easily misjudge whether or not they are out of the way. So ensuring people know how to avoid them is necessary.

3) Pound is huge damage, requiring healing cds. Luckily you only need to cycle 3 healing cps, but ensuring people are all in range for them is also a must.

4) Positioning is often a pain, right before Artillery and right after Blitz. The fight can be made much easily by making sure tanks taunt in a timely manner and position her well. Random positions with fire on the ground everywhere can make it a pain for people to adjust, and can easily lead to a couple deaths.

During the air phase, Iron Reaver flies up into the sky, puts down strips of fire and a set of bombs with each strip. There are some things to note as lead:

1) It’s easy for people to all focus on 2 or 3 clustered bombs and ignore bombs way off to the side. This cannot happen, it is one of the main reasons wipes happen for this fight.

2) Don’t allow artillery to go off in the middle of the raid. Artillery people should often save personal cooldowns for it and avoid fire patches when running back.

This is how I lead the fight:

The Set-Up:

I usually fill up to about 25 people, with 3 tanks, 5 healers, and the rest any kind of dps, somewhat split between melee and range. 3 tanks is not necessary, but it can facilitate things in a pug, and makes the fight kind of a faceroll. From the beginning I assign places, using markers, in a circle around Iron Reaver (leaving a pie slice of about 90 degrees for tanks to run artillery out), and ensure that my healers are evenly spread. I mark the healers and use corresponding raid markers to assign places, because having healers marked in general will help out the raid later as well. Incidentally, I try to even the healers out so I won’t have raid healers all on one side and tank healers on the other. About 60 yards away from the boss, in the direction of that 90 degree slice, I put a marker for tanks to go with artillery. This is a big reason for why 3 tanks simplifies things: the tank with artillery has all the time in the world to get that far away, and it ensures that no one is anywhere near artillery when it goes off. Lastly, I assign a healer cd rotation with 3 cds for pound. For the second ground phase it will have been 3 minutes and the cds will be up again on time.

The Explanation:

I explain that the way I have things set up, tanks should always be able to keep the boss in the middle, or get her there quickly after Blitz. I then remind everyone that they need to stay spread, but move in close to the boss for pound, to benefit from healing cds. Then, if needed, I teach them how to stay away from barrage (I use her left arm, and tell people to stay away from a cone in front of her left arm as she is about to do barrage). Then I get rid of all markers except for the tank artillery marker, and set up 4 markers evenly spaced from the door of hellfire citadel to the gate where we came in. These are for people to call out which markers the bombs are near, so there is no far bomb that gets neglected. I ask everyone with a microphone to help call out which markers have bombs, explaining that especially if I get artillery during air phase, I may not see the far ones.

During the Fight:

Depending on the group’s familiarity with the fight, I may or may not call out Barrage and Blitz. If I do call it out I usually add a calm phrase like “Make sure that left arm isn’t in front of you” so that people can focus on what they need to and don’t panic. Shouting “Barrage! Barrage!” doesn’t really help if people aren’t familiar with the fight. No matter how familiar people are though, I always call out healing rotations during Pound, to remind healers and to allow dps to feel they don’t need to worry. Other than that, making sure bombs get killed is a top priority. If I am running away with Artillery, I ask about the condition of bombs, forcing others to focus more on checking if all bombs are getting killed. After that, it’s almost home free. Just make sure people are out of the Slam when she comes down, then call out for people to use their cooldowns in a calm manner so people don’t get excited and tunnel in a silly way.