I’m gonna assume you know the basics of raiding, and this is just to help you get a jump start on the Hellfire Citadel raid.

There are 3 types of possible phases for this fight. The green phase, orange phase, and purple phase. These phases start when Kormrok jumps into one of the pools around the room of those colors. You get to choose which one Kormrok jumps into when, by making sure he’s closest to whichever pool you want when he does his leap mechanic. Once he’s jumped into one pool though, he won’t go back and if you keep him there he’ll just jump to the next closest pool.

Throughout all the phases he does 4 main mechanics. The first is pound, where you do everyone does splash damage in a 3 or 4 yard range, so just spread a tiny bit and you’re fine. The second is waves of puddles that start from the purple pool and go across the room. They hurt if you let them hit you, so avoid getting hit or if you must get hit at least run through it quickly. The third is a set of runes that go in a circle around the room. If you ignore them they’ll explode after awhile doing raid-wide damage. The only way to get rid of them is to run over them and soak damage yourself. It’s not a huge amount, but popping a defensive can be helpful. The fourth is grasping hands, where everyone gets put into these hands and can’t move, so you just kill them all.

In the purple phase, the waves get empowered. Now they come from all three pools so if you’re in the middle you can get caught with waves coming at you every which way. It’s pretty easy to avoid if you don’t stand in the middle, and if you do get hit just pop defensives. Also, the tanks get punted across the room every once in awhile, and I think take less damage if they’re punted far. So just make sure the tanks have their backs to a wall so they don’t get punted into a pool and die.

In the orange phase, the runes get empowered. Now when you run over them they’ll respawn 10 yards or so in front of you. It’s like you pushed them, and took damage while doing that. The only way to deal with this is to push one rune onto another, which makes them not respawn. Also, the tanks sometimes get rooted for awhile and explode in a 30 yard or so range after awhile. Just watch your range meters and move away when it happens.

In the green phase, the hands get empowered. They become dragging hands, which is the same thing but they drag you to the pools, and if you stand in pools of lava you die. So just have to kill them faster. Also, now the tanks sometimes get put in a crushing hand, where they can’t do anything, so you have to kill that quickly to break them out.

So kill hands when they appear, avoid pretty waves of bad, run over runes so they don’t explode by themselves, and keep your range meters clear when pound or the orange tank explody thing happens.

I’m gonna assume you know the basics of raiding, and this is just to help you get a jump start on the Hellfire Citadel raid.

So this boss isn’t really a boss, but waves and waves of adds. You kill the adds, and feed crates that drop from certain dead adds into your cannons, and that’s it. After feeding a certain amount of crates into your cannons, they knock the gates down and you’re done. So on your boss frames, you’ll see the health of your cannons and the gate, and the health of the gate goes down as you give your cannons more crates. The health of your cannons can also go down if you let the waves of adds kill your cannons. If that happens, you wipe.

When you kill these waves of adds, you’ll have to prioritize targets. There’s a mini-boss at the start that you have to get to 50% health, she casts cones of bad that you move out of. She also focuses random members to do splash damage on them, just move out of the range of those who have it or don’t let anyone be in your range if you get it. At 50% health she pulls a Forrest Gump and runs away. Then for the rest of the fight In it’s siege engines > berserkers > engineers = felcasters > dragoons. When the felcasters reach low health they metamorphasize into terrors, and then they must be top priority over everything. The siege engines drop the crates, so that’s why you wanna kill them first. The berserkers put a debuff on your tanks that can become dangerous if you don’t get rid of them fast enough, especially if multiple ones spawn, so that’s why they’re high priority. The engineers repair the siege engines and stun people and drop bombs around, so they’re more annoying than anything else. I suppose they’re dangerous if things are killed slow and then the repairs aren’t interrupted. The felcasters do shrug raid damage, so they can be cleaved, but when they become terrors (happens at low health!) their raid damage is huge, so then they’re top priority. 

After you kill all this stuff and bring the crates to the cannons for awhile, assuming you or your cannons don’t die, the gate will eventually die and you’ll be done.

I’m gonna assume you know the basics of raiding, and this is just to help you get a jump start on the Hellfire Citadel raid.

This fight has 2 phases: ground phase and air phase. You start in the ground phase and then after a set time air phase happens, and a set time later she returns to ground phase, and so it continues til you kill her. Throughout the fight there will be fire on the ground, just navigate around it.

In the ground phase she has 4 main mechanics. The first is called artillery and is a tank mechanic. She’ll put it on her focus target, and when it drops off it does huge damage in a 30 or 40 yard range. It can go on more than one target at a time, but only one target will explode at a time, so tanks should always be able to run away with theirs before it drops off. The second is called barrage, where she faces the direction of a random healer, leans back, puts her arm up in front of her chest, and then does an enormous cone in front of it. Just make sure you’re not too far from her so you can move to her side or back in time. The third mechanic is called blitz, where she faces the direction of a random player, leans forward, and then charges across the room, hitting anyone in her path. She’ll do this twice, so the second charge usually brings her back to the raid. It’s kinda a pain to figure out how to be out of her path, but if you do get hit just pop a defensive and you should be ok. The last main mechanic is pounding, which is just raid damage for the healers to pad with cds on. One extra thing if you wanna be pro is that random players will do splash damage, but that’s just a make sure your range meter is clear kinda thing, if you can.

In the air phase she flies around and drops strips of fire on the ground that you just stay out of. After they’re dropped you can move through them, but try not to walk over the actual splotches of fire. She also drops bombs on the ground that you have to kill otherwise they’ll kill you. The room is large the bombs are spaced out, it’s easy to not realize one’s up til you wipe. And lastly, she does artillery on 3 random raid members at a time, just run far away and pop a defensive, and try to avoid fire when you run back. When she comes back down there will be a huge circle that you have to stay out of or else you’ll be smashed. Then you’re back to ground phase again and you can kill her.

So ground phase: avoid standing where she’s facing when she does barrage and blitz. Air phase: kill bombs, run artillery away before the debuff drops and you explode. And kill stuff, heal stuff, stay alive, win.

I feel that I’ve come a long way. I know I still have a long way to go if I want to be a truly amazing gamer, but compared to the noob that I was a year and a half ago, I feel like a different person.

A year and a half ago, I had just entered the world of raiding. I had no idea what was going on. Very little concept of what gear levels meant, almost no concept of what boss mechanics are, no ability to be aware of the things my addons were trying to tell me. I also did not know how to navigate beyond using wasd, never tried to truly maximize my abilities (I didn’t know the significance of gcds at all), and didn’t really understand the applicability of most of my spells. All these things I’ve learned well enough to become an elitist and feel like why can’t every other mythic raider do this at least as well as I? 

Gear levels: There’s generally a difference of about 15 ilvls (item levels) per piece of gear depending on the difficulty of the boss you kill. I use ilvls now as a basic threshold, since those with ilvls far lower rarely can perform well enough for the more difficult content that I do. On the other hand, once the ilvl surpasses the threshold, though there can still be a large difference if people are 10 ilvls apart, by then player skill and experience count more. 

Boss mechanics: When I started raiding, I didn’t know much beyond trying to hit a boss with my spells. Boss mechanics, however, require you to be aware of where you are positioned relative to the boss or the room; when the boss is going to cast what type of spell and how you need to react to each individual one; and when to target which mob. Failing at boss mechanics means at best you do badly at the fight (low damage, healing, etc), or worse you die, or at worst you kill the entire group. Succeeding at understanding and preparing for and reacting to boss mechanics means at least you can manage to do good damage or healing (the raiders who perform the best are those who know when to do what in relation to what mechanics are going on); or better you’re prepared for anything that may happen and can save the raid from others’ mistakes; or at best can be one of those raiders who ‘carry’ the group by allowing the group to kill the boss because of your participation. 

Addons: My addons give me so much information. When I started playing WoW two and a half years ago I had an addon that told me the damage or healing numbers of each person in my group (recount then, skada now), and an addon that warned me of boss mechanics and showed me how many seconds I had left before the next boss mechanic (dbm -deadly boss mods). I was able to understand recount, but I may as well have not had dbm: not knowing what boss mechanics were meant that the many animations and words that appeared, huge, on my screen meant nothing at all to me. Now I’m able to use skada not only to see people’s damage and healing numbers, but use it to find out what problems the group is having. For dbm, I’m getting to the point where I can react early, at a glance, to all the timers and call things out beforehand so others know when to do what, as well as use it to see whether my position is perfect. I also have a variety of other addons that allow me to be aware of everything I need to know the times I need to know, including whether or not there’s fire under my feet that other animations hid (gtfo); what events have already happened and for how much longer (weakauras); which mobs are out and what spells they’re casting (kui nameplates); to list a few.

These things have already helped me improve enormously both as a raider and a raid leader. Some skills are really accumulations of understanding what’s already there and an ability to react to this knowledge quickly. For these types of skills, everyone has potential.

I feel very strange about today’s mythic raid. It went pretty smoothly overall, in 3 hours we were able to kill 4 bosses with a pug group. Most of these bosses were one shots too. It’s just the fifth boss took us over an hour, and for some reason that left me (or us?) with a sour taste in my mouth.

Part of it is because anytime the raid doesn’t perform well it’s my responsibility. Either I could find better people for it, or else I could have said things differently or called out differently in a way that would pull us all together and make us do well.

Part of it is I don’t feel that I’ve learned enough from the mythic Kilrog wipes to know how to make subsequent nights on Kilrog smooth and good.

Maybe part of it is that after one week, these bosses feel like ‘farm’ bosses, and the regulars expect they shouldn’t be too hard. Part of it is that after doing so well for the first 4 bosses, that we would get stuck on the 5th boss like this feels like a let down.

Either way. Feels weird.

I think I ask more of leaders than most others I know. I feel a good leader needs to do things beyond what one should expect of a person. This is because, though a normal leader can allow groups to achieve their goals and won’t ruin any groups, a truly good leader can make groups of people amazing. A good leader can motivate people to go over and beyond their goals, and feel delighted doing it.

When discussing raid leading in particular, there are a few things I ask of myself as the leader.

1) Deal with the basics of raid leading well: deal with loot, set up the right people for the right fight, make call outs during the fight in a way that’s helpful to people, etc.
a) Dealing with loot itself can be tiring, especially since I don’t care about loot (performing well when you have really good loot doesn’t feel good at all; performing well in spite of gear limitations is what truly feels great). But most people care a lot about loot, and this can easily cause a lot of drama. In my opinion, the best way to deal with this is to be extremely principled. There are times when I do loot and I prefer person A to get loot as opposed to person B, since person A may benefit much more or this may benefit the raid much more. But I never even consider giving it to person A if person B has won it, though I may ask person B if they’re willing to pass, and give them my reasons. Any loot drama that may arise is more easily quenched, I believe, when you and others know you’re fair, even when it goes against your desires.
b) Setting up the fight and calling things out in a way that truly benefits the raid feels to me almost like an art, at the point I’m at. If done well, I feel it can make an enormous difference. It can make people focus on the things they really need to focus on, and negate any really tough problems that may arise. This particular point needs an article all on its own to discuss.

2) Create an atmosphere that is beneficial to the raid progressing smoothly. My personal preference is to have the atmosphere be relaxed but focused.
a) I know many leaders don’t want their raids to be relaxed, because they believe tension will improve people’s concentration. Or at least, the atmosphere they create leads me to believe this. However, I have never performed well when I was always worried about being yelled at, or focused on what’s bad. I have always performed better in an atmosphere where things were chill, and my motivation to do well came from a desire to be great rather than a fear of not being good enough. So I prefer to create a more relaxed atmosphere for my raids. However, this means I need to pick and choose the right type of people for it. I need people who are personally motivated to push themselves.
b) Keeping people focused is an incredibly important skill for a leader, in my opinion. I think part of it is making people feel you expect them to do well. Not just do well. You expect them to go beyond what they would expect of themselves, and you believe they have this ability. Keeping this feeling up isn’t all that easy, and as a leader I feel whenever I slack at this, I’m failing my group.
c) I also want the atmosphere of the group to be one of trust in one another. I try to gather people I know to be very good at playing, and I feel like as the leader, I should work to get them to know each other well and bond together. When there is that element of trust, everything that is done together becomes something far more exhilarating than when done well alone. Like with bridge players.

3) Get to know the members of the group, insofar as you know what makes them click and what their pet peeves would be. Without being able to assess each individual raider well, I wouldn’t know how best to motivate them. I have players who fear boredom like the plague, and knowing that, I can push them to do things that are extremely challenging, to keep them from being bored. I also have players who don’t deal with failure well, and with players like this I can’t keep pushing them or else they’ll get too stressed out. Just to give one example.

4) Constantly create new goals for the group. People do better when they feel they have something to strive for. I do this for myself, but most people don’t do this for themselves, and as the leader I can easily, with a bit of thought, do this for us all.

I feel like there are a lot more, but I’m too tired now to remember what they are.

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.

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.