Hey guys I’m Myln from WoW Weekly and today we’ll be taking a look at Gorefiend in Heroic Hellfire Citadel. These tactics also apply to the normal version.
There are multiple parts to the encounter, so to start with let’s look at Gorefiends regular abilities.
His first ability is Touch of Doom, this is an 8 second debuff that will detonate after 8 seconds dealing a moderate amount of shadow damage to everyone within the raid. The further away you are the less damage it will do. However when this detonates it will also leave a void zone underneath the player that had Touch of Doom. So to deal with this when you get Touch of Doom you’ll want to move to the edge of the room to place the void zone away from the rest of the raid.
His second ability is an aura called Surging Shadows. This deals damage to every player standing within 5 yards of of each other, every two seconds. This means that on this fight as well you will need a 5 yard spread between players.
The third ability is Shared Fate. This will link 3 players together and one of them will be rooted. The other 2 players need to run towards the rooted player and when they get close enough, it will disappear. If they fail to do so within 10 seconds, they will take a big amount of damage.
The final regular ability is Crushing Darkness. Gorefiend will put shadow swirls on the ground that will explode. Simply move out of these.
Now what makes this encounter special is that when you die, you don’t actually die right away but you get teleported to Gorefiend’s stomach. Gorefiend will also regularly teleport players to his stomach with Shadow of Doom. Once inside the stomach you get a 3 minute debuff called Gorefiend’s Corruption. This will prevent you from entering the stomach again. Meaning that if you die within the next 3 minutes, you are really dead. Also once you are inside the stomach you will have 40 seconds to get back out or you will die instantly as well. To get out of the stomach simply run into the middle.
When you’re in the stomach you want to make use of the time that you have. This is because in the stomach 3 different types of adds will spawn and try to get into the middle to get to where the rest of the raid is. We’ll get to what you have to do with adds that spawn in the main realm after we deal with this phase.
Damage dealers should focus and kill as many Shadowy Constructs as possible. The only exception is when the adds spawn for the tanks. Tanks have to take care of the Enraged Spirit that spawns while interrupting Bellowing Shout. This is because the Bellowing Shout increases their physical damage done by 300%. At 70% health the Enraged Spirit will make a run for the middle and it will have to be dealt with in the regular encounter room. The dps should help getting this spirit to 70% so that the tank can go back out into the normal room. Lastly the healers will have to heal up every Tortured Essence in the stomach that they can.
One issue we ran into in our early pulls was that too many of our players were in the stomach. For example we had 2 healers in the stomach at one point, leaving too few healers in the regular encounter room. So communicate with your group and if there is more than 1 healer in the stomach, perhaps try swapping healers – whoever entered first, should be the first one out.
When an add reaches the middle they will exit the stomach and go into the main encounter area. These adds should be your absolute priority. The Shadowy Constructs will fixate on a player and move towards them. If they reach the player it will explode killing anyone within a 10 yard range.
The Essences will now start casting Spirit Volleys, which reduces your movement speed by 50% and the damage of Spirit Volley will keep increasing by 20%.
Then lastly there are the Spirits that need to be tanked. These have 3 threats to deal with now. First off they keep Bellowing Shout, so remember to always interrupt these. Secondly they now put a stacking dot on the tank called Fel Flames. This will require you to do regular tank swaps at 5 stacks. And thirdly the Spirit will charge at random players with Raging Charge. You need to get out of the way because this will stun you if you get hit.
The main priority during this first stage of the encounter is to deal with the mechanics and adds when they spawn. If your dps don’t kill the adds as soon as possible you’ll likely wipe. Especially the Spirits, they deal heavy damage to the tank so, the faster they go down, the better.
When Gorefiend reaches 0 energy he will cast Feast of Souls, dealing AoE damage every 2 seconds for 1 minute. During this phase you will want to stack up and use healing cooldowns. Gorefiend will now take 100% more damage so you should use stuff like heroism here to get the damage done on the boss. During this phase Unstable Souls will spawn which need to be touched by the tanks. This will deal a moderate amount of damage to the raid, but this needs to be done because if the souls reach Gorefiend he will gain energy more quickly.
There are a lot of abilities to keep track of but the encounter comes down to this:
If you get linked with other players move towards them quickly. Stay spread 5 yards. If you get the Touch of Doom debuff move to the edge of the room. Kill off all adds. Move away from charges and interrupt Bellowing shout. In the stomach you will also need to kill the adds and as a healer heal the Essences.
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