Razorscale Observations

I got my first taste of Ulduar last night starting with Razorscale. My new guild had already gotten started on the instance on Tuesday as I was transferring.

To get a full breakdown of the fight I recommend reading some of the strategies out there, but here is a summary followed by my newfound knowledge.

Phase 1

In the first Phase, Razorscale will be in the air. While flying, she will bomb the raid with Devouring Flame and Fireball. The Fireballs by the way were hitting me for 10 - 11K damage, they are completely random but they can strike you twice before you can heal the first hit making you dead fast. Devouring Flame strikes the ground and kills anyone standing in it. It looks like a blue flame, very obvious.

During this phase, the friendly Dwarf NPCs will collect mechanical parts on the ground and repair the nearby turrets. You need someone to stay near the turrets and click on them when they come up. The turrets will put chains on Razorscale and eventually pull her to the ground.

Also during this phase, big drills will come up out of the ground and iron dwarves will pop out. There are four areas where this happens.

The important dwarves to watch for are the Sentinels which hit hard and whirlwind. It is best to use ranged dps on them.
The Watchers cast chain lightning, so it is best to stay somewhat spread out. They can be crowd controlled however, or the casts interrupted.

Phase 2

Phase 2 is the ground phase. During this phase Razorscale has a Flame Breath which does 17500-22500 damage in a frontal cone, so stay away from the front. There is no tailswipe.

There is also a Wing Buffet which knocks players into the air and back. This is preempted by the message that Razorscale "takes a deep breath". I've found if you stand outside the circle you shouldn't be hit by the knockback. It doesn't do any massive damage, but you'll have to run back into range to heal.

Phase 3

Once you get Razorscale to 50%, she stays permantently grounded.
Now she puts Flame Buffet on the whole raid - which increases everyone's fire damage.
Also she puts a debuff on the tank called Fuse Armor, it is important to have your tank switch after 2 stacks of this! They will not be able to survive hits after that.

Important to know that she keeps doing the Devouring Flame during this phase, so your tanks will have to kite her around some to get out of the fires. You have to stay right behind the dragon so they don't get out of range of heals, spam fast heals and instant casts.


Our Strategy

We started out with 4 tanks and 6 healers. We did eventually add a 7th healer.

There is literally a circle drawn out on the floor where the encounter takes place.

In our initial attempts on Phase 1, we spread out the healers and dps evenly inside the circle.
However, the raid was taking significant amounts of damage from both the devouring flame, and the chain lightning.

We were trying to figure out if there was a pattern to where the devouring flame would land, and noticed it would tend to be focused in the middle of the circle. The flame can be placed outside the circle but it seemed less common.

From that observation, we split the raid into two groups.
One group begins the fight on the left side of the circle, and the other on the right side. We tried to stay outside of the borders of the circle.
We had one tank that would stand in the top and center of the circle to pick up the group that always spawns there.

The Sentinel would always spawn in the center, which would be called out and ranged dps would immediately switch to down the Sentinel. Players would move inside the borders of the circle to get in range of the Sentinel and accompanying mobs, and then move back out once they were down.

Using this method of splitting the raid, we had less deaths from the Devouring Flame. The raid was taking significantly less damage at once.

For the group on my side, my strategy was to always keep renew up on the tanks and keep PoM bouncing. That left me free to switch to a dps or myself immediately after Fireball hits. I missed my Desperate Prayer during this fight after taking a sudden 10K + hit from a fireball. :(

I found that group heals like CoH or PoH were wasted on this fight. People have to stay spread out to avoid big chain lightning damage. I would sometimes use PoH on a group though during the ground phase when we collapsed.

For phase 2, everyone dps's the boss. The additional tanks would just keep threat on any adds that were still alive and we'd return to them once the dragon took flight again.

Once we got her to 50% (phase 3), dps has to let the tanks get agro. We had a couple attempts go awry as once the boss landed permanently as she was running haywire breathing on the raid.

Once a tank gets agro immediately start spamming heals. Have a second tank ready to taunt at two stacks of the Fuse Armor. The rest of the raid really shouldn't be taking much damage if they can avoid fires. Keep in range of the tanks and you should be fine. Get ready to use cooldowns like Guardian Spirit.

DPS goes all out and hope you kill her before she kills your tanks. :)

Other comments:

• We wiped many, many times. We finally killed her right before the raid was scheduled to end.
• This fight can be tough on your mana due to its length.
• I used Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend during the ground phase.
• I'm loving Empowered Renew.
• I found I still didn't use Greater Heal for this fight that often even with the haste proc.
• I did use PoH when practical though.
• Ulduar is definitely tougher than Naxx but still not on a BWL level. Still it is a nice challenge.