Celestial Blessings – Yu’lon Edition For Mages
Just this past Tuesday, I finally gathered enough Titan Runestones to proceed to the next stage of the legendary quest chain. Omitting any plot spoilers for folks who don’t like that kind of thing, the next stage involves one of four challenges issued by a Celestial. Each challenge is specific to the Celestial in question, and you only need to do one of them. There’s tanking, healing, ranged and melee DPS challenges. Naturally, being a pure (awesome) class, mages will be doing the ranged DPS challenge.
I’ll admit it here to my great shame: This challenge wasn’t easy. It took me a long time. I am a fully normal-geared raider, I’ve cleared ToT and my ilevel is 530. I also think I’m not generally terrible as a mage, but I really struggled. I died, and died, and died again. There was a shadow priest there doing it at the same time as I was, and we ended up whispering to each other eventually. You can tell someone else is dying because the challenge is instanced, so you ring a gong and disappear. When you die ignominiously, you show up again at Yu’lon’s feet. This shadow priest and I kept running into each other again and again. At first I was embarrassed, then secretly relieved that I wasn’t the only one having such a hard time.
I pulled out the guild bank and took flasks and more potions and some Banquets of the Oven that nobody cares about. I had long since abandoned my purist “I’ll defeat this challenge without outside help” attitude and alt-tabbed out to see what Wowhead and other people had to say. The strat most people seemed to recommend was one that allowed you to ignore most of the mechanics. This was so prevalent that it was tough to find any other information about the fight. I did try this method but it didn’t seem to work and I resolved to do it my own way.
Here’s how the fight goes. You’ll want to stop reading at this point if you’d prefer not to know.
Yu’lon suggests that power without wisdom to guide it is a bad idea. She tells Wrathion this and he scoffs, at which point she suggests that I should fight Wrathion to prove her point. He of course immediately refuses (“I would annihilate my own champion!”) but then she drops the other shoe: he’ll be fighting me blindfolded. It’s a little insulting, but I suppose it is the only way a fight between a black dragon and a single person could possibly be even. So he agrees, and that’s how the fight goes – Wrathion is blindfolded.
Throughout the course of the challenge, he’ll use several abilities to try and locate you. A frontal cone (ground) attack, a large circle of fire, a “rain of fire” type ability, and a series of small ooze adds. Later in the fight he also conjures many copies of himself (Mirror Images writ large!) that you must kill before they complete their cast of a spell called Inferno because it hurts a great deal.
Other key elements of the fight: Wrathion takes triple damage if hit from behind. You can use to your great advantage if you time your CDs when you are able to step behind him. After he casts his frontal cone attack, he’ll shout “A-HA!” and then rush at you. Wrathion does no melee damage so there’s no risk to you by being near him. At first I was instinctively running away from him too but you lose valuable DPS time this way and there’s no benefit to it. Just strafe to the side out of the cone, get behind him quickly if you can and attack him there. I’d suggest setting Wrathion as your focus target so that you can always cast a few quick spells at him, because…
The hardest part of the fight is his ooze adds. You cannot take more than a few hits from any of them before dying horribly. They also buff themselves the longer they are alive, gain a movement speed buff, and continue to chase you. They are susceptible to stuns, slows, and CC, so I suggest you use all of this to your adventure. I did the challenge as a Frost mage, using my WE’s freeze to lock the adds down while kiting them around. The other thing that really made the difference for me in this fight was swapping out the Cone of Cold glyph in exchange for Glyph of Arcane explosion. A combination of Flamestrike, a few Living Bombs on the adds and glyphed AE was enough to kill them relatively quickly. Without the extra five yards from the glyph, you have to get dangerously close to melee range from the quick-moving oozes.
Suggested preparation for the challenge:
Supplies
-Grab a Celestial Offering from the August Celestials quartermaster. It gives you a 10% intellect buff while you are near the Temple. It should be noted, I didn’t find this out until after and I did it without, but it would’ve been a welcome boost.
-Intellect buff food
–Potion of the Jade Serpent
–Flask of the Warm Sun
–Heavy Windwool Bandage (I’m not kidding)
Talents
I used Ice Floes, Ice Barrier, Ring of Frost, Cauterize, Living Bomb, and Incanter’s Ward. An argument could definitely be made for using Blazing Speed if you prefer, and Ice Ward in place of RoF except it requires something to hit you in order to activate and we’re trying to keep these oozes from hitting us. Cauterize can save your bacon at least once during the fight and is highly recommended. You could also use Nether Tempest instead of Living Bomb, I chose LB for its superior single target damage because I wanted to hurt Wrathion as much as I could while I was DPSing the oozes. NT’s no target limit and superior AoE damage is nice though and could likely have worked just as well.
The last talent choice to use Incanter’s Ward instead of Invocation is another personal thing. The damage mitigation is very valuable here, and time to stand and evocate is precious. I found that evocating was interfering with my kiting, so I switched.
Glyphs
Glyph of Arcane Explosion is recommended for all specs. Those extra five yards makes this much, much easier. As a Frost mage I used Glyph of AE, Ice Lance, and Water Elemental.
Strategy
Put yourself behind Wrathion to start the fight. He’ll always be facing towards Yu’lon. You have the option of using Time Warp at the beginning or saving it for later when you’re a bit desperate and things are getting hairy. I’d suggest pre-potting as well – front-load your damage as much as you can. If you are Fire, try to line up a good Combustion ASAP and hit Wrathion with it very early on. He’ll cast 1-2 of his frontal cone abilities, and possibly his rain of fire thing. You can tell where the fire is falling because it casts a dark shadow on the ground – be someplace else. Ice Floes is nice for this time because you can keep DPSing him while dodging around. He usually spawns the oozes about 10-20 seconds into the fight. They will mill around aimlessly in a group for about three seconds and then they will start heading towards you.
You must not let them reach you. Do whatever it takes to achieve this – You can start off with a Ring of Frost to freeze them in place and gain a few valuable seconds of lead time on your DPS. Remember, the longer they live, the faster they get. You must also DPS the oozes while Wrathion is doing his best to hurt you. Blink, of course, is helpful but it’s not available often enough on its own. Having the extra freeze from the Water Elemental and your own Frost Nova helps a ton. Let them get just close enough and then Frost Nova them. Put either Living Bomb or Nether Tempest on them and then run a bit. Try to hit Wrathion as you run by him. Try to drop a Flamestrike and then Arcane Explosion as much as you can (bonus: it will hit Wrathion too).
Once the oozes are dead, they are out of the fight for a little while…but here’s the kicker. You can’t ever really kill them. They will respawn. Also, they will respawn from the position they died at, so try not to be anywhere near their bodies when this happens. Meantime, Wrathion will be casting his next big ability – he will fill the room with duplicates of himself. Use Arcane Explosion to kill them QUICKLY. If you fail to kill them, they’ll cast Inferno. You can likely survive a few Infernos but the entire room doing them will spell your demise. He will summon two rounds of these, but you should be able to make quick work of them.
At this point, unfortunately, depending on when you killed them – oozes are going to begin respawning and chasing you. In a way, you’re fighting a battle against time because you have to defeat Wrathion but the oozes could be a full-time distraction if you let them. Continue to DPS Wrathion whenever possible, especially after the first wave of oozes dies and before they’re able to respawn. Kill them again when they respawn and try to take Wrathion down. This would be a good time for that Time Warp if you didn’t use it earlier. Use another potion. Blow him to smithereens!
I found that even DPSing Wrathion any time rather than waiting until you are behind him still added up significantly over time. Cleave from Ice Lance or other AoE will also damage him a bit. If you can survive the two ooze phases you should be in the clear for finishing Wrathion. Don’t lose sight of your goal and try to stay calm. Once you get the hang of the ooze adds you’re well on your way.
This is a good Fire mage point of view for this fight. You’ll see he takes the adds out using a combination of Nether Tempest and single target/Pyroblast procs. He also stuck with Invocation and opted to use Time Warp after the second set of oozes has died. There’s really no wrong choice of talent or strategy, just what works for you personally.
Note: the method recommended by many casters for this fight is to spec into Greater Invisibility or some other aggro dump and head out to the balcony railing when the oozes spawn, using your invisibility. The idea is that the oozes will just hang out inside the temple and never attack you at all. I did try this just to see if it would keep me from tearing my hair out, but I didn’t find it worked. After my invisibility expired, the oozes headed straight out onto the balcony for me. Moreover, they also became impossible to kill because they’d been alive so long. It didn’t end well. The balcony strat is also supposed to allow you to ignore the mirror images that spawn. I’m not sure if this has been hotfixed, but it wasn’t a viable method when I attempted it.
I’m happy to have done it “as intended” anyway. I will give you one last tip, though – make sure you check the status of your gear. If you’ve been wiping over and over (and the wipes pile up quickly, much like my unfortunate corpse) you can find your gear destroyed in short order. At some point I took a break for supper, came back and had a really good attempt – yesss! I’m finally getting the hang of this! Then I did progressively worse and I couldn’t figure out why, until I looked at my gear, which was entirely and completely red. Effectively, I’d been DPSing Wrathion naked. Hey, at least he was blindfolded!
Good luck with this challenge, even if it’s tough, you can do it! If you have tips or tricks I didn’t think of here, please leave them in the comments! Unless your “tip” is “I one-shot this! It was so easy.” If you’re that guy I don’t want to hear from you.
Manalicious 