Friday night raiding

No Ulduar on Friday, group makeup and internet issues stopped us. But we did get a chance to see the new boss in Vault of Archavon. Here is another hard boss, it's obvious that most of the guild was in need of a challenge.

Emalon the Stormwatcher is a step up from Archavon. He hits hard and hits the raid. This encounter also requires the DPS to be strong and quick. Emalon has 3 abilities: Chain Lightning, Lightning Nova and some empower his minions thing.

The damage you take from Lighning nova is based on your proximity to the boss.

Chain lightning will jump to many targets and the more it hits, the greater the damage.

And when he empowers his minion that is the test for the raid's DPS. The minion will start stacking this buff and once it reaches 10 stacks in 20 seconds it explodes doing 30k damage to the raid, chances are that will kill most, if not all, of the raiders.

So the strat is: DPS Emalon until he empowers a minion at which time all DPS switches to the minion to kill it before the buff stacks high enough to explode. Once the minion dies the add tank then picks up the newly spawned add while the DPS goes back to Emalon. In between that process people need to move away from Emalon when he begins to Lightning nova, this helps the healers some. If you are point blank, right on Emalon, his nova does 15k damage, not too bad if you're a tank with 35k + HP.

Sounds simple right, well there's some positioning involved so that the add tank doesn't take too much damage from the lightning nova but otherwise it's a matter of timely healing and quick reacting DPS. Someone during the raid said that basically we needed 50k DPS on the minion to stop him from exploding including the time it takes to switch targets.

After wiping about 4 times everyone got it down and Emalon joined his element in a puff of smoke. The raid had an excellent time and I know I enjoyed the challenge of learning the new fight, I know there were others that felt the same way as well.