A Quick Guide to Tanking Halion10&25
Ruby Sanctum’s Halion encounter as well as the mini-bosses that go along with him has proved to be quite an interesting challenge set of challenges. While the actual mechanics of the Halion fight in particular aren’t necessarily amazingly difficult, he certainly hits hard so don’t expect to have too much success tanking Halion if your group isn’t geared enough to progress through ICC. Since I found some of the mini-bosses a tad on the annoying side, I’ll be going over them as well. If you’re just looking for the stuff on the dragon himself, feel free to scroll to the bottom of the page.
Mini-Boss #1: Baltharus the Warborn
My track record on this little fella is probably pretty similar to a lot of tanks that walked into the encounter without fully understanding it. On 10 man, I randomly died, but we still managed to kill him. On 25 man, I wiped repeatedly and was forced to actually learn how to do the encounter.
Ultimately, this fight is entirely about Enervating Brand.
The way it works is the brand is given to 1 player. That 1 player will have 2 debuffs whereas everyone else that thinks they have the brand will only have 1. Every time the brand pulses on the player with the 2 debuffs, Baltharus will gain a stacking buff for each player within 12 yards of the branded person. (And everyone within 12 yards of that person will gain a single debuff which is what causes so much bloody confusion as to how the actual fight works) So all you have to do is identify who has the true debuff and have them move away from the rest of your raid. That’s it.
Okay, maybe not. Also, this guy clones himself and the clones will cast brands as well. So when there are 2 clones up, you’ll have to watch out for 2 brands and when there’s 3 clones up, you’ll have to watch out for 3.
What does any of this have to do with tanking? When your raid members screw up this element, he’ll gain a stacking buff that makes him hit really, really ridiculously hard. Around the 10-15 mark, you should be okay surviving using just Shield Block. Once you hit 20+, it’s time to start using your major cooldowns. Once all your cooldowns are gone, it’s time to start praying.
Mini-Boss #2: Saviana Ragefire
One of those annoying drake type mobs that’s sometimes difficult to position properly. Face her away from the raid. Occasionally, she’ll fly up in the air and target a few people. Those people should not stand by other people as they’ll not only get conflagrated, but they’ll also do fire damage to anyone near them. If you get picked while tanking, then the other tank should taunt the boss off of you when she lands because the conflag causes you to temporarily lose aggro until it’s over. If your group forgot to bring an off-tank, they should simply run away from the dragon in terror until you’ve decided to stop being on fire.
Mini-Boss #3 General Zarithrian
A pretty straight forward encounter that really makes you thankful that you’re a Warrior. He’ll sunder you making you take a lot more damage. Once you have 2 sunders on you, you need another tank to taunt the boss off. (You can probably get away with 3 on 10 man) You’ll be swapping back and forth like this throughout the entire encounter. Adds are going to come from 2 entrances so just tank the boss at one of the entrances so that you can pickup the adds while tanking the boss. In 10 man, when you’re not tanking the boss, you need to pickup the adds on the other side. In 25 man, we just used 3 tanks because we’re lazy. Occasionally, the General will fear which you should immediately break. (You can probably preemptively avoid it since I found the timer pretty accurate although I’ve never been one to really trust such things)
It should be noted that the General doesn’t use weak ass WotLK fear, he uses the old school fear that causes the General to go all crazy and lose aggro on whoever is tanking him. So escaping fear asap is of the utmost importance otherwise this guy will randomly hack and slash a raider member to death.
Halion
I’ll be outlining what both the light side and dark side tanks are doing in this fight. So as to avoid confusion here’s what your 2 possible roles in the fight are.
Light Tank
- P1: Tank the Dragon
- P2: Do nothing
- P3: Tank the Dragon
Dark Tank
- P1: Do nothing
- P2: Tank the Dragon
- P3: Tank the Dragon
Phase 1: Give Halion a quick turn when you pull him so that your group can immediately start killing him. Don’t get hit by meteors. Don’t stand in fire.
Phase 2 (light): Stand around and wait for your raid to do the hard part of the fight. Make sure you snag a healer to give you company. (Only doable if you’ve convinced your raid to 3 heal it in 10 man)
Phase 2 (dark): Make sure you’re jumping through the portal first. Give Halion a quick turn otherwise you’ll lose half your raid to cleave. Watch the orbs so you, don’t get hit by the beam. You want the beam to be going through the middle of the dragon. Turn the dragon at a steady rate when the beam is active so that your raid members can learn how to dodge, dps and heal even during the active beam portion of this fight. If a raid member decides running in front of the dragon’s mouth is a good idea, let them die. It’s not worth moving the dragon to save 1 person so that the rest of the raid can be slapped in the face with a tail swipe. (That’ll knock them down and probably get them killed) There’s no reason to move the dragon during the portions when the beam isn’t active unless it’s the 1st one you’re setting up for. Once you’ve got the positioning down from the first beam, the beam is very easy to handle as all following beams will always start in a safe spot.
Phase 3 (light): The Dragon will reappear and start annihilating you. Use cooldowns so you don’t die. Don’t get hit by meteors. Don’t stand in fire. Monitor the buff and if it says your Dragon is doing 30% more damage, it’s time to start using cooldowns. (And also probably a good time to tell the other side’s dps that they need to stop dpsing for a while)
Phase 3 (dark): Same deal as Phase 2. Monitor the buff on your Dragon and use cooldowns if he gets too beefy. Keep turning the dragon at a steady rate when the beam is active.
Final Thoughts
The Halion encounter is a test of you and your raid’s survival. Other than the first 15 seconds of the encounter, threat shouldn’t be an issue and no taunting will be required. As a result, maximizing your gear/spec for survival at the cost of hit rating is the best approach.
July 9th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
That’s a nice walkthrough. We gave him a try late one night and had to give up on the General. I thought the healers were sleeping until I found the sunder debuff, lol. Zero armor is a bad idea. Tanking by one entrance seems like a good idea, will try that on next shot.
Another tip on Baltharus is to mark the “original” boss and focus dps on him. When he goes down all clones dissapear.
*$
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July 9th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
One thing you missed is Ragefire’s enrage. For those of you making pug groups, it’s super important that you bring at least one rogue or hunter to tranq/anesthetize the enrage, otherwise she starts doing this 100 yd radius Fire Nova/Hellfire thing.
On 10m we had a plate dps tank one of General’s adds, with the two real tanks switching off between General and the other. They don’t appear to melee unless you interrupt them, and even when they do they’re so weak they’re ridiculous. The healers said it was no trouble at all, though you’ll probably want to burn down the DPS “tank”’s mob first just to be safe.
Also, all the spells of the General adds are reflectable (except the channeled Hellfire they cast if they’ve been up too long).
We’re going back in for more tries at Halion tonight - our earlier attempts this week were plagued by bugs and, yes, a few fire-standers. For example, at one point our tree in the Twilight was suddenly killed by a melee hit - not a Cleave, recount recorded it as an actual melee hit. The tank was still alive and “officially” still had aggro, but nevertheless, Hal turned around and smacked the tree. It was bizarre.
There’s also a bug I’ve heard a lot about which we experienced a few times, but not every time, where Hal would aggro on the second person to come through the portal and again, make a shishkabob of him. (It’s possible this was due to poor tank positioning of course.) We finally ended up always sending our rogue through second, and he would pop vanish as soon as he got through; it seemed to help, though if it was a positioning issue could be our offtank just got better.
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Veneretio reply on July 9, 2010 5:39 pm:
Ya, I didn’t go into too crazy of detail on fights. This is a quick guide if you’ve got to tank the fight, it’s not a guide for raid leading by any means.
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Zellviren reply on July 10, 2010 5:08 am:
I would say that the Ragefire AoE needs the attention, though; we tried doing it with no hunter or rogue and it really makes the fight a ridiculous amount harder. And, like you Vene, I was forced to look up what was happening against General Zarithrian because I was sick of being gibbed.
Not a nice feeling to get wiped out without actually knowing why.
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Radhil reply on July 10, 2010 2:18 pm:
My group felt the pain of the enrage just today. Had a shaman switch to healing and just had everyone stack on the tail and chain-healed through it.
All the attention it needed really, once we saw to look for it.
Lindentree reply on July 10, 2010 5:53 pm:
Spent about an hour on Hal, didn’t get him down - kept losing people on zone-in in phase 2.
We eventually figured out that where you zone in to the Twilight is where you were in the “arena” when you clicked on the portal - it doesn’t dump you out in one place, or in random places. So if you have the DPS/healers click from the flanks, and you click from where the phase 1 tank is standing, it’s a simple matter of letting everyone get in before you start turning him. Unfortunately, we had lost a couple of people to attrition by this time, so we never ended up getting him down :-\ I’m confident on next week.
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Scrilz reply on July 13, 2010 4:52 am:
It is not a bug. That person is getting cleaved. If you pull the fire side dragon to the edge of the circle and tank him there you will avoid this problem. The portal spawns at his head ever time. The dragon in the shadow side is always in the middle. If you have the head of the fire side dragon to the edge of the ring you will then zone in out of cleave range. You just need to make sure that the tank gets in quickly and picks up the shadow dragon before anyone else attacks. That will keep people from dieing on the transition.
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July 9th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
For Halion, I did downstairs, and we found that it was much safer for the raid of the upstairs tank parks him in the center of the room for Phase 1, then pulls him about 4-5 steps back at about 77% or so. His portal spawns where he was standing when he transitions, and when people click the portal, they show up where ever they were when they click it. He always spawns int he center of the room downstairs though. That let’s me go through, charge and turn him, which makes cleave deaths non-existent. Before we did this, I would turn him, and invariably someone would appear right in front of him, usually a healer, and get cleaved.
Also as for the orbs, if you look straight at him and keep one right over his shoulder while you are turning him, you will be fine with the beam. Makes it easy to setup when you know the beam is about to spawn but hasn’t yet.
Also also… his hit box is gigantic, tell your melee they can hang back a bit so they can get to the edge quickly when they need the debuff cleansed (and so meteors don’t drop right under him).
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July 10th, 2010 at 8:20 am
As the dark tank I just tanked halion during phase 1 as well since there is no reason not to. Also the portal that you go through to get to the shadow side… make sure that you position yourself on the side of the portal that is closest to the middle of the room. You will spawn on the shadow side at the point where you clicked on the portal in the light side. This lets you spawn closer to Halion to make picking him up easier.
Also he is parry haste enabled… so make sure you yell at your melee not to attack from the front. (which they shouldn’t be anyway due to the cleave but we all know melee dps is stupid :P)
Prot warriors are best placed in the shadow side since you should have most of your physical dps in that realm during phase 3 because they don’t lose as much dps while moving and that way you keep sunder up with ease.
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Lindentree reply on July 10, 2010 11:53 am:
I’d say this is true unless you have a DK tank, in which case AMS can come in handy as an emergency cooldown if someone is standing where they shouldn’t be and you have to choose between getting lasered or getting them cleaved.
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July 10th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
“Light Tank
* P1: Tank the Dragon
* P2: Do nothing
* P3: Tank the Dragon
Dark Tank
* P1: Do nothing
* P2: Tank the Dragon
* P3: Tank the Dragon”
Isn’t entirely accurate. At least the shadow tank gets to dps in p1. The physical tank literally has nothing to do in p2. Absolutely nothing to do. Most infuriating encounter design blizz has done the entire expansion. Terrible. All the more so since it’s p2 where wipes and deaths start to occur and you can’t do jack all about it or even see what’s going on to help solve problems. Ugh.
Also The General’s fear is more of a horror effect no? Or is that just heroic? All I know is the other night zerker rage did jack all for it.
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Radhil reply on July 10, 2010 2:30 pm:
Been doing the Dark Side on the last run. P1 I’ve made my job to stack sunders and use up Shattering while I can.
The General, I would swear I came out of fear the last few times, but he seems to be the only boss we one shot regularly (even when I can’t break), so I haven’t had a lot of tries to see.
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Lindentree reply on July 10, 2010 5:55 pm:
Zerker rage worked for me.
…that sounds like a product endorsement doesn’t it.
Tremor totem also works.
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thebitterfig reply on July 10, 2010 9:01 pm:
i dunno that p2 is the most annoying thing… being a p3 tank for putricide but not tanking or abom driving for p1 and p2 is pretty bad… you feel like dead weight for a large portion of the fight which does actually matter (faster and better p1/p2 mean less chance of folks being dead for p3), and then have a very short burst of actually doing something. tanking on blood princes is kinda like that, where you’re utterly irrelevant for about 1/3rd of the fight. granted, the shadow tank has something interesting to do, but otherwise it’s just making sure the one you’re tanking isn’t too close to a shock vortex…
i’d rather have zero impact on damage for a phase in something like halion or BPC, but contribute through the process of not dying rather than do a painfully small bit of added damage with next-to-zero survival responsibilities.
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Karl Gallagher reply on July 11, 2010 11:14 pm:
/dance
I hit /dance as soon as the raid starts jumping in the portal. And spend the whole phase wishing for Dance Studio. I’m not a fan of the human male dance.
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Whats my main again? reply on July 12, 2010 10:33 am:
What you need to realize… is this isn’t the only way to do this. You can have everyone including tank and healer go in the portal and help dps during phase 2… you just need to be the first one through the portal when phase 3 hits. Its a quality of life thing for the raid because it ensures you are there and have a healer so you don’t lose dps to a buckwild dragon.
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July 10th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
The Laser is Death. I Know This. It’s my personal albatross.
My question is: Are you sure sure about that no rotation thing after the first laser pass? Because the (natural) assumption is that the tank is tracking the orbs, and every time I have even lightly failed at the tracking or rotation job (including some barely off-center positions), it’s been wipe time.
We’ve gotten to phase 3, but anything to lighten the fail load on me would be wonderful.
So what’s the timing on the laser if you stop rotating when it turns off? In 20 seconds, presuming stop on a dime, where does it show up again?
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Kallix reply on July 11, 2010 7:08 pm:
I don’t know what other peoples experiences have been like, or if its different on 25 man, but I found that if I stopped moving after a beam, the orbs would be in a terrible place. I would either have to suddenly move the dragon to make everyone aware they had to move and risk cleaves/tail swipes, or half the raid would get insta-gibbed by the beam.
My advice is to just move constantly, my group soon got used to moving and got it down that way (once we worked out we needed 4 healers).
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Eraser reply on July 13, 2010 3:57 am:
I found this with normal, that stopping after the beams have gone by makes halion end up in a terrible spot 50% of the time. However, for heroic it makes the fight alot easier.
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Whats my main again? reply on July 12, 2010 10:44 am:
If you track the beams just before and during the beam, and then stop after the beams turn off it greatly increases the raid dps and makes things easier on the healers. Basically… if you track the orb by the head and then stop, when the tail orb reaches the head it will be time for the beams to activate. So you can stop and wait for the orb to come around and then just make sure you are in the right position when the beams are about to activate.
Once you get used to it you get into a groove and don’t really have to think about it. Atleast that is what I’ve found as the shadow tank in 25’s.
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July 10th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
I dunno how nobody has noticed this but there’s no reason at all to leave a tank in the fire/outside phase during p2. Just have everyone pile in to the inside/shadow area. That way you don’t need to have a healer be totally useless outside, and your outside tank can dps/sunder/etc. I honestly don’t even know what happens outside during p2 because every time I’ve done this fight (3 successful downings so far) we’ve left nobody outside during it.
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Veneretio reply on July 11, 2010 1:46 am:
While certainly that’s true you can, but then you’re creating another point of failure within the fight. P2 really has little to do with healing and even less to do with the minimal amount of dps a tank can offer.
By bringing everyone into P2, you’re creating another transition where the tank must successfully pickup the dragon. Now if your group is having 0 problems with the transition from P1 to P2 then by all means, gamble twice. But, if you’re even occasionally seeing a raid member or two go down to random dragon cleaves/breathes then I highly recommend what I consider a much, much safer strat.
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thebitterfig reply on July 12, 2010 6:03 am:
i think i’m mostly with vene on this, but the p2/p3 transition has a lot of potential to be a lot safer than the p1/p2 one. the tank could hop through somewhere between 60% and 55%, get the position set well before at least dps come through the portal.
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Whats my main again? reply on July 12, 2010 10:36 am:
Except i’m fairly positive there are no portals during phase 2 from the shadow realm to the light realm. 2 open at 50%
thebitterfig reply on July 12, 2010 8:19 pm:
hrm. well, that’s pretty annoying… and really bad design for 10 mans, particularly when it comes to healers. three healers, unless two healing which leaves either none for the tank, or someone has to one-heal the twilight realm. for 25s, no problem, just leave one tank healer out, but all sorts of things like that are just messed up in 10 mans, where there are just fewer player and much less granularity in terms of organizing the fights. however, when isn’t something badly designed in terms of scaling between 10s and 25s…
anyhow, that’s what i get for presuming how something works… been out of town the past two weeks and haven’t actually had a chance to get into RS… so much for intuition…
July 12th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
If you pull the light dragon to one side of the ring, when you zone into the shadow phase you will not die to cleave. The shadow dragon will be in the middle and you will zone in on the side.
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July 13th, 2010 at 7:20 am
Quick observation from doing this on 10m mode last night. The General’s fear is very VERY old school. So old school that if he casts Fear and you aren’t feared, he’s going to aggro on you. So, unless you’re looking to take over aggro again, don’t zerker rage if the other tank has the boss.
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July 13th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Taking credit for learning how to do Baltharus eh? I see how it is…
Also may want to mention that the tank in Phase 2(Dark) needs to be incredibly fast going through the portal and picking Halion up as many retarded dps’ers love to start attacking without even looking to see if she’s being tanked yet…
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marklar reply on July 16, 2010 3:38 pm:
he…
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Despil reply on July 20, 2010 5:33 am:
dragons are allways “she”
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Seph reply on July 20, 2010 7:54 am:
Even Deathwing!?!?!?!?!?
August 12th, 2010 at 7:07 am
Hey vene, you should talk about trash mobs too, they are way such challenging than boss. How important separate caster and mele, also i would hear from you what you think about the tank trink from 25 man.
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