Of all the guides I’ve written this is one that I’ve dreaded discussing for quite some time. This is because in truth this lay out of the fight may not end up being particularly helpful to your guild. You may find some other neat trick for killing this boss. You may have success with more tanks or less tanks. You might find stacking up everything and AoEing things works for you. There are literally hundreds of approaches to this boss and many of them will be raid build specific.
I’m going to describe it as a 3 phase fight, keep in mind most people call it a 2 phase fight. These people of course are retarded and don’t understand what the word “phase” means.
Phase 1 – Most of the Fight
Cho’gall phase 1 is Cho’gall and two different kinds of ads. You probably notice them in normal however they instantly get soaked into Cho’gall so you don’t really see the effect of them.
The shadow ads must be DPSed down. Each one of these that is absorbed by Cho’gall will increase Cho’gall’s damage by 15% and stacks infinitely. The duration of this is about two fire ads so in order to remove this buff you need to kill two fire elementals consecutively. So failing here is not an option.
The fire ads must be DPSed down. Each of these will increase Cho’gall’s damage by 10% and the next attack will add another 32000 fire damage to the tank.
You will want a sufficient number of ranged to be on this. Much like your normal strategy you need to stack on the back of Cho’gall for AoE interrupts. If Cho’gall gets even a stack of Devotion it can be a wipe. You will want two AoE interrupters (AOE fears, shadowfury and dragon’s breath are all great). You will get four devotions total.
Cho’gall has an enrage timer that is pretty strict on this fight. So you will need to find ways to ‘cheat the meters’ on this fight in order to beat it.
Corrupt your Mages: Mages need to fail as much as possible to get their Corruption to max. Easiest way to do this is stand in the grey pools on the first phase 2 ad death. Fire mages with mage armor up are going to take reduced magic damage and should be spammed shields. You will want a disc priest for this. Other than the shields mages will be unhealable. However mages should survive up until Phase 2. Basically this adds another DPS to your raid for 75% of the fight and you can brez, soulstone, or ghoul him for Phase 3. Mages, do yourselves a favor spam pyros and fireballs, they’re insta cast. Warlocks can also probably get away with it, given it’ll be riskier without iceblock. Make sure an interrupter is designated for just the mage as he will need to be away from the raid.
Skip Fire and Shadow Ads: These ads do a tonne of damage and it stacks up pretty insanely. However you can probably handle not killing some as long as nothing stacks up. You will need a raid wide cooldown for every shadow ad and a tank cooldown for every fire ad. This will allow you an extra 10-15 seconds of damage on Cho’gall for every cooldown you can use.
Raid Stacking: This is the single most common way people cheat the meters. It is as old as time itself. The idea behind raid stacking is that you build a raid to synergize certain buffs and empower a raid set.
Phase 1 Tanking Position
Different people use different tanking positions for Phase 1. People are going to like different scenery or may handle Phase 2 differently. However you will need to have 35 yards of distance between the boss and phase 2 ads. To this extent there will need to be at least 35 yards behind
The position above is pretty standard for a lot of heroics kills. However a lot of people do not like being in the middle of that ground symbol because it masks retical spells making tanking, healing and DPSing harder (you have to assume the retical is there). But yeah you just need to have this sort of space between the boss and Phase 2 ads.
Phase 2 – Adherants
In phase 2 an adherant will spawn. Normally you just spread out and kill it.
In heroic you have to group up, dodge shadow crashes and interrupt mind controls.
So for this you will want to make two stacking groups. One of them will be at range dodging shadow crashes and the other will be in melee interrupting Depravity.
Okay here’s where it gets tricky. You will need people available to interrupt Conversion in both groups. You should expect two in either groups. As well you will want a consistent interrupt for Depravity (one for each ad).
There are many ways of placing the corpses of adherents. However I would suggest using your first one as the marker at roughly 35 yards from the boss. The next one should get dropped to the left and past your first one. Second one to the right and past your first one. You should have three pools decently close on each other. If you end up getting a forth just throw it behind all of them, you probably won’t have to deal with this one.
Phase 3 – Yes THIS is Phase 3
In phase 3 pretty much half of your raid is going to get corrupted. That’s kind of how it has to be. The phase operates as normal except now you have these larger crusher tenticles. You will have to ignore these. They have too much health and deal too much damage for anyone to give any attention to. The only thing really to pay attention with them is not to stand next to them. The smaller tenticles you will still want to kill. Your melee should only kill the ones that are in melee range and your ranged should only go after the ones that are at ranged.
If you have dealt with Phase 1 effectively you should have enough time to finish this Phase 3 before you get over run by the big crusher tenticles and your entire raid is unhealable.
Best of luck on your Heroic Cho’gall kill.
TheGameGuru.Me 