DGtCDB: H. Deadmines

Our last Heroic, and the second "revamp", Heroic Deadmines is the longest instance; consisting of six bosses and a mini-event.

Starting off, you'll come to Glubtok. This ogre boss is a two phase fight. In the first phase, he will periodically use Blink, dropping all threat - so be sure to let the Tank pick him back up, and cast Fists of Flame/Frost in rotating sequence causing him to deal damage and slow or knock back anyone who gets too close to the Tank. Melee should try and stay in Glubs direct rear at maximum melee distance to avoid taking unnecessary damage.

At 50%, Glubtok will port to the centre of the room and begin arcing fire, frost, and lightning bolts to his side. Stay to his immediate front/rear to avoid this. At this point, he will also begin summoning Fire Wall. This will become a room wide rotating wall of fire, initially indicated by a moving line of gleaming fire dots before they ignite - get clear, that you will spend the remaining part of the fight moving in a clockwise manor to avoid. Complicating this a bit, Glubthok will summon small Fire and Ice Elementals the Tank can pick up and kill with their AoE abilities solo and launch Fire and Frost Blossoms around the room that can be avoided by moving out of the warning circles that will be placed where they will land. Keep dodging all this until the Boss dies.

Next you will come to Helix Gearbreaker. He'll be riding on a Lumbering Oaf you'll need to kill before you can attack Helix himself. While you're fighting them below, on the log above the room there will be goblins raining bombs down around the area you should avoid coming into contact with. Meanwhile, these two execute two main abilities. The Lumbering Oaf will periodically pick up a random player, move to the exit doorway, and run down the centre of the room to ram them into the logpile at the end. The Healer should be prepared to patch this person up after this attack. Meanwhile, Gearbreaker will periodically jump onto random players, melee them, and attach bombs to their chests. These people should move away from the party to avoid causing collateral damage and be patched up after the bomb goes off. Manage these two attacks and, once you kill the Oaf, Gearbreaker will jump off and begin using his Chest Bombs a bit more frequently while jumping from player to player. Simply burn him down while remembering to move away when you get the bomb on you and move on.

Our third boss is the Foe Reaper 5000. This boss will require a party member to use the Prototype Reaper at the top of the room - it has a melee strike to build up energy, a charge/stun, and a knockback ability mapped from 1 to 3 respectively - to control the Molten Slags that will spawn periodically from the forge throughout the fight. While you can use this to attack the boss, you must treat the Slags as priority because they do massive AoE damage to anything in their proximity. You do not want these to get to the group.

While that party member is controlling the Slags and keeping them from killing the rest of the party, the Tank should take the Foe Reaper, with everyone remembering that he Cleaves, up towards the top of the ramp for a couple reasons. First, it creates the longest path for the Slags to follow to get to the party. Secondly, the boss periodically casts an ability called Overdrive that causes it to whirlwind around like a ping-pong ball doing AoE damage and the ramp does a good job of controlling this move by keeping it contained while allowing everyone to get out of its way.

The party killer on this fight is Harvest. This is a one-shot attack with a 5 second cast time that will target a specific player and place a circle on the ground where they were standing when it finishes. At this point, he will charge that point and deal immense cleave damage to anything in it's path between where he started and there. Get out of the way. Depending on who the target is, Healers and Ranged should run "up" the ramp while Melee and the Tank should run "down", relatively speaking, to avoid this to minimize the number of people moving during this phase. Note: when he casts this on the Tank he has a nasty habit of doing the short hop to hit the circle and then spinning around to return to the Tank while still in the phase and/or cleaving. Everyone on the boss should back off more than you think you need to just to be safe.

At 30% (40% as of 4.0.6), the Foe Reaver will take his Safety Restrictions Offline to enrage and deal extra damage. Now's the time to pop cooldowns to end this phase as quickly as possible. You'll also want to take extra care to avoid damage from things like Overdrive and Harvest which hit much harder once you enter this phase. Don't wipe because you're close and are tempted to try and eat an Overdrive.

Moving on, we come to the top of the boat and Admiral Ripsnarl. This is a two phase fight with an active and an away phase. During the active phase the Tank will tank Ripsnarl in the middle of the boat while Ranged and Heals should maintain their distance to avoid the Swipes he will be using that deal damage to the tank and up to 3 nearby targets. Ripsnarl will also periodically Go For The Throat and charge a random ranged party member.

At 75%, and repeating every 25% thereafter, Ripsnarl will vanish from the room, entering the away phase, and begin summoning Vapours. These mobs should be killed ASAP because the longer they're up the bigger they get and the bigger they get the more health they have and damage they do. If you allow them to become full sized Condensed Vapours, they will begin casting Coalesce; a Frost damage AoE with a knockback component. You want to avoid this. After a few waves of these ads, Ripsnarl will return and the active phase will begin again only, from here on out, you'll also get Vapours that spawn. They still need to die, so don't forget them. At roughly 10%, Ripsnarl will summon three of these vapours and begin summoning faster; this is now a burn phase and you should concentrate all the firepower on the boss while forgetting the adds.

With Ripsnarl down, you should move away from the door and take time to replenish mana/eat for you now face the master of this ship, Captain Cookie! Cookie doesn't need a Tank per-se, but they're still handy to help deal with the primary mechanic here: the good (yellow and glowing) and bad (green, and with a whirly vortex) food he will throw at random players. Eating "Good" food provides a stack of Satiated, a 30% stacking haste buff, while "Bad" food makes you Nauseated, applying a stacking nature DoT, and both these buffs can each be cancelled out by eating the opposing kind of food. Note, also, that "bad" food does AoE damage to anyone standing within it's green vortex so simply letting it stack up will shortly find yourself with no room to work; especially true for melee heavy parties where the food tends to end up piling up around the pot.

So, the fight becomes more about managing your stacks of these buffs and the easiest, but longest, way to do it is to reserve all food for the Tank and have them moving around eating opposing foodstuffs in order (bad, good, bad, good...). But, this denies the DPS a chance to access a substantial haste buff because Satiated can theoretically hit 99 stacks. Realistically though, 3-4 stacks of that is more probable but means your Tank will need to carry an equivalent amount of "bad" stacks for each DPS that has that. This will allow you to finish the fight much quicker. Ranged heavy parties gain a lot more flexibility to abuse this because they can avoid the "pot stacking" for bad food melee face and leave more up by taking advantage of the entire deck space.

Burn your way through Cookie, and you'll see a note fall to the floor in front of the cabin door. This is your next chance to rest up and get ready to face the "final" boss of this instance, and true master here, Vanessa VanCleef; the daughter of the original boss of this instance.

But, before you can fight her, she's going to gloat like any true villain, poison you, and toss you into a deathtrap to be disposed of with to begin a gauntlet you must complete to face her. In order:

1) You will initially find yourself chained above and being lowered into the molten forge from earlier in the instance. Your party must click on the three valves around the edge to open them; causing a steam blast to knock you out of the forge and onto the ledge above the forge room.

2) Once you get on the ledge, you'll begin the nightmare of Glubtok and have to work your way down the ramp into the forge room towards the exit door while staying out of blazing fire and dodging falling iceblocks as indicated by the usual warning circles. Don't be in too much of a hurry to get moving because it will take a couple seconds for the fire to phase in and this is a good way to find yourself in it right from the start. When everyone reaches the door, the Tank will need to pick up Glubtok and move him around while avoiding the Ice Block zones that will continue to pop up in the limited space.

3) When Glubtok dies, the fires will phase out and you'll get find out Helix Gearbreaker is deathly afraid of spiders. It's a good idea to pick him up during this transition because he can be hard to find once they start spawning en-masse. This is a straight up burn and your goal is to kill him before being overwhelmed.

4) With Gearbreakers death, the Forge Room door will open and you'll enter the Foereapers nightmare which is apparently the spinning lightning gates from Mario Brothers. Your job here is to take your time and weave through these spinning walls of death - they hit for 50K a tick and you can not jump over them - to make your way to the far end of the tunnel. There are a couple safe spots at the far end where you can stop and group up so that the tank can then pick up the Foereaper with the entire group instead of all of you running like lambs to the slaughter piecemeal. So, take your time to get through the maze, group up, wait for an opening in the last gate and then take him down.

5) Now, you'll enter Ripsnarl's nightmare; the death of his family members at the hands of werewolves. This phase consists of three fights in which you must prevent the deaths of each family member by killing the werewolves assaulting them and healing the family members in question so they don't die. So, the Tanks should try and keep agro away from the NPC's while DPS takes the werewolve(s) attacking each family member down as quick as you can and the Healer keeps the family member alive before moving on to the next. To speed from family member to family member you'll have a substantial speed buff so be careful not to run yourself off the docks or ship accidentally. Save all three family members and you'll find yourself free of the nightmare.

Phew...

All that done, you can now return to the deck of the ship to face Vanessa herself. This is a three phase fight with 3 interludes (2 in 4.0.6). In the first phase, the Tank should pick up Vanessa and keep her controlled. Periodically she will cast Deflection, which will block all attacks in the same manor as Hunter's Deterance, Deadly Blades, similar to a Combat Rogue's Shadowstep attack in that she will jump around the room striking random targets, and Backslash, a physical DoT that hits for ~10K every 2 seconds for 10 seconds and will need to be healed through. Throughout this phase, adds will join the fight from the cabin one at a time consisting of the Enforcer, Shadowguard and Blood Wizard (abuse it's Rage Zone as you can), mobs, in that order, from earlier in the instance with all the same abilities they had then.

It's a good idea to tank Vanessa on the far side of the ship for two reasons, the first being that this acts as a natural LoS tactic to bring the Blood Wizard out of the cabin and the second being the "rope" mechanic you will need to use to survive the phase transitions at 50% and 25%. During these transitions, Vanessa will jump out of combat and there will be an announcement that she's going to Detonate Explosives on the ship. To survive this, there will be five ropes available on the edge of the far side of the ship you can take to swing off and back on by clicking on the coils upon the deck. Line up 5 deep and enjoy your swing ride.

When you land back on the deck the first time you'll enter the second phase of the fight and Vanessa will rejoin combat while the adds will shortly spawn again as a group of three. Be prepared to manage these accordingly depending on your DPS situation, CC'ing if necessary so you don't get overwhelmed. They'll continue to spawn in packs of three throughout this phase until you bring her down to 25%; at which point she'll jump away, any adds that remain will despawn, and you'll need to grab a rope and swing off the deck again.

Now, when you next land on the deck and Vanessa will cast Vengeance of VanCleef upon herself to increase attack speed by 75% and damage output significantly from all attacks. This is being changed to instead being a stacking buff in patch 4.0.6 that, presumably, will start lower and become increasingly dangerous the longer it takes you to exit this phase. Even now, though, this is a pure burn phase to 0% and a good time to use your haste cooldown to end the phase as soon as possible. For now, when she hits 1%, you'll need to rope off the ship again as she dies but this will be removed entirely in 4.0.6.

4.0.6 Update: In place of the final swing out, the game will now emote that Vanessa has dropped a final charge when she's about to die and everyone should back off. Anyone in close proximity to her as she stands will die from the AoE damage.

And, that's it, we're done all the instances. For now...