We Killed Elegon and You Can Too!

All righty, that’s more than enough procrastinating.  We killed Elegon over two weeks ago, it’s high time I got cracking and wrote this here boss post.

Elegon is the most difficult fight in normal Mogu’shan Vaults.  This is not so much because of the mechanics themselves, but rather because of the unforgiving enrage timer.  The first time we managed to reach the final phase we simultaneously hit the hard enrage (with the boss at about 40% health).  Our next few attempts we managed to find ways to save time.  Which is probably a good way to approach the fight actually: Work on learning how to handle the mechanics and then work on shaving time off each phase.

What You’ll Need

There’s not a lot of flexibility in terms of raid composition for this encounter:

• 6 DPS in order to effectively deal with the Energy Charge adds in Phase 2.
• 2 tanks
• 2 healers

To give you some idea of the DPS requirements, on our first kill we had an average of over 97k DPS per damage dealer.  But don’t worry too much if that looks hard to pull off right now — remember that you will be stacking a damage increasing debuff on Elegon which will greatly increase the amount of DPS you’ll be capable of doing.

Oh, and both our healers did more than 50k HPS; but again, there’s a buff that increases the amount of healing people receive while standing in the center ring.

Phase 1: Entering defensive mode. Disabling output failsafes.

We had all the ranged DPS and healers stack up next to the console that starts the fight, just inside the center ring.  Standing in the ring causes you to gain two debuffs, one of which causes you to take 5% more damage per stack and the other which causes you to deal additional damage and receive additional healing.  There’s a sweet spot on the very edge of the ring where you can simply jump to reset your stacks, which can be handy for reducing movement; however, I found that it was a bit tricky to find it again when the phases repeated.  Healers can actually stand outside of the ring most of the time (at least on normal difficulty) to reduce the amount of damage they take and avoid having to move to reset stacks, but if a healer takes damage they should step into the ring to take advantage of the healing buff.

Elegon himself is immobile in the center of the room.  Since the room is very large the tank and melee DPS might get out of range of the healers.  We had our tanks angle the boss so that the tank’s back was about in line with the first pillar next to the console.  This kept everyone in range of heals but prevented the raid from being hit by Elegon’s breath attack.

We found that it wasn’t necessary for people to reset their stacks very often.  As long as everyone reset their stacks right before an add exploded (melee included) the damage was easily healable.  Tanks reset their stacks every second add by taunt-swapping the boss.

The current off-tank should grab each Celestial Protector add and bring it close to the ranged stack point.  These adds take increased damage while standing inside the ring, but they must die outside the ring or they will deal additional AoE damage when they die.  DPS need to pay attention and not kill the add until it’s outside the ring.  This is complicated a bit by the fact that the adds will not move while they are casting.  Give your tanks enough time to get them into position.

Healers need to remember to quickly dispell the Closed Circuit healing debuff that is applied to random people in this phase.  Two debuffs are applied at the same time, and it’s cast about every 12 seconds, so each healer will need to dispell one person.

The challenge of this phase was balancing DPS on the adds with DPS on Elegon himself.  In order to beat the enrage timer we needed to push Elegon into the next phase right after the second add died.  You do NOT want to get a new add spawning just as Elegon hits a transition.  It’s possible to recover from this if you are very quick to kill the add and move into position for Phase 2, but it takes DPS away from Elegon.  It also generally causes people to get flustered and panicky, which can lead to mistakes.

Phase 2: Approach! Feel the power of the titans!

This phase is pretty simple, but executing it well might take a bit of practice.  You’ll want to assign one DPS to each of the 6 pillars around the ring.  These DPS players need to be able to quickly kill the Energy Charges before they hit the pillars.  This may be more difficult for DoT classes or any spec with low burst.  Tanks (and possibly healers) can assist the DPS players as necessary.  The Monk ability Touch of Death is particularly useful for quickly killing an add.

Every successive wave travels faster, so at some point you’ll be unable to kill the wave and an add will hit a pillar and trigger Phase 3.  Every wave of adds also adds a stacking debuff to Elegon, causing him to take an extra 10% damage per stack.  Thankfully, even the wave you don’t kill will add a stack.  We managed to kill 4 waves and then ignored the adds and focused on the boss during the 5th wave.  This gave us a 50% damage increase after the first Phase 2, and a 100% increase going into the final phase.

There is a slight pause between each wave of adds.  This is the ideal time for the DPS to quickly drop their stacks and maybe throw a bit of extra DPS at Elegon himself.

There should be one healer and one tank on each side of the room.  Every time an Energy Charge dies it will deal a small amount of AoE damage to the raid, but as long as the DPS are managing their stacks this shouldn’t be much of an issue.  This is a great time for healers to regenerate some mana.  Healers should also stay near the middle pillar on their side to keep everyone in range.

Phase 3: Drawing from reserve power.

As soon as an Energy Charge reaches a pillar Phase 3 will begin.  The inner ring will collapse — make sure you don’t fall to your death! — and each pillar will become a targetable mob called an Empyreal Focus.  These foci will be linked together by Energy Conduits that deal high damage to anyone attempting to walk through them.  Every so often, Elegon will also place Energy Cascade fail patches under random raid members.  You must move out of these immediately to avoid taking lethal damage.  Each Energy Cascade will spawn a Cosmic Spark add.  These adds melee extremely hard, but they can be CCed and picked up by the tanks.

We had some difficulty with this stage at first, but we discovered a couple of ways to make it easier.  For one thing, you may have noticed from my header screenshot that we got the achievement on this boss.  This is because we realized that getting the achievement would actually make the fight easier.  You see, at first we were getting overwhelmed with Cosmic Spark adds.  Then we realized that every time a pillar was brought to zero health Elegon gains a stack of Overloaded, increasing his damage and casting speed by 20%.  Notice the casting speed part: The longer it takes to kill the pillars the more adds he’s going to summon.  Killing the pillars both pushes Elegon into the next phase faster and greatly limits the number of adds you have to deal with.  Therefore, each DPS player was responsible for killing their own pillar.

Once the six pillars were dead we grouped up again at the main console.  This can be a bit chaotic, as there are still fail patches to be avoided and adds to deal with.  You want to avoid being meleed by the adds if at all possible.  Stun them, CC them or kite them.  As soon as the inner platform reforms, drag the adds into the ring and kill them quickly — they’ll be taking additional damage there, but also dealing additional damage too.

Transition Back to Phase 1, and the Cycle Repeats

When the platform reappears a tank must be ready to immediately pick up the boss, otherwise Elegon will death grip the entire raid to him.  It’s possible to use this death grip strategically to kite the Cosmic Sparks into the inner ring, but this is dangerous.  For one thing, the grip deals a fair amount of raid-wide damage.  If anyone is low on health (from being meleed by adds, for example) they may be killed by it.  For another thing, people are likely to become disoriented by the grip, and may be slow to get back into position.  We found it was safer for a tank to just pick up the boss.

After that Phases 1-3 repeat again.  The only difference is that there’s more health to burn through in the second Phase 1, so we kill three Celestial Protectors instead of two.

Final Phase: Let the energies consume you!

After the second cycle is over the final stage begins, which lasts until the end of the encounter.  As soon as the platform reappears everyone should move into the inner ring.  Anyone standing outside the ring will take very high damage at this point.  Even inside the ring there will be a lot of AoE damage.  This is the point when we used Bloodlust and started rotating raid healing cooldowns.  Our Shadow Priest also uses Vampiric Embrace at this point to help out with healing.  Use personal survival cooldowns, healthstones, etc.

Don’t forget to step out of the ring quickly to drop your stacks!  I found that stepping out every three stacks seemed to be ideal at this point.  If you let your stacks build up too high your health will start dropping and you may not be able to survive stepping out to reset them.

Otherwise, just DPS the boss down as quickly as possible.  Good luck!