Main Tank Strategy: Trial Of The Champions

I swear this place was made for a hunter to tank. It's absolutely fantastic for it, other than the last boss. And even that isn't as bad as it could be, except for the fact it's a case of major DPS-race. I tanked normal without a lick of trouble (except for one bit of aggro-trouble at the first boss; you'll see what I mean), and Heroic isn't different enough for me to think it would be impossible, either.

So for hunter tankers who want to make a go at it, here's how this one worked for me.

Stage 1: Jousting
I hope you've been practicing your jousts in the ring. If not, you'll want to do that, since the first part of this battle is all on horseback. Three Horde champions and their groups of three 'hangers-on' will come out to say 'hello'.
The first three waves of three, the 'hangers-on', are no problem at all. Your party should be able to down them with little difficulty. If you get knocked off your horse at any time in the jousting battle, you can go and get back on another and join right back in. If you are killed, you can even run back in and rejoin the fight that way, though it's probably better not to die.
The last wave is the big bosses themselves. You'll need to watch them, since when they are knocked off their mounts, they'll try to make their way to the side and get another. Keep trampling them whenever you can to keep this from happening. When all three are knocked off their mounts, you will be dismounted your own self. Everyone needs to put on weapons. And here is where the actual tanking begins.

Stage 2: The Horde Champions
There are five Horde champions, three of which you will fight in a random choice. I can't recall their names, though I do remember their races. Once I can get more detail on names, I'll fill it in.

Tauren: This one's either a druid or a shaman. I'm not positive which. Whichever it is, though, he's the healer of the bunch. If he shows up, 80% of the time I consider him the first one to attack so you don't get people killed. He goes down fairly fast, and doesn't have any funky tanking tricks.

Orc: This is the other 20%. With a hard-hitting attack, Mortal Strike, and a Whirlwind that can rip through your melee like candy floss, if your damage is doing more than the healer can heal, I strongly suggest downing him #1 *ALWAYS*. Mortal Strike on your tank (especially when the tank is the pet) can really hurt.

Blood Elf: Usually I consider her a high priority to take out, but never the #1 (unless you somehow got neither Orc nor Tauren in the group, I suppose). As a mage, she will try and keep at range, chucking fireballs, sheeping people, and occasionally throwing some painful pyros. She could probably be range-tanked if you've got an extra healer or an on-the-ball and powerful one to keep pressure off the tank. Not that I tried it. It's a musing thought.

Troll: He's supposed to be a hunter, I think. He likes staying at range and doing a lot of shooting. I hate to sound blase, but I never saw anything that grabbed me here as a 'terrifying' attack, so simply consider him to be your 'lucky draw' if he should show up. I always leave him for last.

Forsaken: The undead is a non-invisible rogue. He will set out pots of venom which make pools of filth all over the floor. Don't stand in the fire! Your pet won't really care terribly much (an AOE after all) but others won't like it one single bit. So make sure you drag it around and out of those puddles whenever possible. It also likes to throw Fan Of Knives, attacking everything in that AOE range.

Once everyone is off their mounts, the hardest part here is to collect the enemies. Sending the pet after your #1 kill (probably either the tauren or orc) is a good plan, and MD to the others if possible. Remember that two of them like being at range, so you may need to pick up the big scary fellows and then 'drag' them over toward the range-getters. If you are with a group who is willing to be patient, make sure you get no DPS on the bosses, just healing, until you've gotten them all collected. However, once they're gathered, it's primarily tanking and spanking of each one, with a little movement to stay out of the green goo and to gather up a fleeing mage/hunter. The hits can come fairly hard, so have a really good healer on hand. Especially if you're still not crit-immune.

Stage 3: LEWT!

Stage 4: The next enemy in this place is one of two. The first one (and the one that's vastly easier to tank as a hunter) is the paladin. He has two main abilities to beware of: a 'flash of light' (you will get a screen wide warning of this. All you need to do is turn your back on him and avoid damager and getting stunned) and Hammer Of The Righteous (MASSIVE damage attack on one person; can be dispelled before the hammer hits. Please do it. Please. Just do it. Please.). I don't know for sure whether your pet is immune to the flash of light, so tank carefully until you know. I'm *pretty* sure it is, though. If not, have a MD ready because aggro on the stunned individual will drop.

The second boss, and the more annoying (yet cool) one, is the lightbringer woman. Fighting her at first is easy. She throws holy damage, though not very much, and essentially is a pushover... until she's nearly dead. At that point, she will summon a shadow from the past. These shadows all look like different bosses that you've killed in the past, though they all seem to have the same abilities: an AOE fear (save BW for this moment), some considerable shadow damage, and on top of it all, the priestess will be immune to damage, but still going after you. Once her shadow is destroyed, the priestess returns to full HP (which is about half of the average boss' HP, so not terrible) and can be gunned down normally.

Stage 5: MO' LEWT

Stage 6: THE BIG SPOILER
If you haven't been here yet, and don't want to know who the last boss is, then stop here.

Really. I mean it. Stop here.

Are you really sure you want to keep going?

Totally sure?

I mean, I wouldn't want people to get upset over spoilers.

No, it's not Illidan. Nice guess, though.

OK. I think that's enough pointless spoiler space.

The real enemy is....

THE BLACK KNIGHT! Shocking, I know!

Anyhow, the Black Knight is a three-phase battle all in himself. At first, he has only one trick: bring a single zombie back to life and smash on the tank while the zombie tries to eat the party's faces. Having someone who's fairly tough offtank the zombie and drag it into the line of fire is a good idea; the zombie will go 'Boom' for considerable damage if not killed quickly enough, so sparing the DPS to down it is usually wise.

The man's second phase is a skeletal figure, which will use a version of Army Of The Dead to summon a whole flock of those same exploding ghouls. In normal, they've got around 12k HP each, so not terrible to bring down. Mass AOE if you have it, or singly-targetingt to bring them down. Getting too many of them exploding in one place can be a killer, so I strongly suggest killing them ASAP, then focusing on the boss himself. Your pet should be able to handle the damage (with a healer helping, of course).

Thirdly, the phantom phase. This is the big DPS race. He will constantly be afflicting the party with an attack that does damage, and ups the damage of spell damage. As far as I can tell, this isn't purgable in any way (maybe Ice or Cloak, but I haven't tested it). So simply open up the floodgates, pray to the heavens, and burn him down. Here, like I said, is te hardest part because of the amount of aggro that others will be gathering. Without much time to get yourself an aggro boost, you will need to pull out all the tricks you have (intimidation, MDs at every cooldown, growl on, spec for mass threat over anything else) to have a chance at holding the aggro. The good news is that at this phase, he's quite weak, and will often go down quite quickly. The bad news: if he *doesn't* go down quickly, the combination of 'more spell damage' plus 'lots of spell attacks' will probably squish your party.

Stage 7: Loot and profit!

Good luck! And remember, there's plenty of reason to forego heroic for normal. Namely that The Dark Heart drops in there, but not in Heroic. And let's face it: we'd all love more stamina.

The only thing I was wary about with pet tanking here was trying to pick up the three bosses after the jousting, as the prot warrior in our group had a tough time corralling them together. Glad to hear it wasn't an issue.

Durante wrote:The only thing I was wary about with pet tanking here was trying to pick up the three bosses after the jousting, as the prot warrior in our group had a tough time corralling them together. Glad to hear it wasn't an issue.

Well, I'm not going to say it *completely* wasn't an issue. It's a bitch if the DPS gets froggy, and they can be quite far apart. But some MDs helped, as did the fact the tauren went down fairly fast. Unfortunately, the orc didn't, so we had to make another go, but that was as much an 'Oops that guy hits like a TRUCK!' as any problems with the tank itself.

Even when I wasn't tanking, putting my pet on one of the 'shooty' mobs helped the tank if he was having trouble running around. Same with the final boss; I'd forego shooting the last boss and focus first on his exploding zombie minion so no one got 'popped'. So if you have an extra hunter and are having tanking problems with the first group of bosses, they might be able to help keep the ranged people distracted from healers.

I would like to correct and make useful hints on a few things.

1. After the joust, if everyone runs out instead of trying to pick up the champions from different corners of the room they will despawn and respawn standing near the big gate, all 3 rather close together, plus your teammates will be all ready before the pull. Very recommended. Especially for heroic. This can also be done after the 3 packs on the second boss, can be useful to get mana back up before the main fight.

2. The tauren is a shammy.

3. The pet is immune to the paladins light. And I have yet to see the pet be the target of the hammer.

4. The priest does not get HP to full when you kill the memory, she heals herself over time while you are fighting it. So if you kill it fast, you can get back to her before she's back to full HP.

5. Note that the army of ghouls can't really be tanked, so don't try and run after them with your pet if they are going for a healer. Just dps it before it explodes. Just keep your pet on the boss all the time.

6. The 2nd best dps trinket for BM hunters also drops on normal mode (best if you're already hit capped). It drops from the priestess and is called Banner of Victory.

Nordh wrote:2. The tauren is a shammy.

Yeah. The lightning bolts were quite clear the last time I did this. I forgot to edit. Thanks for mentioning, though; I probably never would've changed it otherwise.

.... he's still a wussy pushover.

3. The pet is immune to the paladins light. And I have yet to see the pet be the target of the hammer.

Likewise on the 'targeted pet'. I guess because part of the idea is that you can dispel the stun and catch the hammer to use against him. But I can confirm the 'never seen it work on the pet'. Wasn't sure if it was just because I always had my back turned, though.

4. The priest does not get HP to full when you kill the memory, she heals herself over time while you are fighting it. So if you kill it fast, you can get back to her before she's back to full HP.

Very nice to know. I was always slow enough killing the other boss that she was healed by the time we finished. Then again, we also got the paladin about 80% of the time, so not enough chances to experiment.

'50-50 chance' my ass...

6. The 2nd best dps trinket for BM hunters also drops on normal mode (best if you're already hit capped). It drops from the priestess and is called Banner of Victory.

A question more for the theorycraft section than here, but: is Armor Pen really that good for a BM? Or is it just a matter of 'It's the best choice of what we have'? Since Armor Pen doesn't carry to the pet, and the pet is so much % of BM damage (even after the adjustments).

ArP is the most highly valued source of dps increase on spreadsheets that I've seen, but I haven't looked around too much tbh. It sucks for surv though since they use more spellbased attacks (explosive shot, black arrow, etc). For MM ArP is even more valuable since they have even higher personal physical damage than BM.

I wonder at what point ArP will make Steady more valuable than Arcane shot though =)

It sucks that ArP doesn't scale down to the pet though, feels like one of those things that will always make stats less valuable to a BM than to any other spec and even class. BM never get full value out of anything.

Pardon deletion for those who read and went o.O. Half-asleep, I posted a 'HAY THESE CAN BE DESPAWNED!' to this thread instead of a guild thread. Which, hyuk, was already said up above. I blame midnight.

I will, however, add that I made an attempt to tank these on heroic. They hit hard. *Very* hard. If you're not ready for low-level raid tanking, I suggest sticking to Normal on this one. Especially if you're unlucky enough to get the draw of the heavy melee bosses like the orc and/or paladin.