Greetings, adventurers! In this guide, we'll show you how to defeat the Assault of the Zaqali encounter in Heroic Aberrus. Please keep in mind that everything in this video is from PTR testing, and it's possible Blizzard altered the encounter in some way since the final testing. If that happens, we'll release an updated video after the fights are live.
Encounter Overview
This is a two-phase encounter where you'll be fighting a boss named Warlord Cagney and a whole bunch of adds. Phase one is about controlling ads, and phase two is a burn phase. The room itself has two large ledges and a center area. You'll want to pre-assign the raid into two halves, with each half on one of the ledges on the pool. Everyone will fight Cagney together in the middle where he starts. After about 27 seconds, he'll jump away onto a giant bird and then start spawning ads. When this happens, the raid will split into the two sides. The boss will then jump down to the right-hand side ledge first and start fighting again. When the boss reaches 100 energy, he'll jump to the opposite ledge and keep repeating this until he reaches 25 health, which will trigger phase two.
Phase One
The boss doesn't really do all that much in Phase One. His main ability is smacking the tank with heavy cudgel, dealing massive physical damage in frontal combat. Anyone hit will also take 15% increased physical damage for 15 seconds. This also causes a bunch of swirlies to appear. Don't stand in the swirlies. The frontal follows the tank, so the tank holding the boss just needs to stand there and take it, and everyone else moves. You'll also periodically have red swirlies spawning called Arbalest Firebolts. Just dodge these. When the boss jumps to the opposite platform, he'll always land in the exact middle of it, dealing a chunk of damage to anybody he lands on. This will also spawn lines of swirlies emanating out from the landing point, so don't stand in swirlies.
While you're dealing with the boss jumping back and forth, you'll also have constant waves of adds. There are four different types:
- Flame-Bound Huntsman: will put red circles around random players. After a few seconds, they'll hit the targets with a spear, dealing moderate damage to anyone within the circle. This will also leave behind the spear on the ground, which then gets a swirly around it and explodes after a few more seconds. Don't stand in other people's circles, and don't eat swirlies. If you're targeted by a spear, move away a bit from the group so everyone else has an easier time dodging.
- Obsidian Guards: will cast scorching roar, which pulses for mild damage to anyone within 25 yards every half second, doing three total pulses. You'll see an animation around the guards, so dodge this if you can, but honestly, melee probably don't even need to run out. They'll also cast volcanic shield, putting a line on a random player than shooting a fire beam at them. Aim this away from the group and make sure no one but the target gets hit.
- Magnum Mystics: spawn with a very large shield called molten barrier. While this barrier persists, it pulses for raid-wide damage every 4 seconds and increases the mystics' damage by 15% per pulse. Breaking this shield is always going to be top priority, so whenever Mystic spawns, start attacking it ASAP. Aside from this, they'll cast magma flow, throwing lava at a random person for mild damage and applying a 15-second dot. This dot can and should be dispelled. Their last ability is a lava bolt, which just throws a bolt of fire to a random person. This can be interrupted.
- Scali Wall Climbers: these guys don't attack you and instead run towards the door that's in the middle of the room. If they reach the door, they'll punch it, causing a massive explosion that'll wipe the raid. Keep these things slowed and just leave them down as they come.
Phase Two
Once the boss reaches 25 health, he'll get mad, jump to the middle of the room, and cast desperate immolation at the flying bird. When the channel completes, the boss heals for 10 health and starts taking for mild fire damage to the raid every four and a half seconds for the rest of the fight. Lust as soon as he's done casting and bring any ads that are still alive onto the boss for cleaves. During this phase, his heavy cudgel abilities are upgraded to Flaming cudgel. This is still frontal dealing massive damage but now also causes every player in the raid to get a red circle. Flames will shoot at each player, exploding for moderate damage within each circle. You'll just want everyone to spread out for this or people will die.
At 100 energy, he'll cast catastrophic slam towards the door, dealing massive damage split between everybody. You'll want at least 10 people soaking each catastrophic slam. If not enough people soak the slam, it'll trigger the door to explode and wipe the raid. However, soaking applies a debuff, causing you to take 75% increased damage from subsequent slam soaks, so don't soak twice. Rotate healing cooldowns as needed to keep the raid stable and nuke the boss.
Additional Tips
As a note on PTR, during phase one, each ledge has rocks that spawn on the ground at the location of the swirlies caused by heavy cudgel. You're able to click the rock to pick it up, giving you an extra action button. While you're carrying the rock, you'll see yellow arrows around the edge. If you run to an arrow and click the extra action button, you'll throw the rock, and doing this will prevent one add from reaching the ledge. So, this allowed you to significantly reduce how many adds you actually end up fighting. At the time of writing, these rocks aren't mentioned in the dungeon journal at all, so it's unclear if they were removed or not. If they exist, we highly recommend using these rocks to reduce the number of ads you have to fight. That is, unless your raid is full of people who are focused on parsing, in which case, let the ads come and cleave them down.
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