In this blog post, we'll take a first look at Mythic the Vigilant Steward Scarn in the new raid Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible. We'll go over what's new on Mythic, how the fight changes, and potential approaches. Keep in mind that this is not a complete guide on how to defeat this boss on Mythic and that it is PTR, so things can change or be reworked greatly.
Mythic Upgrades
The Vigilant Steward on Mythic has a few new mechanics or rather upgrades to existing abilities which are enough to make you want to crawl into a ball and rock slowly back and forth as you're trying to figure out just how in that. First of all, the boss now spawns four traps per cast up from three, two in melee and two Rando in range, so an additional Rando trap. There are also four Golems now, and they've been given reinforced defenses. So upon reaching either 75 health or 100 energy, they become immune to crowd control, so you can no longer keep them from activating new traps. These Golems seem to not have a fixed spawn location; they instead spawned at one of the dragon heads around the room, but which four was random. When they spawned, they B-Line towards random traps around the room to activate them.
With that in mind and the Mythic mechanic, you have to either manage to gather up all four fast with grips and knockbacks, stun him and kill him within that stun, or at least before they manage to activate any nearby traps. Now the issue with this is if they don't die shortly after the stun, they'll all be spread as they'll run towards different traps, so DPSing them down becomes really inefficient. The second choice is to hard CC either two or three of them and nuke down either one at a time or two at a time. One is probably going to be too inefficient as well, and you'll run the risk of one or two of them reaching 100 energy and breaking out of their crowd control.
This is very much down to tuning. How hard will we smack versus how much smacking will we need to do per ad? Now it could be a thing where you hard crowd control all and you drag boss on top of one or two of them which melee cleaves down, and range single targets down range to mobs one at a time. There are lots of different ways to tackle it. It's all about finding whichever is the most time-efficient and allows you to have the most uptime on the boss.
Unstable Embers
To make the fight more interesting, the unstable Embers debuff several players, making them AOE around them in a 5-yard radius. On Mythic, once this ends, the boss will fire off an elimination protocol blast towards that player and deal damage to anyone hit in its path. Anyone between players with unstable Embers and the boss will get hit. If you're hit, you take a ton of damage, but you also take 500 more damage from elimination protocols for 30 seconds, so a bit like Hungering Destroyer in Castle Nathria but spicier.
Players with unstable Embers need to not only be 5 yards spread from other players but also be in a position where they don't blast half the raid when it ends. The raid also, of course, needs to move and be aware of this. You will, of course, need some sort of strategy for where to put these blasts to minimize the chance of the raid getting hit. For example, always aiming him towards the edge of the room and right on the opposite side.
Now the issue is the boss constantly moves, raid constantly moves, and various mechanics force you to move all over the place, like the Tactical destruction cones from the dragon statue, which on Mythic starts erupting from three dragon statues rather than one, so instantly right off the bat discovers up to 50% of the room on its final wave. And yes, everything overlaps everything: Golem spawns, tactical destruction, unstable Embers, cause why not?
Encounter Breakdown
To try and paint an accurate picture of the encounter, we'll break down the first minute or so on a pull. You will get one set of four traps into unstable Embers into four new traps into an additional unstable Ember. This overlaps with golems spawning plus a knockback, the blast wave into the dragon statues, tactical destruction into a new unstable Ember. After the Tactical destruction is done, you will get a little break, and then new traps, and then the madness starts again. Oh, and during this, you'll also get a ton of shrapnel bombs that you have to soak within 30 seconds, and they can spawn in traps and tactical destruction areas. The non-active tank will have the job of soaking these, and you'll probably use immunities to soak him when they're in the Tactical destruction if or when it's needed. Trying to kill the Golems while you're trying to spread the unstable Embers while you're dodging the Tactical destruction while trying to navigate all the traps everywhere is not at all stressful. It's, yeah, it's fine.
Now on the topic of traps, we're unsure if it's going to keep the spawn pattern we saw or if it changes as the fight progresses later on. But currently, you get two sets of traps for a total of eight and one set of Golems, meaning you'll have four trap deactivations to use. These will almost certainly be used to clear the four Rando traps in range, leaving you with the four you spawned in melee, which you can control. Now if the timing continues somewhat the same, it seemed like Tactical destruction is the reset part of the fight. So once a Tactical destruction is done, fight restarts, so you get two trap sets, one set of Golems, new Tactical destruction, etc., but again, we only saw up until the second set of Golems.
The boss was a rough cookie, I can tell you that much. Let me know what you think of the new Mythic mechanic, "it's a trap," and if you have any questions, hit me up here or become a patron or Twitch sub and get access to the Stanky gaming Discord, which is the fastest way to get a hold of me. It's also filled with a lot of useful info and helpful people if you need any help PVE wise. Don't forget the usual stuff like comment, subscribe, and most importantly, ring that notification bell. Lots of guides coming. I'm also streaming all my RAID progression on Twitch, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, stanky gaming, and the raid releases on the 9th of May. Hope and, yeah, thank you all for watching, and I will see you next time.
Conclusion
Stay tuned for more updates on Mythic the Vigilant Steward Scarn in the new raid Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible. Thank you for reading.
