What’s up, I’m Jimfro and this is the Ready, Check, Pull guide for Skolex, the Insatiable Ravener, big shout out to our Patreon supporters who help make these videos possible.
Alright, this is a Bloodlust on pull, single target boss with a ton of movement requirements that make it feel deceptively difficult, however, being that it’s 100% scripted, you’ll get the hang of it fairly quickly.
Now, before you pull, set up 2 markers: one directly under the boss, and another marker 30 yards away and designate 2 groups of 3 ranged players to be the farthest away from the raid.
And now for the strategy!
The most important mechanic of the fight is Ephemera Dust, a stacking DoT that’s pretty much auto-applied to every player in the raid whenever the boss casts Dust Flail, which happens pretty regularly.
The only way to remove the debuff is by having the entire raid, and that includes tanks and healers too, stack up tightly away from the boss - to get the boss to burrow underground and emerge at the raids feet, knocking the raid back, and consuming all of the Ephemera Dust stacks on everyone hit.
This also gives the boss a stacking 10% damage done increase, so the fight gets harder the longer it goes on.
Skolex doesn’t really move, so the positioning will look like this:
The tanks will start by pulling the boss where it’s at, while the raid loosely spreads between
the boss and the second marker. And then, send the first 3 designated ranged players behind the raid, spread apart. That’s because the boss targets them, doing splash damage, and applying an additional stack of Ephemera Dust.
Since these players will be taking more damage than everyone else, the healers should definitely keep an eye on them.
For the tanks, the boss's melee attacks hit its current target as well as the next closest target. So the tanks will need to be stacked for most of the fight, however, at 100 energy, the tanks have a combo taunt swap mechanic that's pretty standard.
But on Heroic, the damage turns into a frontal cone, so keep the boss faced away from the raid, the way it works is that at 100 energy, tank 1 will be on the boss's right, tank 2 will be on
the boss's left, and the raid will stay behind the boss, the boss will cast Riftmaw and Rend in rapid succession, three attacks total and the order is random every time. Riftmaw is just moderate damage, but it also increases the damage you take from the next Riftmaw by 500% for 4 seconds. So you’re basically dead if you take 2 hits of this in a row.
Rend on the other hand is basically the same as Riftmaw, but it hits way harder and it also applies a bleed to anyone hit, as if it wasn’t crazy enough.
So to put it simply, never let the other tank take two back to back hits of Riftmaw or two back to back hits of Rend.
And on Heroic, keep the boss faced away from the raid.
Healers might want to think about using some damage reduction cooldowns here as well.
When the boss is not at 100 energy, there’s a few other things going on:
- The boss will occasionally cast a massive frontal cone at a random target that’s pretty easy for the raid to dodge but gets more difficult the farther from the boss you are.
- For melee, the boss will constantly throw a bunch of swirlies at any player within a 20 yard range, so basically only the melee players have to worry about this. If you get hit by one, you take a bit of damage, but what's worse is that your haste gets reduced by 20%. So kiss your damage goodbye if you end up getting hit by this.
Now, since the fight is super scripted, here's the flow we think the fight will take:
The fight basically alternates between tank combo, dodge frontal, tank combo again, dodge frontal again, and stack for burrow. You’ll be doing this over and over until the boss dies.
And a little pro-tip is: during the first frontal is probably when you should rotate out the 3 designated ranged players.
And that’s pretty much it!
Here’s a quick recap of the fight for you to
review or screenshot for later.
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