What’s up, it’s Jimfro from Ready, Check, Pull, and this is our official boss guide for Normal and Heroic Sludgefist.
This guide is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon. They get early access to these guides before anyone else, so if you want early access too, check out the Patreon link below!
Sludgefist is the 8th boss in the raid, and he only becomes available after killing all the previous bosses. You actually fight Sludgefist in the same room that you fought Shriekwing in, but this time the pillars are gonna be used for something a little...different.
The key mechanic in the fight is a charge that Sludgefist will do every minute or so. He’ll
mark the current tank and then charge in their direction after a few seconds, killing anyone in
the way and only stopping if he runs into a pillar or a wall.
If he hits a wall, it’s a guaranteed wipe, so the tank absolutely needs to aim him at a pillar every time, by simply running behind one.
When Sludgefist runs into a pillar, it gets destroyed and he’ll be stunned and take double damage for a few seconds. There’s only 4 pillars in the room, so the 5th charge is guaranteed to hit a wall and wipe the raid, which means you only have a little over 5 minutes to kill this guy.
Now with the basic premise out of the way, let’s jump into the fight.
On pull you’re gonna tank him pretty much where he spawns. This is a good place to start because Sludgefist will occasionally cast an AoE Stomp that does a ton of damage to players and destroys nearby pillars. So the tanks will need to make sure that he's over 20 yards away from any pillars to avoid this, and of course, everyone should move out of it.
The tanks will also need to stay tightly stacked with each other, because all of the boss's melee swings get copied to the next closest player within 5 yards of the current tank.
If no one else is in 5 yards, the current tank will get melee’d twice, and this guy hits really hard so that would probably not end well. This also means everyone else is gonna have to stay away from the tanks too.
One super important mechanic that happens occasionally throughout the fight is called Chain Link. It marks two random players and chains them together after a few seconds, if the chained players move further than 12 yards apart from each other, they both instantly die and this chain lasts almost an entire minute, so you’re gonna have to be extremely careful about moving around the room with your partner when you have this.
If you’re a ranged DPS and you get paired with a melee DPS, for instance, you now have to play like a melee DPS for a while, oh boy. Also, ranged players should generally stay near each other anyway, so that they don’t have to move as much when they get paired together.
All the other mechanics are pretty minor. There’s some brown swirlies to dodge after he stomps, which leaves a zone of rocks on the ground that you don’t want to stand in.
The boss casts a roar every once in a while that does a little bit of raid damage and pushes everyone away from him.
And on heroic, Sludgefist will occasionally mark a random player with a red arrow and circle,
root them for 4 seconds, and then pull anyone in the circle to him and cast a massive slam that needs to be split between several players.
You’re gonna need 3 or 4 people to stand in the circle in order to share the damage of the slam, or you might be able to get away with using certain immunities like Ice Block or Turtle.
Sludgefist's abilities are on a pretty strict timer, and he casts them in the same order between every charge, so you’ll probably get used to the flow of the mechanics pretty quickly.
After the second AoE stomp, he’ll almost immediately cast his charge on the tank, so they can just move out of that stomp toward the next pillar you want to destroy and already be standing in position for the charge.
He charges, hits the pillar, gets stunned, and takes double damage for a few seconds. So nuke him when he’s stunned. Then just make sure he’s not standing too close to any other pillars, and rinse and repeat.
Destroying each pillar adds a stack of a permanent DoT debuff to the raid, so the healing required could get pretty rough toward the end of the fight.
With 20% health remaining, Sludgefist enrages, gaining 20% increased damage and attack speed. We recommend saving lust for when this happens, because everyone is gonna be taking a ton of damage, especially the tanks.
Alright, so quick recap.
- Tanks stay tightly stacked and keep the boss away from the pillars.
- If you get chained, stay close to your partner, or else you die.
- Tanks make sure every charge hits a pillar.
- Move out of the stomp and dodge the brown swirlies.
- And on heroic, everyone needs to help soak the red circles.
And that’s pretty much it!
If you liked this guide, support us on Patreon! We have a goal of reaching 100 patrons by the end of the tier, so that we can do this again for the next tier and keep making all kinds of other guides too.
Thank you so much to the patrons who already support us. We honestly can’t thank you enough. Also, you can find our written version of these guides on Icy Veins, linked below.
Like, subscribe, and join our discord to keep up with everything Ready, Check, Pull! Peace.
