How To Tank Archavon’s Ass
Something I’ve seen almost every time I’ve been to the Vault of Archavon is whoever the second tank is parking Archavon’s ass right in the gas cloud so the melee DPS have to choose between standing in front of him proccing parries, or standing in the cloud taking a hit debuff and damage over time.
Here’s a handy visual guide to making sure this doesn’t happen. If you think you can tank Archavon fine, my experience suggests there’s a 90% chance that you actually can’t, so you should probably read this.
1. This is you tanking Archavon, you handsome devil. As you can see, you have him well positioned in the centre of the room where your crack team of feral druids are happily hammering Shred from behind their target.
2. Now he’s leapt away and demonstrated his masculinity with a tremendous fart. You went hopping eagerly after him with the trigger happy DPS and now you’re back in melee range, right inside the gas cloud.
3. You’re no fool! Quick as a flash, you back slowly away from him so you’re no longer suffering the 50% hit penalty and massive damage over time. You’re repositioning the boss and everyone can see what a hero you are!
4. Safely positioned! But what’s this? Kitty 1 is dead, Kitty 2 is taking massive AOE, and Kitty 3 is weeping like a baby because he can’t use attacks which require him to be behind the target without standing in the cloud. How did it come to this? Didn’t you say you could tank this fight? Unfortunately, it looks like you forgot rule number one! DON’T PUT HIS ASS IN THE CLOUD!
5. Let’s wind back the clock and see what you should have done. Archavon has leapt away and farted, and rather than running after him like a puppy in need of attention you run to the other side of the room.
6. Now you’re ready for him! Archavon doesn’t wipe threat, and you should be so far ahead of the DPS by now that even though they’re not going to hold back for a second, they don’t stand a chance of catching you.
7. Perfect! You’re positioning back near the centre of the room and the DPS are alive, happy and attacking from behind the target the way their mummies taught them to. You positioned him expertly, and you didn’t have to back slowly away once!
8. Hurrah! Archavon is dead. Once again, no warrior loot dropped. At least you got a couple of badges. Make sure you come back and kill him again next week!
TLDR!
I am terrible.
Awesome commentary!
Tldr? Its got PICTURES, I’m sure you can manage that.
Anyhow, this is a great illustration! Thanks for the humor and the clear explanation =)
Very nice explaination. I have yet to kill him unfortunately :( but this should help a lot. When i was tanking him last night he kept picking me up and throwing me accross the room. That was the first time i experienced that in the 3 fights i have had with him. Is there anything I can do to avoid that or am I out of luck and the OT will have to take him ??
Thanks for the help
Nice matter of explanation on this matter, and helping it by visual items. thanks!
never stepped into this instance but this sure will be in the back of my head once I’m in there.
Nice summary and guide, Thanks!
Thanks for this! I actually am a dps feral druid, and this is the most annoying aspect of this fight. I sure hope some tanks take the time to read this.
Now if only there were a way to make hotlinks in raid chat…
This is a pretty good write up, and it’s all true up to a point. That point being the first Lunge. You can run into threat problems after the first “Lunge” unless there’s a better way to do it than what I’ve been doing.
Basically, after Archie lunges for the MT, he goes after 2nd on threat list. Hopefully that’s your OT, but if it’s not, then your OT taunts and gets aggro.
After he throws you the MT far far away you have to taunt to get aggro back. This puts you at your OT’s THREAT level. Any huge threat lead you had before is gone. If your OT only has a 10k threat lead on the next dps then there’s a high likelihood after he “hops and farts” then you’re going to lose a lot of your threat lead. If he stands there and casts Rock Shards for 3-4 seconds then you’re DEFINITELY lose your threat lead.
Bottom line, you end up being limited based on how much threat your OT can generate. And since he’s often not taking anything except incidental damage, many OT’s have a big problem with this.
I didn’t mention the lunging and taunting because it’s a well understood part of the fight that I’ve never seen any tank get wrong. The gas cloud, on the other hand, I’ve only seen one tank outside my guild ever get right, so I thought it deserved further mention.
What you’re describing isn’t my understanding of how the fight works, but I guess it could be true. You seem to be saying that the Lunge itself is an aggro wipe, i.e. your threat is lost and now the second highest threat is the threat total. Even if this is true, the situation is easily resolved by simply taunting, again, once the leap has taken place.
I have never had this happen, because we just use two tanks and alternate (rather than one main tank who tries to keep aggro as much as possible), which ensures that one of the two of us always has a massive threat lead. By the time the tanks swap, this threat lead has not eroded.
If your DPS are doing like 5-6k I can see this being a serious problem, but to be honest if your DPS are doing that much you ought to get them to just relax. If they’re capable of doing 5k, they’re capable of stopping DPS (or at least capping their threat) during a tank transition or a leap.