6.2m health(10-man) / 25.1m Heroic

Shadow Crash: Does AoE damage and leaves a patch of caster goodness.

Searing Flames: Nasty AoE, needs to be interrupted.

Surge of Darkness: General buffs himself and must be kited or Tank CDs used.

Mark of the Faceless: will target a ranged person and the afflicted person will damage anyone near them. Any damaged in this manner will heal Vezax for a big chunk of health.

Aura of Despair: prevents normal mana regeneration through out the fight. You can destroy the crystals flying around the room to get mana. These crystals drop a cloud on the ground, which will convert your health into mana.

Tank & Spank until he casts Surge of Darkness. Then stop all DPS and let the tank kite him around. This is a great time for the casters to take advantage of the clouds for mana regeneration.

All casters should stay clumped up near the staging area. A shadow crash will ALWAYS target a range person if there are 6+ (2+ in 10-man). So you always know where it's going. When the crash is launhed, all ranged move left until lands.
If you get Mark of the Faceless, you need to immediately RUN TO THE RIGHT!



3 interrupter rotation to take care of all the Searing Flames. If one of those gets off, it's a wipe.

I'm not sure Judgement of wisdom works on him. The source I read listed Judgement of the Wise (self effect only), Glyph of Seal of Blood(Maybe), Spiritual Attunement, Shamanistic Rage,Mana Potions and Aspect of the Viper as the only ways to Regain Mana. It has been confirmed that Evocation, Shadowfiends, Innervates, Replenishment, Lifetap, Divine Plea, Judgement of Wisdom, etc. do NOT work.

Another issue is the move "Mark of the Faceless", a debuff he places on random targets. The target of this debuff does 5,000 damage a second to all allies around them, and for every player they hit with this, the boss recovers 100,000 health. I believe the best solution for dealing with this is by spreading out and leaving an open area for the melee.

bumpage

We may have to try this a lot before we see success on this fight. It's simple in theory but if any little thing goes wrong, it will turn into a wipe real quick.

If this approach is a problem (Mark of Faceless usually is with the ranged dps cus of all the chaos of avoiding the shadow crashes and then running back to get the black buff, he always winds up healing), it can be done alternatively by scattering the ranged dps in pairs.

Positive- it eliminates Mark of the Faceless failures unless someone is REALLY REALLY bad.

Negative - Less utilization of shadow crash buff since two ranged will always be sharing theirs, leaving the rest of the ranged dps lacking.

This alternative method is a slower kill, but it's more likely to be successful in the long run. We overcame the Negative by using a more conservative dps rotation and only going to our full rotations once in the shadowcrash buff. For instance, I only casted Flameshock and Lavabursts until I got a shadowcrash, then I switched to my full dps rotation by throwing in lightning bolts between the FS and LvB.

As we got better, we changed it up and had our ranged dps split into two groups on either side of the boss. So instead of being in pairs, we were in two smaller groups rather than one big group. Our strat involved the healers with the melee, and they got all the green clouds. If we really needed it, they would save us one cloud.

This is the fight I like to call the Raid Team Builder.

Everyone learns really quickly who the weakest link for the ranged DPS is.

Although to truely utilize the 'all ranged stack' strategy, it really depends on NOT kiting during Surge of Darkness. Which is a seperate issue now that DKs got beat over the head with the nerf bat...

When properly executed, Vezax still ends up with a tick or 2 of healing from each mark, but anymore then 2, and the person causing it needs to rethink their raiding ambition.

Mana using dps can wait until they are in a Crash before casting anything. There really is no reason NOT to. More damage and less mana. The only possible reason for casting outside of a crash is to try and inflate your DPS #'s, but that won't work anyway.

The 3 priorities for casters on this fight in order are:

1 - Move your ass to the RIGHT as soon as YOU get the mark.
2 - Side-step to the LEFT to avoid the crash, then side-step into the patch.

and a distant 3 - dps the boss.


DBM & BigWigs both yell at you if you get the Mark. I personally use PowerAuras. I have it put a big black square over my entire toon area. Very clear indication I need to move my rear. ;p

With all the melee we run with, and with our usual 7 healers, I really don't think we'll need to bother mana from clouds either. Though we should break at least one to avoid hard mode.


And yeah...for any wondering if I said that if you can't move away with Mark then you suck?? You're right (as a raider anyway).

There will always be times when I don't move out of something fast enough because I got tunnel vision or just didn't pay enough attention. I try to adjust ... I rarely die in the same fire twice, but if you want me out of your raids just ask.

Everyone will do it occasionally.

Healers generally have their eyes glued to the health bars. As they should.

Melee are making sure they are behind the boss and keeping up whatever priorirty list they have, and trying to see -anything- around the mass of other people on top of them.

Ranged on the other hand have no real excuse. S-Priests & Afflic Locks have a slim excuse, but they should have some sort of DoT timers where they can easily see what needs to be refreshed.