Raid Guide: Battle for Erebor T1
The Battle For Erebor Raid – Walkthrough
With U10 came a bunch of new instances and raids.
There are 14 different possible ways to run this raid. I will only be focusing on the two most popular ways.
When you first enter the instance you run straight and keep going until you go through a portal. Once through the portal you will be at the top of a flight of stairs that leads down to the arena. Run 3/4 of the way down the stairs and wait on the last landing. Do not go right to the bottom as there is a chance this will “bug” the instance.
This is what you will see:
On the left there are 3 banners and on the right there are 3 banners. To start the quest you will need to choose 2 banners. Each banner aids the mobs in some way …
T1 METHOD 1 – CATAPULTS & INFERNO
GROUP 1 – Suggested
1 TANK
1 MIN (HEAL) or RK (HEAL)
1 CPT
1 RK (DPS) or 1 MIN (WAR) or LM – These can switch to heals in emergencies
2 HTR
GROUP 2 – Suggested
1 TANK
1 MIN (HEAL TANK) or RK (HEAL)
1 MIN (HEAL HEALERS AND TANKS)
1 CPT
2 CHP
METHOD 1 – CATAPULTS AND INFERNO
You will choose the Catapults Banner (to the right) and the Inferno Banner (to the right).
THE MOBS
Each troll (Vadok and Laugshat) has a coloured shield swirling around him (see below).
The blue shield provides a -75% debuff to melee skills. This means that if a melee character attacks they are only doing 25% of their possible damage. Ranged and Tactical DPS are ALWAYS targeting the troll with the blue shields.
The red shield provides a -75% debuff to Ranged & Tactical skills. This means that if a ranged or tactical character attacks they are only doing 25% of their possible damage. Melee are ALWAYS targeting the troll with the red shields.
In addition, if the trolls are too close to each other they receive a Brotherly Love buff so the tanks must keep them separated.
The trolls also have a mean frontal area of attack. You should always attack from behind … tanks, keep them turned.
POSITIONING & TARGETING – STRATEGY
The two tanks will run in and use Fray the Edge to pull the trolls to positions 1 and 2 respectively. Once they run in, the battle is on.
Get away from the base of the stairs as there are two dragon heads that shoot fire (see picture below) constantly and will make BBQ of you in short order.
The healers should be at position 3. This allows them to reach the areas near both trolls (important later).
The ranged DPS should start at position 4. In the off chance that they draw aggro it will be away from the healers. Do not start attacking until the tanks have established aggro.
The melee classes will start at position 2. Do not start attacking until the tanks have established aggro.
Once the battle has started the shield colour around the trolls will periodically change. The trolls do not swap, but their debuff does. One person in the group should be calling out when this happens.
At this point the Ranged DPS and the Ranged Tactical will move to position 5 (running along the path between the squares). The melee will run to position 1.
The healers stay on their group, they do not switch. The tanks stay right where they are, they do not switch.
CATAPULTS
Starting partway through the fight, the Easterling catapults begin bombarding the arena. You’ll be given a couple of seconds warning before pieces of the arena are shelled.
It has been my experience thus far that the catapults start when the health of the trolls is roughly at 600K each. It might be a combined 1,200K.
CATAPULTS STRATEGY
The picture above shows what the floor will look like when a catapult is about to strike (there will be an orange circle on the floor outlined by a red box) – See #1. If you are anywhere inside the red box you will get hit. This deals damage and stuns you.
If you notice the pattern on the floor it is laid out in tiles. The tiles form squares (see #1,2,3,4). You should start out standing at the junction of 4 boxes (exactly where I am standing in the picture). This allows you to quickly move away from a tile if it lights up with the red box and orange circle.
The above screenshot shows all the possible locations that the catapults can strike (red boxes). They will never strike 4 adjacent boxes at the same time. So if you stand at the junction, you can take one small step in any direction and avoid the catapults.
INFERNO – STRATEGY
Towards the end of the fight the Easterlings set the entire arena ablaze. There is nowhere that is safe and now the race is on.
The actual mechanics that start inferno have to do with the combined health of the two trolls. Once the combined health reaches 650K, the inferno will start.
There is nowhere to hide … don’t panic !!! At this point the screen will have flames as well as the catapults. This can be graphic intense on your PC so you may want to dial down your settings a bit to prevent lag.
The raid should burn both trolls down to 350K health each. This way they are roughly equal before the inferno starts. If one group is dealing damage faster than the other, slow down.
The best strategy is to keep doing exactly what you were doing before the inferno started.
T1 METHOD 2 – CATAPULTS & BLOOD BROTHERS
GROUP 1 – Suggested
1 TANK
1 MIN (HEAL) or RK (HEAL)
1 CPT
3 HTR
(could swap out a HTR for a DPS RK or LM)
GROUP 2
1 TANK
1 MIN (HEAL) or RK (HEAL)
1 CPT
3 CHP
(could swap out a CHP for a DPS WRD)
CATAPULTS STRATEGY
Same as above (see Method 1).
You will choose the Catapults Banner (to the right) and the Blood Brothers Banner (to the right).
BLOOD BROTHERS
For every 1% health the trolls differ in, they get an increase in damage, from 1.5x at 1%, all the way to 10x at 10%.
POSITIONING & TARGETING – STRATEGY
The two tanks will run in and use Fray the Edge to pull the trolls to positions 1 and 2 respectively. Once they run in, the battle is on.
Get away from the base of the stairs as there are two dragon heads that shoot fire (see picture below) constantly and will make BBQ of you in short order.
The healers should be at position 3. This allows them to reach the areas near both trolls (important later).
The ranged DPS should start at position 4. In the off chance that they draw aggro it will be away from the healers. Do not start attacking until the tanks have established aggro.
The melee classes will start at position 2. Do not start attacking until the tanks have established aggro.
Once the battle has started the shield colour around the trolls will periodically change. The trolls do not swap, but their debuff does.
At this point do nothing. Stay on your original target and ignore the debuff. The damage you do will be less, but it is far safer than running across the room of catapults. This is a slow and steady wins the race approach.
The healers stay on their group, they do not switch. The tanks stay right where they are, they do not switch.
BLOOD BROTHERS – STRATEGY
Many groups fail this because they rush through it … this one is not a race, it is an exercise in patience and strategy.
The key here is to keep the health of the two trolls within 1% of each other. What is not clear … Is it 1% of actual health or 1% of starting health?
Theory 1 – 1% of actual health:
When the trolls both start they have 849,546 morale each. This means that if they get to be 8,495 apart in morale or they start dealing more damage.
There is a common misconception that you should keep them within 10,000 morale of each other …
This does not work …
Simple math tells us that at 500,000 morale they need to be within 5,000 morale of each other.
At 300,000 morale they need to be within 3,000 moral of each other.
To accomplish this:
1) Put the two tanks as Target Assist. This way the whole group can see the morale of both trolls at the same time.
2) No one should be attacking with skills that do big damage, bleeds, etc. This is NOT a race. You have to go really slow.
3) One person in the group (the caller) is designated to call out when one group should slow down. If one group is doing more damage than the other, the caller will yell out to slow down (go on auto attack) or to stop doing damage (target themselves [F1 by default]) to prevent accidentally doing damage. The caller will then tell them when to resume attacking.
Theory 2 – 1% of overall health:
Troll 1 – 80% (639,837) of max health
Troll 2 – needs to be between 79% (671,141) and 81% (688,132) of max health
The max they can be apart will always equal 8,495 morale.
To accomplish this:
1) Put the two tanks as Target Assist. This way the whole group can see the morale of both trolls at the same time.
2) No one should be attacking with skills that do big damage, bleeds, etc. This is NOT a race. You have to go really slow.
3) One person in the group (the caller) is designated to call out when one group should slow down. If one group is doing more damage than the other, the caller will yell out to slow down (go on auto attack) or to stop doing damage (target themselves [F1 by default]) to prevent accidentally doing damage. The caller will then tell them when to resume attacking.
4) Go to your UI Settings and scroll down to Vital Bar Text Display and change this to Percent. All people doing damage and the caller should do this.
Once you have changed this it will display the morale as a percentage. At the start each troll will have 100%. As you do damage the percentage decreases. Do not let them be more than 1% apart.
I reiterate … slow and steady is the key to this method.
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