Keli’dan the Breaker is the final boss in Hellfire Citadel’s Blood Furnace. BF is the second instance you can enter in Outlands, and it isn’t particuliarly tough in normal mode, as long as nobody starts doing stupid stuff.
Mining in HFP while listening to LFG Channel, I joined a group as their healer for the place just because I was bored. High level group, between 65 and 70, easy run. One single glaring mistake on the final boss pull though, and well worth explaining.
The first figure shows how the general area is set up: The boss in a big circular room, which you reach from an antechamber you will have cleared before (with two groups of 2 felguards and 1 orc caster each, tricky if you’re low level and not careful BTW). The two rooms are separated by a wall with a passage in the middle (dark grey in the picture), two pillars (in black) left and right of the passage break Line of Sight and help forming a chokepoint.
The boss will aggro as soon as the five trash warlocks surrounding him are all dead. In normal mode, they cast about 1000 damage shadow bolts, but they also apply a funny magic debuff which adds 1100 to any shadow damage inflicted to the players.
That can get pretty nasty after a while, and to add to it, Keli’dan casts volleys of shadow bolts hitting for 2000 each. The debuff should probably get cleansed as soon as possible, if not, make sure you keep one of the trash warlocks alive until the debuff expires on the rest of the party.
The Pull should, in the ideal world, have the tank grab the warlocks at the chokepoint, and after he has a good hold on all of them (some work for a warrior, very easy for a paladin), they can be AoEd down in short order.
If you have a hunter, placing a freezing or frost trap to protect a squishie healer in the Antechamber is a good idea. Melee DPS should remember to remain within the healer’s Line of Sight, there is enough room for that unless something is being intentionally careless (or stupid, if you prefer).
Once the last warlock goes down, the boss will get annoyed and run to you. In order to avoid having the whole party sprayed liberally by Shadow Volley, the tank should turn Keli’dan around so that his back is now towards the party, at the same time avoiding breaking LoS (again) with the healer.
As an aside, on most bosses except when they have some kind of tail damage (like dragons), turning the boss away from the rest of the party is probably a good practice. Side note: it’s interesting to note that most tanks in FFXI are perfectly used to positioning their target in a way that has their party safe, whereas in WoW this usually remains the mark of the better tanks only.
The boss also does a burning nova explosion which deals a respectable chunk of fire damage to anyone nearby (melee and even the tank if he’s low level should run away) after shouting “Closer… come closer and burn!”. If everyone is out of range he will revert to a shadowbolt volley instead. Note that in heroics, apparently the whole party gets teleported to him so you have to run away as fast as you can when that happens.
Anyway, with these few points in mind, Keli’dan is easier than Vazruden & Nazan in Ramparts and can be vanquished in short order.
How to ruin it:
Last night, we had a warlock + felguard with us. He was the lowest party member at level 65 (still above the instance, no issue there), didn’t listen when told to fight in the Antechamber, and followed the tank (a level 70 druid) into the boss’ room.
About a split second after the druid pulled from range and started retreating to the chokepoint, the lock sent his felguard to intercept one of the middle warlocks, followed by a Cleave which grabbed the one furthest from us.
Of course he and his felguard were positioned behind one of the pillars, out of my LoS. Of course, both their health started dropping pretty fast. Losing a lock and / or a felguard before the boss fight is usually pretty bad. So after running to get into Line of Sight, and tossing some heals, I had two warlocks on me, the druid was focussed on going to grab the one beating on the lock, and one of the two mages, having lost LoS on the normal DPS target, started nuking one of mine and grabbed aggro within seconds.
Of course, given our levels, we recovered from that. However, had the healer been a priest with a level 61-63 group, the “classical” range for Blood Furnace, the warlock’s initial Felguard intercept would most likely have caused a wipe.
Key lessons:
- Don’t break a multi-mob pull unless you know you can get your single assigned target separated cleanly
- Don’t break a healer’s Line of Sight unless you like bandaging or repair bills
- Don’t be Leeroy Jenkins and stick to the discussed strategy. If the strategy fails and you have a better one, you can always suggest yours.
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