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Two Bosses Enter: Chromaggus vs. Shade of Aran

Elizabeth Harper
Updated ·4 min read


Welcome to another day, everyone! This week, WoW Insider celebrates the middle of the week a little differently than the rest of you -- by locking two World of Warcraft raid bosses into an arena and only letting one walk away. In our round of fantasy deathmatches, two bosses will enter, but only one will get to leave. And the best part of the entire affair? You get to watch from the sidelines and tell us who won!

This week we'll be considering a fight against Blackwing Lair's Chromaggus and Karazhan's Shade of Aran. Curious about how these two fight -- or ready to voice your opinion on which would come out ahead? Read on!




Chromaggus is the second to last boss in Blackwing Lair and he can be quite a challenge. First off, he does a not-to-laugh-at amount of melee damage, which is increased by occasional states of frenzy, spiking his damage up into the range of certain death for a player-based raid. At 20% health, he'll enrage for the duration of the fight, doing even more damage. But this is hardly Chromaggus' only source of power -- Chromaggus will also hit anyone in line of sight with two of five breath attacks and any of his five afflictions. The breath attacks are randomly chosen out of a possible five and will rotate throughout the fight, hitting anyone within line of sight of Chromaggus. They include:

  • up-front fire damage

  • nature damage over time as well as armor reduction

  • up-front frost damage as well as an 80% attack speed reduction

  • fire damage over time (can stack)

  • 6-second stun

There are five possible afflictions that Chromaggus will cast intermittently. If a player gets all five debuffs, game over -- they turn into an elite Drakonoids that, in my experience, are happy to wipe the floor with any raid group. They include:

  • fire damage over time, which heals Chromaggus if the target dies

  • nature damage over time as well as a reduction in healing

  • reduced movement and casting speed as well as a mana drain

  • fire damage increased by 100% (painful with the wrong combination of breaths)

  • an intermittent stun

And to top all of this off -- Chromaggus is highly resistant to magic. However, there's still hope for Shade of Aran in this fight, because while Chromaggus is highly resistant to most schools of magic, he'll be highly vulnerable to one school. His resistances rotate throughout the fight, making it an interesting matchup for a caster like the Shade.

The Shade of Aran can be found in Karazhan. Instead of relying on melee combat, he's a powerful magic user -- and like any good mage, he has relatively low health and armor, but has a high capacity for damage. In his magical arsenal are:

  • frostbolt, doing frost damage with a 3-second slow

  • fireball, doing up-front fire damage

  • arcane missiles, a channeled spell doing arcane damage

  • chains of ice, a 10-second root

  • slow, which reduces movement and melee attack speed for 10 seconds

  • an AoE counterspell which locks down a school of magic for 6 seconds

Every 30 to 35 seconds, the Shade will use one of his special abilities at random (but never the same twice in a row):

  • flame wreath, a fire AoE that's dangerous for a player-based raid, but in a one-on-one fight like this, would just be a fire AoE

  • blizzard, a frost damage AoE with a slow

  • super arcane explosion, which is just what it sounds like -- a lot of arcane damage

At 40% health, he'll summon 4 elite water elementals who will hurl waterbolts -- at least until they despawn in 90 seconds.

At 20% mana, he'll polymorph his opponents and stop to drink for 10 seconds to restore his mana, followed by a pyroblast. (If his drinking is interrupted -- say, if Chromaggus is immune to polymorph) -- he'll just use a potion to bring his mana up and follows it with the same pyroblast.

After 12 minutes, he'll berserk and summon Shadows of Aran, who have various high-damage AoE abilities and will quickly wipe a player raid.

With both bosses' abilities described, it's now your turn -- tell us which of them you think would emerge victorious from this fight! But remember, this isn't just a mathematical exercise! Even though Chromaggus is in a lower-level dungeon, we'd like you to consider him to have approximately the same power as Shade of Aran.