Ready Check: Yogg-Saron, pt II
Phase One
In Phase One, your goal is to render Sara vulnerable. However, due to Shadowy Barrier, you can not simply DPS her down. In order to move on to Phase Two, you drag the Guardian of Yogg-Saron over next to Sara, so that when it dies, its Shadow Nova does damage to her. It takes 8 Guardian explosions to kill her.
It's important to pay attention to the green clouds which are in the room. If you stand in the green cloud, you will cause additional Guardians to spawn. That's usually bad. However, if your DPS is sufficient that you want to spawn adds faster in order to get to Phase Two faster, you might want to have a tank swing through a cloud momentarily to get an extra Guardian.
There are two basic ways to do this fight. First, you can have your team run into the room, and trust them to skillfully avoid the clouds. The advantage to this is that you usually have to do less raid acrobatics to get the Guardian from the raid up to Sara in time for its death. The other method is to hang out by the door. Then, a so-called "ferry tank" will drag the add off to Sara in time for it to die. You should choose according to your raid composition and preference.
As mentioned in the abilities section, she has a series of buffs and debuffs that she casts on the Guardians and the raid. However, they're fairly easy to manage if your healers can toss affected raiders the occasional heal, and aren't nearly as much the focus of Phase One as controlling the Guardians. When you have "killed" Sara in Phase One, she immediately becomes a val'kyr and floats up into the air.
Phase Two: Summary
Phase Two is similar to the fight with Thorim, in that the raid must split up in order to defeat the boss. You'll have a group inside an illusory "room" and a group outside that room dealing with tentacles. There are three types of tentacles which you'll want to continually kill, while your "room" fighters are trying to handle their own challenges.
Phase Two: The Mind's Eye
We'll cover what it's like inside the room because it's very specific. As you fight Yogg-Saron and Sara in the outer room, black portal will open. Your melee DPS (and the occasional other if necessary) will all click on the portal. That takes them to a scene in the past.
Once there, they will attack NPCs which are mere illusions hiding tentacles. After you have killed all of the tentacles in the room, you will move on to the "brain room." This is Yogg-Saron's brain -- once you have adequately killed it (30%), you will proceed to Phase Three. For obvious reasons, it is important that your "Room team" be efficient and effective. Your Room Team will only be able to attack the brain for as long as the Induce Madness spell is being cast. If you fail to get out of the room in time, you will go Insane and kill your raid.
Make sure your "Room Team" all go into their portals at the same time. You may be splitting your Room Team into multiple groups, in order to get the brain down more quickly.
Keep your back to the laughing skulls inside the illusory room. These skulls will cast Lunatic Gaze on you, swiftly depleting your Sanity and health.
Phase Two: Out with Our Friend Yoggy
While outside in the real world, the "tentacle team" will be dealing with three different types of tentacles as well as the floating now-val'kyr Sara. Sara's abilities are a pain in the neck, but the most important one to keep in mind is Death Ray. If you stand in the Death Ray, you will die instantly.
Sara's next most important thing to keep in mind is her Brain Link. Two characters are joined by a shimmering beam. If the beam is red, you're too far apart and will start taking damage quickly. If the beam is green, you're fine. You control the color of the beam by staying within about 20 yards of one another. So, your raid will need to pay attention to these beams and stay reactive.
However, you can't simply clump due to Malady of the Mind. You will be afflicted with a brief Horror effect, like a Warlock's Death Coil. Once you're done, however, the Malady will simply jump to another nearby raid member. So you need to keep a base amount of distance.
So, that's great. What are you doing while you're out in the real world, dodging Maladies and getting Spock-like Brain Links? You're doing what you always do when you're fighting an old god -- you're killing tentacles.
There are three kinds of tentacles: crushers, corruptors, and constrictors. Your raid will probably have preferences about which to kill first. However, I favor Crushers as the most important tentacle to kill, since their Diminished Power will have such a huge overall raid effect. The rule, however, is to keep the DPS flowing. If you're burning a lot of time on travelling around to DPS, you may be losing overall DPS.
Once the melee team has gotten Yogg-Saron's brain down to 30%, you will enter Phase Three.
Phase Three: The Final Countdown
When you enter phase three, you should clump your raid up by Freya. You do this so that you can easily restore your Sanity by visiting her Sanity Well.
Phase Three consists mostly of Lunatic Gaze, just like the skulls inside the Mind's Eye, and adds. These adds are called Immortal Guardians. Since Yogg-Saron doesn't move or get tanked in any way, you can think of Immortal Guardians as being something for the tank to do.
Have your tanks pick up Immortal Guardians, and your DPS quickly bring them down to 1%. Once you get them to 1%, Thorim's Titanic Storm will kill them off. Without Thorim, you will be unable to kill the Immortal Guardians.
Again, keep an eye out for Lunatic Gaze. When it's being cast, you must turn away from Yogg-Saron until it's over.
Other than that, Phase Three is really just a tank and spank. Burn hard, burn fast.
Keepers?
Okay, so, this doesn't sound so great. In fact, it may sound very hard. But the good news is that the four Keepers that you have previously released are coming around to help you.
You talk to the Keepers on the way in, and each will supply aid and succor throughout the fight. The two most important, in my opinion, are Freya and Thorim. Freya supplies green Sanity Wells throughout the area, which will help your brain-addled raid restore their Sanity. Thorim, as we just mentioned, is key to killing the Immortal Guardians in the third phase.
Good luck, and good hunting!
Ready Check is here to provide you all the information and discussion you need to bring your raiding to the next level. Check us out weekly to learn the strategies, bosses, and encounters that make end-game raiding so much fun.
