Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priesting the End Time heroic
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen comes from out of the shadows to bask in your loving adoration. He is also scientifically proven more beautiful than boomkin blogger Tyler Caraway.
Recently, I've found myself playing World of Warcraft more and more. It's all because of my new shadow priest I finished leveling on Horde side. Even more specifically, it's because of the new 5-man heroics in patch 4.3. There's nothing I like more than fresh content.
The first of the three new 5-man instances is called End Time. It's got a great concept: You travel forward in time to a post-apocalyptic Dragonblight nightmarescape. In this (soon-to-be) false future, Deathwing was not stopped and the maddened Echos of faction leaders roam a destroyed world. With treasure. As a level 85 shadow priest, it's your duty to travel to End Time, beat up the baddies, steal their loot, and ignore all the terrible time paradoxes your action undoubtably causes.
There are five different bosses in End Time. Your party will randomly face two of four different Echoes (Baine, Jaina, Sylvanas, Tyrande). After beating the first two bosses, your party will teleport to the Bronze Dragonshrine to face off against the dragon Murozond in what is arguably the most fun 5-man fight of the entire expansion.
The four Echoes
Echo of Baine, the twisted champion of Thunder Bluff, fights you on a small handful of islands floating in a pool of lava in the Obsidian Dragonshrine. Periodically, he'll destroy one of those islands. You'll have to move on to one of still-remaining islands when he does this. And be quick about it -- every moment you're in lava, you get another stack of a debuff. Use Dispersion to limit the damage you take.
Baine also has a chance to drop the Time Traveler's Leggings, a pair of i378 crit-plus-haste legs. The Leggings are not unique to Baine -- they have a chance to drop from any of the four Echoes.
Echo of Jaina, the cry-happy leader of Theramore, is found in the Azure Dragonshrine. She has two attacks you need to know about. The first, Frost Blades, consists of three blades of ice that will stun you for 5 seconds if they make contact with you. The second, arguably more important attack is called Flamecore. It creates an ever-growing bomb that you need to walk across to detonate. The act of detonation only causes mild damage, so shadow priests, with our Power Word: Shield ability, are very well suited for Flamecore duty. (If Flamecores are allowed to explode on their own, party-wide damage will be much more severe.)
Defeating Jaina has the chance to award you the powerful i378 Jaina's Staff. She also has a chance to drop the Time Traveler's Leggings.
Echo of Sylvanas, arguably the most physically attractive hellishly twisted specter of pure hate energy in the instance, is headquartered in the Ruby Dragonshrine. She has a handful of attacks that can hit party members who are close to you, so stay at least 10 yards away from other players when you can. The most notable mechanic of the fight is the Calling of the Highborne phase, where Sylvanas summons ghouls and becomes immune to damage. Your party absolutely must single-target one of the ghouls (often, your tank will mark the location of the ghoul to be killed during or prior to the fight) and destroy it before it reaches Sylvanas. Triple-casting Mind Spike works very well here when followed up by Mind Blast. There's really not enough time to see serious damage from your DoT spells, so skip them for this phase.
Echo of Tyrande, located in the Emerald Dragonshrine, is the final of the four random bosses. There's not much to the fight except situational awareness. First, stay outside the inner ring of Dark Moonlight -- being a ranged caster allows us to avoid that mechanic. She'll fire off a stun attack called Moonlance, which heads toward your character in a straight line before splitting off into three directions. Otherwise, your goal is simple for this fight: DPS her and don't stand in the bad.
The Echo of Tyrande has a chance to drop the Whisperwind Robes, a great i378 chest. This is in addition to the loot common to all four of the random bosses.
Murazond
For shadow priests, staying alive in the final fight of End Time is simple -- we merely need to stay out of the little swirly areas of death and doom. Simple, that is, so long as Murazond is DPSed down in quick order. Void zones will spawn faster and faster as the fight progresses -- something of a soft enrage.
The complicating factor of the fight is Murazond's giant, clickable hourglass. It effectively resets the fight. Your cooldowns are reset; your positioning is reset; void zones are cleared; the dead are resurrected. The only thing that doesn't reset is the boss's health. For this reason, you want to be as aggressive with your cooldowns as possible. Don't wait to use your Shadowfiend and Dark Archangel. Pop your trinkets ASAP. Use Lifeblood or Berserking. Leave nothing on the table.
If your group includes a mage or shaman, they're likely to use Bloodlust (or its equivalent) immediately when the fight begins. Its expiration is a great cue to use the hourglass and reset the fight. If you (and your party) successfully exploit their cooldowns, then you'll down Murozond in no time.
Murozond has a pair of terrific drops. You have a chance to get the Robes of Fate, a i378 hit-plus-crit chest piece. You can also get the Mantle of Time, a pair of spirit-plus-haste shoulders.
... and don't forget the quests!
On your first run-through of End Time, you'll be able to accept and complete a couple of quests. The first quest, called Archival Purposes, requires you to beat two of the Echo bosses in the instance. When you turn in the quest, you have your choice of two different i378 items: a spirit-plus-haste Crescent Wand or hit-plus-mastery Archivist's Gloves.
The second quest is titled Murozond and is completed by finishing the instance. Your reward for doing so is a great i378 helm, the haste-plus-spirit Cowl of Destiny. They're great, guaranteed rewards that will put you one step closer to Raid Finder greatness.
Are you more interested in watching health bars go down than watching them bounce back up? We've got more for shadow priests, from Shadow Priest 101 to a list of every monster worth mind controlling and strategies for raiding Blackwing Descent.
