Ready Check: Flame Leviathan, Pt III
Fighting Flame Leviathan
When you get to the end of the courtyard, having blown up all four towers and the Storm Beacons, there is a final gateway. It's guarded by an Ulduar Colossus and a pack of iron dwarves on each side.
When you kill the last of those trash mobs, Flame Leviathan will come storming out, and the fight happens immediately.
There are two ways I'm going to discuss doing this fight, so let's start by looking at Flame Leviathan's abilities.
Flame Vents - An interruptable cast that does massive damage to everyone around it.
Battering Ram - Like Siege Engines themselves, if you get in front of Flame Leviathan, it will ram you. You'll get knocked back and get a debuff that means you take double damage.
Gathering Speed - As the fight progresses, he will stack this buff. It allows him to go 5% faster, and will stack up to 20 times.
Missiles – Everything in the zone that's exposed (meaning, not riding in a vehicle) will take ongoing damage every second. Everything. So if you fall out of your vehicle, you will need heals to stay alive long.
How Flame Leviathan Fights
When Flame Leviathan busts out of the gateway, it will immediately pick a random Demolisher or Siege Engine to chase. Don't worry -- there's a raid announcement when that happens. The boss'll chase that vehicle for about 30 seconds, and then pick someone new to chase. It immediately turns around to follow that person instead.
If it catches the person its chasing, it rams them to do additional damage.
At this point, it's worth talking a little more about the Salvaged Demolisher's ability to launch people. You can actually stand on Flame Leviathan. The Demolisher person-catapult ability is how you do so. If you're so inclined (and we're going to talk about how to do this in a second), you can launch the Demolisher's passenger on top of Flame Leviathan. That person can then attack the missile turrets, which will also have effects on the boss. You'll have impeded mobility once on top, though, so it's best for a ranged class to be the one to go up top.
With that caveat let's talk about the two strategies.
Diagonal Kiting
The room in which Flame Leviathan first appears is a box. We'll label the corners of this box as A, B, C, and D respectively.
When the fight first starts, you should have everyone lined up in corner D. (Make sure everyone's on the inside of the last pillar area, or you'll lose people when the "gate" appears.
Flame Leviathan will immediately pick a person and start chasing them. Choppers should rush in front of the boss, and drop tar in front of him, and Demolishers should set that stuff on file.
Everyone else should get behind Flame Leviathan, and attack him from behind. The target remains in that starting spot at "D," waiting for the boss to reach him.
When Flame Leviathan switches targets, the new person targeted should immediately about face, and head for corner A. Everyone else immediately gets behind the boss, and opens fire. Then, when the boss switches targets the next time, the new target heads for corner D, and everyone gets behind the boss.
This pattern repeats indefinitely. The idea is that the person being targeted by Flame Leviathan should kite him into a corner (A or D, switching between the two). Everyone else gets behind the boss so that they can DPS, and be ready to take off to the new corner at a moment's notice.
This is my favorite method to do the fight. It's fast, easy to explain, and is worth an achievement called Shutout.
The Longer Way
The longer way works similarly. However, instead of kiting Flame Leviathan from A to D, you kite him from A, to B, to D, then to C. You're drawing a big perimeter around the whole area.
The reason you do it this way is to actually purposefully shut down the boss from time to time, giving you a little bit of a break. Whenever the Gather Speed buff is up to 5 stacks, have your Demolisher hurl a passenger up top. The passenger gets on top of Flame Leviathan, and kills the turrets. (You have to kill 2 in Normal Mode, and 4 in Heroic Mode.) Depending on how much stam and survivability your ranged DPS has up there, you may also need to add a healer up top with him.
When the turrets are all down, Flame Leviathan goes into Systems Shutdown. This will give your folks a much-needed break, as well as increase damage done to Flame Leviathan by 30%.
Summary
Flame Leviathan is actually a pretty easy fight. It sounds more complicated than it is because no part of it is based on your actual character or class. Instead, everything is based off the vehicle, with its health scaling according to your gear's iLevel.
Ready Check is here to provide you all the information and discussion you need to bring your raiding to the next level. Ready Check appears twice a week, with writers Jennie Lees and Michael Gray.
