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Shifting Perspectives: Feral tactics for Well of Eternity and Hour of Twilight

Chase Hasbrouck
Updated ·7 min read

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!

As the great dragon crashed down, I turned and began padding toward the entrance to the shrine. The padding quickly became walking as I assumed my elven form, feeling the familiar weight of armor settle around my body. Brushing the sand out of my cloak, I turned to the figure who had silently watched us battle.

"Now that we've killed you," I began, "You can help us?"

"Yes. The path to the Dragon Soul is open. It must be retrieved if we are to have any chance of stopping Deathwing and saving our world. I will now take you there." He gestured, and a portal coalesced into existence.

I couldn't help myself. "Um, I know you're the Aspect of Time and everything, but wouldn't it make a bit more sense to just go warn the other Aspects about Neltharion before he betrays them? This seems rather roundabout."

He stared back at me, expressionlessly.

"Right. I'll just ... take the portal, and Shred something. Sounds good."

The Well of Eternity

Well of Eternity is the second of the new 5-man instances released with Patch 4.3, and it is full of Burning Crusade lore. (In my subjective opinion, it's the best of the three, which further proves that Blizzard needs to go ahead and release The Burning Crusade 2: They're Really On Fire Now.) After a quick intro fight with a demon, you'll meet Illidan, who will promptly enlist you, cloak you, and then lead you around as you kill demons and break things. After a short while, you'll meet Peroth'arn.



The first phase is quite simple. You will enter with 30 stacks of Shadow Walk, which will turn into 30 seconds of Shadow Ambusher, which will grant you some crazy damage. Just dodge the obvious void zones and do your thing. Assuming the other DPSers in your group are reasonable, you'll likely push him below 60% before the buff wears off, which triggers the "run away" part of the fight.

At this point, everyone gets re-stealthed and has to dodge some floating eyes for a while. With your feral movement abilities, this is pretty simple, but many groups just let themselves be found immediately to get it over with. Either way, he doesn't do anything new, so just finish him off and proceed to Queen Azshara.

Of course, you don't actually get to fight Azshara yourself (yay, lore), so this is a battle against her magi, who will spawn in twos. They fling quite a few spells around, but their damage output is mostly trivial for a good healer to handle. If your healer needs help, though, all the magi are stunnable with Maim, and most of the spells can be interrupted (but don't; you want to save your interrupt).

More important, however, are Azshara's spells. First will be Hand of the Queen -- a ghostly hand that will mind-control one of the players in your group. It has very little health, so just kill it quickly (or rage at your group when you get MCed and everyone ignores it ... seen that, too). Second will be Total Obedience, an AoE MC that thankfully has an 8-second cast time. You'll get a very obvious warning message, so just run over, Skull Bash her, and get back to what you're doing. Some groups will attempt to assign someone, but that usually ends in disaster, I find.

After some more cool cinematics, you'll end up grouped with Illidan and Tyrande and square off against Mannoroth and Varo'then.There's a lot of things going on in this fight, but thankfully, the NPCs will take care of most of it.

Unless your group is going for the achievement, you'll want to start off burning down Varo'then. Periodically, Mannoroth will cast Fel Firestorm, which works like Argaloth's did in Baradin Hold; just keep moving until the cast finishes. Adds will continuously spawn from a portal and attack the party. You won't have to worry about these, as Tyrande will kill them. At one point, however, Tyrande will be incapacitated by two Dreadlord Debilitators (you'll get a warning). Kill them quickly, and get back to Varo'then.

When Varo'then falls, he'll drop his sword. Click this -- otherwise, the rest of the fight will take forever (15 minutes ... not kidding). The sword will end up embedding itself in Mannoroth, enabling you to do crazy damage to him to reduce his absurd health pool. Once it gets low enough, he's banished, and you win.

The loot you can use (and there's quite a bit here):

Hour of Twilight

Once you acquire the Dragon Soul, you'll return to the present time and help Thrall get to Wyrmrest Temple in the last of the new 5-man instances. While it's cool to see bits of Dragonblight reused in an instance (and yes, I pulled the jormungars for the joke), it's overshadowed by the fact that the entire instance is an escort quest. Ugh. Luckily, it's very easy. I take back what I said about End Time; this is the simplest instance I've ever seen (and the worst of the three new instances).

After blitzing through some quick entry trash, you'll face Arcurion, a wimpy frost elemental. Nuke him down while avoiding the frost circles on the ground, which represent target points for incoming boulders. If one hits you, you'll take some damage and be rooted; just use Dash or Stampeding Roar to break the root, and continue. Try to Skull Bash as many Hand of Frost casts as you can. He'll trap Thrall in a tomb at some point; you're supposed to break him out, but it doesn't seem to make too much difference one way or the other. Finally, he has a soft enrage at 30% HP, so save Survival Instincts for that point.

More riding. More escorting. More boring trash. Apparently, Thrall's never purchased a flying mount. Yawn. He will throw down a buff totem for each fight, which will give you a small stacking buff, but it's only really helpful if the tank will park the mobs near it. Eventually, you get ambushed by the worst "assassin" ever, Asira Dawnslayer. Asira has only two moves, a ranged silence and a smoke bomb, which also does a bit of damage. Just kill her, and stop, drop, and roll when necessary.

More escorting, a long, unskippable cinematic (yay!), and some slightly more interesting trash (kill the slimes; they slow down Thrall's movement speed if they reach him), until finally you reach Wyrmrest Temple and Archbishop Benedictus. Yeah, he's the bad guy. What, you thought you were getting milk and cookies?

Benedictus is actually somewhat challenging, though not as difficult as he was on PTR where her abilities were one-shotters. Several times during the encounter, he'll summon a wave that travels along the platform. Either dodge it or hop into Thrall's Water Shell (only available in the first half of the fight). He'll also throw down void zones and spam cast Smite or Twilight Blast. As long as you can dodge the zones and waves and help the healer out by interrupting a few Smites/Blasts, you'll be fine.

Unlike Well of Eternity, there's not much here for ferals:

Get the message? Get to Raid Finder and Finish The Fight(TM). More loot!

Looking for the latest and greatest in feral cat druid guides? Shifting Perspectives has the answers! Check out our cat 101 for Cataclysm. Also don't miss gearing your cat for Firelands raiding, addons for cat druids and raiding strats for feral cats, as well as our feral cat Firelands boss strats.