Boss 6- High Priestess Arlokk

[skrallik]

Arlokk is the sixth boss located in the Zul Gurrub Instance. Her aspect is that of the "panther".

Arlokk's Abilities

Arlokk has several abilities that she uses in the fight. They are as follows:

Summon: While Arlokk is alive, mobs of Panthers will be summoned around the area you are fighting her in. These mobs will consist of high level elite and non-elite panthers.

Stealth: At 3 points during the battle Arlokk will stealth and vanish from the fight. This leaves the party time to deal with the Panthers.

Hunters Mark: When this mark is placed on a player all panthers will attack that person until it fades. It lasts approx. 2 minutes. While a pain to the marked player who will need healing, it actually makes it very easy for other players to find the panthers and groups them up nicely for AOE effects.

Strategy

Once the gong in the Temple which Arlokk resides in is hit, a rush of panthers will attack the raid as well as Arlokk. The ranged elements of the raid should be by the Gong while the Main Tank should be tanking in the middle of the room. For the first part of the fight, all DPS should be centered on Arlokk.

The healers need to watch out for Arlokk's "mark" and be sure to spam heal anyone unfortunate enough to recieve the debuff. DPS should be centered on Arlokk until she stealths, and not attacking the panthers because this battle relies heavily on downing Arlokk quickly.

After the first stealth, the party should center on killing the panthers as quickly as possible. When Arlokk returns, the panthers will spawn at an even quicker rate and need to be kept under control (AoE's, flash bombs, fear, etc, etc). All I can say here is that Frost Nova is your friend and should allow you some degree of crowd control with these mobs. Arlokk should stealth one more time before the final engagement with her.

One very simple way to deal with the adds in this encounteris to have 2 people assigned to tank them at either place where the panthers come out of. A warrior is best, but a paladin with consecration can do the job just fine too. Just have them there the whole encounter and heal them, they don't take too much damage and you can forget about the panther adds.

On Arlokk's third repop; the raid needs to down her as fast as possible, simply because of the speed at which the panthers will begin to spawn. At this point it is a race for DPS to down Arlokk, before getting overrun with all the adds that will be popping throughout the last part of the fight.

Some people have noted the use of "Green Whelp Armor" for this fight as it will put attacking mobs to sleep for 30 seconds. It may be a considerable investment for regular leather wearers of the raid to pick this item up. We have also heard of many groups that either get druids to tank in bear form with this armor, or warriors that use it for this fight. Either way it makes the battle, much easier

[roward]

Hm may I add something ? If you kill a panther, 4 will respawn. That's why we die with about 80 pather on all our healers. Just put a tank at each end of the "tunnel" where they spawn, tanks won't have to kill panther, but in the contrary, keep them a bit aggroed. If we start killing them, things get worse and worse. Put the healers in the middle of the room, where they'll be able to heal everybody, tanks on the rear, and the main tank. Raid would need to be just in front of the healers. And things should go as smooth as possible

[Slyvar]

We used to use the "catch the panthers as they spawn" tactic, but blizz fixed it so you can't do it any more. Basically they made them harder to aggro and made the "mark of arlokk" work. So even if you catch a few, most go past you and when she marks someone, they all charge for them anyway.

[Prestwood]

Well, I haven't seen this 4:1 respawn described before, is there a source for that? I have seen various other negative consequences assigned to killing panthers (e.g. they respawn with more health) but nothing very authoritative. Our current setup killing panthers _only_ when Arlokk is invisible makes sense to me, but it clearly wasn't working on Saturday.

A lot of tactics for this fight say "Two paladins..." which rules those tactics out for us until we get BC. There does seem to be a theme in alternative tactics of off-tanking panthers deep in the panther cages so they can't obey the Mark due to LoS restrictions. If we /can/ do this it would certainly make the raid much simpler but I suspect that someone will now tell us that tFO tried this before my time and it had some problem I haven't thought of.

[Slyvar]

Prestwood: Actually we haven't tanked the panther's right in the cages, but if the panthers dont have los to the raid I can't see that the healers would have los to the warriors.

Sounds like you went there on Saturday and had trouble with Arlokk? She is one of those encounters where you can use exactly the right tactics, but if something goes wrong or someone makes a mistake it can really have a big effect. Also the dps need to be really hot on arlokk - if the fight goes on for too long then the group collapses under the weight of all the panthers.

What, specifically, happened on Saturday? If we know, we can probably let you know what we normally do to get around it.

The tactics posted on the forum aren't always exactly what we do btw, we haven't always kept them updated for the things we tweaked as we went along...

[Grul]

We wiped with her on 1% on Saturday, so weren't doing too badly.

The raid had lots of new people in it, so not everyone knew exactly what to do (some people didn't hug the wall enough and were killed by cleaves, fearing at the wrong time, not fearing or not AoEing at the right time etc.).

Lots of people had to leave after that attempt too, but I'm sure she would have gone down next try, Arlokk not a big problem in my opinion

[Prestwood]

As Grul says, we wiped on Arlokk a few times (three maybe?) and it was the breaking point for the Saturday raid. To me, both times I've reached Arlokk it felt like the least under control of the fights in ZG. Last time Arlokk went down with a struggle, this time she just kept beating us. But that's a sample of 2.5 visits. I'll go there a few more times, and I might come back to this thread with a different impression.

[roward]

d**n, didn't know Blizz had fixed it. Well too bad then I guess we just need more aoes!

-Roward

[yavimaya]

This fight benefits from class balance. Having two locks and two priests to fear the panthers when she's visible (on an organised rotation, also flash bombs are very nice) and two mages to AoE them when she goes eases the fight along nicely.
There is a bit of luck in who the mark targets, better if it's on one of the mail wearers (I don't know whether the hunter's can clear if by feigning, but they shouldn't) better for them to have it than a priest as the panthers aren't really that much of a bother for them, but can rip a clothie to pieces pretty quickly.
DPS have to be a little careful not to steal aggro (as she stuns one tank and theoretically should move on to the 2nd tank) and tanks have to be quick to pick her up once she re-appears to stop her cleave hitting the group, but apart from that it's not normally a fight we struggle with.
We generally take her down in when she re-appears after her second vanish, although we have done it before the second vanish when DPS has been high.

I certainly think Thekal is a tougher fight, and although I couldn't make it along for Saturday's raid, our failure on Friday was mainly down to losing some dps early from aggro stealing *cough* Skaz *cough* and then losing a number of healers when she re-appeared in the group and got off a cleave, and then someone re-aggroing her back into the group briefly. The second time went okay from what I can recall and we got her down no probs.

[Slyvar]

Arlokk will always seem a bit out of control as well I think Prestwood - those hordes of panther's just make it seem chaotic even when things are going well! I know my screen in that fight tends to end up as a mass of people and panthers. I rely mainly on watching the tank targeting bars to know what to do. When arlokk is there I fear and dps her, when she dissapears it's time to aoe. One thing that has helped in the past as well is having a tank in with the raid group who spends time going round and aggroing all the panthers. Of course you loose one dps person for that, so we generally just go for the nuke approach.

[Kurse]

Couple of things -

In terms of keeping the tactic updated, the green whelp armour bit should go.

Also about the mark... As it happens on the last attempt I was assigned to healing the marked person and then I got the mark myself. What I noticed was I had about 2 panthers attack me while I had the mark but about 10 panthers on me from normal healing aggro while someone else had it immediately afterward. It was only one time and I can't really recall being marked other times, but it still seems to me the mark doesn't really do much.

[gnomula]

I have to agree with you on that actually, Tabara. Whenever I have a healing assignment for the marked person, they take damage fast for 1-2 seconds at the most, before someone else gets aggro and they all pile onto them. Usually when I am on marked person assignment, my biggest contribution is fearing the groups of mobs that form when Arlokk's visible (which I actually get enough time to concentrate on for once), and spamming.

[shinnjin]

The mark just makes all spawning and already spawned panthers go for that target. If someone builds more aggro than the marked person, they will pull them off. Kinda like mocking blow, or something. *shrug*

Just my two bits.