Meet the latest Vault of Archavon loot Piñata, Toravon the Ice Watcher. If you beat on him long enough he’ll drop some ilvl264+ gear, and maybe even an epic mount. Unlike the other 3 bosses in VoA, Toravon only drops 3 pieces of epic loot, but who can complain..?
If you haven’t yet attempted this boss, I suggest you do so. Difficulty wise, he’s maybe a tad bit harder than Koralon and easily PuG’able.
The fight is really simple for the most part. As a hunter, your job is to DPS Toravon until the adds spawn, kill the adds, then resume DPS on Toravon. Rinse and repeat until he’s dead.
Before the adds spawn, white rings will appear on the floor. This is where the adds will emerge. If you’re standing near one of these white rings, then move. The adds do AoE frost damage, which can easily kill you if you take too much of it.
Since there’s a whole bunch of frosty puffs all around the room, the adds can be somewhat difficult to spot. You can spam tab target or create a /target Frost Orb macro to help with targeting. I found the easiest way to deal with them was just to keep a close eye on the white rings while DPSing Toravon, then mouse target the Frost orb as soon as it’s out.
If you pull aggro on the orb, then either kite it around if you can do so safely, Disengage or feign death. As I’d said, they can do some nasty damage if they get close.
I didn’t get any goodies from him last night, but a warrior in my guild picked up a nice pair of S8 boots, allowing him a decent head start on gear for the arena season.
Unlike Koralon however, this fight is not a showcase for Hunter DPS. There is a lot of target switching, along with a good deal of movement involved with this fight.
Tried this guy in 25 man with about 1/3 guildies and the rest puggers – I was healing on my Pally, and we just couldn’t get the guy down. I’m thinking (and my Recount Addon is confirming…) that the problem was that our ranged DPS just wasn’t switching.
It’s sort of the same feeling of frustration when one of Emalon’s overcharged minions pops when Emalon is at 10%.
On ten-man with 100% guildies, however, we had the wherewithal to have DPS assert the priority of doing Orbs over Toravon.
“Frost before Boss” doesn’t have the same ring as “Bros before hos,” but it works.
Frost before boss… that’s awesome!
I tried the fight last night in a 10 man PuG and we one shotted him. Being that I knew the fight, that made it really easy to prepare for, and pick up the orbs. As long as the tanks know when to trade off and the dps burns down the orbs, this fight is cake.
I got some free Relentless legs out of it too! 🙂
The 25 is harder just for the increased number of orbs; I heard in recent notes that they’re increasing the rate at which orb corpses despawn, which will help the visual clarity of when orbs are/aren’t up.
Interesting hunter tidbit: I decided to go with my well-loved BM spec for attempting this on 25 the other day, and we one-shot the big chilly dude. I attribute some of the success to my own facile targeting and nuking of the Frost Orbs – and I also thank King Krush. Turns out that pet avoidance works pretty well against the orbs’ damage, leaving pets free to help destroy orbs even faster. It was great seeing big red Krush using Dash to slam into the orb, and the frosty ball of doom evaporating a moment or two later.