Summary

This is an interesting encounter as it has a unique bite mechanic. A mechanic that you will have to understand in order to successfully complete this encounter. It’s similar for both 10 and 25 man so here’s how it works: the boss bites one of your raid members, that raid member gets a buff that increases their damage by 100% and that raid member now also heals himself for 10% of the damage done. He kind of starts acting like a virtual vampire.

And as we all know vampires have an unstoppable desire to feed and bite innocent raiders infecting them as well. It’s kind’a like a disease spreading around, with each new vampire having to bite someone else after a minute of getting bitten.

So.. let’s assume you do get bitten, you gonna look shadowy, you gonna get a DBM message saying :”Essence of the Blood Queen on you” and you gonna have this debuff called : “Essence of the Blood Queen”. Basically you are a vampire, you got 1 minute of extra dps in you but after that 1 minute ends you will have to infect someone else.

On your action bar you will have only one usable ability, the bite ability. It will be located as the leftmost ability on standard action bar, on the place whre you initially had 1 keybinded . Well whatever key you are using to fire the cannons in Strands of the Ancients is what you need to pres in order to bite someone.

If you don’t bite someone within 15 seconds you get mind controlled for the rest of the battle, like this guy, which is a bad thing. If you do bite in time you will still not be cured, biting will only buys you one more minute of extra dps but after that you will need to bite again. And so on. Every minute , another bite.

So to understand the bite mechanic is not really that hard, what’s really more challenging is to actually organize the bite order properly before the encounter and then to apply it during the encounter.

So here’s how you do to organize it. The idea is that you don’t want 2 guys trying to bite the same target, for that will result in one getting mind controlled, also you want your top dps to have priority in the bite order, and thus you need to set up a bite order. So you either set up a bite order or you have your raiders frantically running around trying to bite whatever they can. Which is not a good ideea.

Another way to approach this is to have infected raiders on one side of the boss while keeping normal members on the other side of the boss, although more easy to organizes this is also a questionable strategy because ranged need to stay spread out and they can’t spread out and be clumped off on the same side of the boss.

So, the bite order, although it requires more preparation, is still your best choice. Here’s how it works. Your 1st dps to get infected will be the one with most aggro following the two tanks. So you can actually decide who will most likely be your 1st infected dps by boosting the aggro of 1 or 2 of your top dps with the use of tricks of the trade and misdirection.

We had 2 rouges high up and one of them got bitten. So, after a minute you have bite 1 occurring, melee dps 1 bites melee dps 2. So you got 2 infected.

On bite 2, melee dps 1 bites melee dps 3. Melee dps 2 bites ranged dps 4. You got to have ranged spreading the bite also. So now you have 4 ppl infected. Each needs to bite again.

On the 3rd bite melee 1 bites 5, 2 bites 6, 3 bites 7, and 4, (the ranged one) bites 8. Now you have 8 ppl infected. On the 4th bite, all these 8 will bite 8 others and you will have 16 infected. At 16 pop bloodlust/heroism and dps as hard as you can.

If you noticed the transfer to ranged was on the 2nd bite, but you can have that done as early as the 1st bite if you think that’s better. Is just that with melees they don’t need to stay spread out, so there is less running and it’s easier to bite another melee.

Why? Because as a melee you can have a list of melee ppl that you need to bite and, before the encounter you note their location in your raid unit frames.

Whether you are using the default one and just you just dragged the frames to your screen for this battle or if you are using a custom one, doesn’t matter, just note their names and location.

When the time comes, simply click on their name in the raid frames and just spam the skill while moving in the area where the melee are standing bunched up.

Another way to do this if you don’t want to use raid frames is to make a macro. /target nameofraider. And have a macro for each of the bites that you need to do.