Vaelastrasz

Vael is a dragon fight, so the boss will do breaths (tank keeps boss turned away, raid fights from his side), tail swipe, etc. However, Vael is a very unique fight - as soon as the fight begins, Vael will cast a buff on the entire raid that essentially gives you infinite resources - full mana, rage, and energy.

The main mechanic of this fight is that periodically, Vael will cast Burning Adrenaline on a player. Once they receive their first stack of Burning Adrenaline, they will begin accumulating stacks every few seconds. Each new tick will do successively more damage to you. However, Burning Adrenaline also grants you more damage and faster attack/cast speed with each additional tick.

The real risk here is Burning Adrenaline’s final mechanic - upon death, a player with Burning Adrenaline will explode, dealing a large amount of damage to all surrounding allies. The amount of damage done scales with the number of stacks detonated, and it also can cause a chain reaction of cascading explosions if it kills other players with BA.

The strategy for this fight is to have different stack locations depending on your role and situation. As your situation changes, you’ll need to move to your new positions. Cardinal orientation has the entrance along the south wall and the throne to the east. The main tank begins the fight on the east of Vael, turning him to face the throne. All other raiders begin the fight to the south of Vael - melee are right on Vael’s south side (his right), and casters + healers are stacked about 20 yards south of Vael.

NOBODY DPSes the boss until the tank has received BA. The tank stays in place for the duration of their BA. It’s important to ensure the tank gets the first BA because if they don’t have BA, they will not be able to hold threat against BA’d DPS. If a BA’d DPS out-threats the tank, they will die, because Vael is not tauntable.

Positioning

When a player receives BA, they need to immediately move to the designated BA stack position for their role:

  • For melee DPS, this position is to the north of Vael, simply mirroring their southern counterparts. Run directly through Vael to reach this position. BA’d Melee will need to stack together and watch their health, judging their healer’s capability to keep them alive. As you start teetering towards the edge of unsafe, run north to die.
  • For ranged DPS, this position is to the west (left) of your original stack. Spread out from each other, but maintain a separation of at least 10-15 yards, and stay further than that away from the non-BA stack. You don’t need to watch your health - as long as you’re spread out, you won’t explode each other, so just blast away.
  • For healers, this position is to the east (right) of your original stack. This moves you out of range of the BA’d casters but keeps you in range of the tank. When BA’d your primary job is to keep the tank alive, since they’ll be getting to dangerous stacks around this time.
  • Secondary tank(s) are stacked with the melee and simply DPS. Vael isn’t tauntable, so the only way for a secondary tank to take over is if they have BA and are second on threat when the MT dies.

Diagram

enter image description here

This fight is not all that difficult - each individual has fairly basic instructions - it’s just that these instructions are precise, and are different for each role. The real difficulty of this fight is making judgement calls about when to push or when to back off and die safely. If you play this fight too safe, you actually won’t have enough damage from BA’d DPS to kill the boss, but similarly, if your BA’d DPS play too aggressively they can kill all of your DPS early and cause a wipe.

When Black is active, whomever has BA with the highest threat will be rooted in place. The strategy mentioned above is basically designed around having a static tank anyway, so this shouldn’t really be much of a difference.

If running Black, the only way to ensure a clean tank swap is if the primary tank dies in position with the secondary tank already having BA and being second on threat (since Vael is not tauntable). Once the primary tank dies and the secondary tank has threat, the entire raid will need to pivot to adjust. Because of how risky this maneuver is, you should do your very best to ensure your MT never dies in a Black pull. Maximize external CD usage and keep a BA’d healer on them, if necessary.