WoW Insider's Guide to Atramedes
by Michael Gray 
Jan 4th 2011 at 8:00PM
You should note the position of the 10 gongs in the room. These interrupt Atramedes's Searing Flame ability, which is a huge key to the fight. Each time you use a gong, Atramedes will then immediately destroy the gong. Once you've interrupted Atramedes, he's be stunned for about 5 seconds and take additional damage from your attacks for that time. Note that you only have 10 gongs, so they serve as your effective "end point" for the fight if you run out.
General strategy
There are two phases to this fight, an air phase and a ground phase. The phases are repeated until either your raid or Atramedes is dead. The ground phase lasts 80 seconds. The air phase lasts 40 seconds.
Phase 1
- Sonar Pulse places four glowing discs on the ground, which you must avoid. If you touch the pulse disc, you will stack up Sound. They might spawn on top of you; get away as soon as they appear. Ranged characters tend to have more trouble with this than melee, due to pulse movement.
- Modulation places a huge pulse of sound through the room. You can't avoid it and must simply heal through it. It also puts a little Sound on everyone in the raid.
- Sonic Breath picks a target and gives you 2 seconds of warning. Once that cast time is finish, the breath will follow its target with a swath of flame. For this reason, have your ranged characters clump together. When the Sonic Breath picks a target, that person goes in one direction while everyone else goes in the other.
- Searing Flame will do damage to the entire raid, stacking a debuff that causes you to take additional fire damage. For this reason, it's key to use the gongs to interrupt the flame. Note that you only have 10 gongs, so they serve as your effective "end point" for the fight if you run out.
Atramedes will also drop fire at random on the ground. He will also drop new Sonar Pulses, which will explode with little graphic missiles when hit.
Overall, your raid will need stay on the move during this fight, avoiding the fire and Sonar Pulses.
Other resources
Ready Check shares all the strategies and inside information you need to take your raiding to the next level. You might also be interested in our strategy guides to Cataclysm's 5-man instances, and for more healer-centric raiding advice, visit Raid Rx.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ghengie Jan 5th 2011 6:21AM
If you have the intention to write a guide to an encounter, I suggest adding information on positioning and movement too. At the moment this is a condensed tank spot tactic, which does not add relevant information to the raiders that have already downed it, while lacking important information for the players that will attempt this boss in the upcomming weeks.
Regarding positioning, Atramedes hitbox is very large which enables the ranged group to stand at the gongs, while tanking the boss in the middle of the room.
We start the ranged group at the gong nearest to the spawn point, after every airphase we move one gong as we won't need more than 1 gong each groundphase.
During the airphase everybody moves to the oposite side of the room. This way the kiter will drop all fire away from the ranged position for the ground phase.
The airphase kiting is done by our feral druid as he is useless during the airphase, with his dash ability he is able to take over early by hitting a gong (opposite the side our ranged group stands during the ground phase) with our boomkin or shaman with instant ghostwolf as back-up in case the feral is picked first as kiter.
The soft enrage (running out of gongs) is almost impossible to reach, if a raider is very high on threat, don't be scared to hit a gong early. Waiting for Searing Flame to be casted can be lethal as it also adds sound. If you feel comfortable with the timing you can actually pre-stun Atramedes by watching the ability timer on your add on, tho this can be tricky as I already wiped us once when the timer was a few seconds off. I'm only going for this when a raider calls out he needs a gong as he will die otherwise by the first Searing Flame tick.
Ghengie Jan 5th 2011 6:26AM
*an edit, the "high on threat" ofcourse should be "high on sound"
Pottsy11 Jan 5th 2011 7:41PM
I'm finding that on this boss our group is having ALOT of trouble with searing flames. It is an Australian group with ping varying from 300-600 between players, and have found that waiting to see the actual searing flame cast has been fatal on multiple occasions. We are now pre-emotively interrupting it, however this often results in an early stun and a wasted gong :(
^ wishes he had American ping.
Pottsy11 Jan 5th 2011 7:42PM
Preemptively*
yoake Mar 10th 2011 9:34AM
The fire breath in the air phase (Roaring Searing Flame) follows anybody that uses the gong. Ideally you want a rogue/druid to interrupt the Fire Breath in the air phase. They can use sprint to outrun the flames.
You want to kite the Roaring Searing Flames to the sides, so the middle is empty. You have to adjust positions if the room is covered in flames.
You will get 1 or 2 ticks of Searing Flame, even if you interrupt Searing Flame on time. This is normal and can be very tricky in 10 mans (a lot less in 25mans).
Make sure to download the new Atramedes addon (called: Atramedes) at www.curse.com. This addon tracks the soundlevel of all people.
If you guys are stuck on this encounter, you can also go to: http://25man.com/cata-guides/atramedes. The guide over there is pretty comprehensive (shortcut: 25man.com/atramedes)