WoW Insider's Guide to Occu'thar
by Josh Myers 
Jul 6th 2011 at 2:00PM
When you zone into the post-4.2 Baradin Hold, the first thing you'll notice that last patch's Demon Containment Unit trash have been deactivated. The now defunct Destroyed Containment Unit stand silent in the hallways, leaving room for you to engage this patch's new trash, the Eyes of Occu'thar. If you've learned anything from Cataclysm raiding, it should be that trash mobs will do everything in their power to kill you, and it's in your raid's best interest to be prepared. These optical oddities are no different.
Occu'thar
Following Baradin Hold/ Vault of Archavon tradition, Occu'thar is a boss of few mechanics and should provide little challenge to a well-geared and competent raid group. He has 23.7 million hit points on 10-man difficulty and 71 million on 25-man. With his 5-minute enrage timer, you should expect your DPS on 10-man to average around 15,000 DPS, with 25-man having a slightly more forgiving DPS requirement of around 14,000 per person. For 10-man, my group killed it with two tanks, three healers, and five DPS, though two good healers should suffice. For 25-man, we used two tanks, six healers, and 17 DPS, but those numbers are also not required.
Searing Shadows
Occu'thar's first main ability is called Searing Shadows. Searing Shadows is the reason you need two tanks for this encounter. A 2.5-second cast, Searing Shadows hits everyone in a frontal cone for massive shadow damage, and then increases their shadow damage taken by 100% for 30 seconds. Due to this, your off tank will taunt as soon as the main tank receives Searing Shadows, and then the main tank will taunt back once the off tank gets debuffed. This continues until Occu'thar is dead.
Focused Fire
The second ability Occu'thar uses is Focused Fire. In true wannabe-Beholder style, Occu'thar will turn around and fire giant eyebeams of death at a random player. This leaves a huge and very visible patch of pink energy on the ground, which will tick for large amounts of fire damage every 1 second for 12 seconds. In our 3-minute kill, Focused Fire was used 10 times, so expect this ability to be used around every 18 seconds.
As far as I'm aware, Occu'thar cannot cast Focused Fire on melee. If he can, the easy strategy to deal with this would be to have melee stacked on one side of the boss, and have them run through to the other side on Focused Fire casts. Focused Fire is the main source of raid damage in the Occu'thar encounter, so do your best to keep your distance from allies and run away from the highly visible cast.
The Eyes of Occu'thar
If you've survived the trash leading up to Occu'thar, you're already prepared to deal with his third and last mechanic: the Eyes of Occu'thar. Approximately once per minute, Occu'thar will summon Eyes of Occu'thar for every member of the raid. Just like the trash at the beginning of the instance, they will cast Gaze of Occu'thar on their chosen raid member to deal minor DOT damage for 10 seconds. At the end of that 10 seconds, those Eyes left alive will explode for around 25,000 damage to every raider.
The last thing to remember about the Eyes of Occu'thar phase is that it will always be immediately followed by a Focused Fire. Since everyone is stacked in the add phase, it's of absolute importance to be ready to spread to your original positions as soon as the add phase ends. Personal cooldowns should be used to mitigate incoming damage, and this is probably the optimal time for resto druids to blow their Tranquility. This transition from Eyes to Focused Fire will be the most healing-intense part of the fight, and if you can get through it easily, there's no reason you cannot down the encounter.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Manawa Jul 6th 2011 2:09PM
Great guide! Thanks for helping us through.
I hate encounters that make healers make up for stupid... while it may be the truest challenge, it is so arbitrary.
Pyromelter Jul 6th 2011 2:22PM
Isn't that... every encounter?
Saeadame Jul 6th 2011 2:35PM
I guess the point is that in some encounters healers CAN'T make up for stupid. Like, if someone does something dumb it is completely impossible to save them/the raid. I'm not sure if that's better, but it means there's less of the healers struggling to prop up people who are being dumb.
Apple Jul 6th 2011 2:56PM
Instant death mechanics make it impossible for the healers to save you, so that's an example.
Also, that crazy toxic dragon in Sunwell Plateau that permanently mind controls anyone hit by its breath. Et cetera.
Telwar Jul 6th 2011 2:11PM
Well, I have to admit, I'm shocked that they aren't forcing melee to be in front of him half the time.
gewalt Jul 12th 2011 9:44AM
surely by now you are capable of watching the timers and know when you have to step in his face and when you don't have to be in his face. that boss has been out 9 months now.
Thiron Jul 6th 2011 2:12PM
Downed it today in 10-man with 2 healers, dps were about 13-15k.
The most annoying thing is definitely focus fire right after the adds...
kumquat Jul 6th 2011 2:45PM
Yeah... If my math is right, 23.7M health on a 5-min enrage timer means that raid DPS needs to be at least 79K/sec. If you're in a 10-man and 5 of them are DPS (with 2 tanks and 3 heals), that means the DPS need to do at least 15.8K each -- and that's assuming the tanks do 0 damage, when it's more likely they'll be doing somewhere between 5K and 9K. (If there's 2 healers and 6 DPS, the load will be even lighter.) So I think the 10-man DPS requirement isn't nearly as steep the article suggests.
Josh Myers Jul 6th 2011 3:32PM
You are quite right, actually. I just double checked my math and had a number wrong in the boss' health. Changing that now.
sveltekumquat Jul 6th 2011 4:06PM
Aw, look at you, with your reading of comments and editing and stuff! You're swell, Josh of the Myerses.
I think it's even less than 15K too. :) I'm an English major so this could be totally wrong, but it's 79,000 DPS (absolute minimum) on 10-man, right? (23.7 mil divided by 300 seconds) So if we assume the tanks are each doing, I duno, say 7K, that's 65K left. Split among 5 DPS, that'd be 13K. And if there's 6 DPS, it'd be less than 11K. I realize I'm not including stuff like the eye-murdering phases and junk, so that'll bump those required numbers up a bit. But still, it suggests that it's pretty manageable for any group that is at least Z-dungeon geared. (Though I agree with other posters that heroic dungeon gear and PvP gear prob ain't gonna cut it.)
emberdione Jul 6th 2011 2:16PM
Alternate Strat that worked for many of the guilds on my server:
Keep all ranged and melee in one big group, within melee range. Keep them on the opposite side of the boss from the tanks. (The two tanks and everyone else forms a triangle.)
When he does focus fire, shift left. (Or right, whatever, just make sure your tanks shift too.) This nullifies the group up mechanic, for the adds, allows healers to aoe heal, and keeps thing clean.
To compare, it's alot like the Theralion phase of V&T. Ranged clumps up and moves left when the boss casts the puddle.
emberdione Jul 6th 2011 2:18PM
To back this up, my guild, who spent 2 hours previous wiping on Shannox, managed to down him on our second try. The first try on of our tanks dc-ed, so...
Shinae Jul 6th 2011 2:46PM
My group did it the same way last night. Everyone but the tank stacks up for the whole encounter. That way, we all know exactly where the Focused fire pool is going to land. As long as everyone shifts left as soon as the boss turns to cast it, raid damage is minimal.
I can see why the article suggests spreading out for Focused fire; but because you need to stack for the eye-adds, you might as well stack up for the whole time which avoids having to move quite so much.
Cheb Jul 6th 2011 2:53PM
Sounds like what we did. We made a triangle, with the tanks on one point and the dps alternating between the other 2. It's a lot easier to aoe heal and get the eyeballs when everyone's already grouped. We wiped a couple times before trying to spread out, but people would run out of range of heals, people wouldn't move in fast enough - grouping the dps and heals helped a lot. We ran 3 10 mans, all a mix of mains and alts, and the first group wiped twice, then got it, and the other 2 groups one shot him.
SmokeTheBear Jul 6th 2011 3:04PM
This is essentially what we did, too. We didn't move the tanks, but we kept everyone basically moving in one big group the whole time. There's a delay between the appearance of focus fire and the first tick of damage, and if everyone moves quickly, only a couple people with latency issues will take a tick or two of damage.
We marked one person with a blue square, in case people got spread out at all, so that we could migrate back to that person as soon as possible, and once we got that dance figured out, we downed the boss.
Srslyyeswai Jul 6th 2011 3:56PM
Pugged this last night at 2am, 25 man. We had the tanks face him towards the back wall and put a raid marker at his butt.
Ranged, heals spread out and melee does their thing.
When the eyes are released, we all grouped up on the raid marker (on his ass) and aoe'd everything down. I lolswiped 3 times at most and they were dead. After the eyes are dead, we spread out and the focused fire pool would always be where we were all standing. We'd take some damage getting out but at least the healers had something to do :)
Super easy. Just stack for the eyes.
dmrobertson2 Jul 6th 2011 2:18PM
This thing is also a very good gear gauge. The DPS needed is about equivalent to a low end 70% 359+ gear + 30% 346/353.. Just having Heroic gear on won't cut it, you'll get him down to about 25 percent and thats about it. Season 9 PVP gear need not apply to a pug either, the missing crit/Hast/Mastery that is taken up by Resilience is about as bad as bein in 346's.
Other than that it is a very fun fight, very movement oriented and mechanicy.
Dragis Jul 6th 2011 2:24PM
It really comes down to AOEing down the eyes, and in 10 man this might be restricted by your classes. We found it was much less punishing to go in with two healers and have our Disc priest go shadow for the extra Mind Sear.
If you can kill the eyes, it's just a move and tank swap fight. Cake.
ghola Jul 6th 2011 2:27PM
The tank that is currently occupying Occy does not get an Eye, but the OT does. At least thats how it went for us in 10man last night.
bean Jul 6th 2011 2:29PM
Occu'thar was BUGGY for us last night. Focus fire on the tanks, multiple focus fires out at once, and (my favorite) focus fire DURING Eyes of Occu'thar. Hard to burn the eyes when we spend half the time running away.
We managed to get a moderately clean run to finally down him, but it wasn't pretty.