Occu'thar is a deranged demon found within the western wing of the Baradin Hold raid instance. Released in patch 4.2, he offers a chance for both hardcore raiders and casual PUG players to get their tier 12 gloves and pants, as well as an assortment of Season 10 PVP gear. This is WoW Insider's Guide to Occu'thar.

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.

Before you engage the trash, make sure your whole raid is present and accounted for and ready to move as one group. Your entire raid group should stack on one tank, and then stand together for the pull. This is because the Eyes will each focus on different raid members and cast Gaze of Occu'thar, a minor-damage DOT that explodes for huge damage after 10 seconds. Due to this, you want to stack up and AOE them down before 10 seconds pass. Other than this, the Eyes of Occu'thar do nothing special.

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.

Unlike Argaloth's Meteor Slash, this ability does not share damage between everyone hit by it, meaning no one but your tanks should take Searing Shadows. As Searing Shadows hits everyone in a 60-degree frontal cone, you'll want one tank to stand with his back toward the back left corner of the room and the other tank to stand with his back to the back right corner. Once positioning and taunts are figured out, Searing Shadows is an easy mechanic.

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.

Due to Focused Fire's 12-yard radius, you should make it a point to try to stay 12 yards away from the nearest ally. You generally will want your healers to take the center of the room, while ranged DPS will fan out to the left and right. On 10-man, it's very simple to have Focused Fire casts that hit only one person. This is more difficult to do on 25-man, but you also have more healers to compensate for the damage coming in.

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.

As a result, you don't want these buggers to live for 10 seconds. As soon as the Eyes come up, you want to collapse to a predetermined spot and start a hard AOE burn phase. These little nuisances don't have a lot of hit points, so provided you stack well and have players who know how to AOE, this phase should be a piece of cake. Because everyone in the raid is being hit by the minor shadow damage DOT and there's a chance for a few Eye explosions, healers might want to use raid cooldowns like Power Word: Barrier or Spirit Link Totem near the end of the AOE phase.

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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The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new tier 12 armor!

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Filed under: Raiding, Cataclysm, Raid Guides