Oondasta Detailed Strategy Guide

Table of Contents

• +1. General Information
  • 1.1. Health and Raid Composition
  • 1.2. Enrage Timer
• +2. Loot
  • 2.1. Armor
  • 2.2. Cloaks and Rings
• 3. Spawn Patterns
• 4. Overview of the Fight
• 5. Abilities
• +6. Strategy
  • 6.1. Tanking Concerns
  • 6.2. Dealing with Spiritfire Beam
  • 6.3. Piercing Roar
• 7. When to Use Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp
• 8. Corpse Running/Avoiding Wipes
• 9. Learning the Fight
• 10. Concluding Remarks
• 11. Changelog

Introduction

This guide is intended to provide a comprehensive description of the encounter with Oondasta in Pandaria. It is targeted at anyone who desires to understand the fight mechanics.

This guide is updated for World of Warcraft WoD 6.1.2.

Oondasta is one of two new world bosses inroduced in Patch 5.2. This boss is intended to be extremely difficult, and, according to Blizzard, it is only meant to be defeated by raid groups that are progressing on Heroic-level content.

The fight is not very complicated, but the tuning appears like it will be the greatest obstacle in the way of raids trying this boss.

Health	Raid Composition
	Tanks	Healers	DPS
872M	2	5-6	32-33

We do not know if Oondasta has a hard enrage timer. Oondasta has a stacking self-buff that causes him to deal increasing damage throughout the fight, which acts as a soft enrage timer.

Oondasta is located on the Isle of Giants, in the North of Kun-Lai Summit. He spawns in the center of the Isle of Giants.

We are unsure as of yet what the respawn timer of this boss is, but Blizzard have stated that this boss is meant to be rare, in a similar sense to Galleon, so we may find that he only spawns once or twice per lockout.

It is also worth mentioning that the tagging system for world bosses in Patch 5.2 is faction-wide. That is to say, as long as the boss is engaged by someone on your faction, all other members of your faction are eligible for loot if they engage the boss, regardless of whether or not they are grouped together.

The fight against Oondasta is not very complex. It is a single-phase, single-target fight during all of which you will simply be DPSing the boss.

Oondasta has a cone attack, a raid-wide damaging AoE ability and an ability that requires the raid to spread out. Additionally, Oondasta cannot be taunted, but tanks generate considerably more threat against him, thanks to a fight-specific passive ability. There is a tank-debuff that requires a tank switch.

Oondasta is immune to taunts. Tanks who attack Oondasta have 100% increased threat generation, thanks to Alpha Male.

• Crush deals a large amount of Physical damage to Oondasta's current target, and applies a stack of a debuff that reduces the target's armor by 25% for one minute.
• Growing Fury is a stacking self-buff that Oondasta applies to himself as the fight progresses. Each stack increases his damage by 10%. This acts as a soft enrage timer. A new stack is applied roughly every 30 seconds.
• Piercing Roar is a raid-wide damaging attack that inflicts a moderate amount of Physical damage, and interrupts any spellcasting. Getting interrupted by Piercing Roar also locks players out of that school of magic for 10 seconds. Piercing Roar is not instant cast, so this gives players some warning, allowing the to ensure that they are not in the process of casting a spell when Piercing Roar is cast.
• Frill Blast is a wide frontal-cone attack that Oondasta uses at regular intervals. It deals a massive amount of Fire damage to all affected players.
• Spiritfire Beam is essentially a chain lightning. Oondasta targets a random raid member with this ability, which deals a moderate amount of Fire damage, and then jumps to another nearby player within 3 yards, affecting up to a total of 20 players. With each new jump, the damage of the ability is increased by 50%, making it lethal after 2 or 3 jumps.

The strategy for defeating Oondasta is relatively simple.

• Have your tanks face Oondasta away from the raid. When one tank is affected by Crush, they should cease attacking the boss so that they do not generate any more threat, allowing the other tank to take over tanking the boss.
• Tanks must be prepared to avoid Frill Blast, the frontal cone attack that Oondasta casts.
• All healers and casters must watch out for Oondasta's casts of Piercing Roar. When Oondasta begins casting this spell, they should cancel any spell casts they are currently casting, so as to avoid being interrupted and locked out.
• The raid should spread out as much as possible around Oondasta, in order to prevent Spiritfire Beam from jumping to multiple players.

This is a stressful fight for tanks, as they cannot rely on their taunts for gaining or maintaining threat. Keeping aggro over DPS players (and healers) should not be a problem, but over-aggroing the other tank whenever a tank switch is needed can be a challenge.

We advise the tank who receives a stack of Crush to cease all attacks against the boss (while still facing him, of course) until the other tank has aggro.

Both tanks will have to promptly avoid the casts of Frill Blast that Oondasta makes use of. The frontal cone is very wide (60 yards), so caution is advised.

The most obvious solution to dealing with Spiritfire Beam is to have everyone spread out. With the 3-yard range of the ability, this is rather easy to do. That said, however, there is a good chance that there will be a very large number of players engaging Oondasta at once (due to the faction tagging system). This may cause spreading out not to be very feasible.

In case spreading out does not provide enough distance between players to render Spiritfire Beam harmless, we can provide two suggestions for alternative strategies.

• Have the entire raid stack in one location behind Oondasta, and have the player targeted by Oondasta quickly move out of the raid before the spell hits them. If this is done correctly, the spell should not jump to any other players.
• Assign a partner to every raid member, and essentially have the raid spread out in couples. This has the advantage of greatly reducing the number of players that need to spread out, therefore ensuring that you will not run out of room. The disadvantage is that with each Spiritfire Beam, a second player will always be hit.

Finally, there is one other way to handle Spiritfire Beam, should you find the above strategies unappealing. You can have the entire raid stacked up behind Oondasta, and have a Priest stand about 10-15 yards away from this group. This Priest must them immediately use Leap of Faith on the player targeted by Spiritfire Beam, thus pulling them out of the raid. Due to the cooldown of Leap of Faith, you will need at least two Priests in the raid group, so that they can rotate Leap of Faith to cover each Spiritfire Beam.

Piercing Roar is not very problematic in and of itself, but it is crucial that healers (and to a lesser extent, casters) are never caught casting a spell when Oondasta uses this ability. Getting locked out of spell casting for 10 seconds, for a healer, is very likely to cause deaths.

It is also worth mentioning that while the raid-wide damage of Piercing Roar (which cannot be avoided) is not very high to begin with, it will be very high by the end of the fight, due to Oondasta's stacks of Growing Fury. At this point, you will have to use healing and defensive cooldowns to survive.

We recommend using Heroism/ Bloodlust/ Time Warp at the start of the fight, when all players have their DPS cooldowns available.

Because the fight does not take place in an instanced environment, it is possible for dead raid members to release spirit and run back to the place where they died and resurrect. This is a good way for your raid to replenish its numbers. Keep in mind the following things:

• After 2 resurrections in quick succession, you will have to wait for 2 minutes before you can resurrect again.
• When you resurrect, you come back with 50% of your maximum health. It is best that healers are prepared ahead of time to heal you.
• It is best to group up (in ghost form) and resurrect at the same time, rather than each one individually. This gives you a better chance to recover.

If a large portion of your raid dies, remaining raid members should attempt to delay a wipe for as long as possible, to give the dead raid members a chance to run back.

The fight against Oondasta is quite simple. Tanks will have to manage their tank switches on their own, and while this may take longer than usual due to the tanks not communicating over voice chat, it is something that is absolutely necessary if the raid is going to succeed.

The greatest challenge to defeating Oondasta, however, will be proper spreading for Spiritfire Beam. This is something that your raid group will need to work on as a whole. It is very important that your raid talks to and ideally groups with any stray players of your faction that may choose to aid your group by engaging Oondasta. This is because these players' positioning can be devastating to your raid, if they cause Spiritfire Beam to jump to additional targets. Therefore, we encourage you to take the time to talk to any such players that you see and explain the strategy to them.

This concludes the Oondasta guide. As you can tell, this encounter is simple, yet intense. It will strain your healers and your DPS players, and your raid must have good coordination to defeat it. If you have any comments or suggestions, we would love to hear from you on our forums, or via e-mail.

• 11 Mar. 2013: Added alternative strategy for handling Spiritfire Beam, involving Leap of Faith; also accounted for Spiritfire Beam's range now being 3 yards.
• 28 Feb. 2013: Added loot items introduced in PTR 5.2 build 16650.

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