Guardian of the First Ones Strategy Guide for Sanctum of Domination

• Bloodlust/ Heroism on pull, keep the boss near a core's circle on the ground, and keep the boss faced away from the raid.
• Spread out with circles on random players ( Threat Neutralization).
• Dodge the slow-moving floating orbs ( Suppression Field).
• Dodge the boss's randomly facing frontal ( Disintegration).
• Tanks aim Sunder away to get hit alone and taunt swap after each one. On heroic, tanks aim Obliterate at the raid to split the magic damage, and alternate soak groups for each cast.
• Everyone move into a core's circle along with the boss after at least one cast of Purging Protocol at 0 energy, in order to stop the casts and charge the boss back up.
• And quickly run away from the core when it is depleted and starts to explode ( Meltdown).

This fight is a straight up DPS and healer check. The mechanics are simple, but you have to do a ton of damage, and it does a ton of damage to you. The overall idea of the fight is that the boss's energy drains over time, and it starts to wipe you once it hits zero energy, but you can charge the boss back up with the energy cores around the room. You only get to use each core once though, so you have a limited amount of time before it just blows you up, hence the DPS check.

Fight Strategy

Use Bloodlust/ Heroism on pull, and have the tanks bring the boss to the edge of one of these circles on the ground, while facing it away from the group. The rest of the raid should stay close to the back of the boss.

The boss starts with a good amount of energy, and while the boss has energy to drain, there are four mechanics to deal with:

• If you get marked with an arrow and circle around you, quickly run it away from other players ( Threat Neutralization). It does damage to everyone within the circle after a couple seconds, so you have to be quick.
• Dodge the slow-moving sentry orbs that move randomly around the boss. Standing under one does light DoT damage and pacifies you, so they are more of an annoyance than a threat ( Suppression Field).
• Dodge the boss's randomly facing frontal ( Disintegration). Getting hit by it does a ton of damage, puts a nasty DoT on you, and stuns you for a few seconds. This is really rough to get hit by and it comes out really quick, so get the reactions ready.
• The boss occasionally casts a combination of abilities on the current tank. On normal, the only ability is Sunder, which does a ton of physical damage in a small circle around the tank and massively increases damage taken from other Sunders for a few seconds. This is why the boss should be faced away from the group. As soon as Sunder hits, the current tank should step aside and the other tank should quickly taunt the boss and move into position for the next Sunder. On heroic, there is an additional ability that gets mixed in, Obliterate. This cast does a ton of physical damage to the tank, but also does even more magic damage in a small circle around the tank. This magic damage can be split between multiple players, so when Obliterate is cast, the tank should quickly move to where it can be soaked by the raid. However, this also applies a debuff to everyone it hits, massively increasing damage taken by other Obliterates for a few seconds. So a different set of people needs to soak the second Obliterate in the combo. You should pre-assign halves of your raid to soak each one.

When the boss gets to 0 energy, it starts chain casting Purging Protocol, which is a long cast that does a ton of damage to the raid. Each cast that goes off massively increases the damage of the next cast, so it will wipe you pretty quickly, but you may be able to live two or more with raid cooldowns in order to stretch the fight out a tiny bit longer. The only way to stop these casts is by moving the boss into a circle around one of the energy cores, which starts charging the boss back up. As soon as you do this though, the core starts blasting anyone outside of its circle with a ridiculous amount of damage ( Unstable Energy), so everyone needs to already be in the circle when this starts and stay in the circle until the charging is over ( Radiant Energy). The raid still takes significant damage from the core inside the circle though, and the boss starts casting its regular abilities again, so this is a scary situation. The raid should all try to stay toward one edge of the core's circle, so that the players who get targeted by the other circles have a place to spread out to. When the core runs out of energy, it explodes after a couple seconds, doing a ton of damage to everyone and lethal damage to anyone too close to it ( Meltdown). So everyone needs to quickly run away from the core, ideally toward the edge of the next core's circle where this whole process repeats. So drain, core one, drain, core two, drain, core three, drain.

Once you have used all three cores, there is no way to stop the Purging Protocol casts at zero energy, and you just have to hope you do enough damage to kill the boss before it kills you.

Guardian of the First Ones' encounter features an optional achievement: Knowledge is Power. Completing this achievement and every other optional achievement found within the Sanctum of Domination's encounters will reward you with the Glory of the Dominant Raider meta-achievement, along with the Bracer of Hrestimorak to teach you the unique Hand of Hrestimorak mount. To learn more about how to complete this encounter's achievement or any of the others in the raid, please visit our meta-achievement guide below.

We have encounter journal pages for each of the four difficulties, which you can access by clicking the links below.