Lady Inerva Darkvein Strategy Guide for Castle Nathria

• Before pulling, assign half of your DPS to each marked small add for interrupts.
• Tanks keep the boss toward the middle of the room and taunt swap at two stacks of the Warped Desires debuff.
• Ranged players stay spread out around the room and soak red circles.
• Players linked with beams need to despawn the red orbs by linking all three orbs with the beams at the same time.
• When the adds spawn, the assigned DPS need to chain interrupt the small ones, and the big one needs to be tanked.
• Drain each filled container when the boss switches focus to the next container.

The Lady Inerva Darkvein encounter is a single phase fight where the boss's four abilities cycle through being empowered. Each ability's power level corresponds to one of the four anima containers in the room that fill up over time. When a container fills up to level two or three, the corresponding ability will power up to the same level. You can interact with the containers to prevent them from filling up. However, the boss focuses one container at a time, making it fill up faster and preventing it from being drained. You will have to deal with higher levels of each ability at some point in the fight, but the empowerment order and timing is always the same.

The four base abilities are as follows.

• The first ability is for the tanks. It is a big physical hit on the boss's current target that also applies a stacking DoT debuff ( Warped Desires). The tanks just need to taunt swap when the debuff falls off of either tank, which is around two stacks.
• The second ability is anima bottles that the boss occasionally throws around the room ( Bottled Anima). These bottles need to be caught before they hit the ground by having a player stand in each of the red circles on the ground that show where they are going to land. If you do not catch a bottle, it will explode on the raid for a ton of damage, so have your ranged players stay spread out all around the boss to have better coverage of the room.
• The third ability is a bit of a weird one, Lesser Sins and Suffering. Occasionally, 3 red orbs spawn around the middle of the room. They constantly do damage to the closest player, and they explode on the raid after about a minute, but they can be despawned. The only way to do this is with beams that link three random players together while the orbs are active. These players need to position themselves so that their beams are hitting all three orbs at the same time, by having each of the players stand slightly behind a different orb. This instantly despawns the orbs and the beams, and you are good to go.
• The fourth ability is probably the most important one. Occasionally, three random players get a red circle around them and a yellow mark above their head. These players need to move close to the boss without being in each other's circle, because the circles explode after a few seconds and spawn an add where each player is standing ( Unleashed Shadow). There will be one big and two smaller adds, and none of them are able to move or be crowd-controlled. The big add needs to be tanked, or else it will cast a raid-wide explosion; and it also applies a stacking debuff to its target, Unconscionable Guilt, which is not actually a huge deal. The small adds need to be repeatedly interrupted, so you need to split your DPS in half to focus on each one, interrupting every cast ( Condemn). Marking each one and assigning players to each mark is the best way to go. Kill the small adds first and then finish off the big one.

Lesser Sins and Suffering

Dealing with all of the base abilities make up the vast majority of the fight. The other part is dealing with the enhanced versions of each ability, but you only have to deal with one at a time.

The enhanced abilities and their order are as follows.

• The first container that gets focused is for the tank ability. At level two, the instant damage of the ability is copied onto a few random players as a short DoT, so these players will need to be focus healed ( Shared Cognition). At level three, the debuff on the tanks also explodes on the raid when it expires, doing less damage to players that are further away ( Change of Heart). The tanks just need to move away from the raid when the debuff is expiring.
• When the boss switches her focus to the next container, make sure to have someone click the tank ability container to drain it back down to empty. This puts the tank ability back to its base form and also prevents the container from bursting when it gets completely full ( Container Breach). Draining a container does ticking damage to the raid, but it is nothing crazy, and you can pause the draining if you need to catch up on healing.
• The second container is for the anima bottles. At level two, when the bottles are caught by a player, they leave a small red pool on the ground that does ticking damage to anyone standing in it ( Lingering Anima). And at level three, the bottles also bounce one time, so they will need to be caught twice.
• Drain the anima bottle container when the boss switches her focus to the next one.
• The third container is for the red orbs. At level two, the red orbs will have red beams between them, forming a red triangle ( Anima Web). Moving through a beam applies a heavy DoT, so avoid moving through them when possible. And at level three, the beams rotate around the orbs, which looks crazy and makes them much harder to avoid. Be sure to despawn the orbs quickly at this level.
• Drain the red orb container when the boss switches her focus to the next one.
• The fourth container is for the add spawning ability. At level two, the players with the circles are rooted in place, so they will not be able to move the add spawns closer to the boss unless they have a way of clearing roots or teleporting. And at level three, each circle's explosion also sends out shadowy projectiles that everyone needs to dodge ( Fragments of Shadow).
• Drain the add spawn container when the boss switches her focus back to the first container. This starts the whole focus cycle over from the beginning.

We recommend using Bloodlust/ Heroism on pull, because the difficulty level is pretty consistent throughout the fight and there are no health-based timings.

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

For each class, we provide advice on how to tackle the Lady Inerva Darkvein encounter, complete with actual tips, but also recommendations for talents and Legendary Powers.