Painsmith Raznal Strategy Guide for Sanctum of Domination

In Phase One:

• Focus kill the middle spiked ball and run through the gap to survive ( Spiked Balls).
• Spread out with the chains and try not to run into other people if you have them ( Shadowsteel Chains).
• Tanks quickly run the boss's weapon-throw cast to a corner of the room and taunt swap after every cast ( Cruciform Axe).
• Everyone dodge the spikes that come from the tank getting hit by the weapon ( Spiked).
• And on heroic, avoid accidentally stepping on the traps, and have one person run around stepping on them after each of their debuffs wears off ( Flameclasp Trap).

In Phase Two:

• Dodge waves of spikes coming from the front of the room.
• And dodge swirlies on the ground ( Shadowsteel Embers).

This fight has two alternating phases: Phase One where you are fighting the Painsmith himself, and Phase Two which is kind of just an intermission where you are just dodging stuff. Each phase one gets slightly more difficult, so it is likely best to hold Bloodlust/ Heroism for the final Phase One, to try and get through the hardest part of the fight as fast as possible.

In Phase One, there are three mechanics to watch our for, and a fourth on heroic:

• A row of spiked balls occasionally spawns on a random side of the platform and slowly rolls across the platform, one-shotting anyone they hit ( Spiked Balls). To keep everyone alive through this, you need to quickly burst one of the balls down to destroy it, creating a gap that everyone can run through. We suggest destroying the ball in the very middle, so have someone mark it as soon as it spawns or place world markers before the pull to be able to quickly identify which one to focus down. By the way, some classes can just teleport to the other side of the balls every time, so definitely take advantage of that too.
• A few random players occasionally get a debuff that puts chains around them ( Shadowsteel Chains). The chains do heavy DoT damage to the debuffed players, but they also knock back and damage any other players that come into contact with them. They are not a huge deal until a bunch of people have to quickly squeeze through the small gap surrounded by one-shot death-balls. Your best bet is to let all of the people who do not have the chains get through the gap first, and then the chained players can run through one-by-one. If some of the chained players have teleports, that makes things much easier.
• The boss occasionally marks the current tank with an arrow and black circle, and then throws his weapon at them after a few seconds ( Cruciform Axe). When the weapon hits, it does a ton of physical damage to the tank, falloff damage to everyone in the raid, applies a typical taunt-swap debuff to the tank, and spawns spikes that erupt from the floor. So every time the tank gets marked, they need to quickly run to a corner of the room away from everyone else and use a defensive cooldown, and then the other tank needs to taunt the boss. The erupting spikes on the ground do a ton of physical damage and stun you if they hit you, and they move super fast so you have to be on point when dodging them ( Spiked).
• On heroic, the fourth mechanic is traps that the boss occasionally throws on the ground ( Flameclasp Trap). These traps do big raid damage when they are triggered and apply a short debuff to the raid that massively increases damage taken from the traps. The traps can be triggered by players, but they also can be triggered by the erupting spikes and the spiked balls. So we suggest assigning one person to run around stepping on the traps one by one, letting the previous debuff fall off before triggering each one. If you are too slow to trigger the traps manually, multiple will probably get set off at a time and wipe the raid. So be quick, but not too quick.

In Phase two, the boss retreats, and waves of spikes are spammed from the front of the room. These are super fast, but there is a gap in each wave that you need to run to in order to avoid them. Easy enough, but you also have to dodge random swirlies on the ground that do a ton of damage if they hit you ( Shadowsteel Embers). All the while, the boss is pulsing raid damage and stacking a DoT debuff on everyone that lasts for the rest of the fight ( Lingering Flames), which is another great reason to save Bloodlust/ Heroism for the end.

Painsmith Raznal's encounter features an optional achievement: Whack-A-Soul. 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.