Sha of Pride Detailed Strategy Guide (Heroic Mode included)

Table of Contents

• +1. General Information
  • 1.1. Health Values
  • 1.2. Enrage Timer
  • 1.3. Raid Composition
• +2. Loot
  • 2.1. Pets
  • 2.2. Armor
  • 2.3. Weapons
  • 2.4. Amulets and Trinkets
• 3. Overview of the Fight
• 4. Class-specific Advice
• 5. Pride
• 6. Abilities
• +7. Strategy
  • 7.1. Positioning
  • 7.2. Managing Pride
    • 7.2.1. Corrupted Prison
    • 7.2.2. Self-Reflection
    • 7.2.3. Mark of Arrogance
    • 7.2.4. Manifestations of Pride
    • 7.2.5. Bursting Pride
    • 7.2.6. Projection
    • 7.2.7. Aura of Pride
  • 7.3. Sub-30% Phase
• 8. When to Use Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp
• +9. Summing Things Up
  • 9.1. Tanks
  • 9.2. Healers
  • 9.3. DPS
  • 9.4. Everyone
• 10. Learning the Fight
• +11. Heroic Mode
  • 11.1. Differences From Normal Mode
  • 11.2. Strategy
• 12. Concluding Remarks
• 13. Changelog

Introduction

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

This guide is updated for World of Warcraft WoD 6.1.2.

The Sha of Pride is the fourth boss in the Siege of Orgrimmar. This is the final boss before the raid reaches the gates of Orgrimmar, and it is a creative and very intense fight. Raid members will have to very carefully manage a fight-specific resource called Pride, and the fight has a very brutal end where your raid must race to kill the boss before it is too late.

The fight against the Sha of Pride is essentially a single-phase fight, although once the boss reaches 30% health, you enter a very intense DPS burn stage which could be considered a phase on its own.

All players have a Pride resource bar during the fight. Players start with 0 Pride, and certain abilities in the encounter (some avoidable and some unavoidable) will grant players Pride. The encounter revolves around a raid-wide damaging attack that the boss regularly uses, called Swelling Pride. In addition to dealing damage, this spell also causes various negative effects to players based on how much Pride they have; the more Pride a player has, the more harmful the effects will be. Players who have maximum Pride (100) become mind controlled when Swelling Pride is cast, and this must be avoided at all costs.

When the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health, everyone's Pride is reset to 0, and the boss begins dealing constant raid-wide damage. Moreover, after this time, everyone unavoidably gains 5 Pride every 10 seconds, meaning that your raid has a limited amount of time to defeat the boss before they become mind controlled.

Videos:

• PTR Preview — a short overview of the boss, based on PTR testing, which is extremely useful for getting a rough understanding of the fight.
• Video Guide — a video guide of the boss, based on live-realm experience.

On our forums, we are maintaining threads with class-specific advice for each of the fights of Siege of Orgrimmar. So, make sure to check them out, and if you have things to share, do not hesitate to contribute!

Class	Forum Threads
Death Knight	Blood Frost/Unholy
Druid	Balance Feral Guardian Restoration
Hunter	All specs
Mage	All specs
Monk	Brewmaster Mistweaver Windwalker
Paladin	Holy Protection Retribution
Priest	Discipline Holy Shadow
Rogue	All specs
Shaman	Elemental Enhancement Restoration
Warlock	All specs
Warrior	Arms/Fury Protection

Pride is a resource that all players have during this fight, and it is a central element of the encounter.

All players start out with 0 Pride, but Pride can be gained in various ways throughout the encounter. Some means of gaining Pride are unavoidable, while others are avoidable (for example, if the tanks fail to react properly to the tank switch mechanic, they will gain some Pride). The only way for players to reduce their Pride is to bring the Sha of Pride to 30% health, at which point everyone's Pride is reset to 0. Obviously, this can only happen once per fight, and aside from this, any Pride that players gain is permanent (including Pride gained after the reset).

Simply having Pride is not harmful, the resource itself having no properties of its own (with one exception, explained below). However, every 60 seconds, the boss will cast an ability called Swelling Pride that, in addition to damaging players, also causes an effect for each player in the raid, depending on how much Pride they have. We discuss this ability, and the effects it has on players in the relevant section of the guide.

Players who have 100 Pride receive a buff (this is the exception we mentioned above) called Overcome which increases their healing and damage done by 50%. When these players are hit by Swelling Pride, they become permanently mind controlled.

The Sha of Pride is stationary in the center of the room, and it uses Reaching Attack to deal damage to the entire raid if no one is in its melee range.

In addition to this, the Sha of Pride uses a number of abilities against your raid.

• Wounded Pride is a debuff that the Sha of Pride applies on its current target. While this debuff is active, any melee attacks from the Sha of Pride cause the player to gain 5 Pride. This ability requires a tank switch.
• Corrupted Prison is an ability that the Sha of Pride casts 45 seconds after the start of the fight, and every 60 seconds after that. Around the room, there are 4 titan prisons, essentially large circles on the floor. When Corrupted Prison is cast, 2 raid members in 10-man and 4 in 25-man are imprisoned (in 25-man, one player is imprisoned in each of the 4 prisons). As a raid member is imprisoned, anyone standing within 12 yards of the prison is knocked back, takes a large amount of damage, and receives 5 Pride.
  • Players who are imprisoned are stunned, being unable to do anything. While in the prison, the player takes a high amount of Shadow damage every second, also gaining 5 Pride per second. The only way for a player to be freed from a titan prison is for other raid members to stand on the locks of the prison, which are clearly indicated by a glowing orange colour. There are 2 active locks in 10-man, and 3 in 25-man, so that is how many players are required in each raid size. This immediately frees the player.
• Mark of Arrogance is a Shadow damage DoT that the Sha of Pride applies on random raid members. This DoT can stack, so multiple applications on the same player will deal increased damage. The DoT has an unlimited duration, but it can be dispelled. Dispelling the DoT causes the dispeller to gain 5 Pride. There is a mechanic, which we explain below, that grants players temporary immunity to Pride gains, and players can take advantage of this mechanic to dispel Mark of Arrogance.
• Swelling Pride is the central mechanic of the fight. This is a raid-wide damaging attack that the boss uses every 60 seconds (the timing of the attack is also indicated by the boss' energy bar, which serves no other purpose except to indicate when Swelling Pride is going to be cast). Swelling Pride deals high raid-wide Shadow damage, grants all players 5 Pride, and causes additional effects on players depending on how much Pride they have, as follows:
  • Players who have between 0 and 24 Pride are unaffected.
  • Players who have between 25 and 49 Pride are affected by Bursting Pride. This creates a void zone at the locations of these players, which explodes after 3 seconds, dealing a high amount of Shadow damage to anyone within 5 yards. Players hit by the explosion also gain 5 Pride.
  • Players who have between 50 and 74 Pride are affected by Projection. This creates projection of the target, 15 yards away from the respective player. 6 seconds after appearing, the projections explode, dealing a high amount of raid-wide Shadow damage and granting all raid members 5 Pride, unless the player from whom the projection spawned is standing on top of it. It is easy for each player to see their projection, since these are marked visually.
  • Players who have between 75 and 99 Pride are affected by Aura of Pride. This places a debuff on the player, lasting 25 seconds, which deals high Shadow damage every second to any allies standing within 5 yards. Any players hit by Aura of Pride also gain 5 Pride.
  • Players who have 100 Pride (i.e., who are Overcome) have their health increased by 100% and become permanently mind controlled.
• Self-Reflection is an ability that the Sha of Pride regularly uses on a number of raid random raid members. Reflections (small adds that melee, but who have no other abilities) spawn from the locations of these raid members 2 seconds later, dealing a large amount of Shadow damage within 2 yards of the area where they spawn. Players who are hit by the spawning damage of the Reflections gain 5 Pride. The Sha of Pride casts this spell 20 seconds into the fight, and roughly every 60 seconds after that. Each time this spell is cast, the Sha of Pride will choose players who have higher Pride than those chosen for the previous cast (the first cast targets players regardless of how much Pride they have, the second cast targets players with at least 25 Pride, the third targets players with at least 50 Pride, and so on).
• 60 seconds after the start of the fight, and roughly every 60 seconds after that, the boss will summon one add called Manifestation of Pride in 10-man, and 2 in 25-man. These adds melee and they have two abilities.
  • Mocking Blast is an interruptible nuke that targets a random raid member, dealing a high amount of Shadow damage to them and granting them 5 Pride.
  • Last Word is an ability that causes the two nearest players to the Manifestation of Pride to gain 5 Pride when the mob dies.
• When the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health, the Pride of all raid members is reset to 0, and the Sha of Pride becomes Unleashed. The boss deals very high, constant raid-wide Shadow damage (which ticks every 10 seconds). Each tick of this damage also causes all raid members to gain 5 Pride.

There is one other ability that is used during this phase, although it does not come from the Sha of Pride, but rather from Norushen, who is assisting your raid. Several random raid members will regularly be chosen and buffed with Gift of the Titans. This buff lasts 20 seconds and it grants these players immunity to Pride gains (while the players are chosen randomly, one or more healers are chosen each time, which makes it possible to dispel Mark of Arrogance regularly).

Moreover, when all players who are buffed with Gift of the Titans stack within 8 yards of one another, they all gain another buff, lasting 15 seconds, called Power of the Titans. Power of the Titans increases the haste and damage done of these players by 15%.

Despite what may appear to be complicated mechanics, the strategy for this fight is very simple. We will summarise it before going into more details.

• Have your tanks perform a tank switch on the Sha of Pride each time one of them is affected by Wounded Pride.
• Have the tank who is not currently tanking the boss pick up the Manifestations of Pride, and have your raid focus these adds down quickly. Interrupt any casts of Mocking Blast.
• Make sure everyone is ready to move away from the areas of the floor from where Reflections will spawn, when Self-Reflection is being cast. Have the resulting Reflections picked up by a tank, and AoE them down.
• Make sure no one stands on top of titan prisons, but have players ready to move there very quickly when a player is imprisoned, in order to free this player.
• Have any healers who are under the effects of the Gift of the Titans buff dispel Mark of Arrogance from as many players as they can.
• Handle the Swelling Pride effects as needed.
  • Players must make sure to avoid taking damage from the Bursting Pride void zones.
  • Players who are affected by Projection must move to their projections within 6 seconds.
  • Players who are affected by Aura of Pride must stay at least 5 yards away from other raid members until their debuff expires.
• Make sure that no one in the raid reaches 100 Pride.
• When the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health, use offensive and defensive cooldowns and finish the boss off before the entire raid reaches 100 Pride.

Your raid should be stacked up in melee range of the boss (with the exception of the tank, who should be in melee range on the opposite side of the boss). There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, by stacking your raid up you will gain the most from the Gift of the Titans buff, since the players affected by it will immediately gain Power of the Titans.

Secondly, by keeping your raid behind the boss (who is stationary in the center of the room), you are automatically keeping everyone away from the 4 titan prisons (this is important because players who are near a titan prison take damage and gain Pride when a player is imprisoned there).

There are certain implications to keeping the raid stacked up, of which you must be well aware. By stacking up, your raid is susceptible to taking large amounts of damage (and gaining additional Pride) from Self-Reflection, Bursting Pride, and Aura of Pride. So, if your raid is stacking behind the boss, everyone must be very quick to move away as needed.

Finally, if your raid is stacking behind the boss, it is important that the Manifestations of Pride not be killed right on top of the raid, since this would make it difficult to control who the 2 nearest players to it are (something that is important, because you need to control who will gain 5 Pride, with the goal of prioritising players who are low on Pride).

As we have stated, it is not possible to reduce your Pride (except for the one-time reset when the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health), so everyone must be very careful not to receive any additional Pride. In the sections that follow, we will explain how to handle each Pride-generating ability.

Players who are imprisoned must be freed as soon as possible, since they gain 5 Pride per second while imprisoned. You should place a raid marker on each of the four prisons, and you should assign players to each prison. In 10-man, each raid group (tanks excluded) should be assign to two adjacent prisons, and in 25-man, four groups should be assigned, each to one prison. As soon as Corrupted Prison is cast, the assigned players should run to their prison and free the player trapped there.

Self-Reflection has two components. Firstly, 2 seconds after the spell is cast on players, Reflections spawn from the ground, dealing damage and granting Pride to players within 2 yards. This is the most important part of the spell, and it means that when Self-Reflection is cast, everyone must move away from the affected areas on the ground.

Secondly, your raid will have to handle the Reflections themselves. These adds are not problematic, and you should just AoE them down while one of the tanks holds aggro on them.

Dispelling Mark of Arrogance can only be done through single-target dispels (so, not through spells like Mass Dispel), and it should only be done by players who are affected by the Gift of the Titans buff. This will ensure that no additional Pride is gained this way. Your healers will simply have to heal up the damage that Mark of Arrogance does before it can be dispelled.

When it comes to Manifestations of Pride, there are two things of concern.

First of all, you should keep these mobs permanently interrupted, preventing them from casting even one successful Mocking Blast.

Second of all, you must be very careful about which players are closest to the Manifestation of Pride when it dies. The 2 closest players gain 5 Pride each, so you have to make a wise decision. Naturally, no one who has dangerously high Pride should be soaking this ability. More than that, however, it is ideal if you have players soaking this ability who are very far from a new Swelling Pride threshold. So, the player with 25 Pride is a better soaker than the player 20 Pride, because in the case of the latter, the next Swelling Pride would be more difficult to manage by virtue of having an additional player affected by it.

Avoiding the damage (and Pride) of Bursting Pride is quite simple. Everyone in the raid must move away from the locations where Bursting Pride is about to explode (these are essentially large void zones).

An easy way to handle this mechanic is for all players who have between 25 and 49 Pride to move away from the rest of the raid when Swelling Pride is about to be cast. This will ensure that the explosions will not happen close to the raid.

As far ensuring that the raid does not take any damage from Projection, players who have between 50 and 74 Pride should be on the look-out for the projection when Swelling Pride is being cast. After that, they have 6 seconds to move on top of the projection, something that is entirely feasible given that the projections will not be more than 15 yards away.

Avoiding the damage and Pride gains of Aura of Pride is done by making sure that the players who have between 75 and 99 Pride move out of the raid (and away from each other) when Swelling Pride is being cast. These players will then have to remain spread out until their debuff expires (so, for 25 seconds).

When the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health, everyone's Pride is reset to 0. So, provided that none of your raid members have died or become mind controlled, your raid gets a clean slate at this point of the fight.

That said, from this moment on, all raid members will gain a steady amount of Pride, specifically 5 Pride every 10 seconds. Obviously, all other means of gaining Pride are still in effect. Depending on when exactly your raid brings the boss to 30% health, you will have more or less 200 seconds before your raid becomes Overcome. After that, you will have as much time as there is before the next Swelling Pride to finish the boss. Naturally, this assumes minimal Pride gains from other sources, which may not be the case.

So, this part of the fight is a rather strict DPS burn phase, but the tuning on live servers will tell just how strict it is. From a strategy point of view, not much is different here from before. The only change is that there is now high raid damage (a large burst of raid damage every 10 seconds), which will require an adequate response from your healers.

We recommend using Heroism/ Bloodlust/ Time Warp after the Sha of Pride reaches 30% health. This part of the fight is the most intense, since the raid will be taking heavy damage from Unleashed. Another reason why it is ideal to use Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp here is that your raid will have a very limited amount of time to finish the boss' remaining health before wiping (roughly 200 seconds, give or take).

In this section, we will very briefly summarise what the players belonging to each of the three roles have to do during this fight.

• Perform a tank switch on the boss.
• Pick up Manifestations of Pride when they spawn.

• Dispel Mark of Arrogance whenever you are buffed by Gift of the Titans.

• Prioritise DPS on the adds when they are alive.

• Stack up behind the boss.
• Beware of how the next Swelling Pride will affect you, and act accordingly.
• Make sure not to gain any more Pride than you absolutely have to.
• Do not stand on any Corrupted Prison locations before Corrupted Prison is cast.
• Free Corrupted Prison targets immediately.

The most important aspect of this fight, and, indeed, the only one we believe it is worth focusing on in this section, is Pride management.

While there are many mechanics in the fight, some of which are quite difficult to deal with, having each and every raid member minimise the amount of Pride they gain is imperative, and it is the first step towards success. Players must always be looking out for the next ability to be cast, and they must be prepared to leap into action with minimum delay, whether it be freeing someone from a Corrupted Prison, moving to one's projection, or interrupting Mocking Blast.

The Heroic mode of the Sha of Pride encounter has two major differences from the Normal mode version, but the execution of the fight remains quite similar overall.

In addition to the mobs in the fight having increased health and damage, there are two new mechanics that your raid will have to deal with.

• Banishment is an ability that is first cast 35 seconds after the start of the fight, and then every 75 seconds after that. Banishment selects one random raid member in 10-man, and 3 in 25-man, and sends these players into a Sha Realm, leaving a copy of their bodies (called Corrupted Fragment) behind in the Normal Realm. Players will remain inside the Sha Realm until their Corrupted Fragment is killed. Inside the Sha Realm, players are forced to constantly move forward (your character runs forward on its own), and they will have to navigate through a maze, the walls of which deal lethal damage when touched. In addition to the walls of the maze, there are also some adds that move around and that deal lethal damage to players who come too close to them (the range seems to be around 5-10 yards). There are also several friendly adds called Orbs of Light, and coming in contact with these orbs heals players and causes their Corrupted Fragment fragment from the Normal Realm to take 25% increased damage (the effect stacks).
• Unstable Corruption causes Rifts of Corruption (small void zones) to regularly spawn throughout the room, for the entire duration of the fight. While a Rift of Corruption is active, it regularly deals damage to random raid members, granting them 5 Pride each time this happens. Rifts can be closed, which is done by having a player simply walk over it. Closing a rift causes the player who closes it, and anyone else in an 8-yard radius to take a moderate amount of Shadow damage. Players who take this damage also receive a debuff called Weakened Resolve that prevents them from closing a rift for 1 minute.

The strategy for the Heroic mode is based on the Normal mode strategy, with the addition of having to correctly handle Banishment and Unstable Corruption.

• To handle Banishment, make sure that the entire raid is stacked up close to the boss when the ability is about to be cast. This makes killing the Corrupted Fragments very easy, meaning that players will only have to spend a few seconds inside the Sha Realm.
• To handle Unstable Corruption, your raid will have to be loosely spread out around the room, and all raid members should close Rifts of Corruption whenever they can (that is to say, whenever they are not debuffed by Weakened Resolve).

While inside the Sha Realm, players will have to make sure not to touch any hostile adds, or the walls of the maze. Any Orbs of Light that they manage to pick up will cause their Corrupted Fragment to die faster. Realistically, the Corrupted Fragments will die quite quickly, so players will only need to survive for a short time inside the Sha Realm. This part of the fight has been likened with Pac-Man.

Since the Rifts of Corruption spawn constantly and all over the room, your raid can no longer stack up behind the boss as in Normal mode. The ideal way to handle the rifts is to assign groups of players to different areas of the room. Then, these players can simply close any rifts that spawn near them whenever they do not have the Weakened Resolve debuff (while making sure that more than 1 player is never within 8 yards of a closing rift). It is important that no one closes a rift while they are affected by Mark of Arrogance, since the increased damage can cause them to die.

Your raid should still stack up for Self-Reflection, just like in Normal mode, so that the resulting adds can be picked up and killed. Naturally, as soon as Self-Reflection is cast, everyone should make sure not to be standing where a Reflection actually spawns.

A good goal is to bring the boss to 30% health before any raid member ever reaches 50 Pride. This means that Projection and Aura of Pride never have to be dealt with, making the strategy simpler. Depending on what happens, this may not always be possible, but it is a good DPS goal to go for. Healers can dispel Mark of Arrogance even when they are not affected by Gift of the Titans, assuming that this will not cause them to exceed 50 Pride before the boss reaches 30% health.

This concludes our raid guide for Sha of Pride. We hope you have found it helpful. Please do not hesitate to post any feedback you may have on our forums.

• 26 Nov. 2013: Made a few small improvements to the Heroic strategy.
• 22 Nov. 2013: Added two missing pieces of information to the Heroic section of the guide: that players who are banished automatically move forward all the time, and that there are also hostile adds inside the Sha Realm (that deal lethal damage to players who touch them).
• 13 Nov. 2013: Added Heroic mode strategy.
• 16 Sep. 2013: Added a link to the video guide, and also added that in 25-man 2 Manifestations of Pride spawn each time.
• 15 Sep. 2013: Made several updates.
  • Added 25-man health values.
  • Clarified several aspects of the fight, and corrected the number of Corrupted Prison targets in 10-man (2), and the number of players needed to free a Corrupted Prison target in 25-man (3).
• 29 Aug. 2013: Added Summarising Things Up section.

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