Vigilant Guardian Strategy Guide for Sepulcher of the First Ones

In Phase One:

• Kill all the waves of adds as fast as possible, in order to activate each of the 3 shield adds.
• Stand in the shield from a shield add when the boss gets to full energy and casts ( Exposed Core).
• Pick up each bomb that drops from each shield add when they die, take them to the boss, and throw them at him with your extra-action button.

In Phase Two (40%):

• Tanks face the boss away and taunt swap every time the boss gets to 50 energy and casts Pneumatic Impact.
• If you get the Matter Dissolution debuff, run out of the raid until it expires. Everyone dodge the orbs from these players.

In Phase Three (15%):

• Use Bloodlust/ Heroism and try to kill the boss before he wipes you with his ramping raid damage pulses.

Let us start with a quick overview of the fight. It has three phases. In Phase One, you kill waves of adds in order to eventually collect bombs and use them on the boss to get him to come out of the wall he is stuck in. In Phase Two, you fight the boss with only a couple mechanics going on. And in Phase Three, the boss stops doing any mechanics and just starts nuking the raid with ramping damage - a soft enrage.

The goal of phase one is to get the boss to come out of the wall. To do that:

• Start by killing all of the waves of adds as fast as possible. This activates each of the three big shield adds around the room.
• These shield adds put a shield around themselves that the raid uses as protection when the boss gets to full energy and casts Exposed Core, which does a ridiculous amount of damage for a few seconds. Right before this happens, everyone needs to stand in one of the shields to avoid getting one-shot.
• When the damage is over, any shield adds that were active die and drop a bomb you can use on the boss. On Heroic, the shield add attacks you when the damage is over, and you have to kill it in order to get the bomb.
• Once a bomb is on the ground, someone needs to pick it up, take it to the wall that the boss is in, and use their extra-action button to throw it at the boss. They just need to make sure they are close enough to where the button changes from dropping the bomb to actually throwing it. Once you have used all three bombs and the boss is at 40% health, he rolls out and starts phase two!

There are a few other mechanics in phase one, but they just boil down to dodging a bunch of hexagons on the ground and trying to stay a bit spread out, nothing fancy.

There are no more adds, so you only have the boss to worry about.

• The tanks should keep the boss faced away from the raid, while everyone else stacks directly behind the boss.
• The tanks need to taunt swap whenever the boss gets to 50 energy and casts Pneumatic Impact, a very standard taunt swap mechanic.
• A few players occasionally get the Matter Dissolution debuff. They need to move away from the raid until the debuff expires, which spawns big orbs in a circle around the player that move back toward the location of the player when the debuff expired. You can have all the debuffed players stack and face the boss to get the orbs to spawn in the same spots, but that is not entirely necessary.
• Other than that, there are just a bunch of the same hexagons on the ground to dodge as in phase one.

When the boss gets to 15% health remaining, Phase Three starts. All of the mechanics stop happening and the boss instead just starts blasting the raid with ramping damage. This is a classic kill or be killed phase, so you should probably save Bloodlust/ Heroism for this part, depending on your raid's damage and healing.

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