"The wyrms will eat well tonight..."
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Enter Halfus. This two headed brute looks big and looks tough, and would be a total push over if not for his drakes. The Halfus encounter involves fighting a large two headed ogre and his retinue of drake pets. There are five in total, as well as a proto behemoth in the sky that likes to throw down some burning death.
This fight is reminiscent of the good old days of Blackwing Lair where we fought Chromaggus, a large puppy with five possible abilities and two randomly selected for use each week. In the Halfus encounter, only 3 of the 5 drakes will be active each week and they are both a help and a hindrance. The drakes each cause Halfus (or his behemoth) to use one extra ability, making the fight slightly different each time. When you release the drakes from their bonds, it activates a counter effect to the ability that drake gave to Halfus. For instance, the Time Warden makes the Proto-Behemoth use a fire barrage, but freeing it slows the barrage down and makes the flames easy to dodge. Of course, if you free a drake, you must proceed to tank and kill it too, or where would the fun be? Thankfully, each drake you kill also causes Halfus to take more damage for the rest of the fight.
The fight is about good choices, awareness and control, three things that TDC has gotten pretty good at from our experiences in Wrath. It is hard to talk about a single strategy here because the encounter can vary so much from week to week. Generally, we choose to release 1-2 of the drakes immediately to get the bonus effects up on the boss, and burn them down as fast as possible before releasing the next one. Once all the drakes are dead, it’s a quick burn on Halfus until he goes down. Through all of this we are doing a little dance to avoid fires, interrupt shadow novas, swap tanks, and heal AoE damage, so it isn’t as easy as it sounds. But needless to say, we can handle anything Halfus throws at us and are on to the next challenge.
Halfus: “The wyrms will eat well tonight!”
TDC: “Yes, you do look kind of meaty.”