Posted on by Sunnier

Heroic Ultraxion 10 Tanking Guide

Or as my guild calls him, Ultra-Nixon (he even sounds like Nixon). This fight doesn’t change much from the Normal version, but the dps race is tighter and you have to rely on more people to soak Hour of Twilight. As usual, this isn’t meant to be a complete guide. I assume you already know the basic mechanics of this fight and everything here is mostly geared toward tanks.

Differences between Normal and Heroic

  • You need 2 people to soak Hour of Twilight.
  • Hour of Twilight is a much shorter cast at only 3 seconds.
  • Whenever you soak Hour of Twilight, you are inflicted with a debuff which prevents you from soaking another for 2 minutes.
  • A total of 3 people (one being the tank, the other two being random) will be inflicted with Fading Light.

Preparation

  • We used 2 tanks and 2 healers.
  • Use trinkets that increase your dps if you can, even as a tank. This is a dps race, after all, and your cooldowns and the healers’ Aspect buffs should be enough to survive.
  • Use elixirs and potions to increase your dps. As a druid I used an agility flask, my paladin co-tank used elixirs.
  • Create a macro so that you can easily keybind Heroic Will.
/click ExtraActionButton1
  • Create a Power Aura that tracks your remaining time on Fading Light. You will die if you click Heroic Will while Fading light has more than 5 seconds left.
Version:4.23; icon:Ability_Druid_TwilightsWrath; buffname:Fading Light; x:11; bufftype:2; owntex:true; size:0.2; y:-42; timer.enabled:true

Dealing with Hour of Twilight

  • You want to maximize dps, but don’t wait until the very last microsecond to exit the Twilight Realm. I always clicked Heroic Will with 1-2 seconds left on the duration.
  • Thanks to the debuff, each player can at most soak every third Hour of Twilight.
  • Tanks should use their 50% reductions, other classes should save their survivability tools like Ice Block, Bubble, Guardian Spirit, Dispersion, etc if it’s their turn to soak.
  • You will have to organize your Hour of Twilight rotations around what cooldowns are available to your raid members (and this will be different for every team). For example, our rotation looked like this:
    1. Tank 1 + Shadow Priest (dispersion)
    2. Tank 2 + Mage (ice block)
    3. Rogue (cloak of shadows / feint) + Warlock (Guardian Spirit)
    4. Tank 1 + Shadow Priest (dispersion)
    5. Tank 2 + Paladin (bubble)
    6. Rogue (cloak of shadows / feint) + Death Knight (IBF / AMS)
    7. Tank 1 + Shadow Priest (dispersion)

Cooldowns

  • Save 50% reduction cooldowns for when it’s your turn to soak Hour of Twilight. You can try to survive with lesser cooldowns, but it’s a close call and you stress out your healers when you come out of an Hour of Twilight with less than 10% health.
  • Use your other cooldowns as often as possible. Yes, even your Tier 13 cooldowns (though if you can coordinate with the other tank so you don’t use both at once, that’s even better).
  • Once you get near the end, save your Tier 13 cooldowns for the final push. There’s a lot of raid damage at this point.

The Tank’s Job

  • Taunt off the other tank whenever he gets Fading Light. Do it quickly, because the duration is variable and sometimes they only give you 3 or 4 seconds to leave the Twilight Realm. The other tank should do the same.
  • Track your own Fading Light debuff. Use Heroic Will when you have 1-2 seconds left. Hopefully the other tank will have taunted by then.
  • Use cooldowns regularly.
  • Soak the appropriate Hour of Twilight, avoid the ones you’re not assigned to soak.
  • Maximize your dps. You should do at least 18k dps as a tank, 20k-22k is preferable. This isn’t very difficult to do, just perform your rotation correctly.
  • Ultraxion hits very hard with no cooldowns/mitigation up (~80k per swing on a druid). Just be prepared for that.

Druid Specific Stuff

  • Bear form provides two hidden benefits:
    1. You can only receive Thrall’s Last Defender of Azeroth if you’re in bear at the time of activation. This is only 10 seconds or so into the encounter, so you must start in bear even if you’re not the first tank.
    2. You cannot be chosen as a random recipient of Fading Light while in bear form.
  • For these two reasons, there is only one small window where it is safe to dps in cat form. This window occurs after you receive Last Defender of Azeroth and before the first cast of Fading Light. You should stay in bear form for the rest of this fight because if both tanks are inflicted with Fading Light at the same time, someone will likely die from boss aggro and the rotation of Fading Light will be completely messed up. Since this fight has a heavy dps requirement, I recommend Berserking, pre-poting, and going cat during this window.
  • There are even smaller windows of opportunity to go cat if you so wish (whenever Fading Light is not about to go off), but the windows are so short (never more than 10 seconds) that it’s unlikely to be a dps improvement if you switch out of bear during the duration.
  • If you need to enter caster form for any reason (battle rez, innervate), be careful not to do it when Fading Light is about to be cast.
  • I glyphed Frenzied Regeneration for this fight (in combination with 4 piece Tier 13). Because of the Aspect buff, it lasts 40 seconds, which will severely hurt your dps because you’ll be close to rage starved for the duration. Healers also do increased healing because of their Aspect buffs, so the extra 30% granted by the glyph is very useful.

Extra Advice

  • If you’re anything like me and get overwhelmed by too much going on, try not to think about anything except your task. Focus on your tasks alone and don’t worry about the other roles.
  • If you lose track of the number of Hour of Twilights that have happened so far and are unsure if you should stay in for the next one, check your Looming Darkness debuff. If it isn’t up or about to fall off, it’s probably your turn to soak the next one.