AQ40 – 3 man Twin Emps, C’thun

The Twin Emperors: Vek’lor and Vek’nilash

After my solo adventures, Shigeko and Wilson were keen to go in and try defeating the Twin Emperors together. We’d tried pretty unsuccessfully on this pair at 80, so we’d restricted ourselves to AQ40 clears up to the Emps for rep, but stopped there. This time we cleared through to the Emperors, with the aim of getting them down.

We’d read that it was 3 mannable at 85 and were pretty sure we could give it a good shot. It took as a while to nail exactly what to do, the encounter is horribly sensitive to threat changes, but we finally killed them after about 45 minutes of attempts.

Our setup on the pull:

• on Vek’lor: Shigeko (shadow priest) tanking, accompanied by Wilson (specced resto for this) to heal as needed
• on Vek’nilash: Glowberry (specced feral for this), self healing as needed

We tanked them in the same spots we tanked them back at lvl 60, against each wall and/or on their starting platforms as best we could to maximise their range.  You do tend to get thrown about a bit but that’s the basic idea. (See below for positioning in screenshots.)

The whole thing is very knife edge. If we screwed up once, they would wander across the room to attack the other tank or Wilson, and therefore stand together, self healing at 30k per second. But we think we’ve solidified the issues into the following rules:

• Healing is okay on the right mob. When we were on our ‘right’ mob (ie: Glow on melee guy [Vek’nilash] and Shigeko on caster guy [Vek’lor]) we could self heal or have heals applied by a healer (Wilson) without losing our mob.
• Healing is NOT okay on the wrong mob. When were on the ‘opposite’ mob if we self healed or had healing applied, we would lose aggro to the person who applied the healing. This included hot ticks, VE ticks, feral rejuv ticks, direct heals, anything. This also meant that in the final attempt, I didn’t even melee the transformed bugs while I was in cat/bearform when I was on Vek’lor. if I procced my Leader of the Pack healing, I’d pull aggro on  Vek’nilash from across the room.
• No dots. If there was a dot up on them at transition, they would head straight back to their person applying the dot. So we totally avoided dotting them at all. I took lacerate off my bars. Otherwise I kept habitually putting it up. That was bad.

So summary: do what you like on your ‘correct’ mob, and gently gently does it on the ‘opposite’ mob.

I didn’t need a healer if I was careful with cooldowns and when to self heal. With the right combination of two classes you could probably duo this at 85.

C’thun

C’thun in comparison was relatively straightforward. We DPSed him down, killing eye stalks as they popped until he was at 0% to enter phase 2 – we got one Eye beam of Death during that time.

We wiped once in Phase 2 because C’thun gets a little upset if no-one is up top and insta-gibs us all. You can’t avoid getting drawn into his body – but we aimed on our second attempt to spend as little time in there as possible, and just throw up instants on the inner tentacles as we aimed for the trampoline out. Apart from that it’s a simple matter of dpsing him down once vulnerable to get your AQ achievement and Brood reputation with just three people.

You don’t need a tank nor a healer for this at 85, as long as you avoid Bad things(tm).

Reputation

We cleared everything in the instance except Viscidus. none of the other bosses presented any difficulty, and as I recently wrote about soloing them I didn’t discuss those in this 3-man post. (Note that for Skeram, I soloed him while the other two waited out of LoS in the entrance trash corridor. You don’t want MCs complicating an easily soloable fight.)

I’d estimate with the full clear of boss kills, one artefact from trash, C’thun’s eye and the multiple tier piece check-ins, I gained about 10 000 rep in one clear. If you weren’t already revered, you’d get more, as the trash is worth rep until then as well. A pretty easy old-school rep to farm if you have two friends that are keen for a challenge (The Twin Emps are a challenge even at 85 for 2 or 3 players, but very rewarding! =D)

Gallery