Hey guys, I'm Jordy and this is your guide to the Flamewaker Hunter, Shanox and his two dogs, Rageface and Riplem. Now in order to get Shanox to spawn, you'll need to clear some amount of trash mobs in Firelands. As you do, you'll see a zone-wide alert that horns are approaching, are close, and finally, Shanox yells that he's arrived.
He spawns by Balrock and then pats around in a big circle, so you'll want to clear an area of trash that you have plenty of room to fight in. Before we get into the rest of the fight, I want to mention I'll have a big, full-featured assignment sheet for every boss in Firelands coming in the next week or two that will help you with your raids. Cooldown management, tank and healing assignments, the works to help you get through this place. You're gonna need it. Additionally, Pummel and I are just about done with the Phase 3 Loot Prio Guide, a super useful tool to help you decide where to send all of your gear early on in the tier, to help maximize your raids, effectiveness, and ability to get those tough heroic bosses down sooner.
They'll all be up on my Patreon, which is linked below. Okay, back to Shanox. As far as raid composition goes, you're looking to bring 2 tanks, 5 healers, and a mix of ranged and melee DPS as usual.
Also, having a hunter go marksman for this fight helps, but isn't necessary. I'll explain why later. Also, for what it's worth, This will mostly be your basic raid comp for all of Firelands, with you flexing up or down a healer on certain fights. Alright, so let's get into it.
Shanox is a one-phase fight that really only has one major mechanic that you're going to need to deal with. First, let's talk about Shanox himself. He's got about 115 million HP on Heroic 25, and he's not tauntable, so it's important that your tank doesn't die during the fight, or it's surely a wipe.
Now, Shanox will hit his current target with Arcing Smash. dealing 125% of his normal melee damage in a cone in front of him and applying a stack of Jagged Tear, a bleed debuff that hurts and must be healed through. Now he'll only do this when he's holding his spear, which he will occasionally throw toward one of his dogs, Ripplin, dealing about 100k physical damage if you're hit and about 42k fire damage to anyone within 50 yards.
Additionally, a spiral of fire will spawn out of the impact, so look to dodge those. Not too bad. Once the spear lands, Riplim will stop whatever he's doing and rush to fetch the spear to bring it back to Shanox. More on that later.
In addition to this stuff, Shanox will throw two different traps on the ground. Now these can be triggered by players and Shanox's dogs, so be careful of these. The first, Immolation Trap, applies a dangerous dot.
I recommend you having a DK, a Mage, or a Paladin use their damage mitigation abilities and pop these whenever they see them. This will keep the battlefield clear and help to limit confusion about the next, more important trap the crystal prison trap if a player triggers these they'll be encased in a crystal prison that must be attacked to break don't do this and watch your feet if a dog triggers these the dog will likely be encased and the crystal prison will tick down over time until the dog finally breaks free this is critical to an element of the fight that i'll explain shortly okay we're almost done with shanox now we'll discuss his two dogs rageface and ripley first it's important to know if that whenever a dog successfully attacks any player we'll get a stack of feeding frenzy increasing his damage this buff lasts 20 seconds all right so the less important dog is rage face he can't be tanked and will just run around attacking random people but he doesn't do that much damage so don't stress it however occasionally he'll jump at a random raider and cast face rage on them stunning them and inflicting a ton of physical damage very quickly now while he's doing this his defenses are down because he's focused on the mauling so any attacks that hit him here are guaranteed crits and in order to snap him out of the maul you'll need to do a big damaging hit of at least 45 000. if you can hit him with something that strong he'll get angry and fall off whoever he's mauling turning his attention to you this is where the marksman hunter i mentioned earlier comes in with the hunter's mark and a well-timed aim shot you can easily hit over the required 45k breaking the face rage and saving the afflicted player From here, the hunter should work to trap and kite the dog without getting hit, as Rageface will build stacks of Feeding Frenzy whenever he hits a player. Without stacks, he's not very dangerous, but if it stacks up high, you're in considerable danger.
So deterrence to avoid getting hit, find a Crystal Prison Trap and deal with him. Now onto Riplem. This dog is tankable and will also apply the bleed debuff Jagged Tear that Shanox himself applies to his current target.
Additionally, Whenever Shanox hurls his spear toward Riplem, Riplem will run to the spear, pick it up in his jaws, and rush back to Shanox, giving him the spear and then returning to the tank that was on him. The goal here is to drag the dog into a trap right as the spear is thrown, get him trapped, then once the trap expires, he'll run to the spear, then to the boss, and ideally by then the bleed and feeding frenzy has fallen off by the time he's returned to the tank. It takes some time to learn, and I'll get into some specifics how best to handle, but this is the single most important thing to get right on this fight. Alright, let's get into the walkthrough.
On pull, you're looking to face Shanox away from the melee, while your off tank drags rip limb about 50 yards from him. This allows for maximum distance between the bosses and the most travel time for rip limb when he ends up retrieving the spear. It's important that you don't drag him further than 60 yards as the dogs will enrage likely killing your tanks. We lost on pull here for maximum trinket uptime so go ham off the rip.
About eight seconds into the pull Shanox will place his first trap. Here we see a crystal prison trap go down. Be careful if it's in the melee stack as it can be hard to see, so move the boss away from it and melee watch it as you move. It does take a second to arm, but it's easy to miss.
One thing we do is place a marker on someone designated to watch the traps so the off tank can easily see them as he's at a distance from the raid. It's handy, but not necessary. For the first trap, as it's pretty quick into the fight, it's not necessary to use it on Riplem, so I'd recommend you try to trap Rage Face if he's on you here.
This helps to reset his stacks of Feeding Frenzy and makes him much less dangerous. 20 seconds into the pull, he'll throw his first spear. If you're able to reset your bleed stacks, it's great, but this is still pretty early on so we're not too stressed about it. Some immolation traps go down, so DKs, Mages, and Paladins work to pop them with your defensive cooldowns. It helps keep the battlefield clear and can also interfere with the trapping the dogs, as if the dogs run over an immolation trap and pop them, they get a buff called Wary, that prevents them from being trapped again for 25 seconds, which can be super dangerous if you're looking to trap them.
All right, now the tanks are at about five stacks of bleed, and the feeding frenzy on Riplem is stacked pretty high. We're looking to do the trap combo. So the spear goes out, we drag Riplem away as far as we can, or ideally into a trap before he turns and runs to the spear.
One thing that's super helpful here, Riplem can be chains of iced, which slows his movement speed considerably and adds extra time to his travel path. So he chains as he begins to run to the spear, then again once he gets to the spear from a different DK, and then finally, crucially, once more, just before he gets to Shanox. Once he's dropped off the spear, he's now immune to chains of ice, but anything that was on him before he arrived remains in effect.
So a DK in melee should hit him right as he's arriving. Once he's dropped off the spear, your rippling tank should try to get as far away from Shanox as possible to allow for the bleed to fall off. Rocket Boots are great for this, and if you did it correctly, both tanks should now be bleed free and Feeding Frenzy will have reset. Otherwise, your Rage Face tanks and kiters should work to free anyone getting face raged and work to reset those stacks of Feeding Frenzy. Hunters to Turrets, kite him around, trap when it makes sense.
Anything to get that buff to fall off. We found that if you can reset the bleeds and feeding frenzy on the tanks and dogs even one time, you're likely safe enough to get the kill, but work to incapacitate them as often as you're able as it will help smooth out the damage they do and make it much easier. After a few minutes of this, Shanox will give up, go down, and congratulations.
Alright, let's talk about some tank tips. Remember that the bleed on the main tank only applies when Shanox has his spear in his hands. So if you see Riplem on his way back to you with the spear, consider moving Shanox away from him even a bit to let the bleed tick those last few seconds until it falls off. If you have any avoidance trinkets or cooldowns, it can be a good opportunity to pop those once he gets the spear so that he doesn't hit you with the arcing slash and reapply a new stack as well.
For the Riplem tank, you're kind of the most important person in this fight, so make sure you understand your job and manage your bleeds and the dog's feeding frenzy stacks as well. Kite away from him when you can and communicate with the raid that you're looking for a trap. You can also ask a priest to life grip you for a few extra seconds away from rip limb, helps in a pinch. And for some healer tips, watch your feet and don't run into those traps. They're easy to miss as they are similarly colored to the ground.
And be careful as your tanks begin to build up bleed stacks, they really hurt as they begin to tick higher and you'll need to use cooldowns to keep the tanks alive as they work to reset their stacks. And for the DPS, For the people assigned to help out with Rageface, do your best to free anyone getting face raged, and work to trap him when you can to alleviate a lot of the damage that he puts out. Remember, anyone can do this job, but hunters are likely the best at it. Alright, and that's it for Shanox.
Like I said, I'll have a loot prio guide and assignment sheet available for this entire raid up on Patreon in the coming weeks, so check that out once it's up there soon, and be sure to come by my Twitch channel at twitch.tv slash Jordy to say hi and talk about Firelands with me. If you enjoyed this video, please, please consider liking and subscribing. It helps me a ton, and I really appreciate it.
All right, that's it for me. Thank you so, so much, guys, and I'll see you in the next one.