First off, the trash before this boss is complete ass. Expect to wipe on it as much as you wipe on the god damned boss.
Secondly, there’s a lot of shit going down in this fight (o hai, WELCOME TO CATA) so I’ll break it down as best I can without confusing myself. I’ve also only had a few attempts on this fight so feel free to correct anything you see wrong in the comments!
Important note: the elemental monstrosity of the final phase appears with the combined health of all 4 bosses, which is why it’s important that each pair of bosses be DPS’d as close to equally as you can manage. The phase changes at 25%.
Phase 1:
The bosses in this phase are Feludious and Ignacious. From here on out they shall be called Water Boss and Fire Boss.
Tanks
If you’re the water boss tank, interrupting hydrolance is key. You will also wish to tank him away from everyone else because Glaciate damages everyone around him and sucks balls.
If you’re the fire boss tank, be prepared to help the DPS interrupt rising flames after his fiery shield is down. Don’t position him too far away from the fire he’ll periodically leave on the ground because the melee will need quick access to it. Speaking of said fire, every so often the boss will charge off, but he’ll charge right back, trailing the fire behind him.
Healers
Heart of Ice and Burning Blood will be two debuffs put on the raid. While you do want to cleanse these you don’t want to do it immediately, as a few ticks can provide a DPS buff.
Hydrolance should be renamed Hydropunchtotheface.
Melee
You will be on the fire boss. This phase is cake for you compared to the next one. If you get Waterlogged, briefly step into the fire. Try to not cross in front of the boss while getting to said fire because he also does a frontal cone of fire and, well, your healers like their mana.
After the fire shield (which needs to be DPS’d down ASAP) you need to interrupt the hurty flamey thing he’s channeling, Rising Flames.
If you get the Burning Blood debuff and a ranged you like is near enough for a hug, go ahead and g ive them one because it will increase their DPS on the water boss. I wouldn’t run halfway across the room for it, though.
Ranged
You will mostly be on the water boss, though the two bosses should be kept as near in health as possible.* One of you should probably be designated to switch if necessary.
If you get the Heart of Ice debuff, run and give the melee a hug. Yes, that’s right–if you get that DEBUFF, run and give your guildies a hug. It’ll increase their DPS on the fire boss.
If you get waterlogged, dart through the fire that the other boss is leaving on the ground. If you don’t the water boss will freeze the blood in your veins and well, that just doesn’t sound very pleasant. Your healers will probably let you die for your fail.
Phase 2:
A few words about gravity wells and cyclones, as these apply to everyone:
The air boss summons a cyclone you’re going to want to find it. Yes, run TO the cyclone, those things you avoided on every other boss encounter ever. Yeah. It’ll give you a levitate buff that you need to not get gibbed by earthquake.
After earthquake, you need to run to a gravity well so that you get lose the levitatey thing so that you don’t get thundershocked to death.
Each of these much-needed buffs will probably be all the way across the room from where you are. Or on top of each other.
Also: if you get lightning rod, get away from everyone else.
Tanks
The earth boss tank should try to keep an eye out for Harden Skin to interrupt it. Your melee will be doing this as well, but with everyone running around willy-nilly, it’s best to keep all eyes on it.
The air boss tank should…tank the air boss. He teleports around the room just to piss you off.
Healers
There’s a lot of damage being tossed around. You should heal that.
(Do you have people in your guild who state the obvious like that? We do. Do you want to slap them? I do.)
The only thing of note that I recall for this phase is the Lightning Blast that is thrown at the air tank after the boss teleports.
Melee
Find your way to the earth boss. Don’t forget to pull out your razors as you go, because this phase blows (see here).
Try to interrupt Hardened Skin. You know, during all that time you’re not running around looking for a cyclone or gravity well.
Every so often the boss will cast Eruption, shoving spikes through the floor around him. Try to not be standing there.
Ranged
You will mostly be on the air boss. He teleports around like a dick. If the earth boss tank/melee miss a Hardened Skin interrupt, you should help those scrubs DPS through it.
Phase 3:
Tanks
The one of you that can do the best gimped DPS while in tank gear should try to do that, because this is a 1 tank, DPS race phase. The tank-tank should drag the boss out of puddles (think blue defile).
Healers
Quote from Kotakh, SiB Resto Druid: “omfg all that damage incoming wtf heal heal heal heal oom /dies fuck that noise”
So, in essence: don’t stand in puddles, heal the fuck out of people lifted off the ground in Gravity Crush, and flail madly at your healing buttons. Remember, let your least favorite people die first!
Melee
Don’t stand in puddles. Don’t stand on things that look like flares. Blow any self-heal or damage reduction abilities that you have. DPS the fuck out of shit. Use any major DPS abilities (heroism, army, etc) in this phase as well. DPS the fuck out of shit HARDER. BEFORE YOU ALL DIE. If you get lifted up in gravity crush, I hope you bribed your healers well.
Ranged
Spread out to minimize damage from lightning. For the rest, you can actually see the melee section above.
I Like Bubbles 
#1 by Rioriel on March 8, 2011 - 2:52 pm
Encounter, as a rogue, makes me want to spoon my eyes out.
#2 by Rades on March 8, 2011 - 2:54 pm
Sounds pretty accurate. I’ve never felt so useless as a DK as in the Air/Earth phase. Nothing like CONSTANTLY running across the room to get the right debuff, coming back, smacking the boss once or twice and then having to run off to go get the next one. Sigh.
Quick note about the fire trail – it’s pathetic damage, so if any melee ends up stranded on the wrong side, they can just run through. It hits for like 3k or something.
#3 by Krikket on March 8, 2011 - 3:23 pm
Allow me to make a little bit of an edit to your P3 healer strat.
You said:
So, in essence: don’t stand in puddles, heal the fuck out of people lifted off the ground in Gravity Crush, and flail madly at your healing buttons. Remember, let your least favorite people die first!
I propose:
So, in essence: don’t stand in puddles, heal the fuck out of people lifted off the ground in Gravity Crush, and flail madly at your healing buttons. Remember, this is a DPS race, so let the off-tank die first, followed by anyone else who hits like a wet noodle.
#4 by Ambrosine on March 8, 2011 - 4:49 pm
@Rioriel – I think all melee are struck by that urge for this fight. XD
#5 by xarnen on March 9, 2011 - 12:53 am
“Remember, this is a DPS race, so let the off-tank die first, followed by anyone else who hits like a wet noodle.”
Unless said tank is a feral druid who was smart and saved berserk and an agility pot. Then keep him alive cause he’ll eat face and maybe can shift to save the day if the tank-tank gets gibbed. :=)
#6 by Gina on March 9, 2011 - 5:10 am
Funny guide as always <3
Great fight though, as a healer I've done it on 2 different 10man teams now. Once as my holy pally main and once as my discopriest alt x-main. P3 is a BALLS OUT use LoH on dps kinda thing, so healers make sure you have the mana left for it. And DPS pls use your potions / bl then.
One thing to mention, on P1 with the debuffs" Heart of Ice and Burning Blood", our 2 teams did it differently. 1 team (with my pally) consistently moved and dispelled when the debuff was passed and the other team didnt even bother with it, and dispelled straight away without moving. It made up for itself with dps not stopping their dps to move. I noticed last night that both teams didn't have a problem with the encounter so if your dps and healing is good enough you may be able to ignore that debuff too.
Cheers,
Gina @ healbot.net
#7 by Armagon on March 9, 2011 - 7:38 am
Meh, had I read this guide last week, we SURELY wouldn’t have wiped at 4% and 1%. Damn respawns,
Nice summary, although I tend to see a pattern of “do what the fuck you want, basically it’s the healers who win or lose the fight” in cata.
#8 by Artoo on March 9, 2011 - 10:56 am
Armagon, I have to say I disagree with that. Really good healers can compensate for other people screwing up, sure. But genuinely good dps will have a huge impact on most fights, this isn’t an exception. If you’re running with a bunch of dps with that particular attitude they’re probably making things harder for the healers than they need to be.
#9 by Armagon on March 9, 2011 - 12:31 pm
Take Chimaeron for example.
I mean, I really love my healers and I do everything to make them happy, but if a tank dies or 1-2 dps die before the last phase when all are behaving and not standing at the wrong place… it simply doesn’t matter if I do 5k damage or 20k. We kind of need all people alive, which only the healers can make or break.
Or Ascendant Council, phase 3. DPS can not nuke so hard that it makes a difference. Either most DPS live until <5% or they don't and it's a wipe.
So in general, yes, I may be exaggerating, but given that no one makes any grave mistakes, it boils down to the healers for us. Apart from Maloriak we never hit an enrage timer.
#10 by LabRat on March 9, 2011 - 1:20 pm
We just downed the dragon twins last night and waved to these guys before portal.
We have one ranged. The rest are melee.
….*crai*
#11 by Lique on March 10, 2011 - 12:38 pm
Stating the obvious:
After killing Bloodqueen the first time in ICC we go back the next time with 1 pug who’s decided that he needs to lead our otherwise guild only run. About 3 minutes into the fight during which he talked almost nonstop about what the dps and tanks needed to be doing he says, “So healers, she does a lot of damage that you’ll have to heal through.”
All three healers, “Shut up! We can see the damage!”
@Armagon
I really hate the attitude from dps or tanks that it’s the healers that make or break fights. Yes, sometimes it is the healer that makes or breaks the fight, but truthfully, “No major mistakes” just means “nothing big enough to get a dps or tank insta-killed.” It doesn’t mean that the dps weren’t draining their healers mana faster than they should have been. It doesn’t mean the tanks didn’t make a mistake that *could* have gotten everyone killed if not for amazing healers who managed to salvage it (but this consequently burned their mana and cooldowns).
I have only done this fight a few times in the last couple of weeks, so I might be missing something you’re seeing, but watching our guild flail on twin dragons for two weeks after we’d downed it told me this: Healers are far far less likely than dps to end up in the twilight zone on the dragons. The same few dps got hit by it multiple times and a sometimes different melee, but healers pretty much only make that mistake once, sometimes not even that much. And when people get out of the twilight zone, they’ve usually taken at least one hit on the pink balls and need to be healed for something they otherwise wouldn’t have.
Maybe it’s different for your guild, but what I see is dps not seeing the constant mana pressure that the healers face and therefore never learning to care as much about getting out of bad as the healers do. They know that some things will insta-gib them, so they learn to get out of those, but nothing else. I watched multiple dps move close to their healers out of sheer lack of attention only to end up sharing twilight blasts. Or they stand still for twilight blasts and just take the hit.
All of this leads most dps to believe that “it’s all on the healers”, but truthfully, it was a problem with the dpsers. There’s a reason you can usually switch from 3 healers to 2 when your guild gets good at an instance, and it’s not completely because the healers are able to heal that much more.
#12 by Armagon on March 10, 2011 - 3:30 pm
Lique, I can partly agree with that, but I’ve got to add a few things.
a) I’ve also healed a lot, not in Cata, but in Wrath and TBC . in ICC even in our progression 10man
b) When I say no real mistakes, I mean that. I’m the first to be ashamed when I’m closing in to the tank on damage taken, so I very often have a close look at those stats, and it wasn’t that
c) when my guild (without me that day :/) downed Chimaeron they did it with 4 healers and relative ease, where our top 3 healers wiped with 7 of us non-healers for a few hours. Point proven, imho
d) As my girlfriend, our Holy Pally is sitting next to me and Is constantly cursing about Cata normal compared to ICC Heroic, I tend to believe her as well :P
#13 by Kotakh on March 11, 2011 - 11:34 am
Chim is all about healers. There’s no IF or But about that.
#14 by Perrin on March 14, 2011 - 8:30 am
We use this kite path in P3, to avoid people getting caught out of range of healers or the boss.