BLACK RING CITADEL WING 1
Black Ring Citadel (BRC) has 3 wings. Wing 1 is to the right of the “lobby”, Wing 2 to the left, and Wing 3 is straight ahead. Upon entering Wing 1, raiders should pick up a quest from a box to the right of the cavern entrance. They have to clear out the groups of mobs around each of the cauldrons of blood in the cavern and click on the tiny little ladle on top. Completion of this quest will give caster characters a new spell, Shatter Stone. This spell is critical to the completion of the first boss, Excorant the Gargoyle Master. The cauldrons are defended by a group of trash mobs, some elites, some not. Most are easily manageable and not worth mentioning. Do not forget to kill the trash guarding the large snake statue. Clicking on the statue removes death penalty.
Black Ring Guards - I make a special note about the Black Ring Guards because they hit like a freight train. Under-geared tanks will truly struggle with these guys. Early raiders may need to kite the Guards around, or rotate aggro on them.
Excorant the Gargoyle Master – The raid will enter the first chamber of Wing 1 and see Excorant minding his own business next to a vat of molten lava. In the room are 6 gargoyle statues, and a bunch of broken gargoyles and moulds for making them. Excorant appears human in his first phase. He can be easily tanked and does not hit particularly hard. He has, however, a few tricks in his bag.
The first is that he can turn players into stone. Players first detect this because they get a debuff and move really slowly. Players who are stoned should try to move until they are all together in a bunch.
Every minute or so, Excorant awakens a pair of Gargoyles. There are 6 Gargoyles in total and he awakens them in order from the front of the room (where Excorant was standing at the start of the fight) to the back. These Gargoyles must be tanked and killed before the next pair awakes. Having too many Gargoyles up will wipe the raid. Everytime a Gargoyle dies, it drops a pile of sand on the floor. Casters with the Shatter Stone spell can pick up the sand and cast a cone effect on players who are turned to stone. The sand is on a timer when picked up and will run out in 15 seconds if not used.
So the first phase involve tanking the boss, grouping up the stoned people, tanking and heavy DPS on the Gargoyles, unstoning the stoned, and finally getting Excorant phase 1 down to 0% health.
Once Excorant’s health drops to zero, he falls to the floor and a gush of blood appears, in a couple of seconds, he turns into his second form, a large Gargoyle. In this form, Excorant periodically does an AoE fear and wipes aggro, so after the AoE fear, give tanks time to pick up aggro again. Otherwise, this phase is just tank and spank. Excorant drops Gloves, Belts and a Simple Relic II.
After the fight, a door opens and the players are allowed into another chamber with a corpse of a monster on a table, there is no boss fight here, just some trash. The trash up to the room with Yaremka is quite straight forward with the following exceptions.
Black Ring Cabalist - Do not use any form of Crowd Control (CC) on the Cabalist except for Knockbacks. Other forms of CC will cause the Cabalist to use an AoE Fear.
Black Ring Sorcerors - Tank multiple Sorcerors away from each other. Their overlapping AoE damage will kill players in seconds. They also do a root, which makes them irritating mobs.
Yaremka the Soul Eater – One of the few big bosses in BRC. Yaremka is a large horned demon in a room full of electrical contraptions. There are orbs suspended from the ceilings, and other orbs along the alcoves in the sides of the room. These orbs are all critical to the boss fight.
The raid needs to assign some low-DPS classes to the clickable orbs in the alcoves. There are 4 orbs on each side, a total of 8 orbs. Raids can assign 4 players to “orb duty”. There should be a leader for the orb team, he will call for the clicking of the orbs.
Yaremka is a tank and spank with a few exceptions. He puts quite a strong Damage over Time (DoT) spell on the 2nd person on the aggro table. So have two soldiers tank Yaremka so the 2nd on aggro eats the DoT. Keep the two tanks healed at all times. Every minute, Yaremka will Enrage and expand in size. The role of the orb team is to click the orb before he or after he Enrages to Pacify him.
The tanks must bring Yaremka to one side of the room between the suspended orbs and their lightning bolts, the orb team needs to be at the clickable orbs on the same side. The orb team will click on the orbs in synchronised timing and Pacify Yaremka. Then the tanks must bring Yaremka to the other side of the room, the orb team must run to the other set of clickable orbs and repeat the clicking. The clickable orbs have a 1 minute cooldown, so the raid has to move from one side of the room to the other every 30 seconds.
Once the raid get the Pacify down pat, this fight is really easy. Voice chat like Ventrilo is necessary for this fight. Again, undergeared raiders will struggle tanking his DoT. Yaremka drops Legs, Boots and a Simple Relic II.
After killing Yaremka, the raid would face some tougher trash mobs on their way to Sabazios. Most are standard tank and spanks with the following exception. Way back in the day, this clickable orbs were buggy and did not show their status properly. Raids used to kite Yaremka around the room and spend 20+ minutes with this fight. This is a case of the exploit being harder to execute than the intended fight strategy.
Black Ring Templars – These guys are immuned to any additional magical effects from skills and abilities. So they take quite a while to kill. Otherwise, they behave like Black Ring Guards, i.e. hitting like trucks.
Sabazios the Insane – This is an insanely easy fight, so much so that it is considered free loot. Sabazios is basically a tank and spank. There are four giant snake statues in the room that many snake adds will issue forth from. The intended boss fight is for the raid to destroy the giant snake statues before the snakes pick off the squishies and wipe the raid. However, it is not hard for higher armoured classes to ring fence the squishies in a corner of the room so that Sabazios because a simple tank, spank and AoE DPS race. Ah the joys of collision detection. Sabazios drops Legs, Shoulders, Weapons and a Simple Relic II.
So that is Wing 1 of the Black Ring Citadel. It is an easy wing if you have a few seasoned raiders to carry the rest through. Some trash mobs drop Shards of the Exiled God which are crafting materials for two weapons, Quill of the Ibis (one handed edge) and Feather of the Ibis (two handed edge), during the Leviathus boss fight in BRC Wing 3. Sabazios also drops an Amethyst Eye of the Serpent, together with another Eye from Wing 2, is required to open Wing 3. Only the raid leader needs to have both eyes.
