The Blinding Vale

Reconstructed from the log, not from a guide. Ruia opened in Moonkin form, was kicked five times out of five on Warden's Wrath, and shapeshifted to Bear at forty-three seconds. It never left bear form again on this attempt.

In bear form the boss runs a fixed cycle, measured at 21.0 seconds twice on the wipe and 21.0, 21.0 and 20.1 seconds on the kill:

  Grievous Thrash    2s cast, lands on all five, then ticks about once a
                     second for ten seconds
  ~6.5s later        Pulverizing Strikes x3, one every two seconds

Each Pulverizing Strike names one player. The named player is always within about five degrees of the direction the boss is facing at the moment it lands, so the boss visibly turns to point at its target. That turn is the tell, and there are about 1.9 seconds between the cast starting and the damage arriving.

Across both attempts there are 75 observations of a player being either hit or not hit by one of these fifteen cones, and the split is clean:

  every player who was hit      within 39.8 degrees of the boss's facing,
                                and within 28.2 yards
  every player who was missed   beyond 41.4 degrees, or beyond 31.6 yards

So: an eighty-degree wedge, roughly thirty yards long. Being the named target is not what hurts you. Being anywhere in the wedge is.

The base cone hit is remarkably consistent. On Frost Mage it measured 350,387, 350,388 and 350,388 across three separate casts on two different attempts, which is the same number three times.

With Pulverized already on you, the same ability measured 764,956 on Ret Paladin, 743,617 on Hyporock and 778,638 on Frost Mage. Against the un-amplified 350,388 baseline that is between 2.0 and 2.3 times.

Ret Paladin survived his double. He has an 802,680 health pool and was at full health, and 764,956 fits inside that with 37,724 to spare. Hyporock and Frost Mage have smaller pools and did not survive, and would not have survived at full health either. Hyporock's fatal hit exceeded their entire maximum health by 3,777.

The defensives that were up did not change the outcome, and are recorded here so nobody assumes they were forgotten:

• Frost Mage's Ice Barrier was refreshed 4.4 seconds before the first cone and was consumed in full by it, absorbing 141,910. It was gone for the second.
• Hyporock's Divine Protection was pressed at 19:19:13.83 and expired at 19:19:21.83, which is 0.53 seconds before the fatal hit landed. Even had it still been running, a twenty per cent reduction on 743,617 is 594,894, against a health pool that was at 65 per cent when the cone arrived.
• Aura Mastery had already been spent at 19:18:54, covering the first cone sequence, which nobody died to. The shortest gap between two Aura Mastery casts anywhere in this key is 3:02, and the boss's cycle is 21 seconds, so it can cover at most one sequence in eight. It is not the answer to this mechanic and should not be planned around as if it were.

The group released, ran back and pulled Ruia again 31 seconds after the wipe, and killed it in 2:34 with nobody dying. That second attempt is the cleanest possible control, because nothing about the encounter got easier. The boss cast more Grievous Thrashes (five, against two) and more cones (nine, against six) over a longer fight.

The difference is entirely in who the cones touched:

  attempt     cones fired   players hit   hit by a cone aimed at someone else
  wipe                  6             7                                    3
  kill                  9             3                                    0

On the kill, every cone that connected hit only its named target. Nobody was caught by somebody else's, so Pulverized never had a chance to stack into a second hit, and the largest single hit anybody took was 246,857.

Two behaviours produced that. Ele Shaman stood at 31.6 to 35.5 yards on the kill, past the wedge's roughly thirty-yard reach, and three cones aimed directly at him hit nobody at all, himself included. And the melee were behind the bear rather than beside it. Hyporock stood at almost exactly the same distance from the boss on both attempts, so distance is not what changed. The angle is:

  closest Hyporock came to the boss's facing, on a cone aimed at another player

  wipe attempt   39.8 degrees   inside the wedge, and this is the hit that killed
  kill attempt   97.3 degrees   comfortably outside, on all five

Standing in melee is not the mistake, and it is worth being clear about that, because the obvious reading of this wipe is that the healer was too close, and the log does not support it. Hyporock was 6.4 to 7.4 yards from Ruia on the wipe and 4.5 to 7.6 yards on the kill. Essentially identical.

What differed is which side. On the wipe, Hyporock was within 45 degrees of the boss's facing for four of the six cones, beside the bear, in the arc it was sweeping. On the kill, Hyporock was 97 degrees or more away on every cone except their own. Behind the bear.

The fatal cone was aimed at Frost Mage, who was 24.2 yards away on the far side. Hyporock, seven yards from the boss and 39.8 degrees off the line to Frost Mage, was inside the wedge by roughly a degree and a half. That is the whole margin.

What Hyporock did well in that window, which the grade already reflects: the healing between the Grievous Thrash landing and the cones starting was the strongest stretch of output in the fight, and it did top Ret Paladin to full health, which is the only reason he lived through his own double hit. The dispel work across the key was flawless, in the specific sense that every debuff one dispeller could physically reach was cleansed. This was a good key played by a healer having a good night, lost to a positioning rule nobody had worked out yet.

Recorded so these do not get re-litigated later:

• Damage. The boss lost health at a steady rate for the whole attempt, and the kill attempt's rate was only slightly higher.
• Interrupts. Every Warden's Wrath in the moonkin phase was stopped, five of five, by three different players. Once the boss went bear there was nothing left to kick.
• Healing throughput. The ten seconds before the wipe were the healer's strongest of the fight.
• Cooldowns being hoarded. Ice Barrier, Divine Protection, Astral Shift, Fiery Brand and Metamorphosis were all pressed during the bear phase. They were spent on the right window, and were simply not large enough for a hit bigger than a player's whole health bar.
• The boss being close to death. It was not. It was at 44.2 per cent health when the last player fell.

Of the fifteen cones across both attempts, fourteen fit the eighty-degree, thirty-yard model. One does not. At 19:21:05 on the kill attempt a cone named Ret Paladin, who was 7.6 yards away and directly in front, and no damage event of any kind followed: no hit, no miss, no absorb, no immunity.

The three cones at the very end of the kill attempt are excluded from the model rather than counted against it, for a stated reason. They were cast after Ruia shapeshifted into Haranir form at 19:21:41, the boss's facing in those records does not point at the named target the way it does in all twelve bear-form casts, and none of them damaged anybody. The wedge appears to be a bear-form behaviour.

So the geometry above rests on twelve casts, of which eleven behave identically. Treat the exact numbers as a good working model rather than as datamined constants.