Today, we’re going over the Wotlk Class phase 3 raids, TOGC and Onyxia from a tank perspective. TOGC has both a normal and heroic mode while Onyxia is a normal mode only. We'll just be going over the heroic modes for TOGC because they're easier or on par with the easiest hard modes in Ulduar, so we expect pretty much everyone will be just doing their heroic versions. 

Wotlk Classic Phase 3 Boss Guide - How To Kill TOGC & Onyxia In Wotlk?

TOGC has an attempt limit mechanic for Heroic bosses where you get 50 total attempts at the bosses and you get extra loot at the end based on how many attempts you have remaining. At 50 attempts remaining, on 25 man, you'll get a 272 cloak. At 45 plus attempts, you'll get 2 extra ilevel 258 tier tokens. At 25 plus remaining, you'll get a weapon and at 1 plus, you'll get 2 ilevel 258 tier tokens. For 10 man, you'll get the same type of loot at each attempt breakpoint just lower ilevel. Each attempt to break point adds to the total loot. So for a 50 attempt to clear it, you'll get an ilevel 272 cloak or 258 tier tokens and a weapon. This makes wipes really important to avoid because it will impact your ability to get the most sought-after items. For this reason, you'll want to use less risky strats to maximize your chance of getting the best loot at the end. Solo tanking is doable in this raid, but you'll have to weigh whether the risk is worth it for each fight.

Wotlk Phase 3 TOGC Boss

1. Northrend Beasts

The first boss in WoW Wotlk TOGC is Northrend Beasts. In this fight, you'll face a different boss in each phase of the fight. This can either be solo or 2 tanks on both 10 and 25 man, but we recommend 2 tanks for 25 men at least until your guild has mastered this fight. On 10 man, you might want to tank it your first time. But most people will quickly be solo tanking it. Wear a tankier set for this fight until you have it down and know when to use defensives.

Phase 1: You'll fight Gormok the Impaler, you can position next to the door right behind them and just tank him right where he spawns. Make sure melee are ads at a melee range until Gormok has actually activated or he can just instantly one-shot a melee as soon as he activates. Every 10 seconds, he'll cast him pale on the current tank which does instant damage and applies a stack of damage over time debuff. How you want to handle these impale stacks will mostly depend on your kill time and how many totals are going to go out. You'll likely see somewhere between 7 to 12 and pale casts. Typically you'll want to tank swap every 4 stacks but the stacks can also be bopped and bubbled off. If you're a Protection Paladin, it's best to use bop instead of bubble to remove stacks. Because you may want to have a bubble available for the paralytic toxin. Depending on timing bubbles still might not be available in Phase 2 due to forbearance if you bop in phase one. You can take impale past 4 stacks but use defensives for each one if you're going to. Gormok will also gain a 15% damage buff every 20 seconds that stacks up to 60% total. You'll see Gormok throwing snowballs at people too. These aren't tanked so you don't need to worry about these, DPS will just kill them. The snowballs can be cleaved off but not onto.

Phase 2: You'll be fighting 2 worms, Dreadscale and Acidmaw. Acidmaw will initially be stationary while Dreadscale will be mobile every 45 seconds. The worms will submerge and swap which worm is mobile and which is stationary. The stationary worm will use a ranged attack dealing spell damage as their basic attack, Cassian knocked back every 15 seconds and casts their special ability on a random player and that will spread to any other player near that person too. The mobile worm will use regular melee attacks, and drop a slime pool on the ground. Periodically that grows in size similar to grobbulus cast frontal breath and applies its special ability to the tank every 20 seconds. The 2 special abilities are burning bile from Dreadscale and paralytic toxin from Acidmaw. Paralytic toxin does increasing damage and slows the affected player the longer they have the debuff. Eventually, the player will be stunned, burning bile will cause the affected player to do AOE damage to anyone around them and it will remove paralytic toxin from player hit. 

So it's important that players with burning bow and paralytic toxin get close enough to each other to get rid of the toxin. But players with burning bowels should try not to do excessive AOE damage to other players. Paralytics toxin can also be removed with a divine shield and divine intervention. If you're tanking a mobile worm you may occasionally need to move due to the slime pools depending on your kill time. There are several ways to handle this phase but we recommend tanking the worms close together for cleaving whenever possible. The AOE damage caused by Dreadscale while he's stationary leads to the most deaths. So we recommend killing him first and then killing Acidmaw. When one of the worms is killed, they'll be enraged and do increased damage, but the enridge doesn't really matter. If you kill Dreadscale first, just make sure that you're ready to bubble and or get de-eyed for paralytic poison, since you'll reach a point where there are no longer any burning biles out to get rid of the poison. Alternatively, you can try to kill them both at about the same time or kill Acidmaw first, but the raid needs to be very spread out and cautious of burning bile.

Phase 3: You'll fight Icehowl, you'll want to take him against a wall and try to wedge yourself into a corner. Because he frequently does a knockback and you want to keep him stationary while also giving your melee a wall to get knocked against, so they don't lose any uptime. His melees hit decently hard and he'll also hit you with an instant attack called ferocious butt that does a lot of damage and stuns you. You'll want to use a CD before each ferocious butt cast to minimize your chance of death, as it can be pretty bursty. He'll also periodically jump to the middle of the room and knock the hole against a wall, stunning everyone briefly. Then pick a target to charge and if he hits any player with this charge, he'll do a ton of damage to them and enrage for a short time. You'll need to use any defensive you can if someone fails this as the enrage gives him plus 100% damage and attack speed. If everyone dodged the charge, Icehowl will instead be stunned and take a 100% increase in damage for 15 seconds. After this stun wears off, just reposition him along the wall again.

2. Lord Jaraxxus

Jaraxxus, lord of the Burning Legion. This fight is ridiculously easy, you can Solo or 2 tanks it on both 10 and 25, but the best thing you can do is just solo tank it. Wear any gear you want for this, there's no chance of a tank dying in this fight. Jaraxxus will cast a fell fireball constantly that just needs to be interrupted, tanking Jaraxxus in the middle of the room where he spawns. He will spawn a demon portal 20 seconds after the fight starts and another one every 2 minutes after that. However, most guilds will only see one of these portals as the fight ends pretty quickly. When the portal spawns, you should move Jaraxxus on top of the portal for cleaving. All DPS should swap to the portal but you'll get some extra incidental cleave damage onto Jaraxxus. As the tank, you should also be pumping as much damage into the portal as you can. The longer the portal is up, the more ads that will spawn from it. 

Phase 1: Early on, most guilds will get 1 or 2 ads from the portal, you should be focused down immediately. If you're solo tanking just pick these up and get some MDS. They'll periodically jump away but don't chase them. Let them run back to you but keep an eye on them and be ready to taunt them if you lose threat. If you're too tanking, the OT will just pick them up and pull them onto Jaraxxus for cleaving. Jaraxxus will also summon a volcano 1 minute and 20 seconds into the fight. Every 2 minutes after that, you'll handle this exactly like the demon portal. 

Phase 2: Moved Jaraxxus onto the volcano, focus it down and then focus the ads down. The ads spawned by the volcano are infernals that occasionally jump to a random player and do AOE fire damage. If you're solo tanking, pick these up and focus them down. They have almost no HP and will die pretty much incidentally. You'll want to use divine sacrifice and fire res or mastery to keep melee safe through the aoes. You can also move Jaraxxus away while the infernals are aoeing if necessary. If you're too tanking, the OT will pick them up and can either tank them away from the melee to reduce raid damage or stack them on Jaraxxus for cleave. Jaraxxus will occasionally put a legion flame on a random raid member that will cause them to drop fire on the ground, so watch for this in melee and reposition as needed.

3. Faction Champions 

This fight is designed to be like a PVP fight, so you'll feed a bunch of Horde or Alliance Champions that represent different wow classes and specs. Each one of them will also have their own PvP trinket to get out of CC. This fight isn't meant to be tanked as NPCs will drop threads and fixate on raid members frequently. It is possible to tank the fight under certain circumstances, so a tank spec isn't entirely useless. If you have great control over the healers, you could go for the Rogue, Hunter, or Enhancement Shaman. First, the Champs take reduced AOE damage so don't worry about cleaving, as it will do very little damage and most of the time just ends up breaking CC. Use your entire toolkit to help keep yourself and your fellow raid members alive. If you're a tank that doesn't have a DPS or healing off spec just focus on interrupt, CC, and cleanses. If you're a Protection Paladin and have good utility spell usage.

4. Twin Valkyr

This fight can be either solo or too tanked on both 10 and 25. We recommend solo tanking it on 10 man and you can solo tank it on 25 man too, once you've got a good feel for it. On 10-man solo tank and 25 man 2 tank, you can go very aggressive with your gear. If you're solo tanking 25 man, we would start a little bit tankier to get a feel for what you can handle and then peel back from there. The Valkyr is shared health pool so any damage done to them will damage both of them. You'll notice 2 dark and light portals around the room and clicking on these will give you either a dark or light debuff. If you have the dark debuff, you'll be immune to the dark spells throughout the fight. But you'll do half damage to the dark twin. Likewise, if you choose the light debuff, you'll be immune to the light damage but you'll have half damage to the light twin. The dark effects in this fight deal shadow damage and the light effect deal fire damage. As a tank, the color you choose should be the opposite of the one you're tanking if 2 tanking. Typically the raid will mostly start with a dark debuff while a few people will have a light debuff. Take the dark debuff if you're solo tanking so that you do full damage to the light twin since the majority of your DPS will be on her to start. If you're using a strat where the raid will swap colors at certain points, just always have the same debuff as the majority of your DPS. 

Phase 1: When the fight starts, there will be dark and light balls shooting all around the room. If you're hit by one of the opposite colors to your debuff, you and others with the same debuff nearby will take damage. However, if you're hit by a ball with the same color as your debuff, you'll get stacks for your debuff that will give you a 100% damage buff for 20 seconds when you reach 100 stacks. Every 45 seconds one of the Valkyr will cast a special ability either a shield or an AOE. When the shield is gassed, that Valkyr will also start casting a heal that can only be interrupted once this shield has been destroyed. The Valkyr who did not cast the shield will gain a damage buff during this time that lasts until the heal is interrupted. But their damage is so low, to begin with, that you'll barely notice this. If you want you can use a small cooldown, but it's unlikely to be necessary unless you're using a more aggressive set. Keep in mind, you'll do half damage to this shield if you're the same color as the Valkyr cassette. The other special ability the AOE will do huge damage to any one of the opposite color. The special abilities cast are randomly picked but each twin must cast both her AOE and shield before either of them can repeat a special ability. That means if the first special ability you see is the dark shield, you will not see the dark shield again until at least the fifth special ability. Because all 4 specials have to be cycled through once before they can be picked again. 

Phase 2: There are 2 main strats for this boss, the door strat and the normal strat. If you're doing the door strat, you'll pull the Valkyr to the right entrance and then flip around so that you're facing the door. The ridge should be pixel stacked on the door behind the light Valkyr. Make sure both Valkyrs are closed so they can be cleaved. With this Strat, you'll have a couple of people with the light debuff apart from the rest of the raid, soaking as many of the light balls as they can to prevent them from hitting the raid. Blizzard nerfed this shred a little bit from the original Wrath by adding some balls that spawn at the door or this shred is still very doable, but red damage will be higher than it was before. When the dark shield is a possible cast, we recommend switching preemptively to the dark Valkyr a few seconds before the special ability timer comes up. So that you can maximize damage on the dark shield if that's chosen. This is because the dark shield will be significantly harder to break than the light shield with the majority of the raid dealing 50% reduced damage. You'll also want to lessen pop all CDs to make sure you get the shield down. 

Phase 3: During the light AOE, raid damage will be extremely high. Use d sacs, fire all personals and hellstones. Ret and Holy Paladins should be in different groups, so that Holy Paladins can bubble and d sac without canceling to help keep their group up. Protection Paladin should use wall and d sac without canceling. Protection Paladin can also look to use lay on someone. Getting the dark shield down in time and keeping people alive during light Valkyr are the most difficult parts of this strat. If you decide to use the normal strat, just take the twins on top of the light portal to start and have everyone but the soakers swap color based on the special abilities being cast. Since you won't have a wall behind you, you'll also need a couple more people to start as light to get better soaker coverage.

5. Anub’arak

This fight will generally be 2 or 3 tanks on 25 man and solo or 2 tanks on 10 man. The main mechanic of this fight to consider when choosing your gear is the leeching swarm.

Phase 1: when it reaches 30% HP and it does 30 % of your current health every second for the remainder of the fight. Any damage done by leeching swarm also heals Anub’arak for 230% of the damage dealt, so it's really important to have a 50% healing reduction debuff on Anub’arak at all times once he's cast leaching swarm. This ability makes stem less valuable than usual because the more HP you have, the more damage you take and the more healing you do to Anub’arak and prolong the fight. You'll want enough HP to survive burst damage but don't overdo it.  It seemed like 40k to 42k hp for ad tanks and 45k to 48k hp for main tanks was about the right amount to have. You'll also want to use an NR helm enchant and NR cloak enchant and lesser flask of resistance. When combined with aspects of the wild or nature resist totem, you'll have 225 NR which will significantly reduce leaching swarm damage. The ads don't hit too hard so it's best to have block tanks on them as black tanks will reduce a significant precentage of the incoming damage. 

Phase 2: To solo tank this on 10 man just use defensives and stuns for ads and have all DPS focus adds down immediately when they spawn. You'll also probably only get one set of ads during Wrath phase 3 TOGC, so you should let them burrow. Anub’arak will generally be tanked at the spotty starting but some guilds will opt to take him on the sides next to the add spawn locations. The main tank should just flip him around and healers should stack on top of the main tank. He has no frontal damage that would put healers at risk and this positioning makes things easier for the ad tanks. A ranged DPS will shoot down one of the frozen spheres flying in the air to drop an ice patch and the main tank should position around the ice patch, so Anub’arak is partially on top of it. A second sphere should be gripped down and instantly killed by a DK on the opposite side of Anub’arak as the first ice patch. These ice patches slow, any player or ad that moves through them by 80%. But you can use hand of freedom to move through them without being slowed. 4 ads will spawn every 45 seconds and 25 man and 2 and 10 man from the sides of the room. 

The main purpose of the ice patch is to prevent the submerge ability the ads will cast. He casts this every 25% HP they lose, but it has a cooldown. If the ad is on an ice patch, some merge will do nothing. But if there not on a nice patch, they'll become unattackable for a while and be healed to full when they return. The ads have a stacking aura that increases the attack and cast speed of other ads by 12 yards by 100%, so the damage will be greatly increased when the ads are too close together. Make sure to monitor the add buffs to make sure they only have one spider frenzy buff at a time. As an ad tank, wait until the Anub’arak gets close and then a single target taunts it. Protection Paladin should not use righteous defense because it can often cause issues for the other tank by taunting mobs you don't mean for it to. Begin cleave threading both ads as you move them onto the ice patch and next to Anub’arak. Your goal is to get your ads positioned perfectly so that they're close enough to Anub’arak for cleave, but not so close to the other set of ads that they're buffing each other. This might take a little bit of practice but once you've seen it a few times, it should become second nature. The ads will periodically cast a shadow strike on a random raid member which will likely be lethal if it is in and interrupted property. 

Protection Warriors can interrupt this easily with holy wrath and shockwave, a Retribution Paladin can also hold a wrath tanner at both sides in a pinch. The main thing the main tank should focus on is freezing slash. This is a variable cast on a 20-second cooldown that will deal frost damage and stun the tank. You should use CDs right before this comes off cooldown to hopefully have something up for it. This is much more important in Phase 3 when tank damage is higher. 80 seconds into the fight, Anub’arak enters his submerged phase about 10 seconds before he's going to submerge. The main tank should pull Anub’arak to the side away from the frost patches being used for ad tanking so that they don't get destroyed. Once submerged, Anub’arak will chase a random raid member who will kite a noob to a far-away ice patch. The player being chased should stop in front of the ice patch, get bopped, and wait until the bop is about to wear off before finally going over the ice patch. This will stun a new briefly and he'll pick a new target to chase.

Once the borrowers are killed, the ad tank is going to hop off the ice and begin trying to pick up scarabs. The scarabs are not turntable and will give 20K threat to a random rig member when they spawn, but the tanks can pretty quickly overcome that and just tank them. They will put up a stacking dot on players they hit which lasts a minute. Ideally, nobody will have this debuff going into phase 3, so depending on how quickly you're going to push phase 3 after coming out of phase 2, you may need to play a little bit safer and avoid getting these debuffs as much as you can. 

Phase 3: At 30%, a new bull cast leeching swarm dealing 30% of your current HP every second for the rest of the fight. Tanks will be topped the whole time while the rest of there it will be kept low, this is where defensive usage will be important depending on your kill time. You'll probably want to kill the first set of ads in Phase 3 and let the second set Burrower intentionally. But you may choose to kill more waves of ads than that. Keep in mind, the ads will not cast a merge until they reach 75% HP, so just tank them on the DPS but off the frost patch to make sure they get DPS too low enough to burrow quickly. It's really going to depend on killing time when it makes sense to let the ads emerge intentionally. But that's something you'll pretty quickly learn once you get in there and experience the fight. Once your ads are submerged, healers can intentionally leave you low for a long time until ads need to be dealt with again, which will significantly lower the healing being done to Anub. As you're getting close to a kill, you can drop a dummy bomb and or cat around with rocket boots to buy some time if you get overrun with that. 

Wotlk Phase 3 Onyxia Guide

1. Onyxia

She returns to Wrath as a normal mode-only boss and is still found in Dustwallow Marsh. You can either solo or 2-tank this fight on both 10 and 25. The fight is pretty much identical to the level 60 version but she now spawns in Onyxia layer guard every 30 seconds in phase 2.

Phase 1: At the start of the fights take her straight back to the wall. She has a tail swipe that knocks back as well as a frontal breath cleave and wing buff it, so just be careful of where you're facing her and where her tail is when you're moving her. If someone gets tail swiped into whelps, it's going to be difficult for the main tank to pick them up since Onyxia isn't super easy to move around. You'll probably just want to have a Feral Druid go bare and AOE taunt any whelps in phase 1 if you don't have a second tank. 

Phase 2: At 65%, she'll fly into the air. Whelp will periodically spawn from the sides of the room and an Onyxian layer guard will spawn from the entrance to the room. The guard will cast ignite weapon which makes its attacks deal a ton of fire damage to both the tank and anyone within 5 yards of the tank. So make sure nobody is stacked on top of you Rogues and warriors can disarm the guard to remove the ignite weapon buff. The guard can also cast blast nova which deals huge fire damage but has a 5-second cast. To either kill the guard before it goes off or run out. 

Phase 3: Once Onyxian reaches 40 HP, she'll land again and ads will stop spawning. She'll occasionally fear the whole raid for 3 seconds but you should have a tremor totem in your group if you aren't a Protection Warrior. Reposition her immediately when your figure ends, so people don't die.