Healing Ulduar: Ignis the Furnace Master

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For other bosses in Ulduar, check the Ulduar Healing strategy page.

Here’s a rather unconventional approach to killing Ignis which utilizes the side of the instance. Using this method does appear to be rather cheesy, but it takes a lot of pressure off many players. Credit this to Kimbo for figuring this out. Ignis is one of the early optional bosses you’ll encounter first in Ulduar. I recommend working on Razorscale first before doubling back to the Furnace Master.

Quick notes

  • Standard tank and spank
  • Periodic Constructs will activate

Abilities

Scorch – All enemies in front of Ignis will take quick dot damage for 3 seconds (ticks every half-a-second). Constructs within the area will start to heat up and become Molten.

Flame Jets – Geysers of flame shoot up from the ground and throw raid members up into the air. If the Flame Jets connect while a player is casting, they’ll be interrupted for 8 seconds. Targets take fire damage over 8 seconds.

Slag Pot – Ignis will charge a player and grab them tossing them into his Slag Pot (the pot hanging around his waist).

Activate Construct – Activates a Construct with 3.8 million health.

Strength of the Creator – When a Construct is active, damage done by Ignis is increased by 15%. It’s a stacking buff. When a Construct is taken out, the stack is removed.

Ability examples

ignis-flame-patch

Scorch on the ground

ignis-constructs

Construct

flame-jet

Here’s a shot of some of the melee players in the air after a Flame Jet.

Setup

Here’s our non-conventional setup. If you look to your left and right, you’ll see two pools of water that are surrounded by a ledge. Start heading for the one on the left (facing Ignis) that’s nearest the entrance ramp. All ranged DPS and healers should stand on the ledge.

The reason you want to set up in this position is to think back to the days of Starcraft where players set up choke points for enemies to go through. Constructs that spawn, if their aggro is gained by a ranged player, will have to run all the way into the pool and then up the ramp in order to take out a player (green path). The extra distance the Construct has to run should be more than enough time for your off tank to attract the Construct’s attention.

healer-pos-choke

Main tank

ignis-kite-path

Your tank’s going to be running laps along the red path. The ranged group should not be affected by Scorches. Your healers are going to have to strafe along the blue arrow to maintain range with the tank. The upper line is a little under 40 yards.

Execution

Once Ignis is engaged, your main tank will pick him up and start keeping him moving in a roundabout fashion pictured above. After a period of time has passed, Ignis will begin to activate Constructs. Off tanks need to snatch them up and bring them into Scorched areas and hold them in there until they turn Molten. When it hits 20 stacks, it becomes Brittle.

What do you get when you combine something incredibly hot with something incredibly cold? The object becomes extremely brittle. The same thing applies here. The chance to crit the Construct increases. Damage done over 5000 will effectively kill it. Be sure to target Brittle’d Constructs with your ranged players as they explode dealing damage to players in close proximity.

Have players keep an eye on Flame Jets. If spellcasters are caught casting when Flame Jet connects, they’re locked out of casting for 8 seconds. Not good if you’re a healer.

Healing

There are four healing areas to cover in this fight:

Main tank – One healer should be enough but other healers will need to keep HoTs as active as possible especially with numerous Constructs.

Off tank – If there are Constructs up, your off tank is going to need heals as well.

Slag Pot – Ignis is going to charge and pick up a player and toss them into his sack. While in his sack, they will take 5000 damage every second for 10 seconds. Keep a dedicated raid healer on Slag Pot duty. If there’s no one in there, that healer then returns back to healing the raid.

Healers won’t be able to cast too many spells in there. But healers with instant spells should be able to cast them as much as they can. Priests, for example, can Holy Nova while inside the pot.

Raid – Flame Jet and Scorched melee players are going to involve the bulk of the healing here. Chain Healing Shamans will be at their finest especially since ranged players will be strafing along the ledge. After getting hit by a Flame Jet, I will personally light up a few Holy Novas while I’m in the air.

Healing loot

Flamewrought Cinch – Leather

Lifeforge Breastplate – Plate

Pyrelight Circle – Ring

Scepter of Creation – Wand

14 thoughts on “Healing Ulduar: Ignis the Furnace Master”

  1. What screws us up every time on this fight is flame jets during slag pot (btw, turn off flame jets in gridstatusraiddebuff if you use it, makes it easier to see slag pot). Stacks on ignis increase ALL the damage he does, including scorch, slag pot, melee and flame jets. Adds also have to spend almost a full duration in the scorch effect, which means your execution has to be super tight.

    Fire resistance helps a lot, flame jets can be resisted.

    In my opinion though, even after the nerfs he is overtuned for his place in the instance, just skip him and go progress elsewhere, once you get to mimmiron it’s probably worth it taking him down.

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  2. Two quick things:

    1) At least from earlier this week, I can cast any heal inside Slag Pot, not just instants.

    2) Shielding at least 2-3 groups in the raid as Discipline is awesome for Flame Jets. While I could keep shields up on the whole raid, I usually just do the tank and healer groups. In 10-man, Power Word: Shield just trivializes Flame Jets.

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  3. No problem casting spells inside slag pot here as well. I sometimes even throw a couple of binding heals on the tank from there.
    Also the timer for Flame Jets on my BigWigs wasn’t accurate when we first were attempting him (not sure if it’s fixed now). So I just put the boss in focus with focus cast bar enabled. It made avoiding Flame Jets trivial.

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  4. I have found that I can throw any flash heal with impunity inside. Thus, Nourish, Flash of Light, Flash Heal, Lesser Healing Wave all work well. Also anything that reduces the cast of big heals, will allow you to throw big heals too.

    As for the DPS, rogues should always cloak during slag pot, shadow priests should dispersion. Mages can also iceblock, but iirc, they need to drop it before the last tick in order to gain the haste buff.

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  5. Yes, bubble/IB clears the player from the pot. Our pala did that last night.
    I had no trouble healing while in the pot. I specced Healing Focus, and concentration aura which probably helped 🙂
    Still, spamming binding heal didn’t prove enough to heal me through. Support is needed.

    We cleared Ignis yesterday. To improve our flame jet recovery we arranged the groups as follows:
    – G1: 3 Tanks + 2 Tank Healers
    – G2-G5: dps + remaining healers
    We assigned group healing priorities for G2-G5. This sped up our flame jet recovery remarkably. If a healer died, he also could clearly announce which points of the healing would need extra care. Generally, the OT healers were first choice for backup.

    Shamans excell with their chainheal, but prayer of healing is quite strong as well. This fight is intense raidhealing at its best.

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  7. Sadly, we didn’t get much luck with this tactic on 10-man. It seemed to be very hard to keep the tanks and melee DPS, plus whoever was slag potted, in range of the healers. Plus, if they were in range, occasionally he’d flame the ledge, causing mass clothie death.

    Adds also seem to sneak around and up to the ramp, which our tank was finding very difficult to control, and the lack of mobility for the healers means that anyone who gets out of range is all kinds of dead.

    Are/were we doing something obviously wrong? Any tips?

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