Watcher Raid Walkthrough - The Vile Maw Instance
by oogabooga227
Phase Three - The Watcher
Step One - The Shaking Tentacles
At this point, reverting back to the Phase Two to Three transition, you should now have Ranged aggro on the shaking tentacles, corruption removals in place, The Watcher debuffed, and everyone snuggled up. At this time, you can start to take down the Shaking Tentacles to around 8k a piece. Once you have both of your Shaking Tentacles down to 8k, stop DPS get healed up, then commence your Shaking Tentacle cycle. This cycle has NOT changed from Watcher 1.0.
As said above, go ahead and kill a Shaking Tentacle, and get a champion to clobber, and only clobber the second Shaking Tentacle to stop the healing, at this time you can start to DPS The Watcher. Continue this until the new Shaking Tentacle spawns, and have your corresponding Hunter begin range tanking it to keep it from AoEing the group. Kill the lowest moraled tentacle, and move to the new one, and start taking that one down to 8k, and stop DPS. Once you get to the point where DPS is stopped, you are free to start throwing some additional DPS into The Watcher, however soon as the next Shaking Tentacle spawns, you need to make sure you finish off your 8k Shaking Tentacles, and get going on the freshly spawned one to keep the cycle going.
This process needs to occur for the next 15-30 minutes or so until you have a dead squid. As typical for a raid, things don't always go as planned, so I have a few tips for dealing with these Shaking Tentacles.
1. Keep Marks Stacked (Telling, Reveal Weakness, Counter Defense)
2. If you start to fall behind, toss an Oathbreakers Shame on the Tentacle.
Positioning
Gray Rectangle = Fallen Bridge
Large Red Oval = Raid's location
Smaller Red Ovals = Hunters location
Pink X = Tank
Large Green Oval = Watcher
Smaller Green Ovals = Shaking Tentacles
As you can see above, once again we're emphasizing the importance of snuggling up as best as we can. This is roughly how the raid should look upon the transition from Phase 2 into 3. The Hunters should be cross tanking the tentacles as shown above, while remaining close to the main raid in case one should be hung up by a strangling tentacle at any point.
The Watcher's Attacks
Crushing Devastation
Crushing Devastation is a 360 degree AoE attack The Watcher will throw out at random, at least as far as I can tell thus far. There is no induction, it is not clobberable, it simply is something that you need to deal with. The attack itself is honestly nothing special, it only really starts to do some serious damage if you let corruptions stack up on The Watcher, and have no debuffs on him. The basic animation for the attack is that The Watcher appears to leap up, and thrash left and right.
Terror of the Deep
This attack is also a 360 degree AoE, however you can avoid this one! During Phase 3, the white text appears again, however this time it doesn't signal The Vile Scream, instead its the trigger for, Terror of the Deep. As said above Terror of the Deep is a 360 degree AoE, that affects anyone that's swimming inside the ring, sunken structure, ruins, bridge, etc. So in order to avoid this attack everyone must move onto the ruins (which can be seen a few feet below the surface of the water) which surround the watcher. Humans and elves can stand on them, dwarves and hobbits will be swimming, but as long as they are over the ruins they will be fine. The attack hits for roughly 2,500 morale (To a heavy armor class). It needs to be avoided at all costs. Also of note, this attack has a chance to knock back anyone hit by it back to the shore where you will then be hit with a Crushing and Squeezing Tentacle.
Corruption Removal
Above are pictures of the 2 types of buffs The Watcher will be stacking on himself. The beginning of the Corruption Phase begins with white text across the screen that says, "The Watcher Becomes Enraged". From that moment onward, you must have a corruption removal system in place, or you will get die to Crushing Devastation. The only buff that can be removed is the red one, named Vile Fury. These must absolutely be a priority for your raid, I would suggest having a Primary corruption removal for the entirety of the raid.
The Preying Mantis way is that we PREFER a Warden, but one is NOT manditory. Wardens are the best corruption removal class in the game, so if you have one, make them your spam corruption removals. If you do not I would recommend a Champion spamming Feral Strikes, that should be enough to keep up, with occasionally falling behind where additional assistance is needed. Along with your Primary corruption removal, you're going to need what I will refer to as, burst removals. These classes typically in our raids are Lore-Masters, Rune Keepers, and Burglars. Your first line of defense in these burst situations should be Lore-Masters and Rune Keepers as they can use their corruption removal skills from range, and have no need to run up to The Watcher like the Burglar has to. Make sure you can call these out, and keep the raid in an orderly fashion so there is no confusion as to who is up on Burst Removal next.
Debuffing
It's also very important to keep The Watcher debuffed, as I've said many times thusfar throughout the guide. Lore-Masters need to be Ancient Master traited, and Burglars should be Mischief Maker traited. Debuff's cannot be over looked, and should be on The Watcher during the entire raid.
Fire lore
Wind lore
Gust of Wind
Sop: Command
Sop: See all ends
Ancient craft
Tar
Traited Disable
