Hydross the Unstable is the first boss in Serpent Shrine Caverns, Zangar Marsh, Outlands. My quest to solo raid encounters brought me to SSC last week already to kill „The Lurker Below“. I hesitated a bit to try other bosses since they seem to have mechanics that make these fights somewhat tricky.
Hydross seemed the easiest, but it turned out I underestimated the fight a tiny bit 😀
Hydross the Unstable <Duke of Currents>
Hydross has 2 forms that he switches to, depending on where you fight him. Due to the nature fo the fight you need to switch the places once the Mark of Hydross stacks too high. Doing so will spawn 4 adds doing full nature/frost damage and turning immune to this form of damage.
Water Form
- Purify Elemental:Â He casts this when he enters the water beams, making it a player-determined occurrence. It will make him enter a purified state in which he is immune to frost and will hit for frost damage. When casting this, he will also spawn four Pure Spawn of Hydross. These are also immune to frost and also hit for frost damage.
- Mark of Hydross: Stacks up to 5 times, increasing frost damage received by 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 percent.
- Water Tomb: Casts on a single target every 7 seconds. Stuns for 4 seconds and deals 4500 frost damage over 5 seconds (which means that anyone getting this with a 100% debuff needs to be healed before the DoT ends). It also applies to all people within 8 yards of the original target, but it won’t chain to secondary targets.
Poison Form
- Mark of Corruption: Stacks up to 5 times, increasing nature damage received by 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 percent.
- Vile Sludge: Casts every 15 seconds. Deals 500 damage each 3 seconds and reduces healing and damage done by 50%. Lasts 24 seconds.
In a Nutshell
On my first try I just tried to zerg him down in frost form, but he started hitting for 8-9k pretty fast 😀 got him down to 30% but then the damage was jsut too high to compensate. The second approach was a bit more careful , using wolves / elementals / rage for transitions and switch when the mark reaches 50% extra damage. Then it was pretty easy, switched to poison and then back to frost before killing him.
Fortunately Water Tomb will not be cast when soloing the boss, which makes this a whole lot easier.
Hydross drops 250g and 3 epic items.
Good Luck
Edit:
Video
Here is a video of my second kill. As you can see I use feral spirit to help through transitions, and keep the nature phase as short as possible, due to his imunity tonature damage. For Second frost phase I just used heroism to bring him down.
[youtube width=“640″ height=“385″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8XvP3PpsQE[/embed]