Val’kyr Twins is one of the more interesting fights in the Coliseum especially for healers. The encounter consists of two Val’kyr who share a relatively large health pool (28 million+). This encounter requires relatively decent buff management along with snap DPS switching in order to get through it.
Setting up
Divide your raid equally in two groups. Split the tanks, DPS, and healers down the line. One group will be on the left, and the other group will be on the right. For the sake of healers, use groups 1 and 2 on the right, groups 3 and 4 on the left. Doesn’t matter which groups. Just have it set in such a way that group positions match group numbers.
How the essences are positioned
Right clicking on the color provides the appropriate essence buff. Your DPS will wish to pick up the buff that is opposite the twin they are engaging. Healers may wish to collect the same colored buff as the twin their DPS is attacking.
Example: The half of the raid that is attacking Fjola Lighbane will be picking up a dark buff. The healers on that side will wish to pick up the light buff.
Main abilities
Vortex
Each twin has a vortex that will do ~6000 damage per second every 5 seconds. It’s an 8 second cast. The best way to mitigate it is to gain the same colored buff that matches the twin who is casting the vortex.
Example: Eydis Darkbane is about to case Vortex. The players who are attacking Darkbane should immediately pick up the dark buff to mitigate incoming damage until her channel is finished.
When I did this encounter as DPS, I would stand next to the buff that was opposite the one that I currently had. This way, I could switch easily and DPS the opposite twin.
Twin’s Pact
One twin will cast a shield on themselves. It absorbs ~700000 damage. While their shield is up, they will cast Twin’s Pact. It takes 15 seconds for them to cast that and when it goes off, 20% of their health is restored. The idea here is to have the entire raid switch to the twin who is casting Twin’s Pact and break their shield. A Rogue or a Shaman can then interrupt Twin’s Pact.
Example: Fjola Lightbane just cast Shield of Light and is channeling Twin’s Pact. The DPS attacking Edyis Darkbane will run behind her, pick up the darkness buff, and start opening up on Fjola. MacktheKnife, a Rogue, manages to kick and interrupt Lightbane from healing.
Surges
Surge of Darkness and Surge of Light are raid wide “auras†that inflict damage to everyone who is of the opposite buff. Light buffed players take damage from Surge of Darkness and viceversa. Nothing can be done about it.
Incoming balls!
Periodically throughout the fight, there are going to be balls that come in from all sides. You’re going to have a dark ball and a light ball. If a ball hits a player who has the same buff as the color of the ball, they will gain a buff. If the ball hits an opposite coloured player, they take damage. The balls will naturally be drawn toward the twins.
If you want some practice for hard mode, have your healers run interference with their colored balls so that the DPS won’t get hit by them.
Example: Matt’s healing the side that’s DPSing Darkbane. Matt’s buff is the dark essence. Balls start appearing. Matt starts shield everyone and begins chasing dark balls and running interference so that the light balls can get through and hit the DPS.
Healing tips
Raid groups starting out will want to try their luck with 6 healers before dropping down to 5. Split them down the line. If you have an odd healer, coin toss it or random roll the side for them to go on.
Do not get tunnel vision here. Remember, just because you’re on one side with one buff doesn’t mean you cannot heal the other group if you need to. You can cross heal if one side happens to be struggling for some reason.
How do Discipline Priests heal through the raid-wide tick?
Drop some gold on the Prayer of Healing glyph. That will help soften the blow. Shield spamming 10 different targets helps too if you can keep working the global cooldown.
Paladins?
This is going to require a bit of cooperation from the raid. Try to have your members stand near each other when they’re not trying to intercept balls. Holy Light splashing helps. If not, stick to beaconing the tank and going on auto heal on everyone in the area.
We found it was much simpler to just have your entire raid (except for the 2nd tank) stay one color, then swap if needed. Since they share a health pool, we just dps down whichever one is appropriate for the essence that the raid has, and tanking them on top of each other allows for incidental damage to hit both. It just means people have to pay attention and swap quickly if the shield goes up on the other one. This only applies for normal mode.
The trickiest part for us was getting the DPS to understand the “opposite-kills-opposite” color idea, and switching to the shield fast enough. It was frustrating, but it’s a lot more fun now that they’ve added the constant damage (before, you could do it with two healers…haha). After wiping to that twice and having the healers go “WHOA WTFUX WAS THAT?!” we eventually group-assigned heals (yes, we don’t normally do this… maybe nubbing? it’s usually not a problem though! :D) and everything went smoothly. I must say, Disc-priesting I was a little worried, but it was a breeze to keep my group (and a bunch of other random schmoes) up!
With our raid, we usually just have the healers stand dead center and maybe have a tank focus for two, one on each side. Then we just heal all the incoming dmg. It’s worked so far XD
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The healing’s in heroic mode is not only going to be more intense due to it being heroic but also because a tactic that a lot of guilds have gone with, is to tank them both next to each other, which increase their damage and attack speed. This in order to allow quick DPS switching when either of them casts Twin’s Pact so you don’t have to run a great distance.
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Great tips. This is definitely the preferred method of handling these bosses for my raid team. We had a Disc Priest in the middle that was trying to shield everyone he possibly could and that helped us out. I think the real keys to this fight are keeping people from getting hit by the wrong color balls to keep the stress levels of your healers down and also not letting the Twins heal themselves.
After that it’s all about the rinse and repeat technique.
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This is one of my favorite bosses in ToC to heal on my Shaman. Normally I tank heal (10 man) but for this I switch to the Chain Heal glyph and spam it while refreshing Earth Shield and tossing in Riptide for those who can’t avoid the wrong color balls. This makes it a fun fight to look at the healing meters too. Druids – eat your heart out!