Shadow Lab for Hunters
“Dear BRK, I’m supposed to be doing a SL (my first) run with my guild this weekend to get my first key frag. I was wondering if you have any hints/suggestions on how to handle the pulls, bosses, etc. Taudok & Jynx”
First off, don’t you love how hunters sign with their own name and their pet’s name? We sure do!
First room, burn stuff down using trinkets, Bestial Wrath, whatever. Establish your dominance as the top DPS class. If you can make the rest of the party comment in party-chat with, “D@mn, you do some serious damage, don’t you!” all the better. You’re looking for ‘god-like awe’ but ‘respect’ is acceptable.
Big Honkin Demons. Teach the party how Misdirection works. Make the tank stand back in the curved hallway and bring him the BHDs one at a time on a silver platter. When the party is feared, you’ll all stay in the tunnel and not aggro anything else.
First Boss, Ambassador Hellmaw. Crank on Aspect of the Wild for nature protection. Do not use Bestial Wrath as you’ll resist the fears, grab aggro and die. Save Misdirection for when your healer grabs aggro coming out of a fear session. No drops for you here, be sure to pout heavily.
The Big Pull Room. Chain trapping time, so keep the party up-to-date on the fact that you have your mob. If you’re Survival spec, it’s Double Trap Time and possibly Wyvern Sting Time. Your crowd-control abilities are more important than your DPS in this room, so excel at it. Do not break sheep at any cost. Do not break your own traps or we’ll pull your Hunter License.
Use Misdirection to pull the Big Ugly Demon-Chick to your tank again, especially the one on the right-side of the room. She’s a very tough pull. Once you clear the left side, put your tank over in the bleachers over there. You need to get to the little hill in the back of the right-hand side of the room. When the BUDC is close to you and between the 6-pack and the 3-pack by the tent, Misdirect and shoot. She’ll run over to your tank and not disturb anybody else. Do not Body Pull the 6-pack as you run back to the fight; take your time and stick close to the wall.
Second Boss, Blackheart the Inciter. Frankly, if your party has bad luck here no amount of gear or planning will save you. Save your Misdirection for a post-fear tank-can’t-get-aggro situation. Place a Freezing Trap at the feet of your healer so when a fear session starts, you’ll trap your healer and she won’t be able to waste mana. No drops for you here either, more heavy pouting required.
Trash mobs to Vorpil require chain trapping. Keep your mob trapped away from the main tank and you’ll be fine.
Third Boss, Grandmaster Vorpil. There are many strategies to this fight that work. Our favorite is to stand on the ledge to the left of Vorpil, put the tank in the corner there, Misdirect Vorpil onto him and burn Vorpil down PDQ. You can tank-pull him up and down the corridor but massive DPS in that corner is easier and faster, in our opinion. Vorpil drops a blue 65dps gun you’ll love. Ours in in the bank, shiny and polished.
Trash to Murmur, more chain trapping, nothing new.
Fourth Boss, Murmur. This is a tank-healer fight, you’re not going to be responsible for a wipe or ultimate success. DPS from range, send your pet in but pull him out before the Murmur’s wind attacks. Some leave their tank on Murmur through the sonic booms and just heal him, other pull the tank and send him back. Regardless, you’re just gonna stand there and fire until he dies or you all wipe.
Murmur drops the Sonic Spear, one of the two best hunter melee weapons outside of Karazhan. This is why you’re here, so be sure to Need the thing and report anybody who tries to ninja it to BRK.
Got your own tips and tricks? Comment away.
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Thanks a ton Damh & Hobbes!
And any other comments are more than welcome!
Tau & Jynx
Three comments I would add. This is your first time here, and SL can be tricky. If you’re unsure of how to pull a mob in there, let someone else do it or ask first. Wipes come easy in SL for the inexperienced. The next tip is for Vorpil. Like BRK said, there are several ways. His is viable, my favorite is this. Have your tank stand way the hell down the hallway that you entered from. Misdirect, aimedshot, arcane, multi. Then run after vorpil. All focus dps, after teleport, pull him down the same hallway again (south hall). This, like BRK’s plan is heavily dps dependant. Your tank should be in dps gear and using duel wield or 2H. If your healer is any good, tank should be in fury stance using recklessness also. If you don’t have the dps for these two options, then he needs to be kited S,S, N, S to avoid getting decimated by adds, or even put somone on the adds period. Finally for Murmur. Your tank should run out of the sonic boom. You can help with that. Tank starts fight with charge, so that he isn’t closer to Murmer than he needs to be. Use your options menu and turn on “target of target”. You can stand at like 32 yards and not get hit by the blast. When tank turns to run, use aspect of the pack. He should never get caught in the blast that way, and it’s not that much mana to switch aspects during battle and avoid a wipe. Have him intercept back onto mumur and repeat. When you get murmur’s touch debuff, run in the little tent before timer hits 0. Short loss of dps is better than fast loss of life.
When the 2nd boss, Blackheart mind controls he wipes his aggro table. Don’t hit him or have your pet hit him until your tank reestablishes aggro on him.
Damh mentioned that you want to be feared with the rest of the group during the Hellmaw fight. The BHD’s are a pretty good pre-cursor to this fight, so try to practice staying within fear range of this guy, cause you’ll essentially be doing the same thing on Hellmaw.
The Instrauctor on the right side of the “Big Pull Room” is actually pretty easy to get. Move up to the front of the room (leave the rest of the party in the cooridor) just in front of the pillar in the front right. The Instructor paths around these mobs and you have about a 5 second window where she paths forward away from the mobs. Arcane shot her and kite her around the pillar and straight up the aisle. Dont forget to kiss the bride when your done.
As far as the Insighter fight…good luck. Like Damh said, drop a trap at your healer’s feet and tell them to stay on it. Things to keep in mind in doing this though is as soon as you lay a trap have everyone as far away from the healer as possible and try to stay bunched up a bit. This will keep party members from going for the frozen healer during the “fun time”. Also, staying in close range to another group member before the mass MC will have a higher chance of you just meleeing a party member rather then shooting (one of the few times that youre allowed to melee). If you die, dont just sit there. Release and run back (make sure the rest of the party does so as well), cause this is a long fight and I have died up to 3 times on this fight and still downed him. One last thing…blow all your cooldowns, especially TBW/BW when its up!!! Nothing spells death for a group when you forget to blow TBW before the MC and this boss does it for you. Oh and for God’s sake, make sure your pet is on Passive, otherwise he’ll defend you during the MC (he should be on passive anyway).
It’s all downhill from this fight on. The trash pulls are nothing new and the boss fights arent too bad. Third boss is cake if you have the DPS, otherwise, this can be a frustrating event.
Murmor is actually one of my favorite fights. It’s one of the few fights in the game where we can honestly sit back, drink a beverage and take in the scenery. Make sure you stay behind the berm and blast your shot rotation. If you get the debuff thing (cant recall what its called) run back to the little hut right by where your healer will most likely be. Stand under the hut and wait for the explosion. This saves you from taking any fall damage. After this run back and commence your rotation. If your group decides to pull your tank out for the sonic boom, send your pet back in (dash or dive is an asset here) as soon as its done. This will lower the chance he pulls someone into him if no one is tanking him. After he’s down, get you phat lewtz and drink a beer.
Things to remember for any run:
Bring plenty of Ammo, water and food - this is a long instance.
Please please please dont forget to repair.
Keep you pet on passive and growl off if your not responsible for off-tanking.
Lay your traps early and heed Damh’s advice for trapping (trap away from the fight and and dont forget about him).
Good luck Taudok, and dont forget to post up how it went.
- Misfit
We use a kiting strategy on Vorpil. The tank pulls him south twice (back down the hallway you walked up to get to him) then north (into the hallway beyond him). Basically pulling him away from his voidwalker. Peridoically he will teleport the whole party back to his dias and start an AOE. Get you and your pet off as fast as possible. If you get put on Voidwalker killing duty, only use your time/mana on Voidwalkers that are close to him. DPS the Boss as much as you can while killing the Voidwalkers. The Voidwalkers spawn faster the longer the fight goes, so if he’s not dead by the 3rd teleport, you should probably start thinking about your wipe prevention methods.
Hellmaw drops the Dream-Wing Helm. Though it lacks agility, it can still be great for hunters! If there’s no Shammy, take that sucker and use it until you get the Second Sight or BL Helm.
Blackheart drops the Cloak of the Inciter. Again, no agility, but gives other important stats. CSR is great for the Survival Hunter. Put a +agi ench on this bad boy and you’re geared! This cloak is geared toward any DPS class.
As of a couple of patches ago, you can’t release and reenter the zone while the boss fight is going on.
Quote Anon:“As of a couple of patches ago, you can’t release and reenter the zone while the boss fight is going on. “
You sure about that? We ran it last Sunday and it worked then.
Only way to learn how to do SL as a hunter is to wipe. a Lot. it will prepare you for SL heroic…take a lot of pet food. He will die. and remenber, wiping is a part of life. so breaking traps in the middle of 2 six pack pulls because stupid war body pulls one even after you yell at party chat PULLING FOR…. and remenber, before the 2nd boss, in that corridor between first boss room and 2ºnd boss room, be carefull of rogues.they can kill the healer. or you. or both…hell i seen one wipe a afk party there in heroic…it was fun
you can still run in while fighting. It’s not karazhan, it’s just a regular instance.
The gun and the spear are also good for DPS Warriors (though [Crow Wing Reaper] with 3xStrength gems is obviously far, far better than the polearm for me). I wound up winning the gun drop simply because everyone else in the group who could’ve used it already had it.
Also, your party may try to convince you that leaving the mobs in the far corner of the first room alive is a good plan, when it is in fact a terrible one. It’s free rep, and I’ve wound up getting ganked by those bastards more than once during a Blackheart fight (the alternative is to only come in just as Fun Time has ended, which is a pain in the ass and unnecessarily gimps your group).
Great Post and Good Comments :).
As a Tank having been through SL enough to know every pull in my sleep, I prefer to pull everything myself but the BUDC’s in room 2. I learned early on I can’t pull those things without bringing the the rest of the damn room with her. So some other lucky sap gets to do it and I pick her up as the clothie/hunter runs screaming past :).
That boss is def. my fav. boss in the game. “Fun Time” is the best. See, I secretly hope everytime we get MC’d that I go after that DPS crazy Lock in the party and 2 shot him, lmao
If no lock, then the Annoying Blue Shaman and his little totems are #2 on my aggro list! I sometimes try to drag out that fight longer than necessary, just to get a shot at someone 
ESPECIALLY if it’s a guild run, lmao. I’m a naughty, naughty, naughty Tank!
The advice about putting a trap next to the healer is a good one for that fight. I lurve my healers, especially when they keep healin me!
The Vorpil fight can be a Pita if you are ‘Puggin. I’ve found, at least on my server, most Pug groups can’t execute the North/South Kite strat very well, because most of them can’t keep the hell up with me when I’m kiting him. Someone ALWAYS forgets which way we are going and runs the other way. Gah.
I generally use the ‘two hills strat’ instead and let the DPS blast away while having 1 person on adds. Kind of the same thing as sticking him in the corner as mentioned above. Plus, I’m a lazy bastard as well as having an evil streak, so I’d rather not have to kite that sucker back and forth, dodging all the adds that the ‘add killer’ somehow missed. (I was horrible at Frogger and am horrible at the ‘Dodge the Blueberries with Vorpil taking chunks out of me’ game.)
My preferred Strat: Beginning: Tank him on his platform, give me a second or three to get aggro, then pour it on boys! 1st Port: take him all the way up the big hill to the right, massive DPS!. 2nd port: take him to the top of the little hill to the left. 3rd port: Well, if we don’t have him down by now, we ain’t gettin him down. The groups I’ve run with usually have him down either before 2nd port or right after. After that, the adds get too many, even with an add killer workin’ on them.
For Murmer, once I got the fight down, it’s cake. I feel bad for that poor group I was in when it was my first time though. Wipe city x many. Poor chumps. That was one repair bill that I never want to see again. Now I just postion myself at an angle to him, pull back the camera aspect and sidestep my way out of the circle a couple times and bam, down he goes. The fight definitely has a rythm to it and once you find it, shouldn’t be a problem.
Though I still don’t know why my guildies have a Raid Warning for that fight when Murmur starts his ‘gathering strength from the air’ “RUN RUN RUN YOU SOB, RUN RUN”. (yeah it was a guild group my first time, lmao, I still can’t live it down.)
Some people just can’t appreciate the finer arts of Tanking I guess