Section 2.5 - Ayamiss the Hunter

Ayamiss is the fifth boss in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ20) and is a large flying insect similar to the many you have already encountered, except much larger. It is an interesting fight as you can not conventionally tank him while he is flying for the first half of the fight. Once on the ground though the fight is fairly standard.

Abilities

Fly - Ayamiss starts the fight in flight and can not be meleed until you get him down to 70% health.

Poison Spray - Ayamiss can spray poison from his stinger. It affects everyone in the raid and does roughly 1000 damage. He triggers this ability every 30 seconds. The damage is nature damage so can be resisted.

Poison Stinger - While in flight, Ayamiss can sting the person with the most aggro. When he does it puts a DOT on that player that does 25 damage per second (dps). This dot can stack up many times, I have not seen an end to it, as the player ussualy dies before they hit any sort of limit.

Paralyze - Every roughly 30 seconds Ayamiss will teleport someone to the altar and paralyze them. At the same time a larva is released to each them. The raid must kill the larva before it reaches the paralyzed player or it will kill them and spawn an elite Wasp.

Summon Swarms - Ayamiss can summon a swarm of wasps and does so every 20-30 seconds. There are a lot of them but they do not hit very hard and can be AOE'ed down very quickly.

Strategies

The Ayamiss fight is broken up into two phases. The first phase is while Ayamiss is flying around the room and can not be meleed, the second phase is once he lands.

Phase 1

Phase one starts with two major jobs to be done. DPS Ayamiss down to 70% and to kill the larva before they kill a paralyzed player. The raid should plan out melee, ranged and healing groups.

In phase one the most important thing is that no player hold aggro for too long as the poison sting DOTs can seriously add up and put you beyond saving from the healers. We handle this by never holding aggro past 10 DOTs, which is 250 damage per second. If you hold it for longer than that healing becomes difficult. Basically everyone works in shifts, doing 100% damage for about 10 seconds and then slowing to about 50% for 10 seconds. This works well and keeps aggro off any given person all the time. We have also tried rotations pulling aggro back and forth between players and that works well too.

When Ayamiss paralyzes someone all the melee players need to find and kill the larva that spawns very quickly to avoid a player death. All ranged players should keep DPS on Ayamiss.

As soon as Ayamiss hits 70% health he will land and enter combat.

Alternate Phase 1 Strategy

The following alternate strategy was submitted by Quart of the Atrum Guild on Kalecgos.

An alternate strat for phase 1 of Ayramiss is to have a hunter/mage/lock wearing nature resist gear tank her for the first 30%. No firm number was given, but a guess based on MC fire resist effectiveness would be about 200 base.

Phase 2

In phase 2 you can now tank Ayamiss on the ground. Ayamiss also does not use his poison sting any more, so the main tank can hold aggro for the rest of the fight (unless paralyzed), there is no need to trade agro back and forth between players.

The rest of the fight is now fairly simple. The only real concern is watching for the grubs attacking the paralyzed person and killing them, while continuing to DPS Ayamiss down as fast as possible. The only time the fight gets difficult in stage two is if the Main Tank happens to become paralyzed. To combat this we usually have a second tank building agro as well, but not trying to take control. I have heard of groups using duelling tanks (fighting back and forth for agro) to resolve this issue as well.

Images

We will have images of Ayamiss up shortly in our AQ20 gallery here: TenTonHammer's AQ20 Gallery.

Have comments or suggestions? Thought of something that has been missed? Found another tactic that can be used? Found an error? We would love to hear from you! Email us at [email protected].

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