There are four achievements required from the Blackrock Caverns instance. Each boss other than Beauty has an achievement that you must complete. They are Crushing Bones and Cracking Skulls, Arrested Development, Too Hot to Handle, and Ascendant Descending.

Difficulty: Easy

Each time Rom’ogg casts quake an Angered Earth Elemental is spawned under each player in the group. That means that there should be 5 each time quake is cast and these are normally burned down before he casts Chains of Woe. The plan when doing this achievement is to make sure they are not DPS’ed during the fight and instead left aggro’ed to the tank for the Chains of Woe phase.

Once Chains of Woe is being cast there are two different ways to complete this achievement and both are relatively simple. The method you choose to use should depend on your group composition or your tank's gear level.

If your group has lots of group CC available, such as Frost Nova, glyphed Holy Wrath, Shadow Fury, or Hungering Cold, then you can burn through the Chains of Woe, CC the adds and everyone clears out of range of Skullcracker before it damages them. This will leave the elementals in range and wipe them out without players taking any damage.

If your group is light on control but has a decently geared heroic tank (over 150,000 health) then you can use the second method of doing the achievement. Here the group burns through the Chains of Woe and leaves the area, but the tank stays in the AoE with the adds and takes the Skullcracker blow with them. Since it hits for roughly 100,000 damage and you will not be getting heals, it’s tight, but very doable if you pop cooldowns.

Difficulty: Medium - Hard

The difficulty of this achievement varies wildly depending on your group makeup and your healer's timing. Even when done with a good group and excellent healer it is still not a cake walk, so be ready for it.

There are two important things to know for this fight. The first is that the actual boss does not hit for that much damage and is fairly easy to heal through. The second is that the evolved twilight zealots' main damage ability called Gravity Strike hits for 60% of the targets current health. This makes a big difference in dealing with the fight, but more on that later.

The fight is handled very similar in method as you would when not going for the achievement at the beginning with the exception being that only two beams are intercepted. Have a ranged player assigned to the path of each of the two beams and leave the third alone to hit the zealot, they must juggle the buff / cleanse phase of the beams until told to stop. When the beam hitting the unblocked zealot hits 100 buffs they will evolve and the tank picks it up. At this point all DPS switches to the add and downs it before going back to the boss.

Once one add is down, give the healer a chance to recover mana and slow down the pace, then have the second add released by allowing it to evolve and repeat the steps above. Once all three have been defeated finish off the boss.

Now, back to the Gravity Strike issue mentioned above. The percentage damage is the main thing to note and keep in mind. If, while tanking the evolved zealot, the healer tries to keep a tank that has 150,000 health at 100%, that means having to heal 90,000 health every time a gravity strike lands. That is a lot of healing and will quickly lead to the healer going out of mana.

To prevent this there are two options. The first is dependent on group composition. If you have a hybrid class with you that has a healer off-spec you can switch to two healers and the fight becomes relatively simple. Each healer takes turns primary healing, and regenerating mana and you shouldn’t have any issues.

The second option is to not heal the tank to full health when dealing with the adds. Yes, you heard that right. The boss’s attacks don’t do a whole lot, and nether do the adds normal attacks, so if you keep a tank at roughly ½ health that means each gravity strike will only be hitting for roughly 45,000 health, which is around two big heals for most geared healers. This is far easier to manage and will not result in going OOM during the fight. Timing becomes important though as you do not want the tank to get too low and die to normal attacks, nor do you want them to have too much and take too large a hit.

Once the healer has the timing down if using method two, or you have two healers available, the fight is still difficult but much more manageable than trying to get through it with brute force.

Difficulty: Medium

To earn this achievement the tank needs to watch and manage the Superheated Quicksilver Armor debuff on the boss very carefully. Since as the buff stacks the boss takes more damage but also does more, especially from the AoE caused when gaining a stack of the debuff, timing is critical.

It is best to start the fight off slow, only getting a few stacks of the debuff on the boss. DPS focuses on the boss the whole fight. Each time the debuff is about to expire, say 2-5 seconds before, the tank needs to drag the boss back into the central fire to gain another stack of the debuff. The trick here is timing from the tank, the closer to the time the buff is going to expire the more time DPS gets to work on the boss before more damage comes from an AoE blast. However, if the tank cuts it too close and misses the time, the debuff expires, you need to deal with adds, and restart the whole process.

By the time you get to about 10 or 12 stacks, if you are able to apply 1 or 2 at a time, Karsh should be getting low on health. Pull him through allowing him to get to 15 debuffs then finish him off. If he is not low enough to do this by 12 stacks, you have two choices. The first is try to continue applying 1 or 2 stacks and see if you can down him.

The second option is to apply the 15 stacks, then let them clear, down the adds that spawn, and then start stacking over again on Karsh and defeat him. The achievement is to defeat him after he has gotten at least 15 stacks, there is no requirement for him to have the 15 stacks when he dies. This means either method works.

Difficulty: Easy

This achievement is almost a non-achievement. You get it simply for completing the fight correctly. Follow the normal strategy for this fight of having someone kite the adds while the tank holds the boss with DPS focusing on the boss. As long as you have some form of slows to help the person kiting the adds this really shouldn’t be an issue. Hunter slow traps or shaman earth bind totems and a good kiter make this extremely simple.

The kiter simply needs to hold aggro while running around with the adds trailing behind. Also the group needs to hold off a few seconds in between boss teleportations to allow the tank and kiter to get a fix on who has what and where. Once that is straightened out, rinse and repeat until the boss dies.

You can return the to main guide page here: Glory of the Cataclysm Hero Achievement Guide.