This guide is intended to provide a comprehensive description of the encounter with Ultraxion in Dragon Soul. It is mostly targeted to tanks who desire to have a short but detailed overview of what is expected of them during that fight.

This guide applies to patch 4.3 of World of Warcraft.

The Ultraxion encounter is a gear check for both DPS players and healers. From a strategy point of view, however, the encounter is extremely simple to understand execute.

As a tank, you will only have to use an encounter-specific ability at certain times, as well as regularly perform a tank swap.

1. Overview of the Fight↑top

The encounter against Ultraxion is a single phase encounter, the difficulty of which increases over time. The fight has both a hard and a soft enrage timer, ensuring that close to or at the 6 minute mark, your raid will unavoidably wipe.

Ultraxion is stationary for the entire duration of the encounter, and tanks must be in his melee range, otherwise he will wipe the raid.

2. Heroic Will↑top

During the encounter, you will have to avoid two abilities, by use of an encounter-specific ability, Heroic Will. It will appear on your screen, in the form of a special action bar that looks like this:

Heroic Will has a 5 second cooldown and has no resource cost. It is off the Global Cooldown. Using it has no beneficial effects, and merely allows you to avoid certain mechanics.

Using Heroic Will will put you in a special state, for up to 5 seconds (or until the ability you are avoiding is cast), during which time you cannot perform any action whatsoever (attack, move).

This ability can be keybound from the Key Bindings Menu (it is called ExtraActionButton1 and it is located in the Action Bar Functions section). The button may may not display properly (or at all) if you are using any action bar add-ons, although this does not affect the aforementioned key-binding's efficiency. Alternatively, you can use the following macro:

• /click ExtraActionButton1

Clicking this macro (which, of course, can be keybound), has the same effect as clicking the Heroic Will button.

3. Strategy↑top

Shortly after the start of the fight, you will be buffed by Thrall with Last Defender of Azeroth, a buff that reduces the cooldown of all your defensive abilities by 50% and increases their duration by 100%. Additionally, when Thrall casts this buff, all of your defensive cooldowns are reset. This means that you can use them right at the start of the fight and have them available again shortly after.

As a tank, you will have very few tasks to perform during this encounter:

• Whenever you are debuffed with Fading Light, use your Heroic Will ability when there are fewer than 5 seconds left on the debuff timer.
• If you are not currently tanking Ultraxion, whenever the main tank is debuffed by Fading Light, taunt and continue tanking Ultraxion.
• Whenever Ultraxion begins casting Hour of Twilight (it is shown clearly as an emote on your screen, and you can also see the boss' cast bar), use Heroic Will, unless your raid leader instructs you not to do so on purpose. In this latter case, use defensive cooldowns to survive the large damage you will take (300,000). This ability will occur every 45 seconds.

The reason for the tank switch is that, for 10 seconds after the Fading Light debuff wears off on you, you will not be able to generate any threat against Ultraxion.

4. Heroic Mode↑top

The heroic mode of Ultraxion is extremely similar to the normal mode, except that the DPS requirement from your raid is much higher.

The only thing that concerns you as a tank is that, after the Fading Light debuff wears out, you will take 100% increased physical damage for 5 seconds, so the other tank will have to be accurate in their timing of taunting Ultraxion.

In heroic mode, you will have to survive Hour of Twilight by using your cooldowns. Keep in mind that, in heroic mode, a debuff is applied each time you survive an Hour of Twilight. The debuff lasts 2 minutes and causes you to instantly die to Hour of Twilight should you try to survive it again. As such, you will probably be required to survive every third Hour of Twilight, as part of a rotation with other raid members.