Housing Blueprints
One of the boss encounters of the Black Temple, Teron Gorefiend, has a mechanic that can target any of the raiders (minus the tank) and it's important that you know what to do if it targets you. The mechanic is called Shadow of Death and after fifty-five seconds, it will kill the player and grant them a new life as a spirit of the undead.
When this happens, it is up to that player to prevent the entire raid from dying, as they are the only ones who can kill the Shadowy Constructs that spawn upon the player's death. In this guide, we go over how to deal with this mechanic properly do this so you aren’t the one who wipes your raid!
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Your Ghostly Abilities
Tip: If using User Interface or Action Bar addons, make sure you have your pet bar active, as these are where the abilities will appear!
When you turn into a ghost, your character's abilities will disappear, and you will instead gain 5 new abilities on your action bar. Our abilities will be keybound as follows:
Here's what each of the abilities do:
- Ability 1, Spirit Strike, is something you’ll only cast on the boss.
- Ability 7, Spirit Shield, is intended to protect players from Shadow Damage, but isn’t really necessary unless maybe a healer is one of those hit by a Shadow of Death.
- Ability 3, Spirit Lance, will deal Frost damage to a construct and slow them down, stacking up to 3 times.
- Ability 4, Spirit Chains, is a Frost Nova ability that will root all constructs until they take damage.
- Ability 5, Spirit Volley, is just an AoE frost damage ability.
Note: For fighting the Shadowy Constructs, you will only use abilities 3, 4, and 5.
How To Defeat the Shadowy Constructs
Pre-Positioning
Once you get the debuff, you will have fifty-five seconds to act. For the first forty or so seconds, you can keep damaging the boss or healing like you were.
Around 15 seconds or so before you die, you will want to make your way back towards the entrance of the room and go either to the right or left corner by the time your debuff expires, as this is the farthest you can spawn the four constructs as you die.
Don't leave too early, as you'll lose a lot of DPS standing in the back doing nothing
Rotation
From here, you will simply do the following rotation.
- Spirit Volley off cooldown
- Spirit Chains off cooldown
- Tab-Target Spirit Lance until Volley and Chains are off cooldown
You will first want to deal massive AoE damage with Spirit Volley, then immediately root all targets with Spirit Chains. From here, you will Spirit Lance every target on a loop.
Make sure you are consistently rotating construct targets with Spirit Lance, as the most important part of this ability is the slow effect that stacks up to three times. If you try to kill each Shadowy Construct individually, they will make their way to the raid and kill your raid members.
Once the constructs are dead, you can start hitting Teron Gorefiend with Spirit Strike, and give players Spirit Shield, especially those who received the Crushing Shadows debuff.
You can also see if the next player affected by Shadow of Death needs help with their constructs. If your raid likes you, warlocks can soulstone you before you run off to one of the back corners, as once your time as a ghost is up, you will go back to your corpse to either accept the soulstone and resume the encounter, or have a nice floor PoV until the encounter is over.