For those who were worried that cataclysm wouldn’t be hard, my repair bill after the Omnitron encounter in Blackwing Descent would serve to lessen those fears. There are also, though, quite a few who are now worried that cataclysm is too hard. For those people, I’d like to refer Argaloth. He is the first boss in Baradin Hold, the new VoA like boss area in Tol Barad. He drops current tier pvp pieces along with, you guessed it, a couple pieces of PVE tier. I’m not entirely sure if he has a stronger bias towards PVP, as so far after 3 kills and 6 epics, my guild has only seen 1 tier piece. Even better, it was for a class not represented in that raid. Either way, we still have a way to get some epics without too much trouble. Argaloth does serve the function as acting as somewhat of a gear check. Think of it as the entrance examto cataclysm raiding. In 10m at least (and I’d guess 25m would be similar) each dps player must average 10k dps during the encounter to not hit his rage timer. This really isn’t hard with basic heroic/badge gear and some cheap gems/enchants.

Wowhead was nice enough to put up a little description as well as strategy for Argaloth. Check it out after the break.

Argaloth

Argaloth is a massive pit lord demon, held prisoner inside the Baradin Hold. He is the first, and so far the only boss in there.

Strategy

Argaloth is a very straight-forward fight. Split your raid in two equally-size groups, one on each side of the boss. You can use the metal grid on the floor to align the groups. Every time Argaloth casts Meteor Slash, you want the tanks to switch. Half of your raid being stacked will help minimize the damage, and the tank rotation will make sure that nobody eats a second Meteor Slash while the increased Fire damage taken debuff is still on. Consuming Darkness is a fairly nasty DoT that should be removed as quickly as possible.

At 66% and 33% Argaloth will start channeling Fel Firestorm. Simply run around (individually, not as a group) without stopping for the duration of the spell, making sure you are back near your assigned position when it’s over.

The 5-minute Berserk timer requires each one of your 6 DPS to pull about 10k on average.