Pimp Your Druid: Soloing Skadi the Ruthless

Hello again, It’s that time again for yet another edition of Pimp Your Druid. This time we will be looking into how to solo Skadi the Ruthless in Utgarde Pinnacle for your very own Reins of the Blue Proto-Drake. This is the 6th installment of the series and definitely by far the most challenging of all and not for your everyday casual druid, there will be some pretty stringent requirements before you should even consider this so lets get to it!

Prerequisite

• The mount only drops from the  heroic version of Utgarde Pinnacle
• You must be 80 to attempt this
• You must have a bear spec to attempt this
• You must have a good mix of both kitty and bear gear (more on this later)
• You should try and get as many buffs up as possible (more on this later)

What gear do I need?

Straight up, this is only something that should be attempted if you are well geared through raiding ICC 10/25. If you are not wearing mainly 264 or higher gear, you will most likely find this very challenging if not impossible. The question of whether to wear kitty or bear gear is probably something that needs to be decided by you. The fight is challenging in that you need a certain amount of dps to kill adds fast enough yet at the same time, if you don’t have enough HP, Skadi will smash your face. So balance is really the key and depends on your playstyle. Personally I wore all my dps gear + 2 tanking trinkets for the purpose of this soloing adventure.

What buffs do I need?

Mark of the Wild and Thorns are great, but you should also try and grab Fort, Kings, Might and food buff/flasks as well. You can use the Inscription (Runescroll of Fortitude) or Leatherworking (Drums of Forgotten Kings) versions but if you are cheap you can be like me and get in front of UP, queue for Random Battleground to get some free buffs and /afk out. While you don’t necessary need everything mentioned above everything you can grab only improves your chances at being able to kill Skadi. Personally I try and grab all of the above except for a flask.

What spec do I need?

You definitely need a bear spec 0/60/11 but where you spend your points can differ and vary. Personally I modified the bear spec to be a bit more suitable towards dealing with Skadi. If you’re interested in what my spec looks like you can see it here. The one major different between your cookie cutter bear specs and what I’m using is since the fight does require you to pop out and cast some heals to keep your health at a good amount, I have 2/2 Nurturing Instinct. For Glyphs I’m using Maul, Frenzied Regeneration and Survival Instincts.

Getting There/Clearing Trash

Good news everyone! You can skip everything prior to Skadi and there is even a safe spot prior to Skadi to buff up and get ready to pull.

Safe spot to buff up, get ready etc

How to Skadi the Ruthless

Skadi is a two phase fight, the first being a gauntlet of adds in which you must kill them all and pick up harpoons (3 total) which are then used in harpoon guns to bring Skadi down from his proto drake. The second phase will begin once you bring Skadi down to the ground and becomes a 1v1 fight with no more adds. Both phases of the fight are challenging and require a certain amount of timing.

Phase 1

The keys to this phase are add management. There are three different types of adds and you need to prioritize the order in which they die as it will make a big difference towards your overall survivability.

1. Ymirjar Witch Doctor: The most dangerous of the bunch, the Shadow Bolt hurts a lot and they should be focused down as a priority, try and Bash/Feral Charge to interrupt as well to minimize damage.
2. Ymirjar Harpooner: These are the mobs that drop the Harpoon (3 total required), which you’ll need to bring down Skadi. They will drop nets and back away from you so make sure they are in cleave range.
3. Ymirjar Warrior: The least dangerous of all, just filler mobs that need to die.

As seen in the screenshot above, the gauntlet will start once you get close to Skadi. Your best bet is to drop a Regrowth & Rejuvenation on yourself so you some hots rolling on you as you begin the encounter. As soon as the fight begins, Cat Form and Dash down the tunnel, the reason for this is you want to grab all the adds (minus the last pack) together so that you can take them down at the same time. Having loose adds will only slow down how fast you can kill them and will reduce the amount of time inbetween new spawns.

Notice the box in red where all the mobs are still starting to come down the tunnel. Cat-dashing down to pick them up before they spread is critical. Also note in the green box how I have hots up to heal some of the initial dmg

Green Box illustrates all adds minus last pack. Red Box is the last pack of adds to be taken out afterwards. You must always keep an eye on Skadi to make sure you are not in his breath

After the initial grouping of adds, a pair of two adds will come down the tunnel at set intervals. The first grouping will be Ymirjar Harpooner/Ymirjar Warrior followed by Ymirjar Witch Doctor/Ymirjar Warrior repeating until Skadi is brought down. By the time you finish killing all the initial adds (minus the last pack) you would have already picked up the 1st pack of Harpooner/Warrior. Once that is all dead what I do is jump into the last pack which has a Witch Doctor. At this time the 2nd pack should have come out with has another Witch Doctor as well. Since you have two Witch Doctors which hurt a lot, its best to pop Berserk here and kill them ASAP.

Once the last pack is dead, you should be free to heal yourself a little so pop out and drop a few hots on before getting ready for the next set of adds (3rd set of Harpooner/Warrior). Here is where timing comes into play, you will need to decide this for yourself but essentially you do not want to drop Skadi down unless either all your adds are dead or they are about to die. Having extra adds with Skadi up is bound to cause problems so you may want to wait a little or rush a little, it depends on how fast you can kill the adds. My general strategy is to wait until I get 3 Harpoons, then use 2 of them and wait until the set of adds I have up are Harpooner/Warrior (to avoid shadow bolts) before bringing Skadi down. Throughout the whole time you are killing adds, you must keep your eye on Skadi and watch to see which side he will breath on. If you are caught in the breath you will most assuredly drop to low HP or die.

If you are doing this correctly, you should be able to kill adds fast enough to heal yourself inbetween, you should not have to use any cooldowns and finally and most importantly you will only have Skadi and no adds when he comes down.

Phase 2

Lets quickly review all the abilities that Skadi has (in heroic mode):

Crush: Inflicts 200% melee damage to the target, stunning it for 2 seconds.

Poisoned Spear: Inflicts 9,425 to 10,575 physical damage to a target, and inflicts an additional 3,770 to 4,230 Nature damage every 3 seconds for 12 seconds.

Whirlwind: Inflicts 9,425 to 10,575 physical damage each second to anyone for as long as they stand in melee range. Lasts 10 seconds.

As like Phase 1, timing is absolutely crucial to this. Poisoned Spear does a tonne of damage and needs to be minimized as much as possible. The way to do this is to cast Abolish Poison to remove it asap and quickly shift back into Bear Form. Naturally if you aren’t quick and you are caught in caster form then Skadi will smack you very hard. One way to ensure you have time to shift back is to continuously kite Skadi up and down the tunnel, that will keep Skadi running to you which will give just a little bit of extra time to shift back into Bear Form.

Every so often, Skadi will also cast Whirlwind, this can be handled in one of two ways. First this is where you’ll want to pop your cooldowns (one for each WW). Barkskin, Frenzied Regeneration, Corroded Skeleton Key are all good options. The second is to actually switch to Cat Form, Dash and run away. During this time Skadi will still be casting his Whirlwind (for 10sec) so you can actually pop out and heal yourself as much as you can. At all times, you will naturally want to keep up Faerie Fire and Demoralizing Roar to minimize the damage to you. If you ever get into bad situations, you can use a health pot or Survival Instincts.

This will need to be repeated over and over until Skadi dies. How many times you will have to deal with Poisoned Spear/Whirlwind is dependent on what type of gear you choose to wear. The more dps gear the fewer times you will have to deal with it but the higher the chance you will die with lower HP. The more bear gear, the more times you will have to deal with it but the lower the chance you’ll die with higher HP. This as I mentioned at the beginning of the post is completely dependent on what you have available to you and what works best for you.

In red youll see I have the BG deserter buff bc this time I picked up kings/might! Green arrow points to how I have abolish up, you can try and cast it during a WW since Skadi tends to use poisoned spear after a WW. Orange arrow is me hopping down the tunnel.

Another one bites the dust! I’ve been trying this one for a while and it was quite the challenge, best of luck to all those out there who are giving this a shot. Till next time!

No Mount, Go Figure...