Sszorak Raid Guide (The Venomous Abyss)

Overview

• Sszorak is a single-target damage check with forced movement. The fight is a fixed loop of tank combo, venom drops and crosswinds, repeated twice, then an intermission at 100 energy where the room's wind tunnels blast the raid around.
• What wipes raids: a single group soaking two Mutilates in a row, and players getting blown off the platform in the intermission because the cysts were dropped in the wrong places.
• Tanks trade the boss mid-combo. Healers carry constant raid damage. DPS save cooldowns for the intermission damage window.

Sszorak

Abilities

• Ula'tek's Presence: caustic mist ticks Nature damage on the whole raid for the entire fight. This is why some guilds bring an extra healer.
• Corroding Venom: melee hits stack a Physical damage taken increase on the tank. Icy Veins suggests swapping at around 6 stacks, which tends to line up with the combo swaps.
• Apex Predator: a five-attack combo in random order, aimed at the current tank: two Ravage, two Mutilate and one Tempest. Taunts work during the combo.
• Ravage: a tank frontal that stacks a large Ravage damage taken increase. The two tanks each take one.
• Mutilate: a frontal whose damage is split among everyone hit, and it becomes lethal if too few players are inside. Soakers get Mutilated Gash, a split damage over time that makes the next Mutilate much more dangerous for them.
• Tempest: roaming poison tornadoes that damage and slow. Just avoid them. Damage was cut on Heroic and Mythic on September 15.
• Venomous Surge: several players are doused and explode on expiry for raid damage that falls off with distance. Each leaves a Viscous Cyst where it ended.
• Viscous Cyst: a toxin blob that bursts when touched, knocking players back. In the intermission, that knockback is your tool to push back against the wind.
• Caustic Claws: toxin thrown at player locations. Dodge the impacts. On Heroic it no longer leaves Caustic Residue pools since the September 15 hotfix.
• Raging Crosswinds: affected players are launched in a marked direction and gain Turbulent Gusts, floating slowly. Colliding with another floating player ends the float for both. Fewer players are targeted on Normal and Heroic since September 1.
• Howling Maelstrom: the intermission. Gales fire from the wind tunnels one after another, pushing the whole raid.
• Dig In: during the Maelstrom Sszorak takes 30% more damage for 25 seconds.

Phases

Main loop: Apex Predator, then Venomous Surge, then Raging Crosswinds, twice over. Method describes it as a fixed rotation, so it gets easier once your raid has seen it.

Intermission at 100 energy: stack in the middle. Each gale pushes the raid toward the edge; whoever is pushed into a cyst gets knocked back toward the center. Glowing motes on the tunnels at pull and after each intermission show the order the tunnels will fire, so drop cysts on markers opposite those tunnels. Method notes there are four cysts for three winds, one spare, and the spare is popped as a group afterward.

Tank

• Tank Sszorak near the edge with the raid behind him in its two soak groups.
• Swap after the first Ravage or Mutilate so each tank eats one Ravage. Icy Veins points out Tempest is never first or last in the combo, which gives a natural gap for the taunt to come back.
• Point Ravage away from everyone and use a defensive. Aim Mutilate into whichever group is up next.
• Keep the boss away from the cyst markers so nobody pops a cyst by accident.

Healer

• Ula'tek's Presence never stops, so throughput matters all fight.
• Venomous Surge detonations and the Mutilated Gash on the soak group are the main spikes in the loop. The intermission adds knockbacks and burst cyst damage on top.

DPS

• Bloodlust on pull is the standard; Method suggests trying it in the intermission instead if your raid handles the movement cleanly.
• Split into two Mutilate groups of at least five each. Group one takes the first, group two the second, and nobody soaks twice in a row.
• With Venomous Surge, run out and let it expire on your assigned marker, one cyst per marker.
• During Raging Crosswinds, pair with someone launched the opposite way so you collide mid-air and drop back down.
• Save the second set of cooldowns for Dig In. Icy Veins puts the intermission at roughly every two minutes.

Difficulty notes

• Heroic: soaking Mutilate leaves a 500% damage taken increase from the next one, so two soak groups are mandatory. Icy Veins notes a Blood Death Knight can solo soak it with major defensives.
• Mythic: Serpent's Fury marks a player while Sszorak builds rage. At 100 rage he casts Unbound Ferocity, effectively a wipe. Gathering enough players around the marked target (Icy Veins says at least 14 within 8 yards) spends the rage on To the Slaughter, a charge into the stack. Players hit gain Virulence, a short debuff with beams that must not touch other players. Crosswinds use four directions instead of two.

Loot highlights

Items from this encounter's loot table in our journal data:

• Sszorak's Ferocity: trinket whose effect includes a Tempest style poison tornado. Blizzard's August 27 hotfixes made that tornado visible only to the wearer, and the August 14 hotfixes raised its damage by 15%.
• Idol of the Howling Nexus: trinket with an Agility and Strength proc (raised 5% in the August 14 hotfixes).
• Apex Brute's Claw Ring: ring.
• Slithering Savage's Gavel and Venomous Boneglaive: weapons.
• Venomcast Relic, Venomcured Relic, Venomforged Relic, Venomwoven Relic: tier set tokens.

Common mistakes

• The same soak group taking back-to-back Mutilates.
• One tank eating both Ravages.
• Dropping cysts without checking the tunnel motes, or two cysts on one marker.
• Using a knockback immunity in Crosswinds without telling your partner, leaving them to drift off the edge.
• Spending cooldowns right before the intermission instead of inside Dig In.

Mechanics checked against: icy-veins.com, method.gg, icy-veins.com, news.blizzard.com. Ability names and spell IDs come from TheWoWDB's own client datamine.