March on Quel’Danas Overview
Dawn Crystals and Cosmic Damage Don't Mix
One of the biggest struggles of the Heroic L'ura fight is the Dawn Crystals. If a player is hit directly by Cosmic Damage while carrying a Dawn Crystal, the crystal sheds Tears of L'ura, which creates small soaks nearby. If any soak is missed, the raid takes heavy damage from Naaru's Lament, which can wipe the raid.
Players will need to soak any yellow circles throughout the fight.
These Dawn Crystals are mandatory for later parts of the fight and cannot be ignored, which is where the problem lies. Many different mechanics deal direct Cosmic damage:
Being hit by Heaven's Glaives
Forgetting to drop a crystal if marked by a Dark Rune during the memory game
Being hit by Starsplinter in the Intermission phase
Soaking a Galvanize line with a crystal in the Darkwell phase
Getting hit by a Void Core during Core Harvest in the Darkwell phase
Being hit by Dark Constellations
Usually, there are five Dawn Crystals on Heroic which are assigned to five players to carry throughout the fight. This creates many different instances where a player could accidentally take Cosmic damage and wipe the raid.
Heroic L'ura Strategy
With this strategy, players can reduce the number of Dawn Crystals to carry from five down to two. Here's how it's done:
Dawn Crystals spawn after breaking L'ura's Safeguard Prism. Each Safeguard Prism is composed of three Safeguard Matrices. In Phase 1, there are two Safeguard Prisms to break.
On the second Safeguard Prism, instead of breaking all three matrices, the raid will only break two.
Do not interrupt, CC, or purge the third Safeguard Matrix, and let it continue casting Safeguard until it despawns.
If done correctly, the second set of Dawn Crystals will not spawn, and the fight proceeds as normal.
Make sure to remove only two of the three Safeguard Matrices during the second Safeguard Prism!
While a helpful strategy to prevent wiping to Dawn Crystals, there are a few notes to keep in mind when considering using this strategy. Each Safeguard Matrix reduces the damage L'ura takes by 33%. By removing two of the three Matrices, the boss takes only 66% of damage during this time.
In Phase 3, we use the Dawn Crystals to protect against The Dark Archangel, a nasty beam of godlike destruction. With this strategy, we only have two Dawn Crystals, meaning we only have protection against two Dark Archangel beams, at which point we will no longer have any Crystal left to protect us from the deadly darkness. This adds a DPS check to the encounter, as we want to kill the boss on the second Dark Archangel. With the ramping 1% raid buff, the DPS check is only going to get easier and easier.
While the DPS check isn't strict, some groups might be better off tackling this fight as normal without the use of the strategy. Overall, use your best judgment based on your raid group, and best of luck going after Ahead of the Curve!
