"Wait, Susie, did your Taunt get resisted?"
Susie moved to pick up the Lava Annihilator. It came to her, hit her once, then immediately peeled off and went after somebody else.
"Nope. Taunt it back before it gets into the healers."
She had no idea what was happening either. Nobody else had even touched the Annihilator, so why the hell was it leaving her?
After it smacked a Mage, David Taunted immediately.
"I've got it. Heal me."
The elemental turned, came straight to him, landed one hit—
Then walked away and picked another target.
"What the hell? Who's padding on this thing? I said Firelord first!"
David was completely lost.
The Annihilator turned toward the healers next, and RosyCheeks was the unlucky one. The moment she saw it charging her way, she panicked and shifted into Bear Form.
She thought she was about to get flattened.
Instead, it smacked her once and ran off after somebody else.
RosyCheeks looked at her health. Half gone, but she was still alive. She let out a breath, badly shaken.
"I Taunted it."
Nightlord saw the elemental heading for the healers again and quickly threw out a Taunt.
Same thing.
It came over, hit him once, then lost interest and moved on.
Within seconds, the Annihilator was bouncing around the raid and turning the whole pull into a mess.
Gabryell knew exactly what was happening.
The mob simply did not behave like a normal enemy with stable threat. It would attack one target, then suddenly switch to another.
One random hit was not a huge problem by itself. With the Firelord still alive, though, that constant target switching became dangerous fast.
If it smacked a healer during a cast, that interrupted heal could be the one Carlos needed to stay alive. If it hit a caster, the raid lost damage. Worse, nobody knew who it would go after next, so people started watching the Annihilator instead of doing their jobs.
The clean answer was obvious to Gabryell: Banish the elemental, burn down the Firelord, then come back and finish the other one.
"This thing doesn't give a damn about Taunt," David said.
"Not exactly. Let me try again."
Susie Taunted.
The Annihilator came straight back to her, landed one hit, then left again.
"Okay. Taunt works. It just won't stay on me."
She caught on quickly.
"Just keep taunting it back. Maybe we can keep it off the raid."
David and Nightlord agreed.
"Yeah. Worth a shot."
Gabryell still did not call for Banish. For now, he wanted them to see the problem for themselves.
Carlos had no trouble holding the Firelord. The problem was everything happening around him. With healers getting interrupted and distracted, gaps were starting to open in the healing, and his health dipped dangerously low more than once.
"I'm burning!"
DaVinci suddenly shouted from melee.
"This shit hurts! Heal me or I'm dead!"
The Firelord only really had two abilities to worry about: Summon Lava Spawn and Soul Burn.
DaVinci had been hit by Soul Burn. Over the next sixteen seconds, it would deal around four thousand Fire damage, silence him, and cut his physical damage in half.
On anyone who was not a tank, the damage alone could kill them without help. The silence was even worse on healers, while the damage penalty crippled melee.
"I'm burning too! I can't cast!" Danielly shouted.
Gabryell reacted immediately.
"Anyone who can dispel, get that off them now. Keep them alive until it's gone."
ServerHeals had the most experience with dispels.
"I've got Snowy."
"I've got DaVinci," DontPanicHealz said.
The other healers immediately started dumping heals into both of them.
Gabryell frowned.
Too many.
Were they trying to get the main tank killed?
Right on cue, Carlos shouted.
"Holy shit!"
Half his health disappeared in an instant.
Luckily, a few healers had stayed on him instead of joining the pile-on, and they caught him before he went down.
"If you can dispel something, get it off fast."
Molten Core was full of debuffs, and a lot of them needed to be removed quickly. There was a reason GDKP runs later would even pay bonuses to players who consistently handled dispels well.
Not every debuff actually needed to be removed, of course, but this was their first time here. Gabryell was not about to hand them a complete list of what mattered and what did not.
For now, they could dispel first and learn the finer details later.
"This thing just had a kid!" Carlos shouted.
The Firelord had summoned a Lava Spawn.
And there it was.
The real problem.
If a Lava Spawn stayed alive too long, it would split.
One became two.
Two became four.
Four became eight.
And it kept going.
Leave them alone long enough and the whole area would be crawling with Lava Spawns.
Each one could hit for around six hundred damage at range. Once enough of them were up, anyone unlucky enough to get focused would disappear almost instantly.
"They barely have any health. Ignore them for now and burn the Firelord!"
Susie, David, and Nightlord were already getting battered trying to keep the Annihilator away from the rest of the raid. Every time it connected with one of them, their health dropped hard, and the healers barely had any attention left to spare.
David shouted, "Kill the Firelord already! If this takes much longer, we're wiping!"
Someone had already died because the healers could not keep up. They had never gotten topped off, and another hit from the Annihilator finished them.
The healers were starting to fall behind.
Carlos needed constant attention on the Firelord. The other three tanks were trying to keep the Annihilator bouncing back toward them, and the healers themselves still had to worry about getting smacked in the middle of a cast.
They simply could not cover everything.
The longer the fight dragged on, the more people started dropping.
"What the hell? It summoned another one!"
Nobody had touched the first Lava Spawn.
It had split into two.
The raid did not know that, though. As far as they were concerned, the Firelord had simply summoned another add.
"Kill it! If another one comes out, we're screwed!"
They were barely holding things together already. If the Firelord could keep producing adds forever, there was no way they could sustain the fight.
"It can't just keep summoning them forever... right?"
That was how everyone expected mechanics like this to work.
If a boss summoned adds endlessly, usually a new one only appeared after the old one died. Or the existing add despawned after a while before another took its place.
The number of mobs was not supposed to keep growing forever.
They were completely wrong.
Blizzard had designed the Lava Spawns specifically to punish that assumption.
Just another special flavor of Blizzard "fun."
Nobody touched them.
A little while later, two became four.
Now the damage started piling up.
If all four focused the same player, nobody was surviving two volleys. If they spread their attacks around instead, the entire raid started losing health at once.
Either way, the pressure on the healers shot through the roof.
Gabryell checked the raid frames.
Nine people were already dead, and the healers were almost out of mana.
The Firelord was still alive in front of them. The Annihilator was still bouncing through the raid behind them.
And the Lava Spawns had split again.
Eight.
That was enough.
"Wipe it. Healers, run out if you can. Come back in and rez once everyone's dead."
The pull was gone.
Dragging it out would only waste more time.
They were close enough to the entrance that if even one Priest or Paladin made it outside, everyone could skip the corpse run.
The moment Gabryell called the wipe, several ranged players immediately turned and ran.
Dying meant repair bills.
If they could save themselves a few gold, they were damn well going to try.