If you’re just after Experiment 12b from Ultraxion and the Blazing Drake from Deathwing then you can bring any level capped class.However if you’re also after the Life Binder’s Handmaiden then you’ll need to run all of Dragon Soul on heroic. And that means running the Spine of Deathwing on heroic. And you will need healing to do that.

Thus my shadowpriest uses Power Word: Shield lots and also gets healing from Devouring Plague. My paladin burns most of her holy power in word of glory heals. My elemental shaman puts her healing stream totem down on cooldown & is shielded by the Stone Bulwark totem.

For the Ultraxion trash you will need either ranged damage or a taunt.

For Warmaster Blackhorn having ranged abilities will make the fight easier.

I’ve recently started running my rogue through Dragonsoul on 25 player for the legendary quest line and I can say that specing into Shuriken Toss for the Ultraxion trash, Warmaster Blackhorn and Spine to kill the extra corruption tenticles after a plate has been lifted off will make Dragonsoul much easier to do.

The following values are from a Dragon Soul 10 heroic run.

Time taken	Around half an hour
Gold earned	10: ~500g	10HC: ~1,000g	25HC: ~3,000g

Dragon Soul heroic has lots of purple tinted weapons and armor in it which can be used for some nice Transmog sets; my Warlock’s current transmog uses Ti’tahk, the Steps of Time from Madness of Deathwing.

If you’re after the Life Binder’s Handmaiden then you’re out of luck here; you can’t use a saved lock due to the way heroic locks work – you have to run all of Dragon Soul each week for a chance at the mount.However if you’re only after Experiment 12b from Ultraxion or the Blazing Drake from the Madness of Deathwing then you can use a saved lock as these mounts drop in normal.

From what I’ve read it would appear that there is a slightly higher chance for the mounts to drop on 25 player than 10 due to more items dropping from the bosses – you get 5 items instead of 2. I’m not sure if that is the case or not, but more loot will mean more gold from the boss!

The easiest way to get a saved lock is to have a 2nd account – there are tricks involving the group finder, but they’re somewhat exploitive so I’d avoid them if possible. Suffice to say, if you see custom groups in the group finder with strange names or which have two players and are not accepting new people, its possible someone is using a group finder trick.

I’ve got a second account which has a number of saves on it – one at Elegon, another at Horridon and finally one at Madness of Deathwing.

I took that account into Dragon Soul with my main and ran it through to Madness of Deathwing. This is somewhat fun as encounters no longer see you as a solo player – the most irksome thing is having to deal with the time you have before Spine spins being much lower!

To make use of the saved lock, I do the following:

1. Run the save lock character down to Dragon Soul
2. Invite a character into a group
3. Enter Dragon Soul
4. Have my character enter Dragon Soul and go to the Madness area
5. Move the save lock character out of the instance
6. Defeat the Madness of Deathwing, not have a Blazing Drake drop – I’m at ~160 tries at the time of writing
7. Break the group
8. Go to 2

The warning of entering an instances in progress will be the same as below:

Using this method I can give seven characters a roll of the Blazing Drake dice within an hour or so. Including some characters which would’ve been less than fun to run through Spine.

Dragon Soul is based in the Caverns of Time, so the route we’ll take:

1. Hearth to Shrine of the Seven Stars
2. Take the portal to Dalaran
3. Take the portal to Cavern of Time
4. Fly into the cavern

Once you’ve gotten into the main chamber you need to head to the right.

Make sure you’ve got the raid difficulty set to 10 player heroic and then enter!

[Morchok on wowhead]The first boss is Morchok, a big stone elemental who is trying to destroy the Wyrmrest Temple.

You can run around the trash leading up to him if you want; personally I just run through it and kill it before engaging the boss.

When you’ve gotten him to 90% Morchok will split into two – this will likely be in the first second or so.

Ignore the second mob – just nuke down the one on the right which is where your target should still be.

With melee I pre-position myself where Morchok will land – its always the same place – so that I can just nuke away the moment he lands.

Expect it to take between 8 and 10 seconds to kill the boss.

You can now enter the temple and you’ve got a choice of bosses to fight. Personally I kill Warlord Zon’ozz first, but that’s just me.

[Warlord Zon’ozz on wowhead]One of the twilight generals assaulting Wyrmrest temple, Warlord Zon’ozz is reached by right clicking on Valeera – the mouse icon will turn into a flight path one.

Warlord Zon’ozz has three sets of trash around him. Unfortunately these are tentacles rooted to the ground – they’ll add during the fight so its easier to run around and kill each group before pulling the boss.

They can drop profession recipes however, so its not all bad – they can sell for 50-80g depending on your auction house. If you loot the Eye of Go’rath corpse – which is hidden in the ground – AoE looting will let you pick up all of the loot of the pack at once.

This is the view before the pull. Warlord Zon’ozz was a tight DPS check fight back in the day and whilst you don’t need to worry about that any more, the mechanic used to let you get enough damage done to the boss can cause issues.

Shortly after the fight starts, Zon’ozz will summon a void orb. This will start to drift away from the boss and to the walls. If the orb hits a player then it’ll bounce in the opposite direction.

At level you’d bounce the orb back and forth, essentially playing ping pong with it – there was even an achievement for doing this, Ping Pong Champion which is part of the meta.

The part you need to worry about is that if the orb hits the walls you’ll get flung up in the air and take reasonable damage – around half your health – from the fall.

On characters who have the DPS to kill the boss before the orb reaches the wall you can ignore this. You can also ignore this on characters who have a way to negate fall damage. On those who don’t have either of those you’ll need to bounce the orb back to the opposite side of the room. Just get in its way as shown below.

The boss will die in ~20 seconds or less. You’re now stuck in a deep hole – use the portal to escape back to the surface!

This is the other reason for killing the trash – the portal will likely not open until you go out of combat

[Yor’sahj the Unsleeping on wowhead]Take the flight from Eiendormi to get down to Yor’sahj.

Yor’sahj has six trash packs, but thankfully they come and join the fun when you pull the boss – so have that AoE ready.

Not much else to say about this fight – you can ignore the summoned bloods of Shu’ma DBM will tell you switch to. Just nuke the boss.

It’ll die in ~20 seconds.

[Hagara the Stormbinder on wowhead]If you’ve killed the first three bosses then you’ll be able to take Nethestrasz to the summit.

It this here that the hidden boss comes in to play. The boss of “Roleplay events you can’t skip” which will take up about a third of the time you spend in the instance.

To reach Hagara you need to take the portal on the left to the Eye of Eternity, but this only opens up around 2 minutes after you first clicked on Nethestrasz.

The portal on the right goes back to the Wyrmrest base – handy for the vendors there if your bags fill up.

You have some trash to deal with – you start that by clicking on the Focusing Iris in the middle of that platform.

You’ll have several packs appearing from portals, with each pack appearing once the last has died.

After the last summoned mob – Lieutenant Shara – is killed, Hagara herself comes down.

This used to be a fun fight, with special phases and the like. Now its just a “Nuke for ~10 seconds and boss is dead” one.

She does drop the rather cool looking Lightning Rod which is nice for caster transmog.

Take the portal back to the top of the Wyrmrest temple.

[Ultraxion on wowhead] Dropping the first of the mounts in Dragon Soul, Ultraxion has gone from a fight of tricky cooldown planning on heroic to a shadow of its former self. It could be said to be in twilight. You’ll get the Minutes to Midnight achievement here if you’ve not done so already as the Hour of Twilight which made the fight so hard before will not occur.

Once you’ve returned back from Hagara, you need to speak to Kalecgos to start ~minute of roleplay. Then you can speak to Thrall to start the actual event.

However this doesn’t summon the boss. No, there is still the Ultraxion trash. And it is still some of the more annoying trash in game. And naturally you’ll have another minute of roleplay to sit through.

Drakes will slowly appear; kill them as they do so. The drakes which stay in the air will either need to be killed using a ranged attack or taunted down onto the ground to be killed. You’ll also get one or two drakes who engage you on the ground directly.

Drakes in the air spew purple fire in a line away from them and this does percentage based damage. So you can’t really AFK during the trash to kill all of the summoned twilight drakes in one go. If you do AFK during this trash you’ll probably come back to a view like this the one below

Once you’ve killed 15 drakes, you’ll have about 30s to get into position. During which Ultraxion will monologue at you.

You’ll kill Ultraxion in seconds and whilst the boss drops to the base of the tower, loot can be found in the chest which spawns on his death.

IMPORTANT: rogues should not use shadowstep and feral druids should not use Wild Charge in cat form.

It’ll put you behind the boss. And you’ll promptly fall to your death.

Good luck with getting the mount – 1% rates mean you’ll be listening to that monologue a lot.

It also means that you’ll have the minute or so of roleplay after the fight has finished. Oh and a cut scene as well.

[Warmaster Blackhorn on wowhead]This is the first fight in Dragon Soul where you’ll need to start caring about mechanics – until this point we’ve been able to brute-force our way into ignoring mechanics due to the DPS we put out at max level.

You start the fight by talking to Sky Captain Swayze twice. The first time is to get the ship aloft after the Ultraxion cutscene. The second is to actually start the Warmaster Blackhorn fight itself.

This is a two phase fight. In the first phase you fight flying drakes and mobs they drop. You also have to stop the Skyfire taking too much damage – if it’s health goes to zero you’ll wipe.

The damage comes from various sources – almost all of which can be stopped:

• Twilight Onslaught – aka big swirly thing on the deck from Goriona. Stand in it to take the damage instead of the Skyfire
• Twilight Barrage – aka small swirly thing on the desk from the Twilight Drakes. Again, stand in it to take the damage instead of the Skyfire
• Twilight Sapper – a small mob which spawns three times during the fight. Initially stealthed, will run towards the main cabin of the Skyfire – destealthing about halfway there. Will explode for a large amount of damage to the Skyfire if reaches there alive
• Broadside – a heroic-only mechanic which takes a good chunk of health from the Skyfire. You can’t avoid this.

You do have some slack here – on one attempt I ignored all of the above, with the Twilight drakes killed when they’d been pulled into melee range. On that, the Skyfire was at 8% health, so there is a lot of leeway here – mostly thanks to us having the DPS to kill the drakes quickly.

Of all the mobs, the Twilight Sapper does the most of the avoidable damage, doing ~20% to the Skyfire.

Given this, you can safely ignore all of the swirly things on the deck and just kill the Twilight Sappers when they spawn.

… unless you’re going for the deck defender achievement for the meta. Then you need to care; its entirely possible to solo this, although its easier as ranged.

I tend to place myself in the right hand corner of the ship if you’re looking towards the deckhouse; the following picture, with the square I’m in edged in red:

You can also see one of the first Twilight Drakes with its rider in the top right hand corner. They come in pairs and will fly over the deck, dropping the dreadblades which mount them before flying off. There is one on each side, and they’ll fly over the deck from the left and from the right respectively.

Whilst you can kill the drakes before they drop their Dreadblades, you don’t want to try this – if the drake dies in such a way that its mounted dreadblade doesn’t hit the deck of the ship, the fight will reset and you’ll fall to your death.

I tend to DoT the drakes up if I can or used a ranged attack on them once they’ve dropped their Dreadblade off.

If the drakes remain alive, they’ll fly out of range of attacks until the Skyfire crew fire a harpoon at it and pull it into range – kill it then.

You’ll then get a Twilight Onslaught – aka big swirly – which you can ignore.

Then its a Twilight sapper – who you want to kill.

This will repeat until you’ve killed six Twilight drakes. Or the ship goes bang underneath you.

The timings of the mob spawn times means that the second set of drakes will be flying overhead has a Twilight Onslaught is occuring. And the third pair of drakes will have a Twilight Sapper at the same time as well.

Its quite likely you’ll end up with a ship on fire underneath you – doesn’t tick for much on a level 100.

Once you’ve killed your 6th drake Warmaster Blackhorn will take matters into his own hands.

If you’ve got ranged attacks, you want to attack Goriona, although she is immune to all attacks until Blackhorn has jumped down to the deck.

If you’ve got no ranged attacks, just nuke Blackhorn – he’ll take health from Goriona. Goriona will land – just nuke her until she gets low and decides to fly off.

Then just kill Blackhorn – I just cleave the two down.

Just avoid the shockwave as it stuns and the disrupting roar which interrupts you.

[Spine of Deathwing on wowhead]Ahh, Spine of Deathwing. Probably the most irksome fight in here and where you have to obey mechanics otherwise you’ll end up wiping. A lot. This fight will always take around 4-5 minutes to do – the limiting factor is the spawn rate of the bloods which spawn.

Having DBM and Cataclysm boss modules is pretty much essential here for tracking Deathwing’s roll.

If you’re doing this on heroic you will need some healing – to the left are the healing meters for my shaman for her recent Spine kill

To start the fight, speak to Sky Captain Swayze again – doing so will start another cutscene, which I normally escape out of so that I can kill the first three corruption tentacles as you float down. I’ve highlighted the ones I normally kill below. We kill three of them as you’ll always have at least one corruption tentacle up – kill the fourth and a new one will just spawn anyway

Now you’re on Deathwing’s back and the fun really begins. To win this fight you have to pry up three of the armored plates which remain on Deathwing’s back so Thrall can use the Dragon Soul to deal a death blow to Deathwing.

When you killed the corruption tentacles, a hideous amalgamation will spawned from each. However we only really want one up and we want to control when it is up. So how to get these extra three away from us?

We roll Deathwing and this mechanic is the one which catches the most people out with Spine.

When Deathwing senses more weight on one side than the other he’ll roll in the direction of the weight – imagine you’re playing on sewsaw!

Fortunately the roll isn’t instant – you’ve got some time before he rolls and the timers for this are when the DBM timers are so handy for this fight. They’ll give you at least some warning.

But we want to roll to get rid of the hideous amalgamations…

… the answer is to stand in the empty fiery socket left behind when you killed a tentacle. When you do that grasping tendrils hold you in place whilst doing some damage to you. These hold you to Deathwing’s back whilst he rolls and sends the hideous amalgamations flying away.

You’ll also see Bloods coming out of the sockets which don’t have corruption tentacles in them – kill them roughly in the middle of the spine. They don’t hit that hard however – I just let enough build up for the next stage.

Once you’ve gotten at least nine bloods built up, kill the remaining corruption tentacle to spawn another Hideous Amalgamation.

Then kite it over the corpses of the bloods which are slowly working their way back to the nearest tentacle socket. This can be bit of a pain – I tend to kite from one side of Deathwing’s back to the other. You’ll get very used to the DBM warnings about Deathwing being about to roll!

You’ll also find that the absorbtion of the blood into the Hideous Amalgamation can be a little slow. Its likely you’ll need to kite it over blood several times.

Once the hideous amalgamation has gotten nine stacks of the blood and has started to send out AoE pulses of fire – DBM again is handy here to tell you stacks – you need to kill it next to the armored plate.

If it explodes near enough to the plate then it’ll pry up the plate, exposing the burning tendon you’ll need to kill to remove the plate. Only one side will be exposed – you can control which by killing the Hideous Amalgamation more to one side than the other.

The burning tendon only remains attackable for a short time before its cast of Seal Armor Breach finishes – you have around 18 seconds.

I try to arrange it so that I’m sitting in a socket, being held in place by grasping tendrils, to DPS the burning tendon down. Not having to worry about the roll makes killing it in the short time its up easier.

It also means that you can just stand still once the plate has been removed – since you’ll have another pair of corruption tentacles spawn to be killed. And another two hideous amalgamations to roll off Deathwing’s back.

You’ll need to repeat this process of getting nine stacks of blood onto a hideous amalgamation and then exploding it twice more to end the fight.

The best way to show the fun of this fight is to watch it. The video below isn’t my best attempt – I managed to blow up a Hideous Amalgamation too far from the plate to pry it up – but that’s handy to show how things can go wrong, but you can still win the fight.

Time	Notes
0:00 – 0:08	Floating down on the parachute, I’ll kill one of the tendrils and kill the other two after that
0:08 – 0:27	Stand in one of the sockets a killed tentacle has left behind, waiting for Deathwing to roll and throw the three Hideous Amalgamations from his back Some bloods will come out and I’ll kill them away from me so the soon to be carried away amalgamations don’t absorb them. The green target is me putting an Earthquake down.
0:28 – 0:33	Deathwing rolls! Away fly the amalgamations! And you, if you’re not tied down in a socket
0:33 – 0:58	I sit in the socket for a bit, waiting for more bloods to spawn. Somewhat damaging to do so, so I don’t stay there for long. On my tank I’ll sit in there for ages – no risk for a blood DK!
0:59 – 1:28	I run from one side of Deathwing’s back to the other; letting bloods slowly build up and killing them kind of in the middle of the back area.
1:28 – 1:51	Kill the remaining corruption tendril to spawn a single amalgamation; kite it over the pools of blood until it has absorbed 9 stacks of blood. Then kill it at the edge of the plate nearest to Deathwing’s head. It can take a moment for blood to be absorbed, so don’t kite too fast.
1:51 – 2:02	Oops; put an earthquake in the wrong place – it killed the amalgamation before I could kite it to the plate. So it exploded without lifting up the plate; nice demo of what not to do I guess!
2:02 – 2:16	Stand in a socket to be rooted to Deathwing’s back and let the bloods build up again
2:16 – 2:20	Deathwing rolls & you can see how I point the camera back towards Deathwing’s tail to see when the roll has really finished
2:20 – 2:53	Get plenty of blood up
2:53 – 3:26	Right; let’s try that again! Kill the corruption tendril and kite the amalgamation over the pools of blood until it has absorbed 9 stacks.
3:26 – 3:43	Right, 9 stacks again. Kite to the edge of the plate and kill it. Then stand in a socket so that it’ll not matter if Deathwing rolls whilst you’re doing that. For melee this will mean ensuring that you have an empty socket next to the side the burning tendril is on – you can arrange this by killing the amalgamation in the right place
3:43 – 3:47	Plate has been blown up; kill the Burning Tendon exposed before it can pull the plate back down again
3:47 – 4:12	Plate flies away, to expose… two more corrupting tendrils! Kill those and then let Deathwing roll to fling the two new amalgamations from his back
4:12 – 4:47	Wait for enough blood to be around
4:47 – 5:35	Kill the tendril, get the amalgamation to 9 stacks, explode it and then kill the burning tendril to get rid of another plate
5:35	The remaining corrupting tendril dies whilst I’m sitting in a socket – here I got lucky and the new one didn’t spawn underneath me! If that happens and Deathwing happens to roll then you’ll be flung from his back and you’ll get to do this again – this has happened to me in the past unfortunately
5:36 – 5:39	Another plate down! Just one more to go!
5:39 – 5:55	Wait for the amalgamations to be flung from Deathwing’s back
5:55 – 6:02	Plenty of blood appears to have spawned – kill the corrupting tendril
6:02 – 6:30	Kite the amalgamation over the stacks of blood until it has absorbed 9 of them
6:30 – 6:41	Kill it next to the plate, when it explodes the last burning tendril will appear
6:41 – 6:50	Kill the last tendril and then have another cutscene to see
6:50 – 6:56	Good thing we packed all those parachutes!

[Madness of Deathwing on wowhead]After the annoyance of Spine, the Madness of Deathwing is relatively painless – although it can easily reset if you’re not careful.

On landing, speak to Thrall immediately – it’ll start off yet more RP. Get the loot – mostly likely some trinkets which have a good vendor value – whilst you wait.

After the last dragon says “… but you may wish to hurry” or similar is your cue to start the actual event.

You land on one of four islands – you’re carried from island to island by handy gusts of wind from Thrall. If you jump from the front or back of the island you’ll die however. And the carrying winds can often bug out, sending you back where you came from! Keep on trying if this happens – it’ll sort itself out.

When the fight starts four limb tentacles will spawn, one on each island. The kill order doesn’t really matter that much these days, unless you’re going for the Chromatic Champion achievement for the meta. So I tend to work north, killing the tentacles as I go before heading back for the last.

You have to watch out for the mutated corruptions which spawn – you’ll have one spawn a few seconds into the fight. You MUST kill these. If you don’t they’ll attack the aspects instead and if they die then the fight will reset.

You can ignore the blistering tentacles which spawn – they do almost no real damage to you.

Once the limb tentacle on your island is dead, jump to the next island.

Due to the speed at which we kill the limb tentacles, the encounter can get quite confused and its common to have a rogue mutated corruption spawn far away from the limb tentacle you’re actually killing at the time.

If this occurs its worth jumping back to kill it – if you don’t the fight will likely reset.

After the four limb tentacles are dead, jump back to the starting platform – just one jump back north – to kill Deathwing himself.

Make sure you kill him fast enough so the congealing blood doesn’t reach him – it’ll heal him up for 1% health for each blood which reaches him.

Enjoy the last cutscene and good luck with the mounts which Deathwing can drop!