WoW Classic Season of Mastery introduces massive changes to Blackwing Lair

Bill Cooney

Blizzard is making massive changes to Blackwing Lair in WoW Classic’s Season of Mastery, which will make the raid much harder to clear for players and guilds.

Blackwing Lair is a familiar raid for anyone who’s made it to the endgame of WoW Classic. However, Season of Mastery players will find it’s become a much different beast than they’re used to.

Big changes were made to four of the raid bosses in Blackwing’s PTR: Razoregore, Vaelestrasz, Firemaw, and Chromaggus. All will be much more of a challenge than the original raid, but Chromaggus will be a true test, even for veteran players.

Blackwing Lair bosses get turned up to 11

Razoregore’s fight will now spawn an Unstable Chromatic Drake mob that needs to be tanked if you want to stay alive. Next up, Vaelestrasz starts with 60% health, so the fight will naturally take longer than before.

However, once we get to Firemaw is where things really start to get crazy. In addition to his regular fire debuff, he now comes with a shield that sends chain lighting out whenever you take damage, increasing with each jump, as you can see in the clip above.

Finally, we get to Chromaggus, who has basically been entirely revamped from his original version. Instead of just doing two random breaths each instance, he’ll now do all of them in a completely random order each time.

The old wall trick won’t help you here either, as it no longer provides a line of sight protection, and the breaths now have a full 360-degree area of effect. However, there are various effects when healers debuff the breath effects, one of which will provide a bit of cover.

When healers debuff Chromag’s blue effect, it will spawn an ice block you can hide behind, which does provide line of sight from his breath. These don’t last long though, so healers will have to pretty much get the timing of their cleanses down perfectly to keep the raid alive.

More details on the changes to bosses in Blackwing Lair can be found on WoWHead. Needless to say, this raid is far more difficult than the vanilla version and will require a lot more cohesion, consumables, and patience to survive.