Reliquary of Souls

One of the more annoying complex bosses in Burning Crusade. The Reliquary of Souls in Black Temple was a DPS-raced styled boss, in which you had a very limited window of time to defeat the three forms of this monstrosity one after the other.

Before facing off with this boss, however, players needed to rush through a weird gauntlet filled with ghosts. They had to to be killed fast enough so that the raid wouldn't take too much damage and to conserve resources as you had to fight the Reliquary of Souls immediately after, which meant you couldn't eat or drink to replenish yourself.

In its first form, the Essence of Suffering, players were hit with an aura which reduced all healing done and mana regeneration by 100%, armor by 100%, and defense skill by 500. As players had no way to heal one another, tanks had very limited defense, and a random threat table, the key to defeating this boss was fairly simple:

1. Healers, while they couldn't heal, had to work on dispelling a very deadly Life Drain debuff from other players
2. Tanks stacked shield block and as much block value as they could to prevent taking damage, although the boss didn't hit very hard to begin with.
3. When the boss enraged, a rogue would step in close enough to become the boss' next target and blow their Evasion ability.

The above steps repeat until the first form is done away with.

Between the phases, ghosts with very low health would spawn and attack random players. Killing them would make them burst and fully replenish the players in range. You had to make sure everyone was topped off between phases.

The Essence of Desire was up next. It gave players an aura that doubled the healing done, but would gradually reduce mana pools until maximum mana was 0/0. Also, players would take half the damage they did to the boss in return. Players only had 160 seconds to defeat this phase, as the healers would have no mana to continue healing the raid. A warrior main tank makes defeating this phase very easy, as Spell Reflection could be used to counter the Deaden ability, which increases the damage done to the target by 100%. If it hits the main tank, an off tank would take over while the effect of the spell ran its course. Interrupting the ability Spirit Shock was an absolute must in this encounter, as it would deal heavy damage and disorient the main tank. Usually Spirit Shock would be followed by a Deaden, which was also crucial as it had to be reflected back to the boss for maximum raid damage output. Letting a Spirit Shock go off usually meant a wipe, as the boss would start wiping out the next target on its threat table, which would usually be a damage dealer. Every so often the boss would put up a shield on itself which absorbed 50,000 damage and granted immunity to interrupt effects. Getting it off was critical.

After the Essence of Desire the Essence of Anger would be the final form. A soft enrage-type boss, players had to defeat it before the aura that this boss gave off started killing the raid. It dealt increasing amounts of Shadow damage every 3 seconds with the damage increasing by 100 each time. Also, players would do 5% more damage every 3 seconds. Taunting the boss (or it switching targets at any random time) would give the entire raid a debuff that increased their threat gained by 200%. The boss would also gain double the attack speed and a noticeable size increase. Along with a random damage over time debuff that could be mitigated by Nature Protection potions, the boss would deal a frontal-cone area-of-effect attack that burned any resources on the player and dealt damage along with it. Only tanks should be hit by this ability.

Defeating this boss would allow the raid to advance one step closer to the final area of the Black Temple, where the last three boss encounters would reside.