This fight "can" be entirely RNG free, it just requires more attention to detail than ususal. The fact is, once you know how to do the fight, 4/5 times you'll get through things without failing due to RNG (or at least nothing an in-combat rez can't fix). If you find it's just happening to you too much though, the two most likely "RNG" causes of death are cyclone related: 1) Cycloned target lands on top of a ball lightning moving towards another player (eats AE after cyclone damage before they have a chance to move away) 2) A player is cycloned immediately following blowing up their ball lightning (health too low to survive the imminent cyclone damage) #1 can be solved by having your raid communicate cyclone status as well as ensuring that, en route to their ball lightning, players make sure that the pathway the lightning will take to reach them won't intersect the center platform (where cycloned targets land). We've managed to eliminate most deaths caused by this in this manner. #2 can be solved by watching the cyclone timings and acting accordingly. You typically have someone being tossed every other set of ball lightnings (not sure on exact timing, going by feeling here, but it's predictable). So, if you determine when a new cyclone is about to arrive, you can either have players hold off exploding their ball lightnings until a cycloned target is selected, or ensure they're adequately healed/bubbled so as to have enough health should they be picked by cyclone immediately after. As noted above, you typically will only lose one person in this manner, so you can usually just rez them back up and be fine. But taking a few extra steps to mitigate or avoid the RNG deaths is always preferable. Negator

That area, pulls are typically 4 elites and 2 strong (lots of heroic areas are like this). If you're lower level, have a groupie CC the furthest elite or two (if your group is solid, don't bother), your Mortar Volley opener should be able to hit the rest of the elites + 1 strong (place it so you avoid hitting the elite to be cc'd, who's likely standing near the 1 strong you'll not hit with MV too). As MV finishes, toss out your sticky grenade on the pack as you run in and harpoon in the straggler strong mob your MV missed so he gets hit with sticky grenade detonate. Pulse Cannon the pack and you're pretty set; just build up aggro on the elites while dps off's the strongs. Drop your smoke grenade after the Pulse Cannon to help on damage if need be. Same with Explosive Surge. Also, these packs should take you just long enough that your MV and Smoke Grenade are up for each pull. If they aren't, the same opener should do (lead with Sticky, PC pack). Finally, in many of these areas, not all the mobs are ranged. Identify which ones these are and re-prioritize which mobs you're hitting with your AE openers. You can always use your single target taunt to pull back in a melee more easily than a ranged, so try to prioritize catching the ranged from the get go. Once you get 30 and have AE taunt and Storm, this all gets even more manageable (and awesome looking!). Negator

What above posters have said, I've noticed Pulse Cannon is actually really good. I think most people wrote it off as worthless early due to it being a channeled ability, thus, normally being pushed back and not getting full effect. However, this is not the case (at least, right now). Nor does it happen with Mortar Volley; only Full Auto seems to suffer push back. At 34, in full 33 orange FP drops, my Stockstrike crits are just now breaking the 1K damage barrier in PvE. Pulse Cannon, for 1 more ammo, always does at least 1K, and routinely gets at least one crit, upping normal damage output to ~1.2K. Mortar Volley also is pretty much guaranteed 1K+ damage (again, 3 chances for crits). Both of these cost 3 ammo, yes, but our other 2 ammo abilities, HIB, Sticky Grenade, Ion Pulse, Full Auto (even if you get all the shots off), aren't coming close (300-500 damage range normally, 600-700 crit.). So while they do take an extra GCD to use for 3 sec channel: 1) they're doing the damage of two abilities in the same time frame (typically more, as still an extra chance to crit) 2) ultimately cost you less ammo I've been enjoying Vanguard tanking a great deal myself, even on single targets. Our tool set is just perfect IMO and our "rotation" is very dynamic in all situations. I played a guardian in beta and decided not to again because the play style just felt so dull, and I'm finding the vanguard anything but.

Group has run this place a couple of times. The above posters are right, it's basically a dps race. At 75/50/25% he stops doing damage and summons the adds. From what we've seen, he always goes enrage (200% more dmg) at 50%. He stops damage each time he summons adds, so you need to just burst him down to the next add phase (25%) to taper off the damage. We ran this again last night and decided at 50%, we just weren't going to kill the last add. We left it up and dps'd the boss. He didn't come out of his "no damage" mode until he was at 13%, never summoned the 25% wave, and died shortly thereafter. I know another poster said leaving the adds alive causes some other increased damage debuff, but we never noticed. TL;DR: He is damageable during the add phase, so even if you kill all of the adds, switch at dps back to him early to assist transitioning to next 25% point faster (where he'll stop doing damage again to summon more adds). Negator