World of Warcraft Karazhan Raid Guide: The Curator

If you’re looking for a Karazhan guide and tutorial for The Curator, you’ve found the best on the internet.

The healer is the first of two bosses in Karazhan to drop T4 gear. He is not an optional boss. It can give raids a bit of trouble, but remember that practice makes perfect.

Ideal group composition:

1 main tank

3 healers

6 good DPS

Most of your raid will likely be at least 5-6 epics, if not more, before you can consistently kill The Curator. Your DPS must be strong as you must be able to kill the arcane flares it summons in 10 seconds or you will be overwhelmed by them.

NOTE: Be very careful when you first enter the Curator’s room because you have a very large aggro radius.

The positioning for this fight is pretty straightforward. Line up all of your DPS and ranged healers against the wall in the Healer’s room. They should all be roughly apart in a semicircle. The tank will then push the Healer about 30 meters away from the ranged DPS in the middle of the room.

For most of the fight, The Curator summons Astral Flares to attack the raid at a speed of one every 10 seconds. All DPS need to attack them for most of the fight. Whenever there is a flare, DPS must attack the flare.

Periodically, The Curator will turn blue and use Evocation to restore his mana. While blue, he does not attack anyone and takes 200% damage. He does this for 20 seconds, then fires Astral Flares again. When he’s Evoking is when your DPS will attack him. DPS must also remember to stay in Astral Flares until the last one is dead, even when evoking. For this reason, we generally only assign two specific DPS to take care of the last Flare when Evoking, this way the rest of the DPS is free to switch immediately.

It goes back and forth between firing Astral Flares and Evoke for most of the fight. You just need to keep killing Flares and then attack him when he’s Evoking until he drops to 15%. Before that, however …

The healer also uses something called Hateful Bolt, which deals 5-6k arcane damage to whoever is second in threat. For this reason, we generally have a very healthy DPS member who remains second in threat and just eats the Hateful Bolts. You can also use a tank outside of the tank, although we found that this slowed our DPS too much in this DPS run. He rages and will kill the raid after 10 minutes, so DPS is very important in this fight.

Once you get it to 15%, the healer hits harder, stops the evocation, and stops firing astral flares. At this point, all that’s left to do is take it down. Open cooldowns and keep all heals on the main tank and Hateful Bolt’s tank. Once you bring it down to 15%, you should be able to kill it unless you hit the enrage timer.

If you’re having trouble with The Curator, remember that most of the issues you have with it can only be solved by going out and back with better gear, better raid specs, better consumables, or some combination of all three. The healer was the first boss in Karazhan that most of our raid needed to use flasks before we could take him down. Bad DPS can’t and shouldn’t be tolerated, while Subtlety rogues can be fine in 5-mans – they’re horrible raid DPS, for example. Of course, you can always go PvP for a day or two and come back with some additional epics, it can make a huge difference.