Xavius: This is a battle against the corruption debuff; it all adds up, so you need to do everything you can to not take stacks. Sadly, the major determining factor as to whether you win or not is basically the RNG on who gets the dream simulacra. You really need the tank and the healer to get hit at some point, because they ARE going to hit 100 at some point.

In phase one, I loosely spread the dps and go ham on the boss. You want the lurking terrors to hit the DPS, not the healer; I micromanage it as best I can, but don't lose sleep over it. When the big add spawns, I simply switch over to it and kill it as quickly as I can without popping things like second potion or bloodlust; we need the big guns for later.

You want to dispel the Darkening Soul Debuff as little as possible; ideally, you only want to dispel it once within this phase, then again in the next. This means taking around 8-9 stacks of it, which is tough on your tank but, frankly, the resilience of our tank is the one advantage that we have in shortmanning this raid, so we make use of it.

When he transitions, I hit the follow key and just have everyone run around following the tank. Its tempting to hit second pot and lust here, but its probably still more important to leave them to phase three. Use the tank to drag the boss away from the adds for as long as possible, then switch and kill them when they're close. If you have the apm and attention to use a dpser to soak them, that is ideal: the tank and the healer WILL hit 1000 corruption at some point and you want him dead before that. Plus, if you can get the dps doing the 15 second uber dps thing before the mind control during phase 3 with lust and second pot up? Well, that'd be pretty awesome.

I'm not going to lie; getting a lucky dream simulacrum was pretty essential to the plan here. You really need the corruption reset on the healer and tank, which gives you previous seconds to dps to get the boss through this phase.

Once you're in phase three, pop hero, pop potions, pop everything, clean up any last remaining adds from phase two and tunnel vision the hell out of the boss. Whether you have the time to get the boss down before the tank goes mind controlled is dependent on how well you've managed corruption up til this point.

The actual kill was a skin of the teeth just-two-hunters-desperately-kiting-the-boss-for-the-last-2% sort of thing, but they all count!

---------------

I'm not sure those strategies are all going to hold up in Heroic, where the extra mechanics and additional damage incoming is going to stop a lot of the brute force cheese that's being used here, but with additional gear and artifact upgrades I don't see why heroic isn't doable. I'd be very interested in anybody else's experience short manning any of the raids, particularly folks who are running things like 5x Prot and 5x Hunter. Is it possible to do this with unconventional compositions? I can imagine on bosses like Elerethe that it might even be easier.