CT's Bone Dragon and managing "Evil Eye"/"Chaos Breath"

[Maelwys]

If you are a Paladin you can Shield Swipe when you know Chaos Breath is coming and prevent it entirely. You need to land it between the time when you get marked and when he uses the breath. It's been a while since the last time I did CT, but I think you wait like 3 seconds after being marked and then swipe and it'll prevent the breath. You can use Bulwark for a chance to extend your swipe uptime to 10s.

That makes sense... it looks like it's either the 'Chaos Breath' or 'Apocalypse' abilities that actually inflict the damage, and if the boss is unable to use abilities then these shouldn't trigger.

I've actually successfully used Shield Bash (the PLD 6-second stun) once or twice to prevent Chaos Breath as well, but sadly it's not very reliable - there are typically multiple people using stuns on the boss which makes him build up an immunity... so when you need to stun him it won't kick in.

There's a few issues with relying on Shield Swipe though -
+ Firstly you can only use it in a short period immediately after a successful block, which means relying on randomness (even with an Onion Shield I'll not be certain of always having it available on slow-hitting enemies like the Bone Dragon) or using Bulwark. Bulwark is on a 180s cooldown, and Chaos Breath is every 30 seconds in the last phase. On a typical CT I'll usually see two of them before we kill the boss.
+ Secondly, Shield Swipe works by triggering pacification for 6 seconds, which prevents the mob from being able to use abilities. This is helpful in the case of Chaos Breath, but the Bone Dragon also regularly uses targeted ranged AoE attacks on random players (you can notice the ground indicators). If he's pacified then he can't use this ability, and instead decides to run over to whoever he has targeted and whack them with a melee attack. This creates the illusion that the MT just lost hate, and if the boss decides to target someone who's halfway across the arena then it can really mess things up.

Hysteria (or lunacy) I forgot what it's actually called seems bugged. I've tanked the bone dragon 20 something times now and more than half the time I will get hit by the Hysteria debuff and I'll just stand in place stunned for the duration of the effect rather than walk around. Only once did my character actually move around with hysteria on.

Yeah, Hysteria seems really random.
I usually try to dodge it completely, but the few times that I've been hit with it I've noticed a similar effect (or "run on the spot" for half the duration and randomly wander around for the remainder).

Well at least we've got a few ideas now: use a Stun or Pacify (PLD) at exactly the right moment, or keep your HP bar above 70%. Jury is still out on Holmgang...
(SCH "Galvanize" shields appear to count towards the 70% damage, IIRC Stoneskin doesn't but it wouldn't hurt for a PLD to self-buff with it - if nothing else it'll help mitigate the attacks immediately after Chaos Breath!!)

Cheers all!