I think the primary reason I wanted to stay prot was just for ease of AOE damage output. I was very comfortably near/over 20k dmg as prot but wavering from 10 to 16 as fury depending on the encounter length and armor stacks. Obviously I'll get better as I become more familiar with the encounters and I seriously love DPSing so hard. It just seems much much easier as prot (and bonus, picking up and controlling the fragments, getting them near the slime pile).
I'm down with either, however.
I think on Lord Rhyo we might try and compartmentalize jobs a bit more instead of trying to have many people react to specific situations as we find our driving to be unstable. I found this post which I really liked on a website with a L2R link of a normal kill:
"I set up the macro for vodka to include usually the best single target dps that would have bad switch/aoe capabilities on each leg. I assign 3 DPS to each leg and about 3 people to a "swing group". The 3 DPS on each leg are always suppose to be on each leg and only switch off if I call for a super fast turn yano in an "o shit" type of situation. Otherwise it's just the swing group doing the turn. You usually wanna assign DPS that are good at switching fast as the swing group.
Arcane Mages, Ret Paladins, Warriors, and Hunters are excellent choices as they don't require any or very little ramp up time. "
From the logs looking at our longest pull (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/z...=10815&e=11093)
We can see the following:
Harkle and I did the lion's share of the damage on the fragments and the obsians and that was very close to fully sufficient with the splash from Bauser. (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/z...=10815&e=11093) There were only 5 casts of meltdown from the frags and the boss only gained 29 stacks of armor. The meltdowns that did occur were around 60k health and when compared to the current fastest WOL kill of Rhyo which was interestingly close to the amount of time we spent on this wipe that team had only gained 24 stacks of armor (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/a...?s=8697&e=8967)
Boheem and Vik Duo'ed the spark but that was the majority of Boheem's damage done on a target (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/z...=10815&e=11093)
Looking at the feet both Bauser and Ansum did nearly exactly 28k spread between the two of them in an unbalanced fashion. Harkle and I were also constant sources of damage, coming in at a little under 18k combined and balanced.
My suggestion considering this strat would be to always have Bauser and Ansum DPSing a specific foot. If we use the model described above, we have about 1.5 DPSers on each leg. We could swap Chuk to doing the Spark and have Boheem and Kilwenn as our swing team and only ever have the pair of them DPS the foot that matters for our turns. When they do not need to turn they could simply swap to his body to allow Baus and Ansum to get the speed buff going from their balanced DPS. This can be true of Chuk as well who can also hit the body whenever he's not DPSing a spark. I also think we should avoid the "oh shit everyone switch" as described in the original as much as possible because I think this will just invite further issues" The turns should be very controlled and very gradual if need be.
This way we have balanced, constant damage going to Rhyo at all times. In practice we might find that only 1 person, either Boheem or Kilwenn, would be sufficient on the drive team, which would make it even easier to control when and where he turns. Crushing the inactive volcanos is definitely the source of his damage increase.
Also I keep finding random occurrences of people who are very adamant that jumping on the stomp avoids the damage. It seems laughable but I've not yet seen any evidence for or against. We should make a point to definitely test this since it does seem odd that the ability has such a long cast and there are plenty of other occurrences of "jumping avoids damage" in this xpac.
Last edited by Takaoni; 07-20-2011 at 10:14 AM.
Very good thoughts Taka. I appreciate the well thought out strategy adjustments. For whatever reason there seems to be very little discussion taking place for this tier. I was trying to get something going with my post. Also your ideas are exactly the same thing I've been reading.
In regards to the one tank thing I truly feel that having you as dps on one of the legs as well and letting harkle solo with splash from bauser is more than sufficient. We could alternate CDs on Harkle for when metamorphosis isn't up. Yes your dps was lower when you were fury but that is because you were on legs the whole time. Therefore if you are not expected to aoe and we have your constant single target damage that ultimately we'll reach phase faster which is obviously a good thing.
Sigh so many errors due to predictive text.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using Tapatalk
Last edited by Vikrum; 07-20-2011 at 10:23 AM.
Yeah I hear you on the difference between the damage that prot and fury would do but I've got two things here on that. The first is that I did about 10% more damage to the frags than Harkle and Shatoom, slightly more on the legs, and they just edged me out on the obsidians. But this means that Harkle would have to double his DPS output or would have to rely very heavily on Bauser who would then be pulled away from his leg duty. From there the legs would then be imbalanced because there would then be 3 melee. We could always swap Bauser and Harkle into the pure AOE positions and have me and Ansum on the legs.Originally Posted by Vikrum
Even though it seems odd to have me DPSing as prot in this case I actually think that it does a really good job at AOE and helps keep the little fragments all together and in the right spot for Harkle. Having Harkle and Bauser AOE would require Bauser to go blood and lose some damage to gain that threat output or rely on the two of them always stacking in the right spot to get their respective adds on the two of them.
I'm good with whatever we pick though, in the hopes that our goal is balanced and does not rely on lots of target/role changing.
Very nice Taka. I think we need a steering team as you mentioned and we need to keep the run speed buff up, or figure out a way to trigger it as needed to get to an active volcano as fast as possible. At the very beginning of the fight the steering team may have to get help with turning, but as Rhyo hits more active volcanoes he will take more damage and be easier to turn with just the steering team.
I do feel that Chuk should be AEing adds when he can. His AE is going to be very strong on this fight and I know his single target DPS will be lower than Boheem's for the Spark kill. We could use Chuk on the Spark but I think he may need some help. I know he has a few upgrades now but I am not sure where his single target DPS is sitting at the moment considering he is mainly going heals for us.
Hmmm, jumping on the stomp to avoid damage seems iffy but I will try it.
Yeah I'm almost certain I've tried the jumping thing to no avail. In regards to Boh/Chuk deal we'll have to put Chuk (or someone) with me on Sparks as Boh will be out tonight. But we'll have Dewq or Chuk either one for MS.
Lord Rhyolith himself ("the body") is not directly target-able/attack-able during the first phase of the fight, hence the actual crux of this fight and why balance is the primary issue (see Example 1 for all damage dealt to the body across all wipes, and Example 2 for that same log without pet-based damage). Obviously if we could attack the body directly, we would already have all DPS attacking the body full time and only one person manage steering if this were possible, but the design of the encounter is such that it requires maximal DPS (everyone attacking at all times) while also controlling steering.
That said, we can and should definitely still try a "swing group" setup whereby only one or two individuals are assigned to actually change feet when turning is required, as it should provide more stable (albeit slower) turnings. That said, as our attempts have shown us, in order to meet the DPS requirements, we must have assignments that allow all DPS to directly attack a leg at all times, which essentially means a setup similar to what we've been doing, but the problem is balancing that DPS due to the number of people that can be full-time dedicated to a leg. If one ranged is spending most of their time on the Spark, and Harkle never has a chance to single-target a leg, this gives us 4 DPS on full-time leg duty. This mean that any "turn" suddenly places the balance at 1 vs. 3 DPS, which still seems like an extreme swing we want to avoid.
Instead, it may be worth using our Spark DPS player as our actual swing damage, since presumably in a two tank setup, Vikrum can hold the Spark a fair bit longer if necessary. This would allow the four full-time leg DPS to remain on legs at all times, and only utilize the one swing member to actually control steering.
Unfortunately, as discussed in raid the other night, the real issue is simply that of DPS volatility -- with fewer people, the swings up and down in leg DPS at any given moment are huge, and that can (and does) cause a number of problems. To compensate, one thing I'd like to try is placing our two strongest single-target DPS on the left leg, and the slightly lower DPS on the right leg, such that the tendency for Rhyolith will always be to favor his left. Since we are turning right, as we discovered through our own trial and error, it is always far better to undershoot a volcano and require further right turning to hit it than to overshoot by going beyond it.
Another strategic improvement we should try to employ is better obsidian control, due to the impact early obsidian absorbs have later on in the fight. I made up a spreadsheet to calculate exactly how the armor reductions were impacting our damage throughout the fight, to then see how reducing armor stacks (i.e. avoiding armor stacks from obsidians) affect that damage later on.
The spreadsheet can be found at this link if anyone cares to double-check the details, but essentially I've taken the timestamps for all armor reductions and gains, and reverse calculated our Base DPS on Rhyolith. For each time span, the damage is calculated based on the armor reduction during that timespan in Damage Dealt, then all damage is totaled at the bottom. Our actual total damage to both feet during this fight was 12,173,720, so I set our Base DPS for the calculations in the spreadsheet to 97,125, which gives us a calculated total damage of 12,173,691, near enough to the actual to make no difference. Since our fight only lasted 4:37, I also added the extra timestamp at the end to indicate when Superheated begins at the 5:00 mark and thus further extrapolate what our total damage would be up to that point.
Thus, we can now modify the armor reduction values at any given timestamp to then change the damage dealt from that point forward in the fight. This will tell us how much extra damage we would gain by preventing 1% armor here or there, by placing "-1" values in the Mod column wherever we want to cancel out the effect of that Obsidian stack. This gives some interesting information.
I won't paste the whole table again modified, and instead just the results, but notice we had 8 Obsidian armor gains pretty early on in the fight, between the 60 and 110 second marks. If we had prevented those armor gains, we'd get the following damage difference:
Meaning we'd have dealt 1.59 million more damage over this portion of the fight, though we're still 2.1 million damage short of the phase.
A big key factor is reducing that armor stack earlier rather than later. If instead of eliminating those first 8 stacks, I instead go through and eliminate EVERY OTHER obsidian stack that was gained, we get a total of 15 stacks not applied compared to the original 8. However, we get a damage outcome table like this:
Thus, even though we nearly doubled the actual obsidian reductions we eliminated, because they were interspersed throughout the fight rather than early on, we only gained 28.4% more damage over the 8-stack change.
It's also interesting to note that if we eliminate all obsidian gains, we get the following:
Putting us into the final phase a few seconds prior to Superheated beginning.
Now obviously preventing all obsidian stacks is a very tall order, but we can make efforts to prevent as many as possible, and most importantly, preventing the early stacks. One key thing to try is to have Boheem utilize his Typhoon knockback very frequently, pushing obsidians away from Rhyolith. Preferably, these will occur during stomps since Rhyolith stands still for the cast duration, but really with such a short cooldown on Typhoon, essentially any knockback that pushes slimes toward the edge of the platform is ideal. This not only prevents them from reaching Rhyolith for quite a bit longer, but also further groups them up for more efficient AE damage from Harkle and the like.
Hi guys, I found a thread on mmo that has a list of a bunch of heroic 10 man kills if anyone wants to check them out.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ideos-(10-man)
After watching most all of the vids on Rhyo and reading a few strategies I think the strat we're using is pretty solid. The only difference I've found in WoL and the videos is most of the kills have 3-4 range nuke the spark when it is in position. With the spark as priority I'm assuming it's so there is more up time for the range dps on the legs and adds. Also I did find one suggestion that dots do affect the leg steering so its only recommended to use dot casters to steer if they can dot both legs equally and use nukes to steer whichever direction he needs to go. At least until he is low enough to ignore the adds and nuke the boss. I've also read that HB cleave can skew the steering some.
I'm sorry if I'm suggesting stuff that's already been mentioned, tried or done in raid as I've only been in on one run so far. Hope it helps.
If you expect a kick in the balls and get a slap in the face, then it's a victory!
Few notes for Heroic: Rhyolith:
Volcano Target Selection
The main thing I want to try to incorporate is the idea of forcing Rhyolith toward a volcano we want him to activate, just before his Heated Volcano timer is about to become active. At present, we are essentially always moving straight toward the next volcano, whether it is active or not, and instead there are many situations it would be advantageous to "skirt" a nearby inactive volcano temporarily so that it becomes a likely candidate for the next Heated Volcano activation, and thus is very close to Rhyolith and easily stompable in a short timespan.
Full-Turn Opening
One thing I'd like to try is to alter our opening, as we tend to have RNG dictate whether the first volcanoes get smashed too early or just barely get a chance to become active before he stomps them. Looking at the logs and verifying against video of our attempts, Rhyo casts the first Heated Volcano 15 seconds after the first volcano spawns from the Concussive Stomp. Since Volcanoes actually take about 10 seconds from the stomp cast to fully form, this gives us a very small window (5 seconds) in which to direct Rhyo toward the volcano we want/think he'll activate first, which sometimes leads to early volcanoes in front being smashed and putting us behind schedule when he activates one behind him.
Instead, I'd like to try spinning him in a circle from the start, then going toward our active volcano. This will basically allow us to force the second active volcano near the first active volcano spawn, and get "ahead" of the active volcano curve by stomping the first and the second active volcano in quick succession -- most importantly, the second active volcano gets stomped very shortly after it spawns, providing adequate time to realign Rhyo for the next Heated Volcano target.
While we will "eat" the first active volcano damage for quite a while, because it is early in the fight still, we aren't dealing with a lot of extra damage or activity, specifically he'll have a low number (1 at most) of Molten Armor stacks throughout this period, so we can fairly easily heal through that "extra" damage by giving us more breathing room in the middle of the fight.
Early Rhyolith Burn
This one is the most "mathy" but arguably therefore most grounded idea as well. Essentially, I think we should try burning Rhyolith down to 25% much earlier; say at 50% health. There are a few reasons for this, which boil down to:
Healing Remains Reasonable
While we obviously had issues with active volcano stomping at times, I still found it strange that even a simple 15 second delay was causing a huge "net loss" in raid health/healing and I realize that it's almost entirely due to Molten Armor stacks building up as the fight progresses. So as we approach that 4 minute mark and beyond, we're typically at 6+ stacks of Molten Armor (one attempt of 3:54 had him at 8 stacks, or 40% extra damage!). Therefore, the longer that first phase goes, the less likely we'll be able to keep up with the healing.
Reduces Chance for Steering Mishaps
Sort of the DPS equivalent to above, but obviously with a shorter Phase 1, that's fewer active volcanoes we need to hit, and thus fewer chances of something going fubar.
Lower Chance/Stacks of Superheated
As we saw from our 6+ minute attempt with 3 heals, we simply can't afford to get into the final phase with Superheated having been active for long if at all. Thus we need to, at the very least, enter Phase 2 at the 5 minute mark.
Eruption Stacks Drop in Phase 2
The fight design even somewhat lends itself to this sort of early burn, as any Eruption debuff stacks on people will automatically drop once Phase 2 begins, so as long as we can "hold out" until we push him over, it should be fine.
The good news is, looking at our numbers, I think this idea of burning Rhyolith earlier is quite doable. First, let's look at one of our better late-attempts (that is, an attempt where we were using our current "finalized" strategy). Attempt #18 from last night is a good example:
Time: 3:49
Damage to Rhyolith: 11,633,576 (or 50.6%)
Obsidian Armor Stacks Remaining: 29 stacks
Extra Armor Stacks Gained: 19 stacks
This means Rhyo was at 49.4% health with 1:11 before Superheated and 29% damage reduction. Based on our single-target DPS without modifiers during a Bloodlust burn phase on Baleroc, our base Raid DPS seems to be about 215,000 (accounting for Taka tanking on Rhyo where he is not on that Baleroc). At 50% health, Rhyolith would need to take 5.75 million damage to reach 25% and push Phase 2. At 150,500 Raid DPS (70% of our base 215k), we would require ~38 seconds to burn Rhyo from 50% to 25%. Since Fragments spawn every 45 seconds, we would have to time this burn to start right after a fresh Fragment spawn is killed, thus giving us enough breathing room to avoid the next subsequent spawn from using Meltdown on anyone. However, that should be very simple to accomplish as we can often kill a fresh set in ~15 seconds if we focus it, giving us ~60 seconds until the next Fragment set would actually use Meltdown.
What is surprising (to me at least), is that the differences in Rhyolith's armor for these low armor levels don't actually add/remove all that much time. As we saw above, 30% armor has us at ~38 seconds to burn, but here is a full table with the armor reduction and the time for a burn phase:
That tells a pretty interesting story in my opinion, in that the total time to burn increase from 10% armor reduction up to 40% reduction is only about 15 seconds more time. Obviously compare that "gain" to the actual length of time needed to properly "stomp out" 30% armor worth of volcanoes (minimum of 75 seconds) and clearly there's a "break even" point in here somewhere where it's no longer beneficial to continue trying to push down his armor.
In fact, the only factors that should dictate when to stop stomping active volcanoes are:
Figuring out the "answer" to all these based on our chart above is a pretty tricky thing and more theoretical than necessary, but it still helps us think about things differently. All told, if we start setting some very reasonable benchmarks when to push and go into burn mode, I think this will prove a very good tactic.
- Healing Sustainability -- How long we can keep the raid alive against active volcanoes.
- Fragment Destruction -- How much time before Fragments use Meltdown.
- Spark Time to Live -- How long the currently active Spark has been/will remain alive (and thus stack count on it).
For example, I would say 40% armor or lower at 50% health or lower, we should burn after the next set of Fragments drops if we've recently killed the previous active volcano. This would mean: A) Fragments will never Meltdown and B) We will only be soaking active volcano damage/stacks for ~22 seconds (burn starts 10 sec prior to next Heated Volcano cast and it takes another 12 seconds for an Active Volcano to start Erupting). It's also very unlikely that Spark would reach dangerous levels as well since we're burning right after Fragment spawn/death, thus the following Spark will appear a while into the burn, and likely not reach too great a buff stack.
Anyway, I think these changes are easily doable and will give us a pretty solid shot at putting the final touches on this fiery slutball.
Last edited by Kulldam; 07-25-2011 at 05:59 AM.
Bauser is such a monster. Is it just him or is it his hero class? Either way I am having a hard time figuring out why we aren't 9 dk's and 1 healer. /shrug
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
