I might just be stating the obvious but just to clarify. People normally kill Green, with a few exceptions of deadlier combinations (yellow+red), this is just so that they can gain the benefit of stacking for aoe heals, pre-heals for purple and so that aoe damage from killing Black adds also hits the boss. Does that sound right?
If you expect a kick in the balls and get a slap in the face, then it's a victory!
Pretty much Doug; and also because spreading with Red active is pretty gnarly spike damage. Unfortunately Green is the lowest incoming DPS of any non-purple/-blue spawn, but since it requires spreading that makes other things a lot wierder (Red, Black Adds, AE heals as you mention, etc).Originally Posted by Dougall
Shockingly, turns out almost every single Heroic Hagara kill is now using a sploit to become immune to Frost Bubble damage. Aweeesome... ><
Just a couple examples (but you'd be hard pressed to find any kill vids not using this en masse):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSQKhWVr0eg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvSLjPMxElA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8VwISo1BhY
The basic mechanic is that if you can become immune to (or remove) the Watery Entrenchment debuff, it doesn't get reapplied unless you exit/enter the bubble again. You can use all forms of self-immunity to achieve this (AMS, bubble, etc), but the real big thing is since the debuff also applies a 50% movement slow, you can remove it from the entire raid with abilities that remove roots/movement impairment, such as a Stampeding Roar via the Feral Swiftness talent or Earthbind Totem via Earthen Power.
Guess we better get Zonozz down so we can get our 'sproit on too!!!
Notes for Heroic: Hagara:
Just a few thoughts for strategery and tactics.
Normal Phase
- 1-tank, 3-heals
Frost Phase
- Immediately pull Hagara to NE or NW corner of the room.
- If tank damage is too high, have Kain taunt when Focused Assault begins from near max range. Tank taunts back after just a couple seconds to ensure safety.
- Ranged/Healers are assigned to pairs. Each pair stands inside an Ice Lance beam, in a straight line. Front player remains stationary, and only back player in each pair much move out slightly when stack is too high (at ~4 stacks)
- When Ice Tombed, both marked players immediately move into melee range to the FAR side of the boss (thus if we're tanking in NE, ice tomb targets stand NE of the boss), to prevent random ice lance hits just before tomb hits. This also prevents random LoS issues for healing the tank.
A few possible strategies here we can try and test:
- Before fight, we've marked our exact tanking position (NE or NW) with a raid marker, as once Frost phase begins, that is exactly where a crystal will spawn. By starting right at that position, most people are outside of the frost bubble to begin, and more importantly, melee can immediately begin attacking the nearby crystal.
Ranged/Healers Move Center on Boss
This one actually seems like the easiest to repeat, since we tend to be melee heavy and are using three healers. Essentially once the first ice wave approaches and melee start rotating clockwise to avoid it, ranged and healers instead move immediately to the center of the room, on top of Hagara's position. For some reason, ticks from Watery Entrenchment seem to be for about 18.5k, even though 15% of max health would be much higher (around 22.5k for 150k player), and since there are no resists in the logs, I can only assume it calculates resists before damage or some such thing.
At any rate, with 3 healers and usually 3 ranged DPS, that's about 18.5 * 6 = 111,000 damage per second, which is undoubtedly a lot, but with cooldowns should be healable for the small period we'll need. The big advantage is that ranged DPS can stand still and attack every crystal from this position.
We also also adjust the numbers as needed, such as perhaps only have 2 ranged DPS inside and the other running around, or even 2 ranged and 2 healers and have the other healer run but help with healing (such as HoTs) from the outside.
Weave
Probably the lowest DPS option, but also likely the easiest to perform. We essentially stay together as a group attacking a given crystal, and when the Ice Wave starts to approach, everyone steps into the frost bubble temporarily, letting the Ice Wave pass by, before moving back out of the bubble. Since the bubble does a percentage of player health as damage every second, assuming any given player is full health when they step into the bubble, they will have a guaranteed length of time they can survive inside the bubble without any heals (~8 seconds by my calculations). Even when we dispel the snare debuff right under the raid inside the bubble, it should still never take more than 6-7 seconds for anyone to weave into and out of the bubble, and even if it does, we'll obviously still have random heals going off.
Thus the raid continues attacking said Crystal until it dies, then moves clockwise to the next crystal and repeats the process, weaving in and out of the bubble until it dies, and we continue forward.
If meeting the Berserk seems like it won't be much of an issue, I think this method is our best bet.
Rotation
I would consider this the "intended" method. We split the raid into two even groups of 5 each, and start at different corners (so from our Normal Phase setup, Group 1 might start NE while Group 2 starts NW). The raid rotates around clockwise following closely behind the Ice Wave, briefly attacking and dotting any crystal they come across. When someone is debuffed with Frostflake, that players immediately moves toward the outside edge to be dispelled (ala Halion) and thus keeping the snare puddle on the outside. The rest of the group continues running around on the inner edge of the circle toward the boss, safely out of any snares.
I suspect this method will be the hardest to perform execution-wise, but is probably fairly safe once players are used to dodging falling ice and moving out for Frostflake dispel.
Lightning Phase
Since we'll be tanking NE or NW, once this phase begins, we can almost immediately start attacking the add spawn that always appears to the North. Once it spawns and dies at the North Crystal, healers and most if not all ranged DPS should move to the center of the room (for healers this will give us range on everyone, and for ranged it's just to remove some potential chain lightning damage we might otherwise incur).
To activate crystals, we'll have two pairs of two melee each pre-assigned to move from the starting/North position either clockwise or counterclockwise, to trigger the remaining 7 crystals. Assuming roughly the same speed, they'll each get 3 simultaneously and meet at the South position for the final trigger.
I did consider a more complex method for activating crystals quickly (such as pre-assigned locations for four pairs of two people each between each crystal pair, such that upon the add's death, we'd near-instantly activate the NE, E, NW, and W crystals together. The big problem is positioning -- to do that, healers would not be in range of opposite side players, and melee would also be unable to attack the add (or would be out of position if they did so at the start of the chain portion).
Ultimately I think just using a pair of people on each side and having them run around together should be sufficient and be much easier to heal without much difference in time-spent.
Some stuff for Heroic Warmaster:
Phase 1
Drakes
In order to keep the ship alive while also meeting the DPS requirement, it seems that any valid strategy will revolve around killing each pair of Drakes in a single "down-phase" each time they spawn. This will allow us to get through Phase 1 fast enough that the ship shouldn't be in danger of dying as long as we full-soak the Large Barrages and get some (but not all) of the smaller ones.
Thus we'll split the Drake sides into two groups of two ranged DPS each and one healer on each side. Each team can and should move freely about the ship to help with Large Barrages or other miscellaneous stuff, but otherwise the Drake teams should remain close to if not on the edge of the boat. This reduces fire damage potential and more importantly, allows the raid to spread out so charge damage potential is much lower from the melee adds.
A few tips for Drake teams (ranged DPS):
- DoTs can be applied to the drakes as they pass overhead when dropping off the melee adds. Use this time wisely to stack up DoTs.
- If no Drake is available to attack on your side, DoT or nuke the melee adds (Sappers still take priority).
- Similar to ICC Gunship, along your Drake side, try to spread out 5+ yards from the other people near you, so charge is virtually only a 1 in 10 chance of coming at you and forcing you to move and lose DPS time.
- Since each Drake team will have 3 Drakes to kill before the Phase ends, plan DPS cooldowns accordingly. Something like: Drake 1 = Strong Personal DPS cooldown, Drake 2 = Potion+Weak Personal DPS cooldown, Drake 3 = Bloodlust.
Twilight Barrage
Another thing we can test that might work well is having particular players with immunity (or near to it) abilities solo-soak Large Barrage. Dougall's Dispersion will certainly work, and maybe Ice Block/Divine Shield are a possibility too. If so, that would greatly reduce the chances of deaths during most of Phase 1 as usually they are a Large Barrage + Charge combo.
Edit - Updated: It seems full-immunities don't soak damage from Large Barrage, however as suspected Dispersion and similar work fine. Therefore, we can actually utilize Dougall and Kilwenn to solo soak all but one Large Barrage casts via Dispersion and Cauterize. Large Barrage is cast exactly every 35 seconds, so with Glyph'd Dispersion Doug can only soak every 3rd cast, while Kilwenn can soak every 2nd. At most we'll see five casts during Phase 2, so rotation should look something like this:
Since a Mage soak requires Cauterize to proc, we'll just need to have heals ready and landing immediately afterward. Also even though Kilwenn could also get #1 cast, Dispersion is actually less dangerous since it doesn't require immediate healing afterward (though again we'll want to do so).
As mentioned above, this should greatly improve our DPS on other stuff during the fight and allow us to focus much more on Drakes and adds.
Melee Adds
As with Normal difficulty, tanks will need to alternate tanking differing add types, but otherwise keep them on top of each other when not moving to help soak a Large Barrage, so that melee DPS can cleave as much as possible. Only the two tanks, Dude, and Ansum will be able to DPS the melee adds full-time, so minimizing DPS losses from movement is key, as well as maximizing splash damage between the two mobs.
Similar to the Drake teams, these must die before the next set appears, but also take priority behind Sappers.
Sappers
We have not done well with breaking Sappers, but it seems you can utilize AoE effects to break their stealth early. We should have 1-2 people keep an eye on the Sapper spawn timer and be ready to drop an AE of some sort right when they vanish (stuff that would work well: D&D, Shockwave/Tclap, Mind Sear on a tank, Fan of Knives, Consecration, etc). As usual we'll want to use a long stun on them and also save Death Grip as a last resort measure if we get a Sapper far away while we're soaking a Large Barrage.
Phase 2
Transition
Almost equally important to the actual performance of the raid mechanics seems to be the transition going into Phase 2, because poor timing means fresh melee spawns or lots of fire active when the boss spawns, which is at best a lot of wasted DPS, and at worse, a wipe. Therefore, as mentioned above briefly, we'll probably be best off using Bloodlust once the final set of Drakes spawn, as a DPS boost for the Drake teams, but also to the raid overall to burn everything down at once so we're clear when Phase 2 begins.
Dragon
Once the Phase begins and ranged DPS start to burn the dragon, it quickly drops down to the ship and attacks like a regular melee mob, so tanks will again need to swap back and forth as Sunder stacks get high, but keep Warmaster and the Dragon on top of each other so stuff like Dude's cleave can hit both simultaneously.
Positions
One key thing we noticed fairly early on in Normal even (but have not been too strict about due to the ability to ignore most mechanics on Normal) is the distance between the boss and ranged/healers to avoid Disrupting Shout but close enough to allow movement out of Shockwave. To that end, I think static positions will be very useful here, and much like Blizzard's architectural designs in the past, the layout of the room offers a good baseline setup I think we can use. We need to keep ranged at least 10 yards from Warmaster at all times, and since the Dragon only drops one or two shadow patches before landing (and stops dropping them), we should be able to use a fairly static layout provided fire is mostly extinguished by then.
Essentially, toward the bow of ship where the NPCs are channeling (South/down in this diagram), there exists a few long wooden beams that form the following basic T-shape:
Squares are various player groups (green are ranged/healers, yellow are melee DPS, blue are tanks) while the red circle is where Warmaster and the Dragon will be tanked, at the T-intersection. Before the fight, we'll raid mark the four basic positions, #1-4, which can then be used as reference during the phase for Shockwave and Dragon facing.
Ranged groups are essentially split evenly with 2 DPS and 1 healer at each location (#1 & #2), so that fewer people need to move for Shockwave and also one healer can always be casting on tanks.
Once Warmaster lands, the tank will stand on one of the two marked melee positions (say #3 for now) with the boss roughly positioned on the cross-beam. Once the Dragon is burned down a bit, it will land right on top of this location, and the other tank will taunt and face it to the final unused position (#4), such that the bodies of Warmaster and the Dragon are in the same basic spot (the Dragon model is much larger of course). Key point: Once the Dragon is facing a location, melee DPS and the Warmaster tank at the time must be stacked on the other melee position.
Therefore in the above example, Warmaster drops and is facing the tank at location #3 with melee attack from the side at location #4. Once the Dragon spawns, it is facing location #4, so to avoid the cone attack, melee move to location #3 with the Warmaster tank and attack the Dragon. Once a tank swap occurs, melee must move to the opposite position quickly to avoid breath from the Dragon who is now facing their current location.
Furthermore, when Shockwave occurs, all melee and tanks should be careful to always move outward when dodging Shockwave, to avoid eating a Dragon breath accidentally. That is, don't move toward the Dragon's head when sidestepping Shockwave, step toward one of the range positions (or through Warmaster if that's faster).
If this works properly (and I think it will), we should be able to allow melee DPS to attack the Dragon full-time while cleaving to Warmaster, keep everyone in constant heal range, at most only require 3 people to move for Shockwave each cast, and prevent silence from Disrupting Shouts.
Consuming Shroud
This is really the only new Heroic mode ability in the fight we can do anything about or interact with, and as the tooltip describes, it basically absorbs healing done up to 100k and instead deals that in damage to the rest of the raid. I thought about trying to keep the ranged stacked as much as possible so AE heals would benefit us slightly more from the damage of this ability, but splitting into two groups seems more important for overall healing output when dodging Shockwaves and bumps our DPS.
To deal with this extra damage, there are two possibilities that come to mind, and we'll just have to test which is the best. The first is to basically utilize a raid cooldown that works (basically a healer cooldown like Tranq or Aura Mastery) and to quickly heal most if not all of the 100k absorb very quickly while the cooldown is going, thus causing the overall damage dealt to the raid to be much lower. The second option is to heal the absorb value very slowly, giving plenty of time to deal with the extra miscellaneous damage to the raid.
Cooldowns
Since damage on the tanks (and from Disrupting Shout) increases as the fight goes on, we'll probably want to rotate raid cooldowns for Shouts at some later stage of Phase 2. I can't say when for sure that will be necessary, but we should be able to determine fairly easily by roughly how low each subsequent shout is getting the weaker players in the raid and go from there.
Last edited by Kulldam; 01-08-2012 at 01:23 PM.
Heroic: Spine:
Gale & Kain had a few good suggestions that we should implement which requires a small bit of homework for everyone.
Research & Practice Your Highest 25-Second Burst DPS Rotation
Since this fight revolves almost entirely around DPS we can do in a short 23 second period to the Tendon when it appears, everyone should spend a bit of time and determine what their best burst DPS methods are for attacking the Spine. The key here is that, for some classes at least, this may be drastically different than your normal sustained DPS rotation. This may require a bit of research for your class/spec, and undoubtedly also some practice on the dummies -- experiment if necessary to find out how you can best do burst DPS from a dead stop. Use /sw for a stopwatch or whatever, and begin with zero debuffs/dots on the target, and try to find that key method. Everyone should work on this except perhaps Taka who probably won't have a chance to DPS Tendons much especially after the first spawn.
Save Up For and/or Buy the Valor DPS Trinket
To assist with the above, trinkets that allow for on-demand burst are crucial, and luckily there are some really strong ones available for 1650 VP, so everyone should buy and/or save up for and buy the appropriate trinket for their spec as soon as possible.
Rotting Skull
Kiroptyric Sigil
Bottled Wishes
Reflection of Light
Heroic Spine again:
Mostly for Kain and me at the moment, but anyone else who uses Grid that may in the future heal this fight may want to grab this.
http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/gri...searingplasma/
I made a GridStatusSearingPlasma module for Grid that (theoretically) does just what you might expect: It tracks the amount of absorption remaining on a Searing Plasma debuff and displays a numerical text status. There are multiple value thresholds/colors in the settings that can be altered to highlight text in various ways based on the remaining absorb value.
Caveat: I tested this as best I could alone, but no promises it will work out of the box given I can't heal against my own absorbs on a Priest or similar as would be the case for this debuff. The basic rundown of how it works is this:
1. Searing Plasma is applied (SPELL_AURA_APPLIED or SPELL_AURA_APPLIED_DOSE) to a player in the combat log and the total absorb amount is tracked.
2. Any heal applied to the player in the combat log (SPELL_HEAL or SPELL_PERIODIC_HEAL) will show in the combat log as absorbed if it applied itself to the Searing Plasma debuff.
3. The heal value is of course then subtracted from the total absorb amount and the new remainder is displayed as text in Grid, rounded to the nearest thousandth.
4. Once the debuff is removed (SPELL_AURA_REMOVED), the Grid text is cleared.
5. Profit!
While it should be much more accurate than the guesstimation we've been using, there are sometimes delays or timing issues in the combat log, so to cover for these, I've set the module to display a "zero" remainder value on the absorb in the event that the total healing tracked should meet or exceed the absorb, but the aura hasn't actually been removed via the combat log. I assume the time between these occurrences will be small and maybe not even noticeable, but just something to be aware of.
I'm watching a Fatboss live stream right now where someone asked, "How do you handle bloods before the second tendon dies? How do you get rid of them?", they said that they AOE them down with the Amalgs right after the first plate blows off, mop off all residue with the AOE'd Amalgs, then flip. They explain it in detail in their guide: http://youtu.be/QbVkaQ__Kyw
Not sure if this strategy is worthwhile or not but it seems very clean, figured I'd post it.
More notes for Heroic: Spine of Deathwing:
So, it turns out I discovered something fairly game-changing for this fight while exploring an idea about purposely flipping more frequently to do "mop up" with Amalgamations, which was basically in stable situations, grab a new Amalgamation and 9-stack it and quickly flip deathwing; repeat this a few times to get rid of all extra bloods. This relied upon how quickly new bloods spawned so I went through a bunch of footage and started manually timing the delay between blood spawns as accurately as possible using a lap-timer stopwatch (to see the time between each spawn) as well as the total time for a set of spawns together (sadly this must be done by hand as the game has no combat log entry for blood spawning). I discovered two wild things that change our assumptions of the fight a fair bit:
1. Blood spawn rate is not based on the number of active "holes", but is consistent and directly based upon the number of Amalgamation deaths or the number of plate "knockups".
2. Dead blood that turn to residue and reach a hole do not cause an "extra" blood to emerge in addition to the normal blood spawn rate.
Specifically, I timed the following scenarios:
This showed very interesting spawn delay timings, again completely related to the number of armor hits (presumably, could be deaths of Amalgs but that seems less likely and really one in the same regardless):
I won't list the actual timings I recorded cause it's tons of tables so you'll have to trust me, but suffice to say I checked each multiple times to account for errors and while there is the delay in my own human reaction to hit a stopwatch button as well as the random delay in the game, the results were always consistent within 0.5 seconds either side of the delay seen in the table above, and more importantly, when taken over the spawn of 9-11 spawns within that "phase", the total time always averaged out to very close to the listed delay (within 0.1 seconds).
As mentioned above, this also corrects the false assumption we've made all along: That killed bloods "revive and respawn" back into the fight, adding basically a +1 every time they reached a hole. In fact, the opposite is true: A dead blood that is a residue and reaches a hole has no effect on the rate of spawn for subsequent bloods. Instead, it can be thought of that the residue goes back into the "spawning pool" of Bloods, and when the timer is reached based on the number of Armor hits thus far, a new blood is created. It's also worth noting that part of the reason we assumed a new blood was created was because of our testing earlier when moving a blood residue closer and further from the hole and noting it's respawned health was altered based on distance during death. However, this only seems to alter the health level of the returning blood, not the actual spawn rate.
What does this change?
The biggest impact is that the notion of "soaking up" extra residue with Amalgamations is completely irrelevant and a waste of time. This drastically alters primarily the post-plate roll transition we are doing twice, where we're trying to gather up many Amalgs and all the residue. Instead, we need not worry about gathering up blood residue and instead can flip immediately. Moreover, we're wasting time, adding potential tank damage, and acquiring extra Searing applications by killing off all three Corruptions before we roll Deathwing. Instead, we should actually only kill one Corruption (the back one that can be left alive from the previous tendon phase and thus is low health) and then do a roll with two Corruptions still active. Similar to how we handle the start of the fight, once we start rolling, ranged DPS can start attacking the closest Corruption to kill it off quickly, at which point we're left with only the single remaining Corruption that is normal.
Post-Plate Destruction Phase
Ideally, this is how we'll treat the 2nd and 4th Tendon attacking phases:
1. DO NOT kill the existing Corruption, and instead once again time the Amalgamation 9-stack just as Grip is hitting.
2. Burn Tendon as normal with the Corruption still alive (presumably at low health).
3. Once plate pops off and we have two front Corruptions added, DPS immediately kill the existing, back Corruption.
4. As soon as it dies, we start the roll -- since the roll activation time is about the time it takes for an Amalg to "spawn" after it's Corruption dies, we should have the Amalg spawning just a second or two before the roll happens, meaning time spent tanking the Amalg is very low.
5. During roll, ranged DPS attack the nearest front Corruption to our side.
6. After roll, phase proceeds as normal as we finish low health Corruption and get our one active Amalg.
Tendrils/Roll Stacking
I've noticed we can trigger a roll without actually being close enough to a fiery opening to be caught by Tendrils. Therefore, since the roll takes 5 seconds or so to "activate" and hit, we can actually drastically lower the damage we're taking from Tendrils by moving together to one side when we want the roll to begin, but then only actually stepping into Tendril range once the emote and roll activation actually begins. We can do this at the top edge of Deathwing's spine as our initial no-damage position, or Kain suggested we can stand right between two fiery openings without getting Tendril hits, which may also be a good spot as it's easy to find and get to quickly.
Either way, we can likely save a good 3+ seconds of Tendril damage on everyone by doing this small change, and considering Tendrils tick very quickly, that will potentially prevent a huge amount of damage for those flip phases. For safety, the easiest method will be to have the ranged/healers immediately move into safe-roll position, which will always be opposite the side that the existing back Corruption is on. Melee DPS can meanwhile be attacking the back Corruption to kill it off quickly and their presence on the other side will act as the counterbalance, preventing a premature roll. Once the Corruption is dead/dying, melee run back over to the safe-roll position with ranged and once the roll begins, we step into Tendrils together as normal.
This can all be adjusted of course as needed -- maybe we have ranged, once in safe-roll position, immediately start DPSing the closest front Corruption, leaving melee to burn down the low health back Corruption. We'll need to test and see what works best and most efficiently to reduce Searing Plasma stacks and raid damage from Tendrils.
Standard Tank Positions
I hate to keep changing this stuff on us, but it must be done! Essentially, we should move Deph and the Amalg to the front position once again, right against the armor plate, stacked up with the raid on top of him. This will allow me as the Blood tank to then be out a few yards and thus be the first contact point between the raid and freshly spawned Bloods, which should drastically lower the number of miscellaneous melee hits since I can get the initial attack very often. We can also keep Amalgs and Bloods within 10 yards or so again as we were doing before, allowing a lot more AE/cleave damage on Bloods while attacking the Amalg directly.
If blood timing actually is unrelated, we should probably try to kill bloods as close as possible to a hole, since having them pop back up with low/half health would be better.
Not sure if ENOUGH would pop up at low(er) health to make this worthwhile, but if their health regenerates only on the way back, and stops after returning to the "pool" -- they'll ALL come back at reduced health. -- And even if not, once they're popping up fast, they'll likely mostly be returning with low health.
This is something we would want to do after the first plate pops, I'd think, as it'd get weird before that.
If our tests were correct, I can just be slightly to one side to let Kull be on the other. Perhaps with my back to a hole, and my amalg's back to Kull's big pile of shit... -- This will also keep all the residue in a single pile, which early on may let me take less damage, and later on will allow us more freedom of movement (That will likely be needed anyway if we're not mopping them up, since otherwise I'll never be able to tank the Amalg against the plate if it spawns near the back.)
Spreading out left and right may require a couple ranged DPS or healers to make sure to take a step a yard to their left and/or right to prevent "OMG WE'RE GOING TO ROLL" messages when I drag the amalg for bloods. -- But now that we know one person is all it takes, accidental rolls should never be a worry.
If we are once again having me time Amalgs with grips, we really need to get a bit better at getting the Amalg low, and then stopping. (which is a problem we had last night) -- As the alternative is me running in with it with enough health to cause unnecessary ticks of AoE. (when we first started I was pulling it in at 12-15% compared to the 5-8% I've been doing it at) -- This problem will be compounded by the fact that I have to run back and forth. -- I'd say I should run it out with it, to prevent cleaves and AoE, but that's not possible if I'm against the plate... -- So perhaps once it's low Kull should back up? -- Not sure here.
Last edited by Deph; 02-20-2012 at 05:57 PM.
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