Ulduar

[K9]

Ulduar is pretty interesting so far.  How many healers are people running with in the 10 man version?  We ran 2 for XT and the tantrums didn't have much margin for error.  I was tossing LHWs during them as chain heal can be pretty ineffective in that situation. 

Still, fun boss mechanics so far even if Flame Leviathan is a bit easy.  Got the first good looking helm I've had since before Outland of XT.

We're using 3 main spec healers, with 2 who can switch to do decent DPS if needed.

[bhodi]

Did 10man razorscale, ignus, deconstructor with our 10man last night with our stacked core group after failing on deconstructor 25 for the past 3 days. Ignus down in one try, two tries for the others. 2 healers, priest and pally, with a shaman throwing in a heal or two on the needful spots. Healing overall was pretty intense, especially during ignus and tantrums.

[Soulflame]

On 25, we've hit a wall with Deconstructor.  Our best attempt got him to 9%.  To be fair, he repaired for more than that.  So it's just a matter of killing the damn scrapbots.  Or maybe taking one more healer.  We're only using 6 healers for the fight.  I wish I had a bit more pull in the guild, I'd push to try it with 7, or even 8 healers.  Since we're losing at least one person guaranteed on the first Tympanic Tantrum.   

[K9]

Divine Hymn is lol

[bhodi]

Divine hymn is seriously good. There's a reason it's a 10m cooldown. It's like heroism for healers. I dumped out 140k of healing during duration. It's essentially 12 greater heals in 8 seconds.

We got within a hair of beating deconstructor (250k) and really believe that timing the heart is the key to victory. here's how we got close.

Standard fight which I'm sure you all know; Melee stacked up on top of each other (we marked one), ranged spread out but near their party healers (more on this below). We had two priests and we both took lightwell (lawl) so we dropped lightwell on the left and right about 15-20m away. LIGHT runs RIGHT, dark runs LEFT to the lightwell and then back to the group when they get it.

DPS him in the center to 75%, heart opens up, DPS on the heart to 5-15%. As soon as the heart goes back in or you reach that, ranged dps on the adds. Offtank on the pummelers, no DPS on them. If there's a bomb in the group, single target it, otherwise AOE. They are snareific, so totems and frost nova/blizzard win the day.

For healers, you DEFINITELY want assigned groups. One healer per group. Make sure you have druids in the group you want them to heal (tranquility is party bound). We had 5 healers, one in each group and healing was about 200% better when each healer took care of their own group during tantrum rather than piecemeal. Paladins (we had two) kept the tank beaconed so tanks stayed alive during the tantrum. Priests saved serendipity for the quick PoH, priest (my) rotation during tantrum was PoM->PoH->FH->CoH->FH->PoM->FH->CoH with all but the CoH going to the paladin party to help them out. Saved divine hymn for emergencies instead of blowing it on tantrum.

One quick thing you may not know about the new prayer of healing. The first is that obviously priests can PoH outside their group. Now that PoH is targeted, however, the burst is no longer centered on you. The burst is centered on the one you cast it on, even if that person is in your group. That means that even if are in the back and most of the group is out of range of you, you can center it on a moderate target and it will hit the out of range people. This is quite useful and is worth playing around with. I've healed people who are outside my 40yrd range just by targeting someone on the edge and having it spill over.

It's already a DPS race to beat the enrage;there is no way you're going to beat it with 7 healers. Try group assignments. Even (our) mediocre healers were able to keep themselves and 4 other people up.

[bhodi]

Yes, I am looking for something just like that, but in Addon form.

Bonus points if it can watch buffs/debuffs and tell me if someone isn't doing their job.

Letting you all know I found one. http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info11031-InTheBuff.html

I'll be trying it out tonight.

Edit: No I won't. It's broken with the new patch/dual spec. Boo. I did find this: http://www.wowace.com/projects/utopia/  utopia which tracks active buffs/debuffs.

[Phunked]

  achievement is fun for Deconstructor.

A simple 25 man strat:

1. Heroism on the pull. 100-75% is half the fight. If your DPS isn't pants on head terrible, you'll have spill over heroism into the heart phase. DPS  to 10%.

2. Have the pummelers MD'd to your deconstructor tank. Have the OTs DPS (in DPS spec and gear). They don't hit hard (ideally your MT is using a shield, if so you'll block 80% of their damage) and deconstructor is in the melee phase for like 5%. If none of your tanks are capable of switching to a healing/DPS spec, might I suggest that you get right on that? Sure the game isn't balancde around dual spec per se, but it isn't necessarily balanced around using glyphs for your spec or flasks, but both of those help a ton.

3. 1 AoE class can easily clear a side solo, maybe two if they're good. Have those people clear adds, have everyone else DPS.

4. Spread out up to ~10 yards. Have people run away for light bomb/gravity bomb. This lets the rest of the raid DPS like nothing ever happened.

5. If you get a tantrum, have your disc priests preshield everyone in the raid up to ~25 sec prior. Yes I'm serious. One priest can provide the means for about 15 people to survive tantrum with no outside help, and will get faster penances to burst onto the tank twice during that time. You'll also get the mana cost of 3 of those shields back. Combine this with a resto druid dropping hots on everyone who isn't shielded (divide by groups or whatever) and you can 2 heal tantrum. Considering you should have 4 more healers who are presumably also doing something to help, no one should die. If they do, blame the people who can't run the basic strat of "okay now start shielding people by going down your raid frames. that's all you have to do"

6... profit?

[bhodi]

Anyone who has a raid capable of what you're suggesting won't need that walkthrough :P

I also think your definition of 'pants on head terrible' dps and other peoples' is probably quite a bit different. I'm happy if people in my 25 can break 3k, and ecstatic if they're inching on 4k.

[Phunked]

From what I understand, the bare minimum using 90% DPS uptime on heart/deconstructor (reasonable what with bombs, etc) is 3200 DPS from 15 people. This is using the old enrage timer. I'm not sure what it is with the new timer.

Again, this is raid dps not including the heart, so with the heart bonus, your 2.2k dps people are magically at 3.3k and now pulling their weight.

The strat I mentioned really only has two things that need to happen to be able to cheese the encounter:

1. Your MT needs to be geared enough to be able to tank XT+pummelers (freeing 1-2 extra DPS makes it easy mode) or alternately needs to be a warrior/paladin (shield block go!).

and

2. You need 2 healers who are really good at being able to predict raid damage.

Condition 2 is probably harder to satisfy than condition 1. Though to be fair (and I'm not trying to take a knock at you here) if you cannot increase your raid DPS you will have substantial issues with Kologarn and Hodir. Not to mentioned Mimiron and Freya's trash (which is harder than either of those bosses).

[bhodi]

I'm fully aware of our difficulties... we do what we can :) I fully expect our stacked 10man to clear ulduar, our 25man is another story...

Having the MT tank the pummelers is perfectly fine until the totals get above half a dozen. They do almost no damage. Unfortunately, you do need misdirect/TotT to get them on the tank. We don't currently have a hunter at all and having a rogue run around picking them up with FoK and TotT probably wouldn't work very well and the amount of time he'd spend doing it is very likely the same as having a dedicated OT. I do agree that with good players, having two paired ranged dps on the left and two on the right side (essentially one for each corner) is enough to stop the bombs/scrapbots.

On the healing front, we did it (almost) with 5 healers - 2 holy priests, 2 paladins, 1 resto druid, 2 shaman. Healing ceased to be a problem as soon as we told everyone to stick to their group. In fact, while I'm not convinced 2 healers can completely do it, when one healer died halfway through the combat I found I was in fact able to heal two groups through a tantrum. I expect that with pre-tantrum shields it would be quite easy to keep 10 people alive. Unfortunately, it does require level of competence that just isn't quite there with some of our other healers.

I may go holy/disc for my dual spec and see what this disc healing is all about, even though I've stacked the hell out of spirit (as you can see), I can still probably do OK.

[Phunked]

You should have mentioned that you have no hunters. It's still possible, you just need the tank to be good at taunting mobs (taunt now has a 30 yard range). This method is going to be a lot more tricky than the other one, since you might have issues where a taunt resists or if you get more than 1 up every 8 sec (though they really don't hit hard and quick vigi swaps can let you snag them off whoever they're going for after the first hit).

In regards to the healing, while I haven't ever done it with as few as two (last was with 5 I think), it does seem possible in theory, and certainly something I'd like to try. As for the spirit stacking, I'd be curious to know how much mana you end fights with? We tend to run as few healers as possible and that tends to push our mana pools to the limit (if I ever take my druid to runs, I end up at 10-20% mana). At the same time, I never have mana issues per se, it's just very tightly tied to the DPS being high and killing the boss before we all OOM. I should note that with that few healers you tend to see very efficient healing, since you can't afford to heal snipe hots and not have people die. And dps dying WILL run us oom.

[bhodi]

Interestingly enough, I never have mana problems at all. There are two reasons for this.

The first and most major was that we had no consistent raider with replenishment before the patch. Accordingly, I was never able to just stack int for a huge mana pool and replenishment abuse. I chose spirit both because of the better itemization and +spellpower, even though (I suppose) technically mp5 would have been better since I was rarely outside the 5 second window. I've never REALLY done the math, I just arbitrarily picked spirit because I knew holy = spirit, disc = mp5. The downside is that I'm relying heavily on spiritual guidance (spellpower +25% of spirit) which I'd lose if I go disc.

The second is that even though the patch 'nerfed' mana regen, the fact is that for holy priests staying almost exclusively within the 5 second window, we're almost untouched. The loss of mana refund talents deep in the holy tree is offset buy the new useful hymn of hope and the shorter cooldown on shadowfiend. I throw my first shadowfiend when I'm at around 75% mana, hymn of hope when I have none left, and then on longer (7m+) fights I can actually throw out a second shadowfiend. When all else fails, I call for an innervate from our main tank who has the shapeshift innervate shapeshift down pat.

The only fight recently that has taxed my mana pool and caused me to call for that rare innervate is when I dual-healed ignus 10man. Otherwise, I end most fights around 30% mana and often still have hymn of hope or shadowfiend to use.

[Soulflame]

We finally downed Deconstructor after about 6 hours of progression on it.  Yay progress.  We then wiped a few times on Ignis, but did fairly well on the test pulls.  He's doable in his current form.

[Nonentity]

I've done all the outside guys (XT, Ignis, Razorscale, Leviathan) on 10 man on both my druid and warrior, and gotten pretty close to killing Kologarn, if it weren't for bad players.

My guild downed Yogg on the first timer, and is working on the hard mode bosses this week. The guy who runs the raid for us 'casuals' within the guild is out of town this weekend, so hopefully within the next week or two, we'll get the uld25 going. Should be pretty cake by that point though, as half the raid will be the main raider's alts.

[Ingmar]

We finally went yesterday! Killed Leviathan and XT, got totally pasted by Razorscale and Kologarn. I think we're not really there yet, but we weren't exactly experts on the strategies involved, either.

[Merusk]

My guild has been skipping around.  I'm fairly certain the RL and GL just want to say "hey we finished Uldar!" because we've skipped all the optional bosses.  Downed Kol on Friday night and ran into troubles with Auriaya since one of our healers bailed and a 3-year Feral druid stepping-in as resto just doesn't work well.  So we skipped her and went to Thorim.

 First off, let me say the lightning-enhanced trash mobs in the hallway to Thorim are bullshit.  They two-shot our MT several times before we finally got the 4 mobs dead.  No idea what was going on, but a dual-wielding mob that can deliver a 11k hit followed by a 26k hit in 1.2 seconds in 10-man is bullshit and tuned WAY too tightly.

Thorim himself, however, is a fucking pushover fight.  Took us only 4 attempts to down him, and that was just trying to find the right balance of AoE vs Single Target dps for the group split. Having a DK or Pally tank forr the 'ground group' would make this fight almost cake-walk easy, too, as you'd be able to generate enough AOE aggro and Damage to never have to worry about that random commoner spawning and pummeling your healer. (I don't have good enough tanking gea, to swap with our OT here, thanks to pugs always beating me on rolls for offset pieces. Bastards!)

 As it was I just had to keep dropping D&D to make sure they beat on me while the tank's Thunderclap was on CD instead of picking up the healer.  Me + a 1pt Fan of Knives rogue + a Mage was more than enough AOE dps to take care of the adds. 

[kildorn]

Seriously, Uld trash is serious business on 10 man.

We had a hilarious time with our first watcher dude. "pulling it noAUGHEKJHOCWDK_QV !#!"

[Ingmar]

I love the trash we've tried so far. 

[Sjofn]

Yeah, the trash on the way to Kologan was an adventure. I hope that it mostly stays that way through Ulduar, where there's relatively little trash but it's mean. I prefer 5 pulls of having to pay attention to 587432875634534 pulls of no-brain trash.

That said, Thorim's trash sounds a little  .

[K9]

Went in tonight on our 2nd run (10-man), 1-shot Flame Leviathan, 1-shot Razorscale and then got XT down after about 8 tries, having never seen him before. Was a lot of fun, and XT was really close, even with 5 guys pulling 3-4K DPS (we're running 3 healers).

The trash in XT's room wasn't up on our first attempt, and then preceded to be the cause of our 2nd wipe. Still, a great satisfaction to be making progress. Also getting useful and desireable loot is win. Ulduar is definitely a lot of fun for guilds at my level and will provide us with amusement for a long time.

[Rasix]

Ulduar 25 broke my new guild I think.  They had just recently had a split and so a lot of people were doing offspec and they had to even resort to bringing me and lesser geared folk in for 25man progression raids.  The guild leaders a bit too late realized that perhaps Naxx (and not starting on fucking construct with half the healers being offspecs) would be advisable to gear up new recruits instead of chain wiping on XT.  Sadly, more hemorrhaging occurred and I think their attempts to get even a full Nax 25 together will be fruitless. It's just a matter of time before the core raiders start leaving out of boredom or get cherry picked by guilds actually advancing.

Smells like Sunwell.

With a kid coming in a 4-6 weeks, I really don't care all that much. But it's just amusing that I managed to join yet another guild in its death throws.  At least these next few weeks will be interesting.

[Paelos]

Well this shit is officially way way harder than anything we did in Naxx obviously. It's kinda funny, but I guess that's what I expected. I'm gonna give Ulduar about 2 months and then see where we are in the 25 man version. If it looks like things are fun and doable then I'll stick with it, but if it's just going to be killing the same 3 bosses over and over while we bash our heads on the XT, I'm just going to fold up the tent and declare WoW is not for me anymore.

[Fabricated]

Well this shit is officially way way harder than anything we did in Naxx obviously. It's kinda funny, but I guess that's what I expected. I'm gonna give Ulduar about 2 months and then see where we are in the 25 man version. If it looks like things are fun and doable then I'll stick with it, but if it's just going to be killing the same 3 bosses over and over while we bash our heads on the XT, I'm just going to fold up the tent and declare WoW is not for me anymore.

Stand XT in one of the corners and the adds won't spawn from there. When the heart drops there will be a AoE pulse that hits everyone around the heart for 12-16k a pop+silence however.

My guild got 10-man XT to 4% and 10% with 2 pretty substandard DPSers and 3 healers. You just can't bring anyone under 2.5k DPS. I'd say 3k minimum myself.

[Paelos]

We haven't even gotten past Razorscale 25 yet, so who knows 

I do know the A Team run is having gigantic problems with XT though.

[Fabricated]

We haven't even gotten past Razorscale 25 yet, so who knows 

I do know the A Team run is having gigantic problems with XT though.

I think Naxx has made us all suck to be honest. I was in a 25-man pug the other day that one-shot everything but Saph and KT (with 2 tries apiece on them)...

but we wiped 3 times on the eye stalk/maggot room before Loatheb due to people not killing the goddamn stalks properly. We ended up just doing the fight down 2-3 people so we could move on. That just shouldn't happen.

Me, my GL and the other officers in my guild are having kind of a conundrum since there are people in the guild we simply cannot take into Ulduar and expect to get anything down. Then we got some people who -can- play but get discouraged after like 2 wipes and complain because we aren't just rolling over everything. Most of the core group that can play like the challenge so far (ignoring bugged fights), but it's going to be a pain in the ass to figure out how to keep running Naxx to gear people while trying to do anything in Ulduar.

[Paelos]

Yep, the gearing problem reminds me of Black Temple all over again. "Well, I'd like to have you, but you must be this tall to ride the ride. Unfortunately, nobody is running the old ride anymore, so too fucking bad."

[Hindenburg]

Yep, the gearing problem reminds me of Black Temple all over again. "Well, I'd like to have you, but you must be this tall to ride the ride. Unfortunately, nobody is running the old ride anymore, so too fucking bad."

Are you complaining or just making a statement?

[Paelos]

Just an observation. It was annoying for both sides.

[Ingmar]

We haven't even gotten past Razorscale 25 yet, so who knows 

I do know the A Team run is having gigantic problems with XT though.

In 10, XT seems to be easier than either Razorscale or Ignis, and that is also what I am hearing from the 25 raiders I know, but that's only second hand info. So honestly you might want to change your focus to him for a week and see what you can do.

[Paelos]

It's a fun place, so I am looking forward to doing when we get a full group of ppl who know what they are doing. We don't always get that both days a week though. I think if we had the top 25 out of the 35 on the list, we'd be gold on all the early stuff. It's just a logistical problem over the actual fight, as usual.

[Fabricated]

Yep, the gearing problem reminds me of Black Temple all over again. "Well, I'd like to have you, but you must be this tall to ride the ride. Unfortunately, nobody is running the old ride anymore, so too fucking bad."

That and the "I wanna see new stuff!!!" people who get mad when you flat out tell them they aren't going to see anything until they start out DPSing the tank. Or tanks who can't do anything but stand in one place and mash devastate. I don't think the gear situation is going to get any better since we don't have enough people who can be on at the same time to run 25-mans, and I don't think killing just Flame Leviathan every week is enough to make up the gear gap.

In the 10-man (and I imagine it's worse in the 25-man), you cannot have a single slacker. If you're 3-healing (which you will be if you're all in 10-man gear. Good design blizz!), all 5 of your DPS better be on the fucking ball and putting out I say about 3k DPS on average or you're not getting shit done on anything with an enrage timer. You can bore Ignis to death since he doesn't have an enrage but in exchange for not requiring really stellar DPS it requires geared/skilled tanks and very good healers.

A guild that can clear Naxx 25, decked out in full 25-man gear in every slot could easily take months to get through 10-man Ulduar right now if they take even 1-2 people they had to carry in Naxx. That's progression when the first raid is leagues easier.

[Sjofn]

Me, my GL and the other officers in my guild are having kind of a conundrum since there are people in the guild we simply cannot take into Ulduar and expect to get anything down. Then we got some people who -can- play but get discouraged after like 2 wipes and complain because we aren't just rolling over everything. Most of the core group that can play like the challenge so far (ignoring bugged fights), but it's going to be a pain in the ass to figure out how to keep running Naxx to gear people while trying to do anything in Ulduar.

Shrink the raid size to 10 and you have my guild's situation. I know that sounds silly. :P

[Fabricated]

Me, my GL and the other officers in my guild are having kind of a conundrum since there are people in the guild we simply cannot take into Ulduar and expect to get anything down. Then we got some people who -can- play but get discouraged after like 2 wipes and complain because we aren't just rolling over everything. Most of the core group that can play like the challenge so far (ignoring bugged fights), but it's going to be a pain in the ass to figure out how to keep running Naxx to gear people while trying to do anything in Ulduar.

Shrink the raid size to 10 and you have my guild's situation. I know that sounds silly. :P

Nope, we run 10-mans, it's not silly.

We have literally like 50+ish really active players and like another 30 or so who log in like 1-2 days a week for the odd heroic/dailies/short run. Problem is that our server is the unofficial Aussie server and generally has a population that is ALL over the place in terms of time zones. Also, we have a lot of people in the military, post-grad college, or working odd hours. We could probably get about 18 people on reliably if we tried. We were running two 10-man Naxx runs since we just could -not- get 25 people on. We just couldn't. And both runs had 2-3 people who just aren't that good. We carry them and get it done pretty easily still, but you aren't doing that in Ulduar.

[pants]

Problem is that our server is the unofficial Aussie server and generally has a population that is ALL over the place in terms of time zones.

Proudmoore?  I didn't think there were any unofficial Aussie servers any more, since we have several official Aussie servers these days.  There ya go.

Our guild is having probs with 10man Ulduar, not so much due to gear, but rather people standing in bad stuff.  We just appear to have several people who can concentrate on one task, but get them to worry about random bad stuff, or moving based on situational awareness, and they're dead in about 10 seconds.  And has been said, you can't have any slackers in Ulduar 10man. 

We've dropped back to Naxx farming to get KT gear, and trying Sarth 1D.  Even that is still failboat due to people standing in bad stuff (ie flame wall).  I think our raid leader is slowly turning into 50 DKP MINUS guy, as he bangs his head against his desk...

[Ingmar]

The damage from the blue fire on Razorscale is really high and it kicks in really fast. Even our good no-stand-in-flame people are getting a bit mauled by it. I expect we'll get it down eventually but it is rough right now.