Cataclysm Raiding

[Rendakor]

I know we've got a bunch of raiders here, so I figured we should have a thread to discuss strategies, brag about loot, etc.

So based on a completely arbitrary decision my guild decided to start our raiding with BWD. Magmaw was annoying at first until we realized to put all the ranged/healers in melee and just have one person deal with the adds; he's been on farm since we figured that out a few weeks ago.

The Omni council, on the other hand, gave us some trouble. Before the latest update DBM didn't announce the slime targets in raid, so (since my guild is not stellar at watching debuffs) someone had to call out who they were on by clicking them and watching their target. This would have worked, except only one of our tanks (me) has a mic. The latest DBM update fixed that by spamming it in raid chat, so I can just yell it in vent. The other problem we're having is how often the tanks get targeted with the primary abilities of the other boss; Magmatron's laser is the worst, although a Power Generator boosted Arcane Annihilator is rough too. We did manage to get them down last night after 5 wipes or so (including one where we got them to ~140k) but it wasn't easy.

That's all we've done so far other than BH; a couple of us are going to check out Throne tonite with a friend's guild, and we plan to start working on Bastion on our 2nd raid day next week. Is there a clear next boss in BWD or is it non-linear?

How's everyone else doing as far as progression?

[kildorn]

Haven't started yet. I was tempted last night to put up a trial BWD night next week and see if I can get some bites.

[Paelos]

So based on a completely arbitrary decision my guild decided to start our raiding with BWD. Magmaw was annoying at first until we realized to put all the ranged/healers in melee and just have one person deal with the adds; he's been on farm since we figured that out a few weeks ago.

We started in BWD as well, but only did some speculative tries to get strats right. I'm interested in your technique on Magmaw with the ranged in on the melee. Was this 10 or 25? Which person did you elect to put out on the edge? What class was he/she and how much dps was required by that person to get the adds down single-handed? It's an interesting technique.

[Rendakor]

10m, we put our OT out there. As the adds popped, he got threat on them and our mage AOE'd them down. If the mage got behind our Shadow Priest helped out. Ideally I believe a hunter or mage could handle it solo by kiting, but neither of our tanks have good DPS sets and it's only a 1 tank fight.

The other reason this helps is that everyone doesn't have to move every phase transition (where he slams his head into the ground), since half the time it'll hit where the MT was.

[Hutch]

Our guild does Magmaw in a similar way -- the hunter (me) stands at range, thereby determining where the adds will spawn.
But, all ranged (and sometimes melee) dps are expected to help out with the adds. DPS money time is during the exposed head phase, and there's no (new) adds then.

For Omnitron, we use one tank. One of his many jobs is to keep the trons out of the Arcanotron puddle.
The biggest challenge on this fight is to avoid/compensate for all of the aoe damage from magmatron and electron, and interrupt arcanotron's arcane bolt as much as possible. The adds can be tricky but I almost always get a frost patch down to keep them slowed.

We've gotten Maloriak down once so far. It's another fight that requires a lot of movement and coordination. And it's a DPS race, although Blizzard has announced that they're nerfing it from a 6-minute enrage to 7 minutes.

We've peeked into the other two raids, but nothing completed there yet.

Edit: we run 1 or 2 10-man raids depending on attendance.

[Paelos]

How are yall dealing with people getting hit by the adds if you have melee involved? Also, what kind of healers are you bringing to the fight? There is some common raid damage from what I've seen from spits or something.

[Hutch]

How are yall dealing with people getting hit by the adds if you have melee involved? Also, what kind of healers are you bringing to the fight? There is some common raid damage from what I've seen from spits or something.

For the Magmaw adds, it's usually just ranged dps. If the melee gets involved, they don't get infested unless they pull aggro. Avoiding aggro is tricky of course, but it is possible.

The current raid group includes a holy priest, a disc priest, and a shaman as healers. Magmaw has lots of raid damage, in addition to the stunts he pulls with the tanks, so healing is a challenge. Of the half dozen times we've finished the fight so far, we've ended the fight with one or two people dead more than once.

[Paelos]

What are currently the best class/specs for healers in dealing with the raid damage? I'm wondering how when they nerfed aoe healing that we're supposed to combat those higher levels of damage.

[kildorn]

Priests. PoH is pretty bullshit. With resto shamans to fuel the priests.

[Merusk]

Except PoH is getting nerfed 15%.. so that'll be fun.

[Maledict]

Note for those interested - the trick of having one person at range does not work on Magmaw 25 player. If you do that, things will go horribly (but hilariously) wrong.

In tems of difficulty, I would say you'd be fine going to BoT as well. Although there is quite a bit more trash there, Halfus is not that difficult, and both the Twin Drakes and the Elemental Council afterwards are significantly easier in 10 player than 25, so they should be possible to take down with your current gear levels. After that take your pick from Atramades / Conclave of Wind. Chimeron is the trickiest boss before the final end bosses, so I'd leave him till last.

One piece of advice though - don't farm all the easy bosses first. It's a mistake I've seen so many guilds make, and it really hurts moral and attendance in the long run. If you kill all the "easy" bosses, you then have 3 hard end of dungeon boss fights to learn through all in a row, at the same time as farming stuff. I would advise picking one instance (BoT would be my recommendation), and sticking with it till it's complete. Then, work on getting the farm time down on BoT whilst you go back to some easier bosses in BWD. That way you aren;t faced with 3 difficult bosses in a row, and you're players won't end up absolutely sick of being in "hard learning" mode every week. Plus, by the time you get to Nefarion, you should be able to clear BoT in 2 hours or so so your farm time will be substantially reduced.

[kildorn]

Still outright the best AE heal around. A 15% nerf is pretty much nothing to how great it is. Targetable, spammable, and mana efficient if even 3 people in the group needed it.

[Rendakor]

All the infest does is spawn more worms, which just means our tank has worms forever. As for healers, we bring a holy pally, resto druid and pug a third since our other heals went dps or quit in Cata.

Good call on not leaving all the hard bosses for last. We had morale issues in LK trying to down h pp and h sindy at the same time.

[Hutch]

The infest spawns worms and the worms cause further damage, which is why we try to avoid infestation.
Saves work for the healers.

Our priests have made a point of saying "click on the lightwell" whenever they have one up.
I've even seen that as a logon tip.

Our guild's very first raid attempt was on Halfus. (Well, the very first raid boss was the Tol Barad guy, but that's just a dps check.)
Anyway, the Halfus attempt was back before Christmas, when we were just barely able to scrape together a full raid group, mostly consisting of people who were barely geared enough for cata heroics. So we wiped a few times in there, rejoiced over the purples that dropped from the trash that night, and have been working Blackwing ever since. I think if we were to go back now, we'd have more success. But there's only so much time in a week to do raids, so once we have Magmaw and Omnitron down, it's a choice between the further bosses in BWD, or getting started learning the other instances.

We did pop in on the Council fight the other night, just to see what it was like. We wiped a bunch, but it was a good learning experience.

[Evildrider]

We are only a few weeks into raiding as we were waiting for some of our people to get geared up. 

We have Halfus on farm now, although we haven't had all drake combinations.  So far we seem to be doing pretty good.

We are working on BWD now though.  Magmaw has been kinda glitchy on us and the Omnitron council usually goes pretty well, but Toxitron seems to be my guild's nemesis. 

[Rendakor]

Tox is annoying, yeah. Moreso when you're not targetting him and don't notice the slime spawns. As for infest doing damage, my healers haven't complained about it so I assume they can handle it.

[Threash]

The small cut scene before Atremedes made me feel bad about killing him, poor little blind baby dragon :(

[Rendakor]

Got in one half hearted attempt at Atramedes last night after easily clearing Mag and Omnitron. The trash before Atra is fucking PAINFUL though. We spent half an hour wiping on the 4 ability-sharing dwarves before we figured them out. We had to have our OT take one alone while I tanked the other 3 with CDs up and our lusted DPS burned them down.

Then we took a break to watch the video for the fight, after which our mage never came back.  So we gave it a shot with 9 just to see the encounter, and wiped to the first Searing Flames and called it a night.

[Selby]

...and our lusted DPS burned them down.

Yeah a friend's guild is running into this problem.  They are slightly short on DPS #s and it's making fights extremely painful.

[Rendakor]

Well our DPS is usually good*, we had no problem on the right side pack. However, the guy with Burden of the Crown kept roflstomping our OT. I don't know if he was spamming skills, or what was going on (and didn't bother calling him out, since he was a PUG replacing our standard OT for the night), but he could NOT handle two dwarves at a time. I only called for the lust because I wasn't sure how long I could handle 3 of them.

At least, I think they're doing ok. IIRC most are in the 11k range, with at least one pushing 16k. Granted, this is on Magmaw and Council who both have damage increases built into their mechanics, but still. How do those numbers sound to you?

[Arinon]

Sounds like we're about 2-3 weeks ahead of what you're describing and 11k seems a little low given the fights but not bad at all.  Having your top DPSer run around 16k does seem low though so you'd feel a few 11k or 12k people more for some fights.

We actually lust the double pull just before Magmaw regularly or it can go south fast.  Don't have the trouble you're describing on Atremedes trash.   Sounds more like a tank/healer issue to me or maybe a bad spread of abilities as those guys can usually be held indefinitely.

If you have solid interrupts I'd recommend Halfus and the rest of BoT up to Cho'gall before tackling the BWD bosses after the elevator.  The Atremedes fight is twitchy as shit and Chimeron requires rock solid healing but is super boring for everyone else.  Maloriak isn't as bad but has multiple AoE burndown phases as well as a 25%-0% burndown so you can't use lust to shore up DPS weaknesses.

Biggest problem we've been having is managing interrupts.  Lots of encounters now punish you hard for missing punches.  A good DPS shaman trivializes a lot of it but other than that you have to rotate.  Can't wait for 4.0.6.  DK interrupts will be hit capped again and pally tanks get one baseline.

[Rendakor]

We had a LOT of trouble with Halfus. Most attempts lasted less than a minute, and the entire fight was really frustrating. I think we got one of the drakes to half, once. My general thoughts were "fuck this zone" after two hours of wiping with no progress at all.

We've never had any problems with the stuff before Magmaw; maybe our OT was just gimpy.

Our raid comp as far as buff synergy is probably less than ideal; DK/Warrior tanks, Pally/Druid healers, Spriest (our top DPS), Mage, DK, Rogue dps, plus a PUG heal and one random dps who happens to be online, usually another melee.

[Lightstalker]

Halfus difficulty varies wildly week to week based on what drakes are up.

As the DK in a DK/Warrior tanking pair in our 10-man I can't wait for 4.0.6 so I can go back to general interrupting duties.  The big 'gotcha' in the Halfus fight is that the Drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus and a missed shadow-nova interrupt is probably going to cause your healers to lose range and heal themselves - causing a missed and necessary drake tank healing event.  Because of the huge incoming damage from having 2 drakes active at the same time you need your strongest tank with the adds and your interruptingest tank on Halfus.  The surprise of a missed shadow nova forces you to have a plan for the healers in order to prevent them from all healing themselves at the same time (leaving your drake tank to take 4x 40k hits in the interim).

If you are determined you can just activate one drake at the start, tank well away from Halfus, and push on to get the mechanics down by hitting the enrage regularly.  This will cover most of the healing/tank swapping/interrupting nonsense portions of this fight.  Once you can do that regularly, wake two drakes up on the pull, stack everything on Halfus and the kill should come quickly.  The fight is a deliberate attempt to overload a players ability to do the right thing by presenting loads of information all at the same time (forcing decisions).  If you don't know who has the next interrupt or who is responsible for keeping the healers alive the decisions will just come too slow to save the raid.

[Rokal]

As the DK in a DK/Warrior tanking pair in our 10-man I can't wait for 4.0.6 so I can go back to general interrupting duties.  The big 'gotcha' in the Halfus fight is that the Drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus and a missed shadow-nova interrupt is probably going to cause your healers to lose range and heal themselves - causing a missed and necessary drake tank healing event.  Because of the huge incoming damage from having 2 drakes active at the same time you need your strongest tank with the adds and your interruptingest tank on Halfus. 

Or, since the drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus, you could just have one tank on one drake, the other on halfus/2nd drake. This is what we do , and it works fairly well. DPS burns the drake that is being tanked alone, and then kills halfus or the 2nd drake depending on what drake that is. Obvious solution to shadow-nova problems is not to miss a shadow nova interrupt, which is pretty easy with any two interrupters (or one spell hit capped shaman).

[Rendakor]

We tried one tank on one drake, one tank on Halfus/2nd drake and it was working ok until we had to tank swap; I taunted the drake before he got Halfus off me and died almost instantly.

[Maledict]

We tried the heroic mode for an hour last night - best go was 15%, but helaing the tanks throuh the stuns is brutal.

Absolutely no idea how to do it once the patch hits though, given how mages and smite priests wont be able to dps Halfus from the start. the healing rquirements for the fight go up insanely without smite priests, so will be interesting to see how we do it.

[Threash]

Halfus is a joke now, the drakes die a lot faster and you get a 300% dps buff when they drop.  This is on regular but i imagine it's the same on heroic.

[Rendakor]

One shot Halfus tonite; not having to do that stupid tank swap shit made the fight MUCH easier.

[SurfD]

As far as i can tell, with old halfus, there were really only 2 easily effective ways to do the fight if you had the Mortal Strike debuff Drake as one of your random dragons (especially if one of your other random drakes needed to be brought up and killed first)

1- Make sure you have a Paladin and Bloodlust.  This let you lust and burn the first kill drake, while your halfus tank could simply take the MS debuff up to max stacks and then get bubbled / click bubble off to reset his stacks.
2- Bring a 3rd "Dps tank" such as a Feral druid or blood dk who can help soak up MS Stacks in the beginning, so you dont end up with someone swapping to a dake (which hit WAY harder then halfus) when they have 10 stacks and gettign raped.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Actually a warrior tank with shield block could effectively "avoid" the mortal strike debuff long enough for stacks to fall off.

[Hutch]

Halfus is a joke now, the drakes die a lot faster and you get a 300% dps buff when they drop.  This is on regular but i imagine it's the same on heroic.

Oh *that's* what happened? We got Halfus down last night, and I glanced at my recount and saw crazy numbers for all our dps, like 10k higher dps each than what we got on Magmaw. Now it makes sense, thank you.

[Rendakor]

Our kill had crazy dps numbers too, makes sense now. I was getting 150k+ Death Strike crits, it was silly.

After Halfus we went to play with the two dragons for the first time; that fight doesn't seem so bad, but it's one of those where a single fuckup even by a DPS can be a wipe. Got them to about 40% or so a couple times but called it.

[Maledict]

The two dragons are unfortunately, along with magmaw, the only relics of Wrath raiding. That is, the entire fight says "Melee dps a target dummy, ranged go fuck yourself". Most of wrath, especially in ICC, was based aroun d the model of melee doing the damage whilst ranged had to spread out and avoid all kinds of garbage to stay alive, and these two fights both have that same horrible feel to them. Fortunately they are the only two.

(It's why I laugh when peopel moan about a bias against melee in wow raiding. Sure, for the first few months of TBC they did. Since then it's been melee all the way for the majority of fights).

[Azuredream]

Random tidbit of info on Halfus drakes if people didn't know: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2168-Halfus-Wyrmbreaker-spawn-cycle-Al-akir-25-HC-Video-The-Daily-Blink

[Maledict]

Heroic Halfus is *extremely* easy now. We did him with 7healers, 4 tanks, and forgot to bloodlust on the first drake. Still got him down with 45 seconds to spare on the enrage and no deaths. Just burn each target down one by one, don't ever activate the slate dragon, and then he melts with a 400% damage debuff on him.