Ulduar Hardmode tactics.

Derky wrote:Regarding Thorim, I suffer here once out of the gauntlet. ...

With the tanks swopping over a long period of time, it makes life very hard for a paladin. I can cast bacon on Gimi and then heal card, but when the tanks swop Card aint taking damage meaning I need to swop to Gimi making Bacon useless. That in essence reduces my Mp5 and HPS by around 20%

Add the moving to that and only one spell I can cast while moving my HPS drops below 900 at certain points making me kinda shit for this fight. I am sure there are ways around it, just I don't know them yet!

I've gone in and looked at the meters, and found the following deaths for Card and Gimi on all Thorim fights:

Cardinal

19:11:29 30k Chain Lightning (no heals)
19:21:03 13k Chain Lightning (no heals)
19:31:55 9k normal swing after a 30k Unbalancing Strike (RNG - big swing)
19:43:42 three 12k+ swings (no heals)
19:56:45 4k Frostbolt Volley after 2 normal swings (no heals)
20:07:55 two 9k swings after a 20k Unbalancing Strike (no heals)
20:18:38 3k Frostbolt Volley (no heals)
20:28:43 9k swing (no heals)

Gimil

19:11:34 16k crit swing (no heals)
19:21:24 15k Unbalancing Strike (no heals)
19:32:19 9k swing (no heals)
19:43:36 16k Lightning Charge (no heals)
19:57:03 15k swing after Unbalancing Strike
20:07:34 9k swing (no heals)
20:18:28 22k Unbalancing Strike (RNG - big swing)
20:27:59 22k Unbalancing Strike (RNG - big swing)
20:28:50 three 14k swings (no heals)

Thorim cast 39 Unbalancing Strikes altogether, which means they can't always have been fatal. So, Unbalancing Strike is not our biggest problem, it's keeping both tanks at 100% health ALWAYS. Next time both MT healers should just focus on keeping their tanks topped always and don't worry about the raid. I will heal the raid and cross heal the tanks during the Unbalancing Strike (the MT healer that's not on during that Strike can add to healspam on the other MT, with instants, IF THEIR TANK IS AT FULL HEALTH!). Raid damage is not trivial, but it's not urgent - we kept losing tanks to 15k hits, which shouldn't happen. Mana is not an issue either, so no need to worry about that either.

Alternatively, set up a rotation of instants after the first Unbalancing Strike (like Mimiron P1) if we figure out the cooldown on the Strike. It seems to happen every 20 seconds according to the Damage Taken charts, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Edit: (no heals) means there were no heals other than small HoTs between the last two hits that tank took. That could also be due to the MT healers having died early!

Thursday 3rd July

Flame Leviathan: As D said, our first pull was possibly the worst attempt ever! We did recover, however. Bal pointed out that pyrite can be built to 10 stacks slowly and maintained - you have 10 seconds before you need to refresh the stack, so how about reserving one demolisher for permanuking (only one dps on the turrets)? I can try being the launch-chicken, but not sure my dps is high enough to nuke down both turrets before I die to environmental damage - this would also free up one bike. Soon as the demo passenger is flung up, the bike deposits a passenger on the demolisher and that person takes over feeding the demo with pyrite. On the second overload, the new passenger can be flung, while the bike offloads the passenger onto that demo? Bal - you're good at this fight, help me think.

On the first try when I lost Akari, I tried jumping into the passenger seat to reload pyrite, but the vehicle despawned on me. Exploit protection by Blizzard, methinks..

XT-002: Ranged need to group up better, and people need to work on their voidzone dumping skills Other than that it was a oneshot kill, if a bit messy.

Iron Council: Worked fine.. the OT had very good positioning of Brundir on P2 - plenty of room for all three healers to stand between SB and Brundir and cover the whole raid.

Hodir: Crazy kills are crazy - 9k dps from certain mad people, and good use of the shamoo crit buff meant a second hardmode kill. I chased the lightwells on the first two tries, but got in the way of Gimi's tanking so decided to just focus on stacking Singed.

Thorim: I ran a Log Browser query on WoL (Actor: Thorim, Target: Gimilkhâd, Cardinal) and got the following:

Try 1
20:30:55 Card: 8k normal swing (Marv failed )
20:31:39 Card: 36k Unbalancing Strike (RNG, but after a res so maybe he had no buffs?)
20:31:47 Gimi: 11k normal swing (D had died from the zap)
20:31:51 Gimi: 12k normal swing (D had died from the zap)

Try 2
20:40:53 Gimi: 11k Lightning Charge after Unbalancing Strike (Gimi stood in the zap)
20:41:57 Card: 9k normal swing (Marv had died from the zap)

Try 3
20:51:27 Gimi: 19k crit swing after Unbalancing Strike (?)
20:52:21 Card: 8k normal swing (D got ganked by Sif)

Try 4
20:58:59 Card: lolwipe on P1
21:00:07 Gimi: lolwipe on P1

Try 5
21:08:18 Gimi: 9k normal swing after Unbalancing Strike (?)
21:08:55 Gimi: 13k hit right after a 10k hit (D had died from the zap)
21:09:24 Card: 11k normal swing after Unbalancing Strike crit (D had died from the zap)

The first wipe was due to me not focusing and losing Card early - he then died a second time to a massive hit after the res, but I assume that was lack of buffs? Gimi and I got zapped on the second try, which was also a wipe. Third try not sure why Gimi died, but after that D got ganked by Sif and things went belly up. We won't mention the fourth try! On the fifth try we lost Gimi early, then D got zapped, but we still managed to get a kill. Thorim did 18 Unbalancing Strikes (11 on Card, 7 on Gimi), but only 4 of them were mortal - so we CAN heal through them. Seems the pillar zaps are a bigger issue at the moment?

I felt my HoTs made a big difference to tank healing, but I was focusing on a single tank (Card). Unfortunately, since the Lifebloom nerf in 3.1 I can't maintain more than one full LB stack, and even that was straining my mana. So I am not sure who can give the second tank the same treatment - Zuzu with Renew, shields, and PoM/Penance spam? I would like to try putting D on raid-/crosshealing. Alternatively, I'm keen to give it a try with a single tank, and 2 healers spam healing through. D and Zuzu - what do you think?

I'm a bit concerned about Thorim's swing timer - according to the comlog he hit Gimi for 7k at :54:06 seconds, followed by a 9k hit at :54:58 - just over 0.5 seconds later. Parrygibs? Why is he swinging so fast?

AFAIK Thorim's stacking self-buff increases his swing speed?

Pillar melee teams were fine. I died to one because I wasn't blessed with a cleanse or dispel magic before it zapped me. The only other losses to lightning towers were healers. All other melee deaths were tank deaths and one unfortunate chain lightning.

Oh, and DPS being thrown onto flame leviathan ticker no damage until they get thrown off (and the FL doesn't deal damage for the first few seconds, what with the overload.)

Mnemo wrote:AFAIK Thorim's stacking self-buff increases his swing speed?

Quite right, and by quite a lot too!

Lightning Charge - Charges a 60-degrees cone at random direction with lightning sparks. The cone will cause Lightning Charge after a few seconds, inflicting 17,344 to 20,156 Nature damage to players in it, and increasing Thorim's attack speed by 15% and Nature damage by 10%.

Thursday 17th July

Flame Leviathan: Did it with 2 towers up (killed Mimiron and Freya). Did our tactic with 1 bike, 2 SEs downing pyrite, 2 Demos stacking pyrite and chain-throwing casters onto FL. Fast kill, although not a record. Seems we have this fight pretty licked - try 3 towers next time, or do we want to be able to kill him before he exits the first Overload before trying that?

XT-002: Again, people dying due to range issues. 3 tiles - no need to run off! If you run away during a tantrum, you WILL die - ESPECIALLY if you have a bomb on you. There's plenty of room to lay down voidzones without running off to a corner.

Iron Council: Oneshot IC kill, with bonus deaths at the end as Gimi went Mechadorf and hugged 2-3 after Steelbreaker was down. No one got caught by the Overload either. Grats to Tell on the Sigil quest - it's what now, 6?

Kologarn: see Normal feedback.

Auriaya: We had a few tries on [Crazy Cat Lady]. On the first try, the sentries put a stacking bleed on Gimi, and after 8 stacks he takes 20k damage per 2 seconds - while this is outhealable it means the OT will drop during a fear. On the second try, Card died to lack of healing early on, and on the third try I got ganked on the pull, so we decided to drop it (see Normal feedback thread). How are we doing this next time - two tanks, and hope the debuffs wear off every now and then?

Hodir: Two tries to get him down - we lost Gimi to a couple of big Frozen Blow hits, and people kept taking extra damage to stacks of Biting Cold while frozen, so I took a gamble and swapped me with Rynar on the second try. It worked! Very nice healing, and we got him down within the timer.

Thorim: Is a bastard! We kept hitting the wall at 8+ stacks of Charged, so decided to try with only 2 healers. Was a bit of a lolkill (do we ever do Thorim differently? ), but we got him down in the end. I was focusing on Gimi, Zuzu on Card, the raid relying on JoL healing and occasional splash healing on the tanks. Still have issues with people getting chainzapped, it's the price we pay for having a melee heavy group. I never recovered all my HoT stacks on Gimi after ressing Bal, so I lost Gimi (lack of healing) a little later.. ugh. If you are healing this fight it is essential you focus on your target 100% - probably the only fight you have a healing rotation on, as you want all your HoTs and instants used as soon as they're off cooldown.