Ulduar Feedback Thread

No offence on our melee dps was intended. You know that I will heal you to hell and back even if we drown kayte (and all other ranged) before we start

Freya

Almost disappointed we got her down so fast - the fight looked a lot harder on video! Things to watch out for:
- Conservator: be ready to hug a mushroom as a phase changes, you don't want to be caught silenced;
- Group of 3: heaviest healing is probably keeping the OT alive here, he can easily be two-shot. The elemental charges and can throw you back, not sure what to do to avoid it?
- AoE group: run in to hug and make sure your AoE heals are cool.. The damage wasn't so bad as long as no more than 2-3 died at the same time.

Otherwise, if you have any instants (Surge of Light proc or Holy Shock) and healing is in a lull, look out for trees and help take them down. Not sure how bursty/steady damage on the MT was?

Thorim

The Arena is quite chaotic - people need to spread out and ignore the little guys (hit for 500 each on bark, not sure how much hp they have). Healing was intensive and I burned through 4/5 of a mana bar (though I got it back quickly once Bal was back in the ring). I thorned up everyone in the arena, it's extra AoE damage in all the chaos (afaik it scales with the buffee's spellpower now, alas). Critical points in this phase were:
- make sure to keep distance from other ranged, but stay as close to the centre of the room as you can.
- keep the AoEers alive!

Once the gauntlet team returns, healing gets a lot smoother, except people needing to watch out on tank transitions (they swap, like on Gluth).


Was a good raid, with loads of progress and lulz. I loved the trash before Mimiron - was helping Cyclone the sappers at the end to interrupt their lasers (good/bad?), and rooting the boombots makes them explode safely (need to confirm this, but the one I rooted seemed to go almost instantly).

Looks like we have an epic fight ahead of us with Mimiron!

The Thorim tunnel might need some information... so I made this:




I hope it is fairly self explainatory, but some more data:

Basics of the tunnel-team is this:
1. Go through Gate 1.
2. Kill Mini boss 1
3. Go through Gate 2
4. Kill Miniboss 2
5. Go through gate 3
6. Avoid the large circular areas on the floor (skulls)
7. Tag Thorim
8. Jump down to Arena.

The fight starts when you kill all the gladiators in the Arena (and the worm).

The "tunnel team" (monday played out by myself and the Bubble-boys (D, Card, Bal) runs to the gate (Gate 1 on the and pulls the lever (this takes 10 seconds, so it's optimal to have a healer or ranged there, ready to pull the lever ASAP).

Now, the Tunnel team's goal is to get through the tunnel at top-speed. Take note though, that moving fast triggers the hardmode.


The tunnel team runs down the corridor, and upon turning corner is immediately faced with the first miniboss across the 2 rooms.
Now, this is important, the boss will radomly "hold fire" in either hand - this is the side of the room he will nuke. STAND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM.

Move through the 2 chambers, kill HEALER dwarves first.
Reaching the boss, have the tank turn the boss away from the raid, and the DPS to lay the smack down.
The boss will put up a Thorns-a-like effect at some point - causing 2000 damage per attack, this is magic, so it might be helpful to bring someone who can steal or purge it, but not required (just takes more healing on the DPS - and might need to have the DPS watch their damage (for this reason, a rogue is probably a bad choice for the tunnel team).

Killing Mini Boss 1, Gate 2 opens.
More Dwarves to kill (focus on healers again).

Run to Mini Boss 2, which is a lot trickier (and harder to heal) than Mini-boss 1.
FIRST OF ALL: SPREAD OUT.
SECOND: If a DPS gets debuffed, EVERYONE ELSE (including healer and tank) needs to run away from them - as the debuffed player becomes unable to move and explodes after a few seconds.
Not sure how hard it hits, but it seemed able to one-shot DPS last night.

USe a Strategy similar to Kel'Thuzad. DPS spreads out in a Y pattern (Tank in front, Each DPS as far away from the tank and other DPS as possible, with the healer to one side.)

When Mini Boss 2 dies, Gate 3 opens.

MAKE SURE THAT YOU DO NOT WALK INTO THE CIRCLES ON THE FLOOR.
There's some sort of Stun/immobilize field that are triggered when you walk on them - which will easily take you out of the fight for 10-30 seconds (didn't time it... just felt like a long time).

Run over to Thorim, hit him and he jumps down into the Arena.
Tunnel-team rejoins the Arena-team and the Freeing of Thorim!

If all the adds are dead on Boss 2, its not do or die on the debuff, it can be out healed rather easily. But if the adds are alive and you take hits from both, you are dead.

Other wise thats right in my opinion, good write up Taq.

D

Mimiron

What a fun fight! Also a real challenge, with the phases and the moving and all the things to remember. We got him to Phase 4 (transformer ho!) once or twice, which was pretty cool.. even if it seems completely mental. In general, the ranged should stay in one sector of the room (one of the three areas separated by lines) as it avoids out of range issues.

Phase 1: Keeping the MT alive through Plasma Blasts is the trick here. Zuzuna went Discipline to heal the raid through the Napalm Shells, with D and me spamming Cardinal on each PB. The warning comes early, and the PB lasts quite a while and is quite bursty, so it's important to keep spamming heals on the MT until he starts crackling with energy (then you know he's done nuking the tank). We consistently killed him within 3 Plasma Blasts, so we set up a rotation of oh-crap shields, with Bal doing a divine-sacrificing on the first, Cardinal shield-walling the second, and Zuzu pain-suppressing the third. As healing is so focused on keeping the MT alive, it's extra important people don't step on mines (at least until we've got the fight sussed).

Phase 2: Lasers! Healers should move in fairly close to the boss (this helps you react quicker when he goes into Laser-mode), and there is a LOT of AoE damage. Towards the end I found it easiest to just Rejuvenate/Lifebloom/WG everyone (every GCD spent here XD) and let Zuzu/D top up burstier damage. There is no tank in this phase, everyone can take damage equally. And again, move to your right fast when he charges his Lasers - he will always rotate clockwise, and only for half a circle (180 degrees).

The really evil thing in this phase were the rockets - the "voidzone" that marks their arrival doesn't last very long and I kept getting ganked by them. You can see the rockets take off (assuming you're looking at them), but not sure how much time that buys before they land. I suffered from healer tunnelvision in most of my deaths here, too busy keeping HoT stacks up on everyone to notice, too many times.. I looked at the WWS report, and there isn't anything to warn that they're coming. My suggestion would be that we learn to watch when they're fired and how long before they land, and call it out on Vent?

Phase 3: Healing got easier after the first two punishing phases. There is a ranged "tank" on the head, the MT grabs the big bots (they hit hard!), the offtank spends this phase "failing" at bombbots, and everyone ignore the junk bots (they don't hit very hard, but maybe interrupts are an issue?). Healers (and ranged) should move as far from the centre as possible, as it gives the bombtank more time to grab bots heading for us. One healer (Disc/Paladin) on the ranged tank, one healer on the bot-tank, the rest of the healing is keeping the bombtank alive and watch out for anyone getting bombed. Also, was the head putting down directly below him at intervals? These should be avoided. Also, wowwiki says he can root a random person in this phase (dispellable debuff) - did we get this?

Phase 4: ???

Seems the bottom has to be kept stationary, or we end up with the whole transformer moving across the room - the good news is that each section loses one of its abilities from the earlier phases, and they start this phase at 50% health. So, no more:
- Napalm Shells or Plasma Blast (yay!)
- Rapid Burst (frontal cone attack to melee) and the Heat Wave (big AoE) is weaker
- Adds (woo!)

We will still have to deal with Mines and melee AoE (from Phase 1); AoE splash, rockets () and Laser (from Phase 2); targeted blasts on ranged tank (from Phase 3). Considering there's mines and the Laser, the key seems to be to keep the whole thing relatively stationary and burn him down fast here. All 3 bits have to die within 10 seconds of each other, or the ones who died too early will respawn at 50% hp...

I think the way to deal with healing here will be to keep the raidhealer from P1 on the raid, with the other two focusing on the MT and the ranged tank.

Oh, and about the Haste thing...

I get 20% haste for my HoTs from talents (Gift of the Earthmother), plus 18.2% from gear - that leaves me 11.8% short of the softcap (GCD = 1 second). So I do notice a loss of 5% from the missing Wrath of Air totem, and I get a lot more "Spell is not ready" spam when trying to maintain Rejuvenation/Lifebloom on 10 people. It's not critical to me, but it's definitely noticeable.

Small note on the rockets Marv, you got 3 seconds from the "mark" on the floor appears, so it's wery much about quick reaction

Yeah, I'll put it down to healer tunnelvision.. >.<

Mimiron, part deux

WWS still doesn't parse Mimiron well (can't handle the three bits), but I had 5 buffing seeds leftover at the end of the night, so that's about 13 wipes before we got him. We got P1-P2 down pretty well early on, after we tweaked healing assignments (we were having a few issues at the start, when healers took napalm blasts). After that it was just a matter of stabilising P3 so we had sufficient people getting into P4..

First things first: thank the makers for the murloc DPS! Especially on P2, can't describe the relief it was to see the lasers ending every single time. P2 is *extremely* healing intensive, and I always ended with my mana at a sliver (after an Innervate post-P1 which was intensive but in a different way). So thank you, THANK YOU FOR BEING AWESOME!

P3: It was fairly easy keeping the bombtank (Balgarim) alive, with a timed Regrowth after each blast - only got hairy when the head occasionally spawned a bomb as he was down. Also, seems the head has a smaller aggro range than you'd think, so you have to stand closer to him when you nuke.

Edit: And keeping the raid grouped in a sector, in P3, really helped!

P4: John Fucking Madden! Omg, what an awesome (and frustrating!) phase! Lasers, rockets, mines, static, left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, /dance.. The best thing was how you just HATED yourself when you failed, as you had only yourself to blame. For ranged, you have to keep close, just outside the mine radius (buys you reaction time on the lasers), and leg it (NOT INTO THE MINES YOU DAFT TREE!) when the barrage starts. Add to that rockets and crazy AoE damage (though not as crazy as P1-P2) and we had a healthy dose of "nnnnnn" as Zuzuna put it.

PS: Skathi, please wait to summon your poochie until P2.. I hated how he always died running out from the static discharge..

General Vezax trash

Ouch.. they're being nerfed a little in a hotfix (no more multiple voidwalkers spawning), so they should be a little more manageable. There were some interesting debuffs including the shadow crash (why does it report it as Failed, Taq? Afaics it wasn't dodgeable) and a mana draining aura. Will read up a bit on these before next try.

--
Last thing: making a post in the addons thread about raid-management addons (like Failbot). Seen a few being mentioned, and I could use a discussion on which are appropriate for us, etc.

It is dodgeable by the looks of it. Just need fast reaction time. The spell is cast on a single target yes, it also does damage all those around the target (i.e don't hug) but the spell is cast on where you are standing, not the player. I managed to run away from 1 or 2 but you need some 30 yards away from the target to manage that, which aint that easy with the space we were presented with.

D

Yeah, Mimiron is an awesome fight, easily the toughest fight we've seen so far.
And another fight where I managed to screw up on the kill - not once but twice (thanks for the combat ress)

For me, the most annoying past was phase 4, when the barrage was unleashed. Apparently, there is a ath that makes the barrage behave strangely when you are close to the boss, i.e. You get fried in some places that should be safe. My suggestion here is for everyone in melee range, except for the tank except for the tank, to move away, to about 5 yards during the barrage to make sure that you stay alive.

Good job everyone!

Shadowcrash: I'm assuming it's as D said, it can be dodged - but might need the casters to spread out more.

It looked like the voidwalker killed quite a lot of people in the ranged camp, maybe a good idea to have the offtank with the ranged there?

Twilight packs: we all need to figure out a kill order here. The healer either offer to die first or last (and be CCd), as it appeared to be able to heal ~75% or so, not sure about the rest.
Seemed to be arms warriors (bladestorm), frost and fire mages, rogues and probably some other type I missed.

And Vezax looked like a giant lobster .

I have little to say, except - great raid!

I had a blast and today my keyboard smells of beer from smashing my desk up when I failed at running out - bonus!

The shadow crash thing is (apparently) exactly the same as what the faceless one's before the Herald boss in Old Kingdom heroic do. A shadowy rock that flies out and targets the ground near someone, as Derky said.

General Vezax does this throughout his fight, and I bet it does a lot more damage then, so we need to practice moving out of it.

Time to remember how I tank without breaking CC...

Vezax's Trash have already recieved the nerf-hammer

One of the trash packs in the General Vezax room has been removed, all of the humanoids in General Vezax’s room are no longer immune to stuns, the Faceless Horrors will only go immune and summon Void Beasts once instead of 3 times.

Edit: Looks like Marv already posted it .

Awesome raid. Mimiron is a really fun boss. Can't say much else really.

After I was killed from every laser blast, I decided to follow Derky's way. I stayed near Derky, far away from the lasers and imitated his moves (Funny how he was dancing around without reason, and i was like playing "man-to-man" on him ) Then, when the laser appeared, I run after him, clockwise away from the incoming fire (on my first time I even used a potion of speed to be sure) and.. relief! Not even close to danger. On our second try I was already healing people in the center without any troubles. So I think "Derky's way" (as also Taq says for the melee but beware the mines) is the only safe way that also results in less frantic healing attempts

For Balgarim tanking the bombs in P3, the macro helped decisively but the danger remained: unless he was at 100% health when the bomb exploded, he was dead. Now I see (Marv's post and wowwebstats) that Marveen was also adding her healings to my "Shield+renew+pennance", so we must be extra carefull

I am sure that very soon Mimiron wont be a problem to murlocs: we had 12 deaths from rockets, 13 from mines and more than 20 from the multi-lasers. As soon as we learn the "do without think" way to overcome them, we will farm Mimiron.

But, we will always remember one of the best fiights we ever had in Wrath

Marveen wrote:PS: Skathi, please wait to summon your poochie until P2.. I hated how he always died running out from the static discharge..

I felt awful too, I'm trying to learn how to be a better person when it comes to controlling and damage limitation on pets, so I was experimenting with my poor little Cully. He made it a couple of times! He did! I just sucked the other times

Love the fight, loved being deafened on Vent when we got him down, loved the way Rynar came in at the screaming when he did die to ask what had happened. One of the best fights ever, frustrating and awesome in turns.

/salute to the Murlocs, who are just...Murloclywonderfulgoodness.

Don't suppose there's time for Bal to spec change to Prot for phase 3 then go back for Phase 4? Long shot I know...

If we weren't in combat then, then they'll most likely fix it.

They don't want people respeccing mid-fight.

It may be possible, although a shield and some (occasional self) heals quickly sorts out the damage the bombs do. I just have to remember not to judgment martyr otherwise I am slightly screwed.

It's easy to keep Bal alive here, as long as he doesn't noob up (SotM XD). And normal gear upgrades will buy him more stamina and a better chance at staying alive. In the meantime, if you're worried about dying you could swap to a high stamina weapon just for this bit...

If we're worried about the bombots killing him the solution is easy You let the OT (which was me yesterday) take the boombots. The scrapbots hit for utter nill, and Taq takes his without problems, dont see why it should be different for Balg. I was actually wondering about why we did it this way yesterday but kept my mouth shut as we there were more vital stuff to focus on

zuzuna wrote:After I was killed from every laser blast, I decided to follow Derky's way. I stayed near Derky, far away from the lasers and imitated his moves (Funny how he was dancing around without reason, and i was like playing "man-to-man" on him ) Then, when the laser appeared, I run after him, clockwise away from the incoming fire (on my first time I even used a potion of speed to be sure) and.. relief! Not even close to danger. On our second try I was already healing people in the center without any troubles. So I think "Derky's way" (as also Taq says for the melee but beware the mines) is the only safe way that also results in less frantic healing attempts

I have to admit I did turn around a few times and do a "WTF?" to myself. Though I am glad you liked my dancing!

Yeah I find that way a lot easier to position, there is no need to be so close. A lot of people forget how big 40 yards really is, as I need 30 yards to heal effectively (HS) then I tend to use the entire 30 yards. Good to know it helped you out!

Bal - Bal gets Beacon during that phase so its another 10-16k heaing every 5 seconds or so if he needs it or not. I am sure that helps out but probably wasn't noticed.

D

Thursday 8th May, Ulduar Farm Night

Hmm, well the good thing was we showed we had the same bosses on farm as last week - everything including Hodir and Thorim. Just over 110 deaths (11 wipes?) not counting Flame Leviathan. Skathi and Li did good - you wouldn't think it was your first kill on several of the bosses there!

The bad thing is it was one of "those" raids. I will focus on how the healing went and let the Coastrunners and the Warriors comment on their side of things. I felt healing was very shaky on some fights, we just felt slower to react than usual. On my behalf I will tighten healing assignments in future - simply put I think we were dropping too many tanks between us last night..

The fights I'm least happy with were the Iron Council and Hodir. On the Iron Council, I decided to swap assignments for D and me, to make sure we had decursing on Cardinal. Putting a Holy paladin on raid healing and a Tree on OT healing is not efficient, but I felt it was needed to avoid further wiping. On Hodir, I think it was a waste of time to have 4 healers. This just slows the fight down a lot - we need both heavy AoE healing and heavy tank healing for the frozen blows. Unfortunately it's also a fight that requires quick reactions and solid healing experience, so I don't think it's a trivial choice deciding who should go dps. Again, let me hear your thoughts.

On a number of fights we did less than 2.5k Healing Per Second (HPS) per Oracle. That means we should be able to do these fights with just 2 healers, assuming we can handle periodic burstiness. Here's a rundown of total HPS per boss fight according to the WWS:

Boss	HPS	Notes
Razorscale	2530
Ignis	7560
XT	3567
Iron Council	10060
Kologarn	7800
Auriaya	5643
Hodir	6305	(with 4 healers)
Thorim	4700	(not sure we got all of D's healing on record here)

In theory, that means we can do Razor, XT, Thorim (and possibly Auriaya and Hodir once we get better gear) with just 2 healers. What concerns me is whether two healers will be fast enough (last night's raid made me doubt this)! So let me hear your comments.



About Flame Leviathan - I think we showed that we're not nearly ready to do hard modes on him. He's a tricky boss: just because we've so far managed to faceroll him down, doesn't mean we're doing it in the best way. We need better kiting, more focused dps (focus on doing the kill-him-fast achievements first?) and better coordination between vehicles. That's something to work on in future!

On XT, I noticed that a detonating the boom bots one shot all the little ones in their near vicinity. So I started using roots on them, and a few times we got the timing right and killed it, blowing up a big pack of little ones scuttled by. This is definitely something to work on in future - not sure who can root on the other side (ice chains/stuns?).

On Hodir, the skull-on-a-player (Stormcloud?) is actually a good thing! It means the shaman NPC has buffed the "skull" with an aura that increases everyone's crit around you. So if you have it (and aren't dps) run to the melee and make sure they get its benefit. Not sure how easy it is to move Hodir in a specific direction, but keeping him near a light shaft (+haste buff) means the melee have a greater chance of having both buffs up at the same time. Another thing I noticed is that the gnome didn't always get frozen on the big Freezes - it seemed to me that the bonfires she lights up ALSO soak up the Freeze (and are extinguished by it)! Anyone keen to test this theory?


PS: The healing feedback above may sound a bit harsh - but it's nothing compared to how I felt last night. And it's not even my time of month yet, so I can't blame that for it..

Couple of things to remember.

1) We are not hardcore, we are no where near it. This is a "Fun and casual" group.

2) Shit happens

3) No matter what is said or how things are set up. Its down to the individual player at the end of the day. That needs to be remembered.

Hodir - as said, no need for 4 healers at all. If Gimi is there send him as a healer and make 2x DPS out of the current healer set up. If no Gimi, rotate the DPS between those with off spec dps gear. Problem solved.

4) We all played bad at points last night. Things were not thought through at all. Take FL - Just because you need a vehicle to complete an achievement doesn't mean you automatically get it when going for hard modes. Gimi had 300-400k and 600k more health than mine and Li's at points. We don't have high item level gear, tanks / some DPS do. Those people were in bikes or other vehicles that do not tank as much. Should really stream line the set up for things like that instead of wasting the raids time.

5) The death's were not just a healing problem. /point random direction /blame

6) I played like shit and I aint scared of admitting it. I probably caused 1 or 2 wipes during the night from just not being with it. Akari comes to mind on Hodir, totally my fault. Again, apologies. Why I played like shit is of no concern. Next time ill just unsign from the raid as it clearly has an adverse effect.

I do how ever owe Cardinal and apologie for being a cunt on The Iron council. I am quite sure the tone of my voice came accross as a right asshole when I questioned why you can't cleanse yourself. The question was legitimate and the answer even more so. Please accept my apologies.

D

Ha, Derky beat me to the post

I was not playing well yesterday - I was in easy mode, and ofc I was wrong. I am really happy we have not Ulduar in easy mode, and I have to prove that by being better. So simple

I have my dispel on decurse, and for some reason it didnt show when Cardinal got the debuf. So simple, so stupid of me. Sorry, next time I will use the normal way.

For assignments pls, do as they should go - we must be better, not change the game. I dont mind being shout at (from you, murlocs), in fact makes my game better - and it is inevitable I will have my low sometimes

For the hps on Thorim,dont forget the meters don't count prevention healing from shields that otherway is damage for healing (250K on the whole fight)

CU next time in a better form

:-)

Derky wrote:I do how ever owe Cardinal and apologie for being a cunt on The Iron council. I am quite sure the tone of my voice came accross as a right asshole when I questioned why you can't cleanse yourself. The question was legitimate and the answer even more so. Please accept my apologies.

No worries! I'd totally forgotten about that by the end of the fight even. It was a valid question, I just needed a few seconds to figure out what the answer was.

Are you raiding on Saturday by the way Derky? You haven't signed and I'll need to find a replacement if you're not coming.

Anyway - regarding last night - sometimes the raid morale/concentration is low. I have no idea why it happens, but it does maybe once a month or so. Nobody is to blame for it. It's just human nature. We need to cut ourselves some slack when it happens. False-expectations are a big cause of dissatisfaction.

Last night I broke my own rule about “never fighting a battle on two fronts”, and decided to try Flame Leviathan hard mode. My thought was that the fight is so ridiculously easy with no towers, that maybe just 1 or 2 would be doable. The game proved me wrong and it's not smart to start the night with fruitless wipes.

There will be no hard mode attempts now until we've killed Yogg Saron. It'll just be a waste of time. I think we can do manage them, but not without spending a few hours practising and there's just no time to do that at the moment.

It wasn't an awful raid anyway. We did were faster/better than last Thursday considering that we spent an hour on Flame Leviathan and we seem to have the Iron Council licked after last weeks wipe-fest on them.

Oh, and Zuzuna the reason you didn't see the debuff on the Iron Council was probably because I was cleansing it off myself in 1-2 seconds of it landing, but the second I forgot, I got splatted.