Ulduar Hardmode tactics.

Balgarim wrote:Yes, but you must factor in that Ret's are fudging useless on single target mobs. No two ways about it, we are utterly sheet.

Edit: Toned the language down =)

You've been like the ITV pre-watershed version of Robocop!

Balgarim wrote:Yes, but you must factor in that Ret's are fudging useless on single target mobs. No two ways about it, we are utterly sheet.

Edit: Toned the language down =)

Why the mother fucking cunting shit wank did you do that you fucking asshole?

:O

D

Cos I want to, cos I want to.

... so from now on, we're to call Balgarim "Billie"?

...jean?

Piper.

So, for our next Iron Council hardmode attempt:

- No one fucking dies to stupid shit in P1/P2.
- Billie Piper is the main cleanser in P3, with Zuzu as the fucking backup (because Penance is faster to send off than a HL).
- Derky bombheals the shit out of the Steelbreaker tank in P3
- Marv doesn't slack and let dps die ffs!

>.>

Marveen wrote:So, for our next Iron Council hardmode attempt:

- No one fucking dies to stupid shit in P1/P2.
- Billie Piper is the main cleanser in P3, with Zuzu as the fucking backup (because Penance is faster to send off than a HL).
- Derky bombheals the shit out of the Steelbreaker tank in P3
- Marv doesn't slack and let dps die ffs!

>.>

Fuckin' A!

I feel violated....

D

Flame Leviathan + 3 tonight...

Extra pillars of light to dodge basically.

Seems best to only use 1 chopper for pick-ups and tar pools and put the extra player onto a Demolisher for pyrite collection.

Siege engine drivers should also be the people with the best ilevel gear, which means our tanks won't be driving them tonight, as I know I'm near the bottom when it comes to gear levels.

Isn't it as equally possible that those with the highest iLevel have never driven a Siege Engine before? :p

Cardinal wrote:Flame Leviathan + 3 tonight...

Extra pillars of light to dodge basically.

Seems best to only use 1 chopper for pick-ups and tar pools and put the extra player onto a Demolisher for pyrite collection.

Siege engine drivers should also be the people with the best ilevel gear, which means our tanks won't be driving them tonight, as I know I'm near the bottom when it comes to gear levels.

Think it was far more then all this, with Mimirions tower we had the joy of the flaming wall of doom hitting us from every direction.

But, the three people in one demolishers seems to have worked to some degree, providing an overcharge.

Still, what could have been done is both people loaded into one Demolisher, flung into the Leviathan and the other tank lay heavy with the Pyrite, then the chopper picks up one of the players to be reloaded again, whilst the other player waits for player A to be loaded, before taking the seat.

Conclusion from FL+3: A non-hunter ranged would be optimal for breaking the turrets.

In our case, that means
(Mage/Elemental Shaman/Boomkin) > Enh. Shamoo / Frost DK (I guess...) > (blood/unholy) DK / Retadin

Hunters may be about on par with "(other) DK/Retadin" for the opposite reason - Deadzone makes the close turret hard to break.

Updated first post.

Flame Leviathan + three towers (all except Freya)

I tried driving a Siege Engine and refuelling a Demolisher. I has headache now, mostly self-inflicted from frustration..

Driving the Siege Engine has two big issues - stay close to FL (25 yds or <5 tiles) or you can't interrupt his Flame Vents. Most of the deaths that happened tonight were caused by Flame Vents hitting everyone (30% of FL's damage), so this is a big issue. So if you drive a SE, stay close - and don't race too far ahead if he's chasing you.

When I did succeed at trailing him closely, my problem became dodging Keeper crap - between Hodir's Fury, Thorim's Hammer and Mimiron's Inferno I often got completely blinded (big #%£@ing flashbangs of doom physically blinding me, and when I looked back at the monitor my SE had lost 30% of its health). Even with maximum drawdistance all I could see was smoke most of the time - really annoying as I don't see a way to avoid that (turning off all special effects?). It helped a bit when I stopped trying to race through the firewalls to keep up with him, but then he started to Flame Vent ->

The pull seems to have a RNG factor in it, as he seems to target a random big vehicle on the pull. I asked my cannonneer, Blobb, to nuke him for the pull (as the driver has no ranged attacks), and that seemed to help a bit. Though he sometimes targets a Demolisher EVEN if he turns to chase you when you first approach. It's as if he hasn't got 100% aggro until the actual chasing starts?

I felt the fight improved when I switched to the Demolisher, though by then I was sick and tired of getting myself killed I had some teething issues grappling pyrite as the grapple has a 50 yd range which is not as long as it sounds (10 tiles?). The transports must be downed continuously throughout the fights. So, better division of labour? Not sure what the throwing/stacking pyrite tactic was, but looking forward to hearing it - we had the Demolishers doing up towards 110k dps if they maintained the stacks of pyrite. That's a 5 minute fight if only one of the Demos maintain that level of dps - with the other vehicles' damage he should be dead in less than 3 minutes if we do (whatever we're meant to do) right!

On XT-002 - there's an achievement to kill him in 205 seconds, we're about 30 seconds off that. As we've done the kill with 6 dps before, I'm sure we can do it again. Guess everyone was a bit zoned after 2 hours on FL. With just 2 healers you need to be considerate of the Orcales and (a) not run over them on the way to a safe spot , and (b) run off to a side but stay in range for AoE healing when the tantrums come.

Finally, Razorscale - it's the Guardians (medium sized, meleers) that need roasting. So gank the little guys and soften the big guys. Don't bring them too low, or the harpoon engineer dorfs will gank them before Razor breathes.

My main gripe with last night is we spent hours with people driving vehicles they clearly just didn't grasp.

I would like to see a bit more common sense when it comes to that, if you are sucking hard own up and get swopped.

There aint nothing wrong with admitting you can't do something.

D

Derky wrote:My main gripe with last night is we spent hours with people driving vehicles they clearly just didn't grasp.

I agree - I was getting more and more aggravated with my SE driving! The Siege Engines tended to die first of all vehicles (except on tries 4, 9 and 12 out of 12 wipes) - and as soon as one of them dies, we lose control of the Vents and things go belly up. There is a sweet spot of following distance (close enough to interrupt, but not so close you get blinded by the effects) - and I struggled to find it. Maybe it just IS that hard to find and everyone would struggle with it? In any case, if you notice someone failing or have a suggestion for doing things better, point it out!

Been looking at the logs this morning: looks like the Siege Engine cannoneers can do a max of about 40k dps on this fight. However, on tries 9-12 and the kill (after we started trying to maintain a permanent feed on the Demolishers), both Demos were doing 100k+ with the SE cannoneers dropping to 25-30k each. The cannons can do a lot of damage, but it's nothing compared to the pyrite stacks - so the SE cannoneers should focus on downing pyrite and shielding the SE if FL gets too close.

In any case, we've learned a few things:

- High item level on the drivers is poor protection against the Keepers' towers.
- We only need 1 caster DPS to take out the turrets on FL's back, freeing up the other Demo passenger (and a pickup bike!) to keeping a constant pyrite feed to the driver.
- SE cannonneers do more damage if they focus on downing pyrite, rather than nuking directly (except during Overloads, when FL is stunned).

Things I'd like feedback on:

- How was tarring working (or not working)? Which vehicle ignites it?
- Do we need a different kite path than a straight diagonal? I got the impression that Mimiron's Inferno was mostly laid down across corners of the room. If that was a real pattern - would kiting in a circular path in the centre of the room keep us out of it?

I still believe we could have killed FL + 3 last night, but in hindsight it was wrong to try at all. I kept at it because on most attempts we showed a steady improvement. Our best attempts came near the end of the night, and it was right near the end that Balgarim came up with the 3 in 1 demolisher tactic. The last attempt was the best tactically.

Special respect to you Balgarim. You came up with several good ideas, and also did your assigned tasks perfectly.

Regarding Marveen's problem, if anybody is struggling with their task on any boss, please own up and tell the raid so you can be reassigned. There's no shame in admitting you find something difficult. Do not expect me or anybody else in the raid to tell you. It's your responsibility. Personally, I'm usually too busy focusing on my own job to see if you're struggling, so it's down to you.

As Derky and Dahlaine have said, experience > item levels when it comes to Flame Levithan. There's a fair chance that if Gimi and I had been driving the Siege Engines last night, it could have gone differently, though I don't blame anybody for what happened last night. In my defence, FL + 2 was so ridiculously easy, I didn't expect +3 to be such a leap up in difficulty.

On the good side, for every unproductive raid, I learn something.

I have since readjusted our priorities, more in line with what Taqwa has suggested.

Our new main goal is to master the hard modes we've already defeated: especially Iron Council and Thorim. We will do them on hard mode every week. If this takes all week and forces us to do the rest on normal mode, so be it, we have to kill them if we want to get to Algalon.

When they're dead, our second goal is to defeat Hodir on hard mode.

Everything else will wait. I don't think we should try FL + 3 again until all the Keepers have been killed on hard mode. Likewise we shouldn't try Freya + 2 until Hodir has been killed on hard mode, and so on.

This will hopefully lead to more productive raids in future! Thanks to everybody for their patience.

Saturday 27th June

Iron Council: I forgot to log combat for this, but dps was very high and solid - Steelbreaker was at 30% or so when Cardinal exploded (and we had what, 15 seconds to /point and /laugh at Gimi before he blew up in the end?). Cleansing worked perfectly - very nicely done!

Freya: Our first [Knock, Knock on Wood] pull went quite well - things went belly up when I got rooted in the middle of a mushroom phase, which meant I couldn't heal (and most dps couldn't break my roots either!). Solution: assign 1-2 ranged to deal with rooted people? As for healing, I'll need to come up with a better raidhealing assignment - something like the Grobbulus infection tactic: each healer puts one heal (example: PW:Shield and Regrowth) on the rooted person and hope the DPS frees them before those heals runs out.

For the Ground Tremor, I tried to HoT up Card after each warning so I can throw a quick Swiftmend if needed while D avoids getting spell-locked. It seemed to work nicely, even the one time he got locked out! /win

There's an added bit of RNG with the roots in P2 - if you get rooted near the flowerbombs you will get oneshot if more than one hits you (6k each). I'm not sure we can do much about that, other than run out of flower bombs fast and early. We had a lot of dps casualties to this last night (and to Nature's Fury, the lightning debuff in the mushroom phase).

The regular golden Sunbeam zaps are a 6k nature AoE (8 yd radius). They are still outhealable, but ranged should try to stay spread out - with 2+ Elders, healing starts to get a bit shaky. I noticed the Sunbeams can target totems too - one of them zapped the Windfury totem! And another totem got Lightning Bolted by one of the elementals...

It appears to be an easy achievement otherwise - the raid didn't take that much more damage compared to 1 Elder.

Thorim: Our biggest headache last night! He must die within 10 stacks of "Crushed!" or whatever it's called - that happens about 2 minutes before the enrage timer ends iirc? On the kill, I had my Rebirth ready for Gimi when he died, so we effectively had 3 tanks.

WoWhead suggests the fight is considerably easier with 2 instead of 3 healers, though it seems we have an issue with tanks dying to regular melee swings (Cardinal died to regular melee swings on the kill). We must keep both tanks at full health always. There is a big RNG factor here with Unbalancing Strike landing almost instantly after a tank switch, and our current healing strategy (2 tank healers, each focuses on "their" tank but crossheal on the current Thorim tank) isn't working as well as I'd like. Either that or the tank strategy is wrong!

Hodir: Oneshot! After the last two weeks' wipe bonanza this was very odd - but well done! Was a close shave as we were merely seconds from the timer, and included a few people getting frozen (>.>) and possibly an early death or two.

The dps on Hodir was the stuff of legends, and without the excitement of "omg hardmode kill imminent!!1" and people getting frozen/icicled we can probably do even better. Was fun chasing moonbeams as a boomkin..


There's one thing that's clear from all the hardmodes we've been doing lately, our normal mode healing assignments are being sorely tested! Hardmodes are especially unforgiving of crosshealing - so we'll have to be more specific as to who does what on raid healing. Example:

- (Normal mode assignment): D on Cardinal, Zuzu on Gimil, Zuzu and Marv "on raid". Normally Zuzu and I crossheal a fair bit, and even go in and mess with D's bacon.
- (Hard mode assignment): With the assignment above, the moment we start to crossheal on the raid someone WILL die as healing required is heavier and there's bigger specials. So need to specify that Zuzu heals G1 and Marv heals G2, or Marv heals potted/bombed/rooted/?? people.

If you have any ideas on how to improve healing assignments and make them a bit more RNG proof, let me know!

Marveen wrote:Saturday 27th June
Hodir: Oneshot! After the last two weeks' wipe bonanza this was very odd - but well done! Was a close shave as we were merely seconds from the timer, and included a few people getting frozen (>.>) and possibly an early death or two.

The dps on Hodir was the stuff of legends, and without the excitement of "omg hardmode kill imminent!!1" and people getting frozen/icicled we can probably do even better. Was fun chasing moonbeams as a boomkin..

I think Taqwa mentioned that this fight is almost 100% RNG on top of DPS. Thankfully he and Ak benefitted from it in our first attempt and threw out some huge numbers.

We were far ahead of the timer in terms of DPS - however we had two people frozen at the first Flash Freeze (or was it the second?) which can be avoided. If this is done, then like you said - the fight will be a lot smoother.

Yeah, everything I've read about Hodir hardmode says that he's so random that it's just silly.

Read about one raidgroup who was having a hard time meeting the enrage timer, then they did it in under 3 minutes just out of luck of Storm Power.

Yeah, we should be better at avoiding flash freeze - happens to me too, too often.
On the bright side, when I'm stormpowered, it's very easy to break people out of Blocks, heh.



The kill was pretty funny, I thought we weren't on time, wasn't looking at the health or timer, then suddenly I realize you lot are sounding rather excited on Vent... :p
I think Card said that Bal had the highest Storm Power uptime in the raid, followed by Akari, with me somewhere around 20%?

Mnemo wrote:Yeah, everything I've read about Hodir hardmode says that he's so random that it's just silly.
The kill was pretty funny, I thought we weren't on time, wasn't looking at the health or timer, then suddenly I realize you lot are sounding rather excited on Vent... :p
I think Card said that Bal had the highest Storm Power uptime in the raid, followed by Akari, with me somewhere around 20%?

Aye - it was so rushed at the end that we lost about six people to icicles.

No idea about the Storm Power %. But I know I can put out more DPS than 6k so just poor RNG for me there - on the bright side I did see a 39K Lightning Bolt which was pleasant.

I think we had the worst Flash Freeze I've seen - it was miles away from him and half the people needed cleansing which lost us time as well. But I'm pretty sure we can pull this off every week if we have a similar set-up.

Hehe, yeah - I was doing some pretty majestic Starfires by chasing lightwells near the bonfires. And when someone said on Vent "we're way ahead on DPS" I started running around in a circle from excitement and got myself frozen! That, and the last 20 seconds or so of the kill were not optimal dps as I wasn't refreshing DoTs in case we missed the timer..

Crazy first (hard) kills.

Hodir is RNG aye, i've read a fair bit about it over the past couple of weeks and its pretty god damn random. As Taq has said, Ensidia had the same problem as us. They killed him after a week. Then failed to do so for 3 lock outs, now they have not failed to kill him under 2:30 for ages. There RL made a comment the other day on MLG which summed it up.

"STUPID FUCKING LOL FIGHT WITH LOADS OF LOL IN IT JUST OLOLOLOLOLOLOL DIE!"

Yes. He is clearly the missing link in human evolution....

Regarding Thorim, I suffer here once out of the gauntlet. The sheer amount of movement and with the way bacon works I get fucked like a 18 year old porn star.

Let me explain, hopefully with out metaphores...!

Gaunlet = piss easy

Phase 3! (YES ITS FUCKING 3 none belivers!)

I had problems at the start as recount was buggering my UI. So I couldn't set a focus and CTRA decided to not play ball, though once I logged in again that night it showed every one's targets on my screen including NPC's! (joy)

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!

If we did go 2 healers this might be a good fight for me to go DPS. (And yes ill enchant my shit)

FAYA looks to be easy yes, I think we can have that in a few pulls. x3 will probably be the ball breaker though.

D

On Hodir, Akari had Storm Power for almost 70% of the fight. Bal had it for over 50%. I had it for 40%, Taqwa for 30% and Dahlaine barely got it at all.

Storm Power can only effect 4 people at a time I think.

Last time we tried Hodir, nobody had Storm Power for over 30% except Taq. Changing that, plus having 9 from Team A, are the reasons I think we beat him so easily.

(You can see how long you had Storm Power for in the WOL report. Click on your name, then buffs gained, in the Hodir fight.)

It is vital that the healers and ranged run to the tank and give him the Storm Cloud buff ASAP. Our melee must have that buff up as much as possible. The tank can automatically spread it to them. There is still an RNG factor though. You can't make the NPC's buff Storm Cloud.

I think Gimi having his Frost Res gear also made healing him significantly easier, as he never dropped during Frozen Blows, and he certainly did last time without FR gear.

Next week our top priority remains beating the hard modes we've already licked, then Freya + 3.

Freya + 2 is just an achievement.

Mimiron is more of a gear-check hard mode than Freya, I'd wager, so he can wait till last though I need to do more research on this and see what other top Guilds recommend.