I've been slacking again with this. Just needed some new material, I think. So with 4.3 out and guilds going to town on Dragon Soul, I figured now is about the time to update.
The main thing I seem to keep hearing from other players is that Dragon Soul is very easy. I don't know if it actually is, seeing as this is my first time entering a tier in heroic gear from the previous, but they might be right. My guild one shot Morchok with ease. Seems most guilds are going at least 4/8 in the first day or so. We've managed to get to 5/8 and still have one more raid night before reset. I think the only thing that's been holding us back in simple mistakes. Standing in fire (or ice), just generally being noobs when it comes to these fights. In all honesty, we are. We didn't do any of these on the ptr and haven't done any raid finder as a group. A couple people have done some of that, which is why they have a little more insight. But generally speaking, we have no idea what's going on with these fights aside from what we've read and watched in videos.
Honestly, if any guild is having issues with Morchok, they're doing something wrong. He doesn't even hit tanks all that hard. Yes, there's a tank swap. Yes, I died at one point due to a taunt being a little late and me taking a ton of damage due to the stacking Crush Armor he puts on us, but otherwise it was a simple kill.
Warlord Zon'ozz is a really interesting fight. The game of ping pong you have to play with the purple orb he summons is very different. After a few wipes, we found a good position to allow better control of that. Too often was melee having to run out to get in the path of the orb and then the tank had to drag the boss into it's path if we wanted to reset Focused Anger. I suggested having the tank just move the boss to the side very slightly and face him towards that side which then put the melee stack right behind him and thus right in the path of the orb. The boss was also still in the path as he's huge like all bosses in wow. So that made it easy for use to move out of the way when we wanted it to hit Zon'ozz. Healing was extremely rough once the orb hit him. But with people rotating cool downs, we got him down.
Yor'sahj the Unsleeping is another interesting fight. Summoning different Globules and having a kill order dependent on which ones he summons. Took some refining, but he wasn't so bad either. Some combinations proved to be extremely difficult for healers, but others seemed like a vacation. Tank damage is fairly low and despite the tank swap, there's a significant amount of down time in terms of that damage since he doesn't melee the tank while summoning the globules. This allowed me to heal myself back to full each time while the healers followed the group around killing the chosen globule. When all was said and done, I ended up with my t13 leg token.
Next up was Hagara the Stormbinder. This is basically the Alysrazor of this tier, though I feel there's less going on. It's still an execution/stay alive and win type of fight. Lots of obstacles to avoid. Ice Wave proved to be an issue for a lot of people since, seemingly like all things in wow, the graphic and actual effect didn't match up. So you could appear to be 5-10 yards from the graphic yet still get hit with it and die. The other issue we ran into was breaking people out of Ice Tomb. We eventually had our hunter call out which tomb had priority and tried to get both people affected with the debuff to run into the center before they were encased in the tomb. This proved to be very helpful. Melee had to do less running around and the first person, usually a healer, was broken free fairly quick. One wipe we had was at 1%, so maddening when that happens. We ended up not killing her the first night and came back for our second raid night and finished her off. I received my t13 shoulder token from her as well.
Ultraxion has to be my favorite encounter of this tier so far. That fight seems to be designed specifically with a dk tank in mind. All the magic damage going out combined with the tank cool down reduction makes it extremely easy for me to stay alive through seemingly everything. We had some wipes due to people not understanding that Fading Light works like Searing Seeds from Majordomo Staghelm. The debuff is applied with a random length before the ability actually happens. For Fading Light, it's between 5 and 10 seconds. Heroic Will only lasts for 5 seconds, so you have to activate Heroic Will only when you have less than 5 seconds left before Fading Light goes off. Many deaths were had due to this. Eventually people got it down. I suggested taking all of Ultraxion's Hour of Twilight attacks as I would always have Anti-Magic Shell up and every other time I would have Icebound Fortitude (50% damage reduction through Blood talents) up as well. With the two up, I was somehow only taking 8-9k damage from that attack. With only AMS up, I would take 100k. Either way, I could easily survive it and still have multiple cool downs to choose from to use in combination with AMS. After working out the kinks, we got him down. Healing at the end was once again insane. Seems this tier is all about putting the healers through hell at points in the fight. As for loot, the shared boss table tanking ring dropped and my tier chest token as well. I felt really bad about already getting 2 pieces, so I passed on the token and just rolled with the other tank on the ring. He won it yet still offered it to me. Good guy, but he definitely deserved to keep it.
Pro Tip: If using a dk tank for Ultraxion, have them use Army of the Dead before Thrall gives out the Last Defender of Azeroth buff. For some reason it resets all cool downs. This might be because until the hot fix today, Army was being affected by the buff. But at least when I used it at the beginning with another dk (frost), I was able to use it again right after getting the buff from Thrall. My original Army was still up and so was his. So we ended up with 3 armies up. It was pretty funny to see.
Warmaster Blackhorn is the fight I have been fearing this tier. Riggnaros was in a video I linked a few entries back where he was destroyed on the ptr by this boss. I wonder if he had more than 2 stacks of Devastate on him at the time since it reduces armor by 20% per application. Either way, add control was proving to be an issue for us. We started work on Blackhorn late so we didn't expect to get him down. We should get him Monday night when we next head in.
Looks like I'll have to read more in-depth on the Spine of Deathwing encounter then. One thing I will say about these fights, they're fun, at least for me. I'm mainly happy to know that dk survivability isn't in a bad place right now. We'll see how that holds up once we get into heroics. For fights like Morchok, Yor'sahj and Ultraxion, it was fairly easy for me to max out my Blood Shield before taunting the boss off the other tank. I gotta say, sitting there at max health with a 200k physical absorption shield really gets me pumped. The addition of 2 more charges to Bone Shield seems to be working pretty well. AoE fights still give me trouble keeping it up as it seems Blizzard still hasn't addressed that yet. I'm sorry, but 200 fire damage from an AoE should not eat a charge from Bone Shield. That's crazy considering I'm going to get hit with like 10 of those in succession in most fights with raid wide AoE. My only hope is to get Bone Shield up close to a minute before the AoE starts so I can put it back up once the AoE is done.
