Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Tier 15 update

5.2 has been out for a couple weeks now. My guild has been working on the encounters and making some steady progress through normal mode. I don't think I could ever get used to downing all the normals in the first week. I get that guilds that do such things are usually playing on the PTR to learn all the mechanics beforehand. But I just feel that doing so would get me to the "burned out" stage more quickly. I mainly just want to be competitive on my own server; which we are. Currently ranked 5th at 5/12 normal Throne of Thunder. Ji-Kun should be dying on Thursday. We had a 0.8% wipe on our last pull Tuesday. That was heart breaking.

We finished out tier 14 with 5/6H(MSV) 1/6H(HoF) 4/4(ToES). Unfortunately that was only good enough for server 8th. We had a slow start though, so I'll attribute it to that. This tier however, things seem to be going a bit better...

We got Jin'rokh the Breaker down in 3 tries on the first night. Very easy fight, almost Morchok difficulty. The debuff he places on the tanks is a magic effect and therefore can be prevented with Anti-Magic Shell. That's the only real tip I have for dk tanks there. If you do prevent the debuff from being applied to you and the other tank still takes him, feel free to stand in the puddle with the rest of the raid group for the added damage.

Horridon proved to be a bit more difficult. Seems like such a cluster of things going on at once. It was definitely overwhelming, but we killed it after 16 tries. I ended up tanking the Gurubashi and Amani doors. The poison from the Gurubashi is brutal. The Amani warbears are probably the most annoying for me. They cleave and do a ton of physical damage. Anyone who isn't a tank can't survive more than a hit from them. To top this off, they have a rider on them that dismounts after the warbear is killed, which has it's own aggro table. When it dismounts, it likes to charge after the healers. Be wary of that.

Council of Elders took another 23 attempts to down. Despite it taking longer than the others, we were still on pace with 1 new boss kill per raid night, which I found very encouraging. We tried a couple different tanking strategies for this encounter. One where we traded Frost King Malakk while keeping him next to Sul the Sandcrawler. This meant that the High Priestess Mar'li tank would have to grab both Malakk and Sul. The problem was when people would interrupt Sul or Mar'li during a swap. Those bosses would then move to the tank that isn't supposed to have them anymore. We wanted to keep Mar'li from Malakk and Sul. So we ended up not doing any swap at all. I tank both Sul and Malakk until they're dead. This means eating the stun Malakk does. Popping a cooldown or 2 for each stun is pretty much mandatory. Supposedly you can avoid the stun by preventing Frigid Assault from stacking to 15. This is said to be possible with enough avoidance. So far, I have yet to be able to prevent it. But hey, I'm no bear tank with 60+% dodge.

Tortos was next and took 27 tries. Getting the turtle kicking part down contributed to a lot of those though. Wiping on the first breath attack doesn't seem like much of an attempt. I ended up being the bat tank for this fight. Those little guys can be annoying to pick up. Deadly Boss Mods doesn't seem to have a timer for them yet. But they came up every 30 seconds or so. Death and Decay was either off cooldown or about to come off each time they came down. It seemed to happen after each Quake Stomp, at least after the Rockfalls slowed down from it. They are immune to damage until they're completely down, which makes them somewhat frustrating. They also liked to go after the tank on the boss. Sometimes it made it easier to pick them up, but only if that tank didn't use really any aoe. For some reason Pestilence wasn't spreading diseases from Tortos to the bats even when I tanked them basically on him so the melee could cleave everything. I tested it with the Glyph of Pestilence as well. Perhaps they have to be basically right under the center of him.

Megaera took another 18 tries before a kill. That fight seemed rather brutal, which might be why they nerfed some of the damage the following week after our kill. We used the strategy of just killing Venomous and Flaming heads the whole fight. For awhile, people were dying to Rampage and the dot from Cinders. Leaving the Frozen Head up the whole fight means that Hydra Frenzy will stack pretty high. The breath attacks from the Frozen head weren't so bad. But the melee damage became a bit much near the end. I found using Dancing Rune Weapon would help a lot though.

Ji-Kun is our current project. I have gone dps on this fight since unholy aoe is pretty crazy right now. Only issue I've been having is my ghoul. I was a little worried he would despawn when I would go to the nests since he'd stay attacking Ji-Kun for a bit while I was flying around. But he seems to be working ok with that, just showing up next to me when I start attacking the eggs much like a hunter pet. But sometimes he takes a few seconds to get there. So I'll be using Death Coil to transform him to do more aoe and he won't be getting the Dark Infusion stacks, despite the UI displaying he is. Annoying that Dark Transformation was lit up when I really only had 3 stacks on him and not the 5 it was displaying.

Hopefully we'll get to Durumu the Forgotten on Thursday. I need to refresh on that fight a bit. The maze section seemed like it's going to pose the largest problem for us. I can see people panicking and running through a section they shouldn't be. But we'll see.

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