Durumu got some graphical fixes after our first attempts on the boss, and the change was distinct. Given how much bad press the maze got, I’m personally (this is not necessarily the view of <Fidelity> as a whole) convinced it was a mistake to release it with the change from PTR. I’m biased, since I think patch 5.2 was just a touch early anyway.

Now with the maze less of an issue, it is still a pretty tense mechanic, with the path opening up so close to the instant death beam as to be unnerving at times. The maze is just one of those pass / fail mechanics you have to experience, loathe, understand and then enjoy. It’s what I call the 4 stages of learning mechanics in raiding.

Speaking of pass / fail mechanics… Force of Will from Durumu’s Mind’s Eye is just nutty. The dark cone is very hard to see, and if you rely on a DBM warning (DESTRUCTION!)… when it doesn’t go off you are in trouble. It’s not hard to avoid, but there’s enough going on with the rest of the encounter that it can be demoralizing. Psychologically, I think there is a big difference between doing something silly, getting killed with the potential of a battle res, and getting flung out of line of sight never to return.

We handled Life Drain well, with a daisy chain participating to keep the stacks low. Reducing the healing the boss receives makes a big difference to the DPS required to beat the enrage, which is important on a progression kill.

We ran Lingering Gaze puddles out as far as possible, mostly so that they didn’t interfere with navigating the maze.

For Light Spectrum, we have some seriously eagle eyed raiders… or I’m particularly bad at spotting the flashes for the crimson fog locations. Tanks soak the bright light, while healers and DPS are split between the red and blue beams while hunting down the crimson fog.

Once the mean time to an individual failing on a boss mechanic gets high enough, you have a good chance at a kill! (It’s before 9pm right now).

Learning the Ji-Kun fight was a lot of fun, and there is plenty of room to improve on executing the mechanics to really master the fight.

After having a few pulls on the boss, our approach boiled down to using the minimum number of characters to take care of the nests, and getting the most out of the Primal Nutriments buff. We had dual Death Knights and a healer focus completely on nest duty. They devised a system so that they could refresh their Daedalian Wings to consistently fly to nests without running out of charges.

Each of the remaining DPS would jump down to a lower nest in turn, primarily to grab the wings for use back on the main platform. When Ji-Kun cast Feed Young, they would take flight and grab a food globule to prevent it hitting the platform, and to increase their DPS by 100% via Primal Nutriment.

The goal of this strategy is to maximise the DPS on Ji-Kun so that by the time two nests become active at once, you can ignore nests after taking care of the lower nest, and have everyone burn the boss with a couple of Juveniles active. It does require that the DPS on Ji-Kun maximise Primal Nutriment, and wreak havoc on the boss, and that the two DPS on nest duty can clear the upper nests as a duo. Our first kill was 7m22s long, and as Juveniles hatch, it isn’t fair on the healers to ask them to keep everyone up much longer than that. For reference we had Time Warp at 6 minutes in.

We were pretty aggressive at soaking slime at the beginning of the fight, and here what it looked like as the boss went down.

OMG, there’s a giant #@%ing exclamation point! I have a quest… Requiem for a Queen.

Oh no… I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up.

It is super simple, really. Instead of a mechanical monster to kill, it’s a banshee. Only she has a knock back and aggros from about 4325259790 yards away.

I don’t have any explanation for it, but after dealing with the windy bridge for weeks without problem, the sudden appearance of an auto accept “optional” quest made us lose our shit. People were getting flung from the bridge in a fashion that can only be described as willy nilly and accidentally aggroing the banshee, much to the detriment of the guild coffers.

However, we prevailed, and as I managed to catch up on the guild blog I thought we could all look back on this fateful quest and have a good laugh.

For our kill, we were fortunate to have four healers available (thanks again, Avi). So we put aside any notion of killing the frosty head, and just powered through with venomous / flaming… repeat.

Having a major healing cooldown for every rampage was fantastic, and we even paired up a little cooldown (Devotion Aura) to go with a couple.

We tank swapped at two breaths, but it’s important to note that we didn’t have any more than three for any head. Once we have the DPS to consistently nail each each head in only two breaths per phase, we can avoid the tank swap and three healing will become a lot easier. I’ll update the post (or add a new one) with any alternative strategies we come up with.

We started out the usual way on Tortos, with one tank on Tortos, and the other picking up the adds. We tried Noondez turning on Righteous Fury so that the bats would head to the same healer each time…

… but then we realised while Hagrim is pretty short… he’s a whole lot of Paladin.

P A L A D I N.

So let me hit you with some numbers real quick.

DPS: 280k. More than double any of the DPS.

HPS: 64k. More than any healer. More than a PALADIN healer!

With a Hagrim putting out that volume of heals, the bats head to him like him like a drone heading to a very attractive queen. Only with consecrate. The vengeance stacked from tanking both the bats and Tortos is huge for overall DPS, but also DPS into Tortos, with Hagrim doing more than 2.8 times the DPS into Tortos than the cleaving melee.

The downside is the burst into our lone tank.

Some of those spikes while tanking bats and getting hit with Snapping Bite are a little scary, and can lead to a dangerous vampire activity from the bats with Drain the Weak. For our kill, our healers did a great job keeping that to a total of 245k for the whole fight.

Other than that we had ranged on turtle duty. It was nice to have a fight where they had to be conscientious, and we (melee) could just AoE like nobodies business. Velletara (Survival Hunter) pulled turtle kicking duty, and scored many a GOOAAAL! I finally caved, after having some luck with one handed weapons and tried out fury for the very first time ever, and picked a great fight with a ton of AoE (I still didn’t manage to keep up with Esta who used Unholy to wreak some havoc on that fight). Thanks to Skil and Aviola for coming in for the kill too.

Council of Elders can be a pretty hectic fight, with lots of sources of damage. We’ve also had experience doing this boss with between one and three melee, and having the job as the third melee means a whole lot of target switching.

For Frostbite, we put up two flares on opposite sides of the inner circle as nominal stack points for two teams of three characters. Quicksand can interfere with the stack point, as can characters standing not even close to the flare… but unless you say something over mumble, that’s not going to change… so you’ll just have to chase them down.

A large source of significant random damage is Sand Bolt from Sul. Esta (Carboxylate, Frost DK) parked on Sul, and between he and Hagrim (Prot Paladin) took care of interrupts. On our first kill, Noondez (Holy Paladin), Tarnus (Elemental Shaman) and Whipshamazin (Elemental Shaman) handed out interrupts as well.

Another benefit of this strategy is that Sul dies a lot quicker. We still need to deal with two casts of Sandstorm, but we can finish him off well before he becomes empowered again. The downside of this strategy is that the four other DPS need to kick it into high gear to ensure that we get through each empowered boss before Dark Power.

We didn’t tank swap for the majority of the fight, and Hagrim would be healed through Frigid Assault and the 15 second stun. The only time I would taunt (Borgthor, Prot Warrior) Frost King Malakk was at the start of Sandstorm to ease the damage into Hagrim and avoid a stun when overall raid damage is also very high.

Tanking High Priestess Mar’li all fight gave me a chance to change my set up significantly. My damage taken was over 80% magic, so I focused on interrupts and shield barrier, taking Disrupting Shout and dropping Glyph of Heavy Repercussions. Since I couldn’t take Piercing Howl for the Loa Spirit, I grabbed Glyph of Hindering Strikes  / Glyph of Incite for a slow, and Storm Bolt / Shockwave for stuns.

Thanks to Praka for coming in to heal!

Horridon is all about nuking adds. Aside from having the luxury of two Paladins to remove the Triple Puncture debuff from tanks, the fight progressed as it usually does.

The fight taxes healers quite a bit with a lot of dispelling required, some of which can be reduced by good interrupts on the Gurubashi door. Each door takes a some practise to execute cleanly and our kill came when we were familiar enough with each door that we could enter the next door without having too much from the previous door to clean up.

Horridon is the type of fight (as many are this tier) that when you hit a certain threshold of DPS, the fight becomes much, much easier. Blizzard wanted gear to matter, and for most raiders, the tuning is high enough on normal mode that week to week the additional power from gear (as well as improved execution) makes a big difference.

For the last phase of the fight, we stack on a flare beside the boss, nuke War-God Jalak there and finish off Horridon. It’s definitely worth saving a tank cooldown or two for Jalak and enraged Horridon, for while it is the easiest part of the fight, there can be some exciting tank damage to contend with.

Jin’rokh the Breaker is a nice introductory boss to tier 15, and it’s always nice to steamroll something when you first enter a new instance.

There is an art to kiting Focused Lightning away from the Conductive Water, and avoiding Implosion by kiting it through an existing Lightning Fissure. Otherwise there is a good amount to heal for Lightning Storm, a slightly different tank swap mechanic and then loot to collect! We blow heroism when all the ranged DPS comfortably have the fluidity buff for the first time, which is delightfully timed for proc based trinkets.

It was a treat to have Dambrath back in the mix for our first kill of the new raid, and I got to beak out the DPS gear .

Heroic Feng introduces a whole new phase, and you’re allowed to chose the order of the phases. We went with the standard order:

Spirit of the Staff, with heroism right off the bat to get through the phase quickly.

Spirit of the Shield, which is the new phase. We would always nullify the first shield, and kill the adds on the next. For the Siphoning Shield, it is important that all characters (including the tank not currently tanking) are a reasonable distance away from the shield as it spawns. It is a good idea to stack up so that all the adds are in the same place to be AoE’d down. It is more important to slow and burst down the adds than to attempt to keep them in place with stuns, since after being out for a small period, they will heal the boss without getting to the shield. It is worth using Shroud of Reversal for Shadowburn in this phase, since it does a TON of damage to Feng.

Spirit of the Fist. As per normal, a nullification for the raid or stunning the boss during epicenter is required to prevent healers from blowing cooldowns unnecessarily.

Spirit of the Spear. On heroic, the damage in this phase is a lot higher, especially since we left it for last. However, it is the easiest to deal with and by the time we got to this phase it was smooth sailing for a kill.

The Stone Guard heroic is a fun fight, purely for the disco floor. It was a while coming, but it was great to be back into heroic modes again, where a failure to execute can really mess you up.

The tank swapping is the same as normal, only if you fail, you all die. For normal modes, we had been running a strategy where one tank permanently had two puppies. It worked quite well to have vengeance stacked up in once place, and keeping the DPS focused on one tanks movement. For heroic, we changed that up so that the tank tanking one puppy would taunt when his puppy lit up.

Some of our DPS volunteered to paint the floor, and others had to be pressed into service when our volunteers were out of commission (either dead or dealing with Jasper Chains). There were a number of deaths to painters with the combination of damage from painting, damage from the rest of the encounter and range to healers (potentially because having range on tanks and the raid while dealing with Jasper Chains is problematic). So the painters got special attention (particularly if they volunteered or were a healer’s favourite) and we aimed for around 100 stacks to increase damage and mana regen.

We had quite a few (slightly prolonged) discussions about which puppies were the hardest to deal with. Here’s our consensus:

Jasper. Jasper Chains were the worst! In all of our kills on heroic, unfortunately we didn’t get to try it without Jasper Chains. Aside for the awkwardness of dealing with the other mechanics while also being tethered to another raider, and aside form the damage, the biggest issue with Jasper Chains was the impact on painting the floor. In the end we decided that unless the chained pairs were particularly keen, that once you were chained, you STOPPED painting. One of the other DPS or heals could pick up painting duty, or we could go with fewer stacks for a while.

Cobalt. Cobalt Mines really hurt on heroic, and were responsible for many deaths. They are harder to negotiate than Amethyst puddles, and add to the difficulty of dealing with Jasper Chains.

Amethyst. Yes, they hurt, but small puddles are small.

Jade. Jade is consistent extra raid damage. The kind that is well covered with HoTs (assuming they don’t all land as overheals).