« Archives in November, 2015

Mannoroth Heroic

Mannoroth Heroic Fidelity

Ouch. After making relatively quick work of Tyrant Velhari, Mannoroth proved to be a much more difficult challenge. We spent quite a bit of time facing the boss towards the center of the platform, with DPS stacked up against the green pillar. The number of times that we had someone feared through the ‘solid’ pillar to their death was extremely frustrating… especially after Blizzard grandly announced they had fixed that bug.

So we swung the boss around, and had two stack points to run between when Felseeker hit. With a lot more room to play with, there was much less risk of people getting punted off the platform by being slow to move on Felseeker. It even helped a little be with the odd person that was really out of position when they were targeted with Felseeker too. The other major advantage is that no one fell through the cracks after a fear.

Not even so much of a disadvantage as an adjustment was that people had to get used to the idea of good positioning for the Shadowforce push back. It is so much more severe than on normal, and a little bit of a shock to the system after many attempts just hoping you didn’t get pushed through the pillar to your unresurrectable death. The people being pushed back are very quickly out of range (rather than getting rammed into a pillar beside a healer) so dodging the Fel Hellstorm and topping people off was required to get through Shadowforce with consistency.

Extra DPS has a subtle, but important influence on the fight. If the imps and the infernals die quickly, they make positioning a great deal easier and leave some capacity to think about other mechanics of the fight clearly. In particular the combination of a Fel Imp-losion followed quickly by Mannoroth’s Gaze had the potential for some burst damage to anyone in the raid. With just a little bit of extra DPS we managed to avoid this altogether. However, some well timed stuns and AoE prevented the imps doing too much damage. Finally, there were some pulls where some very nice healing that outdid the imps burst DPS to save the day.

Of our 119 pulls on the boss, not too many saw us into phase three. Once we had the positioning sorted, got people to spread a little before the gaze… and then run like crazy from the Empowered Felseeker… we were well on our way to a kill. On the 118th pull… we were merrily trucking along. Everything was grand into the last phase, and we lost four people to Empowered Felseeker. We persisted and lost a couple more to the gaze. Still we kept at it, and got a little worried when the first tank went down. The bosses health inching down, towards victory… Finally when Esta went down, the boss had only 65k health remaining.

The next pull we killed him. Dead. Onto heroic Archimonde!