Avg's DPS# for HLM?

[MJavert]

Hey All,

After killing both Halazzi and Jan'Alai for the first time on Sunday w/o much difficulty (1 shot on Halazzi and 3-shot on Jan'Alai) we set aside some time to try and kill HLM last night and it was full of problems that we didn't anticipate.

After trying a few strategies (tried killing all the adds before going to HLM and the healers were OOM 6 minutes into the fight tank death => wipe) We decided to nuke only 1 of the adds (the snake) and then proceed to keep up the CC and concentrate dps on HLM. But still, we got him to ~55% before the healers were OOM from healing through the spirit bolt phases. We had 2 holy priests specced into CoH as well as a very well geared Resto Shaman spamming chain heal.

My question is this: Healer OOM suggests that the DPS is not ahead of the damage that HLM is dealing to the raid. So...what is a good avg raid dps # benchmark to use when bringing players for attempts on this guy? We've only got access to Kara/Gruul's drops, Badge Rewards, and Craftables atm. Thanks!

MJ

[Snake-Aes]

"badge gear" today really represents a lot. How much dps are your guys pulling? It can very well be a case of bad healer endurance, too. Please tell me they're not decked in S2/S3 gear.

[MJavert]

The priests are in mostly kara epics...one of them got his T5 shoulders off of Void Reaver this past weekend...and the Resto Shaman has gear from TK, SSC, as well as some drops from BT and Hyjal so I don't think it was the healers...

I had my 2 mages up in the 800-900 range...the lock in the 750's and then a rogue in the 550's and a spriest in the low 500's but he was dealing with the shackle so it obviously hit his overall dps...I don't know what happened, by all means we should have done better than an OOM death at 50%. *shrug* I can't get my head around it unless I'm just not taking enough DPS.

Thx,
MJ

[Snake-Aes]

Only difference between shackle and polymorph, for the caster, is that shackled targets don't move. it's the same cast time and refreshing mechanic.

Guild's in t5/badge gear and most of them output 900 to 1200 dps. A rogue with t5 level gear really shouldn't stay under 800 unless he has to run around a lot

[inthedrops]

I'm no expert here. I've attempted malacross probably 20 times, and we've killed him ONCE. Our guild doesn't have ZA on the calendar so we get a mix of different people every time.

Here's what I can tell you based on my experience so far.

First, what works one day won't work the next. So what you were doing in regard to changing your add strategy is the right thing. Keep playing with that.

The day that we killed him we had a really weird strat but it worked. We actually only brought in ONE tank, a warrior. So I dropped off my Tankadin and brought my Warlock, the other Tankadin we often have brought his mage. We also had a hunter and priest. Everything else I don't remember. We very carefully planned which add would die first and instead of having the dps'd add tanked we kited it. Sounds dumb but it allowed us to bring in an extra DPS. Before each shadow bolt volley, we ensured that we had the next add down. But we kept them all under CC until the shadow bolt volley was finished, then we worked the next add. I have to admit I don't remember if we killed all the adds or left some up. This was a bit ago. I think we left two cc'd for the remainder.

But the point is that we were able to find a way to bring in an extra dps and that was enough to push us over the top to DPS the guy down. Maybe you can find a clever way to bring fewer tanks and more dps like we did. I am pretty sure only the Ogre (who was the first to kill) needed to be kited but I'm not positive!

Sorry so long.

Oh and to answer your question about dps. My warlock usually does 900 plus on most boss fights. But this fights really kills my dps due to banish duty and shadow vollies. I think I was barely pushing 700 and the others weren't much more than that. I doubt anyone was over 900 but perhaps the rogue.

[Snake-Aes]

The strat that worked best for us yesterday was perma-ccing 2 of the 4 targets...target 1(elemental) would be killed, then the target 2(snake, cced till after the spirit bolts), then the boss.

Turns out this fight is fairly simple if the adds are well controlled, got him down in 3 attempts with dps averaging at 800~ per dpser.
Fun part is that I was responsible for both previous wipes Consecration is op.

[dab]

Shadow absorption potions have been a great help for us to help survive the last shadow wave.

Other than that it is a DPS race.

[Snake-Aes]

Also, circle of healing is OP.


The "Race" doesn't start until he's at 80%, so take your time to manage the adds as necessary.

[2ndNin]

Am going to ask something silly, did you interrupt enough?

Hex Lord is really a fight of 3 stages:

Stage 1:
.... Start dpsing ads, try and kill 2, cc 2.

Stage 2:
.... 60s into fight first spirit bolts go off, ideally 1 add down, group stays on the adds until both down, interrupter moves to the hex lord if its a druid, priest, shaman or paladin.

Stage 3:
.... 2nd add down, everyone focuses on the boss and remembers to interrupt, healers try and regen mana / keep tank up during normal phase, then blow it all during the bolts, repeat till dead.

Up until the first set of bolts its nice and easy, then you really need to watch for heals, a single heal negates a large amount of dps, and letting cc get broken will hurt. You want to down this guy basically within that 6 minutes, anything longer and your healers will be in a lot of pain keeping the raid up.

[Snake-Aes]

That's something I forgot to mention =( The most important part of the fight once the adds are down and you start racing is to counter his abilities. All healer classes will give him a heal when drained. Druids are specially bad because you can't interrupt most healing, but you can steal it(healers are happy to see magi stealing it) or purge it. He died just after the second stack of his drain soul debuff.

[Wulfhere]

We just killed him for the 1st time last week on our 1st night of real attempts. Raid DPS was ~4000 for the death. It looks like most of our DPS did slightly less than they normally do. It took us just under 5 min to kill him, we killed 2 adds.

We had a feral druid sleep the snake, then tank the elemental in cat gear. Elemental add dead just at the start of the 1st spirit bolt. Leave 3 adds CC'd during spirit bolts, then feral druid tanked the ogre add that was sheeped and the mage CC moved to the snake add. Feral druid to cat form for remainder of the fight.

We used 1 priest with a mainly PVP spec (sigh), 1 resto shaman, and 1 holy paladin. Using 2 CoH priests + resto shaman seems OP for the fight. I can't see how the healers were OOM at 55% with a shadow priest.

The problem may have been HLM getting off too many heals. When he soul drains a druid, make sure Lifebloom is purged/spell stolen. Priest, pally, and shaman soul-drain heals need to be interrrupted. (Edit: beaten to the punch )

As long as the adds are controlled, it shouldn't be too bad. Here is our WWS ( http://wowwebstats.com/2rgjavacn3tl5 ), it will expire in a couple of weeks.

[2ndNin]

It doesn't start at 80%, it starts roughly 1ish minutes into the fight, we never have him at 80% by the first drain (first add downed normally, 2nd being started). Soul drains start as soon as the first shadow volley goes, which generally means 1 interrupter moves to the hex lord and the tank, the rest stay on the adds until the 2nd is dead. After that provided you have an interrupt for the heals its easy, if you get a shaman, hunter, warrior, or rogue drain its stupidly easy, paladin / mage are probably the hardest (paladin makes tank + all melee move, need to make sure pets leave fast, mage does massive damage to targets).

The soul drain also drops your damage each time (1%, 10% increased damage from him), so you effectively have a soft enrage timer, if you are hitting enough soul drains the volley will start to get very harsh.

[maccalus]

He drains soul from the beginning of the fight, but the debuff to the raid/buff to him doesn't start till he hits 80%.

[ehly]

Hmm, well I'm not sure on the benchmark. Our mostly t5 geared guild gets about 700-1000 on Hexx. My ZA group is the only one that mets normally in our guild, as most others have given up since they had mixed results in pvp/kara gear.

Here is a parse of our last run. We sub'd in a couple new people, but still got 3chests. http://wowwebstats.com/sokazae444oxc?s=5651-5908

[MJavert]

Still having problems with Malacrass. We've gone as far as to start farming Shadow Primals for the aldor rep SR necklace. I don't quite know what the problem is.

This week we one shot all of the bosses prior to Malacrass with little/no difficulty. But when we got up there to do our 2 hour progression attempt on Malacrass, we kept on wiping due to people dying to add management or Soul Siphoned abilities + spirit bolts.

This time we insisted on killing all the adds before working on malacrass in order to insure that our DPS were on task dealing damage instead of worrying about CC, but it did not work to our advantage. Indeed, the most successful attempt (~75% i know, utter fail) was when I AoE tanked 2 adds + malacrass and we burned them that way. I think for our next attempt we will focus on burning the ONE add that can't be CC'ed or CC resistant adds and then all on malacrass. Also thinking about keeping an interrupter on Malacrass for the whole fight to make sure that none of his nastier stuff gets out.

A few questions:

What of his abilities are interruptible?

The Nova Totem: Avoid or Kill?

Warlock DoT's: Call a Cleansebot in Vent?

Thanks,
MJ