[25] Hodir hard mode threat

[callimar]

So, we took a crack at hard mode the other night. Now the kill took us 5 min but that has more to do with idiots eating too much biting cold and dieing than anything else. It was also a half hearted attempt in that we had 7 healers and 2 of the melee dps were tank off specs. My issue though is maintaining agro while mages are cracking off 60k crits. For our last attempt of the night I managed to do 4700 dps and sustained 10402 threat over 5 min. Yet I was no where close to being able to maintain the threat I needed for the fight even while our top dps by the end of the fight was right at 9800, he did push 11.5k for a while but had to stop or he would have pulled.

We only had one rogue and one hunter so the MD's and Tricks were not coming in as regularly as I would have liked. Also, for reference I have watched a couple of kills with pallies MTing the encounter and they finished the raid with about 1.8 mil threat over 3 min. I had generated ~1.9mil threat at the 3 min mark and DPS was still pulling agro like no bodies business.

One thing that has been brought up to me is having a mage push to 130% threat and then just taunting off of them to get that huge threat boost. I tried to check this in some videos I watched and it seemed like this was the case as I saw said pally doing 30k+ threat as he screamed past a mage at 130% threat. I haven't tried this so I thought this would be the place to ask.

My rotation is DP > AS > EXOR > HS > SOTR > JUDGE > HOTR > CONS
HS > SOTR is because I have the new libram. I also substitute Exor in for judge when I can because of glyphs.

Any tips from those of you how have already done this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

-Cal

[Splug]

Mirror Images mute out the mages' threat for their duration, so they can fly as high as they want for ~25 seconds, then pop invisibility at the end and go back to zero. That should give you almost a third the fight for a threat lead, and it probably still will get close by the end. Just remember: the time that mage has where his threat is nullified is a fixed quantity. It becomes a larger relative portion (and thus, longer percentage of the encounter's worth of threat lead) when the fight is 3 minutes than it would be if the fight is 7 minutes.

-Splug

[Faro]

Make sure you're getting tagged by the storm cloud as well. It really helps for threat.

Having the mage go up to 130% is fine for single tanking, but I wouldn't go for it if you're duo tanking due to taunt DR. That has more to do with my taunt DR paranoia than anything though, I've had it kick in at times when I know it shouldn't .

[callimar]

Splug thanks
Faro, been 1 tanking it since the get go =)

[Faro]

Splug thanks
Faro, been 1 tanking it since the get go =)

Then abuse the **** out of your mages !

[Spamdrew]

That is the other thing. If they are really starting to ride you pull him away from the threat monkey and then egg them on to overtake you. One taunt after they pull agro and you get a nice big threat jump as long as you do it right.

[d503]

My guild got this 2 nights ago. One thing I had all the ranged do was save their cooldowns 'til after the first Flash Freeze. That way they were using cooldowns when they were assured that 25 stacks of Singed are up and the Crit buff has spread around a bit, they'll get more effectiveness of their cooldowns.

That way, I've had time to build my threat lead as well, and benefit from Singed and the crit buff.

Two attempts, DPS pulled off of me because they balled too outrageous, and he was on them before I could do anything. I think I remember hearing the words, "121k incinerate, I'm sorry!"

Make sure they're being good about watching omen, your rotation looks solid.

Might help too if you make sure you're only wearing 2pc of FrR gear (I use Boots, Belt, and have FrR Aura and I'm fine).

Good luck!

[PsiVen]

That is the other thing. If they are really starting to ride you pull him away from the threat monkey and then egg them on to overtake you. One taunt after they pull agro and you get a nice big threat jump as long as you do it right.

I actually encourage someone to pull aggro before the first flash freeze, so I can taunt off them and not worry for the rest of the fight. Of course, it's playing with fire, so don't try this at home.

I noticed one thing on the WMO record-holders that I should have realized: You can use SoB for this one, if your healers don't complain too much. It scales well with the haste and crit buffs, putting it far above SoV for damage here. I've no idea how some guys are posting over 5500 DPS, but I imagine SoB is most of the difference along with higher buff uptime in longer kills.

Make sure your raid is using their threat drops and buffs effectively. A pally tank pulling 4k DPS puts out enough threat for others to pump 11k. Modifiers and tricky taunts let you squeeze out more, I think our highest casters were around 13k this week.

[Kihra]

One thing to watch out for here is moving too much as a tank. It's really good for the stability of the fight to move as little as possible. For example, if you are constantly running around looking for beams to get your melee in, you might accidentally move Hodir too close to your ranged dps, and the threat pulloff for them decreases from 130% to 110% when you do that. Therefore your moving can actually get your ranged dps suddenly 1-shot.

My strategy as MT on this fight is usually to just let ranged DPS go completely nuts, and I just wait for the top one to get aggro and then taunt. Then you have a really big threat lead over the other ranged. In general with this fight you should only be threatened by the "luckiest" caster, i.e., the one that got all the buffs. If you use that guy as a means to jump your threat up, then you often won't have any threat issues for the rest of the fight.

[tylernemeth]

The "taunt off reckless dps" strat works out best for our mt. We have one mage who is ridiculous with dps, on our last kill for hard mode we recorded him doing 17k dps. Noone, can hold agro against that without taunts. Our strat is balls to the wall dps with taunts for tanks to hold agro. I really wish we would have WWS that fight cuz it was almost world highest mimiron hard mode dps and that would have been awesome to post on EJ. But generally for that fight the taunting strat is the best for threat imo.

*edited for typos*

[callimar]

Thanks for all the info. I was loosing my mind trying to figure out wth I was doing wrong and it was getting old simply hearing, "well, just generate more threat."