[Faction Champions] A guide to this encounter

[Belloc]

Honestly, the way you deal with melee mobs is to kite them through snares. It's not really that difficult. If the ret paladin is the one giving you trouble, burn him down first. Set up a disarm rotation so that your melee don't have to run away when he targets them and just burn him.

We got our kill without ANY assigned CC (aside from telling our warlock to banish the druid when the kill target was at 20%). But, then again, we use the pet strategy, so healers don't heal the kill target until 20% or less. Just keep away from melee mobs -- kite them through frost. Unless you're facerolling the normal mode, you should have enough practice by now.

[Joanadark]

DoTs tick for like 6k. As a holy paladin, you shouldn't be healing, you should be dispelling and casting BoPs, Freedoms, and Sacs. Druids and Disc Priests should be the ones healing and they should be watching the aggro lights on their raid frames.

Oh, and don't forget you can cyclone the ret too.

[Worldie]

What joana says. The SP, the lock and the Moonkin are worthless as long as you dispel their dots, but if they are let tick then the damage is quite huge.

[Rinanth]

I haven't read through all the posts here, so somebody might've said this already, but I just thought I'd add a little tip:
If there is a pet, putting your team's pets on it will occupy a healer.
Yes, their healers really are that stupid (tends to mostly be the pally healer who does this) that they will spam heal the hunter's cat instead of the warrior.

By having our hunters set their pets on the hunter's pet, we basically make one of their healers CC themselves. Obviously this doesn't work for all combos, but my guild finds it really helpful.

[Rhiannon]

That tip's been said about once every page :p.

We tried out having our prot warrior/feral spam demo shout/roar all the time, following a suggestion from the R&D forums, and it seemed very effective in making a lot of the melee stick on them for a great portion of the fight.

[trellian]

On this fight I always stay prot, have DP up and autoattack the killtarget while playing whack-a-mole with my raidframes.

It's not fun, but at least I get to top the meters in some way...

[Worldie]

Pff i'm constantly breaking the dispel meters (Second only to the mass dispeller) by speccing ret in prot gear, mobs will occasionally focus on me but with my 50k hp they can't hurt me, and i got infinite mana via JotW =)

[Niinbob]

Just something my guild noticed, and we have been using the past several weeks, is the adds always seem to focus the lowest % health person in the raid (duh) so I put on 2 stam trinkets to get as much hp as I can, about 63k fully buffed, and charge in first.

The healers try and keep me between 40-60% hp for the duration of the fight, and every champion focuses me.

Like clockwork as soon as I hit 100%hp, they all leave me and the fight turns into kiting again, but if you can manage keeping a tank around 40-60%hp they will continue to try and kill him

I think we manage (while chaining cooldowns) to get the first 2-3 of them dead before they stop attacking me because none of the DPS have to kite, they can just stand and DPS until I am topped off

Sorry if this has already been said but I didn't see it anywhere and it works wonderful

EDIT: I forgot to note that I take all my gear off and requip it before I pull, so I start at like 40%hp when I charge, altho I am not sure that part is required

[Koatanga]

I don't know if what I have been experiencing relates to the health thing, or something else. We have our two rogues sap two of the targets, then I pull with my shield. Everything immediately attacks me, as planned.

I seal and judge Justice, which has in the past led to OOM issues. To prevent that, I have swapped to using my healing shield and weapon.

Since I started swapping those out, I am like crack to them. Immediately after the pull, I have the attention of ALL of the DPS, and I hold their attention for a very long time (30 sec?). This is followed by a free-for-all where they go aroung gibbing people until they suddenly remember I am around and come cling to me again.

I take a bit of damage, but I have the attention of all my healers, so I am not consistently low in health.

I use TidyPlates so I can see by the nameplate colour what mob is aggroed to me and what is not. For the vast majority of our 25-man last night, I had everything. This is not to say that they don't still cast spells at our people even though they are aggroed to me, but the melee attack me exclusively.

The health trick mentioned above sounds very similar to what I am experiencing, with the exception that there is a place in the fight where they do drop aggro on me and then return.

If it matters, our group last night was:

Warrior
Enhance Shaman
Death Knight
Rogue
Warlock
Hunter
Shadow Priest
Holy Priest
Holy Paladin
Resto Druid

Warrior, Shaman, DK, and Rogue were all on me most of the time. We killed Resto Druid and Holy Paladin first.

[Dantriges]

So 25 faction champions heroic

How many healers do you take, how many do you assign to dispel, how many offensive how many defensive.
Problem with mage and hunter, ranged sometimes pick off casters and healers.

[Worldie]

Our usual setup is 5 healers, 2 defensive dispellers (usually the 2 prot pala, or prot + ret pala), 1 disc priest full time dispelling and mass dispelling, and 1 shaman with purge binded to every key.

[Dantriges]

Shaman elemental or enhancer I assume. Do you count the disci priest among the healers?
I assume it´s 6 healer minus the disci guy on dispel duty, or?

[Worldie]

That is indeed correct, and the shaman is either Enha, Elem, or both if we happen to actually have both in the raid.

I cannot stress enough how important dispelling (both offensive but expecially defensive) is for this fight. This fight is 50% about moving away from angry melees, and 50% about dispelling everything that is dispellable.

Note that, defensively, divided by type, you got:
Poison: Wounding Poison
Disease: Frost Fever
Curse: Curse of Exhaustion, Hex
Magic: Shadow Word Pain, Vampiric Touch, Moonfire, Insect Swarm, Chain of ice, Polymorph, Hammer of Justice, Psychic Scream, Fear, whatever im forgetting.

As you can notice, Curses can generally be ignored, thus paladins are the perfect dispellers since they can Cleanse everything else, and actually some times 2-3 debuffs at once.

[Belloc]

You left out Curse of Agony. Not that it makes too much of a difference, but it can kill.

[culhag]

- Cleanse: This is your best friend: no matter what's your spec, defensive dispelling is a very important part of this fight. As long as there arent Unstable Affliction going on (in that case dispel = oneshot), removing DoTs from people is very important.

You should remove that Unstable Affliction part.
It hits for like 10k when you dispell it, so it's really not a problem. I'd say that as a prot pally you should take care of the UAs.


One thing I found surprising – I haven't fought them a lot, so I don't know if it's normal or just something random – is that all the melee seemed to almost always stay on the warrior we used to open the fight with a charge.
It helped a lot, since they didn't bother our clothies too much, but I was surprised as I thought they'd focus random clothies and switch a lot.
It seemed to happen pretty consistently even when we came back the next week.

Is that normal or were we just lucky ?


EDIT: forget the question, I hadn't seen Joana's AI analysis.