Logical Progression Path?

[Fetzie]

The first times I killed archavon and emalon they berserked, which was a distinct possibility in PuGs at any point.

If you play the boss crap, you will hit the enrage, indeed the first time we did argaloth we wiped to the enrage. Now we nuke him in 3 minutes, we knock 15-20% off during each flame phase.

anyone doing less than 12k dps isn't doing their job right. Just like me failing at retribution when our other tank wants to tank a boss

[fuzzygeek]

What is the logical progression path for working on heroic bosses? We downed Cho'gall with 0 deaths last night (which there should be an achievement for, IMO); Nef should die once kite tanks figure out wtf we're doing, and honestly we're beyond geared for it at this point. We do have people who have done Nef in 10m, so do have access to heroic BWD as well.

One of my more progression-oriented raiders is suggesting Chim -> Half -> Maloriak etc.

Although, now that I think about it ... Looking at % on wowprogress, it looks like the ordering goes something like:

h.BWD:
Chim (13.5%)
Maloriak (6.84%)
Atra (3.59%)
Omni (3.3%)
Magmaw (3.24%)
Nef (0.26%)

h.BoT:
Halfus (23.02%)
Double Dragons (1.27%)
Council (0.58%)
Cho'gall (0.43%)


I know Omni was nerfed somewhat, and they changed the mechanics of Halfus (Dragon's Vengeance doesn't apply until the drake is killed, which seems kind of obscene given shadow nova thing, but maybe I'm missing something).

I imagine the kill numbers are a fair representation of what would make sense, I guess.

[Belloc]

The heroic progression order I would suggest is:

Halfus
Chimaeron*
Maloriak
Atramedes*

At this point, look at your comp and figure out whether you'd prefer Omnitron or Conclave. Omnitron's difficulty lies in handling multiple elements that combine to kill you very quickly if you do not react perfectly. Conclave's difficulty lies in relying on multiple teams to handle their jobs well, which includes having 2 people bursting 150k damage within 3 seconds and a bunch of other people controlling adds so that they don't get destroyed.

Don't connect Dragon's Vengeance with Shadow Nova. They have nothing to do with each other. Dragon's Vengeance is the stacking damage taken buff on the boss, not the cast speed slow. As long as you've released Storm Rider, the shadow nova cast will be slowed.

Finally, I'm recommending Halfus first for a few reasons. First, he was nerfed to be much more forgiving on tank damage. He's still going to wipe you within 30-60 seconds during your learning attempts and that's fine -- don't get discouraged. The fight is 100% an execution check -- if you can handle it, you're ready. If you can't, your raid is going to need to improve (in individual skill and raid strategy, likely).

I've listed Chimaeron second because, lol, it is such an easy fight. I'm serious here -- if you follow the heroic thread, you should be able to get a kill on your first night of attempts (of course, don't be discouraged if that doesn't happen). I did put an asterisk next to it, though, because the burn phase is a DPS check (or an RNG check). If your DPS is strong, Chimaeron is the 2nd boss you should be working on. Otherwise, save it for 3rd.

Maloriak is listed as third (even though we worked on it second) because it is a more complicated fight than Chimaeron. There are so many things that you will need to learn as you progress through the fight. What do you do when your tank gets frozen? How do you handle a third fire breath when you only have 2 raid cooldowns? Should I let the add tank eat the breath, too? What do we do if I miss a kick on green phase aberrations? Etc. This fight will test your raid's ability to think outside of the box to come up with solutions that a normal raid would never think of. Some good info in the heroic Maloriak thread but, believe me, you're going to wipe and you're going to get annoyed.

Atramedes is listed as fourth because of the DPS check. The fight is, in all honesty, the second easiest fight in there... but it's very easy to screw up. It's also very easy to avoid the screw ups, but.. yeah. Oh, and the gongs suck royally. Anyway, you basically have to kill him before or during the fourth air phase, because that's your last gong... so, yeah, DPS check with zero tolerance for sound failure. Two ticks of the gong will usually kill someone if it deals full damage, so be thinking of ways to solve that problem... because, believe me, you will get two ticks a lot of the time.

After that, I'd say you're ready to decide for yourself!

[The_Marsh]

To give you an idea of how easy halfus heroic is, we walked in there without ever attempting it. 5 attempts later it was down. 3 tanks, 3 healers (1 disc priest), 4 dps. Just have your tanks have a focus interrupt for halfus, release everything, stack it, then AoE. Once you get all the other dragons down its almost a certain kill unless you fail by not having your free action potions/bubble interrupt, etc.

Sort of wished we hadn't cleared out BWD since now we have nothing else to progress/raid for the rest of the week.

[fuzzygeek]

Don't connect Dragon's Vengeance with Shadow Nova. They have nothing to do with each other. Dragon's Vengeance is the stacking damage taken buff on the boss, not the cast speed slow. As long as you've released Storm Rider, the shadow nova cast will be slowed.

Ah, right. Thanks for the clarifications and thoughts.

We're a 25m guild, so we have more leeway with regards to interrupts and makeup, but also that many more people who can screw up. Although on our CG kill last night no one in the raid hit 100% corruption, so maybe we've gotten better at execution.

[pdrayton]

It's funny how progression difficulty varies so much from raid group to raid group.

We killed Halfus pre-nerf pretty quickly (smallish # of pulls spread over 2 nights IIRC), wasted 40 attempts over almost 3 weeks on Chimaeron (epic fail, I know - let's just say that we were slow to correct fundamental misunderstandings about the required healing for 2 Feud tanks & 1 DPS break tank), then killed Maloriak in under 3 hours.

I'd be interested in thoughts on our HM progression curve. So far we're 3/13 (Halfus->Chimaeron->Maloriak). Our 25man raid team is pretty good at execution fights where the price for "getting it wrong" is instant death/easy-to-diagnose stuff like sound/corruption; and at brute-force DPS/HPS fights. We suck a bit more at stuff where you could make a mistake and have it not cost you dearly, eg. Omnitron or Alakir.

For now I'm thinking the path sounds like: Magmaw->Atramedes->(Omnitron/Conclave)->Dragons->(the rest).

This is partly because Magmaw seems like a simple DPS burn with limited target swapping, Atramedes has a "if you suck you die and we can replace you" nature, and Omnitron/Conclave seem more dependent on everyone doing the right thing at the right time, with either enough chaos and/or the raid spread out so much that diagnosing failures will be annoying.

Comments?

[Boyfriend]

I think Atramedes is ridiculously easy now post nerf, I think we killed him on our third attempt on heroic (having not made any serious attempts pre nerf). It's basically the same as on normal + adds you have to kill.

[PsiVen]

We found Chimaeron rather painful, especially since we had to keep shuffling strategies. Given the required tank rotation to have every single Double Attack delivered with 0 stacks of Break, carefully rotating cooldowns to make sure the Feud tank didn't get gibbed, and perfectly timing the transition, it seems far more technical than the other bosses. We are all breathing a sigh of relief that Atramedes and Maloriak actually let us use a normal amount of tanks/healers and aren't much different from normal mode; we hope to kill one or both Sunday night.

For a 25-man, I expect Chimaeron is a much more clear-cut choice for the 2nd heroic to kill. For 10-man I'm not convinced that it's the 2nd easiest anymore, but we'll see if we actually kill those other two quickly.

[Belloc]

We found Chimaeron rather painful, especially since we had to keep shuffling strategies. Given the required tank rotation to have every single Double Attack delivered with 0 stacks of Break, carefully rotating cooldowns to make sure the Feud tank didn't get gibbed, and perfectly timing the transition, it seems far more technical than the other bosses. We are all breathing a sigh of relief that Atramedes and Maloriak actually let us use a normal amount of tanks/healers and aren't much different from normal mode; we hope to kill one or both Sunday night.

For a 25-man, I expect Chimaeron is a much more clear-cut choice for the 2nd heroic to kill. For 10-man I'm not convinced that it's the 2nd easiest anymore, but we'll see if we actually kill those other two quickly.

We use our typical group for 10-man Chimaeron (2/3/5, of course). If we have our ret with us, he tanks during normal phases, otherwise we use our druid. Any DPS that can taunt can serve as a third tank without respeccing.

Double attacks are eaten by whoever doesn't have break stacks. If that's going to be a problem, there's always AD or GS... but it's never been a problem for us =/ YMMV I guess, but Chimaeron has always seemed cut and dry.

[Shathus]

Sorry to jump back from heroic to normal talk, but how many of you are 2-healing encounters? Or is that only something you'd recommend after being in mostly 359 gear (the raid)?

I'd really love to get our ele shaman back DPS'ing instead of being our 3rd healer, but it just seems like there's a lot of damage to deal with on fights.

I'd imagine there's some switch back between 2 and 3 healers for different bosses, just checking what your thoughts are.

[Belloc]

Sorry to jump back from heroic to normal talk, but how many of you are 2-healing encounters? Or is that only something you'd recommend after being in mostly 359 gear (the raid)?

I'd really love to get our ele shaman back DPS'ing instead of being our 3rd healer, but it just seems like there's a lot of damage to deal with on fights.

I'd imagine there's some switch back between 2 and 3 healers for different bosses, just checking what your thoughts are.

We are currently two-healing V&T, Ascendant Council, Cho'gall, Omnitron (I think), Magmaw (I think), and Atramedes (normal). I'd probably suggest that we are only two healing some of those because we seriously outgear them.

It's pretty safe to two-heal V&T, Cho'gall and Atramedes, though.

[Epimer]

Sorry to jump back from heroic to normal talk, but how many of you are 2-healing encounters? Or is that only something you'd recommend after being in mostly 359 gear (the raid)?

We're 9/12 normals (damn your eyes, Cho'gall) and we two-healed most of our progression kills through necessity (i.e. poor healer availability) and before anyone was stupidly well-geared.

Two healers: Magmaw, Omnotron, Atramedes, Maloriak, Halfus, Twilight Ascendant Council, that stupid TotFW first boss.
Three healers: Chimaeron, Valiona & Theralion (I don't know why, it's complete overkill. I think our progression kill didn't have the off-specs to manage 1 tank 2 healers so we had to do it that way the first time around and stuck with it out of habit).

Our latest healing recruit is a bit... low on throughput, shall we say, so our regular Resto Druid has been damn near solo healing some of the earlier bosses and ranking quite highly on WoL because of having to pick up the slack.

[Aerron]

We have experimented with 2-healing our farm bosses ... Halfus, V&T, 4/6 BWD (not Chim or Nef) ... you would probably be fine with that.

[Donut]

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good time and level of gear to start hard modes. We raid pretty casually but have had Cho down for a few weeks and about an hour of attempts into Nef and he doesn't seem so bad either. When we get Nef we'll be at 12. I was wondering what level of normal gearing would make the learning curve for the hard modes a bit easier so that we could realistically and tangibly progress with an hour or two of attempts per week. Because I don't want to allocate our main 10 man for that, not progress at all, and leave our 25 man out to dry at the same time.

[Belloc]

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good time and level of gear to start hard modes. We raid pretty casually but have had Cho down for a few weeks and about an hour of attempts into Nef and he doesn't seem so bad either. When we get Nef we'll be at 12. I was wondering what level of normal gearing would make the learning curve for the hard modes a bit easier so that we could realistically and tangibly progress with an hour or two of attempts per week. Because I don't want to allocate our main 10 man for that, not progress at all, and leave our 25 man out to dry at the same time.

To realistically raid heroic raid content, you need a lot more than an hour or two per week.

If you're only going to be putting in an hour or two a week, you pretty much need full epics and, even then, you still probably won't have bosses going down without a couple weeks' worth of attempts.