[25] Cho'gall HM

[Carabas]

My guild just started trying Cho'Gall hm and we got several problems, so I'm looking for some advice.
Flame buff hits hard and usually we wipe after a tank (me or a warrior) get killed. We ignore the first Fire Elemental, Cho'Gall gets around 7-8 stacks, but it is survivable with a major cd, we start having issues with the 2nd Fire Elemental (at this point boss is <85%) no cd seems enough to withstannd damage. Probably some healers start following the add tank.
How do you deal with it? Thanks

[Kerriodos]

I personally use Glyph'd Divine Protection and the Mirror of Broken Images. So long as his Devotion buff doesn't get too high, that and some extra healer attention should be more than enough to handle the damage. If for whatever reason the Fire Elemental has four stacks or more (either we purposely ignore it or people are playing poorly), I'll layer on a second cooldown--usually GoAK with Mirror and AD with DP.

[Brutalus]

If you're not assigned to deal with the adds, it's probably worth rotating DP and the mirror, yeah. We kite the boss with the add tank as well so that there are never any range problems and so that we can cleave the boss with the adds. It's probably worth the add tank using cooldowns too while tanking them so more healers can focus the maintank, too - I use GoAK into DP which lasts the whole duration of them being up. Also, what are you doing with the tank stacks? We found it easier to give them to the add tank than to the maintank.

[Carabas]

At the moment we are doing this way: palatank starting on Cho'Gall, fire elemental (goatk), fury -> tank swap, warrior on Cho'Gall, pala on adds. When we got the next fury, we swap again. I was using both Mirror and DP glyphed.
Probably the add kiting was too far away from the boss, so healers were not in range of both tank.

[inthedrops]

Part of the challenge of this fight is figuring which, and how many of the adds can be ignored in order to make good timing into the last phase.

This is the struggle all guilds have to figure out. So keep working on that and don't stubbornly stick to the same plan the whole time.

I happen to tank Cho'gall when the adds are out. And we ignore Fire Elementals when the adds are out. This means I tank one Fire Elemental with full stacks on Cho'gall per round of adds.

During progression I literally used three cooldowns simultaneouly in order to survive. Divine Protection + Mirror + GoAK, and then for the second round Divine Protection + Mirror + AD. Either GoaK or AD was always up for every other add.

Eventually I got to the point where I used Mirror for the Shadow Elemental pulses instead of using it for the Fire Elemental as I found it got scary there sometimes.

While you're tanking, keep an eye on Cho'galls worship stacks. If he has more than about 3, you're asking for some SERIOUS hurt and three cooldowns may not even be enough.

Make sure Cho'galls worship never stacks more than the occasional one or two (and hopefully never 3 or 4)

[culhag]

We have a few DPS who are assigned to bring all the elementals down a bit, to around 5 stacks.
In addition we have a long CD rotation so that I always have roughly 50% damage reduction for all the fire elementals.

[Kishandra]

A great way to boost dps (and therefore increase the amount of dps you can spare whittling down the fire adds) is to get a mage to 100% corruption as fast as possible (eat all shadow crashes and don't dispel accelerated corruption). Once he's at 100, just have him stand outside the group chaining instant pyroblasts with rotating cooldowns (like amz, ho sac, iceblock, etc.) during shadow phases. Done correctly, he'll survive into the tentacle phase where he gets rezzed, then start dpsing like normal.

Ultimately, this mage will do roughly as much damage as three average dpsers in your raid, which either frees up spots for healers (6 max) or allow you to be more liberal with the damage you can apply to the fire and shadow adds. You can -try- having two mages both get corrupted like this if you have an abundance of outside cooldowns available, but most 25m raids can probably support only one freak mage.

What we also do is just have ranged dot the adds as soon as they spawn, by the time they're eaten they're at 50% health max, and all it cost was 1-2 gcds from half the dps in the raid.

[warden]

The corrupted mage strat has worked wonders for us; we actually use two of them, using spirit link totem to top off their health when they get low and CDing every shadows. On the elementals: every single one of them gets dpsed to below 10%--the mages take care of a lot of this. We have pretty much 0 issues with tank deaths, unless the add tank gets trapped by pools or something.