[10HM] Lord Ryolith

[fafhrd]

Quick question: When you're tanking a Spark, how do you deal with the Fragments?

We're unable to get the Spark down before the first Fragments spawn, but it usually dies before the second. However, there's still some time where the Fragments are out of my reach and pummelling our healers. We're using 2 healers and they get a little too strained if the Fragments go for them; we also tried having our hunter misdirect some to me, but the MD cooldown is 30 seconds (too long).

We have our melee DPS pick them up and tank them, usually via Death and Decay and howling blast. One MD is not going to get you all the fragments at all reliably. Healing plate through their damage isn't hard and it lets DPS start on them immediately. It also lets all the AoE hit the boss to speed up the fight.

If you really wanted to do it via MD you could try something like having the hunter pet on *Sparks* with you, and have the hunter glyph MD and md them to his pet, in which case MD incurrs no cooldown. It would largely be a waste of the hunter's time and still wouldn't help if any dps are aoeing prematurely, but it would get more of them in range to be picked up by you without cooldown issues.

[Era]

Having the melee pick them up sounds like an interesting idea, I'll note that down, thanks.

[Paoanii]

What we do that works quite well Era is we just save MD for that particular set of fragments. Its always more than 30 seconds between those particular sets and its the only one that you really need an MD for. You stated that you always have the spark dead before the second wave of frags, so you can pick up the spark, get the first fragments MD to you, pick up second fragments like normal, rinse and repeat. We tried the melee tanking frags strat and it's just an unnecessary amount of extra damage going out and can cause random melee deaths to the stomp if you're not spot on with volcanoes.

[Era]

Hmm, that's a good idea too! Thanks.

[Winkle]

Had our first attempts on this last night, our biggest issue is steering, with more DPS on the boss it just seems a little more twitchy but i think with more practice we'll be ok.

Regarding the volcanoes though, how many is acceptable to have active simultaneously? Obviously the less the better but should we expect to wipe if 3 are active and he stomps?

[Belloc]

Had our first attempts on this last night, our biggest issue is steering, with more DPS on the boss it just seems a little more twitchy but i think with more practice we'll be ok.

Regarding the volcanoes though, how many is acceptable to have active simultaneously? Obviously the less the better but should we expect to wipe if 3 are active and he stomps?

More than 2 volcanoes is going to wipe you. Hell, 2 for more than a short while is too much.

[fafhrd]

Yeah 2 is pushing it, if there are 3 up you are very behind on stomping them.

Make sure to stomp them in order too.

[Era]

How bad is stepping on inactive volcanoes? We're having a lot of craters, but our designated driver says it's not a big issue, so I figured I'd just double-check.

[Fetzie]

It permanently buffs his outgoing damage by 5% (pretty sure it isn't 10%) per inactive volcano he treads on. Stepping on too many inactive volcanoes will end up making the difference between people surviving the second and third stomps in P2, and them dying.

[Treck]

It permanently buffs his outgoing damage by 5% (pretty sure it isn't 10%) per inactive volcano he treads on. Stepping on too many inactive volcanoes will end up making the difference between people surviving the second and third stomps in P2, and them dying.

No it does not.
Stepping on an inactive Volcano will give him 2stacks of 5% damage.
Stepping on an active Volcano will give him one stack of 5% damage, and make him loose 10x Obsidian armor.
Every 15sec, he looses one stack of his +dmg buff, so as long as you dont eat to many inactive Volcanos to fast, all it will do is give you slightly more to heal for a few sec.

[Belloc]

I was under the impression that stepping on an active volcano removed 2 stacks of the 5% buff instead of generating another one.

[Bellante]

He loses a stack every time he spawns adds afaik. Don't know if he loses stacks "passively" like Treckie says, but guess he knows

[oldboyz]

a whole night on him without any success

we try 2 heal, but all the time wipe du to hight stack volcano debuff (2 active, 1 around 7+stack)

we then went 3 heal but nothing changed

our leg leader seems to have some trouble where there is noone from all our previous normal down
we had some wipes du to adds, but very very few (we were 2 hunt MM&SV)

so i don't really know where is our improvement...
-need more luck with nicely placed volcano
-...

any advice?

meantime i plan to go on Bethilac

[baleogthefierce]

a whole night on him without any success

we try 2 heal, but all the time wipe du to hight stack volcano debuff (2 active, 1 around 7+stack)

we then went 3 heal but nothing changed

our leg leader seems to have some trouble where there is noone from all our previous normal down
we had some wipes du to adds, but very very few (we were 2 hunt MM&SV)

so i don't really know where is our improvement...
-need more luck with nicely placed volcano
-...

any advice?

meantime i plan to go on Bethilac

Sounds like you need to have someone else do the steering calls. You should rarely ever have two active volcanoes up at once, and even then only for a few seconds.

[Hrobertgar]

I have observed that his steering seems to be more sensitive in HM than on normal, Some of it may be melee getting temporarily cut off from their leg by lava lines, but it can definitely be frustrating. I have seen his turn bar gor full left to full right in a couple ticks and also watched as an unfortunate stomp allowed him to do a 180, once as his foot passed THROUGH an active volcano without landing to stomp on it, sigh.

We have downed him a few times, usually we have most of the dps completely dedicated to specific legs to even out dps, with only a couple ppl switching for turns, yet his bar can still go full left to full right in like 1 step. Last night we actually switched to a more free-for-all leg setup, which although it lowered dps output, may have helped steering. Last night was a little rough: a couple of DCs, and an instance reset (hot patch?) just before a pull.

As long as we can push several seconds before superheated, we can usually start blowing raid survival CDs and have him down before the 3rd stomp in ph2. With a good steering and not horrible RNG on volcano placement we can often get his armor pretty low pretty quick, and Heroism after 3rd Spark dies will consistently get us into ph2 before superheated as long as all the dps are up. We tried a few times last night to press on with a dps down (brez on CD or used already) and the additional time it took to push at our dps level meant he superheated as we pushed ph2 and it was just impossible. So for now, we need all dps up after the 3rd spark to push him, hopefully as we gear up, things won't be so tight.

Using tranquility in ph2 anytime the raid gets below about 50% health is good too. Usually he stomps once right away, and then we can blow tranquility on the next one. I use Aura Mastery on the first if the raid is low, otherwise I save it for the second as well.