[10] XT Hardmode (Heartbreaker)

[Faro]

Some really good advice in this thread, I'll just throw my 2 cents in. We did this the first night with two tanks, three healers, and five dps. One healer died as we went into hard mode to I don't really remember what, and our warlock died at about 40, so we cleared the enrage timer by ~2s. We had two ranged dps and three melee, so the second tank would just drag the light sparks into melee range and they would die from random cleaves+the DK dps on it. We had a problem with lightsparks meleeing people as soon as they spawned, so the warrior tank started intervening whoever got lightbomb in the last 2s of it's duration, worked pretty well.

Second week we did it with 2 tanks, 2 healers. This week we're planning one tank two healers, should go over just as well. Also, I don't like macros that deselect the boss just out of personal flavor, but I have a similar set up to modus'. It's just:
/cast [target=lifespark,exists] Hand of Reckoning
/cast [target=lifespark,exists] Exorcism
I don't remember if there's a harm after the exists or not as I'm doing this from memory, but good luck to everyone trying it .

[Cali]

Do you really tank the light sparks?

We did Heartbreaker last week and didn't even think about tanking Light Sparks...
We had 3 healers (2 Holy-Priests, 1 Resto-Druid), 3 melees (1 Arms-Warrior, 1 Feral-Cat and me as Ret for JoL and Divine Guardian), 1 Frost-DK, 3 Mages! I normally tank almost all of Ulduar10, but it's good to have a competent tank-partner and so i thought me as Ret would be better for buffs (replenishment, JoL etc.) and that my tank-partner can gather experience tanking something "harder".

As soon as the hard mode began, all our Mages looked out for Light Sparks. The melees just did dps to the Light Sparks at their spawning and ran right back to XT doing dps there. We never had a problem killing them before they reached someone.

We had more problems with our healers on tantrum, they didn't perform well this evening...

[PsiVen]

Tanking sparks was necessary before their HP was cut in half. It's still pretty much mandatory in 25-man. The least you can do is taunt them as a DPS paladin/warrior/deathknight so that ranged don't have to move.

If you want a clean, easy kill of XT on 10-man, bring 2 tanks and 3 healers. It'll be a long fight but the execution is very simple. If you're confident in the DPS, 1 tank and 2 healers is enough as long as one of them is a priest/druid for tantrums.

[Belloc]

The only problem with not attempting to control the sparks is that they can and will kill your DPS if they get a good enough hit in.

If you have a tank taunting them, as I displayed earlier, this will not be an issue. Otherwise, you'll be putting additional strain on your healers and running the risk of DPS getting killed.

Also, throwing ALL of your ranged on them will just sacrifice DPS on the boss. The enrage timer is pretty lenient, but not lenient enough that you can throw efficiency out of the fight.

[fuzzygeek]

Light sparks melee on cloth for 5kish?

We have people run out of the raid, and 2 ranged DPS blow them up. 1 tank, 2 healers -- our typical healer setup is Shaman and CoH Priest.

[Corpsicle]

We had a spark crit our ret paladin last night for 20k.

[amh]

We had a spark crit our ret paladin last night for 20k.

On 10man?

[Belloc]

We had a spark crit our ret paladin last night for 20k.

On 10man?

Judging by his armory and the fact that this is a 10 man thread, I am going to assume that to be the case.

Sparks can hit quite hard.

[amh]

That's a hell of a crit, since we never saw any normal hits above 5k. Ouch...

[Faro]

I didn't think light spark tanking was necessary until we tried it and it one shot our third healer. No tantrum, he just got crit for something stupid high.

[Corpsicle]

Yes on ten man, our guilds 25's are proceeding at a slower pace than our 10 is right now. Casual friends and family guild though, so they are not doing that bad.

We were rather surprised when he got pretty much one hit by it and made him check his combat log for the exact amount.

[Doloth]

When we did this achievement, we had a problem with our mages dying to gravity bomb. Sometimes people would die to a gravity bomb hitting during a tantrum, but you can't help that and it is healable. Our big problem was that one mage once had gravity bomb crit him for 22k. It one-shot him. There was no tantrum, no light bomb or life spark. He just got gravity bomb, ran out of the raid, and then died. He digged through his combat log and showed that gravity bomb had crit him for 22000 shadow damage.

Yes, this is 10-man, so I am wondering, how the hell to survive that? Stack enough stam so you have over 22k hp on every dps? I'm assuming this is after resists, but I may have to double check that shadow protection is up this next time.

[Gracerath]

Just throwing in my experiences, which went similar to others posted. 2 tanks 3 healers was pretty clean. We had a wipe where the spark melee'd our druid tank on XT for about 7k while she was low. Doh! As with the normal version of the fight, the biggest threat was always a tantrum + bomb combo. Everything else was negligible. I'm not going to complain though This hard mode isn't as difficult as we thought it would be and it drops basically the best weapon I can get for my DK (cause Yogg 25 is probably a ways off yet).

[moduspwnens]

When we did this achievement, we had a problem with our mages dying to gravity bomb. Sometimes people would die to a gravity bomb hitting during a tantrum, but you can't help that and it is healable. Our big problem was that one mage once had gravity bomb crit him for 22k. It one-shot him. There was no tantrum, no light bomb or life spark. He just got gravity bomb, ran out of the raid, and then died. He digged through his combat log and showed that gravity bomb had crit him for 22000 shadow damage.

Yes, this is 10-man, so I am wondering, how the hell to survive that? Stack enough stam so you have over 22k hp on every dps? I'm assuming this is after resists, but I may have to double check that shadow protection is up this next time.

NPC spells can't crit. Life sparks can crit because they melee you.

[Faro]

When we did this achievement, we had a problem with our mages dying to gravity bomb. Sometimes people would die to a gravity bomb hitting during a tantrum, but you can't help that and it is healable. Our big problem was that one mage once had gravity bomb crit him for 22k. It one-shot him. There was no tantrum, no light bomb or life spark. He just got gravity bomb, ran out of the raid, and then died. He digged through his combat log and showed that gravity bomb had crit him for 22000 shadow damage.

Yes, this is 10-man, so I am wondering, how the hell to survive that? Stack enough stam so you have over 22k hp on every dps? I'm assuming this is after resists, but I may have to double check that shadow protection is up this next time.

NPC spells can't crit.

Your mage is either lieing or exaggerating.