When to aim for hard modes?

[VikrumthePally]

To prevent starting a new thread I will piggyback here.

We did our first hard mode last night. XT with 2 heals, 1 tank, 7 dps.

Where would our next step be from here? We are thinking, IC, GV, Thorim, Hodir in that order. I don't know that our dps has ever once looked at what the buffs actually do b/c our dps as a raid actually goes down a lot on Hodir. So that is why I put him last.

We beat ourselves up a bit and don't think we'll ever get Mim/Freya hard mode.

Thanks.

[amh]

If you can do XT then you have the resources to all the others. I can't really say anything about Vezax, haven't had all that many attemps on him. In terms of difficulty I'd say Hodir -> XT -> Council -> Thorim -> Freya -> Vezax ------------------------------------------------------------> Mimiron

No idea about Yogg :(

I don't know that our dps has ever once looked at what the buffs actually do b/c our dps as a raid actually goes down a lot on Hodir. So that is why I put him last.

Hodir hard-mode is more a Hodir easy-mode (from the healers' point of view;). Get it right and it's extremely straight forward. Make your dps read this, should give them a clearer idea of how to handle the different aspects of the fight.

[VikrumthePally]

Excellent. Thanks a lot for that linkage as well. Another quick question while you are here.

I assume this is yes by your last post. But would you say the healing is less intensive on IC as opposed to XT?

[amh]

A whole lot, yes. Let me quickly dig up parses from those two fights...

Erm, yeah, looks like I was wrong. Better get input from someone who's actually healed this. I would think XT is harder to heal because of the tantrums (spiky), where IC is more of a predictable spam-fest. Our IC-kill had more incoming damage than XT, however. Take a look and see what you make of it :/

IC: http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/49 ... amagetaken
XT: http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/49 ... amagetaken

[Belloc]

No idea about Yogg

Yogg isn't a difficult 10-man hard mode if you can execute the fight well.

We had just gotten our first 10-man Yogg kill (had focused on the hard modes up until that point) and found it to be relatively easy. We had an easy phase 2 and got our kill on our first phase 3. I decided that we were going to do the hard mode the next week. Turns out, we got lucky on our Yogg kill, because now we've got the brain team dying before going in, people chaining the death coil, bad brain links, etc.

Make sure you know the fight well and that everyone has a plan for it. If you can execute the fight without mistakes on normal mode, you can one or two shot the fight on hard mode. If you cannot execute the fight flawlessly, however, you won't get a kill without extreme luck.

[VikrumthePally]

Wow on Yogg hard mode. That is surprising. After about 50 tries I would say we got him on normal.

I would say 35 of those were phase 1 heh.

But on our kill shot we got to p3 in just 2 portals. That made everything very easy.

[Big Mushy]

While my guild is still struggling with 25 man (we cant down freya/thorim/mimi yet) our 10 man group is progressing nicely, we tried out 2 towers on FL and 2 shot it, decon was 2 shot and IC was 1 shot (on steelbreaker up) so overall it was a good night we were 10 seconds off hodir simply because 1dps got frozen 2 times and it was too late to call it, next step is thorim and freya (maybe only 2 elders up for a lol)

[Tiandelin]

Our guild just started trying for hard modes in our 10-man this week and managed to get six of them, which makes me think we probably should have started doing this a couple weeks ago. My observations about it, though:

XT-002 is by far the easiest. We did it with 1 tank, 3 healers, 6 dps and had over a minute left on the berserk timer. If you can do the fight with everyone able to handle light/gravity bombs, you can do this fight on hard mode.

Iron Council isn't far behind. We actually had our Steelbreaker tank die shortly before Brundir (whom we killed second) went down, and we decided to hang on just so that we could see phase 3. We ended up battle rezzing the first tank and just killing him.

Hodir is a step up, and it's all about coordination with the buffs. You must have dps stand in starlight whenever possible. You must spread storm power around. You must break the mages out of ice blocks quickly to keep the singed debuff up. It helps if everyone can dodge icicles, too.

Thorim is at about the same level. Taking advantage of the two safe zones (see here) really helps, as does remembering that the blizzard affects the outside of the room (the darker blue floor) only. We mind-controlled a warbringer for our kill, which seemed to help.

General Vezax was surprisingly easy, for all the fuss about mana on this fight. Disc priests and resto druids really shine here, as they can take advantage of shadow crash pools. We killed him with just a paladin and resto druid healing. The key is to heal as efficiently as possible and have everyone make sure their cooldowns are available for the animus. Overall, I'd say he might even be easier than Hodir and Thorim IF you don't kite and your ranged can avoid shadow crashes.

Freya was by far the hardest fight we got down. Problems we had included people (especially healers) getting rooted away from mushrooms during conservator phases, lashers annihilating people when they blew up too quickly, and ground tremors coming at really bad times (especially during lasher phases). Too many observations to list here, but don't feel bad if it takes you a while to get this down. We spent about 4-5 hours on this fight when we one-shotted half of the other hard modes.

We took a couple stabs at Mimiron, but it seems like he's on an entirely new plane of crazy even beyond Freya. Haven't tried Yogg with one watcher yet, though he doesn't seem bad with just Mimiron out, and I'm sure the Flame Leviathan goes down next week (we skipped him before we realized that most 10-man hard modes weren't that bad).