[Northrend Beasts] Preperation for HEROIC/HM Boss #1

[BubbaBill]

Question: Can the application of the Impale DoT be dodged, or parried? Would high avoidance slow down the speed at which you accumulated stacks?

The dot always gets applied, but I'm not sure about the Direct Damage from the Impale attack which is a substantial spike in it's own right, that might be avoidable.

[Belloc]

I've never seen impale be missed, dodged or parried. I believe it is completely unavoidable. The stacking part isn't so bad, but the direct damage is, in my opinion as a tank, the hardest part of the fight.

[fafhrd]

Hm. I wonder if you can SW+intervene to eat a stack for your tank.

[wingman]

Some notes on what worked well for us. Just as a point of clarification, all times are from the moment the first mob is attackable, which is about 20 seconds after you talk to the NPC to start the encounter.

Three tanks, each tank taunts Goremok after 2 stacks of Impale. If this is done properly, no tank will ever have more than 2 stacks and once the last tank gets his 2nd stack, the stack is falling off the first tank. All DPS on Goremok. If a snobold gets on a healer or caster, ranged switch to that snobold, melee stay on boss. When boss gets to about 15%, switch and clean up snobolds. The worms will enter the arena 2:30 after Goremok is attackable. The problem is if your dps is good and you kill Goremok early, the worms zone in at that time. So, best bet is to get Goremok low in about 2 minutes, clean up snobolds, then push Goremok over.

3 tanks for phase 2. One tank is always on the stationary worm. The other 2 tanks both follow the moving worm, one with aggro, the other nearby but out of range of his spit. Pop hero and all dps nuke down the worm that starts out stationary (Acidmaw). Once the first kiting tank gets burning bile, the tank following him taunts, and the burning bile tank runs to the raid clearing any paralysis debuffs. With all dps on Acidmaw and heroism popped, you should be able to get him to 30% or so before he submerges. Another useful tip: if hunters marks are on the worms, you can see the mark just above ground when they are submerged and you'll know where they will come up at. Once they re-emerge, dps finish off Acidmaw (if the kite tank gets paralysis, the backup tank taunts and continues kiting until someone in the raid can get burning bile and cleanse the paralysed tank, or better yet, you're kite tank is a paly and you use a bubble macro to remove the paralysis from yourself - this is why you don't bubble impale off yourself in phase 1). Acidmaw should easily die before he burrows again, and all dps should switch to Dreadscale. I've seen some strats that say you have to kill both at the same time on hard mode, but that's not accurate. Dreadscale's enrage after Acidmaw dies is still less damage on the tank than 2 stacks of Impale and melee from Gormok. Pop trinkets, use CDs, all of that is fine, but you should be able to live thru his enrage even without external CDs. He'll burrow and then re-emerge again and become mobile. Your dps should be able to get him below 10% before he burrows again.

Right about the time he burrows from his mobile phase, one of the tanks needs to go to the gate and be ready for Icehowl, because he's on his way in and will be active right about the time that Dreadscale re-emerges for what is now the 4th time and is stationary. The worm should die quickly, if you didn't already kill him before he burrowed. Icehowl isn't tauntable in heroic, so the tank waiting by the door needs to pick him up the moment he becomes attackable and build threat quickly. Once the worms are dead and the raid gets on Icehowl, all tanks build as much threat as they can. Have your tanks in the top 3 on threat so if healers fail and one tank dies, the boss isn't running loose raping the raid. At this point it's just a dps burn. Don't fail at avoiding his charges, try not to be clumped too closely together beause his conal frost breath stunning dps will cause you to lose dps and make the enrage timer an issue, and the tighter clumped ppl are, the more likely he is to charge a group which meands 5-10 people have to run out of his stun is harder than only 1-3 ppl. If he hits someone with his charge and enrages, have tanks pop CDs and they may live, and he'll calm down after about 15 seconds or so. Sadly, if he hits someone, that means he isn't getting stunned and taking extra damage, which means you'll probably wipe to enrage unless you're dps outgears the place. At 8:30 into the fight, he enrages and will wipe the raid, but you may be able to zerg him down if you're at 5% or less.

[amh]

Make sure to Soulstone 15 members of your raid with level 18 Warlock alts.

At the same time I'm slightly disgusted and slightly jealous for not thinking of this myself.

I´m a bit surprised there´s been no reactions to this. Is this common procedure? Just looking at the first frame of Paragon´s Twins-kill, and they seem to have a lot more warlock-abilities-on-cooldown than actual warlocks in the visible raid. Bit too laggy to actually watch the vid where I am right now.

[fafhrd]

Well there's not a lot to react to. The option's been in game forever, and was even brought to the forefront once before when someone (method?) used it for one of the first vashj kills, back when she was ridiculously hard and buggy to boot. Blizzard's response then was only to limit soulstones to locks in your raid, and people pointed out then that that only restricts you to SS 15 people instead of 25 - which is where it still stands.

I'm sure this isn't the first time people have done it since then if that's what you're suggesting.

[amh]

Asking, not suggesting :) Seeing how long it takes us to recover from a wipe the normal way, I can only imagine how rigid these people must be if they all have to zone in, zone out, tab out / ninja-log to the alt, pull up a soulstone, tab / relog, and then zone back in in time for the next attempt.

[fafhrd]

Even worse when you have to coordinate who's switched onto an alt to soulstone but needs to be soulstoned on their main when they're back online by someone who is currently on his main getting soulstoned

But I guess if you don't wipe, and you have some extra people not raiding that night anyway, it's not that bad, since you'd only need to re-SS however many people died that kill.

[Kup]

I'm convinced that everything on 10 man hard mode up to and possibly including Anub'arak (the only one I haven't done yet) is solo tankable. We were about to call our run the other night because icehowl kept enraging at like 5% so we had our bear tank get on his warlock to give an attempt at solo tanking it and we won on the first try. Fully raid buffed I sit between 45k - 50k and used my trinket that puts me close to 55k at 5 stacks, bubble cancelled the second I hit the seventh stack and had 3 when the worms came in.

The healers said it was actually easier to heal one tank rather than a main tank and another with a dot on them in 10 man. The second boss is a joke to solo tank, twins is easy as long as dps only focuses on one only switching to kill the others shield when it came up and I'll know more about Anub later this week.

[Joanadark]

Make sure to Soulstone 15 members of your raid with level 18 Warlock alts.

At the same time I'm slightly disgusted and slightly jealous for not thinking of this myself.

I´m a bit surprised there´s been no reactions to this. Is this common procedure? Just looking at the first frame of Paragon´s Twins-kill, and they seem to have a lot more warlock-abilities-on-cooldown than actual warlocks in the visible raid. Bit too laggy to actually watch the vid where I am right now.

A bigger issue is that the Wipe-counter system is stupid because a good number of guilds were able to just learn all the fights on their alts and then zone in and kill everything and reach anub'arak with 45 wipes left on their mains.

[Xequecal]

So, snobolds spawn every 20s and there are 5 in heroic mode.
Each one gives him a 15% buff. I'm confused as to whether or not killing the snobold gets rid of the 15% or if there are two 15% buffs per snobold (1 rising anger and 1 buff that's active when a snobold is active).

Impale happens every 10s and lasts for 45 seconds. It does 4.5k/2s per stack. Impale itself does how much damage base?

What I'm trying to figure out is when tanks have to start using cooldowns on impale switches.

10: Impale 1 - Tank 1
20: Impale 2 - Tank 1 (Snobold 1) - 15% damage buff
30: Impale 3 - Tank 1 (Pain Suppression)
40: Impale 4 - Tank 1 (Snobold 2) - 15% damage buff (30% total)
50: Impale 5 - Tank 2 (HoP Tank 1)
60: Impale 6 - Tank 2 (HoS/DS from pally healer) (Snobold 3) - 15% damage buff (45% total)
70: Impale 7 - Tank 2
80: Impale 8 - Tank 3 (HoP Tank 2)(Snobold 4) - 15% damage buff (60% total)
90: Impale 9 - Tank 3
100: Impale 10 - Tank 1 (HoP Tank 3) (tank 1 cooldown before taunt/impale) (Snobold 5) - 15% damage buff (75% total)
110: Impale 11 - Tank 1
120: Impale 12 - Tank 2 (tank 2 cooldown before taunt/impale)
130: Impale 13 - Tank 2
140: Impale 14 - Tank 3 (tank 3 cooldown before taunt/impale)
150: Impale 15 - Tank 3

Theoretically given that impales are 10s apart and tank cooldowns are 12s, if you hit it correctly you should have your cooldown still active for the second impale.

Snobolds have 539k health in heroic? Therefore I need 6 DPSers at 5k DPS to kill the snobold before the next one comes out?

The door opens after the 12th Impale. The worms will go active right around the 13th Impale, he needs to be dead by then so you should only see 12.

Given that, to boost your DPS, I suggest 2 tanks. Start with 3 Impales on Tank 1, then Tank 2 taunts. Get 4 Impales on Tank 2 (this coincides with the stack dropping off on T1) and have Tank 1 immediately taunt. HoP Tank 2. Tank 1 gets 3 stacks then Tank 2 taunts, HoP Tank 1. Tank 1 and 2 then split the last two impales before he dies and the worms go active. If you get #13, you can just go into worm phase with your better geared tank having 2 stacks.

This strat lets you do it with two tanks, only have Impale x4 on a tank for 1-2 seconds, and never have to heal a residual Impale stack on an offtank after the first 45 seconds of the fight, letting all your healers spam the current tank to try and prevent the gibs. This way you can also probably cut down to 5 healers as well and add yet another DPS.

[Joanadark]

Gormok the Impaler self-buff:
15% @ 1:00
30% @ 1:15
45% @ 1:30
60% @ 2:00
75% @ 2:30 NOT ONE BUT TWO WORMS ENTER NOW

[Aubade]

Gormok the Impaler self-buff:
15% @ 1:00
30% @ 1:15
45% @ 1:30
60% @ 2:00
75% @ 2:30 NOT ONE BUT TWO WORMS ENTER NOW

Oh god, not this again ><

[Cryo]

Weve been using varrying combinations of strats,
in 10 man, Warrior goes 3 impales, i go 3 impales, He goes 3 with trinkets on 2 and a cd on 3, I BOP him and do 3 with a cd on 3rd then bubble. Warrior has at most 1 impale left on him when worms spawn, i say at most because if i wait a sec on my bubble, it is possible to taunt right before gormokk impales for the last time and let it hit the bubble =). Worked twice anyway.

[Worldie]

Actually he got only 4 snobolds, not 5. His buff stacks only reach 4 as well.