[10] Lord Rhyolith

[Tebin]

Thanks, out of curiosity what was your tactic? We've started putting all dps on rhyolith, with only three staying on full time when adds are up.

[Jeremoot]

We keep the melee DPS on the legs to reduce the amount of AoE damage from sparks. One healer stays with them, and the rest of the healers and ranged DPS sit in a corner of the platform. Fragments are quickly AoE'd down, and sparks are dragged outside.

The melee DPS drive Rhyolith and call for ranged help on a leg if they need to make a sharp turn. We have one lead driver that calls out on vent which direction to steer him.

When phase 2 hits we use raid cooldowns e.g., Divine Guardian, Rally. The last phase usually ends in 30 seconds or so and as soon as he turns orange it's usually the sign that "hey, we won!"

[Epimer]

For us, it's two ranged DPS full time on the adds, and 4 melee full time on the legs. Looking at the logs it seems that ranged help out for very sharp turns, but it's <5% contribution to leg damage overall.

In theory the ranged and healers stand in one spot to make it easier to grab Fragments but in reality they run about like headless chickens once things start to get a little hectic. Sparks are dragged away from the ranged, but given that they're spread out anyway, it's just finding a clear spot and standing in it.

We don't even have a P2 tactic; he turns orange, I scream at the trigger happy DPS that I'm quite far away so sit on your hands for a few seconds, and he dies a little while afterwards.

[Argayle]

The usual raid composition in our guild is:
2 tanks
2 melee
3 ranged
3 healers

What we do on this fight is having 1 tank switch to dps, usually me (warrior) and we keep the 3 melee on the legs and they handle the turning, we usually have him turning clockwise on the platform.
1 healer is assigned the leg dpsers 1 healer the raid and 1 healer for the MT.
The adds should die before the next wave spawn, on fragments we clump on the raid healer and on sparks the tank pulls it away. Sometimes we have 2-3 secs of overlap on sparks->fragments but thats manegeable.

Everyone except legs dpsers and their healer are usually on the right side on the platform.
When the boss is reaching the switch % we try moving him closer to the group so everyone can clump and pop CD's for the switch. After that its won kill and loot

[Tebin]

115 wipes later, it's done. For comparison, we had 24 wipes on Alysrazor.

Utter utter shit of a fight. Came down to us getting our steering a bit tighter. for some reason, two melee was easier, despite our other melee being pvp geared.

[Juugimus]

Grats Tebin.

[rodos]

We finally got this guy down last night after many, many, many wipes. Went 1 tank, 3 heals, 6 dps (2 melee, 4 ranged). We put 2 ranged on adds (Lock and Boomkin - our best AoE), the rest on legs. Previously we had only 2-3 dps on legs, stretching the fight out far too long, so that if we ever made it to P2 he already had stacks of superheated and we all fell over.

We also let the sparks build a few stacks before damaging them, leaving more time to dps the boss. With 3 heals it was really no problem keeping the spark tank alive.

[Shathus]

We have just been banging our heads on this fight for too long. Ignoring people getting hit by the lava streams more than we should be, we're still having arguments on the driving. I had assigned our drivers, but being occupied with tanking the adds, I had left that part of the fight to their hands. We've only made Phase 2 once or twice out of probably 40 attempts, and half the raid was dead when we did. A lot of the problems seem to be when we have 3 eruption stacks going, 1 being at 10+ stacks and the healers just can't keep up.

Near the end of the night, I just took over the driving commands (still tanking) and switched up the dps on the legs. I had the ret on the left leg (A), DK on the right (B), and hunter on the right (C) who could switch hard turns. This seemed to be a fairly standard setup for driving (dps on each with a 3rd for harder turning). My question is more how do the DPS need to attack when needing turns.

Ie:
go left = (A) dps hard, (B & C) auto-attack or stop dps
go right (A) auto-attack, (B) go hard, (C) auto-attack
sharp left (A & C) dps hard, (B) auto-attack
sharp right (A) auto-attack, (B&C) dps hard

or should all 3 be switching for hard turns? Having not actually DPS'ed the legs myself, I just don't have a concept of what it takes to move them, I only see the bar moving (or not moving) and I want to know what to tell people to actually be doing when I say "hard right".

There were also times we'd make a turn and he's be lined up to a volcano and I would say "go straight" I'd look and he would just keep turning. Am I calling out the command too late? When I tell them to go straight, should (A & B) just auto attack and C just dps the adds?

[rodos]

If you have 3 distinct stacks of eruption then I would say yes, your steering is the problem. It will occasionally happen by bad luck, but on all our attempts it was a pretty good indicator of a (probably fatal) mistake having been made.

From what I've seen you have to steer him a bit like a ship - account for the lag in his response. Sometimes it's necessary to actively bring the bar back to the centre with dps rather than let it tend back naturally. For a hard turn, all dps switch to the appropriate leg. If anyone on your team has ever driven a semi, or skippered a larger vessel, give them the steering job.

[Jeremoot]

Yeah, you have to stomp on every volcano. Missing one you can heal through, but once you miss a second you're going to be taking a lot of damage.

[Koatanga]

We used:
1 tank*
3 healers
2 melee*
4 ranged

One of the melee was a feral druid who served as insurance to pick up the boss in P2.

We have to get the sparks down right away, because otherwise I am kiting spark into people in order to pick up fragments. When the spark dies quickly, it's not too bad to handle all the adds.

Had 2 < 1% wipes, then changed the strategy slightly. At around 30%, I put all DPS onto the boss. This allows them to get DoTs and debuffs on him and decreases the length of the burn phase. After that strat change, P2 was trivial. The final adds despawn anyway, so any DPS on them is wasted.

[Andover]

We have just been banging our heads on this fight for too long. Ignoring people getting hit by the lava streams more than we should be, we're still having arguments on the driving. I had assigned our drivers, but being occupied with tanking the adds, I had left that part of the fight to their hands. We've only made Phase 2 once or twice out of probably 40 attempts, and half the raid was dead when we did. A lot of the problems seem to be when we have 3 eruption stacks going, 1 being at 10+ stacks and the healers just can't keep up.

Near the end of the night, I just took over the driving commands (still tanking) and switched up the dps on the legs. I had the ret on the left leg (A), DK on the right (B), and hunter on the right (C) who could switch hard turns. This seemed to be a fairly standard setup for driving (dps on each with a 3rd for harder turning). My question is more how do the DPS need to attack when needing turns.

Ie:
go left = (A) dps hard, (B & C) auto-attack or stop dps
go right (A) auto-attack, (B) go hard, (C) auto-attack
sharp left (A & C) dps hard, (B) auto-attack
sharp right (A) auto-attack, (B&C) dps hard

or should all 3 be switching for hard turns? Having not actually DPS'ed the legs myself, I just don't have a concept of what it takes to move them, I only see the bar moving (or not moving) and I want to know what to tell people to actually be doing when I say "hard right".

There were also times we'd make a turn and he's be lined up to a volcano and I would say "go straight" I'd look and he would just keep turning. Am I calling out the command too late? When I tell them to go straight, should (A & B) just auto attack and C just dps the adds?

My humble opinion...you're wasting DPS if you're having one person stay on the left leg when you need a hard right turn. You're only making the turn a lot more difficult to accomplish. I assume you're single tanking if you can afford 3 DPS on legs at all times. Think of it this way, it's like you're having a tug-o-war with the steering wheel. You have one person pulling left when you want to go right...it doesn't make any sense. When you call out a direction to turn him, all 3 DPS that you have designated need to get on that leg and PRONTO. Blow a short DPS CD if they have to.

Try this once:
Keep your DK and your Ret Pally on the legs. We tend to just turn him in a circle to start with so everyone unloads on the left leg and he does a nice spin-o-rama at the begining of the fight. Designate ONE MDPS you can trust to drive Rhyolith. That one person with the help of, lets use your hunter here, drives (by using Vent/calling it out) the boss to the volcano that has been active for the longest time. The Hunter should help out when required and be giving the driver the location of the next active volcano. It might be beneficial to have a 4th RDPS that can help with a hard turn. The longer the volcano is up the more debuffs your raid gets and the harder the fight is. The thing that helps us out the most is we try to take out as many volcanos (inactive) as we can on the way to an active one. Less of a chance of getting an active volcano behind him requiring hard turning.

Do that and when you have removed his debuffs and he's at around 30-35% have all DPS switch to Rhyolith and nuke him to P2. Any adds up at P2 will despawn allowing you to be topped off and get to the boss. Just blow Hero and make P2 a joke. Be sure to have ranged and healers still stacked up behind boss for P2 to help the AoE healing.

Hope that helps.