[10N] Grand Empress Shek'zeer

[Chronos]

Working on this fight this weekend. Any tips or suggestions to deal with adds in p2 and damage in p3?

[baleogthefierce]

We found 3-healing to be a necessity thanks to the high tank damage in phase 2. I went Holy Avenger and used that as part of my cooldown chain, you will take significant damage until the small adds begin to fixate on other people or are killed. Phase 2 automatically ends if you kill all the small adds, so be sure to keep several alive until you've trapped and killed the reavers. In general you can AoE safely on the 2nd trap as it takes the boss several seconds to re-emerge if you do accidentally kill all of the adds. Our DPS had no problem making the check for a single add phase, ymmv.

Phase 3 is just a stack and burn with lust/hero. As long as your fear targets get out of the raid and are quickly dispelled, you should have no problem with the damage once your healers adjust to the fact that they can't top everyone off (think Anub'arak 2.0) -- we shot to keep the raid at about 1/3 hp and the tanks and fear targets as close to full as possible. The tank damage is almost a non-issue here since all the major tank cooldowns will be back up (assuming you only get one add phase) and tanks still have to swap the boss so they can pool their resources for active mitigation.

[Darielle]

Phase 2 automatically ends if you kill all the small adds, so be sure to keep several alive until you've trapped and killed the reavers. In general you can AoE safely on the 2nd trap as it takes the boss several seconds to re-emerge if you do accidentally kill all of the adds. Our DPS had no problem making the check for a single add phase, ymmv.

Trapped adds don't even need to be touched. If you let 2 traps form, you can freely kill Wind guys and trap Reavers. If the boss comes back out while the trap is still ticking the reavers down, it really doesn't matter because nothing happens.

[PsiVen]

IMO the only DPS check for Phase 2 is killing a few adds before your tanks die. If you take the time to form 2 full traps you can spend a large amount of time standing around. We had enough spare DPS to kill one of the Reavers if we screwed that up too, as long as you don't kill all the Windblades and wind up with a Reaver up during the second P1 it should be fine. We split the tanks by side (1 Reaver 3 Windblades per) and burned down the 3 Windblades on one side ASAP, then offtanked (2 Reavers on left, 3 Windblades on right) until the traps formed. Just be careful not to kite fixates into the first trap. You can use it on the first Reaver early to distract the Windblades but that will put a time limit on killing the Windblades before they break the trap.

P3 damage is actually pretty low if you don't try to spam people to full, the only danger is getting 2 healers feared. With quick dispels it is a very safe phase and this week we killed her with 6 people up going into that phase due to a bad disc explosion.

[Darielle]

As an extra note, Calamity can be Dodged, Parried and Blocked.

[Kitmajere]

As a possibly useless aside, a monk tank can extremely easily kite the Windblades. Just dizzying haze them and run in circles while they are dpsed, and waiting for enough residues to be dropped to form two traps for the Reavers. This makes P2 trivial.

[Auracle]

Hey all,

Finally cleared this this past weekend (got stuck on Un'sok for a bit, sigh).

Observations...

Phase 1:
Sometimes dissonance fields seem to randomly go down at the same rate even with one player with Cry inside the designated field and chaincasting. This happened ~ 4 times in 20 attempts, and was extremely disruptive, not sure if anyone can shed any light here. We were VERY careful not to have people/pets/doomguards/anything-that-shouldnt-be-there in the un-designated field after the first time this happened. Bug? Or did I miss something?

Once the energy fields are ~20% energy apart that was sufficient for our healing crew (3-healed it) to top off in between.

Did not find any particular rhythm to the Cry/Dissonance such that we could easily have all Cry damage soaked, it seems to vary a fair bit as the Dissonance fields lose energy as unpredictable rates. Devo Aura is quite helpful to mitigate part of a Cry that isn't soaked in a Dissonance field.

Sometimes Dissonance fields will just sit and do nothing for up to 10 seconds after reaching 0 health. Basically, dont drop a raid CD until the explosion has actually occured.

Phase 2:
Tanks should be ready to burn major CDs on the pickup of this phase, as they have to take 10 - 15 secs of all 4 adds (assuming you split evenly) before th Windblades begin to fixate.
Of the 8 adds, the 6 Windblades CAN be stunned, which we found key in helping to minimize tank damage. Note that while they are fixating they cannot be stunned.
You have plenty of time on phase 2, such that you should always be able to form two full traps, i.e. one for each of the large adds. We kept 1 Windblade alive along with the 2 large adds, to ensure the phase wouldn't end prematurely. This is a great time for your healers to regen some mana/focus etc, since tank damage from one large add each is non-existant.
At the end of phase 2, both tanks should have the poison soaked debuff which lasts 2 minutes. Every DPs in your raid should get this by running over them, before the phase ends. ALL dps benefit from this buff.

Phase 1 Redux:
Nothing special, but while your tanks still have poison-soaked, the OT should periodically run through the raid over the DPS, giving them a fresh 30 buff any time it expires.

Phase 3:
Nothing special, tremor totem/Fear wards are nice if you have them available, but really so long as healers are quick on dispels this phase is a non-issue.

Have fun!

[baleogthefierce]

We tried splitting up the Reavers and Wind adds this week--one tank takes 6 small adds and rolls every cooldown they have until we kill 3 of them, the second tank takes only the 2 Reavers. This worked great for us since there is a big gap in gear between our 2 tanks, and the 6 small adds do considerably more damage than the 2 Reavers.

[ramboschox]

We tried splitting up the Reavers and Wind adds this week--one tank takes 6 small adds and rolls every cooldown they have until we kill 3 of them, the second tank takes only the 2 Reavers. This worked great for us since there is a big gap in gear between our 2 tanks, and the 6 small adds do considerably more damage than the 2 Reavers.

this is what we also do and it works great. when some of the reavers are dead I taunt the big add we dont wanna put in a trap, so i can dish out some more dps on the big guy. ended in rank 67
Before that we had a hard time getting the right timing for the switch in p3, because the explosion short before transition or even after transition where lethal. hopefully dps fixed it with nukestops.

But i fear my tank colleague and me did suck a bit at giving the debuff to our DDs (roughly about 30% uptime)
Here are my questions:
What are your numbers here in terms of buff uptime?
Does Hand of Purity help against Cry?

I am damn shure it helps against the Posion debuff on the tanks.
and yes, sry i know I should use more CS...

Here is our log:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-j ... 55&e=10250

[Lastwolf]

Did this for the first time today.

I tried our monk tank to kite the adds, he got splatted a few times.

I went on the small ones, chained my cd's, holy avenger and 2 stamina trinkets.

P3 is easy.

[fuzzygeek]

Paladin/Monk tanks here. We just split left/right to make pickup less chaotic. We also just leave one big add up the rest of the fight because having the buff for the rest of the fight is hilarious.

[frontallobe]

We found that the entire fight's wipes was almost all focused around the phase 2 adds phase. The tanking in p1 was seriously boring, nothing to interrupt, no need to move the boss.. it was weird. I can't think of a boss that had us do so little for so long. We had to come up with (and maybe we're horrible.. certainly a possibility!) about 15 things to make phase 2 happen from all 10 people. Those things TRUCK FACE. Put together a narrated tips/tricks video for our other raid teams for when they get here. If it helps others of our skill level, great! http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=k5BApSORA5Y#!

[Winkle]

It's also viable to kite the 6 adds, at least thats what we do. The fact that you need to keep them alive for some time for amber puddles anyway means there's no need to kill them asap.

BTW when we do it i tank the 2 big dudes, i then taunt off 1 windblade and kill it in around 5 seconds, vengeance + green buff means i destroy them.

[Ra3L]

We just have 1 tank(DK) get the 2 big dudes an me(Pally) tanking the 6 windblades.
And honestly...the hardest part about that tactic was to get the mobs to me without
misdirection of any sort.

Then chaining cooldowns and killing them asap except for 1 which will be left alone until
both traps are available.

Then pushing her into p3 without another p2.
Pop Hero/Lust and you are good to go.

[frontallobe]

the hardest part about that tactic was to get the mobs to me without
misdirection of any sort.

^ Literally what caused us the most wipes was this transition. What a bear.