[25] Mimiron Hard Mode

Apart from the DPS burn element of meeting the enrage, this hard mode seems to be mainly flame control and positioning.
It's not so much where the fires currently are, its keeping complete awareness of where the fires are GOING to be in like 30 seconds.

Mechanics for those not aware are:
-10 minute hard enrage. Computer voice gives warnings. Upon reaching it, the room explodes for unlivable fire damage until everyone is dead.
-every 30 seconds 3 fires spawn on top of 3 random people in the raid. they initially hit for 7-8k damage or so, then a patch of fire spawns where that person was. It ticks for about 5k after resists with an FR aura up if you stand in it. Once spawned, they will move towards the person closest to their end VERY slowly. They move like a step or two every 5 seconds. If the person they were chasing moves away they will adjust to chasing whoever is now closest, even if that means a change in direction. Fire's persist indefinately unless put out.
-During phase one, at the 1 and 2 minute markers Mimiron will do a big blast of frost damage that puts out every fire in the room. You really should not be hitting the second one though or you'll be behind on the enrage.
-During phase 2 he will periodically pulse frost damage on the melee and put out any fires in melee range. This covers about the same area as is hit by his normal heat wave.
-From phase 2 on Frost Bombs will periodically appear in a random place in the room where there is currently fire. It will look like a giant blue orb floating in the air. After about 10 seconds they will explode, basically one-shotting anyone standing within a 40-yard (read, REALLY BIG) radius and extinguish all fires within that area. Basically they clear a new section of the room for the raid to adjust into.
-During phase 3 there are small Fire Fighting Robots that run around putting out fires. They do not bother you or attack you, but have an aura that silences anyone who happens to be near them. They are attackable, and can be killed by ranged at the end of p3.


Note that mines now only hit for 15k, not 25 like before, rockets now have a gigantic obvious bloody BEAM of red light streaming down from God where they are gonna hit, and next patch is going to bring a whole ton of additional nerfs to the encounter as a whole soon on top of the above.


A few thoughts:

-Looking at parses of the guilds that have killed it, one thing we couldnt understand is that the holy priests seem to be doing a lot of spamming Holy Nova. My assumption is that's prolly due to the shear amount of movement. We already noticed how amazing resto druids are for this fight.
-The damage intake during p2 is a royal pita. What with heat wave on the melee hitting for rediculous, frost damage on them on top of that, the single target rapid fire when you have to have ranged semi clustered in order to properly seed fires where they need to go, and healers having to move away from frost bombs and during spinning up. The solution seems to be grouping into 3 parties with assigned resto druids and holy priests pumping out serious group healing, and holy paladins covering heavy spike.
-Phase 2 appears to be the best place for heroism.
-watching vids, I got a chuckle out of how method excercises all this flame kiting and positioning control, but ensidia just flat out is so good they dont have to. lol


Anyone else had a chance to play with this hard mode?

I actually preferred Method's kill, it looked a lot cleaner and more controlled. Apart from the deaths of the end, of course.

The phase 2 positioning "change" you suggest is actually pretty much identical to our phase 2 positioning even on non-hardmode kills. By grouping up, one or two more people might get hit per rapid fire, but it makes group healing so much easier that it doesn't matter.

Two comments:

First, doesn't the heat wave hit everyone in the room?

Second, if the fires move to the player closest to them, couldn't each fire be controlled to the point where it moves between two spots constantly?

Allow me draw a simple diagram to illustrate: ("o" = player, "F" = fire, "H" = fire head)

Code: Select all

initial positions
  o   o
  o   o

fire spawns on player
  H  o
  o  o

players reposition
o  FH o   
         o    o

fire is chasing the player on the upper right
o  FFHo
         o     o

players reposition before the fire spreads again
oFFH      o
                 o    o

fire is now running through itself to the new closest player
oFHF       o
                 o     o

players reposition before the fire reaches the new closest player
o       HFFo
                  o     o

and now the fire just looks like an idiot!
o       FHFo
                  o     o

Would that work? I know that 3 fires spawn, but if ranged could position closely when a fresh set is expected, two players should be able to control the fires extremely effectively if your description of the fire mechanics is correct. This would obviously be harder to manage on 25-man, but should be considerably easier on 10.

The distance you'd have to spread out away from each fire spawn unless you were the people controlling the fire in order to get it to do what youre suggesting would simply cause additional fires to spawn in extremely bad places in other sections of the room you want to keep clear.
You dont want fires spread. You want them all as massed together as much as physically managable, which is "very" because they move so slowly.

Trying to stop fires in their tracks or get them to turn around honestly isnt worth the effort required. What you CAN and should do is zig zag them.

You also wouldnt need two people. You're overestimating how slowly they move. The same person could just take the couple steps over to the new position. Generally you just have a ranged DPS kite them in such a way. There shouldnt be too much thought involved. You just take a step or two every so often. Hunters are good for this job.

The phase 2 positioning "change" you suggest is actually pretty much identical to our phase 2 positioning even on non-hardmode kills. By grouping up, one or two more people might get hit per rapid fire, but it makes group healing so much easier that it doesn't matter.

Understand the incredible amount of damage that is going out in this phase. We're going healer heavy, in fact much heavier than we'll need to go to beat the enrage, in order to learn the encounter and we're still just falling to peices in p2 from the damage intake, even with aura masteries and heroism.
IF you stack, that makes matters worse, so it takes some skilled healing and clever planning to be able to brute force it in that manner. Maybe the key lies in all that Holy Nova spam we were seeing on the parses.

I doubt it, Holy Nova puts out appalling HPS.

Glyphed it's not too bad. We were looking at people's Holy Novas hitting for like 3k.

It has one big advantage, its instant. That buys time for druid hots to tick, paladin heals to land, chain heals to complete casting, etc.

Is the napalm strike graphically larger during p1 on hard mode? I was trying this out on 10m (25m thread but I think it applies to both >.>) and we had a real problem with people getting hit by napalm strike. At first I thought it was just people adjusting to the fires but it genuinely seemed to have a larger cleave. Not sure that cleave is the right word but I think you know what I mean. Maybe burn radius?

Is holy nova party only, or all raid players in range? It may actually become somewhat efficient if you're hitting 8 people every cast, and as mentioned can be fired on the run without cooldown.

-Splug

Joanadark wrote:

The phase 2 positioning "change" you suggest is actually pretty much identical to our phase 2 positioning even on non-hardmode kills. By grouping up, one or two more people might get hit per rapid fire, but it makes group healing so much easier that it doesn't matter.

Understand the incredible amount of damage that is going out in this phase. We're going healer heavy, in fact much heavier than we'll need to go to beat the enrage, in order to learn the encounter and we're still just falling to peices in p2 from the damage intake, even with aura masteries and heroism.
IF you stack, that makes matters worse, so it takes some skilled healing and clever planning to be able to brute force it in that manner. Maybe the key lies in all that Holy Nova spam we were seeing on the parses.

I'm aware -- we've put some attempts in on it as well.

It doesn't really increase healer load with our Priest-heavy setup. We haven't tried the Holy Nova spam yet, but the one or two extra people getting hit with Rapid Fire are also getting PoH heals that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. All it really does is make topping everyone off when he looks away easier.

Essentially, those people might take an extra 4k or so rapid fire damage, but the healers don't have to spend any extra GCDs or even mana topping them off since they're already putting the same amount of healing on everyone else in their group anyway.

Well we're progressing. Consistantly making it to phase 3 now. Once we make it there with a fully intact raid phase 3 should be very easy it seems.

Turns out that the key to fixing phase 2 is in fact fixing phase 1.
Keeping strat specifics classified until we get a kill, since we should down it today hopefully and it'll unlock algalon for us, and the algalon race is still kinda serious bizness.
Updates soon to come.

Also, the upcoming nerfs to the general encounter are going to hit the difficulty of the hard mode a pretty significant blow. I'm not particularly happy about that. I think the encounter is quite well tuned as it is. Most guilds that have done it seem to share this opinion.

Most guilds who've downed it are miles above average.

Most guilds who've downed it SO FAR are miles above average.

Fixed.
Time is the ultimate nerf. Wait until the encounter is mapped out and strats posted all over bosskillers before placing judgement.