[25] Freya: Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood

I noticed we don't have any good threads on this particular achievement and since the guild is now trying it, I thought I'd open a thread to see how those of you who have more experience with it have made it a bit more manageable. We're working on 2 knocks as I type this and we'll probably have it within the hour, but I thought I'd do something similar to my Algalon thread to see if I can get some common questions answered.

What is the best way to deal with the wave of Detonators? Right now, we're just basically calling out to stop DPS as the Ground Tremor cooldown comes up and hoping that no adds explode before everyone can get topped off. It works, well, sometimes, but we often lose a DPSer or two, and if she's too slow on casting it, we're late killing the wave. Is there a better way to deal with this, or do healers just need to shape up?

We don't usually have too much trouble with the 3 Add wave. Now that the Water Spirit's charge can be interrupted, we can keep this wave pretty well under control. Any tips would be welcome, though.

Our DPS and healing is often a little low on the Conservator wave. I don't think we do anything too terribly crazy. We kill roots, stand out of sunbeams, etc., but we often still have 10-15% to go on the Conservator and/or lose a few people on this phase. Is there something we can do differently?

I appear to have a lot less avoidance on Freya for some reason. On Steelbreaker just last night, I had ~63.6% avoidance, but the logs on Freya show I had only ~53.6% tonight. Three percent is probably that Scorpid Sting isn't being kept up, but I certainly notice this 10% missing. Is this something you've noticed, and if so, is it worth doing anything about?

What's the best way to tank her around seed bombs in Phase 2? Right now, I hold her kind of in the river on the left, and then just drag her back and forth while the healers and ranged are at max range. Some melee stay on the boss (Ret Pally for JoL and Cat Druid for DoTs), and some stay in the group to kill roots. I think we have another guy that gets trees if they're on the far side. How is it best handled?

Any help is appreciated.

Do you happen to run with a prot warrior, elem shaman and a few mages?
the lashers can be stunned, if you are grouping up to aoe them down you could get the shaman to pop eartbhind totem the moment you call out 'stop aoe' to root them in place and the raid moves away, the warrior stays nearby and the moment they get free uses shockwave to keep them still for 4s more after that the first mage in the rotation (respecs frost for the pet) uses his ranged pet freeze to keep them in placce. That should buy you about ~10-15 seconds of ranged aoe to finish them off.
Haven't tried it myself, but thats what i saw in the method/fusion 25man freya+3 movies. One way was to have a warrior aoe taunt them out of the raid, shockwave in place and a ranged freeze to follow.

moduspwnens wrote:I appear to have a lot less avoidance on Freya for some reason. On Steelbreaker just last night, I had ~63.6% avoidance, but the logs on Freya show I had only ~53.6% tonight. Three percent is probably that Scorpid Sting isn't being kept up, but I certainly notice this 10% missing. Is this something you've noticed, and if so, is it worth doing anything about?

Guessing you got hit in the back by the Detonating Lashers.

amh wrote:Guessing you got hit in the back by the Detonating Lashers.

Well I turned her to face away from the raid as much as possible, but I thought my avoidance seemed oddly low on Freya herself. I just checked the logs to confirm it.

That must be the case, though, because I looked at one of our later attempts and the logs show me at normal avoidance levels.

There are a few tricks for detonators that work on both 10 and 25man. The best way is to cycle aoe roots on them (mages, primarily). Have your mages spec into the water elemental (I think) so that they can do a cycle of ranged frost novas. Basically, stack up on the boss, aoe them to 20%, stop aoe, wait a sec (so that damage is no longer ticking), frost nova and run out. When everyone is far enough away, start the aoe. When the nova breaks, the first mage uses his aoe frost nova. When it breaks again, the second mage does it. Ideally, you won't need a third. A warlock's aoe stun (shadowfury?) isn't bad, either.

Oh, and have a frost trap in the middle.

Done properly, you don't have to worry about anyone taking any damage from the explosions.


An alternative is to have a feral/warrior AOE taunt them and pull them away from the raid while they get aoe'd down, but I really don't like that idea. Not enough time and I just don't see it working.

Finally, an earth elemental will constantly taunt them to where ever it is, so keep that in mind.

Angry vs Freya Video - Mondane said he had some trouble with the encoder, and that sometimes at 13:00 or so into the video it kicks out. It's during the epilogue so it's not a big deal.

We went with the challenging roar at 20% -> move adds -> kill at range strategy. It causes them to all take the same path back toward the raid, so we had a mage respec for improved blizzard and frostbite. What we settled on doing was having a designated death knight throw a death and decay pit down right before the AE taunt, and we'd use that remote pit as ground zero for the kill zone. Once they all got there, two of the warlocks rotated shadowfury to keep them stationary while AE started up again and the druid got clear. While actually fighting the lashers, we had everyone gather up just to the west of Freya until the sunbeams came up, and when they came up everyone jumped across her to the east side. When ground tremor started casting, the warlocks would shadowfury the lashers to pause all non-tremor damage. Damage halts were called for tree spawns, unless the lashers were sufficiently low to pull out for AE.

Phase II: Believe it or not, 2-keeper P2 is harder than 3-keeper P2. If you're making it to P2, your healers have learned to deal with Ground Tremor well enough that it's not a major threat in isolation, and there's not much other damage happening to make it dangerous. However, Ground Tremor has a higher prescedence to cast than Iron Roots or Unstable Sunbeams, so a large amount of the damage lost to root-killing gets to stick to Freya longer, and there are fewer root->seed situations to contend with. Even with her higher health and tank damage, it was drastically easier.

-Splug

Big grats :) Did you assign specific people on all three elementals? We've been getting storm and water down low before nuking the Snaplasher, and then killing off the last two. Your way seemed to save you some time.

We've only done +1 on heroic, I doubt it was the one that gives her the roots-ability. We've tried it with roots a few times, but phase 2 was pretty hard when it would be roots -> seeds every single time. Would adding tremor to the equation actually make it easier?

Yes, damage is split across the trio with the intent to kill them evenly, provide interrupts on the water spirit and stormlasher, and have a synchronized HoJ when ground tremor starts casting.

-Splug

I'm not quite convinced that adding Tremor leads to fewer Roots being cast, it seems quite like they are all cast on a rotating random timer which comes more rapidly with more elders; i.e. you wind up with the same average number of roots in +3 as in +1 or +2. In that case it would be possible to get lucky and wind up with fewer dangerous root situations, but you could also end up with more.

Our biggest obstacles so far have been avoiding sunbeams and killing roots before they get people killed by something else.

Do you mean in P1 or P2? In P1 the roots are largely unchanged, and ground tremor has a fairly long recast time. In P2, the recast on tremor gets shorter, and it seems to supress several times where she'd normally cast roots. It's possible we just got amazingly lucky, but the roots barely ever were even cast in our only trip through P2 with 3 elders.

EDIT: Rewatching the video, DBM still gives the same timer for ground tremor in p2, but there are several cases where the timer has 5 seconds or more remaining when the tremor starts casting. So her abilities certainly start to become more crowded in p2.

-Splug

in our only trip through P2 with 3 elders.

I think this says it all. once you reach p2 with an intact raid, for the most part the battle is over, regardless of how many elders are up.

I disagree. P2 with 2 elders is actually harder than P1. The roots occur at such a high frequency that getting people out of them every time makes Freya damage significantly slower, and you still run into the problems of lethal seeds due to Blightleaf's damage increase. We found that to be a source of problems that really didn't come up in three keeper due to ground tremor edging out some of the seed spawns, or in 1-keeper due to the lower seed explosion damage.

-Splug

I've heard a rumor that Freya doesn't cast seed-bombs in P2 if she's out of mana. Is that still true?

Sometimes she bugs out and doesnt cast seeds.
I don't its really controllable. Certainly mana burning her is a waste of time.

We have a rule while doing Freya...we don't talk about Seeds...you just wait and see. Generally if you don't talk about them, they don't happen.