What order to attempt 10/25 hardmodes?

Need some advice for what hardmodes to try first in 25 man.

I think I read some discussion on this but it was probly in the middle of a long un related thread. So for future refence we can put our opinion in here.

I have done all of Uld 10 hard modes except 1 light. So I can offer my opinion there.

10 man list

1.) I choose you Steelbreaker.

Reasons for this. Fairly Low DPS/Healing requirement. Very simple raid positioning. (Almost no movement except transition between phases). And it starts the algy quest chain.

2.) Heartbroken.

Reason for this is the DPS requirement is not bad with a BL. Healing a bit tougher then Steelbreaker, but not too bad. A little raid positioning, tank needs to make a lifespark taint macro and thats it.

3.) Orbituary.

Reason for this is it does not have much of a gear requirement. Ilvl helps yes but you dont need it. Learning the fight can take some time, as everyone is learning something new, and they are all important. Just put your smartest players as demo drivers and you can get it in time. It's 3 because you may waste a lot of time on this which can be discouraging when the whole instance is still waiting for you.

4.) I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare

This fight is pretty hard. Not so much for the Healers. Nor really for the tank except for having to be fast on the taunts. But for DPS they have to learn to USE the buffs while at the same time avoiding the usual damage. First one where you have to watch the clock and call a wipe if your not close. Feel good to get it, but feels VERY BAD to kill him 3 seconds after the cashe is smashed (happened once).

All of these 4 could be done in any order I would say. Depends what your strengths/weaknesses are.

5.) Knock, knock, knock on wood.

This fight is tough. Hard on even the best healers. Constant damage + insane spikey damage. It's a challenge for the tank, who must tank freya + Ancient Conservator and deal with mushrooms. Or freya + storm lasher + waterspirit and avoid getting 1 shot by snap lasher. And theres beams of lights and roots to make it interesting. For DPS its a few simple stupid checks. Can they kill trees as they spawn? Can they kill iron roots as they spawn? Can they Kill the 3 adds at the same time? Can they snare/kill the swarm without wiping the raid? Can they pump enough DPS to down Conservator?

It's a tough fight, but we 1 shot it first try. And have been farming it for weeks 1-2 shot. Just a lot of practice on 1 and 2 knock + a lot of preperation is key.

6.) I love the smell of saronite in the morning.

This fight seems tightly tuned. It took us a long 1 1/2 days to get this. Obviously for healers its a whole new kind of hard, and very much a gear check for everyone. It also takes a lot to get ranged DPS to learn how a) avoid shadow crash b) avoid mark of the faceless c) use mana efficiently d) watch their threat on the animus as it can not be taunted. Definatly a hard fight.

7.) Lose you illusions. (has since had melee damage nerfed)

This fight is unforgiving. Very difficult positioning compounded by being frozen needed dispells. Charged bolt is a killer. Tanks need a CD rotation. Hard healer/tank/dps gear check plus skill.

8.) Firefighter

This fight is crazy. So many ways to die. So many phases. Ughh. Feels good once you get it though. But who knew a "dont stand in the fire" fight would be so hard.

9.) One light in the darkness

Haven't done it yet.


If anyone could make a list for 25 man that would be awsome.

If I understand it correctly, your list above is only for 10 mans right? Was going "WTF?" till I read your last line.

For 25 the difficulties change a fair bit since your don't outgear a lot of the DPS/heal checks. I would say:

1. Orbituary/Heartbreaker - which one is easier depends on whether you raid is better at DPS (Heartbreaker) or execution (Orbituary). Both are pretty easy though after all the nerfs they've had. We steamrolled XT, but took a few hours on Orbit even after nerfs.

2. Lose your Illusion/I could say your blah blah whatever - again, depends on whether you favour DPS (Hodir) or execution (Thorim) - we missed Hodir by like 1 second for several weeks with minimal effort, but spent like 16 hours to people being bad on Thorim.

3. Steelbreaker - quite different from 10 man due to lack of outgearing. DPS reqs are higher than the earlier ones, healing needs to be very efficient, positioning is much stricter, tanks can fuck up much worse.

4. Smelling General whatever - haven't beaten it, but seems harder than 10 only because you have more people who can fail. Were getting to Animus on 2nd pull of first night of attempts, should probably go back if not distracted by making a mace.

5. Firefighter/KnockKnockKnock/Yogg - haven't done, can't comment I gather the order is Firefighter -> Yogg -> Freya currently though.

So what about for ten man raids in mostly ten man gear? What's the easiest/hardest to do? We keep missing Thorim by like... > 5 seconds, we can get XT into hardmode, and down to about 50%
We do FL obviously, but so far two towers was the most, trying it 3 this week.

Start with Orbituary/Heartbreaker.

The way we are approaching Leviathan, is that each week, we do with one new tower for about an hour, check for progress, kill the most annoying tower we left up if we're not close on a kill (Close being 10% or less), and attempt again next week. It's been pretty tiered that way, however we've only downed 3 tower so far (All but Freya).

Heartbreaker, tell your DPS to break the heart every single attempt. Worst case, they don't break it, but you can gauge the DPS from it to help determine how you will do on other hard modes (Cache, Steelbreaker, etc). Best case, you actually break the heart and can get some attempts in at the hard mode.

Thorim 10 man hard is A LOT easier then both freya and vezax IMHO. On 10 man, we just have 2 tanks, one goes arena one goes tunnel, on boss we just taunt after each unbalancing. If you are trying to have 1 tank tank the whole thing, and its not a feral with 600 resi, then I could see this fight being very difficult.

My order for 10 man would be :
Orbituary
Heartbreaker
Cache is Rare
Lose Your Illusion
Knock on Wood
Saronite
Mim

Haven't killed Yogg + 1 yet but in our 4 wipes it seemed like a pain

I think thorim got a lot easier after the nerf to his AP. Him, Steelbreaker, Algalon (can't remeber if there were others) got mega nerfed in their melee damage.

kanst wrote:My order for 10 man would be :
Orbituary
Heartbreaker
Cache is Rare
Lose Your Illusion
Knock on Wood
Saronite
Mim

That.

For Thorim, tips on being in the tunnel to make it go faster? So far we do all of what I can think of, kill healers first, I stun them if they're healing, kill the boss, AoE etc, but we always seem to miss it. Our closest attempt was when we missed it by the hunter running into the stun trap (albeit it was her first time, but she could've made it )

Any ideas to make up a few seconds in there? We'll try Heart Breaker again tonight. Hardest part of that is that our more casual crew currently clears through to Catlady with our better folks showing up to kill the keepers + General attempts at the moment.

pedal2000 wrote:For Thorim, tips on being in the tunnel to make it go faster? So far we do all of what I can think of, kill healers first, I stun them if they're healing, kill the boss, AoE etc, but we always seem to miss it. Our closest attempt was when we missed it by the hunter running into the stun trap (albeit it was her first time, but she could've made it )

Any ideas to make up a few seconds in there? We'll try Heart Breaker again tonight. Hardest part of that is that our more casual crew currently clears through to Catlady with our better folks showing up to kill the keepers + General attempts at the moment.

How many people you sending tunnel? Send more?

Arena is really easy when you get the hang of it/if rogues spec for throwing specialization, 6-8 dps can handle arena real well, send everyone else tunnel. Our mages in tunnel are responsible for interrupting heals

We do 10 man, at the moment we do a 4/6 split, 1 tank 1 healer 2 DPS, 3 DPS, 2 healer 1 tank respectively.

pedal2000 wrote:We do 10 man, at the moment we do a 4/6 split, 1 tank 1 healer 2 DPS, 3 DPS, 2 healer 1 tank respectively.

Is the 6 arena? If so that is too many, we normally send 3 dps tunnel. The tank picks up the outside 2 of the 3 pack, ranged focus and just kill middle guy. After first boss you just round up adds and run, they can be killed when you get to second boss. 10 man its all about keeping moving, the adds die really fast with focus fire so you are essentially running the whole time. Dont ever get out of combat, one mob is at 50% pull the next pack.

Hmmm.. well we do the chain pulling already, but we will try it with 3 DPS this week and see how it goes. What do you do in Arena? At the moment we place our tank on the tip of the circle closest to Thorim (apparently the adds target whomever is closest off the bat) and then have everyone else stand near the middle of the Circle. Would it be easier to move to a corner?

pedal2000 wrote:For Thorim, tips on being in the tunnel to make it go faster? So far we do all of what I can think of, kill healers first, I stun them if they're healing, kill the boss, AoE etc, but we always seem to miss it. Our closest attempt was when we missed it by the hunter running into the stun trap (albeit it was her first time, but she could've made it )

Any ideas to make up a few seconds in there? We'll try Heart Breaker again tonight. Hardest part of that is that our more casual crew currently clears through to Catlady with our better folks showing up to kill the keepers + General attempts at the moment.

Interrupts and CC can be important when you're first working on it - the acolytes heal, so killing/cc'ing them first, and having someone ready to interrupt them while killing them is very important (they can heal like 80% health with a single heal).

Misdirects/tricks of the trade are nice so people can go all out while running to the mobs too.

Drag the 2nd boss down the stairs while people are killing the pack before him, so casters can start on him ASAP - you can then aspect of the pack all the way to thorim once he's dead. Having a druid start running up the stairs to the doorway when the boss is nearing death is good too, so he can sprint out as soon as the boss dies - thorim takes so long to jump after being triggered that the rest have time to catch up.

About thorim. I always make it to him with 60-70 seconds left on harmdode timer in 10 men.

5 in 5 out.

1 Me (Tank)
1 Non druid healer (Druid is less gimped then others in arena since their insta casts wont be pummeled)
3 dps. 1 needs to be able to interupt. I usualy take Ret/Hunter/Ele sham from what I have.


The key, get aggro on the guards, dont worry about the acolytes, let the dps worry about them. As soon as the acolyte is dead, do the next pull, again aggro on guards is important. When 2nd acolyte is dead, pull boss even with a couple guards still up.

The next part is key. When the door opens there are 4 mobs there before the boss. 2 healers and 2 guards.

Your job as tank is to get a bit of aggro on each guard (judge / exo / AS ) anything without stopping your run up the stairs, pull the boss immidiatly so no new adds spawn. Your 4 people will deal with the 2 healers at the bottom of the stairs while you tank boss for a 3-4 seconds. The guards run slow so they will join you next. Then 3-4 seconds later you healer and dps will come up the stairs, around this time someone gets the debuff where they epxlode, so people have to watch out where they stand as they come up.

Now if my dps arn't very aoe heavy we usualy end up killing the second mini boss with the 2 guards still nearly full health. The door opens, we run through and activate phase 2, i'm pretty sure the guards just they behind.

We did Thorim hard the past 2 weeks with 1 tank (me). We send a DK (DPS gear/spec) into the tunnel with 2 healers and 3 DPS, while the other 2 DPS hang out with me and the 3rd healer in the arena.

The extra heals come in handy in phase 2.