[25] Alone in the Dark

Doing this fight with my guild feels like doing Yog on normal mode with a complete pug. Holy, freaking, cow. Oww my face.

By far the most technical, complex, and difficult encounter since pre-nerf Muru. Greatest Healing, tanking, and DPS finesse challenge of the entire expansion. I thought Firefighter was hard.

Anyone else been working on this and have any comments? I've been working on a whole storyboard of MS paint diagrams for our entire phase 3 strat, and after the 2nd ES it gets so rediculously complicated it looks like JOHN FUCKING MADDEN. Not even an exaggeration.

O.o what general strat are you guys going with?

I can understand that having 5 separate players identify and target the marked mobs is quite difficult, but I've always assumed that the intended way to do this fight is the same as on 10 man: DPS taunt all 5 mobs out in separate directions, and then tanks taunt them back. This way you only have 5 mobs healing, and you've already got a DPS on each of them. Add another DPS to each mob for a short while and you should be able to out-DPS the heal.

When the fight is changed in 3.2, I'll be very disappointed in any guild that does it any other way. No one should have any issues assigning 3 players to taunt an add every so often.

Unfortunately, I realize that such coordination is difficult at the present moment. I do wonder, however, how many people have actually practiced and tried such a strategy.

The tooltip for the heal buff actually says they're healing everything around them.

I don't think it's worth pursuing the achievement aggressively. 3.2 is going to reduce the difficulty drastically, and I don't expect to get it "pre-nerf" starting now. I do think it's worth having some time in to practice and prepare for a rush on it at 3.2, but trying to hammer on it full time now is just going to ramp up raid hours without significant chance of victory.

-Splug

I don't think it's worth pursuing the achievement aggressively. 3.2 is going to reduce the difficulty drastically, and I don't expect to get it "pre-nerf" starting now. I do think it's worth having some time in to practice and prepare for a rush on it at 3.2, but trying to hammer on it full time now is just going to ramp up raid hours without significant chance of victory.

That's how we felt about many of simple 10 man hardmodes, until we got them. But I can see your point. I gusse the best need to have something to do.

But imagine they did get it, that would feel pretty darn good. And even if you don't. The experience could benefit more then the burn out costs.

Good luck!!! (I'm jelouse)

Belloc wrote:I can understand that having 5 separate players identify and target the marked mobs is quite difficult, but I've always assumed that the intended way to do this fight is the same as on 10 man: DPS taunt all 5 mobs out in separate directions, and then tanks taunt them back. This way you only have 5 mobs healing, and you've already got a DPS on each of them. Add another DPS to each mob for a short while and you should be able to out-DPS the heal.

When the fight is changed in 3.2, I'll be very disappointed in any guild that does it any other way. No one should have any issues assigning 3 players to taunt an add every so often.

Unfortunately, I realize that such coordination is difficult at the present moment. I do wonder, however, how many people have actually practiced and tried such a strategy.

1) Any DPS tanking a mob that is ever higher than 1 hp will instantly die without some kind of massive cooldown running on them.
2) Even if they wouldnt you can only afford 4 healers if you want to meet the DPS check. It takes all four healers concentrating on a geared main tank to keep them up through 2 or more adds at high HP. Theres no way they could ever heal 5+ people all tanking mobs with heals running on them.
3) It takes your entire raid turning and AOEing to out-DPS the heal. If you get a double-stack of the heal you don't out-DPS it at all, you just try to slow it's rate and survive until it ends. 2 DPSers don't come anywhere CLOSE to putting out enough damage.
4)You have to survive 4 Empowering Shadows to be able to win. The number of beacons each time increases, and after the 2nd Empowering Shadows on you get ALOT more than 5 Beacons.

I wasn't kidding when I said in the thread about Exodus' rumored kill that beating this encounter is probably the greatest feat of Tanking, Healing, and DPSing ever achieved in this game. the 10-man Alone in the Dark is nowhere even remotely close to the 25-man version.

Out of all the guilds that have beaten it, pretty much all of them have used a different strategy, or variation of the major strategies. The one we're working on is closest to the one Premo used, which is essentially brute-force AOE-based.

What's amazing is thinking of the time restraint you have to kill the alone of the dark and equating it to yogg +1. When we did it this week, I was like well he is supposed to be dead right now and we are only half way there and for yogg 0 you loose 10% dmg and gain another healer and possibly a tank.

I think the best way to apporach this is to basically test your dps with yogg + 1, give them a strict time limit during p3 and see how close you can get to the burn required to get the kill.

Joanadark wrote:

Belloc wrote:I can understand that having 5 separate players identify and target the marked mobs is quite difficult, but I've always assumed that the intended way to do this fight is the same as on 10 man: DPS taunt all 5 mobs out in separate directions, and then tanks taunt them back.

1) Any DPS tanking a mob that is ever higher than 1 hp will instantly die without some kind of massive cooldown running on them.
2) Even if they wouldnt you can only afford 4 healers if you want to meet the DPS check. It takes all four healers concentrating on a geared main tank to keep them up through 2 or more adds at high HP. Theres no way they could ever heal 5+ people all tanking mobs with heals running on them.

STARs strat IIRC actually was DPS taunting the beacon'd adds out, but the idea wasn't to tank them as DPS, it was just to get them out of range of other adds so the others didn't get healed - They had 3 hunters the pretty much spent all of p3 identifying the beacons and taunting them, unloading on them as they ran, then feigning them back to the actual tanks so they were out of range when the heal went off. The number of people actually tanking the adds didn't change, and the majority of the DPS to keep them low was still AoE.

The 2nd(?) guild that landed a kill did something similar with priests and fade IIRC from their posted strat.

The 2nd(?) guild that landed a kill did something similar with priests and fade IIRC from their posted strat.

The Fade kiting thing was a joke. They were trolling. That wasn't their real strat.

Joanadark wrote:

The 2nd(?) guild that landed a kill did something similar with priests and fade IIRC from their posted strat.

The Fade kiting thing was a joke. They were trolling. That wasn't their real strat.

3rd guild apparently. I remember premo before the kills saying they'd tried with rogues and priests kiting, after the kill they posted a pretty detailed write-up (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 8164&sid=1) about priests and fade, so I assume it wasn't a troll. I haven't watched their video though, so I take it that's not what they're seen to be doing?

Reading it again, it does sound ridiculously risky with AoE threat being so hard to measure, and then having to balance it both while the priest is AoEing and then on the 2nd priest when the first is doing the back to back fades. But then STARS' strat sounded painfully risky too.

edit: *reads past page 2 and finds confirmation of trolling*

Joanadark wrote:1) Any DPS tanking a mob that is ever higher than 1 hp will instantly die without some kind of massive cooldown running on them.

Well that's kind of the point, isn't it? Every 10% (if I am not mistaken), the mobs lose a buff stack, reducing their damage. When the players taunt, the mobs should all be at 1 health. The mobs run out to them, hit them for insignificant amounts of damage, and then they get taunted back before the mob has healed enough to regain a stack.

I'd more expect the problem to be separately identifying all 5 beacons and not mistakenly taunting one that another player has targeted -- all within 10 seconds. If players are getting killed by the adds they taunt, then DPS on the adds has failed.

The hunter taunt is only a brief fixate, so it goes back to its proper tank afterwards anyway. And if the mob does get too close, they can always feign.

Makes hunters indispensable +0 TBH.

If you used a ret to taunt, then the tank would need to taunt back at the right time, which would be tricky when you have 2+ mobs to taunt!

Hardest fight currently in the game by a fair margin... Not only does it require perfect execution but on 25% of the attempts you dont even have a chance to kill it due to RNG.

I've killed both muru pre nerf and this, and this was harder.

Tanks have to be perfect, Healers dont have .1 second to think, and dpsers all have to output their maximum dps potential or it wont die in time.

As was said earlier theres plenty of different strats to kill this, we switched 3-4 times before finding one that was perfect for our group comp.

On the flipside, greatest kill feeling ever ;D

Which guild are you in again? Vigil I'm guessing.

yep!