Thread: From Stars: Yogg-Saron +0 Strategy

I translated the original Chinese post of their strategy from:
http://bbs.ngacn.cc/read.php?tid=2529673&fpage=1

Q:Why do people think Yogg-Saron +0 is "No Patch No Down"?
A: Known to all, the hardest thing of this combat is how to deal with Phase 3, so this post will be mainly focused on Phase 3 strategy. According to several posts from EU/US forums, players thought it needs 6 mins and more to kill Yogg-Saron with the help of one Keeper.Take damage tanks took and Shadow Beacon into consideration, we need 4-5 tanks and 5-6 healers, meanwhile the raid dps will be decreased by 10%. This means, regardless of Shadow Beacon, we aren't able to take down Yogg-Saron within enrage timer. That's why almost everyone thought even with full lv239 gears, it's still mission impossible.

Q:Is it really "No Patch No Down"?
A: We got this world first kill last night, so it's not. Of course there were hotfixes from Blizzard, I'll talk about this later. After we killed Mimiron we did a theorycrafting, we thought with 10 warlocks we could bring down Yogg-Saron in 3 mins and reduce Beacons to 3 or less.
After trying over and over again, familiarity with this combat and improvement of gear helps to increase dps. Most Have-To-Face-Yogg classes managed to double their damage, so finally we got this world first kill without an extreme comp.

Q: Why do we say affliction warlocks are MVPs?
A: Phase 3 is the most special combat throughout Azeroth, you have to turn back every 11s-19s to avoid Lunatic Gaze so for a normal class maybe you only get 2/3 time to dps. But affliction warlock is a exception.
Another important reason is that, Phase 3 starts at Yogg-Saron with 30%HP left, affliction warlocks with Death Embrace can obviously reduce Phase 3 combat time with 16000-18000 drain soul per tick.
Also in Phase 2, spamming dots makes warlocks much more powerful than other classes. We take 5 warlocks with us, actually this number is less than what we thought to be.

Another class is rogues with Honor Among Thieves, with 2 pieces of T8 significantly reduce energy cost of Fans of Knives and a damage boost against targets less than 35% health . Our rogues say they could manage 9000-10000 dps, but because of restriction of Phase 2 and interruption of Phase 3, we didn't take Honor Among Thieves rogues.

Of course, rogues and warlocks are greatly capable of AE, so they could reach a high dps during this combat. Maybe you can see a death knight managed to be NO.1, this can't prove anything, the core of dps deck can only be warlocks and rogues.

Warrior: Protection/Arms, dps boss, Battle/Command Shout.
Mage: Remove curse, dps boss, AE on Shadow Beacon.
Priest: Disp heal/Shadow dps Beacon.
Shaman: Dps boss, totems.
Death Knight: Strongest tank, aoe Ebon Plague.
Paladin: Healer MVP/Ret dps boss and blessings.
Rogue: AE MVP.
Hunter: Dps boss and pull Phase 3 adds.
Druid: Flexible healer/tank.


Q: What's the difference among +0,+1,+2,+3,+4 Yogg-Saron?
Strategy:
The first thing people mentioned is Phase 3 adds can’t be killed without Thorim, and every 45 sec there would be a Shadow Beacon(with Mortal Strike that is 375,000 hp during 20 sec and cumulative).
The monsters damage is based on hp, 1% is about 2,000, but 100% is around 35,000. So if they gain hp from Shadow Beacon, they would bring down tanks extremely quickly and say W~I~P~E to us. So how to separate the monsters is the hardest and most important thing.

Improvement of Gear
Damage decrease by 40%, 20% more damage taken, 20% healing reduction and 20% less HP compared to +4 Yogg-Saron, this brings not only DPS pressure, but also tanking problem. We used to take down Yogg-Saron +3 without Thorim at the middle of June, felt that it's easier than pre-nerf Mimiron, this would tell the improvement of gear is very important to Yogg-Saron +0.

Soft Enrage
Phase 3 of +0 combat is different from others.Normally we got a 15 mins Enrage timer, but in +0 Phase 3, the 4th Shadow Beacon is almost the limit of raid, this 180 sec soft enrage time may stop many guilds.


Q：So what strategy does Stars use in Phase 3?
A：The strategy we used in Phase 3 was very highly tuned. We can even say, the 3 Tanks, 4 Healers and the 2 Hunters are the key to the encounter, they push a wrong button, we wipe. Maybe there would be a more efficient way to do this but this is exactly the way we win the battle, and we are proud of it.

First let’s check out the Shadow Beacons. Every 45s after P3 starts, Yogg will place Shadow Beacons on 3-5 random adds (the first wave should be 3, but it will definitely goes to 4 or 5 the second time). The Beacon looks pretty like Hunter’s Mark, and will explode after 10 secs, all enemy creatures within 20yd of the explosion will gain a stackable HoT which heals 750K HP in 20s. So the strategy goes to 2 basic rules:

1. Keep all 5 beacons 20yd away from each other.
2. Keep all beacons 20yd away from Yogg.

The general procedure we execute it:
1. Formation: similar to the easy mode, all melee around the boss to deal with adds and interrupt all Siphon Life. The rest of Melee DPS attack Yogg all the time.
Tanks: We use 3 tanks here to take hands on new adds one by one (1 per 10 sec), to make sure all tanks receive nearly same numbers of adds. (Actually this is sooooo hard to achieve, we missed lots of adds).
2.After Yogg apply beacons to the adds, the tanks move as below



The first Beacon. This is not hard to handle since there is only 5 adds around and the newly spawned ones will not be marked, so it will definitely be the 1st, 2nd and 3rd adds that spawn to be marked. The tanks will only need to easily move to pos A, B and C, and get back after the Beacon explode, and certain damage dealers burn them to keep tanks safe.
2) The 2nd Beacon. This will happen after 90secs. There should be 10 adds around and 4, 3, 3 on each tank. We still pull them to A, B and C, and Hunters standing at the green spot use Distracting Shot to move all 5 marked adds safely away. However the most difficult point comes, there will be multiple ways the Beacons spread among pos A, B, C:

Very difficult to handle, mostly a wipe if happen:
(3.1.1)(1.1.3)(0.3.2)(2.3.0)(0.2.3)(3.0.2)(3.2.0)(2.0.3)
Pretty easy to handle, and will happen more likely:
(1.3.1)(2.1.2)(2.2.1)(1.2.2)(1.1.2)(2.1.1)(1.2.1)

The hunters need to figure out the Beacons fast and choose the right add to DS.



The advantages to handle Beacons with Hunters: DS will force the add to follow the Hunter for 6 secs and since the adds move extremely fast, they will move out of 20yd range in 3secs to avoid being effected by the explosion, and the threat will immediately restore after 6secs so the add will go back to the tank to let the damage dealers burn them. Furthermore, Hunters can deal significant damage to the boss itself, even bit with Rogues and locks, so we can get less tanks and more DPS.

3) The 3rd Beacon happens at 135secs, similar with the 2nd, there will be more adds on the tanks, and it will be more and more difficult. We only managed to deal with 3rd Beacon twice among all our tries, the first, 1.8M left, the 2nd, we kicked his ass.
3. Burning. Some of the damage dealers burn the adds (Rogues and Shadow Priests are best, and a Unholy DK for the 13% spell vulnerablity), for efficiency we AEed them, all of the raid goes burning adds on 3rd Beacon.

So, the key and most difficult points of the encounter:
1. Tank pulling: The tanks should be extremely concentrated on pulling adds, since they spawn randomly.
2. Tank healers: Newly spawned adds will hit the tank for around 35K, but we use 3 dedicated healers + 1 assisting healer, sometimes you cant fully rely on the healer, instead you need a good communication with the tanks and proper use of CDs.
3.DPS: all damage dealers must make around 5500-7500 to burn him down in 3mins provided you can not face the boss in around 1/3 of this phase. It’s extremely hard even on +1/
4.Handling with Beacons: the Hunters must choose adds and DS in a perfect rotation, and hope it is not the worst situation like (2.3.0)(0.2.3) or (3.0.2) (after theorycrafting we found that we only get half chance to get a ideal situation), but anyway those are not totally impossible to deal with, we get a (0.3.2) on our kill, and the excellent performance and luck of our DK tank helped him to survive many, many fatal attacks, made him the strongest tank.

Other little details:
1. Use a Aura Mastery Chain to avoid Deafening Roars, or the Tanks can not hold too long.
2. Use Bloodlust/Heroism at the beginning, burn the boss fast to 20% and start Execution, there will be no time for you to do this any more.
3. Don’t just turn round every time upon casting of Lunatic Gaze, turn yourself after 1 hit to make sure you maximum your DPS uptime at the cost of 4% sanity once.

Q: The damage meter?
A: The Unholy DK did impressive damage, actually they are really, really powerful in this encounter, and keep 13% spell vulnerability is another great benefit for the raid, however they AEed a lot of 1% adds so they did many wasted damage. The exact main AE class are Rogues and Shadow Priests, their powerful and stable AE are the key to the burning of adds. The most considerable is the damage dealing to Yogg itself, this is the real key to this encounter, and not many raids can achieve this.

Q: What about the difficulty of this encounter? Is this the best ever?
A: Definitely, this one is harder than any other bosses in the history of WoW, the Sunwell is not even comparable with it. On whether is it the best, I have to say, this encounter is certainly well designed, but a good encounter should not make any class too OP in it, and locks are extremely powerful in this battle, if you get 8 or 10 locks it will goes easier but it’s boring, in my personal opinion, it is less interesting than Mimiron.

Q: The situation on this kill? Are there any good luck with you?
A: First we got some human resource issue so we only have 5 locks, it’s not a very extreme comp. Second we had 2 members dropped during the fight, one died too early and encountered a very rare (0.3.2) spread Beacons; so I think we have a lot of room on this encounter, also a certain outcome for our practice in months. However we got blessings, our DK tank miraculously survived 4 adds with 2 stacks of HoT.

Q: Did Yogg +0 get any nerf? Does the nerfs affect the meaning of the kill?
A: Yogg was tuned several times after Ulduar ships:
1.P1 and P3 adds health nerf
2.Sara’s health nerf
3.Death Ray will not affect DCed targets any more.
4. Corruptor Tentacles spawn faster, and Blink/Shadowstep can be used now.
AND this is the most recent change:
5.The hidden protection mechanic of Sanity increased to 40%

the 1st and 5th changes affect Phase 3, and since the healing mechanic of Beacons and adds’ damage are relative to percentage of HP, so the 1st one exactly increase the difficulty for the tanks to survive at the cost of less DPS pressure, so is not considered as a nerf to +0 (however it’s a good new for +1 raids which choose Thorim). The 5th change is the most recent one, this significantly smooth the sanity situation into Phase 3, definitely increase DPS (we can consider 1% sanity = 1s facing DPS time), if not, some of our raid member will get mind controlled earlier, but this will not greatly change P3, so this kill is certainly worth remembering.

Impressive, /respect

That's impressive stuff.

very interesting read indeed...sounds like you need pro pro hunters/tanks to pull this off

kudos to their dps who could do 5.5k+ whilst the constant lunatic gazes

I cant imagine more than 10 guilds world wide with enough skilled players to tank and seperate adds in this way.
To all the PvP'ers who think PvE is easy, i laugh at you, muhahahahaha

Nice tactics, definately amazingly difficult to pull off.

Originally Posted by nobanme

I cant imagine more than 10 guilds world wide with enough skilled players to tank and seperate adds in this way.
To all the PvP'ers who think PvE is easy, i laugh at you, muhahahahaha

Nice tactics, definately amazingly difficult to pull off.

Agreed, crazy and complicated strategy, very cool.

PvP skill is just a different sortof skill from PvE - PvP is the 'twitch' factor, the difference between an extremely skilled PvP player and a very skilled PvP player is a few fractions of a second at best. Extreme PvE skill is more like putting together a large, coordinated dance, where if one part of the dance goes wrong, then the whole damn thing falls apart, and the pyramid of dancers falls into a spike-pit and has to pay 70 gold to repair.

Bravo!

First of all BIG gratz to u guys....and second BIG thanks for the strategy

Correct me if i am wrong....u got the Mimiron hard first...and the Yogg hard first right?

Amazing. That's just insane.

Originally Posted by Hermmes

First of all BIG gratz to u guys....and second BIG thanks for the strategy

Correct me if i am wrong....u got the Mimiron hard first...and the Yogg hard first right?

No I'm not a Stars member