HM Megaera 5th head = Wall

[Thedave]

Heard you can one tank it with your tank going over to poison head during rampage to build agro on it before tanking w/e head you're killing. Anyone try this strat?

You can, but melee get hurt more.

[Cirque]

I have never done it on 10 man, but 25 man is all about finding the minimum amount of people you need to have on the adds to not get over run. Faster head damage means less adds overall.

From the looks of your logs, you can have less people on the adds and have your ele be on them fulltime. Your shaman should be wrecking the meters with constant chain lightnings.

Once again, things may be very different in 10 man so take this with a grain of salt.

In 25 Meg is a joke, I have done both and honestly compared to 10m, 25m Meg is faceroll. And no, the shaman should not be wrecking anything if you assign people properly to adds as you should if dps on heads is an issue, and is definitely not wrecking anything if adds are literally all over the place which is what is probably happening with OP's raid.

OP, what we did in the end was ignore the adds on 10 man. I know this sounds crazy, but it's what we did. Of course, you need coordinated stuns. We had the tanks taunt some adds to them so they can kill and interrupt them at their leisure. The others were to stick on the dk dps who went blood presence for this just to pick them up to prevent them being everywhere and nowhere. Overlapping the DK aoe stun, shadowfury, monk stun, and singletarget stuns while burning down the heads was what worked for us in the end.

As some suggested, you can definitely consider using hero for this, but we used hero for the second-last rampage as we had little cooldowns left at that point with our comp.

For 25, for those who want to know, we had some demo locks and priests burn them down every time, aoe stuns at random and it pretty much all worked out without breaking our heads over it (no pun intended).

[Soulstrike]

when are you planning to use hero/lust???

i suggest you use it on 5th head during rampage, since on 4th head most of dps's 3min cd should have come back up and kill this head pretty quick

6th head there is less 1 wave of adds so you can play it safer than other ones

[Mini]

Heard you can one tank it with your tank going over to poison head during rampage to build agro on it before tanking w/e head you're killing. Anyone try this strat?

We killed it this week one-tanking with a monk. It requires extremely good execution from the tank and healers to prevent the tank from getting gibbed during or immediately following the breaths. I don't think it would be possible with any tank other than a paladin or monk.

This strat also has a pretty long learning curve (especially for melee), because there are A LOT of places you can't stand or you get breathed on and killed, which makes the positional requirements imposed by the fire/frost that much more penalizing. Frustratingly, most of this learning requires dying to discover, so it leads to a lot of wipes just to figure out where to stand.

We found that the 6th head was hardest for us because of the RNG on having multiple healers tied up with fire and frost, so we used heroism here to get it down in 1 breath. We kill every other head about 5 sec after the 2nd breath.

Hindsight being 20/20, I wish we had learned it with two tanks. It's also possible (like every other fight this tier) that it's tremendously easier with a prot paladin.

[Tojara]

The nice thing about one tanking it is gear will make a bigger difference doing this boss on farm than doing it with two. In the next week or so we might only see one breath per transition.

One tanking is something you should decide to do from the start and stick with. There is allure to the strategy because it would seemingly make it face roll, but it still isn't. There is less room to kite torrents and your melee have to be precisely positioned. Instead of two tanks and three healers being stretched between them (with little chance of dying) you have one tank who needs proper CD managements (both personal and external). The other nuance to this is sometimes on the first heads your DPS is too high and you have to sit around waiting for rot armor to hit a certain number.

We always used lust on the fifth head because with CDs we would safely only have one breath and one set of adds as opposed to two. The sixth head only has a single wave of arcane adds if you do it properly so it's not nearly as dangerous. Seventh head being the easiest if everyone is up because aside from a tank dying you have zero consequences for having things spiral out of control.

Rampage is the easiest part of the encounter by far, it can be trivialized by planning beforehand. You don't even need raid CDs on the first 2-3 (if you're lacking them), and the last 3 are easy with CDs. Rampage deaths will only occur if the adds get casts off during one. We dealt with the adds by CCing them during the regular phase and AoEing on top of our rampage collapse point. Always used a RoP, solar beam or AoE stuns during this time to make sure they didn't get many casts off.

[Simplexity]

So my guild (10M) unexpectedly killed Council in 2 hours last night and went into this fight blind for a couple pulls. Was wondering if someone could help us out with a 10m strat.
Comp: Blood DK/BrM/H Pal/Disc/R Sham
Ele/Aff or Dest Lock/Boom/Rogue/Hunter

1) Most guilds I see from videos go BRPBRPB. What makes the 5th head so tough then that most guilds lust on this head rather than the 6th or final head? How does the timing work for the adds spawning?

2) Given our comp (double Solar beam w/ Symb, RoP, Shadowfury), how should we handle the adds? When is it best to kill them and when is it better to burn the head? How do we tank these since we don't have any plate DPS and should they always be on the head we're killing for AoE?

Thanks for any help!

[Tojara]

The seventh head is a non-issue to be honest. On every other head you're going to PAY for having torrents in bad spots, not clearing up ice patches with cinders or not handling the adds right. The reason the seventh head is easy is because you have absolutely zero consequences for doing every mechanic awful. As long as the tank(s) are alive and you just CC as much of the adds as possible you can just flat out burn the boss. We have killed the boss 3 times now and we have never wiped on the seventh head.

Just think about why the fifth head is dangerous. The red head does the most damage to tanks for one. You just previously killed a frost head for the second time (meaning you have three torrents instead of two) and finally you killed the arcane head as the third head. When you kill a head two appear in it's place, so because you killed the arcane head you now have to deal with two sets of adds spawning for the fourth and fifth set of heads. It's just a lot to deal with and we opt to kill it as quickly as possible.

The sixth head by comparison has three torrents, three cinders but only one set of adds. The arcane head is also the least dangerous from a tank perspective IMO as well. This head is still hard but it's a lot easier than the fifth head.

There are lots of ways to deal with adds. You can have a melee get threat on them and rotate stuns/aoe silence to kill them or you can CC them, ignore them and do the same thing when everyone is stacked up. We hard CC them one by one (they spawn every two seconds for six seconds) and just ignore them. Paralysis, hunter trap, fear, blind, bind elemental, wyvern sting all work and are some of the abilities we use. CC them once, straight burn boss then they get picked up by a tank and dragged to our collapse point. On the collapse point we use solar beam, RoP or AoE stuns. They melt pretty quick.

[Kyrstlol]

So my guild (10M) unexpectedly killed Council in 2 hours last night and went into this fight blind for a couple pulls. Was wondering if someone could help us out with a 10m strat.
Comp: Blood DK/BrM/H Pal/Disc/R Sham
Ele/Aff or Dest Lock/Boom/Rogue/Hunter

1) Most guilds I see from videos go BRPBRPB. What makes the 5th head so tough then that most guilds lust on this head rather than the 6th or final head? How does the timing work for the adds spawning?

2) Given our comp (double Solar beam w/ Symb, RoP, Shadowfury), how should we handle the adds? When is it best to kill them and when is it better to burn the head? How do we tank these since we don't have any plate DPS and should they always be on the head we're killing for AoE?

Thanks for any help!

1) BRPBRPB - Don't even go there with the green head, it is a massive pain in the ass for movement and healing.
Add Spawning - Aim for 1 pack on first 2 heads, none spawn on third, then 2/head on 4-6th, 7th they're almost constant, just cc as much as possible and burn.
Lusting 5th head - The reasoning behind it is because the red head you want to kill in 2 breaths each time since the debuff it puts on the tank is only 60k ticks at 2 stack and 90k ticks at 3stack, plus its up for an extra 15 seconds if you get that 3rd breath. Theres also an extra purple head spitting adds out at this point (2nd Red) so you have more of those to deal with second time around. Lust here isn't necessary but can help.
Personally I'd have your dps hold off on their dps cooldowns at the pull, use them on the 2nd head (Red) and then again on the 5th head (Red again). Lust the 6th (2nd Purple) or 7th (3rd Blue). Keep in mind your lust can help with the rampage healing as well on the 6th or 7th heads. But either way works, 2nd purple head isn't too bad since less adds spawn while purple head is active.

2) Have your brewmaster dizzying haze pick up adds with a little help from solar beam and misdirect if needed. They have like 1.5mill HP and his Keg Smash should rip them up fast. Have only the hunter help him out if they aren't dying fast enough, everyone else nuke boss and finish off any remaining in a rampage.

<3K

[weakdots]

our group is stuck on head #6. we get down 4th head with dps cooldowns and 5th head with lust really quicky. problem with the 6th head is there is so many cinders and torrents going out that dps grinds to a halt with all the movement. We use 0 dps on adds in our strat and we kill the heads fast enough that ring of frost+psyfiend is enough to buy us time on the adds then our BM tank kills them when we stack for rampage. But as i said things fall apart at the 6th head. my concern is if we switch dps cooldown from 4th to 5th head and lust on 6th that we will hit our old wall of getting head #4 down too slowly.

[Kyrstlol]

as i said things fall apart at the 6th head. my concern is if we switch dps cooldown from 4th to 5th head and lust on 6th that we will hit our old wall of getting head #4 down too slowly.

4th head shouldn't be a problem, you have less torrents with one blue head at the front and less cinders than you will later with one less red head dead. The dps cds and lust fill the gap that appears in dps capability and dps loss due to torrent/cinders, as you noticed, and this will happen later than the 4th head.
Good luck if you try what I posted above

[Mini]

Try having one DPS (warrior/DK are best) going out and CC'ing the adds if they are overwhelming you on Blue#2 or Red#2. Yes, it's a DPS loss on the head, but it will allow the rest of your group to feel a lot less overwhelmed while they finish the head off.

Our group also ran into tons of problems at heads 4-6 when we were progressing. We focused a lot on different ways to use our DPS cooldowns or how many adds to kill or whatever, but the thing that we found was most helpful was actually to change our positioning for the frost/fire so that it wasn't as disruptive and people could just do more DPS in general.

[Kalliope]

2) Have your brewmaster dizzying haze pick up adds with a little help from solar beam and misdirect if needed. They have like 1.5mill HP and his Keg Smash should rip them up fast. Have only the hunter help him out if they aren't dying fast enough, everyone else nuke boss and finish off any remaining in a rampage.

<3K

My guild has been on this boss for maybe 4 hours over 2 days and we're close to a kill just need more time. But I do feel like our adds could go better. I had seen this thread after our first night on Megaera and we tried having our Brewmaster pick up adds (previously used a ret paladin) but the problem is by the time the adds actually get to our monk they have stunned maybe 3 or 4 people. And we can't really keep them stunned if the plan is to have him tank, stun and kill the adds on his own. It goes okay with our ret pally on the adds but then we have to pull him off the boss and sometimes even another dps off adds which causes the heads to die slowly. Anyone have any suggestions?

And we too kinda are stuck on that 5th head. The rampage after we kill the 5th head just ends up killing us because everything gets so messy with the adds and we always have healers out with debuffs.

[Kyrstlol]

My guild has been on this boss for maybe 4 hours over 2 days and we're close to a kill just need more time. But I do feel like our adds could go better. I had seen this thread after our first night on Megaera and we tried having our Brewmaster pick up adds (previously used a ret paladin) but the problem is by the time the adds actually get to our monk they have stunned maybe 3 or 4 people. And we can't really keep them stunned if the plan is to have him tank, stun and kill the adds on his own. It goes okay with our ret pally on the adds but then we have to pull him off the boss and sometimes even another dps off adds which causes the heads to die slowly. Anyone have any suggestions?

And we too kinda are stuck on that 5th head. The rampage after we kill the 5th head just ends up killing us because everything gets so messy with the adds and we always have healers out with debuffs.

You're probably better off with the ret pally picking them up, for us we had a fair few attempts when learning with our brewmaster grabbing them but it turned out a lot easier for our Frost DK to grab them, he didn't even need blood (threat) presence. The BrM suggestion was because the poster I was replying to said he didn't have any of the offtanking type classes in his raid. If you've got one it's easier to use them and maximise dps on the head in other ways. If you really need to use the tank for dps, you'll need cc's like solar beam and ring of peace used on the adds as they're being picked up so they have a chance to get in range of your BrM.

edit : you could also try the solo tanking strat to pick up dps if you're really needing it but be very aware it will require more than a couple of attempts for your melee to learn their positioning so they don't eat breaths, as well as your tank and heals to organise cd's to survive. If doing so you need to never take more than 2 breaths on a head and have to be careful of when to kill a head as you want <37 seconds on your yellow breath debuff whenever a head dies.

[Angelicat]

Hey guys, my guild started working on this fight a day ago, and did about a dozen attempts. We are thinking of solo tanking it (because our DPS isn't exceptional and we were always hitting 3-4 breaths on the first two heads, which as I understand is bad). We never really made it past the third/fourth head, and usually wiped on the second trying to two tank it. Our biggest problem seems to be the adds so far. We didn't get a very good clue on how to handle them. We tried CCing and killing them, neither working out better than the other (though we didn't put in many attempts into the fight itself). We were also getting two waves of adds on the first two heads.

Our raid comp is -

Prot Pally

Fury Warrior
Surv Hunter
Assassination Rogue
Feral Druid
Frost Mage
Destruction Warlock

Disc Priest
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid

The feral druid was our other tank for the night, before we decided to try one tanking it towards the end. Should we stick with two tanking or one tanking? I understand it's harder on the melee, and we happen to have 3 melee, but I feel at this point we might need the extra DPS.

We also don't have stuff like RoP and solar beam to deal with the adds, so do you guys think it would be better to put one DPS on the adds to kill them off? Our DPS were also using DPS CDs on the first head, but I'm thinking they should use it on the second head instead, since ice beams without cinders seem to be really rough on us. From the first night of attempts the fight seems kind of brutal, so any suggestions to help would be appreciated.

[Deleted]

Truth be told, we started by trying to cc them. When we did that, we were getting 3-4 breaths. The instant we decided to kill them, the dps improved drastically somehow. Fire head dead before 2nd breath, others before 2-3 breaths. I reckon that it was a combo of not perfect ccs, letting some stuns go, and some specs benefitting from multidotting.

You already said you try it that route, but since most people on the thread recommended ccing them / putting a melee to aggro them and cc... I wanted to recommend the other way. Put 2 dps to kill them, add a 3rd once you kill the arcane, and throw a hero on the 2nd fire head. On the very last head, when you have 3 arcane heads on the mist, aoe cc them while you burn the last head.

[Deleted]

10man question: We only play with one melee, a rogue. Is it possible for the rogue to take the adds?

[Deleted]

Having major issues with megaera, people always drop at 5/6 from megaera's rage/torrent combo, we can 1breathe most of the heads but decide to do 2 breathes for better cooldown management