Mythic Botanist

[Drish]

So I know that the order most guilds do Botanist in is Naturalist, Arcanist, and then suiciding calls on Solarist.

I'm curious as to if anybody does it in a different order, and what their experience is? Since 7.2 with the damage buffs it doesn't matter if you reach the end with 0 rezzes with the suicide strat, but I know we wasted a lot of time pre-7.2 as phase 2 is a battle of longevity, causing phase 3's battle of attrition to sometimes be very tight. I'm mostly curious with how the abilities interact and if people find it faster/harder or slower/easier or whats happening in the other versions.

If anyone has even just a video with 0 commentary i'd love to watch.

[Deleted]

So I know that the order most guilds do Botanist in is Naturalist, Arcanist, and then suiciding calls on Solarist.

I'm curious as to if anybody does it in a different order, and what their experience is? Since 7.2 with the damage buffs it doesn't matter if you reach the end with 0 rezzes with the suicide strat, but I know we wasted a lot of time pre-7.2 as phase 2 is a battle of longevity, causing phase 3's battle of attrition to sometimes be very tight. I'm mostly curious with how the abilities interact and if people find it faster/harder or slower/easier or whats happening in the other versions.

If anyone has even just a video with 0 commentary i'd love to watch.

Serenity killed it the first time with Arcanist dying last.

Afaik everyone usually kills Naturalist first, and then you have the choice between Arcanist and Solarist. Killing arcanist 2nd makes P3 rather simple so it's the most popular.

[Nitros14]

I believe Midwinter killed Arcanist last they have a video up.

[Zafu]

We tried both strategies a fair bit before settling for the usual Naturalist > Arcanist > Solarist kill order.

We initially quite liked the idea of doing Arcanist last as we are very melee-heavy and felt we would struggle with the sacrifices. What transpired quite quickly though was that we were just wasting dps on lashers/constant movement and were running into problems where we didn't have enough soakers available for Call of Night, so we swapped back.

Here's a quick run-through of how we ended up working this phase:

If you're struggling with Solarist, the trick is to get to the phase with an APT/Ress available at the very least, and if necessary save it for when a healer gets CoN. The tank will need a lot of spam healing, so anything you can do to ease that burden is very important.

We set markers to the left and right of the room, about 60yds apart and with the orb closest to the stairs spawning roughly between them. We had the first Calls sacrifice to the spores, with Orange marker going to the back of the room and purple marker going towards the stairs. We kept two people assigned to each colour to cover soaks; make these people mobile ranged dps or, if you must, use mobile healers such as druids or monks. If spores are up, instruct the calls to soak those immediately, and if they aren't, instruct them to die to their first solar collapse. Make a decision about which Call of Night target you want to ress on the fly, and have your shaman healer (assuming you have one) drop the APT nearby. Alternatively, use a battle ress on that player. The trick is to get them to die as soon as possible so the soaking players can get back into the melee stack ready for raid healing as the orbs die.

Kill the closest orb to the boss first, and then make a call on which one you need to kill next - don't necessarily always work clockwise or anti clockwise if it's going to be tricky for your ranged/melee to reach the orbs in time to put damage onto them. After the second set of orbs and Calls of Night, you'll likely have exhausted external cooldowns on the tank and he/she will need to be dispelled. Have the other tank taunt and have the entire raid follow the boss to the other side. Make sure you call repeatedly not to go near the tank to avoid a painfully low% lasher fest. Kill the lashers, sacrifice the third calls (with melee soakers if you have to) and put as much damage as you can into the boss.

If you're at 8% or above when a set of orbs comes in, switch to them to nuke them down. If you're below 8%, it's probably safe to just call for a push on the boss. Use Time to Die if you can to make this call more reliable, too.

Honestly the tricky part in this phase is getting the beginning of it clean - after that it really does become very simple. Just make sure those Call of Night's know where to go and are comfortable dying to their own solar collapse if there are no spores available. Make sure your spore soakers in phase 2 know to stop soaking them when the boss is at around 25% health, too, to make things easier for you!

Hope this helps and good luck on him!

[Unholy_Prince]

Solarist last is the goto strat for a reason