Please Help with Heroic Warmaster - 8/8 Heroic Capable guild

[Pearsyn]

Hello there, first would just like to give an advanced thank you to anyone that contributes anything that helps us kill this boss

We are a very close knit guild, that had the dps to kill heroic spine pre-nerf...but we've been grinding our face against heroic warmaster for almost 150 attempts....its getting brutally painful

Our Raid comp is as follows:

Tanks
Warrior and Paladin [We do have a Death Knight Tank that raids in our alt runs]

Melee DPS
Combat Rogue
Ret Paladin (Usually sitting in favor of range)
Unholy Death Knight (Always sitting on this fight, playing his Fire Mage instead)

Range DPS
Survival Hunter
Shadow Priest
Destruction Lock
Fire Mage
Boomkin (Usually on his druid instead of Holy Paladin for this fight only)

Healers
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin (Again usually playing a Balance Druid for this fight)

When we first attempted this we were using a strategy that soaked every onslaught as a raid, and soaked as many barrages as we possibly could. There was alot of movement involved and I opted for the strategy to solo soak most of the onslaughts using a Shadow Priest and Cauterize.

Our Onslaught soak order is as follows: Mage -> Raid -> Mage -> Priest -> Should we have a 5th, we usually soak it as a raid, we usually don't (when we make it this far)

The premise of this strategy as I understand it is that in order for solo soaking to work properly, you must be killing the Twilight Assault Drakes before they fly away.

We have split the ship into very tiny sectors that allows for maximum efficient soaking of barrages while the Drakes are active.

Our Warrior Tank and Combat Rogue (our rogue will often feint and sprint to help with another if he hasn't soaked recently)
Ret. Paladin (solo soak w/DP glyph)
Prot Paladin (solo soak w/DP Glyph)
Survival Hunter/Destro Lock (As a hunter with the 4.3.2 I can nearly always solo soak with deterrence active, only once did it do enough damage to kill me, overkill of 2k)
Shadow Priest/Fire Mage
Resto Druid/Shaman

At the start of the fight, the warlock and myself dot up Goriona with the 1-3 Globals you can get off, warlock is putting up Bane of Havoc on Goriona to minimize if not eliminate entirely any Twilight Flames that will be cast at the Start of Phase 2.

I proceed to run over the ship, Hunter's Mark, Pre-pot and dot up the Drake over head, so are all casters, when the Dreadblade and Elite Slayer land, tanks are keeping them close so that our rogue can do his worst on them. The first set of drakes are usually completely dead before the Onslaught hits the ship. Melee adds die shortly after and everyone is sitting and waiting for that next set of drakes and the Sapper just before that.

We've found that the ships health varies after the first wave of adds around 55% to as high as 72%. Our Goal is always 66/67%, 61% isn't great, but 55% is too low.

Second Onslaught hits after/as we dot up the drakes overhead and the Dreadblade and Elite Slayer land. Everyone Groups up quickly, Diving Gaurdian and spread out even quicker than we stacked. Should be noted here, that Charges and Cleaves are not an issue whatsoever for us.

Our Ranged and Ret Paladin burn the drakes down with as much as we got, they both die before they fly away. The sapper is killed by ranged and hopefully we see more than a concussive shot on it, a hammer of justice works wonders. There seems to be alot of time before the 3rd set of drakes reveal themselves, which isn't a bad thing since usually the Dreadblade and Slayer require a bit of work. Both of the melee adds are dead before the 3rd wave of drakes. And this is where things get really tricky for us.

After the second set of drakes we've found our ship health to be consistently around 28-42%, usually at 28/29% sometimes higher. So we haven't activated the 3rd Deckfire, but its sure on its way.

As the 3rd set of drakes are flying over a sapper is landing...this is probably the hardest drake set for us to kill before they fly away, but we usually pull it off. I've assigned our ranged dps to kill the sapper before they switch to the drakes since more often than not, the deck seems to be just blanketed in fire.

As soon as the sapper is dead we burn the drakes down quickly, if the drakes are allowed to fly away its pretty consistent that our ship health is between 12-21%. At this point we'll go into a soak everything mode, and we'll get that 5th onslaught which if we don't soak as a raid will put us too close to comfort to the ship blowing up. If we get a 5th onslaught, we also get an additional sapper, that range have to kill while we should be dps'ing Goriona.

Our Best attempt was incredible, we entered Phase 2 at 28/29% ship health - Don't ask me what happened but it was very nice to see nearly no fire on the deck.

Phase 2 -its very simple but we have trouble getting there, our range bring Goriona down, she almost lands immediately just from the Bane of Havoc, and I have a star above my head, and try to get range grouped up as quickly as we can, deck fire permitting. For the first shockwave we are probably spread out because of the deckfire, but I'm giving clear warning to the cast on shockwave.

I call out 3 -2 - 1 second warnings on both shockwave and disrupting shout. I preface the Shockwave one with, get ready to move.

Our Problems:
We have ALOT of trouble consistently getting to Phase 2, We've only seen Warmaster with everyone alive a handful of times out of 150 attempts. Our best attempt we had warmaster to 29% but the wipe was inevitable as a tank had died and there was no battle rez available.

US-Malganis - Chainfire If you need to look up the world of logs.

Outside of a deathgrip is there something else we could be doing for the sapper? Our ret paladin tries to HoJ the 2nd and 4th Sapper, leaving the 3rd HoJ for our Prot Pally.

We have Shadowfury, Mind Flay, Concussive shot, Earthbind Totem....but sometimes it seems like the sapper only reveals himself 5-10 yards away from the bridge of the ship giving us almost no time to kill him. We've tried getting the sapper to reveal himself earlier with aoe abilities but honestly that doesn't seem to work too often. As I type this I'm thinking one of the best life savers might literally be me respeccing my hunter to entrapment and place it just before the bridge door.

Deckfire - There are times when we reach phase 2, that it seems like the Gnomes haven't even begun to help put out the fire. Its very unnerving that if we're doing everything we can to get to phase 2, we finally get there, and there isn't any safe place to stand other then on top of a harpoon gun. Is there something that triggers the assistance of the crew member gnomes? I'm aware of the fire that has already been water gunned doesn't do damage, but thats not what I'm referring to.

I've considered bringing in another fire mage that would do hopefully significantly more dps...however I really don't think our issues have alot to do with DPS, 4/5 times we're killing every drake before it flies away.

Do we just have to step our raid awareness up, hope for good rng, hope that fire stays under control? Is there a better Onslaught soak order? maybe Raid-> Raid-> Mage -> Priest?

We were saving lust for the 3rd set of Drakes....but they seem to be dying just as fast without lust...that sapper really throws a curve ball for damage to be done to the Drakes.

Maybe make sure one of the 3rd drakes flies away, raid soak the onslaught, buy us a little time to kill off the dreadblade/eliter slayer before Goriona lands, or even warmaster for that matter and either let the ship cannons kill the 6th drake or kill it as soon as its in range again?

I'm really out of ideas here...and like the title said, in our core group I know that we had the DPS required to kill Heroic Spine Pre-Nerf...we even attempted to do it last week but were met with a message about you must complete every heroic first.

This fight is an absolute joke on normal for us, we have Deck Defender, Chromatic Champion, That Dizzy Achievement, Taste the Rainbow...all things we did because we had to kill a boss on normal.

Thanks for taking the time to read.
Synapse

[PalawinFC]

The deck fire will spread towards anyone near it so make sure you stand as far away from it as practical to make the gnomes job easier. Also there was a bug where the fire would fade but graphic would remain until someone walked over it. So the fire is never going to be reliable.

It sounds like you should have more than enough dps to kill the drakes in one harpoon, and your composition is good, plenty of range dps, so you shouldn't need any help with that, especially if you are solo soaking onslaughts - it should be quite easy to get to phase 2 reliably if your barrage soaking is consistent.

If the boat is dying before phase 2 AND you're killing the drakes in one lift, then either you are missing sappers or your soaking is atrocious. But you seem to have a system for that and I'm sure it works for you. I'm not sure if solo soaking the onslaughts means the boat takes more damage (the tooltip suggests it does but forum posts have indicated otherwise), but if you are doing everything right and the boat just wont stay alive, maybe try soaking it with the raid and a cooldown - we've done all 4/5 without solo soaking for 2 months now and never wipe in phase 1.

As for the sappers, a prot warrior can stun each and every one with charge/shockwave/conc blow. HoJ can get every second one. And grip can get every one. You should have way more than enough for it.

As for dying in phase 2, as long as noone is hit by shockwave and the tanks taunt appropriately, the only reason you could be losing players is to poor healing. If you hadn't prefaced it with the fact that your guild can kill heroic spine I would have said they just need to step up their game but spine is miles beyond the difficulty of warmaster, your post actually made me do a double take. Perhaps your holy pally carries? I'm sure you already know this but make sure your healers aren't too close to the boss as they will get silenced. Is the only reason I can imagine your tank died because once Goriona leaves the healing is relatively easy.

Oh also, you're a good storyteller lol, enjoyed reading.

[Powarf]

Didnt read your entire post but.

Your soaking order is wrong, on heroic you need atleast 2 persons to soak each onslaught without the ship taking dmg. so it should be:
Mage/Spriest > Raid / Mage/Spriest > Raid > Mage/Spriest

Also, if you dont kill the 3rd set of dragons fast you will get a extra onslaught so obviously make sure you dot them up when they fly above the ship first time.

Also, your dk can just grip the sappers and WIN

[Manas]

Didnt read your entire post but.

Your soaking order is wrong, on heroic you need atleast 2 persons to soak each onslaught without the ship taking dmg. so it should be:
Mage/Spriest > Raid / Mage/Spriest > Raid > Mage/Spriest

Ehem. Ship ALWAYS takes damage from onslaught, dont spread false information Barrages are fully mitigated, but during an onslaught the ship acts as 1 person and shares the damage with whoever you have standing inside it.

And to the OP, try using heroism as the 3rd set of drakes are comming down, it smoothes out p1 by alot.
And oh, claiming you had the dps to kill heroic spine pre-nerf is not the same as actually attempting it and doing it. Cant find any logs of you even trying that, and if you're putting in over 150 attempts on blackhorn you're faaar away from killing spine pre-nerf, even if you had a perfect setup for it.

[Deleted]

Didnt read your entire post but.

Your soaking order is wrong, on heroic you need atleast 2 persons to soak each onslaught without the ship taking dmg. so it should be:
Mage/Spriest > Raid / Mage/Spriest > Raid > Mage/Spriest

Also, if you dont kill the 3rd set of dragons fast you will get a extra onslaught so obviously make sure you dot them up when they fly above the ship first time.

Also, your dk can just grip the sappers and WIN

The ship still takes damage it just takes 300k instead of 600k from solo soaking and 1200k from not soaking it at all. The onslaught will still hit the ship even though 10 players are in it but it will only hit for like 50k, which is nothing.

Do you really have that low ship health?, We usually only soak the barrages from the first drake and then RAID soak all the onslaughts and we end up with like 44 % when the last set of adds spawn. Killed it yesterday after our third attempt with everyone alive in the second phase.

[damz2969]

Soak onslaughts with the entire raid + a raid cd, that way the ship takes less dmg. Yes, the movement is a bitch but it's not really that hard and it is totally worth it. Only use solo soakers for the barrages, dont bother with them otherwise, it can cause alot of unnecessary deaths. The small soaking isn't that important, it's the onslaughts and sappers that do the real damage to the ship, so focus on those. Tanks alone can soak a lot of the small ones, and with some help from firemage, rogue, spriest, boomkin etc who can use cds, it should be more than enough.

Stay out of charges, especially during or right after an onslaught soak. Dot up the drakes as they fly over to drop the meele adds (could get them below 50% before they even get harpooned). I'd also recommend using 5 ranged if possible, makes the drakes a lot easier.

Get a dk in the raid and grip the sappers, make sure everyone are really focused on those and use target macros efficiently. We use 2 DKs and it can still be a bit tricky sometimes. You can also bring the sapper to below 50% if you all pre-cast spells as the drake flies in with it, you can start casting before he's even dropped and burst him down.

If people die in the first phase, ANY sappers let through or drakes dont die in one burn, you need to play better. Always prioritize Sappers > Drakes > Dreadblades > The last meele add which I don't remember the name of now.

In phase 2, just make sure everyone sticks to the drake till it flies off, stay out of shit and make sure your tanks communicate and do the taunting properly. If you manage to stabilize in phase 2 without deaths or too much fire, it should usually always be a kill, only thing that could wipe you is staying in shockwaves or tanks failling, especially once the drake is gone.

And no, you cant claim you had the requirements for spine prenerf with 150 wipes on gunship and without even having attempted it, it was alot harder than it seemed. Once you get past warmaster it shouldnt be hard though since it is kind of a joke now. Gl

[Deleted]

Setup:
Tanks
Warrior
Paladin

Melee DPS
Combat Rogue
Frost Death Knight

Ranged DPS
Shadow Priest
Affli Lock
Fire Mage
Boomkin

Healers
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman

Soak as many small ones as you can, but NEVER take risks, if you ain't absolutely sure you won't die then don't soak.

Onslaughts:
Have mage+SP do the soaking for 1st and 4th onslaught
Use Tranq+DG on 2nd onslaught and SW+STL on 3rd onslaught with everyone stacked.

Make sure you drag the slayer/dread over to one of the drakes, so cleaves, combustion etc. can spread on everything.

Phase 2:
Kill off remaining slayer/dreads first. Ranged focus Goriona while standing on the right side of the boat. Melee focus boss while standing in the middle. Healers heal everyone from the left side of the boat.

Save raid cooldowns such as STL+DG+SW for the last 30% and try to cordinate who uses what when at that point.

Remember to use the boomkin and shadowpriest dh/tranq if needed.

[david0925]

Sigh, a lot of misinformation in here.

Barrage: zero damage done to ship if soaked, even if it killed the person soaking (why do you think the achievement is even possible?)
Onslaught: Ship count as one person and will split damage

The fight is actually a lot less complicated than you describe. First of all, 2 heal the fight. Damage in this fight only becomes unhealable once you have too many adds up, or if Goriona is up for too long. Both of these cases can be mitigated by high dps. Even when Blackhorn is sub 10%, damage dealt does not warrant 3 healers.

Second, the most important aspect of the fight is killing adds on time, especially the drakes. They take precedence over the humanoids even for melee. So split up for DPS to deal with drakes on two sides. You need to make sure you kill at least the first rounds of drakes in one harpoon.

The fire is still pretty random as far as I observe. The most important thing is to not panic and find a suitable place to stand in both p1 (in preparation for Onslaught) and p2 (for Shockwave)

In terms of soaking. I recommend just soaking onslaughts with all of your raid member because it makes soaking barrages a lot less necessary. In fact, you only have to soak a couple rounds of barrage if you have your entire raid soak the onslaught. We've tried to cheese with Shadow Priests and Mages and found it to be completely unnecessary.

The fight is really just a slightly more elaborate version of "kill X before y happens"

[Kragragh]

Maybe you can't claim to be "8/8 capable" if you can't get past 5/8.

Just saying...

[kynd]

That is ALOT of solo soaking Onslaughts. You need to think of the ship as an extra player sharing a soak. To quote the dungeon journal... " Goriona unleashes a massive blast of dark energy at a random location on the deck of the Skyfire. Twilight Onslaught deals 800000 [note 1] Shadow damage, divided evenly among all players within its 10 yard radius and the Skyfire. If the attack strikes the deck of the Skyfire without hitting any player, the gunship suffers the full damage. "

So if you think of the skyfire as an extra player, its taking half of the dmg from an onslought, you need to soak more onsloughts as a raid if you are struggling with the ship dying.

[kaamila]

it took us almost 200 attempts to kill it, now we usually 1 shot it. we have everyone soak the onslaughts except for the last 1 before the boss comes out, our spriest solos that one. we break off into groups of 2 around the ship and soak the little twilight blasts together.

[peki]

10m...you dont need help

Thanks for your useless input. -Azshira



edit: you are welcome! -peki

[Khragar]

To beat the enrage timer you're going to have to two heal it.

We were having the same problems as you; an amazing attempt getting into phase two, but then dying to soaking the next 10 attempts.

However, we tried a new strategy last night and killed it in 10 attempts.

We only have to soak 3-4 twilight barrages. This should be done BEFORE the first onslaught when the raid is taking little damage. You could soak in pairs or have tanks try to grab them on their own. I also solo soak a few as a holy paladin with glyphed DP. Keep in mind that it doesn't hurt to soak more than 3-4, but this should really only be done by solo soakers.

Since you only soak 4 barrages, EVERYONE needs to be in the onslaught. If you are missing one person for a single onslaught, the boat will explode at the end.

This strategy assumes that you can burn the drakes in a single down phase per pair. My raid did not have trouble with this, but you could pop hero on the second set of drakes and use potions on the third.

Using the strategy, we consistently entered phase two with the boat between 5%-10% health.

There is no real special way to do phase two. Burn Gariona, stack up for the healing debuff, and avoid shockwave.

[Radalek]

We took alterantive route and killed it quite easily after we took that approach. Clean P1 and transition is the key, once in control P2 is pretty easy. We soak only first 2 Onslaughts with entire raid. Rest is solo soaked by fire mages (cauterize) and spriests. We barely soak any small ones. Disc priest with pain sup and mages with cauterize soak some here and there just in case ship is badly damaged near the end. Mages take early barrages so their cauterize us up later for onslaughts. So you basically avoid it pretty much. This strategy however revolves around heavy damage on drakes. They can't leave the ship once they are hooked otherwise it's a wipe cos ship will take too much damage. Position melee at one edge of the ship so they can cleave the drake and 2 melee adds. Ranged on the other side. Depending on your setup you can assign some ranged to melee side if that drake is not dying in time. Dot classes are amazing here cos doting both drakes while they fly over dropping melee on the deck can get 5-10% of both drakes even before they get pulled in. When 3rd wave is about to drop pop heroism so you can kill off adds faster since there will be short period of time when boss is there and melee adds are still up. Heroism will help you kill it faster and go through transition cleaner. Pop damage reduction tank 4p and one or 2 more cooldowns when first aoe hit is coming to stabilize the raid. Once you got raid stabilized stack behind the boss, avoid shockwaves and start popping cds for it once boss is below 30% and you'll be fine.
Benefits of this strat are less movement which equals more dps in P1 and since people are not taking barrage damage you'll see less random deaths from charges since generally raid will be full HP most of the time. Just make sure you move out really fast after first 2 onslaughts which you soak as a raid.

edit: Deck fire and P2 transition. Clear the middle and positon where you will tank the boss while Goriona is still up, have ranged spread at the edges of the ship, once she is down get into position behind the boss. Most of the fire is actually fake fire and you can use spriest to disperse and run through it and it will actually remove 50-60% of the fire so you have clear overview of safe spots

[tust]

My suggestion is to replace your shadow priest. He's a bad player and known ninja / troll on other servers.

[Foxtails]

If you are capable of getting the DK to tank you can have the raid ignore all of the barrages. my duty as the DK tank is to solo soak 3/4 barrages every drake phase leaving the entire raid free to soak all of the onslaughts. We have our Pala tank solo tank the adds on the left side on the drake to maximize cleave damage to make sure the drakes only get a maximum of two barrages. After the second set of adds he bubbles to clear his debuffs then continues to tank the adds. It is also a lot easier to control the fires with this method because i can prevent the second fire until the first is almost completely gone and sometimes even prevent the third.

Once you get into phase 2 it's pretty much a win if the fire is controlled.
(get him to use a off weapon with spellshattering it really helps in the first phase!)

[Sanya V]

If you are capable of getting the DK to tank you can have the raid ignore all of the barrages. my duty as the DK tank is to solo soak 3/4 barrages every drake phase leaving the entire raid free to soak all of the onslaughts. We have our Pala tank solo tank the adds on the left side on the drake to maximize cleave damage to make sure the drakes only get a maximum of two barrages. After the second set of adds he bubbles to clear his debuffs then continues to tank the adds. It is also a lot easier to control the fires with this method because i can prevent the second fire until the first is almost completely gone and sometimes even prevent the third.

Once you get into phase 2 it's pretty much a win if the fire is controlled.
(get him to use a off weapon with spellshattering it really helps in the first phase!)

Plz clarify this . Also how can dk solo tank 3\4 barrages ? AMS or something else?
Can prot warrior solo tank both ads btw? Can you remove stacks from prot warrior with holy paladin's BOP or something else?

[Foxtails]

Plz clarify this . Also how can dk solo tank 3\4 barrages ? AMS or something else?
Can prot warrior solo tank both ads btw? Can you remove stacks from prot warrior with holy paladin's BOP or something else?

I don't think BoP removes them but i am not 100% sure. If you can't remove them with BoP a warrior is out of the question, they will just end up with to many stacks. To soak them i just eat the first and leave the second, then use ams which is up long enough to soak the third and fourth. ( make sure bone shield is always up when soaking. )

[Pearsyn]

Thanks for the input, we do appreciate it. If anyone has anything else to mention about Deckfire, last night on 2 attempts we had the 25% Deckfire that just never seemed to stop spreading.

Outside of that we'll continue to look at this thread for further input, we had some real life issues effect our raid schedule last night, and we face him first thing on Monday.

Just for clarification though, we are 2 tanking and 2 healing, the raid composition is the raiders we have been using. We proved last night that we can do the fight with 3 melee, and more than likely we will be using that on Monday, the assistance of the dk for the sapper was definitely a plus. Hopefully I can post good news in a short few days.

[Deleted]

All advice given is sound and constructive, I do personally prefer all in onslaughts and 4-6 single soaks of barrages. However I wonder why noone has commented on you getting a 5th onslaught at times. If you make a focused effort on getting all drakes down in one harpoon it makes the fight so much easier even when doing so on the 3rd set. Coordinate dps cooldowns, fly by dots etc and consider moving melee adds to the side so melee can help dps if needed.
Killing drakes as fast as possible is in my opinion the key to phase one.