25HM Will - Rages vs. No DK's

[ashin]

Hello,

We started working on the fight last night (25m so adds are beefy) and we had a lot of trouble initially managing the rages. We are trying to burn them in groups of 8, so every other round. But we only have 1 DK, so we do not have enough AOE grips to keep everything stacked together. We initially tried to CC the Rages with AOE's like RoF x2 etc., but this doesn't last long enough and the Rages would get too close to us by the time they got caught in another one. With any of the 8 or 10 yard CC we found sometimes a Rage would just bypass it completely.

So we started to single target CC x 4 for the first pack, and then use our DK to grip after the second pack spawns and we've broken CC.

This was working but it seemed VERY cumbersome and we lose a lot of DPS time. Melee are on other duties so, aside from the DK, it is primarily ranged that have to burn down the Rages. If they don't all die in the exact same place at the same time, we'd have trouble with our Hunters being able to detonate them all before their deterrence expired.

First I just want to vent a bit - I think it is a little unfortunate when a fight can be completely trivialized by one class mechanic that is not distributed to any other classes. To a lesser extent I feel like Blizzard abused mass dispel too much in their design of this tier, but DKs vs. Will really takes the cake.

With that said, do you guys have some suggestions for a better way we might deal with this problem?

Also, what's a good guideline for minimum HP % on the Boss for each intermission? We were aiming for around 30% each and then burning bosses after the third intermission.

Thank you!

[Ganaza]

Warriors with bladestorm do insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane damage on those adds (just make sure they're not rooted so they dont turn and 1shot a melee) We had ours rotate each 'kill wave'

[eschatological]

You just need to CC the individual 4 and have your ranged be on the ball. You said hunters, plural, they should each scatter-trap one, if you have mages, sheep is great as well. Those are the main long-term CCs I can think of which are relevant here, though I guess an ele shaman with a low CD hex could work as well.

The key is to keep them near the back wall so that when the 2nd set of 4 comes down, you can grip them in one place, your hunters can put down their binding shots/traps and warlocks use shadowfury, and you can go to town. Mages and hunters are best for getting them near the back wall because they have good mobility: blink/disengage, CC, and then spend the time moving back DPSing the Strength, then switch back to bosses when you get back to where you need to be.

[Reolac]

Without a grip I feel the biggest issue is soaking the sparks after they die. But this can be achieved with single back up soaks. I think having every DPS on them and killing every wave is the most foolproof way to kill them.

Your intermission numbers are fine, remember you only need to kill 1 wave of Strengths every intermission. Also I think it works better if only melee deal with Courages.

[ashin]

Thanks for all these tips. Yes, soaking is by far the hardest part without a grip! For us killing every single wave with only a grip every-other-wave seemed very problematic.

[Zofu]

Thanks for the tips my guild is also about to start on Heroic Will.

[Sonrisa]

We've killed it a couple times with only 1 DK, we had 3 people soaking per wave of adds (symbiosis works wonders) with a couple backups, usually it would go something like this on the rages:
Kill CC kill kill cc kill cc kill
break
kill cc kill cc kill
break
kill cc kill cc kill
break
kill cc kill cc cc cc cc (and nuke and hopefully kill boss)

The DK can grip every time you kill like this and so can the hunters, except for the overlaping 2 kill waves at the start. As a MW monk I could soak the second of those 2 waves with a couple CDs(Cocoon and Fort Brew) and Zen Meditation. Even without grip its easy to soak them, since floating from ZM/Cocoon helps a lot in catching the sparks. It's important you make sure the melee don't instantly go on the strengths after the rages die. If they are targeted by a spark they MUST go to the rage camp so it won't just roam off. We would also use 2 rings of frost and typhoons if needed to try and help keeping the rages contained.

[shadysands]

there are different ways to do it ofcourse having 2 DK's makes it a lot easier.
2x ursol's vortexes can do the trick but requires good placement, also soaking can be backed up or done entirely by rogues/balance druids with symbiosis from rogue - cloak of shadows, monks can soak with their talent (dampen magic?) and zen mediation, you can soak individual sparks with warlocks, paladins, shadow priests can soak a couple, feral druids with symbiosis on shadow priest.
we had backups on soakers so this wasnt a problem. It is really difficult to time the aoe so all die at same time, so high chance to have rogue sparks. For this reason we had everyone who is targeted run to raid stack point as the sparks would no travel to all directions but head one way. This allowed soaker to keep his cool a bit longer and detonate when all sparks have landed to the point they can be triggered. Also my suggestion is kill the first wave (4 adds). and cc the next one with single target cc like sheep, hex, trap, blind etc.

[ashin]

Thanks for the advice all.