Megaera- Reset blue stacks?

[lordsphinx]

Hi Everyone,

After banging our heads for what seems like forever on Tortos, my raid group will be starting Megaera tonight. I’ve got a pretty good idea about how we’re going to go about the fight, but I’ve seen so many different strategies I figured I would ask. My 10 man raid comp is as follows, avg ilvl ~502ish

Prot Pala
Brewmaster Monk

Disc Priest
Resto Shammy
Holy Pala

Enh Shammy
Balance Druid
Feral Druid
Shadow Priest
Destro ‘lock

We have more than enough CD’s for rampage if you include things like Ascension, Vamp, etc etc, so I’m not particularly worried about that. My question is the head kill order. I’m thinking about going with the Fatboss recommended G>R>G>R>G>R>G, but everyone on here seems to be adding a Blue in there to reset stacks (G>R>G>R>B>G>R). Is this really necessary? Does the blue head melee that hard to require resetting his stacks? My experience is whenever these kinds of guides say something to the effect of “but it doesn’t hit that hard, I wouldn’t worry about it”, it ends up hitting pretty hard and we should have worried about it.

What order did you use on your first kill? Any tricks you can share? We spent way too long on Tortos, so I really want to get a couple new bosses and catch up a little.

Thank you for any help you can give.

[Noorri]

You really just need to try and figure our what is best for you. I would suggest doing one kill on the blue head just to make it easier to tank though. Your GRGRBGR rotation seems like a good idea.

Does the blue head melee that hard to require resetting his stacks? My experience is whenever these kinds of guides say something to the effect of “but it doesn’t hit that hard, I wouldn’t worry about it”, it ends up hitting pretty hard and we should have worried about it.

But I strongly agree with this. Alot of the guide makers have no idea what the avarage normal guild will struggle with. Lore from Tankspot said that Tortos was a much easier fight then Council for 25-mans, but I think our guild has 3 times or so as many wipes on Tortos then Council. The guide makers are usually doing it too overgeared and overskilled to see how the fight works out for the normal guilds.

[Spiralphoenix]

We did it on 25 but use the alternating G/R order as well. Don't forget that while the blue head is getting stacks of Hydra Frenzy, it's breath is far less dangerous. It just does damage, and it's other "effect" does nothing until 5 stacks and the damage (from the breath) is basically static. Ignite Flesh and Rot Armor both steadily make the damage from those heads increase and it gets pretty rough, and after killing a blue head you will be dealing with both of them at once (with your tanks on the opposite ends of the room). By alternating G/R, you're only ever dealing with one or the other "dangerous" breaths at a time. Doesn't mean it's not possible, and that it might not end up being the easier route for your group - there's surely a lot of valid orders you can use to successfully kill it.

[Contritus]

Almost entirely certain that the blue stacks are reset via tank swapping after each Rampage using that strategy, instead of killing the Blue head. To use your example, the fight starts with Tank1 on Green and Tank2 on Blue. Green dies and Tank2 goes to tank Red while Tank1 picks up blue.

From my experience, all the stacks are deadly, which is part of the math problem for dps. Four red stacks is deadly. Getting stunned by blue stacks is deadly. It's all bad if your dps is too slow.

My only tips would be; make sure your melee aren't digging up in the bosses ass because that makes running out with the fire harder; use Hand of Purity on Tank2, going back to the analogy, during the time after you've swapped back to Green just as Rampage ends but before the Red stacks fall off Tank2 which is a chokepoint healing-wise; “but it doesn’t hit that hard, I wouldn’t worry about it” is exactly what I'd say about Rampage until the 4th or 5th head dies, which is when you'll want to start chaining cooldowns in whatever mode or manner fits your comp.

[Deleted]

On 10man my guilds first kill was 4 healers and G-R-repeat

From now on we 3 heal it (we do this on almost all fights), with the same kill order G-R-repeat because the healers whined over having to run on blue.

Tho I heard the easiest one was G-R-G-R-B-R-anything

[lordsphinx]

From my experience, all the stacks are deadly, which is part of the math problem for dps. Four red stacks is deadly. Getting stunned by blue stacks is deadly. It's all bad if your dps is too slow.

I probably wasn't clear with my question here... I'm concerned with the stacks of frenzy the heads get when they're not killed, increasing melee attack speed by 20%. I know they also have a DPS check to get each head down in enough time, but I'm more concerned with how much frenzy the blue head would have if he wasn't reset at all.

[vaccine]

At least when we were learning it we didn't see any decrease in the number of Ice Beams that 1 blue head at the back generated compared to having a ton (as initially we tried to rotate in order). The blue is simply the least dangerous of the lot when it's up front and the haste stacks it gets from not being killed aren't particularly dangerous. If you kill it you have to deal with empowered red and empowered green at the same time, whilst also throwing in Ice Beams into the mix. It's been nerfed quite hard since the guide videos you've mentioned as well so the heads die much faster now and far less breaths which are the most dangerous bits for tanks.

Edit: As a comparison, our last kill with no blue kills saw Blue and Red heads do roughly the same damage, and that's with Red only up half the time.

[blackspark]

On normal mode we killed blue-red-green-blue-red-green-blue, to keep stacks balanced and to not have so many cinders/acid rains.

Megaera used to hit the tanks pretty hard (specially the red head with it's dot), but since the nerfs the only problem i can really see a group having is bad management of cinders/ice torrent which can mess up the whole fight.

The healing is still a bit rough but there's no need to bring 4 healers, as some undergeared groups did at the beginning.

[Alopex]

We've been doing it the single blue kill way since our second kill. First kill kept it balanced.

From a tanking perspective, what kills the tanks is mostly the breaths, especially on the last 2 heads, and even more especially on a frenzied red or green. Killing the blue head with all the frenzy stacks reduces the amount of damage the blue head tank takes in the easier to heal blue-green phase, and removes the stray from the green immediately after. I would assume that healers would be hard pressed for mana if the blue kept their stacks the entire fight if you're undergeared for ToT.

[Caeth]

has anyone tried G-R-B, G-R-B?

[Cairhiin]

I would go with the order that has already been said earlier in this thread: Green-Red-Green-Red-Blue-Red-Green. Always stack up for rampage next to the head you are going to kill next. Put colored raid markers on those two spots to make it easier to communicate for those that can't remember anything. The fight doesn't really become hard till head #6 which makes it quite a boring fight to learn as you are going to be repeating the beginning a lot.

My suggestion for healers would be to dispel the DoT asap independent of where people are once you start on the 6th head. From this point on it it's basically a race against time with all the raid damage that is going on. Also try and have your healers communicate when they have to kite a blue beam so they can pick up the slack. Rampage was easy to heal for us, we never had a problem with it. Save your powerful cooldowns for rampage #5 and #6. The first four are really easy to heal through.

[keelea]

The way my raid did it was Fatboss's way at first. It ended up being so much poison splash that the healers would lose the race and couldn't play catch up. So we start with a blue, then do r>g>r>g>r etc. Throwing a blue later into the mix would be the same, I assume, you'd just be kiting the laser at a later point in the fight.

[Alopex]

has anyone tried G-R-B, G-R-B?

It's ok, but can be a lot of healer kiting leading to tank deaths

[dkdk]

We go with no blue head kill, never had a tank die to blue head and a healer getting the blue debuff is just too annoying to use it for us.

[BLSTMASTER]

The attack speed later on gets pretty tough. I'm assuming that since its your first attempt (or havent killed yet) on Megaera, your group isnt super geared to be able to burn through the heads within 2-3 breaths. In this case, I think its better if you add in a blue in the mid, as later on (by the 5-7th heads) they will have quite a high dps for a while that you won't be able to rotate all your CDs through.

So my suggestion would be GRGRG'B'R or GRGR'B'GR ,If you're set on leaving blue, that is . Our healers said that blue was the one that gave them the most trouble when healing the tanks so we decided to postpone blue as much as possible.

Later on when you can burn through each head in 2 breaths, you won't be needing to kill blue at all, as you can just simply rotate CDs through the tougher head. Definately a fight that becomes significantly easier with more gear, when you can go through each 'breath breakpoint.

[lordsphinx]

Our DPS is actually very strong, but we have a lot of casters and struggle on fights like Tortos where you're never standing still for more than 5 seconds. I think we should have much better luck with Meg because **it looks** like there's a lot less movement than Tortos.

[Deleted]

I would recommend leaving the blue out completely, that is what we did and had no problems, and we are not super progressed or anything (6 norm atm). We never had a tank death on the blue head during progress (or since). I'd go in there leaving it out to begin with, and switch to killing blue ~5th if you find your tank on the blue head is dying. A blue kill in the fight is a lot more hassle so don't bring it in until you know it's needed!

[laplacedemon]

has anyone tried G-R-B, G-R-B?

We have been killing it like that since the first week. Used 3 healers at first, dropped to two in the last two weeks. With a demonic gateway in the middle and at the back, healers have ~3-4 seconds of downtime at most so it's not a problem.

[TheDarkExileCreel]

We use the G > R head rotation and don't kill any blue heads. Every time a head dies just have the tanks swap and that will allow the blue stacks to drop. So like this:
Tank A is tanking Green and Tank B is tanking Blue at the start.
When Green head is killed the tanks swap.
So then Tank A is tanking Blue and Tank B is tanking Red.
Then when red head dies they swap again.
So Then Tank A is tanking Green again and Tank B is tanking blue again.
Rinse/Repeat.

My team has a prot pally / brewmaster monk. So just put your brewmaster on green and prot pally on red. Prot pally should talent hand of purity and pop it right before each breath. Have your holy pally focus mainly on healing your prot pally (that gives you another hand of purity). The disc priest can keep up you brewmaster with mainly atonement heals , PW shield and Penance. Have the resto shammie handle dispelling and focus mainly on raid heals during the non rampages.

[Noorri]

Just to add to how we are doing it, since I didn't say in my first post.

My 25-man guild is doing it BRBRGBR, and using 7-8 healers. The damage from greens explosions seemed alot harder to deal with then having a single person kiting a blue beam here and there. If you assign a few healers to spamheal the fire debuff target they can really clean up the area before dropping it and this makes the total raid damage easier to deal with then having loads of green bombs. The meele doesn't need to move nearly as much because there are almost no green bombs and their increased DPS uptime makes up for the extra healer. We tried GRGRBGR first but the damage from all the green bombs where overwhelming us quickly. When we switched to BRBRGBR and added a healer we got the kill quickly, and one-shot it the next week (although we had about 7-8 people alive at that point :P).