megaera 25 HC issues

[Sinitar]

Hello there. My 5/13 HC guild decided to tackle this boss, and we seem to have hit a brick wall. This may be the result of poor tactics execution, but the encounter itself seems to be unforgiving at best. I'll start with a WoL from our last night's runs: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-rigpa42fu0cxav5g/

At this point, I don't think it is as much of a dps/healing problem. If we can do council HC without too much hassle, we should do this boss too imo, although I may be wrong. Anyway, we're using the lock portals tactic where our raiders place the ice beams between them. We also had several people clearing them with cinders, but I've read that cinders should be dispelled asap and we should scrap this tactic altogether. What do you think?

Another problem is the worms. At first, we tried dps-ing them down, but the head died slowly. Then we assigned only a few dps to them while CC-ing them to the best of our abilities, but even that didn't work out. Some people suggested to do 0 damage on the worms and have then CC-ed until a rampage, then clear them out. Is that a viable tactic?

As for the heroism, a good number of people recommend using it at the 5th head. We've only got there once, but that 4th head is just the roadblock for us. There's way too many adds stunning the people, and they can't make it to the stacking point in time.

Any sort of advice or tips are appreciated.

[Deja Thoris]

I've only done it on 10 man but I dislike the whole "leave adds till the rampage" tactic personally.

the way I see it you have 3 options:
1) Kill the adds as they spawn, head lasts a little longer
2) Wait until the rampage and kill them, then the next head lasts longer since the total dps req is the same. Add to this they shit on the raid in a rampage / stun people etc which just adds damage to an already hard part of the fight.
3) Set up better cc/stun rotations.

We just killed them off the bat, once again, that's in 10 man so it may be crap advice :P

[Thursley]

Assuming you're doing the 'never kill green' strategy, there are a few different ways to use the lock portals. The one I found to be most effective was having whoever gets picked for the ice torrent click the front portal and get sent to the back one. The key thing to keep in mind is that the ice doesn't actually do a whole lot of damage or slow very much as long as you're only in it for a short time, so it's okay to run through it to click the portal. Basically everyone gets as close as they can to the portal without already being in ice, and if they are picked they run forward and click it, then everyone else readjusts to the new ice. Portal placement is very important for this; you want there to be enough room for people to stand between the ice that leads to portals on either side, otherwise you use up your space too fast. People who have cinders can clear the ice around 1-2 portals if they're in a position to do so, but it isn't terribly important. They should 'never' try to clear ice anywhere else in the room, it's wasted effort. Melee also just get dispelled instantly and shift over slightly whenever a new fire puddle forms on them.

As for worms the key things are to have someone capable of holding threat on them (we use a DPS DK in blood presence) and rotating aoe CC/doing some damage until the head dies. You're almost always better off killing the heads quicker and getting 1 less wave of adds as long as you can keep them controlled. For controlling them you want a rotation of people using their AOE CC when adds start channeling the stun beam. We generally use warlocks (who are also assigned to attack them because of very good AOE), some with shadowfury and some with howl of terror for diminishing return issues, and shadow priest fears (glyphed so the adds don't run). Solar beam is extremely effective as well, and DPS shaman can get it with symbiosis if you need more CC. I believe knockbacks also break their channel but be careful about spreading them out. Depending on how many rogues you have, you can use smoke bombs on the raid at the beginning of rampages to force the worms together (most important is usually when you're stacking up to attack the arcane head since that is farther off to the side).

[DreamCast]

IMO if you guys want to finish off this tier before 5.4 just drop down to 10man, you can pretty much faceroll bosses like animus and lei shen with gear.

I think this is why blizz is splitting the feat of strengths next tier because 5 full nights on animus heroic, we couldn't get it down. 2 10man grps, took it down next reset and our group only needed 2 resets for lei shen hc and the other group 3 resets.

There is no ways in hell we would of downed lei shen on heroic yet if we were still 25 man.

[Knyphyn]

IMO if you guys want to finish off this tier before 5.4 just drop down to 10man, you can pretty much faceroll bosses like animus and lei shen with gear.

I think this is why blizz is splitting the feat of strengths next tier because 5 full nights on animus heroic, we couldn't get it down. 2 10man grps, took it down next reset and our group only needed 2 resets for lei shen hc and the other group 3 resets.

There is no ways in hell we would of downed lei shen on heroic yet if we were still 25 man.

Is that really necessary?


Personally ive only done 10M but we used Solar Beam/Symbo Solar Beam + Ursols to control them. As long as you get a stun/silence out you should be good.

[Nimitzles]

Is that really necessary?


Personally ive only done 10M but we used Solar Beam/Symbo Solar Beam + Ursols to control them. As long as you get a stun/silence out you should be good.

Unfortunately he is right, with gear 10man is a lot easier esp on fights like animus and lei shen heroic. Infact animus heroic killed our 25 man grp and reformed into 10man and pretty much killed in under 10 attempts the following week. 10 man really becomes a joke with gear

[Deja Thoris]

Unfortunately he is right, with gear 10man is a lot easier esp on fights like animus and lei shen heroic. Infact animus heroic killed our 25 man grp and reformed into 10man and pretty much killed in under 10 attempts the following week. 10 man really becomes a joke with gear

I'll use the standard reply of "oh, so you dropped the people you were carrying in the 25 team man did you"?

[Darkfrosty]

Unfortunately he is right, with gear 10man is a lot easier esp on fights like animus and lei shen heroic. Infact animus heroic killed our 25 man grp and reformed into 10man and pretty much killed in under 10 attempts the following week. 10 man really becomes a joke with gear

Typical response from a 25 man guild that couldn't compete. You are deep into a tier with burnt out raiders so obviously if you take your best most motivated players from a 25 man that spent a lot of time working on a boss it will then seem easier. Still don't understand why people still use this excuse.

[Puerto]

I'll try to help here.

Here is our kill video with vent so you can try to get an idea of what we are doing and when.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmofpltOX-8

Ok so, with all the gear and buffs we have now there are things you can do that some guilds couldn't when they got their first kill.

1. 6 healing is much easier. Which is looks like you are doing now.
2. Your Shadow Priest should be taking Divine Star and not Halo. You can get 2 Divine Stars out during each Rampage. The healing it does is just stupid.
3. Shadows Priest should be Sym'ed for tranquility for help with healing as well.
4. Take a look at my video and how we setup the Warlock Gateways and used them. We had all range and heals positioned at the farthest Gateways. Whenever someone got Torrent of Ice, they went straight back in a line. If someone could, they would overlap another patch of ice on the ground to save space. What we used the Gateways for was to teleport in for Rampages.
5. Cinders are only to be used to get rid of ice on the ground that are close to the Gateways. Everything else can be ignored.
6. HEAD 5. This is the hardest head to get past. Everyone here needs to use pots and all DPS cooldowns to blow it up. Everyone should be single targeting it as much as possible to get it down quickly.
7. Only have about 3 people on add duty. 1 person tanking them and 2 people DPSing them. The 2 people DPSing them should be Hunters for MDs. We had a DPS monk switch to BM. Reason for this was that BM Monks can glyph their Breath of Fire ability to daze, which helped with interrupting the adds.
8. Setup a rotation for stuns and solar beams for the adds.
9. Save lust for the last head. Players still run straight back with Torrents of Ice, but players with Cinders need to be dispelled immediately. ALL players here need to be 100% damage into the last head. Adds will be handled by the third tank and any stuns/solar beams they need.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

[Sonnillon]

Keep the 25 is harder then 10 man discussion out of this thread and try to give advice to OPs issue.

[cFortyfive]

Animus 10 hc is a decent joke with gear.
Anyways I think the best way of handling the adds is just bombing them away as fast as possible. Given we didn't have a huge warlock roster at the time we had a frost dk with blood presence pick up the adds so they wouldn't spread out and we could comfortably bomb/cleave them down during a single stun - a wave didn't really last five seconds that way. You also seem to have two dps warriors - the taunt banner and disrupting shout are pretty decent to help against the adds. Clearing up frost patches is something you should do if there happens to be too much ice near the boss but not everyone should run around doing that - just announce someone when you need the space.
That said at least taking a quick look over your logs - a lot of the deaths seem pretty stupid. There really is no reason to die to the breath. Also the huge amount of frost patch and frost torrent deaths seems to indicate that a couple of your raiders might be sleeping or something.

[Tearyn]

We were definitely leaning more towards killing the wyrms asap on our first kill, off the top of my head i believe i had 2 fury warriors, 1 ret, 1 feral kitty, 1 dps monk and a dps DK on them, with an enhance joining in after our first purple head kill when wyrm spawns started overlapping. We found having ranged on it would sometimes cause adds to bugger off out of melee range, as we had no tank on them so we left all our ranged dps on heads, along with rogues and 2 enhance(one of whom swapped later on as mentioned) Optimal it might not be, but hey, it worked.

We went Blue - > Red -> Purple -> Blue -> Red -> Green -> blue. Heroism on the last rampage to get through the last head asap, where we were getting the poison swirlies.

Only had 1 warlock(which was an alt in less than stellar gear) so people had to be pretty on the ball with the beams and such, but very doable, we've since started doing it with no warlock.

As mentioned the more priests with divine star you have, the better. Our shadowpriest did 19473275 healing, amounting to 54925.3 effective HPs, nearly 8% of the raid healing total.

Dispels on cinders, by 1 assigned healer with a backup, pretty much as soon as the player targeted was out of melee, or after clearing the ice around melee if there was any. Never bothered clearing anything that wasn't in immediate danger of interfering with melee killing adds.

Here are links to our Kill video (boomkin and disc priest PoV) and what i believe are the Logs of our first kill.

[TheNationGamer]

Having 2-3 monks,dks and locks for the fight is the best thing possible

i know myself and another dk along with a demo lock(s) swapped to adds

[Deleted]

One dk switch to blood presence, let him take aggro from adds, rotate stuns, rings of skills and solarvortex and u can freely dps boss while one uh dk grabs aggro.

[monikasun88]

Until the 4th head, you can wait till people with cinders relocate themselves to a better position to dispel but after that, the damage starts ticking for a lot mroe and you should just dispell it pretty much when you see it.

[Mystidruid]

Feral druids are great for helping to cleave down adds while maintaining good dps on each head. Thrash + swipe will put a hurt on the worms while still building cp's to keep rip up on the head. I saw your feral was using ursol's vortex. I found disorienting roar to be of better use since it will break the stun casts from the worms. I'm pretty sure we had a combo of solar beam and hunter misdirects to get the worms that spawn away from melee to run to our worm tank.

[Kuruption]

. Anyway, we're using the lock portals tactic where our raiders place the ice beams between them. We also had several people clearing them with cinders, but I've read that cinders should be dispelled asap and we should scrap this tactic altogether. What do you think?

Our 25 man uses portals for the ice. They'd move the ice to the back portal, and after it was done, click on it, and then they'd teleport to the front. Now, you have to make sure all of your ranged/healers are behind the front portal, or you'll just have a mess with ice. As for cinders, we have 1-2 healers assigned to them to heal them up to clear out the ice. After most ice is cleared, we dispel.

Another problem is the worms. At first, we tried dps-ing them down, but the head died slowly. Then we assigned only a few dps to them while CC-ing them to the best of our abilities, but even that didn't work out. Some people suggested to do 0 damage on the worms and have then CC-ed until a rampage, then clear them out. Is that a viable tactic?

This was a trial and error with us. It mostly depended on our DPS. If we were close to killing the head, we'd ignore the adds. If the adds came out and the head had a decent amount of health, then we killed the adds.

As for the heroism, a good number of people recommend using it at the 5th head. We've only got there once, but that 4th head is just the roadblock for us. There's way too many adds stunning the people, and they can't make it to the stacking point in time.

We always did it on the last rampage. You could use it on the 4th head for practice though if that's where you're stuck.

Good luck. The fight can be complete hell.