Blast Furnace

[Drutt]

Had a first few pulls on this the other night before raid end and it seems like a real clusterfuck of a fight.

I've watched every video I can find on this encounter and what I've gathered as far as target priority is concerned is this:

P1: Operators > Engineers > Security Guards

P2: Kill any Operators (ideally none) > clean up engineers > Elementalists > Firecallers > Guards.

P3: Clean up orcs > smash boss.

What seems to vary is how people deal with Foreman and how people deal with Operators.

Q1. When is the best time to kill Foreman? P1 or P2? Is it better to deliberately rush him down, or to cleave him and then just DPS him as opportunity arises?

Q2. I've seen some raid groups just assign a single person on each side to Operators while the rest of the raid handles adds. This seems a bad idea to me due to increased Blast Wave frequency, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Q3. In P1, some raid groups split into two, others tank everything near the middle. Which approach works better?

Feedback and encounter nuance advice appreciated!

[Waerloza]

We burn one Elementalist immediately in P2, then clean adds/Feldspar, then focus on the Elementalists, with the Firecallers taking priority, but our cleaving is enough that it's not a problem.

We split the group as evenly as possible in P1 to get fast it as soon as we can.

Good luck!

[Deleted]

Q1. When is the best time to kill Foreman? P1 or P2? Is it better to deliberately rush him down, or to cleave him and then just DPS him as opportunity arises?

This depends a bit on what your gear is like relative to the difficulty you're doing - rushing him down makes P1 and the transition a lot simpler, but also makes P1 longer, giving the heat time to build up and making P2 harder. We rush him down in normal, because we outgear it, but just cleave him and then finish him off in P2 in hc.

Q2. I've seen some raid groups just assign a single person on each side to Operators while the rest of the raid handles adds. This seems a bad idea to me due to increased Blast Wave frequency, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Seems like a terrible idea to me - I can't see any possible advantage to it.

Q3. In P1, some raid groups split into two, others tank everything near the middle. Which approach works better?

This one probably is fairly dependent on your group. Everything in the middle means more cleave opportunities, but makes getting the bombs out to the regulators more difficult, and requires very quick target switching when the operators come up. It's probably only really viable in ranged-heavy comps, but most people seem to be running with them these days.

[Adramelch]

Are we talking about heroic?

In any case I've killed it on various ways, so let's start from the common points:

1) Everyone focuses the operators. As you say having just the one person on Operator means more heat which results in more blasts.
2) In all my tries/kills, we've killed Feldspar at the start of P2, after both groups have gathered in the middle.
3) In P2 the priority isn't quite Elementalists>Firecallers>Guards. You need at some point to clear Firecallers and Guards a bit or you'll get overwhelmed. We usually did 1 Elementalist, clear adds, 2 Elementalists, clear adds, last Elementalist.

If you are split the target priority should be Operator>Engineer>Feldspar(if he's on your side)>Guards.

I've found that the split tactic is more controlled. Tanking everything near the middle means the melee can't cleave on Operators so you have more uptime on them->more blasts. The only non-split tactic I've tried that seemed like it would work (and the guys that suggested have actually killed it like this) was tanking everything on one side and closing that Heat Regulator, before moving to the other side. You wanted the ranged guys to kill the "other-side" Operator for that to work properly though.

The biggest variety I've seen to this fight is when to use Lust. I've killed him with:

- Lust at pull and and in P3 when it comes up again (boss was at like 40% or so)
- Lust on 3rd elementalist and clear both remaining elementalists and adds
- Lust on P3

I've also tried lusting on P2 to kill Feldspar and the rest but it didn't work.

Overall, the important thing on this fight is that people need to understand that it's primarily a single target fight. Melees etc cleaving is all fine, but I saw that when I switched from AoE to ST on my boomkin (that is, only using Starfall when high priority targets were down or when I was close to capping charges), the fight became way smoother and we killed it in a couple of tries. Of course my overall dps was much lower (I've seen drops from 50k to 35k or something), but a lot of that dps was wasted on Slag Elementals and also, on occasion we missed killing an Elementalist by 300k or so, which was solved by me planning ahead with my charges and keeping them for the Elementalists.

[Drutt]

Went back last night and killed it on our second attempt with the minor clarifications you guys provided above. I suspected it was just fine margins stopping us from nailing a kill and that proved to be the case.

Much appreciate, everyone!

In case it helps someone else, the strat we finally used was:

P1: heavily stacked group on the Foreman side plus temporarily borrowing two ranged DPS from the other side, Hero on pull, smash Operator + Engineer then tunnel into Foreman until about 20 seconds after hero drops. The two borrowed DPS then went back to their side and P1 completed as normal with a Operator > Engi > Foreman target priority.

P2: kill remaining operators > engis > burn Foreman. Kill first Firecallers if already up; if not, burn elementalist. Tidy up Firecallers after first elementalist down, burn down the next two Elementalists. Tidy up Firecallers, kill last elementalist. Clean up remaining orc adds, tunnel boss.

Nothing too dissimilar to other groups but I thought it might be of help to some.