Help me pick the "right H BH P2 Balcony Team

[Radish Spirit]

I can't seem to find a reliable consensus on this.

Half the signs point to "send as few as possible to push P3."

The other half say "send as many as you can to keep adds down."

Going in tonight with 17 people at ~687. There are only two Heroic parses matching this size & item level with 0 deaths. One sends 2 DPS for what seem like short periods and mostly has the tank doing it alone... the other sends 4 DPS and both tanks! #nohelp

I unfortunately don't have a Boomkin. My choices of Balconeers are UH DK, Ret Pal, Fire Mage x2, Enh Sham, Demo Lock x3, WW Monk x2.

Last week I sent 4: Demo Lock, Ret Pal, WW Monk, Enh Sha.

It went... okay. No kill, but I don't think Balconies were a big culprit. Still, people felt if we pushed P3 sooner (less DPS in Balcony) we might have had a better chance.

[Deleted]

I can't seem to find a reliable consensus on this.

Half the signs point to "send as few as possible to push P3."

The other half say "send as many as you can to keep adds down."

Your damage taken by the explosive rounds is too high. Looking at one of your attempts it was 25% of overall damage taken.

Trying to race the explosive rounds damage by pushing the phase is a terrible idea in my opinion, you're not going to hit an enrage on the boss and you can reduce the raid damage taken by clearing the balconies effectively.

On our 16 man kill we sent the tank + our holy priest + 3 DPS ( Ret, Rogue, WW). We used this team on the first 3 smashes and then only the tank went up on the fourth smash, immediately jumped back down while we pushed to 30% and used a healing cooldown before we transitioned.

The reason we sent a healer is because the smash itself does around 100k damage and having a healer top the balcony group off and jump down early allowed our melee to clear the balcony each time. The healing you lose when the healer has to reposition and heal the balcony group pays for itself by reducing the explosive round damage. There is difficulty in having the healer move to the smash, especially when they can get marked right before it. You might get unlucky.

So I'd say: Send 3 DPS with a healer. Skip a smash when you think you can start pushing to the next phase (Clear at least 3 balconies - We would skip the smash at around 40%) Use a healing cooldown or amplify/tonics/whatever to keep the raid topped at around 32%. Do this and you'll get to phase 3 cleanly and then the hard part is over.



Edit: Don't worry about which classes if you use this tactic, just send whichever melee are most confident at doing it.

[Deja Thoris]

I'd personally send the ww monks and uh DK and maybe even the ret for insurance. You'd just need to get them to co-ordinate so the DK's dots aren't wasted.

Actually, I'll qualify even further. Send the better players, don't fixate on the classes. Getting behind on them is your soft enrage. "Duh I missed it" isn't what you want to hear. In theory if you clear the balconies well every time and you don't splash ridiculously then you'll be fine.

Your biggest problem is this: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ution&fight=19
(Click on explosive round). Holy fuck thats a ridiculous amount of splash damage. Spread!
Rough napkin maths shows that about 5.4m damage from splash damage. While it will never be perfect, that bit has to improve.

[Adramelch]

I isolated the 6.40 wipe from your logs and it seems you are taking an absolute shitload of dmg from the soldiers and even worse about 25% of the shots splash around which can't be good.

I only have a log from 17 people at ~685, but this includes yours trully as a boomkin which somewhat trivializes the balconies. Still comparing:

Yours: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ken&by=ability
Ours: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ken&by=ability

Your raid got 27.5 million damage from 1147 explosive round casts that hit 1554 times (the surplus should be splashing damage), while ours got 10.35 million damage from 537/604 casts/hits. That's a massive difference and clearly shows that you weren't handling the balconies correctly (sorry I'm at work and can't look at more wipes so the chance that I peaked a bad one are somewhat high).

For me, the balconies are pretty much the thing you need to get right for it to be a kill. So if you have to sent more people because your combo doesn't have specific op classes for it, then do it. I know that Unholy DK is pretty good upstairs, dotting everything and self-healing and I also had a ret pally do more dmg than me in my original kill of Blackhand (although we had a healer up so he could stay up longer). I don't know why your mages are playing fire in this fight as it's clearly inferior to arcane (or so I am told by mine and there's not reason to discard their input since it's a single target fight). EDIT: If they are the same from the logs you posted they are switching to Arcane so nevermind.

I would definitely send the DK, a couple of locks and the ret pally, but they do need to keep their defensives/tonics for the balconies if you don't have a healer up there and pre-shielding is probably a good idea. Based on my experience, if everything is done correctly, they should be down by the time the first marks hit the siegemaker (so the plating is off and they can dps it).

Also it seems you are not soaking the 3rd set of marks correctly seeing as only 1 tank has damage from the DoT? Also DPSers have a shitload of damage from impale for no reason?

[base33]

we run 20 man.. we have two hunters who try to disengage onto the first cliff as well as 2 boomkins that try to flap down. (mage can also slowfall)
as long as somebody gets up there it makes it so nobody has to go up for the first smash.

If not we send the smash team up.. which is myslef (Holy priest) + all of our melee (5)
We tell our tank to jump right back down so he is rdy to soak the 3rd set of marks. Its not his job to kill the adds. Usually only 3 of our 5 melee get up for what ever reason.. and that seems fine.

During progression we would go up for 4 total smashes. Now since hes on farm and we are all 690+ ilvl we just go up for 2-3 smashes and push.

[kajeet18]

My guild sends 2 combat rogues, and 2 unholy dks, along with a monk healer to prolong them staying up there. Thats it really, just melee dps that can cleave well with a healer to keep them up. Kill them all then jump down, as long as you dont have people die up there, it really is a simple mechanic.

[Adramelch]

we run 20 man.. we have two hunters who try to disengage onto the first cliff as well as 2 boomkins that try to flap down. (mage can also slowfall)
as long as somebody gets up there it makes it so nobody has to go up for the first smash.

If not we send the smash team up.. which is myslef (Holy priest) + all of our melee (5)
We tell our tank to jump right back down so he is rdy to soak the 3rd set of marks. Its not his job to kill the adds. Usually only 3 of our 5 melee get up for what ever reason.. and that seems fine.

During progression we would go up for 4 total smashes. Now since hes on farm and we are all 690+ ilvl we just go up for 2-3 smashes and push.

You had 2 boomies and you sent the melee? Now that's weird. Ofc if it works, it works so who cares.

[Radish Spirit]

Also it seems you are not soaking the 3rd set of marks correctly seeing as only 1 tank has damage from the DoT?

Can you elaborate?

We had one tank assigned to do this. It seems like the time between 3rd marks is more than sufficient to drop stacks so one tank should be enough unless I'm missing something.

[Adramelch]

Ah then nevermind. I was under the impression that it wasn't enough, as I've always seen tanks alternating in the pugs (or when supplementing other guilds' roster) I've killed him with and so I said to my tanks to do the same because if it ain't broke, don't fix it etc etc. If they do, then discard that point. Still the second part (which you didn't quote as it's a separate point indeed) still stands. You have some people taking a shitload of damage from the impale. Zedikus, Bheindel and Tridwr being the main culprits.

[base33]

When they got up it was a huge difference! but they were inconsistent (couldn't always get up).. and one of them would get a mark while they were up top. RL made the call to just have them focus on the siege bc that was really our #1 problem. Obviously if melee was struggling we would have them learn the mechanic. But melee did it fine.

[Adramelch]

Yeah boomies are just so fucking op for that thing. If you have 2 boomies with 4 pc, there's essentially enough time between the balconies so that one of them has CA+NV ready, and they clear the balcony in a matter of seconds.

What we did pretty much was have the 2 boomies and 1 uh dk go up:

- If both boomies went up, dk jumped straight down, the boomie without the CDs just multidotted everything and jumped down and they other boomie cleared the place.
- If CD boomkin didn't go up, the other two guys stay up as long as they can
- If non-CD boomkin didn't go up, the dk can still jump down while the other guy burns the place
- If both boomkins failed, the dk can still sufficiently self heal and kill soldiers