Assistance on heroic Blast Furnace

[Joaquin]

Hi all, looking for some advice on how to fix our issues with heroic Blast Furnace.

Comp (12):
2x warrior tanks
holy pally
resto druid
resto shaman
hunter
mage
warlock
ele shaman
feral druid
rogue
ret pally

Most recent logs here

P1 is fine. P2 we have all dps on Feldspar until he's dead, while cleaving other adds. When Feldspar dies, Ranged dps pops a slag on the 1st Primal Elementalist (PE) while melee finishes up adds and helps dps firecallers. When slag pops, all DPS on PE. Rinse repeat. After the 2nd PE goes down, we try to clean up all adds and resume melee on adds, ranged popping slag on PE. We get overrun by the time we get to the 4th PE or release the heart of the mountain.

We're running into problems after the first PE. It doesn't go down in 1 shield and we end up getting really high heat if we make it to P3. Like 86+ sometimes higher.

What we've tried:

• swapping to all adds after each PE either dies or shield goes up. We end up taking too long and getting overrun by slags.
• pushing through the first 2 PEs, relying on melee to help with adds and that's been fairly successful, helping us get to the 3rd phase but again, we tend to have a fuckload of slags up. We end up dying in that phase due to too much heat and still getting Volatile fire.
• melee occasionally dpsing slags that weren't on PEs just to get them down a bit but I think this was probably wasted DPS.

We've wiped a lot, more than I care to admit, and I'm running out of ideas. Looking for what we can improve. I feel pretty strongly that we have to pop the PEs in 1 shield, but I have seen kill vids of this not happening, but adds still somewhat under control. I want to push through the 2nd phase as fast as possible, but then we have too many firecallers up and it gets out of hand. Only having 12, I feel like our margin of error is zero. Any suggestions?

[base33]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ng&hostility=1

You need to dispel primal earth shield.
Reactive earth shield healed for 7.72M.. that it a lot. Shaman purge // Mage spell steal. Should be #1 priority. for them

Also, Killing Primals in 1 try is pretty important. Not a gamebreaker but def helps. If it just can't be done make sure you have a 2nd slag low health right next to it.

Make sure you're Stack firecallers on the primal elementalist and keep Security guards away so they don't drop shields on firecalls or slags that slow the phase down.

[Joaquin]

We had mage spellstealing earth shield. Problem came in when we didn't get the PE down in 1 shield. All dps would swap and would miss the Reactive Earth Shield. In order to fix that, might try to drag 2 slags to current PE kill target for splash damage (like you suggested) and rely on ranged to kill slags and melee to kill firecallers and security guards. Guards are pulled aside by 1 tank, firecallers are brought to PE kill target by the other tank.

Thanks for the suggestions. At least I know we're on the right track. That earth shield was definitely screwing us over. Is that coming from the firecallers? I know there's a Primal Earth Shield when we pop the PE's shield, but it gets reapplied as we're killing the PE.

[base33]

you can still dispel PE when shield is up. your mage/shaman needs to have it on focus.

Also, your tank needs to dps the PE too. Especially during a progression kill. Your druid healer has almost the same damage done as one of the tanks.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...one&target=172

Also, as you can see your Fire mage is the lowest on PE damage. If your not getting them down in 1 shot he might want to consider going Arcane. Its a less DPS output. But if the first phase is fine you might not need the extra cleave.

Arcane owns for single target for both PE and the final burn phase.

& its not like hes helping cleave the firecallers down
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...one&target=181

[Skul]

Focusing purely phase two if that is the problem child.

#1. You must dispel the earth shield every time it is on your PE if PE has or is currently being damaged. Assign one dps to focus solely on slags / PE / Dispells 100%. Remind your other dps they should steal or purge if they have it off cooldown as well.

#2. I recommend assigning one melee dps to full time firecaller duty for interrupt and to keep them in line. This person should be a high burst class who can pop over to help with PE in the event you need immediate PE help (but otherwise stay on firecallers).

#3. If tanks don't know how to interrupt the firecaller heals, they need to learn immediately.

#4. Having to use two slags for every single PE is likely going to mean your dps is to low and the snowball is going to run you over. Your team needs to work on proper dps, burst, interrupts, and purges / steals. You can have one or maybe two PEs require two elementals... but any more than that is going to become a problem.

[Joaquin]

you can still dispel PE when shield is up. your mage/shaman needs to have it on focus.

Also, your tank needs to dps the PE too. Especially during a progression kill. Your druid healer has almost the same damage done as one of the tanks.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...one&target=172

Also, as you can see your Fire mage is the lowest on PE damage. If your not getting them down in 1 shot he might want to consider going Arcane. Its a less DPS output. But if the first phase is fine you might not need the extra cleave.

Arcane owns for single target for both PE and the final burn phase.

& its not like hes helping cleave the firecallers down
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...one&target=181

Very good points. The tank is working hard to interrupt firecallers and bring them down, but I agree that at least our firecaller tank should be helping DPS the PEs. We were just talking about that this morning.

Fire mage was in charge of calling out dps targets and marking and stealing earth shield. That might have slowed down his dps a bit but I think the most damning evidence there is that he's fire for the AOE damage and if he's not doing that much cleaving in P2 then I think it's very viable to have him swap back to arcane.

Awesome points. Thank you for your advice!

[raps]

One thing that helped my group was realizing how much dps can be on Feldspar in P1. One side has 2 dps, 1 Tank, 1 healer and they're handling the Bellows and adds just fine. The other side started putting 1-2 dps fulltime on Feldspar and he would be just about dead when the phase ended. He would die while we were cleaning up engineers at the start of P2.

In P2 we start by cleaning up the engineers. Then move to the first Elemental/Elementalist. 1 tank keeps the guards away from them, while the other tank brings the Firecallers into the scrum to hit with cleave that will just happen. Then finish off the Firecallers before moving to the second elemental/elementalist. Now we clean up all the adds before moving to the 3rd. Then clear all the adds leading to the 4th. We always make sure the Firecallers are in with the Elementalist so they catch that cleave damage. So many classes do AoE through their normal rotation it's really helpful.

[Joaquin]

Focusing purely phase two if that is the problem child.

#1. You must dispel the earth shield every time it is on your PE if PE has or is currently being damaged. Assign one dps to focus solely on slags / PE / Dispells 100%. Remind your other dps they should steal or purge if they have it off cooldown as well.

#2. I recommend assigning one melee dps to full time firecaller duty for interrupt and to keep them in line. This person should be a high burst class who can pop over to help with PE in the event you need immediate PE help (but otherwise stay on firecallers).

#3. If tanks don't know how to interrupt the firecaller heals, they need to learn immediately.

#4. Having to use two slags for every single PE is likely going to mean your dps is to low and the snowball is going to run you over. Your team needs to work on proper dps, burst, interrupts, and purges / steals. You can have one or maybe two PEs require two elementals... but any more than that is going to become a problem.

1. I had the mage assigned to it, and he was usually pretty quick about dispelling while they were dpsing the PE down. The big heals happened when the shield came back up and we were working on firecallers. I'll make a point to emphasize those earth shield purges. Our shaman can help.

2. We had our rogue dedicated to firecaller dps and interrupts, and then moved all 3 melee over while the ranged worked on slags. I think this works but we also had 1 melee putting some off dps on a slag here and there, and noticed the targeting wasn't as quick or as focused as it should be at times. IMO all 3 of them should be able to destroy any firecallers that are up. This was a change later in the night but I think it was working for us. What really fucked us was taking too long to get through P2 and having PEs survive 1 shield break, and then having the raid break off to clean up adds. I think we have to charge through the first 2 PEs, clean up adds, and then push through the last 2.

3. 1 tank is taking the firecallers, he's using all he has but I think the melee needs to be better about this. When they swapped to the PEs I (hpally) even tried to throw some interrupts and stuns.

4. Agree. Next time we're going to try a cooldown rotation on PEs. All DPS CDs, melee 2nd pots, ranged 2nd pots, and CDs again. I'd like to reserve bloodlust for the remaining adds as the HotM is released.


Thanks for your input.

- - - Updated - - -

One thing that helped my group was realizing how much dps can be on Feldspar in P1. One side has 2 dps, 1 Tank, 1 healer and they're handling the Bellows and adds just fine. The other side started putting 1-2 dps fulltime on Feldspar and he would be just about dead when the phase ended.

We had our hunter stay with the feldspar side until the 2nd operator dropped. He pretty much was there only to DPS feldspar and that seemed to help. He was still coming out of P1 (after 2 operators) with abot 40% hp. Will definitely suggest 1-2 stays on Feldspar FT on that side as well. Thank you!

[Joaquin]

We finally got a chance to go back to Blast Furnace last night for the first time since I made this post. I'm happy to say we downed it in 4 attempts.
The biggest difference maker for us was having all melee on Firecallers near the current elementalist target, while interrupting and killing them. That freed up our FC tank to help dps the elementalists and zero heals went off.

We also quickly cleaned up adds between elementalists. It's something we did before, but it was taking too long because we had firecallers to deal with first. This allowed us to move on to elementalists more quickly. Basically, we didn't let firecallers live long, and it also reduced the damage from their other cast and volatile fire.

And lastly, assigning cooldowns and pots for each PE made a huge difference. All elementalists died in 1 shield, and we blood lusted on the 4th PE. It was a very clean kill, though we did lose a few people at the end and I'm relieved we finally got it done. It really came down to very focused and deliberate DPS in the end. Thanks again for the helpful advice.