Another +100 wipes Xhul please help thread

[zubic vila]

Hi everyone,
Seing there was a guild recently posting here for advice on dealing with seemingly impossible barrier that is Xhul, and the advice helped them, I was hoping we might get a few insighful advice for our specific composition and failings.

Here is our log from tonight:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Gw8gxWB3qKfztD2R

We had a few evenings in the past with resto shaman going enhancement, and monk (me) healing instead (we're both main spec healers), so this was our first evening trying it like this. We also had an evening of DK going blood and doing three tank.
That log is here:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...AHLtz#fight=21

Thanks a million!

[Deleted]

Your tanks are fucking up strike swaps, and your ranged eat Void Steps like a suicidal diabetic would eat gummy bears. Additionally, you have people dying from ticking Fel Surge damage, which means healers are either overburdened (because people are taking loads of avoidable damage from, say, standing in fire patches or from Ablaze), out of position relative to the Fel Surge drop spot, or garden-variety incompetent.

Your primary issue is tanks and Void Steps, though. You cannot have people taking multiple Void Steps over the course of a night if you intend to kill this boss, and your Guardian absolutely cannot fuck up taunting for Void Strike on what is close to every 3rd pull.

[Divinexve]

Your tanks are fucking up strike swaps, and your ranged eat Void Steps like a suicidal diabetic would eat gummy bears. Additionally, you have people dying from ticking Fel Surge damage, which means healers are either overburdened (because people are taking loads of avoidable damage from, say, standing in fire patches or from Ablaze), out of position relative to the Fel Surge drop spot, or garden-variety incompetent.

Your primary issue is tanks and Void Steps, though. You cannot have people taking multiple Void Steps over the course of a night if you intend to kill this boss, and your Guardian absolutely cannot fuck up taunting for Void Strike on what is close to every 3rd pull.

The Pursuer was the hardest boss in the game

[kubuntu]

if yuo tanks have problem with stacks swaping yuo can try 3 tank it ( works for my guild), alsow only 1 DK might make imps problematic
you need good aoe CC rotation for imps every 20 sec ( stuns , aoe silences etc) becous your raid setup is kina bad
alsow you shoud not pop hero at start but at last 20%

[Deja Thoris]

Basically to kill this boss you need to tick the following boxes:

1) Don't fuck up tank swaps.
2) Have a rotation for every set of imps. If you don't have at least 2 DK's then assign people to single target interrupt just incase. They are always absolute highest prio.
3) Until the chains become empowered (green boss dead) we have 2 markers we ping pong between every "event". The events are basically the blackholes and the void steppers. Void steppers spawn? Move to other marker - except the people assigned to kite them. Black hole spawned? Move back to other marker.
4) You need a soak rotation for blackholes.
5) You need a bait group for chains and understand how to deal with it.

What Kubuntu said is wrong. The last 20% of the fight is a joke with these ilevels. Lust at the start to burn through the hard shit asap.

Finally your one destro lock needs to get good. He hardly ever uses havoc. He hardly casts chaos bolts. His immolate uptime is 15% on some pulls. He REALLY needs to read guides, practice and get a UI that gives him information he needs.
Your mage should also not be frost. It just cleaves non prio targets and has little burst for imps. Thats a minor mater though. Mechanics > all.

[Gradywhite]

The very first time we killed Xhul'horac was coincidentally the very first time nobody took a void step during an attempt.

[Nitros14]

What Kubuntu said is wrong. The last 20% of the fight is a joke with these ilevels. Lust at the start to burn through the hard shit asap.

You'd think, but guilds doing these bosses now often do the same damage that top guilds did with 20 less ilvl and 1-2 rings.

[Summer]

You'd think, but guilds doing these bosses now often do the same damage that top guilds did with 20 less ilvl and 1-2 rings.

This is not true. If the guilds progressing now did the same dps as the top guilds when they progressed they'd never kill anything at all. Archimonde and having to manage 1 or 2 Doomfires instead of 3 is a pretty good example but it's the same on other bosses; on Velhari you never see a second edict in P1 while happily 5 healing etc.

We've always lusted Xhul when Omnus becomes active as that part of the fight is the problem part, the start and the end are trivial.

[Deleted]

Tactic wise and what people are doing wrong is being said, and i know healing requirements arent high but for sake of future progress ill mention it anyway.

Why is your disc priest specced into spirit shell? Does he do this often? Spirit shell is dead since mop, its terrible compared to spamming pw:s and the mana cost is way to high...always go Power infusion. Also spec halo instead of divine star, only use divine star on Council and Tyrant and halo on all others. Not like hes casting it anyway...

He is also not casting Achangel near enough and not using penance on cooldown. He also has 2.2k spirit when he has DP trinket? I heal all bosses with 1.1k spirit and often don´t go near oom at all still (if i could get it lower i would). But if he always uses SS i can understand why he thinks he needs the spirit. But its just a waste of stacking a stat and using all your mana that goes to a shitty spell that is worse then pw:s spam, wich is alot cheaper and absorbs more dmg.

[zubic vila]

thanks for your input, guys!
In theory we do know about what things are to be avoided and most of the tactics points we are aware of (imps, soaking black holes, bating/kiting void dudes, baiting chains...) and we have been trying to implement them, but it's still not falling into place.

Things I notice during fights is mostly that imps get out of control very easily, resulting usually with people geting Ablaze from intercepting the fel ball. This then I think leads to those people unable to soak the black hole if they are in that rotation, and on 3 tank tactic where druid tank was meant to be soaking holes on his own, he would cause the nasty explosion...at least thats what I gathered from the logs. so root cause imps out of control. is that a fair conclusion? or am I overestimating the impact of imps?
in any case, so far we havent tried assigning single interrupts duty for imps, I think partially because people don't think it's necessary, and mostly because it seems quite a hectic fight where you can't control if an interrupter will need to run out with fel surge when they're meant to interrupt...so I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this and how to actually have those single target interrupt assignments work?

sort of related to the above issue is soak rotation for black holes...same deal...people in the rotation often time have fel debuff from getting fel surge or getting hit by imp balls. we have been trying to call it out so next person in rotation takes over but it's been a bit of a clusterfuck on TS and hasn't worked out well. any advice there*

also, if any of the monks are seeing this (or I might post on monk forum) it was my understanding that diffuse magic works for black hole soaking but I'm not sure if something might mess it up, make it not as effective or...I was sort of expecting only to get a 90k hit with its 90% magic dmg reduction....but most times I tried soaking, it would hit me for far more. so are there any additional conditions to it, other than "don't have the green debuff when you're going to soak"? I realise my question(s) might be embarrasingly banal

thanks again!

[Deja Thoris]

I said it earlier. Imps are top prio. You've seen how it snowballs out of control when they cast. Yes its possible to ST interrupt. DBM can assign the markers then you can have 2 people interrupt each one (incase they have to run out).

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ype=interrupts Thats how many casts they are getting off. (40% of them)

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&target=75 This is the damage on them for the night. While admittedly you don't have a great comp for killing them, theres no way on earth your SP should be 3rd.

It's also a minor point but the ring is doing a lot of damage to imps. In an ideal world you want to kill the imps before it explodes for extra boss damage. Work on that too :P

[Khebul]

monks/rogues/warlocks/DKs/mages can all solo soak black holes, but you want to use your mages for empowered chain immunities in last phase. For everyone else except rogues issue comes from feltouched debuff. If you have it when you soak BH - you will explode and fail to clear green fire.

You have 3 options: accept the fact that you'll explode, get 2-3 rogue alts to soak or determine soaker dynamically on voice comms. Be aware that DKs (and maybe monks) can immune fel blazes with well-timed AMS.

You also need to bait BHs quite far away so nobody except soaker will get debuff from it (both shadowflame and empowered singularity). As for BH damage - it is empowered by shadowflame stacks you have. Nowadays, good geared rogue can soak first black hole with Feint + CoW/external without triggering Cheat death.

[Deleted]

Alright, this might help your case, it might not..

Our choice for this boss was to do it as safe as possible, which basicly means our imp damage/interrupts were horrible too, to combat this we used a single guardian druid taking all normal BH(and 1st and 3rd/4th empowered), and all the melee were tasked to either single interrupt and/or 'catch the blazes' if imps would get casts off. As you are aware if damage is lacking there can be casts getting through.

For positioning we did a triangle setup, 2 markers for 'ranged' where they would go back and forth for voidfiends(had one ranged "kite them"), and one marker BEHIND them for BH baiting/chains. Ideally, all fel surges would run to corner by the stairs, all the voidsurges are immuned by grounding totem so the only difficulty the raid really need to handle is killing stuff and not getting hit by voidstep(voidfiends teleport ability).

In respond to your BH soakers getting hit by blaze, they just dodge them. In our case, I (the guardian) would pretty much always run the extra mile in big arcs to make sure i wouldnt get blindsided by imp bolts, same goes for tank who takes void strikes. It's very simple awareness issue. Basicly our BH soaking was Guardian all normals, and with empowered 1.guardian 2. dk 3. dk 4.guardian 5.guardian. In all likelyhood boss should die on 3rd/4th empowered bh marker.

IF you have to use someone who has firedebuff to soak Blackhole, just simply announce it in voicechat. From my experience you can have 2 explosions per try without killing anyone, aslong as no one gets hit by 2nd when they have debuff from 1st.

In any case, what you need in order, as people have said.
- Tanks taunt when should(it's really not as hard as people make it out to be)
- Interrupt/kill imps ASAP
- Dont get hit by voidstep
- Assign BH soaking
- Assign chain baiters

You can kill this boss with lot of fel fire on the platform, even if it gets out of hand at some point. But if you get both fires on the platform, it gets very difficult very fast. So voidstep is very much guaranteed wipe. It's basically the only thing that makes us wipe on this boss, stupid as it sounds. How hard is it move out of stuff at this day and age? :/

[Deleted]

Kidnapping this thread, would anyone be kind enough to go through our logs?
We've gone over 100 wipes now (our first this expansion) and morale is going down and we consider a tactical switch.
Please help me try and save the team spirit I'd be very VERY grateful!

It's Valhall guild on Azjol Nerub (EU) on warcraftlogs.com

[Deja Thoris]

Kidnapping this thread, would anyone be kind enough to go through our logs?
We've gone over 100 wipes now (our first this expansion) and morale is going down and we consider a tactical switch.
Please help me try and save the team spirit I'd be very VERY grateful!

It's Valhall guild on Azjol Nerub (EU) on warcraftlogs.com

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...s=1800&wipes=1

You seem to be doing ok to me, you just need to get an error free pull. Early shadow-fel annihalations are going off in a few attempts killing people. Apart from that your main sources of deaths are people dying soaking blackholes and empowered chains. Just learn how to deal with them betters. I'm not sure theres any ground breaking advice for you tbh.

[Deleted]

Kidnapping this thread, would anyone be kind enough to go through our logs?
We've gone over 100 wipes now (our first this expansion) and morale is going down and we consider a tactical switch.
Please help me try and save the team spirit I'd be very VERY grateful!

It's Valhall guild on Azjol Nerub (EU) on warcraftlogs.com

Your black hole soakers and tanks are causing alot off shadowfell Annihilation. I didn´t go into logs in detail but this is either people putting their fel fire wrong, imps getting casts off or tanks just plainly taunting wrong. Make sure your blackhole soakers watch their debuffs and communicate. If he has a green fire debuff then he should mention this so someone can go instead.

You dont got a whole lot of voidsteps but it seems when you do alot of people with green debuff step in and cause Annihilations and its a definite wipe for you.

I did want to look at your replay but you don´t got advanced combat logging enabled so i couldn´t.

edit: Another issue i came across on your logs is that often only a few people seem to be second potting. They either second potting at wrong time or the rest of your raid just isnt. Make sure you make this clear on when they should pop their pots. I couldn´t really tell as your logs dont show a boss percentage, wich probably again is due to no advanced combat logging.

[Tusq]

We killed him a few weeks ago with approx 110 total wipes.. Imps is usually the biggest problem here, so bring a second dk. I know roster issues is troublesome these days, but DPS isnt really an issue on this boss. Control is 100% key. We brought a 707 Alt DK for this fight and it made is soooo much easier. And we 3 tanked too. The 3rd tank can also take any of the empowered BH's in the last phase.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mmary&fight=10

We also used this tactic that makes the fire handling very very easy in our opinion. When you get the Fel surge just run ontop of the current patches and make the people who soak the black hole go clear it. When last phase hits you will barely have any fire if done properly (And if you do, you still have plenty of room to kill the boss). If you reach last phase with 80% of the raid up it's going to be really easy for you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s42MlBwGZbg

[Deleted]

Just a quick question regarding Xhul, what is the point of 3 tanking?

[Deja Thoris]

Just a quick question regarding Xhul, what is the point of 3 tanking?

To avoid shadowfel annihilation from bad tank swaps and to allow one of the 3 tanks to eat blackholes.

[Deleted]

To avoid shadowfel annihilation from bad tank swaps and to allow one of the 3 tanks to eat blackholes.

Having 3 tanks doesn't really resolve bad tank swaps, since you're going to have 2 guys pingpong the boss anyways?(unless your goal is to make sure a retard whos fucking up never taunts boss, but why not remove him and go with 2 tanks then?) It's just purely the blackholes and nothing else.

Your logic confuses me.