Mythic Fallen Avatar Help

[Chewtoy]

Hello friends!

We've been a bit slow this expansion but we're finally getting to this boss, and our comp is less than ideal to reduce the complication of the fight with soaking.

Our current roster sits at
Tanks - Bear, Warrior, back up as DK and Paladin
Healing - Paladin, Holy Priest x 2, Monk, Shaman, Druid - back up shaman, paladin
DPS - DH x 2, DK x 2, Ret, Rogue, Warrior, Shadow Priest x 2, Mage x 2, Hunter, Warlock x 2, Elemental Shaman x 3

Touch of Sargeras Soaking
From what I'm seeing we either need a 50% or more damage reduction, or an immunity in each to solo it. Is it possible at the gear level now to have just two players jump in without anything and soak? I'm not sure how to best approach it with such a lack of good options.

So if we do, 2 tanks, 6 soakers in two groups - 12, that leaves 6 players free. Is it feasible to do...our 1 rogue as an every soaker, 2 free players + whatever left hand matrix soakers are not up next, 2 free players + whatever right hand matrix soakers are not up next, then a rotating 1 person immunity group that pulls from all those? Is that doable, or overly complicated. Obviously I'd have to look at soaking rotation timing, but I'm not sure what else to do here. Healing druid that can go bear each time? Or is there another group that can do it. Does DK AMS work enough? Prydaz at this gear level?

Corrupted Matrix
Corrupted Matrix it seems like you just take 6 people all going to six stacks. I'm assuming you use two of the newer weak auras that are out to create two groups of six so they can follow it and track it easily, correct? Then it's just learn when you transition into the beam and the crap overlaps that occur.

From the other thread I saw

There will always be periods where you have unbound and swaps overlap. It's not something you can solve with a specific, golden rule of soaks. You've got three approaches here:

1: Deal with it and learn how to trade off a lane during unbound.
2: Assign immunity-classes to take over the lane during unbounds (EG; I always take over from our boomkin as a hunter, with 2 of the i *think* 3x unbound+lane switch overlaps) in case of fuck ups. My guild personally went with a combo of 1+2 (used my turtle whenever boomkin would mess up, barely had to last 100 pulls).
3: Add extra players to the soak rotation. EG, with 6x soakers, you usually would go to 6x stacks (leaving 4x solo soakers for touches now, 2 tanks, and 2 entirely free players - was previously 5 soakers, 1 free player). You can change this so that right before an unbound, the person soaking leaves in favor of one of the two float-people, no matter their stacks. Personally, I'd find this super confusing though (and also, we had a healer as our one float-person, specifically assigned to keep the tanks alive, as healers aren't guaranteed range on tanks at all times in this fight).

Handling Maiden Shield with Overlap of Abilities
Do guilds have certain players hold CDs for it, or what's the best way to deal with shield 2 and 3?
With the HP nerf, are guilds now letting him phase in the middle of shield 4 still?

Phase 2 - do people still really use avalanche elixirs?

Do guilds progressing still start in phase 2 and learn it, then tackle phase 1?

Any other helpful tips or tricks for a guild just starting on this craziness?

Thanks!

Chew~

[Tradu]

Not sure about which classes can solo soak Touch at this point, but the issue with having multiple people do it is that some of those people will have the healing reduction debuff, which can be sketchy depending on the timing of their Touch soak, because healers might not be able to top them in time. It also requires better coordination than just having 1 person doing it.

For beams, yeah, the WA makes it a lot easier(although we had issues with it just not working at all sometimes, for no reason we could find) and 6 people are definitely enough, sometimes they won't even need to go up to 6 stacks. Draco's post is pretty accurate, and I think somewhere close to it in that thread I also posted how I took over beams during Unbound(essentially start at opposite ends of the line, run towards each other, when you get close to each other the person who has been soaking already dips out of the lane)

We used pots for 2nd Maiden shield, 3rd was usually fine(not sure if people held CDs for that one any more than the other shields). Not sure if they ended up doing it on the kill(missed that raid), but our goal was still to phase during 4th shield, but we had some pulls with good transitions where we just killed the Maiden before 4th shield as well.

Avalanche Elixirs aren't very expensive, so you might as well. They add a bit of damage and avoid some fall damage, which is nice to have but not "mandatory" anymore.

[Dracodraco]

From the top:

Assuming you want to 4 heal (a few guilds, including my own, 5 heal after the nerfs just because P2 becomes less of a coin-toss; With a fifth healer, you actually have enough power to spam heal a few tornado-mishaps without balancing on the brink of being overwhelmed), your setup:

Tanks: Bear+Warrior.
Healers: Paladin+Shaman+Druid. Pick your strongest healer for the fourth spot (priest and monk both works).
DPS: DH x 2, DK x 2, Ret, Rogue, Warrior, Shadow Priest x 2, Mage x 2, Hunter, Warlock x 2.

Elemental just brings absolutely nothing to that fight worth mentioning. If your elemental shamans are significantly better players than some of your other DPS, there's wiggle room - but generally, I'd never take one myself for progress purposes.

Touch of Sargeras Soaking
From what I'm seeing we either need a 50% or more damage reduction, or an immunity in each to solo it. Is it possible at the gear level now to have just two players jump in without anything and soak? I'm not sure how to best approach it with such a lack of good options.

Your touch soakers are 2x DKs, 1x Rogue, 1x DH. These 4 people will never soak matrix debuffs (taking 4 of the 8 total "free" spots - tanks take another 2). DKs can do this with AMS (and the bigger AMS talent) due to their traits with passive magic damage reduction, DHs can do it with their 1 minute CD + the talent that makes blur reduce damage more and their artifact traits. Rogue is rogue.

Other options for soakers:
Resto druid (bear form + barkskin + 6% dmg reduc from talent is enough).
Resto shaman (with the ghost-wolf artifact trait+HST artifact trait, he'll have 40% reduction).
MW monk (alternating cooldowns).

You can use prydaz for safety if you want, but there's a high likelihood the shield won't even be up when you're soaking touch, so it's not really worth it; All of the above classes mentioned could do it PRIOR to the 10% touch damage nerf. They shouldn't struggle now.


Now, with 2 "free roaming" spots left, you have to decide if you want a dedicated healer not assigned; We personally did because we had a paladin+monk tank setup, which required our paladin to always be in range of tanks to heal them, so having him soak a beam was not very consistent if the tanks had to move to the far away side with Maiden. Either way, you assign 1x tank healer and 1x melee DPS as "free roamers", or 2x melee DPS. If it's 2x melee dps, have them stood near each conduit to back-up incase something goes wrong.

The reason you want to minimize the amount of melee DPS soaking the beam is because whenever melee is soaking, it makes the room harder to navigate; The purple beam is going to slice the room, forcing people to move around it (including maiden, who will rape the raid if she's hit by a purple beam as she's moving). Whenever melee soaks, make sure they're stood at MAX melee range, so there's space for maiden to pass in front of the beam. This is how I'd organize the groups:

1:
Mage
Warlock
Melee
Shadow Priest
Healer
Healer


2:
Mage
Warlock
Melee
Shadow Priest
Hunter
Healer

This is mainly because the healer/hunter will (usually) be soaking the beam while a shield is up (or just around). Hunter, whether BM or MM, has a higher chance to be able to reach maiden when soaking (due to pet/range), and healers don't care.

As for optimising, see if the shields are an issue first. Your warrior should carry HARD on them, using CDs on every one. If it becomes an issue, have people save shit; It's really not a DPS race anymore. No reason to worry before you figure out if it's actually a concern.

Practice P3 after getting to/through the third shield. This way P2 will still be relatively fresh in your raiders minds when you finally do make a clean transition. Your goal is to get through 30% of the boss' HP consistently in P2 before dying (and obviously, getting the boss sub-30% in P1). We actually messed up so badly this week that we transitioned with 37% HP and 5 healers and still made it, so both numbers are fairly flexible, though.

I'd also argue that Avalanche potions are "mandatory", unlike Tradu. They're too cheap not to use; If you're getting knocked by a mark, that's atleast 1-1.5M falling damage you're absorbing with a potion with zero downsides but to your pocket. To put it in perspective, each prevented fall damage from dark marks is basically the same value as a Prydaz shield. The entire raid doing it greatly improves your survival rates.

Dark marks, soak as many as possible for the first 2, then for #3, #4 and #5 (on the last platform), start suiciding and immuning. If you're getting the boss super low, move it up a notch; Soak the first set, then immune/suicide 2 and onwards (this is what we did, but we had far more immunities+paladin spellwarding to save a warrior). As a really ghetto immunity, ancestral totem from shaman works. Our specific strategy was:

1: Soak 2x marks in melee (one left, one right, 4x soakers in each). 1x Mark in range dies alone in a ress totem (overlaps with rupture).
2: Solosoak if immunity. Spellward non-immunity classes. Hand of sac on warlock/DK/spriest lets them solo as well (other externals should work too, it's just what we had spare).
3: Solosoak or die.
4: Solosoak or die.
5: Solosoak or die.

There's a weakaura that helps assigning where the marks go, based on their explosion-time.


Healing CDs specifically with our healer setup (Pally+Shammy+Druid+Hpriest):

First rupture: Tranq.
Second rupture: Aura Mastery.
Third Rupture: HTT+Hymn (HTT popped ~10 seconds before; This is a bad overlap of chaos+rupture, need to top the raid ASAP).
Fourth rupture: Tranq.
Fifth rupture: Aura Mastery.
AG, wings etc was used at our healers' own leisure.

P2:
First rupture: AG.
Second meteors: Healing tide. (to keep raid stable, might be tornado hits that needs spam healing etc).
Second rupture: SLT.
Third meteors: Hymn.
Third rupture: Tranq+Rally.

You're now on the last bit of platform. Offtank takes the single meteor spawn, Aura Mastery is popped as soon as it's ready to keep you stable till the boss either kills you or you kill it.

[Chewtoy]

@Dracodraco dropping the knowledge again! I really appreciate the reply sir. Thank you to @Tradu as well