Getting Rocked by Halfus...

[Tribalwar]

So my guild went in to BoT and did great on trash, and got up to Halfus... Well we got to the boss, and he has the Whelps, Slate Dragon, and the Storm Rider. The AoE was soo bad that the three healers were having a hell of a time keeping up the raid. The healers we have, have been threw all of ICC, and Heroic modes as well and we have never seen such a huge problem keeping people a live. So we tried many strats, and still have issues with healers having REAL LOW mana after we get the Storm drake down. We have interrupts on the boss as well so we don't get the nova he throws out...

Just an FYI, we also have downed Magmaw, and the ODS in Blackwing Descent. Yeah they were hard as hell, but do able. Another tid bit of info, the healers have been healing together since BC so they kind of know how to work together and not heal needlessly. Also people are at least 340+ and healers are 348+ gear levels.

Please a little help on this, because we are just getting rocked!

[Fuzzzie]

When we did it we didn't release the slate dragon, we killed the storm and then dragged the whelps on top of the boss so they would get cleaved down. Once the whelps are gone, the fire damage isn't a problem. Just get interrupts on the knock back or you'll get close to enrage

[Surtain]

With that combination raid damage is very hard to manage off the bat. With my guild we ran a resto druid on one tank, and resto shammy on the other, and a holy priest on the raid. Lightwell is crucial to conserve mana. The tanks we have are a prot pally, myself, and a prot warr. What we did was I, pally, picked up the welps and had the storm drake MD'd to me. Staying by the welp cage we burned down the drake while me and the warrior swapped agro to manage the healing debuff. After storm was down we aoe'd the welps with Halfus in the middle to soak up the extra damage. Letting both the Storm and the welps out at the same time, while making tank damage pretty bad, made raid damage very minimal and allowed for interrupts of the shadow aoe. After the welps are down it is just a burn on Halfus to beat the enrage timer which is no issue at all. Hope that helps some and if you have any other questions feel free to hit me up on this topic or in a PM. Good luck =)

[Deleted]

Here's a good tacc that we've been usein, seeing as you are "lowgeared" and possibly dont have the dps for enragetimer if a dps dies.

We pulled up the AoE drake and nuked him down really hard with heroism.

When he's dead we AoE'd down the whelps.

At this point the boss takes 100% dmg.


What you can do now to make the boss go down fast as heck is to pull the third drake and just offtank him, have a good communication with the tanks that you taunt of eachother. Aint no really damage going out to anything bout the tanks and you have a 150% dmg done should get him down fairly fast.

And just have a tank and possibly a rogue or ele shammy takin all the interupts.

[Honzi]

Try it with the time warden drake. Seems to be alot easier than the slate dragon.

[Deleted]

Try it with the time warden drake. Seems to be alot easier than the slate dragon.

You cant chose which drakes that are avalible, it changes from reset to reset.

[Cowt]

Free both the Storm Rider and the Whelps right off the bat.

Have the Storm Rider just held by one of the two tanks, while they pass Halfus between each other at 5 stacks. The other tank, without the Storm Rider, should be on the Whelps.

You want to be killing the Whelps before the Storm Rider, because they're a hell to tank due to the sheer amount of targets. After the Whelps are down, move onto Storm Rider and pop that Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp.

While all this is happening, you should have a dedicated interrupter on the boss, preferably an Elemental Shaman as they'd be able to interrupt at range, and can therefore still DPS the correct targets. Using a Focus Target macro works ace here.

Once the two first adds are dead, get that Slate up and running. At this point, the fight isn't very difficult, and the healers should be able to relax for quite a while. Finish off the Slate Dragon, and nuke the boss down.

- If you're having problems beating the Enrage timer, you could try to have Halfus ontop of whatever is being killed at the time. Any extra AE damage on him will work towards saving time. Or if you're having a problem with the tanks passing Halfus between each other and still maintaining threat on the whelps, a third tank, Feral Druid, is handy as they can easily switch back to DPS after the Whelps are down.

Good luck.

[Deleted]

I still respectfully dissagree with you guys who say that they should have the boss, storm and whelps up at one point.

I'm quite sure my raid team would be able to handle that, but as he nemtioned the group is at ilvl 340 and healrs on 348.

What i posted above makes it less hectic, more healing friendly and more focused and still able to kill him before the enrage timer.

[Gimla]

Free both the Storm Rider and the Whelps right off the bat.

Have the Storm Rider just held by one of the two tanks, while they pass Halfus between each other at 5 stacks. The other tank, without the Storm Rider, should be on the Whelps.

You want to be killing the Whelps before the Storm Rider, because they're a hell to tank due to the sheer amount of targets. After the Whelps are down, move onto Storm Rider and pop that Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp.

While all this is happening, you should have a dedicated interrupter on the boss, preferably an Elemental Shaman as they'd be able to interrupt at range, and can therefore still DPS the correct targets. Using a Focus Target macro works ace here.

Once the two first adds are dead, get that Slate up and running. At this point, the fight isn't very difficult, and the healers should be able to relax for quite a while. Finish off the Slate Dragon, and nuke the boss down.

- If you're having problems beating the Enrage timer, you could try to have Halfus ontop of whatever is being killed at the time. Any extra AE damage on him will work towards saving time. Or if you're having a problem with the tanks passing Halfus between each other and still maintaining threat on the whelps, a third tank, Feral Druid, is handy as they can easily switch back to DPS after the Whelps are down.

Good luck.

first off, long time reader, first time poster.

raid setup:
DK tank
prot pally
2 holy priests
resto shammy
fire mage
survival hunter
Demo warlock
boomkin
feral
OT: guild got our first kill on him last night after 2 nights of attempts + an extended raid, we had this exact dragon setup. We chose to have our DK tank aggro halfus and release the storm rider at the same time, tanking both. Our Prot pally took out the whelps and we aoe'd them down while our feral sat on halfus for intterupts with the Dk tank.

Right after we whelps dropped we switched onto storm rider, our prot pally + dk swapping due do the debuffs, with all 3 of them focusing on interrupts on halfus. We found that without a hero during halfus having 100%, we couldnt do the fight, so we saved it for when storm rider was down then zerged halfus. We also tried releasing the slate dragon before 50% for the bonus damage, but due to furious roar, the tank would just drop after taking some hits and then we had troubles getting the shadow nova right after. Mages can blink + CS it i think, our pally would bubble, humans have racial.

In the end it comes down to taking the dragons efficiently, interrupting as many novas as possible, and saving your heals as much healing as you can during the post-50% phase. Having two lightwells here + lock cookies made the healing quite easy once the whelps were down, 1 renew and a lightwell hit and i would have enough to survive until the next furious roar.


Edit: also as none of the bosses you have possess a cleave, tank them all right on top of each other, also makes tank swaps easy. by the time we even switched to the storm rider halfus was at 90% or so from splash, and i would also toss my instant dots on him to help while we burned down storm rider.
We hit the enrage timer for 1 second before we got the kill.

Sorry for the wall of text, and GL!

[Surtain]

If your tanks are swapping properly and your interrupters are doing their job the tank damage is all you need to worry about. Without the welps out you are taking 2x the damage from Halfus, the Storm Drake, and the Proto-Behemoth, thus making raid and tank damage worse. For lower gear levels it is advisable to limit the damage to as few sources as possible, ie. the tanks who can rotate cooldowns and swap agro, rather than let the whole raid hover low and risk losing dps and not making the enrage.

[Bloodmayj]

Having all three up actually makes things easier Pikozz. My group was having the same problems, we pulled the storm and then the whelps, and just seemed to have too many problems. Pulled both, and we oneshot it. Yeah, its a lot of damage, but once they're down it's smooth sailing.

[Bucknazty]

Healers with 348 "should" be able to heal through the damage. In a pug I did we had the same combo and, while the novas were interrupted, healing was not TO bad. Healer comp was Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Shaman with me being the resto druid. I was on one tank, other was beaconed, and shaman was on raid only. Pally and I threw out AoE heals when we could.

Whats your healer comp?

[Amghealme]

So my guild went in to BoT and did great on trash, and got up to Halfus... Well we got to the boss, and he has the Whelps, Slate Dragon, and the Storm Rider. The AoE was soo bad that the three healers were having a hell of a time keeping up the raid. The healers we have, have been threw all of ICC, and Heroic modes as well and we have never seen such a huge problem keeping people a live. So we tried many strats, and still have issues with healers having REAL LOW mana after we get the Storm drake down. We have interrupts on the boss as well so we don't get the nova he throws out...

Just an FYI, we also have downed Magmaw, and the ODS in Blackwing Descent. Yeah they were hard as hell, but do able. Another tid bit of info, the healers have been healing together since BC so they kind of know how to work together and not heal needlessly. Also people are at least 340+ and healers are 348+ gear levels.

Please a little help on this, because we are just getting rocked!

We just entered BoT for the first time last night and got first two bosses rather easily.

We ha the same drakes and it took three attempts to down him. We started with whelps and storm, then the other. The only real hectic part was when I was tanking the drake, whelps and taunt trading halfus. After that it was all downhill.

[Stevoman]

Link your armory.

100g says you're stacked full stamina ahead, ala the Wrath mindset, which is why your healers are going OOM so quick. Someone has to fill up that 190k health bar of yours. You need to have a healthy amount of avoidance. (I have no more health than our DPS, but have close to 40% dodge and my Savage Defense has a total proc chance of 54%/swing and absorbs 20k/bubble).

[Reg]

Yeah, I'd like to see the armory of your tanks. I know your Prot Pally should be rocking Mastery hardcore. DKs I don't know as much about.

[Deleted]

Having all three up actually makes things easier Pikozz. My group was having the same problems, we pulled the storm and then the whelps, and just seemed to have too many problems. Pulled both, and we oneshot it. Yeah, its a lot of damage, but once they're down it's smooth sailing.

Well i guess thats from person to person, this is just how we did it and we 3 shotted it the first time we ever went in there so, last week was more faceroll with MS drake and AoE drake asleep.. Told the other tank to go dps and solotanked it.

[Thokh]

We did Halfus our first time last night, and oneshotted. By far the easiest raidboss in T11 content so far.

I fail to see your issue though. We thought Magmaw and ODS was fairly hard as well, but Halfus is super duper ez. Are you sure your raid is avoiding the fire on the ground? We did it the following way:

DK tanked Time Warden, I (prot warrior) tanked Halfus and Nether Scion. DPS killed Time Warden, and then we released Whelps and killed them, then killed Scion, and proceeded to BL and burn Halfus down with one minute to spare on the berserktimer. We have about 346-352 geared people. Was absolutely no problem for me to tank the two, and I'm stacking avoidance as well as stamina (going for socket bonuses, gemming green/purple instead of yellow/red).

I do believe we had the easiest drake setup though. Also, our tanks, including me, did like 24k DPS due to some debuff on Halfus, and some DPS climbed upwards of 28k. To be honest I wasn't paying much attention other than on surviving and not standing in fire, since it went so fast and was so damn easy.

[Tribalwar]

I appreciate the help y'all! I will link this to my guild and have them look at this, and maybe they can learn a thing or two. I am one of the healers, and i am busting my arse to keep people a live, and maybe this will help a lot!

Also just for Thokh; we didn't have the Time Warden...

Also my Armory is Tribalwar@mal'ganis.

[Vook]

We did Halfus our first time last night, and oneshotted. By far the easiest raidboss in T11 content so far.

I fail to see your issue though.

That's because you don't know that Halfus' difficulty varies based on which drakes are up. My guild is pretty good (H Halion in 3.3, H LK after 4.0) and we wiped for about four or five hours on Halfus before getting him down, because we had Slate/Nether Scion, a very hard setup, especially for a group in blues.

[Amghealme]

That's because you don't know that Halfus' difficulty varies based on which drakes are up. My guild is pretty good (H Halion in 3.3, H LK after 4.0) and we wiped for about four or five hours on Halfus before getting him down, because we had Slate/Nether Scion, a very hard setup, especially for a group in blues.

We had the same setup as the OP and did fine. By far the easiest out of the six we got on our first raid weekend.

My best guess is the tanks are stam tanks and the DPs weren't interrupting the shadow thing.