So... We have Storm, Nether, Time this week for Halfus.

[Deleted]

Ok, if you're DPS is decent, and considering this is normal mode we're talking about, this is quite simple. Grab an interrupt team and keep them on Halfus 100%. Easy enough, you wanna pull halfus so he runs to the storm drake and release the storm drake on the pull. Also release the Nether on the pull and depending on the gear of your tanks, and the state of your DPS, you can either 2 tank this or 3 tank it.

2 tanking will require CD stacking but the drakes will drop quicker. Get the OT to take both the Storm and Nether and drop the Storm ASAP. And I mean fucking ASAP. You will want to pop BL/Hero/TW/AH here. After the storm goes down, kill the nether drake. Then leaving the time warden down, just nuke the fuck out of Halfus and there you go, free loots.

3 tanking is the same except it requires no CD stacking and tanks will take a drake each and the boss on a seperate tank. Easy enough. Here though, it's vital you tank all 3 together to capitilize on cleave damage.

The reason I advised you to leave Time Warden down is because, unless you have the whelp group, it's incredibly easy to just heal through the ~20k hits from those pathetic fireballs. So as long as your healers are slightly geared, you should have no issue. We managed this on the 2nd week of Cata by only releasing 2 drakes, and it's the way we've done it ever since. I do imagine this won't work with less DPS or on heroic mode though.

[Tharkkun]

Release Storm and Time at the same time. Interruptable Novas, easily avoidable fireballs = very little to no raid healing required. If there is no failure there's nothing to heal but the tanks. So now all your focus can be on the MT who has no mortal strike debuff and the drake tank.

Kill them both and finish off Halfus. Our healers last night said this was the easiest combo they had yet.

[jearle]

This combo is pretty easy, of course it depends on your makeup as most encounters do.

For 10 man.

Release Storm Rider immediately. Keep a tank and an interupt (preferable ele shammy or enhance shammy) or melee at the least on Halfus and tank in the middle. Tank Storm with tanks back to Time warden have melee and all ranged spread out to minimize barrage damage.

Burn Storm, release time at ~ 5-10% on Storm. Tank picks up Time start burning him. Everyone moves out of fireballs. Time dies.

At this point you have a decision to make:

Do you have really good dps and weak healers? Hero and burn boss
Do you have mediocre dps and good healers? Release Scion Drake, offtank. Hero and burn boss. Scion tank uses CDs during roar.
Do you have really good dps and good healers? Release Scion Drake, offtank. Hero and burn boss. Scion tank uses CDs during roar.

If you have a mage good enough to blink and counterspell the nova after roar in p2, the healing is really trivial.

The extra 50% damage to the boss because of the 3rd drake released is quite noticeable and if you're hitting enrage is probably the method you want to use.

Save heroism for after the release of the 3rd drake, this will maximize your damage on the boss and yields a much higher damage increase then releasing 2 drakes at once and burning them.

[Azrok]

Honestly Nether without Slate is not that bad, sure the tanks get hit more but the boss does not hit that hard and its nothing you can't heal through

How I would manage this (assuming 3 healers 5 dps 2 tanks) is to release Storm right away and burn him down asap. This means healers will have to heal through the fire stuff people will inevitably stand in because it's instant, but if you have decent healers it isnt impossible to heal through. As soon as Storm is down release Time, kill him, release Nether, etc.

It's just a matter of if your healers can heal through the first ~45 seconds of the fire hurting the raid. It is doable, I did it last week. GL

[tremulant]

we had this setup, pretty simple,

if all else fails do it the slow, 1 by 1 way
release/kill Storm first, have interrupers on halfus
release/kill Time next, (you could obviously release Time at the start with the Storm, either you deal with having 2 drakes up at same time or leac him trapped until Storm is dead and just spread for fireballs and take the dmg but limit the splash effects.. both ways are easily manageable)
kill halfus (with or without releasing/offtanking nether, it doesn't matter halfus dmg is low anyway)

---------- Post added 2011-01-19 at 08:48 PM ----------

and btw,
on normal modes,
Slate without Nether and Nether without Slate are both faceroll, they can be ignored while doing the first 2 drakes and then kill halfus with or withouth releasing them.
and if you have BOTH of them in your setup, then you just release/kill one of them second.
so really, there's no hard setup in normal mode.

[Mathaios]

We killed him last night.
MT on halfus, OT in the dragons. OT released time warden and our hunter the nether one, we pop'd heroism and killed the time warden, then the nether and finally the stormrider. Very easy fight :d

[SilkforCalde]

Once the drakes were dead the fight felt uselessly easy.

What does this even mean? Uselessly? The fight is tuned so the fight gets easier as you kill drakes. Kinda like OS + 3D. Uselessly? What does that mean?????

[Gnomity]

We killed him last night.
MT on halfus, OT in the dragons. OT released time warden and our hunter the nether one, we pop'd heroism and killed the time warden, then the nether and finally the stormrider. Very easy fight :d

You didn't release storm early so you could interrupt the nova? Cause that nova is probably the worst ability he has as far as raid damage is concerned, especially since it can interrupt your healers.

We always pop storm first when he's up - last week we had storm -> Time -> slate and burned him with no problems.

As a fire mage, I personally love it when we have whelps MANY WHELPS! HANDLE IT!

[ericyeahright]

Our RNG with Drakes has always sucked, first week we had hardest, etc, etc.

I'm wondering if this doable. Last week we had Storm, Slate, Time. We wiped fast.

So, I'm asking input on what to do. We don't have Slate, which is awesome, but Nether + Storm seems bad. I'm wondering if Nether buffs the cast for Halfus. If it does not, then it would seem like we would release Storm first, then do Nether, and then release Time and burn Halfus down.

Thanks if you have input

We had the same combo, down him after 5 attempts. Next.

Really though, its not hard, just make sure you have enough healers and everyone isnt standing in shit.

[A Day to Remember]

Guild downed this easily last night, at the pull we had one tank release the Storm and had a Hunter release and MD the Time Warden to the offtank. Popped BL and downed the two drakes then Halfus. Ofcourse this will depend on your tanks using proper cooldown rotations to stay alive with the two drakes on him, but there should be no raid damage so your healers will be free for the tanks.

[Thereign]

We just released Storm, burned him down while having the healers heal for ridiculous amounts (as well as hoping for good RNG, and as soon as it died we released the Time Warden. After the Time Warden is up, it's cake.

[Mathaios]

You didn't release storm early so you could interrupt the nova? Cause that nova is probably the worst ability he has as far as raid damage is concerned, especially since it can interrupt your healers.

It was our healers idea, we didnt have much trouble doing this and after the 2 dragons were down the last one and the boss were pretty easy.

[CombatJack]

If you are doing this on 10 man i recommend releasing 1 drake at a time, Storm being the first. Our healers didn't have much trouble keeping everyone alive during the super fast fireball barrage. When releasing 2 drakes at once our tanks would get obliterated.

[Omgabear]

Talking about it,
Today we got: Slate dragon, nether scion, and Whelps, worst combo ever.
How to solve it? we tried pulling both slate and nether, but its still hard and our tank kept dcing. Any tips?
Doing the whelps first doesnt really seem like an option seeing tanks have to switch very fast due to his faster
stacking of the ms-like debuff. Slate first, tanks and raid still take too much damage, same goes for the
nether scion.

Tips would be much appreciated!

[Malachy]

Nether is pretty cake without Slate, so let him be. And it was (still is?) bugged for a while and the Frenzy debuff would stay. That's what I call Healer Boot Camp.

@Omgabear

Two very good tanks, 3 very good healers. Release Nether, tanks both switch between Halfus and Nether. Release Whelps, tank near boss AE/cleave 'em down and after that it's smooth sailing. Might save BL for Whelps because they are probably worse than Nether (or our tanks sucked at AE tanking).
Leave Slate, his debuff is useless on normal.

[Deleted]

Talking about it,
Today we got: Slate dragon, nether scion, and Whelps, worst combo ever.
How to solve it? we tried pulling both slate and nether, but its still hard and our tank kept dcing. Any tips?
Doing the whelps first doesnt really seem like an option seeing tanks have to switch very fast due to his faster
stacking of the ms-like debuff. Slate first, tanks and raid still take too much damage, same goes for the
nether scion.

Tips would be much appreciated!

Release Nether and burn it down asap, then release drakes and kill those. Ignore slate dragon all together and remember to swap tanks when the ms debuff drops.