HC 25m Rhyolith - what are we doing wrong? Logs included

[Deleted]

Hi guys. We've been on HC 25m Rhyolith for around 5-6 hours and it's basically without any progress. While this amount of hours is nothing when it comes to progress, it does seem like a lot when we aren't moving any further at all.

It seems like we aren't capable of actually making it into p2-transition before Superheated starts stacking. I'm fairly certain it's a question of min/maxing and adjusting assignments a little bit and I'd like to hear it from you guys :P

We didn't log our first night (random incident) but heres our log from the second night of (only) 18 attempts: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-bdbot4h9nd7n72ij/.

Some general assignments and also the tactic we used:

Legs: 8 DPS: 2x rogues (assa/combat), 2x hunters (MM/survival), frost DK, fury warrior, retribution paladin, shadowpriest
Sparks of Rhyolith: 3x arcane mages and a MM hunter.
Fragments of Rhyolith: 2x shadowpriests, 2x demonology warlocks and a boomkin.
We two-tanked it using a DK-tank on Sparks and a Warrior on Fragments.
We 6-healed it.

We tried stacking up when adds were about to spawn in order to make them easy to pick up.

These assignments were practically only used on like the last 3-4 tries as we adjusted them many times during the night. Are these correct and should people stick like 100% to these? Some general advices would REALLY be appreciated.

I would also just like some general tips, advices and stuff we can do in order to improve our raid-DPS and general performance. I'm basically looking for everything we can improve and min/max.

My personal performance was really, really bad as I was, for some reason, playing assassination and had to basically raidlead (something I'm not too familiar with).

- Meckie.

[Sanadoz]

Nobody should DPS the Sparks until their stacks get to about 8. At that point the tank pops a defensive cooldown and calls for ranged to switch quickly and blow it up. Also you should do a flat out burn on Rhoylith (ignore sparks, ignore fragments as well but make sure they won't charge) once his armor gets to 10~. If a fragment wave just spawned AoE those down instantly and then get on the boss. If necessary bloodlust around this mark. The goal is to push him to 25% without Superheated which occurs at 5 minutes.

[zythian]

Trying to make your entire raid move to make the tank's job easier is a massive DPS loss for everyone involved. You don't need to have people on sparks the second they spawn, you can wait for the debuff to start stacking up pretty decently before switching.

Our entire raid switches on legs whenever possible. Zerg adds, zerg boss, zerg adds, zerg boss. Superheated was an issue we dealt with more on PTR than on live. As long as you get to volcanoes quickly and have a large amount of DPS on the boss whenever possible (which is a large portion of the time), you should have no real problems with Superheated.

Generally once the boss is in the 10-20 stack range we begin to zerg him (even if he's still @ 40-50%) and only kill fragments. If spark damage gets too high our tank just kites it for the remainder until it despawns going into phase 2. Your biggest problem is most likely just not having enough DPS switching back on to the boss.

[Deleted]

Raid looks fine, we 2 tank 6 heal it.
Assignment wise:
Do you have no one on the liquid obsidiums? We put a boomkin on them and he does ~50% of his overall damage to them. If you don't kill enough of them you'll never get him into p2 before superheated melts your raid.
Sparks: almost the same, we put both mages and 2 hunters on these
Fragments: almost the same assignements here, we use 2 locks and 2 more random ranged, with the Obsidium boomkin helping out when he's got the obsidiums under control. (he gets them fairly low with sunfire spam, them lets the melee cleave them to finish them off).

Everyone does their job, then gets back on the boss asap.

We stack as a raid off centre, with the add tank tanking the adds on us aswell. The faster you aoe the adds down the more dps you can put out onto the legs. Plus it stops healing aggro pulling the adds all over the place.

Pull, everyone (including healers) nukes legs for 10-15 seconds to get them as low as possible before steering becomes the issue.
He Superheats at 5 mins, so that's pretty much how long you have to push p2 give or take 10-15 seconds, at 4 mins we move more dps on the legs to get them lower, then on 4m 30 we lust regardless of the legs / bosses hp. Assuming everyone has made it this far stagger your raid cd's pretty much into 2 halves, have half pop cd's once he stands up, then the other half pop after he's done another stomp thingy. We group up in p2 and heal thru the laser beams as they don't do enough damage to warrent spreading the raid out.

People need to avoid the magma lines, especially melee seem to get spanked by this often.

Other than that, there is a certain amount of RNG-ness when it comes to the spawning of volcanoes.

[Deleted]

How about tanking the fragments on top of oozes or legs? Should we drop this and just tank the adds on top of the raid?

Assuming we have 4 DPS specifically assigned to the sparks, they shouldn't actually be on the sparks fulltime but wait untill the Spark gains a few stacks and then switch?

Assuming we have 8 DPS fulltime on legs, will we be able to hard-turn the boss if rogues have BF up the entire fight or will they have to toggle it off in order to hard-turn?

[Dracodraco]

Personally, I'd say you have too much DPS allocated to the spark. Assuming your DPS are good at multidotting, it should go down fairly fast even if you only have 2 MM hunters on it (do note that we start burning from the start, and aim to have it dead by the ~10 stack point). We use 6-8 actual melee dps on the legs, and have 2 fire mages, 2 warlocks, 1 elem shaman, 2 shadow priests, a boomkin or something along those lines dotting up the spark while dealing with fragments/the boss. Fire mages combustion is simply evil for this fight, as they can obliterate big groups of adds, giving ALL your dps much better uptime on the boss itself.

Kill 3 sparks, offtank fourth.

We tank the fragments on top of the boss' legs in order to get AOE to hit them - this also means that ranged just follows the boss around, and if they grab aggro with their AOE, so be it, they should be standing in the middle of them anyway so it wont matter. Boomkin+ele shaman constantly pushing oozes away, with hunters throwing traps down to slow them.