Failing on Mythic Blackhand P3

[Deleted]

How do we improve? It feels as if it is just too little DPS, but that seems too simplistic, maybe it is too little healing.

Here are some logs.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...MKJc/#fight=68

Bit many unfortunately, our logger saved them up for 3 days, day 60 was day 3 and our latest day. We reached P3 multiple times but we kept on failing, and I'm not really sure how we can improve. We wiped on low % several times.

[Nuckels]

I don't have time to look at logs but what caused most wipes for us was actaully later debriswaves not being propperly soaked and cutting us off and forcing us to do stupid movement.

We save hops and just make sure its all covered nowadays for the later once with druids going in with hops + hunters + mages and rogues.

[Dracodraco]

There's very few things that can go wrong in P3. Sadly, it's not easy for us to tell from logs which one it is. Worst to least:

1: Are your demolition craters being soaked?
I see some deaths due to erupting slag craters; This can both be because you are too slow at moving (you need the raid to be positioned BEFORE blackhand activates the craters, or people are gonna take atleast half their health in damage standing in it, which kills), and because you fail at getting the demo's soaked. If soaking is not an issue, a quick and dirty fix to up your survivability is to mark someone reliable in P3, and have him move the raid around, making sure to keep distance to craters.

2: Are your Impales/Slag bombs fucking up?
If they overlap on people, that's usually an instant oneshot. Can't happen. Get the addon Blackhandassist (plugin for bigwigs - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/bigwigs_blackhandassist ). Make sure everyone in the raid has it. It'll make bombs yell "Middle" and "back"; This assumes the tank will always be at the front with his bomb, and tells the 2 random targets where to go. If we're strapped for space, our "back" bombs literally goes out BEHIND the raid instead of trying to line it up (you might be standing right on the tangent of a crater, so no space for 2x bombs without either being inside crater or overlapping).
Marks will yell "left", "middle", "right". Assuming you go around the room clockwise, have left be your decision maker. He positions himself outside of the raid as close as he thinks possible, and middle/right lines up after him. No shuffling around.


3: You have too many people taking massive shattering smash. On all the +7 min tries I check, you have 6 people inside the smash; Your two DKS, two rogues, and two tanks. That should be 4 people.
Why are both tanks taking it? One of you will inevitably always have the slagged debuff, which means you're gonna be taking some spike damage there. How the flow of the fight should be for tanks/melee is:

Tank1 has boss faced out towards the edge of platform.
Boss throws bombs.
Tank2 taunts boss to turn him around to face the middle. Bombs go out to the left.
Boss throws out marks to the right.
Boss, still facing middle, does smash on Tank2+3x melee dps (2x rogue/1x DK ideally in your case). While boss is doing the throw of impales/smash, Tank1 should be moving a long the rim of the platform to next position. When Tank2 goes flying, Tank1 lets boss run as far as he can after Tank2, then taunts the boss. This ensures ~10 seconds of zero melee hits because the boss is pingponging, giving the healers more of a breathing room. Repeat untill boss is dead.
If a smash-soaker has debuff and can't cloak/AMS, call a backup warrior/DK in; A debuffed target should never soak smash.

Essentially, if you and your warrior are BOTH taking the smash, your positioning must be absolutely CHAOTIC to say the least in that phase. This way, the boss will move in the same pattern all the time as illustrated on this map:
http://imgur.com/igwOFJV (and yes, I am completly incapable of supplying good visuals. Bad = Craters, blue lines = tanks flying and taunting around (so the bomb-tank would be moving between the different points of the blue line on the outer edge), and green is the small area where ranged essentially never has to move from the entire encounter.



And that's really about it; the fight can easily last ~8 minutes for first kills, so I wouldn't say speed is your issue. Just need to get everything down smoothly. If what I believe is true (that your tanks are both flying and then has to drag the boss to the edge while trying to tackle bombs), just doing what I explained will already help ALOT by making it less chaotic.

A few pointers on Debri waves -
If you imagine the platform is a clock, with 12 at the top (the sharp point), any debri that falls anywhere between 2 and 11 has to be properly soaked on the first go. 11, 12 and 1 are less important, because they'll basicly overlap with your first smash before any craters are active, anyway.
Likewise, on debri #2 and #3, if any debri falls near the melee, ignore it. DO NOT have them go soak it. It's a waste of a cooldown; you'll be placing a crater right on top of there in a few seconds with a shattering smash anyway, so the space saved is minimal.

[Deleted]

I don't have time to look at logs but what caused most wipes for us was actaully later debriswaves not being propperly soaked and cutting us off and forcing us to do stupid movement.

We save hops and just make sure its all covered nowadays for the later once with druids going in with hops + hunters + mages and rogues.

We only have 1 HoP unfortunately, we use one on P1 and we use one again at the start of P3.

Could consider dropping it from P1 though, but we only had probably 1 P1 wipe in 30+ tries, dont wanna change too much.

[Dhryke]

Falling debris, as well, needs to be soaked properly.

[Deleted]

There's very few things that can go wrong in P3. Sadly, it's not easy for us to tell from logs which one it is. Worst to least:

1: Are your demolition craters being soaked?
I see some deaths due to erupting slag craters; This can both be because you are too slow at moving (you need the raid to be positioned BEFORE blackhand activates the craters, or people are gonna take atleast half their health in damage standing in it, which kills), and because you fail at getting the demo's soaked. If soaking is not an issue, a quick and dirty fix to up your survivability is to mark someone reliable in P3, and have him move the raid around, making sure to keep distance to craters.

2: Are your Impales/Slag bombs fucking up?
If they overlap on people, that's usually an instant oneshot. Can't happen. Get the addon Blackhandassist (plugin for bigwigs - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/bigwigs_blackhandassist ). Make sure everyone in the raid has it. It'll make bombs yell "Middle" and "back"; This assumes the tank will always be at the front with his bomb, and tells the 2 random targets where to go. If we're strapped for space, our "back" bombs literally goes out BEHIND the raid instead of trying to line it up (you might be standing right on the tangent of a crater, so no space for 2x bombs without either being inside crater or overlapping).
Marks will yell "left", "middle", "right". Assuming you go around the room clockwise, have left be your decision maker. He positions himself outside of the raid as close as he thinks possible, and middle/right lines up after him. No shuffling around.


3: You have too many people taking massive shattering smash. On all the +7 min tries I check, you have 6 people inside the smash; Your two DKS, two rogues, and two tanks. That should be 4 people.
Why are both tanks taking it? One of you will inevitably always have the slagged debuff, which means you're gonna be taking some spike damage there. How the flow of the fight should be for tanks/melee is:

Tank1 has boss faced out towards the edge of platform.
Boss throws bombs.
Tank2 taunts boss to turn him around to face the middle. Bombs go out to the left.
Boss throws out marks to the right.
Boss, still facing middle, does smash on Tank2+3x melee dps (2x rogue/1x DK ideally in your case). While boss is doing the throw of impales/smash, Tank1 should be moving a long the rim of the platform to next position. When Tank2 goes flying, Tank1 lets boss run as far as he can after Tank2, then taunts the boss. This ensures ~10 seconds of zero melee hits because the boss is pingponging, giving the healers more of a breathing room. Repeat untill boss is dead.
If a smash-soaker has debuff and can't cloak/AMS, call a backup warrior/DK in; A debuffed target should never soak smash.

Essentially, if you and your warrior are BOTH taking the smash, your positioning must be absolutely CHAOTIC to say the least in that phase. This way, the boss will move in the same pattern all the time as illustrated on this map:
http://imgur.com/igwOFJV (and yes, I am completly incapable of supplying good visuals. Bad = Craters, blue lines = tanks flying and taunting around (so the bomb-tank would be moving between the different points of the blue line on the outer edge), and green is the small area where ranged essentially never has to move from the entire encounter.



And that's really about it; the fight can easily last ~8 minutes for first kills, so I wouldn't say speed is your issue. Just need to get everything down smoothly. If what I believe is true (that your tanks are both flying and then has to drag the boss to the edge while trying to tackle bombs), just doing what I explained will already help ALOT by making it less chaotic.

Strong agreement with everything in this post, but one thing of note is the issue of taunt immunity in P3. For first kills, the last phase is usually extended to such a degree that if you taunt for both slag bombs AND after smashes, you will run into problems with taunt immunity. The quick and clean solution to this is to have the boss knock the soakers along the EDGE of the platform rather than into the middle, and only taunt for slag bombs. This both avoids issues with taunt immunity completely, and makes Impale sets that go out immediately after a smash much less chaotic because the angle from boss to raid never really changes much.

[Dracodraco]

Strong agreement with everything in this post, but one thing of note is the issue of taunt immunity in P3. For first kills, the last phase is usually extended to such a degree that if you taunt for both slag bombs AND after smashes, you will run into problems with taunt immunity. The quick and clean solution to this is to have the boss knock the soakers along the EDGE of the platform rather than into the middle, and only taunt for slag bombs. This both avoids issues with taunt immunity completely, and makes Impale sets that go out immediately after a smash much less chaotic because the angle from boss to raid never really changes much.

Yea, I seem to recall having that happen, honestly not sure what our tanks are doing to deal with it. We have a monk/DK now, and I think the monk just rolls like a maniac for the smash where the boss is taunt immune. Should only happen once, though. I'd be deadly afraid of knocking melee a long the edge, a little miscalculation and off they go to a fiery death.

[Deleted]

There's very few things that can go wrong in P3. Sadly, it's not easy for us to tell from logs which one it is. Worst to least:

1: Are your demolition craters being soaked?
I see some deaths due to erupting slag craters; This can both be because you are too slow at moving (you need the raid to be positioned BEFORE blackhand activates the craters, or people are gonna take atleast half their health in damage standing in it, which kills), and because you fail at getting the demo's soaked. If soaking is not an issue, a quick and dirty fix to up your survivability is to mark someone reliable in P3, and have him move the raid around, making sure to keep distance to craters.

2: Are your Impales/Slag bombs fucking up?
If they overlap on people, that's usually an instant oneshot. Can't happen. Get the addon Blackhandassist (plugin for bigwigs - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/bigwigs_blackhandassist ). Make sure everyone in the raid has it. It'll make bombs yell "Middle" and "back"; This assumes the tank will always be at the front with his bomb, and tells the 2 random targets where to go. If we're strapped for space, our "back" bombs literally goes out BEHIND the raid instead of trying to line it up (you might be standing right on the tangent of a crater, so no space for 2x bombs without either being inside crater or overlapping).
Marks will yell "left", "middle", "right". Assuming you go around the room clockwise, have left be your decision maker. He positions himself outside of the raid as close as he thinks possible, and middle/right lines up after him. No shuffling around.


3: You have too many people taking massive shattering smash. On all the +7 min tries I check, you have 6 people inside the smash; Your two DKS, two rogues, and two tanks. That should be 4 people.
Why are both tanks taking it? One of you will inevitably always have the slagged debuff, which means you're gonna be taking some spike damage there. How the flow of the fight should be for tanks/melee is:

Tank1 has boss faced out towards the edge of platform.
Boss throws bombs.
Tank2 taunts boss to turn him around to face the middle. Bombs go out to the left.
Boss throws out marks to the right.
Boss, still facing middle, does smash on Tank2+3x melee dps (2x rogue/1x DK ideally in your case). While boss is doing the throw of impales/smash, Tank1 should be moving a long the rim of the platform to next position. When Tank2 goes flying, Tank1 lets boss run as far as he can after Tank2, then taunts the boss. This ensures ~10 seconds of zero melee hits because the boss is pingponging, giving the healers more of a breathing room. Repeat untill boss is dead.
If a smash-soaker has debuff and can't cloak/AMS, call a backup warrior/DK in; A debuffed target should never soak smash.

Essentially, if you and your warrior are BOTH taking the smash, your positioning must be absolutely CHAOTIC to say the least in that phase. This way, the boss will move in the same pattern all the time as illustrated on this map:
http://imgur.com/igwOFJV (and yes, I am completly incapable of supplying good visuals. Bad = Craters, blue lines = tanks flying and taunting around (so the bomb-tank would be moving between the different points of the blue line on the outer edge), and green is the small area where ranged essentially never has to move from the entire encounter.



And that's really about it; the fight can easily last ~8 minutes for first kills, so I wouldn't say speed is your issue. Just need to get everything down smoothly. If what I believe is true (that your tanks are both flying and then has to drag the boss to the edge while trying to tackle bombs), just doing what I explained will already help ALOT by making it less chaotic.

A few pointers on Debri waves -
If you imagine the platform is a clock, with 12 at the top (the sharp point), any debri that falls anywhere between 2 and 11 has to be properly soaked on the first go. 11, 12 and 1 are less important, because they'll basicly overlap with your first smash before any craters are active, anyway.
Likewise, on debri #2 and #3, if any debri falls near the melee, ignore it. DO NOT have them go soak it. It's a waste of a cooldown; you'll be placing a crater right on top of there in a few seconds with a shattering smash anyway, so the space saved is minimal.

I'm not sure why you think that both tanks are taking it. We both take damage from super shatering smash, but that's just a cursory glance at the logs, in reality, we swap only on bombs, we use displacer beast and heroic leap to move back in, this is to avoid taunt immunity, so there is little of what you describe. Same with DKs, they rotate.

I think an issue we are having is that we just don't have enough immunities and ways of soaking things at second and third set, hunters use their thing and we use our BoP. What then? Can't really mobilize groups of people too easily.

[Deleted]

Yea, I seem to recall having that happen, honestly not sure what our tanks are doing to deal with it. We have a monk/DK now, and I think the monk just rolls like a maniac for the smash where the boss is taunt immune. Should only happen once, though. I'd be deadly afraid of knocking melee a long the edge, a little miscalculation and off they go to a fiery death.

I mean, with regards to getting knocked off the edge, I say let retards be retards. If people are so bad at judging the angle when you keep the boss completely still for the entire duration of the smash cast...

Besides, only the tank taking the smash actually has to get knocked along the edge, which is completely risk-free because if you fuck up, the boss will instantly port you back so long as you're his aggro target (TY for retard-proofing that with your exploiting, chinese guild that got caught doing it!); the rest of the soakers can simply make sure the smash takes them towards the middle of the raid. The entire idea of getting knocked along the edge has nothing to do with where melee get knocked towards, and everything to do with avoiding taunt immunity and making Impales less of a clusterfuck.

Edit: Also you need to replace your Rogues. Like super bad. They bait for the same length of time as my two rogues, have the exact same iLvl, and do almost 10k DPS less. They are atrocious.

Actually basically everyone in your guild bar maybe your warlock, your two tanks, and one of your DKs are doing 5-10k less DPS than they ought to. That either speaks to a super fucky strat or just bad performance. Whichever it is, you need to figure it out and fix it, because I honestly don't think you can kill the boss without getting absurdly lucky with this sort of DPS.

Oh, and one other point - your Resto shaman consistently has 50k+ mana when you wipe. Mana is there to be used. Tell him to use his mana.

[Tojara]

I see a few wipes where more than 4 people took the smash at the same time, which is really bad. There were a few deaths where your melee were taking mark for death and ended up getting killed because they were positioned poorly. IIRC mark prioritizes people without the slagged debuff and without a mark for death bleed already attached. It does this until all possible range are bleeding, and then I believe it will start randomly picking ranged people again, despite melee not having marked for death. It's why after the second and third smash all slag bombs exclusively go on melee.

Honestly other than that, your melee have really low damage in my opinion. I really think your warriors at the very least could be doing more.

One thing I would suggest which would probably put you over the hump completely is just have your two rogues and both of your tanks take all the smashes. Yes, one of your tanks is going to be slagged, but that can be fixed with just using externals and their own personals for it. Both your tanks can charge right back to the boss anyway, (as can your warrior DPS, but warriors are kinda poop at taking smashes). This should at the very least allow your DK to just tunnel the boss the entire time instead of alternating who has to do really bad dps for 10 seconds every 25~ seconds while they slowly make their way back across the platform.

Most of our wipes in P3 were exclusively debris. First one needs to be basically perfect and the second one just needs to be okay. Don't soak ones near melee (by that I mean behind or even slightly to the side). If it's like 15-20 yards from the second stack point, you probably want to do that one. Third debris pile you can safely ignore, and the only one I would suggest getting is if it's in the way of your range groups last movement. The slag eruption that corresponds with the third debris pile has funky timing most of the time, with him casting it while the debris is falling, which means most of the time the debris that is spawning during this time isn't going to erupt.

[Dracodraco]

I'm not sure why you think that both tanks are taking it. We both take damage from super shatering smash, but that's just a cursory glance at the logs, in reality, we swap only on bombs, we use displacer beast and heroic leap to move back in, this is to avoid taunt immunity, so there is little of what you describe. Same with DKs, they rotate.

I think an issue we are having is that we just don't have enough immunities and ways of soaking things at second and third set, hunters use their thing and we use our BoP. What then? Can't really mobilize groups of people too easily.

If that's so, then fair enough; just eerily similliar damage numbers from smashes. Looking at some attempts more in depth, you do end up overlapping SOME smashes with the other tank, though.
As for third demo's, at that point the boss should be sub-8% and it's essentially a burn to kill him with the next smash for most guilds. It's not even about trying to soak them properly, it's about trying to make sure you have a tiny spot to stand in that won't kill you. You'll need to suicide people if you've got no one with cooldowns. They happen every 40 seconds, so realisticly you'll need 5+4+3 (accounting for the fact that as you have less open space, debris will fall and totally overlap with already used space) - you have 6x deterrences from hunters, 1x bop, 1x bubble, and then you're sort of fucked. The elemental shaman might be able to take one solo with both his personals up, but yea.

[Deleted]

Edit: Also you need to replace your Rogues. Like super bad. They bait for the same length of time as my two rogues, have the exact same iLvl, and do almost 10k DPS less. They are atrocious.

To be fair, our rogues have to soak debris since we have such a limited roster for it in P3. Your rogues just soak smash and go ham on boss, quite different really.

[Deleted]

In addition to what others have said:

- Your p3 dmg is low'ish, upward of 100k raid dps missing. If your p2 lasts 20seconds longer due people saving cds+banking resources so be it.
- Hunters dying to debris without using deterrence when its ready according to logs.
- Healing cds seem poorly spaced - spirit link start of p3? Tide/tranq during lust/hero? Why? You need those for later.
- Some of your healers have a questionable affinity for healing them selves to an extent that makes you wonder at what cost that healing comes.
- Properly your biggest problem is you use an extreme amount of space during p3. Why dont you continue to tank the boss near the edge? Your ranged is constantly moving aswell. Perhaps critically reevalute your tanking/taunting/soaking with some of the tips given in this thread.

-> Precise deliberate calculated actions are key in this phase - reduce panic adhd-movements to ensure consistent results in this phase. Ie. stand the fuck still and only move when a mechanic absolutely dictates it.

Lastly I would strongly recommend you start livelogging - it will often provide some valuable insight and makes people accountable for their actions. This oviously requires atleast one person actually looking at logs between attempts.

[Deleted]

To be fair, our rogues have to soak debris since we have such a limited roster for it in P3. Your rogues just soak smash and go ham on boss, quite different really.

They literally have the exact same percentage uptime on the boss across almost every pull. I've checked. They're not pulling their weight - and for the record our rogues have to soak every single debris in the vicinity of melee too - that's what Shadowstepping back to the boss is for.

[Deleted]

Woo killed it. Thanks for help guys.

https:/https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/DWnKPhgRpxBFqJjL#fight=10

[T18Z]

They literally have the exact same percentage uptime on the boss across almost every pull. I've checked. They're not pulling their weight - and for the record our rogues have to soak every single debris in the vicinity of melee too - that's what Shadowstepping back to the boss is for.

I can understand your criticism, but you are overly harsh. We'd spend the first 10+ seconds of phase 2 soaking cinders 20 yards away from the boss often (4-5+), and furthermore on phase 3 we were soaking, at least I, the furthest debris that were over 30 yards away from the boss, because of our setup and the past experiences with failing on soaking and a safety first approach. Also debris and smash get cast so close together by the way that if you use it to get back to the boss after soaking a debris (pointless), you're going to get sent 30 yards away from the boss as an exchange via the smash and shadowstep being on CD. It's not worth it.

Anyway, we killed it today. I didn't soak ranged debris anymore, nor ranged cinders in P2. Our performance was similar to your rogues, except I ranked slightly higher than them due to a faster kill. Furthermore you've killed the boss 6(?) times now, so a comparison between yours and ours was always a bit unfair. In the end we got rank 21 speed ranking and killed it in under 7 minutes, so thankfully our kill was a nice one. I still don't quite understand the need to attempt to slander us with your insults, there really wasn't much need for it, especially considering you don't even play a rogue and my rankings put me at equal to or better than your rogues on close to all fights.

Thanks for the advices anyway - definitely helped regarding the kill.

[Pennoyer]

Woo killed it. Thanks for help guys.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/DWnKPhgRpxBFqJjL#

Quite a fast kill for a first kill. Must have been tough to do that with the alleged "bad performance" out of your DPSers LOL.

[Deleted]

I can understand your criticism, but you are overly harsh. We'd spend the first 10+ seconds of phase 2 soaking cinders 20 yards away from the boss often (4-5+), and furthermore on phase 3 we were soaking, at least I, the furthest debris that were over 30 yards away from the boss, because of our setup and the past experiences with failing on soaking and a safety first approach. Also debris and smash get cast so close together by the way that if you use it to get back to the boss after soaking a debris (pointless), you're going to get sent 30 yards away from the boss as an exchange via the smash and shadowstep being on CD. It's not worth it.

Anyway, we killed it today. I didn't soak ranged debris anymore, nor ranged cinders in P2. Our performance was similar to your rogues, except I ranked slightly higher than them due to a faster kill. Furthermore you've killed the boss 6(?) times now, so a comparison between yours and ours was always a bit unfair. In the end we got rank 21 speed ranking and killed it in under 7 minutes, so thankfully our kill was a nice one. I still don't quite understand the need to attempt to slander us with your insults, there really wasn't much need for it, especially considering you don't even play a rogue and my rankings put me at equal to or better than your rogues on close to all fights.

Thanks for the advices anyway - definitely helped regarding the kill.

Your performance in the logs I was given was poor - simply not good enough compared to the raw uptime you had on the boss. That's all there was to it. In a progression environment, either the players have to remedy that issue (which to your credit, you did), or they need to be replaced. Suggesting so is hardly slander.

Could I have worded it differently? Perhaps. However, the internet, and this forum is particular, is filled with thick skulls, and sometimes harsh wording is the most effective, if not most considerate, way of getting the point across. Posters who ask for help here are often unwilling to accept that their raiders are not doing things properly, and stating it in very uncertain terms is the easiest way of pointing it out reliably. It is a cheap trick to grab attention, and while I understand your taking offense, please believe me when I say that it is not meant as a personal attack - merely as a tool of rhetoric.

Granted, I did not take the time to look at replays to see that you were assigned in a completely hare-brained fashion in P3 (I mean, honestly, soaking debris 30 yards from the boss? Why?), and this is certainly a failure of diligence on my part, but I assumed (in error, for which I apologize) with almost exactly identical boss uptimes that you were, in fact, hitting the boss as much our rogues were. What I should have done was take into consideration the fact that poisons etc likely make your boss activity seem higher than it actually was, and I will remember this when analyzing rogue logs in the future.

[Deleted]

One odd thing I noticed.

https://youtu.be/M-d92n-ofvg?t=322

This has happened in all of our attempts at this stage, and I believe if our DPS wasn't as high, it would have led to a wipe. Basically, at the third set of debris, he does a slag eruption at around the same time, but for us, it has always led to slag coming from the debris. I've seen videos where it doesn't happen. Are we doing something wrong? We didn't fail in terms of soaking the right amount of people per smash so it can't really have been anything there can it? Is it just luck? Though it has happened at least 3-4 times on our part.

[Deleted]

Yea, I seem to recall having that happen, honestly not sure what our tanks are doing to deal with it. We have a monk/DK now, and I think the monk just rolls like a maniac for the smash where the boss is taunt immune. Should only happen once, though. I'd be deadly afraid of knocking melee a long the edge, a little miscalculation and off they go to a fiery death.

Well, as a tank what we do is rather simply, our prot paladin gets each slag, and then I taunt, he DOESNT get smashed. I do get smashed but just charge back, no chance of getting taunt immunity that way. It does mean you need 3 melee to get into smashes though