Heroic Socrethar with a smallish raid

[Fayenoor]

We are a small group of 2 tanks, 3-4 healers and 9-10 DPS (3-4 melee + 5-6 ranged) trying to progress on Heroic Soc.

As a quick background abt us, we have so far killed Zakuun and Ishkar and everything below that with our small team. Our DPS pulls between 45-60K per DPS on average on Soc - the guys with ring closer to 60k, guys w/o rings closer to 45K.

Healing comp is pally + priest + druid. (sometimes a Mw as a 4th).
Melee is rogue + war + ww + ret --> they are our top DPS all with rings and 4pc.

Ranged -> 2 hunters + 2-3 mages + 2 locks (+1 boomy sometimes). The boomy + 1 frost mage + the locks + 1 hunter are good DPS (with rings and 4pc). The rest either don't have 4 pc and/or rings or are not that strong as DPS.

General Strat we are following
Phase 1 is fine. No issues with soaking etc.

Phase 2 begins fine. We pop lust on first Dom.
Construct assignments:
1. Draw line of fire on CD between blue portal and red. raid stacks up on red portal. People with Gift of Man forms lines towards purple portal.
2. Construct uses big bad smash on CD on boss and other adds caught in cone.
3. Construct shoots Orb at ghosts. All ranged DPS turns and burns ghosts if Dom is not alive.
4. Construct spends all free time doing white damage to boss.
5. Melee stays on boss fulltime except to DPS Dom when it pops. Melee also interrupts boss.
6. Plan is to keep boss in P2 till kill.

Problems we are having
- Melee is generally good at interrupts. So, we are fine at that task
- Construct is doing around 160K-180K DPS.
- When key ranged DPS gets Gift of Man, they often end up going out of range of the ghosts. And Ghosts end up taking longer to die; specially after second Dom when there are 4 gifts up at the same time.
- Ranged is trying to interrupt the Caster adds from purple portal to drag them into melee and construct cleave range. Problem is we are running out a interrupts doing so. These mobs just start casting again as soon as they get interrupted sometimes. We have no DKs in raid; so can't grip. Eventually these caster mobs start piling up and healers get overwhelmed.
- DPS on Dom is such that, Soc gets 3 casts off before Dom dies. This means we have to switch back to P1 after 3 Dom Phases or have to kill Soc before then. We managed to take him to 40% after 3 Dom Phases. So either we suck at DPS on Soc, or we have to change plans to do another P1.

We tried doing a 2nd P1. Doing a P1 with 4 Gifts up is a major PITA.

Q. How many P1s do guilds with 690-705 ilevel go through for their first kill?
Q. What is the best way to handle the caster adds in P2 without a DK?
Q. Does our team need to add more DPS? I.e. DPS per healer ratio in P2. (1 tank + 4 healers + 10 DPS in P2). I am thinking add management will be easier with 1 tank + 4 Healers + 15 DPS in P2?

[Deleted]

I'm not much help but I can tell you what I've learned by leading pugs with it every week. There is 1 thing that makes soc multiple times easier, to the point that I think if I have this there is nothing to fear. Have 2 or 3 players really good at ghosts do ghosts and all others ignore them.

Notice I do not mean random assignments based on class but people that actually know how to kill them fast.

Then again I sometimes get people that know how to trap them well, but even then it seems more unstable.

[Fayenoor]

I'm not much help but I can tell you what I've learned by leading pugs with it every week. There is 1 thing that makes soc multiple times easier, to the point that I think if I have this there is nothing to fear. Have 2 or 3 players really good at ghosts do ghosts and all others ignore them.

Notice I do not mean random assignments based on class but people that actually know how to kill them fast.

Then again I sometimes get people that know how to trap them well, but even then it seems more unstable.

We tried that. The frost mage, boomy and hunter are very good at ghosts. We assigned them to ghost killing duty. Ghosts go fine till 1 or more of them gets Gifts of Man and has to move out of range. We don't seem to be very good at subbing people on the fly to take their spots at ghost killing.

Problem still are the caster mobs from purple portal. They just refuse to come into melee.

[Valkon]

Your ghost killers should always be in between the fire and the soul, even if they get the gift. Everyone else should adjust away from them so they can stay close enough to do ghosts.

The remainder of your range should be killing the caster adds when dominators aren't up.

I find that laying down 2 fire lines makes the ghosts trivial since you have so much more space to move around with. I usually go fire line > prison > fire line and then full time on boss until the portal moves. Also, make sure your construct is never casting smash on the dominators - it should be saved exclusively for the soul.

Additionally, you shouldn't get any exert dominance casts going off on the 3rd dominator, since that lines up with the soul casting apoc. You should be able to kill the dominator before the soul starts spamming exert again. That gives you at least 4 dominators.

Another thing that helps - when the dominator is about to spawn, the exert needs to be interrupted -immediately-. If you wait until it's almost over to interrupt, the soul will become immune to interrupts. Spreading out ring + lust + personal CDs on various dominators can help too. So lust on dominator 1, ring before dominator 2 and personal CDs on dominator 3 (or 4).

[Hino]

Hi,

Here is what my guild is doing, on P2 where you have problems we tank the boss next to the purple portal with the group stacked as much as possible on boss, the players with gift run out to the side just as much so they don't clip the group with their AOE damage, Dominator gets either MD'd by hunters or when it gets in range of tank the tank taunts it, have the construct tank draw as many charge lines from the blue portal the group (between the 2 portals) and only use prisons in case he really needs to avoid ghosts getting out of the green fire, the ghosts should die from fire alone. With this strategy we only get the first P1 and one more P1 after. The downside to this strategy is bad RNG when the portals swap and the new blue portal spawns where the purple portal was, it is very hard to adjust to this unless you pay very close attention to the swap, in this case a players panic and run releasing the remaining ghosts from the first blue portal and it ends in a wipe. Also we use a disc priest with clarity of will on construct as often as possible. I hope this helps.

[Deja Thoris]

Your tank needs to do more damage. Apart from the basics like kiting the ghost over the fire the tank damage is far and away the biggest source of damage on the boss. Think of it like this, your raid is there to control adds, interrupt the boss and help kill the dominator. The tank in the construct needs to melee as much as possible and cast reverberating blows on CD without exception.

[Valkon]

cast reverberating blows on CD without exception.

This is wrong. Your construct tank should be holding onto reverberating blows whenever the dominator is out. It's a huge DPS loss to use it on the dominator.

[Fayenoor]

Thanks; these are all good advise that we can try out next raid night.

How many Dominators do you guys get per kill? 3 or 4?

[Kazkek]

3 people on ghosts for 15 man might be too much. We use a single warlock to take care of all the ghosts with 20 people. Destruction is strong for that fight because of exactly that. You can have the warlock go stand off by himself away from the group and if he gets gift it doesnt really matter because no one should be standing with him.

Also doing the fight with 2 phase 1's and 2 phase 2's makes healing a bit easier and less hectic overall. Just stop interrupting after the second dominator.

[Deja Thoris]

This is wrong. Your construct tank should be holding onto reverberating blows whenever the dominator is out. It's a huge DPS loss to use it on the dominator.

You are right, I mistyped pretty badly there. I guess the point I want to make is that the construct completely wrecks the boss and a large part of that is the reverberating blows. Heres just a random example https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&target=54
The tank did 280k in the construct, you can optimise your team as a whole (which never hurts) but if you just optimise what the construct is doing its a massive gain.

[Crimsonfell]

We did our first kill with like 13 people, leaving 2 locks on the adds the entire time of the fight and standing at the very end of the fire trail so they could get heals if they got gift. Robot never trapped any ghosts and stayed on boss the entire fight while the other caster adds are interrupted (for us they are also gripped) onto the boss and just cleaved down. The tank can worry about interrupting those adds if your melee are handling the boss casts. When we started initially we were hero'ing on the first dominator, using 3 min cds on 2nd and then using pot on 3rd and then the boss would be dead. As odd as it may sound when you are first starting out it is all about killing that dominator or else you cant 1 phase him and the raid just drags out. I suppose one thing that actually makes a huge difference is don't even place 1 prison down. As soon as the robot becomes available it should apply itself to boss, and never turn away.

[Valkon]

I found it much easier on the raid to drop two fire lines. The effect on boss DPS is relatively minor compared to dropping only one fire line. But that was for my raid, your raid might be better able to handle a single fire line, but I suspect since you're having trouble that the extra line will be a boon to your raid. Casting or not casting a prison literally takes nothing away from your boss dps since you can cast it while moving.

[Deleted]

As mentioned, destro lock can more or less solo ghosts, put your lock (or both) on ghosts with boomkins and others with knockback as back up if ghosts get near (they really shouldnt though). For construct your main goal is to ensure there is enough fire trail between the raid group and blue portal, usually 2 lines is enough but 3 can be usefull for some spawns.

With regards to how many dominators, with out logs it's hard to judge but what you should be aware of is, each cast from boss does 10% damage to construct (before mitigation, disc shields and most cooldown work on construct), so by default the 10th casts puts you back to phase1. Whole point of using BL on first, and rings(and/or 3min cds) on second dominator is to ensure it dies quickly so theres at most 3-4 casts gotten through, for third dominator the boss will be casting apocalypse at the same time so you should generally be able to kill the add with only 1 cast getting through. TLDR; you should normally be forced back to phase1 on 4th dominator.

If this is an issue, you should look into optimising your ghost teams, less you have there and more effective they are, more you can have handling everything else. In any case, when dominators do spawn, all of the DPS should be switching to them, even the ones on ghost duty.

There's really no other "easy fix" to sorting your problems with the casters due to not having DK's, than improving your other assignments and being able to have more dps on those targets, in fairness it shouldn't take more than 2 interrupts from ranged to ensure an individual add is brought to the boss, where construct can kill it very quickly.

The only problems we ever had on this fight, was when there wasn't optimal classes to handle ghosts, once that is fluid, everything else is quite easy to manage.

[madmonarch]

We stack near red portal, construct places 2 lines wide just to blue portal so there's gap between boss and fire. Since Gift is cast only on ranged and healers we send former to the edge of fire, closer to blue portal, and latter hides behind the boss staying in one line. Other ranged stand between boss and ranged with gift. That way they can switch quickly between dominator, soul and ghosts.
We have 3 groups of 1-2 melee interrupting the casts of soul (dbm announces the number of cast), and ranged interrupting casters occasionally. Sure dk is the great relief in this fight.
Construct always melees Soul except when drawing two lines of fire and switching to dominator. Cast Rev Blow on Soul on cd and sphere on ghosts on cd as soon as they spawn until they die.

[Zantos]

Most guilds only do 2 phase 1s. The second time, keep ghosts trapped either the entire phase or starting at around 25% boss hp. Also, you don't need to do lines on cd. 2-3 lines, right next to one another so they cover a large area is good. If you spend too much time dropping lines, you lose a lot of dps on the boss.

[cremor]

We always kill it with two P1 and two dominators per P2. Try to transition back to P1 just before the portals change position. That way you only have four debuffs for a very short time in P1 and two debuffs for about half of it. Use raid cooldowns during the transition back to P1. Four debuffs + random damage from P1 + healers moving into position can be tough.

[Stayzy]

By the sounds of it, you dont have the dps to do the fight in one phase 2, you will have to revert back to phase 1 as the damage from gifts will overwhelm your healers.

To answer your questions though:

It is doable with a smaller raid size and within the given ilvls. Our guild got our first kill at around 704 ilvl with 13 players, and in our first kill we got it down in the first phase 1 (although we havent been able to replicate this since, must have had some good rng).

Without a dk gripping, it is pretty painful to deal with the adds. But with the amount of ranged you have, you shouldn't run out of interrupts like you are saying you do. Set up a shadowcaller interrupt order for your ranged players and deal with each shadowcaller one at a time. If you are really struggling you can always get hunters to glyph their explosive traps and knock the adds into melee.

As I already mentioned, your dps wont be enough to kill the boss in phase one, as if you were intending on doing it this way, 40% by the third dominator wont cut it. We found that in this scenario, you could either leave the boss interrupts alone after your first dominator and the boss should change phases before the third dominator OR if he didnt swap back to phase 1 before the 3rd dominator spawned, we had the robot suicide into the ghosts coming from the white portal while we cleaned up any adds. You really dont want 3 sets of gifts out at once though, cause that stuff hurts more than anything.

Another thing to mention is the ghosts from the white portal. If your robot tank is doing their job, the adds should not reach your raid as they will die on the fire line they lay down. If ghosts are commonly escaping, make sure the robot tank either gets some hits on them and calls out for dps on them or lays down another line alongside the first one to make a double width 'fire highway' so escaping wont be an issue. The only time from my experience when ghosts made it to the raid is the very first wave of ghosts, and all we do is have our hunters barrage, chim shot and kill shot them because they are low on hp. Every other ghost wave should just die on the fire. I assign myself (hunter) to deal with any ghosts that look like they will make it, and the robot tank always calls out in this case.

[kamuimac]

We tried that. The frost mage, boomy and hunter are very good at ghosts. We assigned them to ghost killing duty. Ghosts go fine till 1 or more of them gets Gifts of Man and has to move out of range. We don't seem to be very good at subbing people on the fly to take their spots at ghost killing.

Problem still are the caster mobs from purple portal. They just refuse to come into melee.

force your 2 locks to go destro (sac+cr) on this fight pair them up with 1 hunter who is good at initial slowing of adds and gg rest can forget ghosts are even part of this fight.

[IsrafaelMage]

Wasnt this boss easier with less people? Our experience was such, i think (we killed sorth first, and zakuun last, which is infinitely harder and still can cause wipes). You can try it like this:

a) two lines is a must, when i was doing ghosts i always shouted at the construct tank to paint them
b) if ghosts are a problem, tell your ghost team to figure out a cc rotation, which would help them to hold the ghosts in line
c) caster adds can create a huge strain for your healers with debuffs, so they must be hard switched and killed, even melees. And a little advice - dont attack them till they reach the main raid clump (attacking it causes it to start casting immediately). Only interrupt the dangerous stuff, which is the debuff, and not aoe spell.
d) save ring for each dominator (so it's hero(+cds) / ring / cds again / ring and so on))
e) The trick we use - after first portal switches (or just at 3 minute mark), the ghost team returns back and starts to ignore them, and tank uses the trap to get the new packs of adds. Doing it like that minimizes the chances that you wipe because bad interrupts on the boss caused him to evict tank from the construct)

[Pleeb]

Ghosts and gifts are by my opinion the hardest aspect of the fight. To make the gift-handling easier have the people with gift stand between blue portal and red portal as mentioned. This lets the people with gift also DPS the boss. As you have 2 warlocks have them specc destro and wreck the adds with AoE shadowbolts. When you have 2 warlocks you can also have a rotation on Shadowfury to even further keep the adds in place. 1 shadowfury per wave should be enough if your warlock instantly shifts to ghosts. Using cyclone from the boomkin can also help if the warlocks should fail. We use 2 and often 3 players on ghosts in mythic to ensure they die. You can never kill the ghosts to fast. If you finish them in a global or three that just means the casters can switch back to boss / caster add while waiting for the next wave. Sadly you don't have a Dk which makes the adds so much easier, but having the hunters and mages interupt the adds (and not attacking them until they are close, also mentioned) you should fairly easy get them into cleave-range from the soul. War / monk / ret has good cleave for add so getting them into melee range quickly would drastically improve the kill-time on the adds.

A tips for dominator damage is to use the ring 8-10 sec before the dominator spawns, to allow the explosion to hit the add for some extra burst! This might will probably waste some damage on the boss, but in my opinion that is worth it to down the add faster. We use hero + ring on 1st, pot + cd's on 2nd and the 3rd we yolo (it times with apocalypse so there is plenty of time) (we only get 3 dominators))

If you want more precise pin-points on potential errors ( your strategy is fine if you can make it work properly ) enable advanced combat logging in advanced settings and /combatlog the next time you wipe on him and we can dig through the logs to look for mistakes / missplays!