[Horridon] We are completely stuck (logs included)

[Deleted]

Hello everyone,
We're totally stuck on Horridon (10 man, Normal). We can do Jin'Rokh pretty good and mostly kill him first try, but we have hit a stone wall with Horridon. We barely make it past the first door (Farraki)... and when we do, we wipe on the second door (Gurubashi).
I included the logs of our try last sunday. I'm the only melee DPS and I'm a Feral Druid). I have the feeling this boss is a nightmare for melee DPS players. I know my rotation pretty well on single-target bosses but Horridon... my DPS is next to worthless.
But I'm certainly not the only one with problems on this boss. Could anyone of you be nice enough to check out the logs of last sunday 19 May and give us some pointers?
I have to warn you: since we wipe so early in the fight, you might see some really blatant mistakes. If so, please just point them out. The more advice I can get, the better.

Secondly, do you have any advice for me specifically?
My problems are:
- I have to use Mangle instead of Shred because the small adds move all the time and I waste too much time finding the right spot behind them in this chaos for Shred.
- My Raid Leader tells me to use all my cooldowns (Virmen's Bite, Incarnation and Berserk) immediately at start, when hitting Horridon himself, before the adds come in. Is this a good tactic?
- How should I attack the adds? Should I attack an add, get to 5 CP, use Rip and move to the next regardless if the add is dead? Or should I focus and kill one add at a time?
- Is it so that Horridon is indeed a hard fight for melee DPS players? My DPS is a disaster on this boss...

If you have any tips for the raid or for me specifically, I'd be very grateful.
The logs for last Sunday are here: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/lod35ze10zwkjlix/
It's of 19 May, realm Hyjal in France, guild Acïd.
My character is here in the Armory

Thank you!

[Deleted]

You don't want to use your cooldowns immediately on Horridon. DPS focus should be on the adds, not the boss. And yeah, it's an annoying fight for melee players, but not much more than any others.

[Deleted]

Damage seems to be awful low taking into consideration that people can AoE/cleave/multi dot ect. Futhermore 2 healers is more than enough. Theres is barely enough to do with 2 healers.

[Deleted]

I'm a mage so I can't really speak much about melee specific things, but we did have some struggle with Horridon as well in our progress.
As for popping CD's at start I consider it a bad idea, pre-pot sure but since you're having real problems I'd say save cd's until you have 2-3 wastewalkers up at first door to
try and nuke those down.
Your damagedealers are all very low imo, but that's most likely cause you don't have enough boosted damage on boss and such as well as not getting any real tries.
Your dps must work together, and your healers too. Your dps prio is:

1. Dinomancers
2. Big adds i.e. Wastewalkers, Venompriests, Frozen warlords, Warbears.
3. Clean up the smaller adds (aoe if lots of them)
4. Take down Horridon a bit.

Healers must dispel efficiently on first gate, on second gate you should be interrupting venompriests but if you fail dispels are important. It boils down to effectively interrupting everything you can, dispelling everything you can and nuking the right targets.

As for your own dps, I would get rip up on important targets (not smaller adds) and focus on those few targets. Use CD's wisely to get heavy damage on important adds.

[Deleted]

Going by try number 2 your elemental shaman did 43k dps, he used elemental blast 10 times during a try lasting 3:24, if he hit it on cooldown he would have gotten those 10 out by 120 seconds, meaning it was off cooldown but not used for about 84 seconds in such a short attempt. He does not cleave with chain lightning at all and his fulmination use ( earth shock at 7-9 stacks ) is terrible, 2 times during 3 minutes and 24 seconds when he should be swimming in shield stacks from chain lightning.

[Pyroneus]

You are going to need a lot more DPS than that to be able to get the fight down.
For 510 ilvl your survival hunter should be pulling another 40k DPS at least.

First gate you have to focus down the basilisks, the dinomancer, and the big guys (wastewalkers i think they are) that cast the magic debuff. The dinomancer must be interrupted and you should dispel as much as you can, mass dispell works.

Door 2 you need to focus down the venom priests and the effigies (the duplicate venom priests with lower health) - interrupt these as much as possible. Dinomancer is your second priority though make sure his heals are interrupted.

Door 3 you focus down the Dinomancer, the little adds and finally the bigger adds - dispell the diseases the little guys give as much as possible.

Door 4 you target the shaman (don't stand in their cleave), the bears (don't stand in their cleave), the Dinomancer and the little adds in that order.

We heroism on door 3 when the 2 bigger adds drop down and pop army and stampede so that the little adds waste their diseases on our pets. Others choose to use it to nuke Jalak down though.

You should really all be hitting 80k DPS as a minimum though, except you as the melee as you will be handling the orbs and your rotation will be cocked up due to that.

[Blackmist]

Kill the adds. Completely ignore the boss until you can handle them. At each door there are different adds, but at each there will be 3 important ones that should be focused down. Tanks need to interrupt them.

This may be a moot point however.

Looking at your guild, you formed fairly recently, and most people there have prior raid experience. Not trying to be mean, but it may just be that your leadership is not good enough to co-ordinate a raid. It's not as simple as sticking 10 people together and hoping they blunder through it. This tier more than any is about execution and planning. The same mistakes are being made time and again, and I'm afraid that this is not a player issue, it's a whole raid issue. Can it be fixed? Depends on you. Communication is the number one skill for raider, in my opinion. If you're not communicating in a useful way, if players cannot trust each other to do their jobs, then there may be nothing for it but to move on. I've been in my fair share of lost cause guilds, and the key to this game is knowing when to walk away, and who to take with you.

[braeldiil]

The trick for this fight (as for almost all others) is to simplify, simplify, simplify.

The original strats are written by heroic guilds with top players. So they can say things like "have all dps switch to all adds as they spawn, while interrupting and dodging everything" and expect that to work. For normal guilds, that's not going to happen - the constant switching will kill your dps. The trick is to divy up the jobs so each player can focus on their piece and do that well, instead of trying to do too much and flailing about.

For this fight, the key for the doors is to pick an add and kill it. Most of the time it doesn't matter what you pick, as long as you keep the total number of adds down. You want to find an add, kill it and then move on. Don't switch until it's dead (or low enough that the bleeds you've already applied will kill it).

There are two exceptions to the "just kill a random add" rule. The first is the dinomancers - those need to hit 50% asap so you can close the door. The second is the venom priests on door 2. It's useful to mark them before the pull to make them visible when they jump down. You should also assign interrupters to them so you can minimize the venom stacks.

Past that, it's mostly on the healers. They need to figure out who can dispel on each door and have the designated dispellers for that door focus on that. We actually had to shift up our healers a bit to get a good dispel mix, as well as having dps and even the tanks help out on some doors.

A final tip - most strats have you tanking Horridon in front of the door, with his side to the door. That tends to be a mess, with adds getting lost under him. We found it to be much easier to tank him beside the door, facing into the wall. Keeps the fight area much cleaner.

ACSII art (DD is the door, Hhhhh is horridon with the 'H' being the head)

----DD-----
H
h adds
h
h

[Amuramie]

Everyone else seems to be picking at your strat and DPS. While those are true, please be aware that you are losing a LOT of people to Double Swipe.

Just move out of it. It hits in a cone in front of the boss and behind him. If he is close by everyone, the safest thing to do is to run to his side (but not beneath him). Edit: the cone is widest farther away from him, so in general, you want to run towards the boss where the cone is most narrow. Just don't run through the cone, it will give you a bad day quickly.


The other thing you're losing a lot of people to is the fire DoT that the Wastewalkers cast. Your priests should have a massdispel rotation to clear it off of the largest clump of people, then single dispel everyone else.

Good luck.

[Deleted]

One of the oh so very common problems here is people blindly aoeing or even dpsing horridon instead. It's completely suboptimal but one thing you could do would be to have a tank and healer take horridon far away so none of the DPS are tempted to hit him and he won't charge anyone either. This way you can focus exclusively on the adds from each gate.

[Army Dreamer]

Just forbid you DPS to even look at the boss until all adds are dead.

[Ethes]

Personally, I'd suggest sticking with 3 healers for now. Although it might be worth it to swap to two and try that out as well. We found at low gear levels 3-healing easier though.

General tips for the encounter:
1st: Small thing for your RL, don't use your cd's on Horridon at the start. It's a waste! The boss will take lots of extra damage towards the end of the encounter (after all 4 door have been destroyed!). There is no need to go all out on him right at the start, however do dps the boss in between door and at the start. Just don't waste your resources!

2nd: Position the boss in such a way (we have him directly in front of the door, with a fair bit of space between him and the door. Also, he's standing with his side towards the raid so swipes won't kill!) that there is enough room for your non-boss tank, dps and healers to deal with the adds, move out of crap, etc.

3rd: Have the people he is charging at move towards the head or tail of the boss (the original position of his head, the idea is that his position won't move (too much) so you have him swipe at where your tank is supposed to be (he can move out of it as well)). He'll cast double swipe right afterwards and you don't want this ability hitting half your raid. Ideally, he barrely moves at the charged people. Using speedboosts to get there is worth it (Rogue: Sprint, Druid: Dash, Paladin: Speed of light, Shaman: Ghost Wolf, Warrior: Heroic Leap/Charge, etc.). Most classes can do this without too much effort.

4th: Use heroism to burn down War-god Jalak as soon as possible. Thats where the real strain on the healers will be as most likely they'll be pretty oom by this point. Afterwards have your tanks and healers rotate cd's to keep your tanks up. Triple Puncture will start doing a lot of damage when Horridon is enraged. However, during practice it might be worth using heroism on a door you're struggling with.

5th: Always clean up all the adds from the previous door before moving on. You don't want the crap they drop to fill up the space at your next door.

6th: Switch to the dinomancer the second it comes up. It is the mob with top priority at each door (as it will finish the adds there spawning). Moreover, make sure its interrupted as you don't want the damage you do to the boss be healed up.

7th: Dispels! Make sure they happen as fast as possible (I'll give more insights on them for each specific door).

8th: Once the Dinomancer reaches 50% of his HP, he'll drop the orb. Pick it up asap (maybe designate someone to do so) and make sure you continue movign from crap. You can run around while carrying the orb!

First door:
Don't stand in sand traps, they grow and are dangerous. Make sure you have plenty of room between the boss and the door for the dps to run around and kill the adds. Healers should dispel the sunfire-like attack as soon as it comes up (or you can have a priest designated to mass dispel as this is magic), although its mainly the initial damage when it's applied that is high. However, the most important dispels are done to people that get stunned (possibly in sandtraps!). If human, you can also trinket (every man for himself) to get out of this! Make sure that the big adds are prioritized unless the dinomancer is up.

I'd rate the first door the easiest door of the four.

Second door:
You'll have green poison on the ground, move out of it asap! Try to keep the priestesses interrupted as good as possible, but if some go off its not a big issue, dispel people if they reach more than 4 stacks or you'll be busy forever with purely that. When the small greenish mobs are up, make sure they die asap. They'll also spew those bolts around and have your healers watch out for people with rending charge. It does a fair bit of damage so these people might need some extra healing.

Other than that, just deal with the regular boss mechanics (interrupt dinomancer, move when charged at, etc.). I would rate this the second easiest door

Third door:
This door is a proper pain in the ass! The bigg (dangerous adds) have more HP than at the previous doors and there are ice orb things that hurt like crazy. Moreover, the small adds apply a disease debuff onto people that requires dispelling (resto druids can gain a disease dispel through using symbiosis on a holy paladin) and when it starts stacking it hurts a lot (10k per second per stack). Make sure you have plenty room as you'll need to move a lot to as those ice orbs will be around and standing in them is not an option. On the one hand the big adds need to die fast, but you don't want small ones run around endlessly. It might be a good idea to have 1 person designated to kill some of the small adds if they're causing problems.

This is the hardest door in the fight, get this down and you shouldn't have to much issues with the rest.

Fourth door:
Adds, totems and hexes! Darn shammy's should die here! There are big adds riding on warbears, once the warbear is dead you can kill these shamans. When you can, do so asap! They're annoying! They cast a chain lightning which requires you to spread out 5yards or deal with jumping damage (which increases per jump by 50%) from chain lightning. Like many things in this fight, you can get a few but it does make it more intense for your healers. Same thing like previous door, there will be things on the floor that require you to move away, so make sure you have plenty of room so you don't have to die from totems.
Healers should dispel hexes asap (paladins can't help with this), but apart from that its not that much of a problem door.

second hardest door in my opinion. Make sure you keep dealing with the general boss mechanics properly!

Final phase:
The boss won't gain any abilities and now needs to be properly dpssed down! Finish off any remaining adds that are up and stack up at one side of the boss afterwards. This will make it easy for people to move to the head of the boss when charged and makes the aoe healing easier when War-God is up. Save your cd's for when heroism goes up when War-god Jalak jumps into the arena. When the War-God gets into the arena have the OT pick him up, tank him next to Horridon (for cleave and splash damage on Horridon), blow heroism and nuke him down. Afterwards finish off Horridon while having tanks and healers rotate cd's on tanks as Triple Puncture will hit very hard when reaching higher stacks.

Raid specific tips:
There are a few things I find remarkable. First off, you're running with 2 holy priests if I'm not mistaken? (my French sucks!) It might be worth it to have one of them go disc as attunement is very strong on this fight due to the additional damage the boss takes after doors are broken down.
Secondly, your groups dps looks quite low to me whereas people are doing fine on Jin'Rokh. Have your dps use abilities that spread onto other targets, but do focus on the specific targets that have to go down first. I think if your dps picks up, you'll have an easier time on this boss!
It seems your tanks die from Triple puncture, you might want one healer in charge of tank-healing and two others dealing with the raid damage (not exclusively ofcourse).

Feral specific tips:
I'm not sure if you are (as my French is terrible), but make sure you use swipe and trash. Specially the latter is very important when dealing with multiple targets simultaniously. It might also be worth to look into the AoE rotation in general for a feral, Noxxic can give you a rather basic understanding of what you're supposed to be doing when AoE'ing.

Best of luck, I hope you'll kill him soon!

P.s. Please ignore the shitload of typo's, spelling and grammatical errors. Typing isn't my best skill

[Amuramie]

It seems your tanks die from Triple puncture

About this, make sure your Tanks are running with DBM active. It is more or less a requirement for tanks on this fight, they -have- to know when the Triple Puncture is coming and have their defenses ready for each one.

DBM would also help alert your raiders to when they are standing in the Double Swipe.

[Deleted]

Thanks everyone. I'll take this sound advice to the raid leader (I'm a mere officer and not the leader but I'm the only one who speaks English perfectly)

[ati87]

The best advice I can give you is to stack on the first 3 doors so aeo hits everything and tank has a easier time picking up the adds

[clevin]

...For this fight, the key for the doors is to pick an add and kill it. Most of the time it doesn't matter what you pick, as long as you keep the total number of adds down. You want to find an add, kill it and then move on. Don't switch until it's dead (or low enough that the bleeds you've already applied will kill it).
h

God no. Ignore this. It matters greatly.

There are two things to internalize about this fight. First, that the doors are all the same basic mechanic, just different flavors of it. Second, that things happen in a regular, timed rhythm.

1) All of the doors are flavors of this - Some small adds spawn. Then a single elite jumps down. More small adds... then after, I think, 20 seconds, a pair of elites come down. Then the Dinomancer comes down. The keys here are 1) focus the elites and let cleaves/AoE take out the others and 2) Kill the first elite before the pair comes down. The Dinomancer only needs to be focused to 50% when he drops the Orb. The key here is that the elites spawn at given times... I can't remember the exact number of seconds, but it's not random. What this means is that, if you want to kill elite 1 before elites 2 and 3 appear you have to get a certain amount of DPS on it since you have a fixed span of time before the pair jumps down.

Some raids make the mistake of having an elite at, say, 5% and then when the Dinomancer spawns, they all move to it. If you're in that situation, interrupt the Dinomancer's heal, but finish off the low HP elite. That means you don't have to worry about the bad crap that elite casts (or interrupting the casts)

On the first door, have at least some DPS pop short (1-2 min) CDs on elite #1. Make it a priority to kill it before the next 2 spawn. If you have 2 dps do that on door 1, then have another 2 dps do that on door 2. By time you're at door 3, the DPS who popped their CDs on the first door should have those CDs back so have them pop their CDs again on the first elite of door 3.

Other key things:

Interrupt venom priests
Get out of crap (Sand Trap, etc).
At door 3, slowly kite things to door 4 so you're moving away from the Frozen Orbs.


PS: DPS does seem low, but that could be people scrambling and getting used to avoiding things. I don't have time to look armories up, but how geared is everyone? The problem with ToT is that you can kill Jin in 485 gear but that's WAY too low for Horridon for all but the very best raids. You ideally want to be 500+. 495 is fine, but 48x will probably not work unless you execute interrupts, dispells and damage avoidance perfectly.

PPS: OH COME ON... your mage is 516 and one hunter is 514. And your dps is THAT LOW?


---------- Post added 2013-05-20 at 10:44 AM ----------

The best advice I can give you is to stack on the first 3 doors so aeo hits everything and tank has a easier time picking up the adds

Yes to the tank. No to aoe. People who just AOE fail here. Focus the elites. Certainly use cleaves and do SOME AoE, but unless you're overgearing this, you can't just blindly AOE. The priority is Elites > Other adds.

[braeldiil]

God no. Ignore this. It matters greatly.

There are two things to internalize about this fight. First, that the doors are all the same basic mechanic, just different flavors of it. Second, that things happen in a regular, timed rhythm.

1) All of the doors are flavors of this - Some small adds spawn. Then a single elite jumps down. More small adds... then after, I think, 20 seconds, a pair of elites come down. Then the Dinomancer comes down. The keys here are 1) focus the elites and let cleaves/AoE take out the others and 2) Kill the first elite before the pair comes down. The Dinomancer only needs to be focused to 50% when he drops the Orb. The key here is that the elites spawn at given times... I can't remember the exact number of seconds, but it's not random. What this means is that, if you want to kill elite 1 before elites 2 and 3 appear you have to get a certain amount of DPS on it since you have a fixed span of time before the pair jumps down.

See, this is wrong. The elites are not always the most dangerous mobs. On door 3, the little adds that spread diseases are much, much worse than the orb guys. On door 4 the flame casters are about as bad as the bears, and the shaman really don't matter. The only door where the elites are a huge priority is door 2 - on all others it's dinomancers then whatever.

More importantly, this isn't an elite guild. It's a normal-mode guild that's struggling a bit. Under those circumstances, they need to simplify their plan, so people can fight rather than think. Killing an add, any add, is infinitely more productive than spinning in a circle looking for the one true target.

Past that - cooldowns. The only cooldowns you should ever use on door 1 are ones that will be up for door 2 - so 90 seconds or less. Anything longer than that should be saved for doors 2/3. To be blunt, if you can't beat door 1 without medium cooldowns, you can't beat door 2 at all.

[clevin]

See, this is wrong. The elites are not always the most dangerous mobs. On door 3, the little adds that spread diseases are much, much worse than the orb guys. On door 4 the flame casters are about as bad as the bears, and the shaman really don't matter. The only door where the elites are a huge priority is door 2 - on all others it's dinomancers then whatever.

More importantly, this isn't an elite guild. It's a normal-mode guild that's struggling a bit. Under those circumstances, they need to simplify their plan, so people can fight rather than think. Killing an add, any add, is infinitely more productive than spinning in a circle looking for the one true target.

Past that - cooldowns. The only cooldowns you should ever use on door 1 are ones that will be up for door 2 - so 90 seconds or less. Anything longer than that should be saved for doors 2/3. To be blunt, if you can't beat door 1 without medium cooldowns, you can't beat door 2 at all.

You're just... no. You focus the elites first because a) they have a lot of HP and won't die to cleaves/aoe whereas the non-elites will since they have fairly low HP and b) the elites do raid damage unless perfectly managed (and even then...). For example, the Wastewalkers spread sand trap and Blazing sunlight. You're wasting time and mana dispelling Sunlight and it plus Sand Trap WILL overrun you if you leave those mobs alive.

In contrast, most of the non-elites have fairly low HP and WILL die to AoE/cleaves and they generally aren't AS dangerous. It's not that they're not a threat - as you point out, the flamecasters are. But in terms of what to focus, it's the elites first.

Simplifying 'so that they can fight, not think' is a waste. You have to think, have raid awareness and be able to dps/ interrupt, etc. If you can't, ToT will be one nightmare after another. Focusing the elites isn't hard - you can have DBM mark them or an assist can do that. And I'm sorry, but a raid that can't kill the mob with Skull on it should just hang it up.

Cooldowns... as I said, having a couple of DPS blow 1-2 minute CDs to get ahead of things and make sure the first wastewalker is down ASAP will help. Getting to the second door is the goal here. Frankly, though, their DPS sucks for their ilevel. A 514 geared hunter in the 50k region? Really?

[rated]

See, this is wrong. The elites are not always the most dangerous mobs. On door 3, the little adds that spread diseases are much, much worse than the orb guys.

It's much more easier to just stack up and kill the warlords. The "little adds" will not be jumping all over the place now since everyone's stacked therefore those little adds get cleaved down with out much worry. The only thing you got to do is kite away from orbs which is the equivalent of don't stand in fire 101.

[KCguy]

It might be better if your group goes back to Heart of Fear and Terrace Springs. You can clear both in a few hours, use your elder charms and try and get 4 sets etc. It worked wonders for my group. Granted we only raid up to 6 hours a week and we haven't exactly progressed super far (on the serpent boss), but it helped up get over that hurdle for Horridon. LFR in ToT is hit or miss in terms of getting gear, so maybe going back would help. Hell, I'm still using the 4 set bonus from last tier, but it is awesome to keep together until I get tier tokens. I've had no luck currently.