10-man normal Megaera - looking for some advice

[Deleted]

So, my guild are currently working our way through 10-man normal Throne of Thunder. We've had problems with bosses like every other guild does, but we always seem to overcome that and the next again week after finally downing a boss I usually end up wondering what all the fuss and struggle was about because it feels so easy.

Now, last lockout after a stressful evening of fine-tuning some things here and there we killed Megaera. It was by no means a clean kill, I think there were three people alive at the end.

In the raid tonight we got to Megaera relatively quickly, and with the same group as we got the kill on, we've just spent almost the entire evening wiping on her and finally got the kill once again. It was cleaner at the end but most of the raid feel like something is going wrong somewhere and we just can't put our fingers on why everything is so messy.

Head kill order is GRGRGRGR or whatever it is. We never kill a blue head so we do deal with a lot of damage towards the end and it does get intense. If anyone could take a look at this log of the kill and maybe share any insight that would be great.

worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-yi330n4dtip2qfsz/dashboard/?s=7759&e=8252

If you have any constructive criticism in regards to this it's very much welcomed. Thanks a lot!

[primalfears]

our guild has found it much easier to do brgrbgr and we 2 heal it the damage oinput is minimal this way and overall make this fight that much easier the blue beam actually make the fight much easier then having so many green go off less movement and damage and you can clean up red with it since you 3 heal this strat we be your best way imo and make it a much easier fight

[Simplexity]

Try GRGRBR. Lust on the 2nd to last rampage and you will only get 1 ice beam. The damage can get out of control after killing the third green if you do GRGRGR.

[Deleted]

We tried the same strat but quickly figured out that damages were too high at the end.

So what we did is : Green Red Green Red BLUE Red Green

Lust on the last Red since it was where we were struggling the most.

[Deleted]

I'll give you our strategy, since we're also 10-man and I'm a protadin as well.

First off, I make sure to assign raid cooldowns to every rampage ('cept the first which you really don't need cooldowns for).

Second, we started progression by only killing Green and Red heads but bolt damage was getting high by the end so we just replaced one of the green heads for a blue one and our order ended up being: G - R - G - R - B -R- G.

As a Paladin tank you should be tanking Red head everytime (though you may have to switch after Blue head or so if your offtank can't drop green stacks). Take off your DP glyph if you have it and spec for HoPurity. Those two make the Red dot a joke. If your other tank had to pick the red head at any point just make sure you get your HoPurity up on him.

Also, to minimize Poison Bolt damage we did the following:

Split the raid, excluding tanks, into 3 groups:

Group 1 - All melee DPS plus a good melee-range healer (i.e. monk);

Group 2 - 1 Healer + roughly half of you ranged DPS;

Group 3 - 1 Healer + the rest of your ranged dps;


Group 1 is always stacked up right behind the head that is to be nuked.

Group 2 and 3 have set positions (marked with a world marker) about 30 yards from the boss, apart from each other about 20 yards, and players should always be stacked up with their group.

This strategy is made to avoid DPS loss and incoming damage caused by Poison Bolt. Having the raid in 3 groups guarantees one of the 3 will get targeted by the bolt. Then, only that specific group moves away for the bolt and, once it lands, go back into position.

During rampage everyone stacks up on Group 1 (melee) position for the next head to be killed, that way melee can start nuking the head during transition and only the ranged groups and tanks will have to move once rampage is over.


EDIT:

Forgot to mention.

Dealing with Cinders - Melee just drop them someplace they won't have to stand to kill any of theads, as close to the cliff as possible. This may cause movement trouble during rampage but it was done to minimize melee dps loss (Since our melee are our top DPSers). People from other groups just move a few yards to the BACK of the cave and drop it there. Each particular group's healer is responsible for dispelling all members of said group. Ranged group healers might have to help the melee group if you have too many melees (and dispell cooldowns might not be enough for everyone)

[Deleted]

Yeah, I suggested we switch up the head order and we did for a few attempts but a couple of raid members aren't so great at the whole movement thing so we ended up going back to this to simplify as much as we possibly could. I was mostly looking for insight as far as the logs go, perhaps people are slacking somewhere and it's setting us back or maybe just our set-up lacks enough strong cooldowns to get through this head kill order?

Changing the kill order of the heads is an option and I'll pass it onto our raid leader for consideration once again but what worries me the most with this is that our healers aren't so good at movement so if one of them has to deal with the ice beam it's pretty safe to say that it won't go well.

Edit: thanks a lot for the responses so far. We've killed Megaera twice now but as I mentioned in the OP it's always a very sloppy kill and we spend more time than we need to wiping on a boss we've already downed. Just wanted to get some advice before next lockout so we can spend a bit less time on this one and a bit more time punching bosses we've yet to kill.

[Saphyron]

Since I play disc priest most of my input will be on him

Rogue
Well first of in the clean kill your rogue died cause he did not move
Also seems your rogue is really bad at moving away from cinders or maybe its just because of slow dispels not quite certain.

overall healers
Also looking at your death seems like the only good healer you have are the druid. The other 2 is really bad at responding to low health targets
Again it seems your healers are bad at dispelling.

Disc priest
Healing is really low on most fights also make your disc priest use penance offensive since it heals more that way unless someone is taking alot of damage.
He seems to also atonement heal when there is high raid damage. bad priest bad.
Powerword : Barrier is not used often. he should use it every second rampage to reduce healing needed and mana usage.
Also penance usage is really low. it should be higher since its a really good heal. 160k+ heal for low mana cost low channel time and even more if you use it offensively

Shadow priest
the shadow priest has bad uptime on dots means lower dps means more raid damage means higher chance of dying.
does not use mb on cd bad for dps mon even moreso considering he is using divine insight 40 MB was used which equal to a fight of around 3min 20sec. kill lasted 8 min and 13 sec he shoudl at least do twice if not close to 3 times as many mb's

Thats it for now might be able to find more but since i play a priest i took those 2 out to see what they were doing wrong.

[Deleted]

Since I play disc priest most of my input will be on him

Rogue
Well first of in the clean kill your rogue died cause he did not move
Also seems your rogue is really bad at moving away from cinders or maybe its just because of slow dispels not quite certain.

overall healers
Also looking at your death seems like the only good healer you have are the druid. The other 2 is really bad at responding to low health targets
Again it seems your healers are bad at dispelling.

Disc priest
Healing is really low on most fights also make your disc priest use penance offensive since it heals more that way unless someone is taking alot of damage.
He seems to also atonement heal when there is high raid damage. bad priest bad.
Powerword : Barrier is not used often. he should use it every second rampage to reduce healing needed and mana usage.
Also penance usage is really low. it should be higher since its a really good heal. 160k+ heal for low mana cost low channel time and even more if you use it offensively

Shadow priest
the shadow priest has bad uptime on dots means lower dps means more raid damage means higher chance of dying.
does not use mb on cd bad for dps mon even moreso considering he is using divine insight 40 MB was used which equal to a fight of around 3min 20sec. kill lasted 8 min and 13 sec he shoudl at least do twice if not close to 3 times as many mb's

Thats it for now might be able to find more but since i play a priest i took those 2 out to see what they were doing wrong.

I'm the boomkin on this raid (also very much open to critique) but would like to thank people for the good advice so far, it confirms a few things but change to the kill order sadly i fear will cause more issues due to the movement issues previously mentioned.

The Rogue imo is actually quite good at moving but as im sure you saw from the logs our luberly resto druid did virtually all the dispells so i feel our Rogue who seemed to get picked on for a fair amount of cinders suffered as a result with the speed of dispells not being picked up by the rest of our healing team.

Our Spriest is a competent player however he's suffered from rotating 3 different classes in our raids so far in ToT to fill the gaps so he's rusty but spriest is now his main and i'll make sure that advice gets to him since it will help him alot.

We're a 2 night a week casual outfit so we're not expecting the world from people but anything advice wise to ease the pain on this fight even tho we're getting it down is very much appreciated.

Our team are good/mature people so i'm sure they'll be grateful for the pointers.

Thanks alot.

[Deja Thoris]

I'm no specialist on pally healers but imo:
- Hand of purity was used 4 times on the fight. He can use it every 45 sec which co-incidentally lines up with every 2nd breath. Esp the fire heads, 70% less damage for 6 seconds there is huuuuuuge
- Hes talented sacred shield. Isn't eternal flame better? Heals from EF get transferred the beacon target and in high damage phases he can pop holy avenger, holy shock > EF then holy raidance > EF for 20 seconds. This will "EF blanket" a decent number of raid members with a pretty strong HoT.

The only other thing that makes this fight a lot less painful is killing the heads quicker. To be honest the healers look fine. When heads take much longer than a minute to die the pain gets more intense due to the stacking nature of the damage. Some of your heads were more than 1:20 apart though more gear will naturally nerf this aspect of the fight.

[Vilbu]

We do GRGRBR in both 10 and 25. All stack with melee and dodge the bombs as a group. We don't spread until we have the beam to deal with, and as a priest I am using divine star, also our shadow priests are using divine star for utility and doing insane amount of HPS with it.

[Deleted]

We do GRGRBR in both 10 and 25. All stack with melee and dodge the bombs as a group. We don't spread until we have the beam to deal with, and as a priest I am using divine star, also our shadow priests are using divine star for utility and doing insane amount of HPS with it.

The Divine Star tip is interesting, I'll pass it along to our two priests. At current I think our Disc is rolling with Cascade and our Spriest with Halo.

Thanks again for the stellar advice everyone, it does cement and confirm a few opinions about a couple of things for me so I really appreciate all the second opinions you have to offer.

[Triisken]

Our guild tried doing GRGRGRG at first, but it wasn't working for us. The damage became too much however so what we found worked was doing GRBRGRB. The damage became much easier to deal with and now Megaera seems like a piece of cake.

[khrave08]

Our group was having problems originally just doing GRGRGRG, but what made it possible for us is lusting during the second to last rampage. That way, the red head gets killed faster and there is less poison bombs coming in from the back of the cave since when the final green head spawns, it won't be sending acid bombs any more. In the final phase, cinders should probably be dispelled close to instantly, because they start hitting very hard.

As a disc priest, I highly recommend Divine Star on that fight, since you stack between rampages it hits everyone and can be used twice during each rampage. It also does some damage if aimed properly.

[Saphyron]

Our group was having problems originally just doing GRGRGRG, but what made it possible for us is lusting during the second to last rampage. That way, the red head gets killed faster and there is less poison bombs coming in from the back of the cave since when the final green head spawns, it won't be sending acid bombs any more. In the final phase, cinders should probably be dispelled close to instantly, because they start hitting very hard.

As a disc priest, I highly recommend Divine Star on that fight, since you stack between rampages it hits everyone and can be used twice during each rampage. It also does some damage if aimed properly.

I'm slightly confused here.

It is only during Rampage you should stack up rest of the time you should stay 5-8 yards apart due to cinders and green explosion from venom heads
I heal this fight and granted yes I do also use Divine start but personally I find the mana spent per healing gained from that spell too much so I barely use it.

We do G-R-G-R-G-R-G thinks that many heads can't remember tbh and during the last 2 heads there is so much raid damage coming out I have to mana preserver as much as possible during the first 5 heads. We pop Hero at 20% at the second to last head so we can burn it down fast and have HERO during the last rampage to make it easier for healers and some dps in the start of the next head.

Personally as a disc priest on this fight (holy would be far better but im disc shadow) I Penance/Smite spam the first 2-3 heads (not much overall damage and the spells is cheap as fuck.) After that I mainly use penance offensive on CD keep my AA on CD and cast shield's, prayer of mending, renews, greater heals, prayer of healing and flash heals around to make certain no one is dying. Also having a dispel on a hotkey due to importance of dispelling on the sec it goes on a player.

Also as a raid group we are using disc priest holy pala and resto druid. On first Rampage we use barrier + tree form - second we use Devotion + tranq and a pain suppression on tank tanking red head. We make certain the tanks get around 3-4 stacks else those CD's will not be off CD which is bad. very bad.

Have a video of our first kill but I was doing really really badly due to having crappy gear + pugs. If you wanna see it PM me OP. But it is a way of doing the fight.

Lastly haven't slept for a while, so most of what you read now is properly horribly written.

EDIT: Just noticed on our first kill my healing was actually below your disc priest healing but my over-healing was far less. your disc priest healed 34m and 69k hps with 8m overhealing. I healed 36m and 63k hps with 2m over-healing. So I take back what I wrote earlier about your disc healer being low on healing.

Then it is simple a your dps stays too long in cinders - does not get dispelled fast enough or not moving from venom explosion.

EDIT2: Just took the numbers from our team. Our paladin at the time of kill was the worst geared with 498 ilvl I was 502 and the druid was 504

Paladin: 62,49M healing with 107k hps
Blood dk: 37,38M healing with 63,7k hps
Priest: 36,41M healing with 63,3k hps
Druid: 31,22M healing with 53k hps
Enhance Shaman: 17,48M with 29,7k hps
Tank druid: 14,87M with 25k hps

[Deleted]

We also lust during start of 6th head. That means there is only a very short non-rampage part during that phase. A person dieing left or right on 7th head won't break you and you can still finish it, not so easily during 6th. I don't think we've ever had any deaths during rampage, just near end during normal phases.

[Ianus]

We also lust during start of 6th head. That means there is only a very short non-rampage part during that phase. A person dieing left or right on 7th head won't break you and you can still finish it, not so easily during 6th. I don't think we've ever had any deaths during rampage, just near end during normal phases.

go brgbrgb use lust on 6th head and it should be easier for healers

[Deleted]

go brgbrgb use lust on 6th head and it should be easier for healers

Hmmm? We killed it since week 2, and looking from logs we 1shot it now every week. I'm not saying we struggle with it, just saying what worked for us, since this is not a fight that is "omg you HAVE to do it this way". I've killed it with different tactics in pugs already, all depends on strength/weaknesses of your group. Just try out different stuff if you're stuck on this. Lusting on start of 6th head helped for us for example, may help for OP. Our first kill was sloppy iirc, some people dead/battlerezzed, but a kill is a kill. Sacrifice some people during 7th head imo. Like, not joking, prioritize tanks at 7th head at any cost if you're struggling on mana. If all healers low on mana can even call out on vent to not dispell/heal someone who gets cinders. Only need 1 person alive and boss at 0hp to kill it.

[Xomniuri]

We found towards the end of the red and green killing the green explosions we're coming so frequently with the fire debuff, if you had the fire debuff and a green explosion at the same time your pretty much one shot.

We ended up doing G-R-B-G-R-B-G and we lusted the last rampage
Firstly we stack in melee for rampages, just make sure everyone scatters as soon as it's finished.
We also found that trying to keep ranged and healers in optimal positions. eg
For green and blue up we tried to keep to the far right and keep ranged at max range at the back
For red and blue up we tried to keep to the far left.
This allows the entire head to be killed with most of the area full of fire and ice paths where you can't stand because you'd get hosed with a breath, with the tanking positioning switch.

We run the fire debuff as far back as we can till it gets dispelled, this not only keeps them out of melee range it also stops people sitting in the fire and getting a tick of damage from the flame pool.
We also run the frost beams straight back, this stops people getting trapped by people running them sideways and in mid, making people have to run through them to stack for rampages.

Also don't try to run the fire through frost or vice versa it's a waste of time and healing

[cabyio]

Really when it comes down to it, Red and Green heads are your enemy. They do damage to the raid, fire is one person at a time, and green is lots of people. Blue does no raid dmg if people place the beams correctly. Our order is B - R - B - G - B - G - B. You do end up with alot of ice beams but I think its worth it for the lack of raid dmg it gains you. Also mind the fact that fire will hit like a damn truck by the last head so put lots of healing on that tank.

[Saphyron]

Really when it comes down to it, Red and Green heads are your enemy. They do damage to the raid, fire is one person at a time, and green is lots of people. Blue does no raid dmg if people place the beams correctly. Our order is B - R - B - G - B - G - B. You do end up with alot of ice beams but I think its worth it for the lack of raid dmg it gains you. Also mind the fact that fire will hit like a damn truck by the last head so put lots of healing on that tank.

Personally i would disagree even more so since he has the healing comp he has. its really easy to heal. just be certain that your team mates is better at avoiding stuff.