Megaera 10n help

[Kaga]

So out guild have been having troubles on this boss weekly, and i'm hoping to figure out what we're doing so desperately wrong.
We can kill her, have a few times, but usually we only get a kill running GRGRGR, or GRGRBR, while using 4 healers, and even then, it seems to be down to luck, depending on how many healers have to deal with dropping cinders away from the raid, and kiting the torrent of ice. In general, we sink an annoying amount of time into this boss each week, and i'd love to figure out a more reliable way of getting past her.

When running 3 healers, we get overwhelmed by raid dmg just as easily, again depending on how many healers are being forced to run.
We've also tried including another blue head in the rota, but we find it doesn't help a huge amount with general raid damage, and again just causes more issues with cluttering the few areas in which healers can keep the majority of the group in range, as well as adding more "run away, little girl" mechanics for the healers to deal with.

Rampages don't kill us, not a problem. Tank damage isn't an issue either, even when we're trying GRGRGR, it's usually just general raid dmg + RNG between killing heads 5-7.
Generally it's just tough raid damage causing an issue (apart the occasional frustrating wipe due to healers standing in acid bombs) and as soon as 2-3 healers get cinders/torrent at the same time, we're done.

WoL here

[Deleted]

I'm not very good at reading WoL, but from what you've said.. If it's not rampages killing you, and it's not tank damage, then it's avoidable damage that your raid is taking. Either they're not moving away from Acid Bombs fast enough, Cinders isn't being dispelled fast enough, or they're standing in the breaths from the heads. That's the only raid damage other than rampage you should be taking.

[Kaga]

Breaths aren't an issue, we see people tard out on that once in a blue moon.
We do, frustratingly, have the occasional wipe from a healer standing in an acid pool, but that's not a common issue either tbh.

It's the general raid dmg killing us (acid bomb splash mainly) due to awkward combinations of healers being afflicted with cinders/torrent. Even with even rotation of heads it feels pretty overwhelming.

[Deleted]

You should never be needing four healers on Magaera, three at the absolute most.

If the poison damage is so bad for the raid that you need these healers then think about going blue and red with your fifth head as a green. Your fourth healer (the shaman) is doing virtually nothing that more dps wouldn't overcome.

The healer who switches should be a ranged; you are quite melee heavy. Make sure you are marking places to group up for the Rampages on either side, and that your melee are dumping cinders safely. What cooldown rotation have you worked out for the Rampage?

[Kaga]

Yeh that's me being the extra healer, for the first 4-5 heads, i completely agree I've got nothing much going on in terms of healing, it adds more CDs for rampages and mainly helps us deal with the dmg at the end of the fight. Unfortunately it's how we got our first kill, so we often find ourselves going back to it.
I'll be playing ele if we use 3 healers.

Rampages are totally not an issue 3/4 heals, doesn't matter, we've got tons of raid CDs, we haven't died to rampage since our first few attempts weeks back.

[bajcli]

I don't really get where this GRGRGR thing came from...
For me it makes a lot more sense to go BRBRBR (+a green after 4 heads are down), since you can clear up icy ground with cinders so easily and you just have to worry about not putting cinders at the stacking points.
Acid bombs are by and large unavoidable raid damage that you can mitigate by running far away, but this usually requires more people running at the same time (especially frustrating for melee).
Torrent of ice, however, only requires the targeted player to move which shouldn't be a problem even with 3 healers.

Have you tried going mostly with blue + red?

Just glancing at your longest attempt, your raid takes ~51k DPS just from acid rain, making up for almost 20% of all your damage taken.

[Kaga]

Bear in mind that 51k dps is weighted mainly on the last couple heads though, it really does feel overwhelming.

Your point about torrent only affecting the individual instead of the entire group makes sense to me though, in general we've taken to avoiding including the blue head when we can, but the more i think about it the more i think we should consider including it more and getting used to the mechanics of cinders/torrent properly.

[Deleted]

Of course, but if you're going to go down a healer then the avoidable damage needs to go down a lot. How vocal are your healers when they get the ice beam, ie are they good at micromanaging and swapping targets if one of them is out of the way... Actually, probably a better question is are they ending up too far away because the ice patch is stacked too near the front by the ranged or the other healers and they're getting trapped - we've got a proper disasterzone of a healer that got gibbed by that a lot on our tries? Did you use a warlock on your kill for the Demonic Gateway to help the kiter? (Noticed on your roster you got a decent geared lock - especially if you decided to opt for a Blue>Red option this is a lifesaver)

As a comparison, our group is quite close in average level and you can probably see where we went wrong for a few weeks, but the damage output from a few of your dps (the mage especially) could be a LOT higher to ease the pressure on your healing. http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/258099/

What becomes hard about the Blue>Red rotation is the number of patches, but dispelling cinders over them will keep the front of the room free.

[wondershwonsen]

We took our first attempts on Megaera yesterday using the B-R-B-R-B-R-B-tactic and got to the 5th rampage on our best try.
I´d say our DPS-output was quite okay, because our tanks never got more than 3 stacks, but the ice patches were giving us serious trouble.

Our RL insisted on dispelling the Cinder debuff as quick as possible and said there´d be no need to clear the ice patches by running over the, since they would despawn after 1 minute and removing the patches is recommended strictly for heroic.

We tried to kite the beams in a straight line to the back, but that never worked well because there was to much confusion an occasionally players that were on their way back from kiting were targeted again by torrent of ice. Needless to say, after a while we were completely engulfed by patches of icy ground and there was no way to move.
Another problem was that players that were targeted by torrents and kiting them away from the group wouldnt get back to the rampage camp fast enough when the head died.

So my Question is:

Any advice on the kiting thing?
Do players even take damage from icy ground while affected by cinders when running over them?

Thanks, mates!
And sorry for my crappy english, i´m no native speaker.

[bromli]

The whole point of GRGRGRx is that healers never have to keep tanks up while running with ice. It's as easy as any other method. Cinder pools despawn eventually; u don't need to clear them at all. Consider lusting the second to last rampage, as it allows more raid cds to be up for last rampage.

[khatsoo]

Acid bombs are by and large unavoidable raid damage that you can mitigate by running far away, but this usually requires more people running at the same time (especially frustrating for melee).

As a melee in this fight you have such a long hitbox on the heads to move freely in a huge area and avoid most of the acid bombs damage.
Actually my guild is killing GRGRBGR and we are usually only 2 melees able to dodge acid bombs and drop cinders by the water easily, gaining a lot of dps.

Also, if you have a rogue, make sure he takes the Elusiveness talent and rolls it in Rampages (and in most Acid Bombs if he's aware). I noticed Acid Bombs hit you for around 140ks even if it goes to a ranged and you're in melee. While using Feint throughout the fight, I usually end up being the one with least Damage Taken by far, helping our healers a lot managing the heals.

[Deleted]

I'll give your mistweaver a few pointers since that's the class I play.
His uptimes are all good, as is his management of the abilities he uses, the problem comes in with the abilities he doesn't use.
Firstly, He really should get the Celerity + Chi Torpedo talent combination for Megaera, on our kill last night Chi Torpedo ended up second on healing, it's free and generally awesome, use it!
Secondly, spinning crane kick was never used, now you said rampage wasn't an issue which is when this would be best, but it could still serve a purpose for general healing when the raid is being shat on in the later phases.
And lastly, which has nothing to do with with abilities, are you sure he needs all of that spirit? every point in spirit is a point which could be used for throughput, if he feels he needs 11k spirit + the horridon trinket then let him go with it, but I heald that fight with 7k spirit and Relic of Chi-ji / Spirit of the Sun (N) and didn't have too many mana issues.

Hope this helps!

[Kaga]

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I think healer communication is something worth working on, esp. if we start including the blue head (or excluding the green), as well as using our lock portal when we have one. In general i think our raid positioning could use some work, save kiting torrent starting from the heads.

snip

Lusting on the 5th instead of 6th is certainly something we could do if we try to continue rotating green+red mainly. Really thinking about it, we might've had more success using 3 heals for R/G instead of the 4 we originally used ages back to help with torrent+heals.

snip

We actually often have 2 rogues in the team, and between feint and cloak, they never take dmg. This is always a pretty big help for heals!

snip

Thanks for the insight from the MW PoV, i'm sure our monk will appreciate it, and although i'm certain we've so far being just doing the fight *wrong*, more throughput is never a bad thing

[Kurzior]

Looking mostly at the holy pally since that's what I'm most familiar with, but this applies to all your healers to some extent. Use your cooldowns and coordinate them. There's no point in everyone blowing something big for the first rampage. Even with 2 or 3 healers you can get throught that with only some minor throughput or defensive stuff and have plenty of time to regen mana during the second head.

Have your pally run Holy Avenger for this fight instead of divine purpose. DP is a strong talent, but for a fight where damage comes in very predictable and large bursts, you want the reliability of Avenger. DP can easily not proc during a rampage phase which hurts his healing a TON, not to mention he will end up spending a lot more mana when DP doesn't proc at convenient times, which hurts a lot later in the fight. He also needs to work on increasing his holy shock useage.

Make sure you're coordinating healing and defensive cd's for rampages so you aren't wasting them by overlapping a lot when only 1 or 2 are needed. You also want to try and save something for non-rampage phases after rampage #4, since damage from bombs and cinders is going to get rough after that point.

Mana conservation is big on this fight. You want to do anything you can to be near full mana when the 4th head dies because from that point on, you won't have time to stop healing and your only regen is going to come from things like mana tide or possibly hymn. Do as much as you can to keep mana consumption low until at least the 3rd rampage when damage starts to ramp significantly.

Your raid needs to be aware that healing gets crazy at the end of the fight. Any self healing or defensive cd's they have access too should be getting used and used heavily.

3-heal this fight. 4 healers puts you in a place where you're spending an unnecessarily long time killing the 5th-7th heads when everyone is taking a lot of damage from bombs and cinders. The extra dps is a huge help.

[holypriest]

Like others have said 3 heal this rather than 4 heal it the more healers you have the longer the fight is going to take, which means more damage taken.

Have your priest switch to divine star, Cascade while an awesome spell costs a lot of mana and doesn't do much in this fight as the majority of the time people are stacked up. Divine star usually does about 20-25% of my healing on this fight (compared to cascade at 5-8%).

Looking at your damage taken for your longest fight (8:23) Cinders is some peoples top damage taken. Comparing this to our logs our cinder damage is always last (rampage and acid raid are always way higher). Some are lasting 5-6 ticks when they should be dispelled after 1-2.

[Esie]

I suggest you try different head combinations because on our first kill we changed to the most ackward combinations (firstly just to see how is it with less poison bolts) and it was a lot easier and ended up with a really clean kill afterwards.

We tried LFR way first, was getting kinda crushed on 6th head cause of all those poison bolts, so we tried GRGRBRG and GRGRGBR but it was the same again (mind you our healing team is quite good with a bit of gear setbacks)

Finally we switched to BRBRGRB and got it down on 3rd try. It was unbeliavable how easy it was compared to previous ones. Since you negate the poison bolt till 6th head and even then you only get one, raid damage is practically nonexistant. We had melee dropping Cinders at the water, and on last two heads pretty much instadispelled them and everyone just avoided them or doused them with Ice torrent.

The only important thing with the BRBRGRB tactic is that your ranged/healers need to be max range possible and try to kite ice to overlap as much as possible to free up space.

Hope this helps some unless if someone suggested this same tactic already, but wanted to add my 2 cents.

[Valech]

We killed it three weeks ago with 3 healers (2 Paladins, 1 Disc). We went G/R/G/R/B/R/B. After a hour of wiping we figuered that
a) Damage on tanks is high but not problematic
b) More then two green heads spamming those AoE bombs are a real nuissance.

So we decided to keep the green-head-kills as low as possible AND bring the Ice Beam in as late as possible. We also decided to Bloodlust on the 5th rampage. Note, that this is not the last rampage. That would allow us to almost kill the sixth head while rampage was still up, so we had not to deal with the ice beam (Megaera won´t use any head-specific abilities during Rampage). All available Cooldowns were used on the last rampage and we killed the last head, dealing with not more then 3 or 4 ice beams the whole fight.

This tactic was the breakthrough for us. But as said before, you will have to find your own way. Note, that the above described tactics will involve high damage on people with the red debuff (they need to be dispelled INSTANTLY after the sixth head) and high physical damage on the tank, who tanks the blue head until you killed it once (they stack an attack speed buff, if not killed).

You might want to use some of the following, which will help a bit with the kill:
- Use two camps, marked by worldmarks. The first camp is between Red and Blue and the second between Blue and green. Stack up at the left one while the first rampage is active and then proceed switching the camp each rampage. this allows your melees to continue dpsing the active head.
- Tell your Cleavers and Multidotters, that it is not smart to multidot unless it gives you additional chances to procc something. two targets with Flameshock = more Lavasurge = Neat.
- If you happen to have a warlock around make him place his portal between the camps and like 25 yards away from that. people with the ice beam run towards the gate in the back (not the one between the camps!) click it, and proceed dpsing the boss. The beam will follow the player´s trace to the remote gate and will vanish before it reaches the portal´d DD.
- Because the dot will have to be removed instantly you want your people and especially your melees not to stack up. Two people moving = loss of dps.
- Getting away from the green AoE bomb means getting as far away as possible, not just exiting the circle on the ground. Damage will decrease with growing distance.
- Make sure your healers and DDs dont stand in the heads´ breath. Our hunter learned it the hard way.
- Paladins may remove a tankdot with their bubbles. Make sure, that the paladins have a makro to cancel out that bubble immediatley, so that the tank won´t lose aggro. Interesting especially for the red head tank. That fire breath is bad.
- Do not use any CDs above 1 Minute for the first three Rampages.

Stolen from myself. From one of the other Megaera threads.

[Celarent]

In 25-man, our first pull duplicated the GRGR first-four strategy as a weekend 10-man had been trying (unsuccessfully). After one wipe, I couldn't help but notice how manageable Cinders were compared to Venom. I switched us to BRBRGRG and Megaera was dead two pulls later.

Communication among healers is key for Torrent, as is understanding the "vacuum" mechanics of fire and ice. But I'd highly recommend experimenting with kill orders, especially since the community is so focused on a particular one that doesn't suit all groups.

[minkage]

After many wipes of trying different combos

g/r/g/r/g/r/g = insane raid damage. brute force method!
g/r/b/g/r/b/g = I think its a fine combo but icebeams really freak players out. Its the least damaging thing on that fight but people freak out when they get targeted
b/r/b/r/b/r/b = you end up with so many beams that you are just nonstop moving and the heads die slow as heck

We finally settled on g/r/g/r/b/r/g = posion bombs are not as spammy with only 2 green kills and you introduce only 1 icebeam towards the end of the fight.

[pld]

Have you tried 2 healing it? Taking a look at my guild's WoL, our DPS is relatively similar. It took us about 7 minutes to down the boss (we do g/r/g/r/b/r/g) which is almost 1-2 minutes shorter than your best attempts. The faster the heads die, the less raid damage you'll run into and your healers won't run OOM. Link to our Megaera kill below.

Another bit of advice for your pally - he needs to up his Holy Shock count and make better use of his Holy Radiance. It's one of his strongest AoE heals and will help mitigate some of that raid-wide damage.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=2400&e=2825