Spoils 10m HC help (little bit on other bosses too)

[squarefaced]

We're currently 9 heroic (killed malko before shamans), and we're just getting on to spoils, we've had a few wipes on it, but we raid 2 days a week, which means we can't afford to log 100 wipes then start thinking about what else we can do or improvements we can make, so I thought I'd come here, and could add more logs as and when.
for perpective on comp we usually run-malko was 30ish wipes, kill ended up being with monk/warr tanks, shaman/monk healers, rogue, hunter, ele, lock, ret, sp dps, however we didnt secure another kill last week, shamans was approx 50 wipes, ending up with shaman/monk healing inside, disc outside, with 2 warrs+monk tanking

Our raid roster consists of - 2 protection warriors (neither have extremely viable offspecs), 569.19 and 568 respectively, one geared for crit mastery or w/e, the other for parry and stuff ([url]http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/frostmane/St%C3%A1bbe/advanced[/url] and [url]http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/frostmane/crashyk/advanced[/url] )

[B]Healers:[/B] Paladin (strong ret os), monk (weak dps os), shaman (weak enh os) 568, 567 and 566 (Pinkadin, Dewinsan, Harpija)

[B]DPS: [/B]Rogue 569.75, WW 567.13 (has a fairly strong tanking os but dislikes it), Hunter 568.67, Warlock 569

Boomkin 555.07 (trial, weak tanking os), Ele 568.53 (weak healing os), Shadow 569 (weak disc os)

On a 2 tank 3 heal fight, we use rogue/ww/ele/hunter, then a toss up of lock or sp. Hpala has alt disc/sp [url]http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/frostmane/squarefaced/advanced[/url] (used this to heal kardris for shamans), or 556 hunter/556 blood dk.


We've not spent significant time on spoils (13 wipes) - http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-baa37ffw0gfzalvl/ dashboard for the logs of the tries, but would just like to get more advice on it beforehand if possible, and will add to this as we get more tries in (next raid will be Saturday)

We had 3 or so 4 minute wipes, but most wipes took place between 1 minute and 2, one issue was that my side of the room (Initially crashyk, pinkadin, kalls sagi inquill - sp hunter ele) wasn't clearing the room in time, however they are all more than geared enough for the fight, even with a healer buff, we'd be 36 energy and pulling the last big add, or be a few % into it when timer went down - mantid side. The mogu side with initial rogue/ww/lock/mw/prot managed to clear their side in time sometimes (definitely cleared when they got healer buff), later on we tried switching some players around, and settled the last few wipes switching the tanks around - as one tank's pulling is more proficient.

A few things that would help perhaps would be class specific advice - for our dpsers to up the damage, or avoid damage better, personally I've read through all the spoils threads on here and posted what i thought would be useful on our forum, but didn't find much about specific classes/talent preferences and things.

We had balls explode 2-3 times (usually didn't kill us), should just one ranged be assigned to them? If so which one.

Another thing is that healing can be somewhat tricky for me sometimes, and not totally sure where the highest damage will be, perspective on which mobs being up = the highest damage taken, or cd usage from other healers would be interesting. There are some isolated deaths that seem to come out of nowhere, and the gusting bombs hurt, can you fully avoid the damage from them by just moving before they are cast (similar to siegecrafter spinning thingies)

Raidbots compare: http://raidbots.com/comparebot/5295c...7a000468#buffs


Extra credit questions!:
For the last two saturday raids, our monk healer has been away (he is sub 80% attendance grr > ), and so when we come to juggernaut, we've had a few problems, previously we've always 4 healed with an offspec dps and staying in rather than being knocked back - which gave us a 1 shot for the first kill, but we wipe a lot on juggernaut to the healing when we 4 heal, with shaman, paladin, then shaman priest in their healing offspecs (disc), this week for the kill we ended up going 3 heal, and getting knocked back, but it irks our dps, and the thing i want to find out is what our healers are doing wrong here (including me)

We've got 5 juggernaut kills, with 4 logged - 3 weeks of 4 healing, and most recent kill was 3 heals (yes, believe it or not kalls was healing)

02/11 http://worldoflogs.com/reports/exdri...ses&boss=71466

09/11 http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...ses&boss=71466

16/11 http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...ses&boss=71466

23/11 http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...ses&boss=71466

Alternatively, raidbots for each healer
mw- http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/fros...rnaut-10H-1102
rsham- http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/fros...ernaut-10H-803
hpala- http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/fros...ernaut-10H-501
(os rsham)- http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/fros...ernaut-10H-803
(os disc)- http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/fros...ernaut-10H-601

Looking over it myself, should we just 2 or 3 heal (however many we have) with main healers, and get knocked back - since we have decent raid cds, esp given that since its 'farm' the boomkin trial comes in so we get +1 player with a raid cd

Thanks in advance for the help, just ping me if i've missed anything crucial, I probably have!

[Thalur]

Concerning Spoils:

This fight is a dps race. You should eliminate all other problems first, and then try to get the rooms done in time. Your group distribution should consider two things: both sides should have about equal dps, and both sides should have as many of the buffs they need as possible. Something like using Bloodlust drums on one side is perfectly acceptable. Tank damage is also important, especially our monk tank usually wears quite a lot dps items on this boss (e.g. cloak, trinkets).

Healing should not be a problem. It's not easy to heal, but once you know the mechanics and people avoid getting extra damage this should not be a problem. Sparks should never explode, and it's best to assign one player to the sparks to minimize the damage lost on the "bosses". Hunters are great for that. However, if you get the staff (healer buff), we found it best to let the healer do the sparks so dps can focus on the crates. Generally, we like to have the healer buff because with the right positioning, the healers can contribute quite a lot to the fight.

Last you need to optimize your crates. There must never be a time when no adds are up. Always get the buffs first. Depending on how comfortable you are with that, you can often have some small adds in addition to whatever you are currently doing to maximize cleave damage. Just see how much you can handle and how much is necessary to get it done in time.

For a faster learning curve, it is also a good idea to switch the sides of the groups once both groups are comfortable with their "first" side so you don't get a lot wipes later in the fight.


Concerning Juggernaut:

I think 3 healers is the optimal number for the boss. It can be done with 2, but P1 can be quite dangerous. 4 healers is completely unnecessary and makes the fight longer. Also, the knock-back tactics is much easier than staying with the boss, because the cannons are very easy to avoid like this and you can use the time to heal everyone up from the seismic and knock-back. Enrage will not be a problem (since you even did him with 4 healers).

[Tojara]

Alternate sides. One side does the large add while the other does small/mediums. When one sides large add is dead, each side switches.

What this accomplishes is only one side spawning sparks at a time, and only on the side doing big adds. There is always a tank/healer buff on each side and if you always drag the big add to the middle your DPS never has to worry about sparks at all. This trivializes the heroic mechanic and optimizes your DPS far more than any other advice you'll get on this encounter.

Healing is not hard on this encounter. Make sure people don't ignore statues on the Mogu large add because the AoE they do once they get 5 buffs will nearly one shot your side without CDs. Generally don't have two mediums up at once and if you uncover any of the stationary mobs (kunchongs/urns) focus them down first. Urns and Kunchongs are by far the most dangerous small box, otherwise you can open smalls to your hearts content.
Having sparks spawn while you're doing small/mediums is inefficient, because it's just not feasible nor efficient for you to keep dragging them to the middle. Minor cleave in addition to healer/tank buff will kill the sparks in more than enough time.

Start by opening up panda boxes on each side then:

Mogu side opens up large and puts it in the middle. Use CDs as it's most efficient.
Mantid side opens medium/smalls and cleaves/AoE. There are no sparks.
When Mogu side is about to finish it's large do the opposite. So Mogu starts opening up small/mediums and Mantid side works on their large add.

This makes your DPS as efficient as possible because swapping for sparks or not utilizing the tank/healer buff is wasteful. The tank/healer buff is always there and if positioned properly will always do 75-80% of the sparks health, in AoE. It also spaces large adds out enough to where you will always have CDs up for them.

We have done this encounter like 6-7 times now. When we just treated each side as individual sides we barely made the timer or ended up wiping. When we swapped to this we had 15-20 seconds left. With gear it's more like 40-50 seconds, but that's to be expected as you get more familiar with the fight.

Use lust and potions if you feel you're behind. We generally don't use them until the second room and save each individual one for large adds.

[Soulzar]

Tojara, interesting sounding tactic. It obviously works well for you so please don't take offense by me saying it seems counter productive to be having sparks spawning while trying to single target the big add... Its class specific for sure on how effective or ineffective it can be. Some classes can cleave without losing single targets dmg. Some classes increase single target dmg with adds. Me (Destro lock) by example, would only want to passively AoE with RoF on those adds to generate embers, and tunnel all my embers into the Boss via Chaos Bolts. Having to toggle F&B to put real AoE to adds spawning, or switch targets with greatly lower my dmg on the big add, keeping it up longer. I think cleaving smalls as example with the big add sounds productive, but having the big add up longer for the sake of getting a small down in the process.. does not seem to net a gain IMO.

We have both groups do Buff - Buff - Large - Large - Small/Mediums. Remainder of prepot and initial procs + hero for first big add, long cooldowns + second pot for second rooms first Large. This way both groups are single tareting and both groups are cleaving at the same time. Our healers delay picking up the Healer buff if they get it until the first Large dies, so that they have the buff still later in the phase when its needed for the AoE/Sparks

Above said, most people advocate against both larges in a row and to wait for cooldowns to come back up, but I really think its best to get the larges out of the way and let the healer use his cooldowns. They will be backup for second room.

Lock specific, since we do both larges in a row I ensure I have 3 embers stored up and when the first large is at ~15% the tank will open the second large so that I can Havoc 3 shadowburns to the new large. Same thing is done with the second large onto a fresh Medium add. I do not use F&B much at all in this fight, primarily tunnel as many CB's into adds as possible and snipe shadowburns where I can. The Urns that spawn a Mob that have shared health on Mogu side are great for Havoc CB's or Shadowburns since you can dump 2x the dmg to the "one" add.

Good luck to you guys. This fight has a ton of different way to get to 50 energy and what I wrote above is just one of them. Find what works best for your group comp.

[Deleted]

Tojara, interesting sounding tactic. It obviously works well for you so please don't take offense by me saying it seems counter productive to be having sparks spawning while trying to single target the big add...

The logic (as he stated) is that there is always a tank or healer buff. If you're lucky, you'll get both the tank *and* healer Pandaren buffs. By tanking the large add in the middle of the room, any sparks that spawn will get killed purely by your tank's cleave, and one of those 2 procs. It's what we did in my guild and the DPS never really had to touch sparks while we killed the big guy.

[Deleted]

Tojara, interesting sounding tactic. It obviously works well for you so please don't take offense by me saying it seems counter productive to be having sparks spawning while trying to single target the big add...

This is not the case. The reason for this is that your tank can stand in the middle of the room and just cleave the sparks as soon as they spawns while everyone focus the big add. Having spark spawns when you have the big add up is optimal. You can also stack around the big add so that the healing wave gets the add, the sparks and all the players. Very good.

[Tojara]

Yeah like people expanded on, that's mostly the reason.

Sparks have just above 1 million HP and the healer/tank buff does at least 75% of the sparks HP. Position correctly and move the large add slightly around the middle of the room will ensure that your DPS don't need to touch the sparks at all. This allows them to focus on the large add and it also allows the other side to open up as many medium/smalls as they feel comfortable. For us that simple means open medium/smalls until the other sides large add goes down, then swap.

When we treated each side as their own individual side things got really hectic. It wastes a lot of time trying to drag small/medium adds to the middle in order to cleave the sparks down, where dragging one single large add is far easier. It gets more complicated when you throw in tank buff randomly stunning adds and other adds that like to stop and cast.

Case and point it's very inefficient. For us it led to drastically lower DPS as we constantly had close calls with sparks nearly going off which cause DPS to swap off and overkill sparks by a lot. Chaos bolt for instance can hit for well over a single sparks health, and it's just inefficient regardless of the fact that they can cleave two at the same time for you to be using single target at all on them.

People ignoring sparks and just allowing healers/tanks to cleave them down wastes a lot less DPS and gets focus targets down a lot quicker. Our healers typically if they get the healer buff do over 200k DPS because they position themselves on the sides of where sparks go down on.

The only other tip I can give is if you're side is starting with the large add and you have the healer buff, don't pick it up until sparks actually start spawning. The pure DPS buff is least important and can be picked up at anytime, but by picking up the tank/healer buff immediately you lose 30-40 seconds of potential cleave on the sparks in the last minute of a side when the buffs wear off. Sure it helps with single target, but we treat tank/healer buff as our spark clear essentially making the encounter for our DPS the same as normal mode.

[Radio]

You can 3 heal Juggernaut without outranging the boss, but there is a trick to the mortar barrages. If you have one tank (this is the only way we've tested it) highest on Jugg's aggro table who is self sustainable, and keep them on the opposite side of the boss to the raid (yes, this does mean that you have one less tank for mines in p2), it gives Juggernaut a chance to fire parts of his barrage on that side instead.

Sometimes RNG will still give the main part of the raid all of the barrages, but usually I end up diverting 33-100% of the barrages on a regular basis by standing out like that. I've also noticed some occasions where someone noobed up and got knocked to the far side of the room that they were targeted by some of the barrages too.

Even still, it's entirely possible to survive p2 with 3 healers standing in range while dodging all of the mortars, it's just a little dicey at times.

[Aiurus]

Juggernaut:
Just throughput wise, 2 healers is fine for both phase 1 and phase 2, when raid CDs are planned out. However, 2 healers is really tight on the standard HPS requirement, so when people take one or two extra hits/ticks they weren't supposed to, they are in danger of dying. Laser Burn/Ricochet/Borer drills aren't very controllable, and you could easily have someone die to any combination of two of the abilities. Because the Enrage timer really isn't tight, for consistency's sake, I'd recommend 3 healing, using the knock-away strat. This gives everyone a much bigger margin of error.

Spoils:
Beyond the specific class assignments for each side, I think you need to have the right mentality on the fight first. Understand the implications of small vs medium vs large crates. Yes, small crates are often times really easy, but you do send more sparks to the other side. Also, understand the motive for opening more boxes. You want to open more at a time for better AoE/cleaving. You want to open enough so that you can AoE to help you meet the DPS check, but not so much that you start dying. It's a delicate balance, and you'll have to continue thinking about the other side too.

Some general tips:
-warn the other side if a bunch of adds are dying at once (meaning you send multiple sparks simultaneously to them)
-Tank/healer can switch sides after the first room so they can continue to do the same room that they have mastered
-since each room lasts 270 seconds but the pandaren buffs only last 180, you can delay clicking on some of the buffs, namely the Staff, till when there are sparks out
-Anima Golem heal is very obnoxious, pay close attention to it
-Mogu side is burst raid damage, whereas Mantide side is constant but high raid damage

Good luck on those fights.

[Deleted]

Alternate sides. One side does the large add while the other does small/mediums. When one sides large add is dead, each side switches.

.

Imo this is a bad idea as one side will end up getting sparks while they are dealing with the boss add. If this side doesn't have the healing buff then you're wasting valuable dps time killing the sparks instead of dpsing the boss. We always have both sides to monks, then big add together at the same time and save the healer or tank buff for AFTER the big add is dead (especially the healer buff seeing as no sparks spawn until this point)

[Tojara]

No. You realize that you always have a BrM or MW buff on each side, and they basically do the same damage? If your tank is tanking the add in the middle using the strategy I outlined, he just drags the boss on top of the spark lets the buff kill them. Explain exactly how that is wasting valuable DPS time if it's free cleave for doing a normal rotation?

The strategy isn't reliant on using the healer buff and isn't RnG.

The point of the strategy is to have the healer OR tank buff do all of the work in regards to killing the sparks, that way your DPS can just single target focus the boss add down. If both sides are doing medium/smalls at the same time then each side is going to get flooded with sparks at the same time. It isn't a large deal because this is the time AoE/cleave is more valuable, but in order to cleave/AoE efficiently you need to keep dragging small/mediums to the middle where the sparks are.

Considering the volume of small/mediums you unlock compared to one large at the time, efficiency wise it's much easier to just have to worry about dragging that one add and only having to worry about sparks while doing it.

Note I'm not saying that this is the only way to do the fight, but the logic is still sound. There are lots of ways you can approach this encounter.

[Deleted]

Aye I guess I can see the logic here. We just found the best way for us was to mirror each other this way eliminates any rng for us as we know exactly how many sparks are coming and when and there's no chance of becoming overwhelmed. Also while progressing it might be better for them to both open big add together as normally you can blow your cds on the pull with all procs up, get the monks down and still have alot of "full power" time on the boss add. Admittedly this matters less with each kill.

But as you say it's very much horses for courses. Whatever gets you the kill

[squarefaced]

Thanks for all the great responses/discussion, I've been fairly busy so I didn't really find the time to make a decent reply, for us we ended up choosing not to 'mirror' (logs from last night are here: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-z3th3tz32lxvkjv2/ ) we had one side as me (ret rather than holy), hunter, sp, resto shaman, warr tank and then the othe side was druid tank (os), monk healer, rogue, ww, ele which worked better than in the past, I'm not sure exactly what the other side is doing (w/e works for them I guess), our side was pulling pandas, then massive + 2 small, then next 2 small, then 2 medium, row of smalls, then something or other (I DONT KNOW IM JUST AOEING) then ending with large @ 36 energy.

One issue was that although I was standing in shit 24/7 (mine/tank's bad positioning), people were dying fairly fast, and a resto shaman doesn't feel that well equipped to deal with it?

(OH we're playing more today so more logs will be incoming)

[Barrun]

Resto shaman is very strong on this fight, that shouldn't be your issue. Healing the massives can be a strain at moments but Healing Rain, HST and glyphed Chain Heal are enough to get by without using any cooldowns if you think you'll need them later. HTT and Ascendance are both great if something goes wrong such as a Matter Swap fail or a spark exploding, and Healing Surge is very effective for healing people that are slow to respond to things on the ground. Windwalk totem is pretty essential on the mogu side if the slow debuffs are up too long, and picking up Totemic Restoration will give the shaman an extra Windwalk if need be. There's absolutely no excuse for a resto shaman to not be able to perform their job on this fight.

[squarefaced]

Uh, update, we killed it now, thanks for all the help it was great, would it be ok in terms of misleading title to then ask questions about thok in this thread too? Since it gives nice background

[Thalur]

Just go ahead and ask

And you should be able to change the thread title.

[squarefaced]

We've now had approx 30 wipes on Thok, we started the night with 1 tank (using our crit mastery warrior), 3 heal (monk 568, pala 570, shaman 572), and rogue/ww/hunter/ele/boomkin, we then swapped to the parry etc warrior tank, who we managed to keep alive better - other one was getting raped, they're both 569-70.

The whole night I was having to change/refine cds, add more in or move them earlier, and on most of the tries, our cds had to be burned well before scheduled, meaning that i'd step in between the two ranged groups to pull us into next phase rather than dying (using 3 groups in healing rain range). Last hour of the raid we had our ele shaman healing instead of resto as rsham went to do something.

Unfortunately we failed a bit with logs so only have 6 tries (early tries), http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...ses&boss=71529

Initially as holy paladin i was using ef with int build, 14k spirit, 7170 haste, however I tried SH instead (no time to change reforge), and had slightly different results, but since it was my first time using SH (i swear by EF), I found that once entering 'panic mode' i ceased using judgements on cd and just panic healed, which could obviously have been better on my part. Will have more logs from tonight's tries around 2000, and I've now reforged to mastery, and significantly less spirit.

Our cd rotation as the night drew to a close ended up being something like

5) LH - i wanted to pop it earlier to allow for reuse before end of stacking since we were phasing very fast
7) When ele was dpsing, HTT, after he went healer and we were 2 tanking, it was then rallying/banner 1
10) personals, hs if needed, bop on resto shaman (2nd rallying and banner used after 1st goes down)
13) devotion + tranq from boomkin
15) guardian and AW from me
17) HA + DF
19) personals and HS again
21) ranged move to melee and smoke bomb

We chose to have the 'move in' time much earlier than "advised" as people have said in other threads how lower stacks is fine, see berserk first etc. We wanted to save all the resto shaman's cds for the poison stacking, and have him roll cds to take us to 10+ (I'd have HA and DF back), though after more reading up I've come across doing 13 stacks running gives 3 mins between phases? But is that press key at 13 stacks, or use key to open for 13?, in that case we'd have an easier time with cds as we could use shaman cds in p1 too then.


Another thing is we had resto and ele shamans both using conductivity, but sometimes we had no healing rain up at all, what can we/they do to solve this, or what builds do shamans/monks use, any insight from people that have healed it would be good.