Hi all,

I’m in a guild that has Karazhan, and Gruul on farm status and have just recently been having a go at Magtheridon's Lair. The encounter itself is not the problem, but his trash. We seem to spend a tremendous amount of the evening clearing his annoying four packs, that we end up with only 2-3 proper tries on him before we have to clear again.

Any advice would be appreciated on how to handle that trash quicker.

Assign a tank and a rogue for interrupts to each, pull them a bit away from each other, make people spread out to dodge rain of fire and make them use sta heavy gear. Your healers need to be in their toes as there's usually heavy damage plus the dispelling, but clearing all those packs in 15-20 min is easily doable with some practice.

First you need to understand the abilities of those trashpacks, all of the warlocks have a couple abilities they will spam, and depending on those you'll need 1-3 tanks on them.

- SW:Pain
- unstable affliction
- deathcoil (first person in aggro)
- fear (second one in aggro)
- purple aoe thing which knockbacks/aggro whipes
- rain of fire
- shadowbolt aoe

I'm not sure if they are limited in the abilities they can use, or if they just use them randomly.

Now, what you want to do is to keep at least 2 tanks/2 healers on each add from the start. You assign 3 positions to them (one on top of the stairs where your raid is, and 2 downstairs, preferably far away from each other so there aren't any double shadowbolt volleys on the healers)
Have one tank tank it, and the other one ready to feral charge/intercept+taunt once the MT for that add gets death coiled (happens a lot). Mostly you'll have 1 person tanking it, while the offtank runs around being chainfeared (tremor totem helps a lot). Communicate on vent to have a third tank run in if you have an add which is using the purple aoe which resets aggro, deathcoil on the MT + fear one the offtank and then another aggro reset after one of tanks taunts it back means the add will run around uncontrolled for the rest of the fight.

Basically, bring heaps of tanks, spread them out, and practice. Our first clears took 45 mins, now we get them down in 12 minutes all the time. (if only we could do the same with magtheridon)

I am pretty sure the fear is the closest target that isn't the MT. I usually run with our MT while he pulls the Warder back to the raid so I eat the first fear instead of a healer. I don't need to be on his hate list to get the fear.

Im not so sure, im often getting feared when im healing the offtanks (often chained) when im standing further than the paladins healing them too.

Nobody mentioned the most important thing?

they can be interrupted/curse of tongue/mind numbed??

Do strategy before you pull the first add.

We pull EVERYTHING back to the entrance, with 2 tanks handling whichever mob we're currently DPSing and 3 tanks dealing with the other 2 mobs. Four healers are assigned to the "front" tanks (mobs not being DPSed) with another healer assigned to those 4 healers (so they can focus on tanks and not worry about keeping themselves up...obviously they need to move out of Rain of Fire and that sort of thing). Everyone else is in the back dealing with the focus-fired mob, which is tanked in the little alcove opposite where you zone in (to allow as many healers as possible to LOS the volleys). Make sure your interrupts are on...especially on the "front" tanks. They need to focus as much as possible on keeping the volleys rare.

I got a chance to see these guys last night, and I came up with some theories I'd like to run by those here. You guys proposed this list of abilities:

- SW:Pain
- unstable affliction
- deathcoil (first person in aggro)
- fear (second one in aggro)
- purple aoe thing which knockbacks/aggro whipes
- rain of fire
- shadowbolt aoe

I'd like to refine this to:

Hellfire Warder
-Shadowbolt AoE
-Shadow Word Pain
-EITHER Deathcoil (first person in aggro) OR fear (second person in aggro)
-EITHER Unstable Affliction(causes purple AoE?) OR Rain of Fire

I'm not precisely sure about the breakdown, but consistently when we wiped on a pull, a mob that feared the first on aggro before would fear the first on aggro again, they'd fear the second on aggro if they'd done that before, they didn't rain if they hadn't done that before... I didn't see any who did both fears. I didn't see any who didn't Shadowbolt. I always saw tons of Shadow Word Pains. I did not see Unstable/Fire Rain on every add, hence my theorycraft. (Our strat was to tank 2 of them far away and pull the first one farther back, so the one we were killing was pretty much always far away enough that you could distinguish what was coming from it and what was not).

As a side note, I felt super useful here. I wish we'd had another dps shaman to bring in. Ranged Interrupts are very nice.

Grounding Totem will eat fears and I believe Deathcoils as well. I think they all have the abilities but they just don't use everything very oftem. I am not quite sure about this but I believe I have dodged rain of fires for a while on one add and then when it is about to die it does its shadow nova and runs around.

Have 1 tank on each at first, and 2 tanks on DeathCoil duty: when someone's mob DeathCoil's the tank calls for help and he gets duo-tanked...

Warlocks always keeping CoT up, to allow for the tanks to interrupt some Shadownovas...

Keep the mobs all far away from each other, so only tanks and their healers are eating Shadowbolts from the mobs you're not zerging...

This works like a charm for us...

They might want to try pen gear as well? We only had 2 shaman, myself and a restoration spec. I got resisted sometimes but it was fairly infrequent whereas my resto buddy said it was happening all the time. I don't think he had any spell hit gear... with ToW down I have 14% spellhit and 37 Penetration... Next time I go in I'll try to get specific resist rates for the spell at those values.

since we use 5 tanks on mag himself we usually have like 2 druids 3 warriors in group...

We have a druid sit back with the camp and solo tankthe one being DPS'd... we then have 2 offtanks on each of the other 2 adds... with any tank spec druids primary aggro oon the offtanked so the warrior OT's down there can stay in zerker and break fear sometimes. We then put 1.5 healers on the offtanks (total of 3 raid healers, 1 floating in middle)... The mobs are tanked in a zig zag to make the best use of the environment and allow all the raid members to only be in danger of one shadow bolt volley. Oh, make sure your locks are dropping soulboxes every other pull or so AND make sure u got someone specced into uber HP stone... so key for the boss fight and also helps on the trash.

With this Trash strat we generally clear all the trash with 0 deaths, but obviously occasionally we'll have some death coil spammer mob that might get a healer or two... and, like any guild, a string of uber bad luck can cause us to lose a handful... I dont think we've wiped on a pull in a few raids and it usually only takes us about 18-20 minutes to clear all the trash, if not less.

To clarify: The fear, just like the fear on the boss fight from the adds, targets the 2nd closest person to mob... if somoene steps between the mob and the tank, even the tank can be feared... doesnt happen often, but definitely has happened to me once or twice and a couple other tanks. understanding the fear mechanic in here helped tremendously on the boss fight as we were able to control the fear while we got really good at the fight... after we got good at the fight we stopped worrying as much about the fears and just dealt with them (this comes when ur healers are better at healing the 5 OTs during the first minute of hte fight). Before that point though, we would position a mage or hunter in ways that would cause them to eat fears instead of OT healers... once healing is stabilized and ur tanks are potted up... its better to let a healer get feared because DPS is paramount... ur off-tanks shouldnt be afraid to use CDs on your kill shot.

And for the record, enhancement shaman own the 5th add if its up during Quake... If not an option, make sure you have smart mages... Im sure alot of people reading this thread are close to the point or at the point where most wipes are caused by the 4th and 5th adds being out at the time of mag's release.... If 3 healers cant keep the mag tank up for about 25-30 seconds its time to either look for new ones or explain to them they are probably going to dump their mana bar before the last add dies..

This seems pretty crucial for pretty much every TBC boss at the moment. Our first day in Mag's Lair we'd spend 20-30 mins clearing the trash, then 10 mins or so working out strategy/cubes after that, leaving us almost no time to work on the boss before trash respawned.

Even if you aren't reliably getting him to phase2 yet it's worth working out at least a basic cube rotation, assigning all the tanks/healers/utility to their roles and such before you pull the first trash pack.

I try to get all that managerial work done during the trash clear.

This has been my experience as well. I ate a fear while still out of combat once. Another warrior's blood rage should have been more than enough to have him eat the fear over me.

There is enough room for a X-------X--------Xraid spread on all pulls, for the first it needs a mob tanked near the portal to have that spread with no risk of aggro on the patrol though.

Can't help with exact range though, sorry.

We do every pack in the same place: One add on the ramp, one add right by the zone-in, one pulled way to the back, and one across the room from the zone-in. 2 off-tanks, 4 on.
Misdirection is a godsend for these