Apologies for starting a new thread for this, please move to the Shitheap if you deem it to be unnecessary but I couldn't find a suitable topic to post under.

Simple question really, my guild just killed Hydross (finally) and we're thinking of starting on Lurker so I've been digging up some strategy guides from various websites and watching movies of the kill. Now all of these movies are pretty similar except one, which is the DnT movie. Instead of running in circles (a la C'thun) to avoid spout they just all hop into the water at the appropriate moment. What I noticed is that all the piranhas appear to be dead, and upon entering the water players are afflicted with a "scalding water" debuff for 1k damage per tick. This seems to suggest that they've somehow flicked a switch or valve somewhere to (maybe) heat up the water and (perhaps) kill all the fishies? My question is: does anyone know if such a switch/valve exists and if so are they willing to share the information.

Reason I ask is that, while most of my guildies are reasonably skilled, there's more than a couple that I think might lack the coordination (aka basic ability to run in a circle) to avoid spout, and watching that DnT movie makes me that there's a viable work around.

My understanding is that to get the water scalding you need to clear all trash in the entire room, and it will be hard to get more than 1 or maybe 2 tries in before you would have to reclear respawns. At the moment probably not worth it, but maybe if they increase respawn times.

They have increased the spawn timers on the trash. So now it should be 2 hours and "plenty" of time to kill the lurker below :-)

Good luck.

And doesnt it stop spawning when you've killed certain bosses now? Or isnt that all trash?

What's wrong with using the water regardless?

I never take more than 1-2 hits from fish though I usually just blink through the water spout

Off topic, but is it just me or are people here becoming increasingly becoming actually afraid to make new threads? It seems even worthwhile threads are starting off with "Sorry if this doesn't warrant a thread but..."

Anyway... just saying I thought it was quite humorous.

Yes, clear out the pumping stations. The reason people do it this way is it decreases the randomness of the fight. When you jump in scalding water you know how much damage you're going to take. When you jump in without scalding it you could be taking a very wide range of damage, depending on how many fish are spawned by others before you.

Hmm, perhaps they changed it but we had no problem with fish attacks on our attempts this past weekend.

While I think no fish would be better it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. We had more problems with evades and him spouting in random directions after completing the 360.

We use basically the same strat as seen in the DnT video except with no scalding. We ran into a few issues initially with fish swarming but with practice and a few adjustments it wasn't a problem.

The fight is too random and stupid with the fish. We've killed him either way and I almost always blink through the spout or run around the perimeter as jumping in water can sometimes be instant death for cloth depending on how many fish are already up.

So, C'thun was a 100% random encounter? I always thought running in circles wasn't that hard.

We let the people decide should they run or jump down to water (we have fishes), as long as they survive. Personally I find jumping to the water much easier as a healer, but many our DPS guys do this also. We also have most of our ranged DPS guys standing on the small platforms, so diving is the only option for them.

When we did our first tries I was sometimes killed in 1-2 s by the fish. This is avoidable however by spreading out properly. Use the platforms and spread out as much as possible and there will not be huge amounts of fish in one spot.

Getting raped by a mob of fish is entirely avoidable but it requires spreading out amongst the platforms and requires you be careful with group makeup. See what happens is that healing people will agro the fish near them and bring them over to you. If you have for example a shadow priest on one platform and some of his group members on another platform allllllll the fish will agro when he does damage due to VE healing. This will cause a huge ass mob of fish to come and instagib you. Now if you're careful with group makeups and make sure the priest is in a group where all the people are right near him the fish wont "chain" from the other islands. The fish spawns from a single island are easily manageable and won't gib you unless you're in the water for a looooong time.

This also means you need to be careful about any cross platform healing. It definitely requires a little more awareness with what's going on with healing and shadow priests but once you get it down it's not problem at all. We haven't been losing anyone to fishies since we realized shadow priest VE healing was agroing fish from other platforms.

the problem with the "jumping" strategy (without having the area cleared) instead of just running the circle is the fact that you have plenty of time to get back on the platform BUT if the fishes are not yet despawned and low hp / armor classes get a knockback or get "twist" knockbacked after the spout have aggro of all spawned fishes -> xyz dies ...

we had problems killing the lurker with the "everyone can jump in at any time" strat as some of our mages were raped by the fishes and the sheeps in phase 2 were missing. on monday we only allowed 3 ppl to "use" the jump in strat and we downed him that evening.

in fact running in a circle should not be that great problem so why jumping into the water

On our strat all of the ranged dps is on the outer platforms, as well as almost half the healers. This means far far fewer people are getting knocked back by the random target knockback and much less fish are spawning. Doing this and jumping in the water when the spout gets to you has resulted in it being much easier for us to survive.

I think it's safe to say it's just a matter of preference and each guild will find the way they like to do it.

Just because Some guild only used 2 warrior on the Twin Emps instead of 4 tanks doesn't mean it was the "correct" way to kill them.

If it works, who cares what the "correct" way is? And who is defining the "correct" strategy anyways.... I really hope the devs don't expect anything they design to be beaten with a single strategy.

Tanking corner to corner on Heigann also "worked" but was clearly not the way to do it. :P

(Was rather frustrating when they patched that, as we had to slightly relearn our normal strategy as we had to move him further out in the room which messed with the tank's rhythm or something... all in all we wiped on our legit strat a few times cause they fixed the exploit by increasing his mana burn range...)

It does seem that they want you to clear the trash and use the scalding water rather than subject yourself to the randomness that can befall a raid getting eaten by fish.

I don't follow. What if their guild only had 1-2 warlocks? What if those warlocks were bad players and caused tons of wipes because they couldn't execute the transitions correctly? In that case, I think it would be the correct way (for this guild specifically) to kill them.

Not everything can be reduced to simple numbers and min maxing to determine and optimal end all discussion strat.

That's kind of like saying if you don't have priests there should be another way to kill Razuvius. Blizzard has always demanded some sense of class balance whether it be for Tranqshot, or Mind Control, etc.