I've rummaged through the "Hydross + Shield Block" thread and can't find a lot of discussion on this...it's mostly a tanking gear discussion.

Last night was my guild's first night of real Hydross attempts (we'd poked around SSC before, done some attempts on a few bosses). We aren't going to tank-and-spank him through 250%, as it's clearly not intended and won't be possible in the next patch. I'm pretty pleased with our progress, got him to 50% on the last couple attempts before a tank death (OOM healers). We were lasting 8 minutes on those attempts, so clearly our control is about where it needs to be and now it's a question of DPS (obviously far from where it needs to be). As DPS gets more familiar with the fight I'm sure they'll get faster, but we're looking at having to almost double what we're putting out in order to score a kill.

Our DPS has never been stellar...we've struggled with many of the DPS races over the last couple years, particularly with Loatheb. We consistently kill 4 adds before Mag spawns (minimal potting) and kill Gruul in about 12 growths. Consumables will obviously be a big chunk of the DPS we need to make up for the kill but there's clearly something we're missing in terms of pushing it to the proverbial limit.

Last night we were pulling all our DPS off Hydross to burn the adds down quickly when they spawned. This led to the melee underperforming...less than half of what the casters were putting out (top caster was around 300k, top rogue was about 130k). It might be worth keeping the melee on Hydross full-time. Also, while we initially banished 2 adds, we found that our DPS was killing the first two fast enough that they had to wait around for a few seconds on Banish before finishing the second pair off. Using fears instead of Banishes (or maybe ranked down banishes?) we could squeeze out a little more DPS there. We could also pull the adds next to Hydross to use Whirlwind/Blade Flurry/Multishot.

Basically, we have a huge DPS gap ahead of us and any of the ideas I've come up with seem like drops in a bucket. Is there some big-deal concept I'm missing or do we just need to refine our execution, stack the raid with caster DPS and pot to hell and back?

I've never done Hydross before, but ranked down banish for at least the 3rb add to be killed would be a very smart idea.

You already know all you need to kill Hydross, work on your execution and you should have him down. Over time, experience and slightly better upgrades will make the encounter a bit less stressing (but far from trivial).

You definitely need to DPS pot to hell and back for Hydross. I'm certain that Blizzard will needs to reduce Hydross's HP to smoothen the raiding difficulty curve, considering he's after Gruul.

That said, you can do a couple things to help perk up your DPS:

- Minimize melee. Sad, but true. Melee that are grouped up on the frost phase can get chain ice blocked. I believe our kill had 2 or 3 rogues + the tanks.
- Group the first two adds together. This will help with multishot, bladeflurry, and potentially whirlwind/cleave. Throw 20 and 30 second banishes on the other two--they should break right on time.
- Make sure your shadow casters are being DPS efficient. Their damage scales greatly with single targets and it might not be advantageous for them to follow the DPS train for the adds. Even normal casters can waste time on spells that don't finish.
- Finish the fight in the nature phase, taking at 250%, blowing last stand/nightmare seed, then shield wall on enrage. You should be able to bring him down quite a bit in the last minute.

We had 8-9 healers last night, changed some folks around over 4 hours of attempts. 3 Rogues the whole time (all daggers with Malchazeen or Gladiator MH), 4 tanks. From everything I've read it was a pretty solid raid group. The point about Shadow-based damage is really interesting and something I hadn't thought of...especially since we have a lot of good geared Warlocks and a dynamite Shadow Priest.

Melee are an absolute liability on this fight especially if you don't do it in NR phase exclusively. More ranged dps helps a lot. The frost phase could use some work in this regard, melee are a detriment since they need to basically choose to dps or not dps him and risk getting water tombed since depending on how many melee you have, you can only spread so far around him. A ranged class just needs to find a safe place to stand, and if they get tombed, its not a huge dps loss for 1 person to get it.

The solution to melee dps and tombs is pretty simple - make groups of 2-3 melee stand on top of each other and have each group spread out, letting you control the amount of melee that get chain tombed.

A large part of the fight seems to be having 2 tanks that can generate substantial threat very quickly on the transition. An HS/Shield Slam should be enough to overpower the dots very quickly. The tank knows when the transition is coming, he can save up a ton of rage when the time is right. If DOTs are the only things on Hydross for the first couple seconds, unloading a full rage bar into him should give you solid aggro.

That is 2-3 people not dealing any damage while stunned versus 1, and 2-3 people who need to be healed versus 1. That isn't really a positive.

Well "versus 1" assumes you have basically no melee DPS.

In my experience, rogues top DMs on Hydross (non-250 strat). Last week we had a rogue do 542k damage over 10 minutes, with next caster being a mage at #3 with 425k damage -- and the mage typically tops DMs on almost every other fight.

I'm not really seeing the "melee are a liability" part.

Well the difference to me is (just on the frost phase, nature phase no one is inhibited by anything really) is to be able to do your job, you really can't just stand somewhere and no one will be near you. The previous suggestion, while a viable solution, doesn't change the fact that if 2-3 melee get tombed by standing on top of each other, its more healing required and more dps lost compared to a caster or hunter or anyone who can dps at range getting tomb.

Thats really solid rogue numbers. I'm just assuming you he's grouped with a shaman obviously, we don't have one at the moment so our melee dps isn't as high compared to our caster dps. On our kill the top was Warlock, Mage, Hunter, but I can't remember how much they did off the top of my head.