http://www.juggernautguild.com/wws/w...919/index.html

Pretty sure the 1400(nearly) dps Crookgrin did on this kill made up for the extra healing he required. You're kinda right, though. We killed Hydross with 2 melee groups like this and the stuns definitely slowed things down, even though melee is capable of dealing the highest dps of any class on this encounter(I think).

Conclusion: One melee group good. Two bad. Kinda cool how it balances out.

Dots should never be enough to pull aggro during the transition. I'd really investigate your tanks about this one. Make sure everyone is running the latest version of KTM and have it set to Hydross as the master target. It accounts for his aggro wipes on phase transitions. Watch it closely and see how much threat each warrior can immediately generate on the transition. Leave shadowpriests on Hydross full time - asking them to follow the assist train on the adds is extremely inefficient -- not only for their own personal DPS, but for the mana regeneration they give their party. All they have to do is watch KTM closely during the transition, let the tank establish that first burst of aggro, and then go.

Quigon already illustrated how this is the poster fight for consumables. You kill adds faster, which gives you a greater amount of (consumable laden) time on Hydross. The benefit here just cannot be overemphasized.

That is really solid melee dps for that fight. As long as people stop directly damaging hydross the transitions aren't bad at all, you just risk a miss/dodge can be bad, but parries can be entirely eliminated and positioning properly prevents any real risk of a bad avoidance streak messing up the transition. My only annoyance is not being able to Revenge with absolutely reliability since you can only dodge/parry his attacks and not block, but if people are paying attention to their threat its not a big deal.

It's not the changeover that is tricky, per se (though if your tank/hunter is a tiny bit slow or lagged - in Australia latency becomes more of an issue than most of the rest of you are used to - or misses and you get a bad dot tick or two it can be trouble with poorly positioned caster), but the fact that the tanks losing aggro is not something you want to happen ever. Because it's a fight with an aggro reset this also means that your shadow priests and warlocks might not be able to go all out for a little while when using full consumables. Even after banishing and doting up the second add I have to be a little careful early on Hydros - and by the time you feel really comfortable, or would want to use a soul shatter and go all out, it's time to swap sides and start again.

I am just incredibly impressed at how much damage your melees deal out. We have one rogue who tipically deals out around ~900 DPS, with a non-enhancement shaman, but 1300+ is absolutely impossible for us. Our fury warriors are also nowhere near on top as yours are.

I wonder if the difference is in spec/gear or just enh shaman vs non enh.

Yeah I don't really see how 1300 dps (or 750k ! damage) is possible for a rogue. The enhancement shaman adds that much? I was #1 damage for Hydross tonight with about 550k damage. How would they not pull agro?

Apologies if I am dumb and not seeing something, but why is a Felguard build so exceptional on Hydross? What makes Felguard better than the 21/40 demsac destro builds our warlocks seem to enjoy? I thought that was one of the highest nuking builds, with only some mana issues.

Our warlocks are fairly dominant on the dmg meter on this one, but the rogues definitely hang in there well, as do the mages. As far as the dots, they won't aggro unless tank misses, but, we use misdirect to compensate for any screwball behavior on flips, since he likes to hover at the tripline and the misdirecting just helps to lock up the initial aggro and just keeps things safer.

Quite simply put, flask your raid and you should slaughter him with where you are at. When we were doing it, our best attempt was 52% midway thru our 2nd full night at about 8 minutes. We flasked and the next attempt was a 2% that we lost to enrage(failed to activate shield wall in time).

Four attempts later he was dead at 10:10. The value of flasks cannot be overstated on this fight, and it is not even remotely possible without them.


Flasks will let you get thru the adds with 15-20 seconds to spare(assuming u dump all but shadow priest on adds and warlocks keep hydross dotted while focusing adds), giving you all the dps time you will need. At ~1:40 left when you flip to nature from frost, quad banish and end it.(Note: if you don't have 4 warlocks, i feel bad for you, but just kill however many you have to and banish the rest)

Quigon: He definitely has some issues as you noted. We had one instance where he just flipped to frost, aggrod a priest way out in the nature zone, went almost all the way to him, priest fades, and he came back to me and did not change to nature, though he had to have been in the zone for at least 4-5 seconds. In general, as long as you take him well over the line, tripping seems to be fairly clean as long as you don't miss everything, but yea, sometimes an attempt just goes south when you did everything right.

There was a mistake with the logs apparently and all of our dps numbers were inflated! As well as my ego. Sorry for the false information!

Not sure--I'm not a warlock but during a long fight the Felguard is going to be doing significant damage with cleaves etc.

I don't really know how/why it works but I do know that the damage is insane.

A pet that can do 100k+ on a fight is pretty ridiculous I think.

And yeah...what Quigon said; dots are dangerous even with MDs.

That's fair, and true. We did have one transition where he was literally 30 yards out from the beam before finally switching to NR phase. I almost thought he had bugged out. Obviously I was already on that side at that point. I should have mentioned the part about being really aware of where you're standing just before the transition is called, and when it's called. Positioning is everything. Best part is when you get nailed with the 100% water tomb + sludge at the same time though.



I definitely wont refresh dots just before a transition is about to happen, but I don't worry myself to death over it. If we're going nature to frost, there's no risk whatsoever in me heading over to the frost side if I'm not near pulling aggro.

I sort of wonder how they coded the mechanics for his phase change -- almost seems to me like it's a "pulse" check every 5 seconds or so, which is why sometimes he'll change immediately and other times it'll take longer. But yeah, pretty crappy.

If you have two hunters in the raid, a Misdirect onto the appropriate warrior at each transition is an immense help. I can't begin to count the number of times that Misdirect has saved a lock when my SCT reads: Heroic Strike (Miss) Shield Slam (Dodge). The global cooldown is an ETERNITY in that situation.

I'd also like to add my support to the "When he decides to transition is completely fucked up" idea. Sometimes he'll go Nature as soon as he crosses that "line" made by the two Naga banners and sometimes our Frost tank will hold him a good 10 yards from these banners and I'm just waiting for him to turn green. You can't reliably predict when the transitions are going to occur so you can nail him instantly with your abilities although I've been seeing that transition behavior is somewhat consistent within a given fight but not between attempts. Sometimes there are outliers in which he transitions quickly whereas the rest of the time it has taken awhile. Thinking back, some of those seem to occur when random shit happens on the transition that cause us to stop moving him because the incoming new MT got Water Tombed. These observations are making me think that Snowy's theory of "pulse checking" is correct. All that being said, the Misdirects do help minimize bad transitions due to missed abilities and instant/delayed switches.

There are solutions to my complaints, that wasn't my point I just was mentioning where I think consistency could be added.

You can time dots easily, you can double MD, you can have the old MT, also HS/SS - and we do all of that. But since theres little to no grace period on the switch itself (none I think), he can move that billi-pixel and double transit when he decides to pulse/change early on the move. Its just weird how inconsistent the changeover is, and it makes him artificially harder... kind of like say, Faerlina's rad version of rain of fire. Actually that's a terrible analogy... but I'm already heavily digressed.

I definitely agree there is a pulse... but what is weird is how tonight we had 2 transitions... in the same second, same timestamp (I kid you not, I mean thats just fucked up). Yet sometimes he sits there for a good 5-7 seconds and casts extra abilities before changing. Both are problematic.

DoTs, as mentioned, are a scary thing. Tombed on two transitions, and I still managed to pull aggro.

Having your shadow DPS on the 2nd (or 3rd with "three tanks") and then the boss will add a good chunk to raid DPS. Melee are superior for add DPS, if done correctly, because they lose almost no DPS from switching. Magic DPS is far too ramped to be handling all the adds.

Always, always have your warlocks and shadow priests get over to the side you're going to swap to next and get at max range. It should only take you one wipe to figure this out.

Almost certainly a pulse for the switches, We had some issues last night where he would sometimes change phases very quickly and sometimes we would be sat there waiting for the change to happen.

Also had some issues with the nature/frost tank being hit with the wrong type of damage which i cant see how it would happen, The only way i in nature resistance gear auto attacking could pull aggro from the frost tank is if he resets aggro but i would still often take frost damage for a few seconds.

Im not sure if it would help having shadowpriests and warlocks stood on the side you want him as mentioned before so even if they do pull aggro he's staying in the same zone.

The issue there is they almost certainly die if they pull aggro and it's a downhill battle from there onwards.

Mis directs on each pull should be possible i think? We had 2 hunters in the raid.

Also what percentage are people taking hydross down too before the first lot of adds, Ive heard as low as 80% or less..

Yeah, Hydross should be at 80% at the end of the first phase because it's the longest phase where you can dps him.

Quick question: has anyone seen competitive rogue DPS in this fight without Blade Flurry?

That's not really true. Our longest dps phase is by far the last one. We organize our switches to get a final nature phase with enrage right when 5th nature mark hits so we can cc the 4 nature adds and full dps during all 5 nature marks and a bit more after that (shield wall and well, as long as you can survive when the tank is dead ;x). We already did 30% during that phase, but if the fight went well he's at 15% or so when we do this last switch.

Considering the only DPS alternative besides deep Combat is Mutilate and the boss goes immune to poisons... I'd say no.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to push anything per se. I was just trying to help people based off my personal experience.

For us we had a pretty strict anti-DoT policy for the reasons that Quigon already mentioned (better safe than sorry etc.). Basically we had some low-teen wipes that had pretty much 100% perfect execution in terms of transitions (smooth) and deaths (none or maybe 1 to Tomb at 250% because he sits there and won't fucking move). I know that for one of our warlocks he went from ~250k to ~500k damage on the fight by respeccing from UA to Felguard (I don't know the exact talent distributions). Keep in mind that 250 is with a spec that had to hold back more than 50% so I'm sure a less "dot oriented" warlock spec might before better. As for armory profiles, none of our warlocks still have Felguard that I know of--it was one of those "let's beat this encounter!" type of things.

As the frost tank, my solution to the trip issue is to simply run until he trips due to the shady nature of it, because if that mark hits 250 someone is toast.