As was said earlier, your add offtanks don't need any resistance. You put more pressure on the healers, but especially in 2.1 Hydross is an easy healing fight. Bringing 5 tanks (Warriors/Feral Druids/Prot Pallies) to a raid is not exactly a tall order and I certainly wouldn't call it raid stacking given the number of viable tanking specs/classes right now.

Have Hydross tanks had any difficulty picking up an add out of the transition phase? Anything that makes picking up an add easier before the AoE starts?

We usually have one of our feral druids tank two of them, one of the paladins stuns the 2nd one he picks up so he has time to get to it. If you have the tank get full rage before the transition and have a paladin stun the mob they pick up it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Can anyone confirm that the adds cannot crush and therefore arms warrior OTs could use a 2h and cleave to hold aggro well on 2 adds without taking more damage?

We found that banish one, two ot's, and the third tank being the "other tank" ie frost tank picks up an add too. Conc blow works well so they wont hit you much. Drag them on hydross and AOE+single target. Also, on first nature transition, nature tank AOE taunts, and on second frost transition the frost tank does the same. Just adds a little extra control while the everyone's getting in the groove, and the adds hit for nothing on a maxed resist tank.

Short version - two MT's two OT's and one banish is absolutely sufficient. No one will have to tank more than one.

Asuming the adds have 40k HP average now (isn't that what they're at since of recent patch?), I did a little math.

Asumptions (Perfect World)
No Lag/Delay
Chaincasting
Everything performed in sync

Lets say Seed of Corruption does 2k per target it hits on average. The seeds will go off very quickly with DPS on Hydross, this would allow for warlocks to chain cast seeds on Hydross. They have a 2 second cast time and inflict 2k damage.

So this results to 1k damage per mob, per second, per warlock. In 5 seconds, 1 warlock will do 5k damage per mob. In a raid with 4 warlocks, they can do 4k per mob in 1 second, or 20k damage per mob in 5 seconds. If the mob HP I had above is correct (around 40k), they will do nearly 50% of each add's life per 5 seconds.

Factor in any extra warlocks, count the mages and the adds should be destroyed in under 10 seconds, right? I'm guestimating lag/delay/response etc.

If all these numbers were true, we would use 4 mixed tanks, each tank holds his own mob and we allow a 5+ seconds for aggro gen, then AoE is called in, they shouldn't have trouble holding their target, right?

My math is a lot of wishful thinking and I definately don't claim accuracy. Can anyone give me a real perspective?

Wow! This sounds really too easy. Sounds like a crime. I can't wait till we go back in there .

Similar to the way we do it, we use 3 OT's, 2 of them grab 1 each and are usually wearing minimal resistance gear, 3rd OT grabs 2 adds. We DPS down 1 of the adds the OT with 2 is tanking and then all dps back onto Hydross giving the MT's time to re-establish solid aggro on Hydross himself. The rest of the adds are then AoE'd down with SoC, done it this way with as little as 2 locks without any real problems.

Just going to add in my experiences in case it helps anyone else who is in the middle of learning this encounter.

We're just farming Mag/Voidreaver now and got our first Hydross kill last night. We found with single target DPS we fell behind the enrage timer but with full AOE we lacked control on the adds. We used the method suggested a few posts back which was to banish one mob with a low rank banish, have 3 OT each get one mob and then AE. We always pull the mobs under Hydross to max our dps on adds and Hydross.

Melee dps focus on the first add and when it dies that tank can get ready to pick up the banished mob.

With our current gear level we still had to chain fear/stun/root the last set of adds to make the timer but it was a good compromise between control and damage output.

We found it useful to have the opposite phase tank near the banished mob in case it broke before we were ready. He could pick it up and bring it under the AE.

Good luck!

My guild killed him for the first time last night with about 3.5 hours of work on him total. If you are having trouble on him, going w/ 1 tank per add is the way to go in my opinion. Right from the start we could see that "numbers" wise (DPS, healing needed, mana) this fight is not intensive at all with that strategy, it just comes down to the off tanks being on the ball and picking up each add. We had 2 feral druids and a protection warrior on full time off tank duty, w/ the 4th add being picked up by whatever main tank wasn't on Hydross for that transition. With each tank only holding one mob, I called aoe as soon as I could see all 4 mobs were together on top of Hydross. Single target DPS picked a target each (not assist train, just random) for about 5 seconds to let the MT build some aggro as well. Once we fixed the stupid stuff (messed up pulls, ranged pulling aggro and causing a transition) we killed him fairly effortlessly.

If you're having major issues, give this a try. Pay one of your arms tanks to spec prot for the fight if you need to, but get 3 dedicated off tanks in there. Our adds were never alive at the 2nd mark, and often died within 10 seconds of spawning (3 mages, 3 warlocks aoe'ing.)

Just for interest, its worth pointing out we use one warrior and one pally to tank Hydross, was
no problem and gave us an extra warrior for OTing.

Malkuth

A prot Paladin could hold aggro well on all the adds, I'd just worry about him taking too much damage unless he had great hybrid resist gear. Honestly I don't see how control would be an issue if you had one tank on each add...any tank should be able to hold aggro 1-on-1 for a mob being AoE'd.

On our third day on hydross, we manage to get hydross to 16% before he enrage at 10min. This is our best attempt.
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&m&s=6045-6706

Any idea on how to improve on our raid dps, esp mages and rogues. We use 4 tanks on 4 adds, with mages single target dps.

Your rogues seems to be really low on dps, with them being combat spec they cant have the poison problems of muti spec so they must really do something wrong. Which groups gets the shamans?

First post here.

We are attempting to use a pally tank to hold 3 adds and using 4-5 locks to SoC the adds down with the melee cleaving and blade flurrying and the ranged using a little AoE after the first couple of SoCs.

Wondering a couple things. If we have (in theory) 3 mobs beating on our pally what resist levels he should have to stay up, and if anyone knows if there is a disadvantage to having the tank turn and run with Hydross rather than backing up, or trying to strafe through the transitions.

Arch: Using 4 adds tanks is a decent DPS hit itself. Personally, we use 2 add tanks, along with a 30 second and 20 second banish, leaving 2 or 3 DPSers(usually our shadow priests) on Hydross at all times. If your single target is where it should be your tanks should have plenty of time to autoattack a banished mob for a few seconds. When we hit Nature phase sub 20% we chain CC the adds and DPS down Hydross, to my knowledge we've yet to hit the 250% mark doing this.

If you really wanted to you could eliminate an add tank and have the person moving off of Hydross tank one, but it's just not necessary.

If you're having any kind of DPS issues here, this is your first problem.

Agreed. using the "tank all adds and aoe" strategy, there's no way on earth that your ranged AoE classes should single-targetting any of the adds.

Tank the adds under Hydross and tell Mages to unload Flamestrike etc (be careful of tombs on Frost phase if using Blastwave/DB). Assuming they are fire-specced, and with 5 targets to hit they have over 84% chance for a crit that will refund mana to them anyway.

If nothing else, it's good practice for your AoE when you get to Morogrim as they will need the same AoE skills in a more controlled manner.

Flamestrike tends to miss quite a lot unless your tanks are masters of precision. For us, the switches are pretty chaotic and positioning isn't precise enough for that.

We just mark one add to focus fire down to give the Hydross and add tanks time to generate threat, then we AE the other 3 adds.
Using AE effects is really the way to go to get adds down quickly and have enough DPS time on Hydross himself.

Make sure you dont mark it with a skull though if you use bossmods, since it will take the skull and put it on someone else

The adds aren't level 73, so they should not crush a warrior with 350 defense.

The adds are level 71, which means you need 480 defense as a Warrior (and 405 as a Druid with Survival of the Fittest if I remember correctly) to be crit immune.

Edit: Nevermind, you're talking about crushes not crits.