I hear prot pally tanking but could a holy pally offtank atleast 1 add in healing gear? i'v off tank alot with healing agro and all. My guess is i could free up a tank spot or atleast give enoght time to an offtank to build threat on the other add then come taunt he one i'm offtanking.

While it's possible to keep you alive, it's far too much of a mana soak to even bother with in my opinion.

The way we handle hydross is to use two banishes (one downranked) and have the ranged dps single target everything. Rogues, fury warrior, and shadow priests all stay on hydross full time.

It was probably the harder way to learn the fight but its been working for us for quite some time. I'd suggest it for people only if you are overly confident in your dps, from what i've read here other methods are probably significantly easier to learn.

Its also worth noting that we didnt get hydross down until the patch that they nerfed him.

One extra tidbit: Our last add gets dotted and dragged into range of the melee then ignored by the ranged dps while warriors/rogues aoe it <nature phase only>

If you were still curious, we use a Prot Pally and a feral druid to tank the adds. Our prot pally is around 200 of each unbuffed. I have seen him dip down low a few times, but our healers usually have no problems keeping him up. Fully buffed he only has ~12k'ish HP.
The pally gets snap aggro on the three adds, feral druid picks up the remaining one (which, if not quick enough, goes straight for a healer), and then the feral druid taunts/swipes the other adds to try to spread out the damage.

Our last kill, our hunter in the pallies group "forgot" to put up his NR aura and it was our cleanest kill yet. Of course, getting as much resist gear for the pally and using a flask of chromatic resistance will make it easier for your healers. I also give the pally nature and frost protection pots. (Looking at one of our kills, he used 1 of each, I'll have to ask him when/why).

Your rogues/warriors need to be careful with the cleaves/ww/BF, our rogues tend to be overzealous at times trying to top the dmg meters, and have met many an early death due to BF'ing the adds too early.

All that being said, the hard part about this fight isn't getting the adds down, it's the transitions. Seems we wipe from time to time when bringing in new people who don't realize how aggro sensitive the transitions are. With 5 locks, the AoE will be very easy and clean but be sure they know there shouldn't be any DoTs on Hydross during a transition.. (when more comfortable with him, you can have DoTs on.. but be weary while learning)

Not really a maxing dps issue on hydross but it's related so I will put it here.

It's been almost 1.5 months since we have killed Hydross but it's never smooth for us and it doesn't seem to be improving. We spent more than 3 hours on him yesterday (we were planning on downing 3 bosses...) and the best we have done in the past without a repeat has been 2nd try kill.

Just to summarize the group composition and strategy: We go with 5 tanks (3 warriors, 2 druids or 4+1) 7 healers and rest dps. 2 boss tanks are wearing 490 def & 200+ resist gear for phases, off tanks wear 490 def plus some good resist pieces. At nature phase 4 add tanks gather all adds on Hydross and are AoE'd down. At frost phase, due to the water tombs we couldn't do the same, we always lost a tank, so in this phase adds are grabbed by tanks and using a hunter MA are killed almost where they spawn. Rogues and shadow priests stay on Hydross all the time, tanks that are done with their adds help dps on hydross until switch. Also stop DPS is called during the switches on vent. It's rinse and repeat after this. The problems we face most, sorted by frequency are:

- We lose a healer on switch: Despite telling them not to stand where the MT is pulling the boss which happens to be where the adds are going to spawn and telling them not to use HoTs before transition starts, it's almost guaranteed we will lose 1-3 during an attempt. We are (at least I am) at a loss what to suggest to them in order to survive.

- Similar to the above, split second after a switch a healer gets agro and makes Hydross switch again increasing the add count to 8. We say no HoTs 10 seconds prior to switch but this still happens.

- Again similar to previous one this time a caster gets agro after switch. We aren't suggesting anything to them any more, we just grill them a bit because of not moving with boss to the other side on vent.

- We lose the MT that's about to give tanking duty to the other MT. We guessed that healers were getting a bit too keen on healing the next MT and neglecting the healing on the last 2-3 seconds of the current one. Or, although I don't think this is the case, the transition run begins too late and he takes the last 1-2 swipes at 500%. Usually we start moving at x:10 such as 09:10, 07:10 counting down.

- We some times lose other members but I can't pinpoint what exactly happens each time so I'll pass.

Any advice on what we might improve?

Hydross each week sucks so much of our energy that we have only downed 3 bosses yet and we are close to downing 4th. I was expecting we would be on Vashj by this time already.

Thank you for your input!

Am I reading right you're not using capped resists on the Hydross tanks? And taking him to 250%? That doesn't sound like a wise combination.

If you run with two hunters make sure your next Hydross tank gets a Misdirection on every switch. I've actually never even seen issues with a healer getting aggro on Hydross and causing an extra transition. As for DPS getting aggro, we just tell our DPS to stop attacking entirely when we reach a 100% mark and switch him ASAP; we make a point of never reaching the 250% mark and still generally have time to spare (On good nights generally we get 2 minutes to spare on the enrage, on bad nights about 15 seconds). I'd say risking 250%, especially in Frost, isn't worth it.

Also since you're using enough tanks to have one on each add, make sure every single one of them knows which add to go for. Plan this beforehand. If they still manage to not grab an add in time I'm not sure what to say.

We also AoE the adds in both phases. Chain Heal is extremely awesome for dealing with the occasional bad Water Tomb you'll get while doing so in a Frost Phase, but since the adds should die before you reach the 25% mark the only people in any real danger from getting Water Tomb at this point are the tanks, and that's more because they're stunned and thus unable to dodge attacks then anything.

We initiate switch right after the 100% mark hits. Which incidentally is also the "damage stop" sign for DPS. About 5 to 10 seconds into the 100% mark the switch takes place and we go add hunting. One add remains completely untanked and is focus fired down by all DD. A rouge picks it (always the same viewed from above but some people can't hit the right one repeatedly without another player playing the target marker). It goes down within 5 to 10 seconds and generally does not manage to even do 1 point of damage to anyone despite having no tank on it. There's big aggro ping-pong due to all DDs nuking it from different positions.

Former Phase tank picks up one add (with now completely wrong resists, but that's easily manageable as long as the new marks aren't there), OTs pick up the two remaining adds. Adds are pulled to Hydross. When the first add that is not tanked is down, we generally have the adds firmly in place and AOE fun starts. Some DDs without AOE help a bit with single target on the add that the other-phase tank is tanking so it is guaranteed to be down by the time the mark hits.

Then back to Hydross pounding.

Repeat.

1) Hydross tanks must be in full resist + crit immune, add tanks in partial resist.
2) Just before application of the 100% mark call for "no more dots", and 5 seconds after 100% mark start the transition.
3) We use 4 tanks on adds + Hydross tank, adds are dragged onto Hydross and aoe begins.

We kill Hydross with 2-3 minutes remaining before the enrage.

We always had 3 hunters. One each on NR/FR on Hydross, and a third on an add during frost phase to a mixed gear druid (during nature phase we just aoe everything with a couple novas and it all dies before the first mark, loose or not). We have 2 mixed gear tanks, (druid tanks 2) and the FR/NR MT pickup an add when not tanking hydross.
Obviously this works well as we have 3/4 of the highest raid-dps kills for him on wws. This last week we only had 1 hunters and wow the difference it made. Something like 11.5k instead of 13.5k raid dps. People had to hold back a lot to not pull agro after transitions and quite a few times the 2nd frost add on the mixed gear druid got loose and wasted a lot of aoe dmg.
3 hunters really seems to be the key, at least for us. I hadn't realized how much of a difference it could make until now.

What this guy said. Your main tanks need max resist and uncrittable defense. Bottom line. Healers are probably getting aggro cause they have to bomb heals on tanks that are not geared right, and when he switches, they probably have just landed a heal.

The fight is very easily killed if you stop DPS at the 100% and move him about 5 seconds later.

I see no reason why you would ever want to tank him in 250 these days. The adds should die in like 15-25 (considering what gear you have) seconds with a full AE strat. You should not reach his enrage at all.

What everyone said above is valid. Only point I would make is we've never had any off tanks wear any resist gear, nor do we have our main tanks where any resist gear for the opposite element, and we've never had a problem- you definitely don't want your Main tanks gimping themselves at all to get off tank resist. In 5 or 6 kills we've maybe lost an off tank once, another tank just pops challenging shout and shield wall and then we rezzed the off tank. Just be sure you have a good healer assigned to focus on the off tanks during that time.

We just aoe on Hydross during both phases, a bad water tomb has never caused a problem. The only really bad water tomb is on the transition from frost to nature, when he tombs an off tank or two just as he's being pulled across, and the add gets loose.

We start moving him when the 100% mark hits, he is only tanked in 100% phase for 2 or 3 seconds ideally before he switches.

Using speed pots, invisibility pots, etc. all proved to be unreliable. Just have your tank charge Hydross from the right side by the pillar. He stands near the pillar while you're eliminating the 4-5 elementals that are spawning, then charges in.

For the second question, it's not a bad idea to continue if Hydross has bad transitions for the sake of letting everyone get a feel for the fight. It's a tricky fight to learn at first, so letting people know when to AOE (making sure the adds are grouped up next to Hydross), when to stop DPS'ing before the transition is complete, making sure no dot's are up, etc. However, once you're making progress on the fight, you might just want to wipe it if the initial pull is messed up to ensure you hit the enrage timer. Later on, with more experience and better gear, it's easily doable to kill him even when you have an unexpected transition.

We pull by having the tank intercept on a warlock's eye. There's a point near the right flag where two lines intersect, I put my eye on that intersection, VERY slightly towards hydross (i.e. on the hydross side of the line, but only barely).

We've also been engaging Vashj the same way.


When we were learning the fight, however, at the very start, we just skipped the whole "start in frost phase" thing and just pulled him into nature phase. That let us get good at elementals and transitions, rather than screwing up the engage multiple times, only to have someone mess up the transition and start over again.

We just have our tank run in around the right pillar (the pillar to Hydross' left where the poison elementals are on the assembly line). No speed pot, no invisibility pot... he just hugs the wall and mashes intercept and we haven't had a switch since the first day.

We found the "Intervene an eye" method the most reliable after trying out a few things. We had a fair amount of issues with Hydross moving through the Warrior intercepting him and thus transitioning before, and the same kind of issue with Swiftness potions, and our MT got annoyed at Invisibility pots and the inability to use them in combat, but such problems don't appear to occur with Intervene (Presumably because you're not charging a moving target, and the target you're charging is simply closer).

We've always used invisibility pots. As long as the healers wait for Hydross to be engaged (hang well out of aggro range), it's fine.

Just a quickie to say we got him down this Tuesday, many thanks for all the tips.

We worked it like so:

1...........2

......H......

3...........4


Spawns 1+2 were off-tanked (brought onto Hydross asap)
Spawn 3 was rank1 banished
Spawn 4 was nuked and held by the tank who had just switched from Hydross.
Remaining spawn was collected and dragged to the middle for some AoE.
Our mages reported Blastwave and Dragons breath worked well, as well as AE.

All in all a very easy strat based on info from this thread that worked quite smoothly, we also CC'd the adds at 15% and creamed his chops.

This week we geared up 3 DPS Warriors in 80-90 FrR / NR (not including auras) and had them 2H tank an add each. We have a feral Druid picking up the 4th. I can't tell you how much easier tonight was. Warlocks can spam Seed of Corruption immediately. There's no clumsy struggle for aggro or anything like that. The adds just flopped and we had tons of time to burst DPS Hydross down.

Regarding the pulling of Hydross, I tried it with invisibility pots, but found out you're fine without them if you just pay attention.
I go to the right pilar when I'm going to pull, and build some rage on the adds there. I then get as close to Hydross as I can, while hugging the pilar and making sure I am out of LoS of Hydross. Then when I am as close to him as possible I go for it while mashing my intercept key.
Never failed this way when I payed attention, though I wouldn't recommend this if your Frost Resistance tank likes to drink during raids ; p.

With the lowered hp on Hydross adds, we basically gave up on keeping Hydross in Frost side on the pull since we haven't had dps issues on Hydross using AoE on the adds. The NR tank just pulls Hydross into nature and the other tanks pick up the adds, AoE kills them in 15 seconds, then we just dps Hydross swapping forms right as the 100% mark hits.