4.03 Raid Mechanics and testing
 

A thread to test and document boss mechanics, that are either not well described elsewhere or not completely understood, from the first four raids in Cataclysm.

Please focus on tested mechanics as opposed to theories of how they may work, and note any areas that aren't fully understood. From my experience so far it seems that some boss mechanics are more complicated than have been described, and some strats may be working for un-intended (or at least, poorly understood/described) reasons. For example, Magmaw’s Magma Spit ability (10-man):

• Hits for approximately 36k damage
  
• Cast at 3 targets each time
  
• Prioritizes targets out of melee range, but will target melee if there’s no one at range. (we found that either having 1 player at range, or lots of players at range works best, having only 2 or 3 was difficult on our healers).
  
• Cast anywhere from every 5 seconds to every 20 seconds (ignoring impale phases). This appears to be a random time between casts, and can be a problem before the first impale if you get some bad luck as this can easily be the #1 source of damage for the raid if it's cast as often as possible. Subsequent impales come much more often, and so the DTPS from all abilities, including this, drops significantly in the 2nd half of the encounter.

Magmaw (Normal, 10 + 25):

If only 1 person is at range and everyone else is tight in melee range, Pillar of Flame will always target the single ranged person. We found this extremely helpful because the graphic on the floor indicating it's arrival is incredibly hard to see with 15 people stacked up + totems + healing circles + etc.

We found Magma Spit regularly targeted Melee in 25 (I'm positive, I died to it at least once). Not sure if Spit reacted otherwise in 10. Perusing our log shows no overt preference to melee or ranged targets. I would suspect not, or Iluminati's everyone-in-melee technique would have left their sacrificial lamb eatting every Magma Spit.

In 25man we had a Pillar of Flame dropped on a Melee target in Melee range (only this melee and one pet took Pillar of Flame damage). This only occurred once during our pulls and kill. A preference for ranged makes most sense and Iluminati's experience obviously worked for at least one pull and it would be statistically unlikely the sacrificial victim was randomly chosen each time if the rest were valid targets.

With regard to Magma Spit (in the 10 man version), I wonder if the ability is a conal AoE. I noticed on a messed up Pillar placement, when the ranged shifted to behind the melee, the healing went up substantially. I did not notice a preference for ranged for this ability.

On our last Magmaw attempts we ended up with 3 ranged killing the parasite (2 hunters and a mage). The hunters would stand at range to DPS and everyone else was stacked in melee range. When one of the hunters was targeted with pillar of flame they would move, and the mage would move out to range to help slow/kite/dps down the parasite. Sometimes a healer would have to move out of melee range to be able to heal these three. The damage taken from Magma Spit was usually hunters>mage>ranged healer>everyone else, with the hunters getting hit 10-20 times, and most melee only getting hit 1 or 2 times. And there appeared to always be 3 Magma Spits as long as there were targets left (even totems, pets, etc.)

The apparent preference for ranged made our strategy (having 3 people at range) basically the worst choice possible as we ended up with 3 players taking huge amounts of damage, which was pretty much the worst case for healing. Either having 1 person at range, or lots of people at range would appear to have been better ways to deal with this mechanic.

Even taking that in to account, there is a lot of variability in how often Magma Spit gets cast. I've seen logs where it's almost every 5 seconds, and logs where it's averages about every 10 seconds, which is approximately the difference between needing to 4 heal (with 346ish gear) and being able 3 heal with some room to spare. Figuring out if this is just random, or if there's some logic to it would have a bearing on group make up, at least until we outgear it.

The Pillar of Flame ability will not target the one person at ranged if they are moving and will instead target someone in melee range. We were able to consistently reproduce this effect during two different pulls.

10-man Magmaw
I can corroborate Illuminati's experience of the Pillar of Flame picking a ranged target, even when there is only one player at range. We used this tactic about a half-dozen times, with only one pillar in 'melee' range the entire time. I think the anomaly was due to one player not stacking in quite close enough.
I'd be surprised if what Stangg suggested, wrt the Pillar only targeting the ranged player if she's not moving, is true. It just seems too dissimilar from the fight mechanics I've come to expect across 3 years of raiding.

On a related note, how about Magmaw's melee attacks? Although we had some good attempts with a controlled Pillar of Flame using only one player at range, we ended up moving all our ranged DPS and healers out of melee range anyway for our kill. We were experiencing uncontrolled deaths when Magmaw was transitioning; both when the chains have been applied and Magmaw is entering the vulnerable phase, and at the end of the vulnerable phase when Magmaw breaks free. Combat logs show it was a regular melee attack being thrown out, and we're certain it wasn't an aggro pull. On our kill, our rogue was one-shot coming out of the vulnerable phase, but we were able to continue on regardless with our ranged DPS and healers a safe distance away. I don't think it's a regular aggro pull, anyway; certainly there is an aggro reset at the end of the vulnerable phase, but we've had the odd one-shot at the start of the vulnerable phase as well. In one case, our holy priest was one-shot entering the vulnerable phase. It seems there's a brief period where Magmaw is untargetable and will throw out melee attacks on some unknown basis. Perhaps proximity?
Anyone know how to control this a bit better?

We experienced similar problems and this is how we dealt with it:

While Tank#1 is mangled, Tank#2 is taunting/dpsing/threating as hard as he can.

When "Vulnerable" phase is about to be over (but before it is actually over!) everyone except tank #2 gets at max melee range (or slightly further). Tank#2 is as close as possible without falling off. The tank should be the first one hit and everyone else should immediately get back "all the way" into melee range. If you don't move back into melee range fast enough, it's very easy to be surprised by a flame pillar in the middle of your group.

When Magmaw picks up the (primary) tank for the Mangle ability, that tank's threat disappears from the threat list. This leaves your top DPS at the top of the threat list. Whether tank's threat returns to the list unaltered after Mangle is somewhat moot, since in current gear DPS uniformly surpasses the last-known threat of a tank during transition and impale.

Unfortunately, Magmaw continues to melee for 1 to 3 attacks after he begins the Mangle. In 25 a plate DPS can usually survive one hit, sometimes two if heals were already luckily incoming, in 10man a plate DPS can generally survive without issue. Mail or leather wearers would have little survival chance (a Rogue in #2 threat could try an anticipatory Evasion or Vanish). When impale completes it's possible again for DPS to be primary threat, since the tank could not taunt (or taunted pointlessly) during this phase (from what I've seen the exposed head is not the same as Magmaw for threat purposes).

The best solution around this in 25man is to use two tanks. The second tank taunts when the first is Mangled. This week I'm planning to experiment with the 2nd tank taunting outside of melee range a few seconds before Mangle (melee continues on MT as OT is out of range), MT taunting "back", then 2nd tank stepping into melee range. Ideally this would place the 2nd tank ahead of all other DPS, so when the primary tank is Mangled the second immediately becomes a true tank.

In 10man the best solution may be for everyone to evacuate melee range as impale ends. The MT should be dropped and as the only valid target in melee range be the default target for melee attacks. MT taunts, everyone steps back in.

Agreed, we found this to be the preferred method in 10-mans, although everyone has to be on their toes to move out right as impale ends to not get 1-shotted, and then move back in so they don't end up with a pillar of flame on top of the raid.

Another ability that I've heard conflicting/incorrect info on is the chains. Magmaw has a chance to break 1 chain if he hasn't been impaled yet, and the chain ability is on a fairly long CD (not spammable as some strats suggest), so it's much more efficient to have all your players on his head wait and throw their chains at the same time. This should impale him on the first try, kind of obvious once you see it work.

It sounds like you use 1 tank in 10 man. How do you handle the massive armor debuff on your tank? Chain cooldowns for 2 minutes straight? We thought this might be doable, but instead opted to use cooldowns on the mangle and just tank swap afterwards. This gives us a greater number of cooldowns overall for our raid and tanks, and significantly less tank damage.

You can also simply have an offtank taunt like 5 seconds before mangle and have the offtank eat all of the mangles while having your MT always tanking the boss. This also means the MT should be highest on threat when the OT is mangled.

We had a pally tank and a dedicated pally healer, plus the tank is getting a fair amount of group heals as well. CDs were used for mangle, but the extra damage from the armor debuff was just healed through. Granted this is a fairly high HPS to maintain single target healing, but it's certainly do able (looking back through the logs again, it doesn't seem very efficient though). This freed up our 2nd tank, a DK to help out if (when) parasites got out of control, which was much more likely to cause us to wipe.

Also, making sure that Magmaw gets impaled on the first try every time (good communication when people hop on his head) definitely cuts down on tank damage.

Edit: We 3 healed it, I would assume this is the default strategy since I think 2 healers would get overwhelmed fairly quickly. The DTPS before the first impale can easily be above 35k, which is out of reach of most 2 healing teams in current gear, even taking CDs and good luck in to account. If you're having problems with healing, you could always try 4 healing it, especially if the 4th could kick in some DPS during the impales. I believe he has a 10minute enrage which leaves some leeway, and should be doable with an average of about 12.5k per dpser.

Here's the log from our kill: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

During a trial phase of a kiting method for the worm spawns, i was able to reproduce an effect whereby I (ret pally) would run out of melee range 3 seconds before pillar was cast, and out of 9 attempts had a 100% success rate at forceing the pillar to spawn on me, and during every attempt i was constantly running. Thus, reinforcing the preference for a ranged target and disproving the nontargeting of mobile ranged.

EDIT: 9 boss attempts, not 9 pillar spawns.

1 tank 3 heals is definitely a workable strategy, we have been using that successfully, regardless of having a DK cheese tank the adds, or ranged + heals swap back and forth.