I've recently been thinking about our last SSC clearance and have realised there are quite a few questions about boss abilities that I don't know the answers for. Just wondered if anyone else can shed some light onto these and perhaps share your own experiences with them.

1. The banishes from the first adds at Leotheras. Is this fully intended to sometimes land on the people tanking the adds or is there some way to bypass it. I first believed it was due to someone being too high on threat but that was proved wrong pretty quickly.

2. Once all the adds are killed at Karathress I have observed that sometimes he actually has different abilities, or fails to use ones he should do. Last week he was using Sear Nova on us when we were dpsing him down (http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=38445) but the week before that he was failing to use this ability. Has anyone else noticed a week where he didn't use this ability? Some times he seems to have Spitfire totem, Sear Nova, the beast enrage and also the Ice stun ability and other times I think I have noticed him with a different combination.

3. This is slightly more Rogue specific perhaps. On Morogrim, I swear on our first kill I was able to cloak of shadows just as the water tomb exploded and received no damage. This happened multiple times in one night and I was never taking the frost damage. This week, and for the previous few kills, I have been unable to replicate this. Did any other rogues try this or notice it? Apparently you can still press healthstone or pot and get that to land before the damage registers though.

4. Slightly more simple question perhaps, and certainly one more commonplace. What makes the adds despawn sometimes on The Lurker Below? Is it something to do with pathing/evading or does someone else know the answer?

I couldn't really find any other posts with these answers in so thought it might make an interesting thread!

The only one I think I have an answer to is #4. For us the lurker below adds despawn if and only if they evade out on somebody.

Haven't seen Karathress too many times with all adds down but both times we've had all the adds down he was using spirfite, searing nova, beast within, and ice tombs.

For number 1, I've seen it hit me while tanking an add before anyone else has even hit it, I'd consider it intended until blizzard changes it. To me it didn't seem like it hit the people tanking any more or any less often than anyone else, and it didn't cause a wipe if it was handled even remotely properly, so it seems like just a random targeted ability to me. I don't think anyone but blizzard could tell us for sure if it's intended or not, but I'd assume yes.

For 2, as far as I've noticed he's always had everything, but I don't get in every raid, and don't end up meleeing on him every time we kill him either, nor do I watch my combat log that closely if I'm not taking absurd damage, so I can't be positive.

Not a rogue so I can't be sure on 3, assuming it wasn't good luck on timing and near impossible to replicate, I really don't know.

For 4, I'd guess Buiden's right, if an add despawns for us it's almost 100% the same one, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was an evading thing, as far as I know we never tested to be sure though.

Rogues aggroing the Ambushers and then vanishing makes em despawn as well.

In general, if you get the ambushers in combat and are able to get them out of combat again, they despawn. Having a rogue/hunter aggro them, and thereafter vanish/feign death works.
We have replicated this consistently.

It might be that a paladin aggroing them and DI'ing himself would work aswell.

Mmmm if only you could DI yourself.

It seems like a lot of mobs have this thing happen to them when they deaggro... like the shield going away on the Mana things in Curator's hallway, and now these despawning.

Spamming CoS works depending on client-server lag, if CoS gets registred before grave or after
However vanish worked every time I tried it, I don't even get thrown up I think - as if you vanish pyro in a duel. CoS works about ~30% of the time for me.

If you get it on low HP, you'd better spam your vanish button

Tonight while working on Karathress we decided to change the order some. I figured it would be easier to do Shaman -> Hunter -> Karathress -> Priest (basically just offtanking priest the entire fight instead of killing). It was going well but when Karathress hit 60% or so, he gained Blessing of the Tides ( http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=38449 ), which also boosted his nova and totem damage, leading to the tank dying during a Beast Within.

We came to the conclusion that the Blessing must have come from the still alive Priest, as a way to stop a raid from just burning down the boss before killing all of his adds. Anyhow, it was a surprise that we didn't expect, so be sure to save Karathress for last when killing him

It does, it also increases his shadow bolt damage.
He yells for aid at 60% before he gets the blessing, can't remember exactly what it was.
The fight would be completely trivial if you could leave the priest up though I suppose.

This isn't SSC-related, but let's lump TK in as well. One thing I've been curious about just as a gimmick -- if you had your entire raid stand on top of Void Reaver (and use AR gear), would he never cast Arcane Orb at all? Alternately, if you had 24 people on top of him and one person at range, would he just chain-lob orbs at that one person as he ran in circles around the room? Not really practical, and Void Reaver is easy regardless, but just one of those "hmm, I wonder what if" things where I'm not going to waste my raid's time finding out.

Well, all the skills with restrictions we've seen in the past did have a "default" behaviour : think patchwerk, he never used hs on your main tank except if he was the only one in range.
So I suppose that void reaver would cast arcane orb on melee targets if no ranged are found, and chain orb the only one at range.

I wouldn't say all. Take the ogre trash in Gruul's lair. Stick everyone on top of them and they won't use their charge ability as it has a minimum range.

It all depends if the ability is coded to choose ranged first over melee or if it simply has a minimum range associated with it. I would guess he wouldn't do it, but then again if you're going to deck out an entire raid in arcane gear so they can take the pounding, why not just have them spread out in the same gear and take the orbs

That definitely seems to be how "charge" abilities are coded. When we fight Attumen, our whole raid hangs out at max melee range behind the horse's rear end, and he simply never charges. Even going back to ZG, it was possible to position your raid such that Bloodlord Mandokir never charged. There's lots of mechanics like that which you can simply remove through positioning, although there's often a tradeoff (like forcing your hunter to do leet melee DPS).

The "one person at range" strat for Void Reaver appeals to me, but only because I am envisioning a hunter chain-chugging speed pots while the Benny Hill theme plays over vent.

I have a question regarding Karathress that I figured I'd ask here prior to potentially wasting an hour or so of my guild's time on.

Is there any mechanic in place to prevent a raid from killing Karathress first, or even second, without killing off the rest of his adds? We headed his way after our Morogrim kill last night and pulled him a couple times to get some ideas and a bit of familiarity with the fight, and this is one approach that I don't want to rule out unless there's some obvious reason to not do it that we've not discovered yet.

Edit: Oops. I read that post too, for some reason it didn't click for me. Apologies.

As mentioned above, the adds will give him a buff during the fight (think Hakkar).

Come on, this thread isn't even a 20-page monstrosity. Your post is #16. Look at post #9.

*Incoming jokes about how one-on-one Void Reaver will never arcane orb.*




Also, is there anything stopping people from forcing adds to despawn on Lurker? It seems to sound like, similar to the curator trash bug, a hunter could intentionally despawn them. Or is it simply that doing so would be impossible due to the rest of the raid being on the trash threat-list on spawn?

This is a generic SSC question so I'll throw it in here:

Is there any real "trick" to the Leotheras trash besides stacking mages?

The other night, with two mages, the last 7-pull by the tents was, in all seriousness, harder than Karathress and probably a couple of other bosses. Swapping in a certain class to help with trash clearing feels so dumb. (On that note, why does Blizzard insist making humanoid raid mobs that can be poly'd but cannot be trapped or sapped? Ugh.)

Keep in mind warlocks can fear most of the Broken, however it's risky considering it's already a tight space to work in. Also try assigning one mage to two mobs, and have them chain-sheep each of them, alternating of course.

Several trash pulls were reduced in size on the PTR, and this is one of them. At least it's getting fixed.

From what I've noticed, the adds only banish the tank if there's no one else in range of it. As a healer, if I'm standing at ~40 yds from the tank and there is no one else there, he'll get banished. If I stand closer (in interrupt range), I'll get chain banished instead.

Can always mass dispel it, if you really want to =P

I agree it'd be great if we could sap or trap some of the mobs if we didn't have the mages (doing it with 3 sucked pretty hard, I'm glad to hear that pull is smaller now)

And that's an interesting idea Arnive, I think I've seen the tank get banished on the one we were assisting (with melee on etc) but I'm not 100% sure.

edit: to be fair I could be completely wrong on the current tank being banished, but I know when OTing I don't get chain banished, but do get targeted sometimes.