We have been working on Magtheridon for about a month now and have only recently started to get smooth progress on him (re: We can get to phase two with 4th channeler at 50% with no deaths fairly reliably). It took a LONG time for our warlocks to become acclimated to the infernals to get CC moving reliably. We had one great attempt where the stars aligned and got him to 41%, but other than that we have never broken 95.

For us Mag was almost a breaking point for our guild. Now we have the frustration of dealing with people clicking (or not). There is some anecdotal evidence in this thread, but I am just curious if this is normal/abnormal progression time for him? He still feels still too hard for his spot in progression. We are a pretty serious group of raiders, and I really can't imagine more average players ever killing him anytime soon.

In my experience it works the opposite way a lot of the time. Our first two clean Channelers-down attempts ended with two different hunters saying "wtf, I swear I clicked, I even got the debuff, but no beam came out." They had autoshot on while standing by the cube waiting for Mag to cast, and their autoshot broke the channel instantly.

As far as Infernal CC--Banish/Fear are good, obviously, as is Frost Trap (can we get a Big Brother that shows who breaks Trap as well as Poly?). But I like to avoid Frost Nova--too much potential to cause trouble.

I wish I could find the image itself, but after one of our...less successful magtheridon nights, our MT posted an excerpt from the windows instruction manual explaining how to right click, complete with a diagram of a mouse and an arrow pointing to the right mouse button. It amused me to no end, and we haven't had a failed click since. Maybe you should try that!

I require this image!

This one?

I wouldn't say he's "too hard." He's a step up from Gruul, but Gruul was also a step up from Maulgar, as it should be. Building a fresh TBC raid team, when we first killed Maulgar, Gruul didn't go well, but we beefed up a bit and he quickly went down. After killing Gruul, we spent a few nights saying "I can't believe how hard Mag is in comparison," but then he came together fast. Coming back for our second kill, we only wiped once, and it was a cube misclick.

My advice is the same as always--work on killing the Channelers really, really quickly. (If you're regularly getting 3.5 down by the time Mag spawns, you'll probably stop wiping soon, but whatever problems you're having can be alleviated by killing them even faster).

It -should-, but I guess it's a matter of safe > sorry.

Although clicking the cube then clicking Mag can have equally hilarious results. :P

There is a big emote in the chat log when he starts casting the blast wave. It took us a few rather frustrating wipes to learn that this was the signal to click the boxes, nothing else.


Here's our hard earned experience from that night:

-Clicking when the bigwigs timer goes to zero is a bad idea and will wipe you. It tells you when his ability cooldown is up, not when he's using it --- it's too early, your clickers will die.

-Having someone call out on vent to click when the cast bar starts will wipe you. Human reaction time to notice the cast bar + vent lag + human reaction time to click the box is enough to get 1, sometimes 2 blast waves off.

-Have all the clickers watch for the emote themselves and click the button as soon as it shows up = win. You don't need the mob selected, or need to watch for a cast bar - the emote is big and obvious enough as long as you're focused on watching for it.


That said, we still call out time in excruciating detail over vent anyway, and someone yells to click when it happens even though everyone has usually clicked by the time they hear it on vent already. It's just that kind of fight :P


e: oh and one other thing. When you finally get him close to 30% and in the excitement of the fight happen to synchronize his explosion and a blast wave, you'll wipe too :P Hold him at 33% or something and wait for a blastwave.

Hahahah, our first 30% attempt involved finding out that the raid-wide damage comes about a dozen seconds -after- he hits 30%, not immediately. Hence, it coincided almost exactly with when we were supposed to click, resulting in panic and a wipe.

At that point the tough part of the learning curve was well past already, so we laughed it off and went again.

I found some of the ideas in this thread very helpful, especially the raid target icons and such so I wrote this lil macro to toss icons over peoples head and spit out their name in raid chat for good measure

Just replace player1-5 with the actual player names, Im not sure if it can be done cleaner or not seemed to work ok in testing it. Additionally this could probably be edited to just say grab all the people in groups 4 and 5 and alternately put raid target icons over their head.. I still need to work out the logic on this my lua skills arent the best

Edit: Vhaarr In #wowace hooked me up with this gem, if you happen to have any addons that use RosterLib you can just use something like this to assign a raid target icon to everyone in group 4.

It's pretty surprising how easy the fight is after killing all channelers. We had three nights on Mag trying to get phase one down with little to no success. On the 4th night we replaced a healer and a tank with 2 dps classes. On the 4th pull of the night we got him to phase 2 for the first time, and we killed him on that pull. We even had no idea about the 30% mass aoe, only thought about the single target cave ins.

I would strongly advise bringing 7 healers/4 tanks instead of 8 and 5. We had 7 and 4 on the night we killed him and we got the 4th add down on the 1:50 mark, 5th add was dead before the first earthquake. And that was with zero consumables, pretty sure five down before he spawns is possible.

Happen to have a WWS for that night? We seem to be at about the same level, would be great for comparison.

When you use 4 tanks, I'm assuming you have the first two adds tanked by one person, w/ a misdirect (Druid i assume?). How do you handle interrupts and holding aggro? I guess on the first 2 adds you could just split DPS a little, put an enh shammy and a rogue on the 2nd to die, correct?

There's no chance one person can hold two adds with no head start against a raid going full bore. More likely it's your 3rd or 4th tank holding two channelers, and after the first channeler dies that tank taunts one off.

We stack the first two mobs on a druid and it works fine. A rogue and a mage switch to the second add when the first gets below 50%. The misdirect aggo + swipe with minimal target switching is enough to hold the mob there until the first is dead. We use no cooldowns on either of the first two adds because damage taken at that point is ultimately trivial. Heroism/Trinkets/AP/AR/etc. are all used starting on the third add on, staggering Heroisms between the 3rd and 4th adds.

I wonder how many warlocks do you use and does anyone die at all before he breaks free? We don't even get 3 adds down before he breaks free (we tend to run with 7 healers/5 tanks or 8 healers/4tanks +3 locks) and I can't understand how even fully flasked we barely kill 3 as he's spawning (even if we do loose let's say 2-3 dps people by the time he comes out). Is it a case of needing to l2p or do your warlocks do alot of damage along with infernal control (ours only really dps until infernals start landing from what I can tell).

How are shadowbolt interrupts dealt with on the second mob if no DPS is being applied to it? Very quick target switching? If DPS *is* being applied to it, isn't that DPS necessarily hampered by threat? Can a paladin really hold his highest aggro possible on two targets simultaneously?

Focus Macros.

/stopcasting
/cast [target=focus] Counterspell

/cast [target=focus] Kick

/cast [target=focus] Earth Shock

etc.

I can't hold my highest aggro on both targets at once. But I can hold my highest aggro on one target while maintaining aggro on a second target at no loss.

Consecration on it's own can only do ~200 TPS with normal tanking gear, so you don't want real DPS on it of course. But set your interrupters to fight the first target, have them set focus on the second, ensure they have a focus frame with a cast bar.

Consecration should be enough to manage marginal AEs like sweeping strikes, which would otherwise be unusable due to range.

And it's something I use in my regular threat rotation, so it's not lowering the threat on my primary target.

We killed him the first night we had three warlocks, other nights had 2 warlocks only. I don't see how you'd lose dps first, people who die first are either healers/warlocks "infernal aggro" or tanks "infernal spawn or healer getting feared". I don't think shadow bolt damage is enough to kill people at the start, unless you get real unlucky with spawn/fireblast I suppose.

One thing I keep hearing is how people die to infernals and how they need more warlocks to control them, which is not true. Once you understand how infernals spawn it's pretty simple to deal with them. More dps.

Channelers spawn infernals every 30 seconds, infernals stay up for one minute. So every channler can have a maximum of 2 infernals up at any given time. Now, if you are able to kill the first channeler before the 30 seconds mark, you will have one less infernal to deal with. If you kill the second channeler before the one minute mark, that's one less infernal to deal with as well. It's a pretty big difference to kill an add at 29 seconds instead of 31, same thing being applied to all 30 second intervels untill all adds are dead.

From what I have noticed, the only big part about the fight is the 1:00 to 1:30 part, you deal with the most amount of infernals at that point and it's pretty much up to your healers/hunters/warlocks/offtanks to keep the infernals from killing people. The way it "should" happen it something like this:

0:01 Pull
0:20 1st add dead, tank on this add picks up add #3
0:30 4 infernals spawn, simple to deal with
0:55 2nd add dead
1:00 3 infernals spawn, total of 7 up. All infernals up til 1:30
1:25 3rd add dead, tanks moves to Mag
1:30 2 infernals spawn, 4 despawn, total of 5 up.
1:50 4th add dead.
2:00 1 infernal spawns, 3 despawn, total of 3 up. Tank picks up Mag.
2:30 earthquake as the last add dies, people move to spots to click.

We pop heroism right as we start attacking the second add.

And to the person asking about the 4 tank strategy. The tanks on the first two adds are tanking one add each to generate maximum threat. We have a 4th tank tanking two. When the first one is dead, the tank on him goes and picks up one of the adds from the person tanking two and drags him out of aoe/heal range.

Edit: The only way to lose people from what I've seen is shadowbolts from the last add, if he decides to stay alive until earthquake.

Is this really how it works? I'd gotten the idea that each Channeler drops one roughly every 30 seconds, but don't recall seeing 4-5 drop simultaneously at the 0:30 mark.

Have to agree with that, I'm pretty confident when I claim that it is certainly not how it works. They do not consistently spawn one every 30 seconds.