Northerner

We typically lust on three but often stack one and two depending on rogue turnout and how frisky we are feeling. I can't see a great incentive to lust on four unless you are intentionally holding it to make sure you didn't get random deaths in the 1-3 period.

That's definitely one of the fun parts of this fight though, the more cooldowns and consumables you invest in channelers 1-3, the more controllable the whole fight becomes. Conversely, investing heavily in the early part of the fight will blow up in your face if you have stupidity related deaths and are still learning it.

 

KamPa

A question - do you bother interrupting volleys on #5? They come pretty fast and are quite damaging, to the point where I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have non-meelee outrange them and keep dpsing, while only having meelee on interrupts - or perhaps ignore them altogether and focus on downing him asap, only interrupting mending. Having abyssal drop after volley hit is also quite painful, as fall damage adds quite fast, and it becomes a problem with having to dedicate half of healers on Magtheridon, 2 on channeler himself and only having 2 left for raid healing.

 

• Kalroth

Yes, we (try to) interrupt everything. With the entire raid on the last channeler, it shouldn't be hard to lock it down. With a normal raid you should have at least 2 rogues, 2 mages and 1-2 shamans plus the previous channeler tanks. So there's 6-8 people that should be able to interrupt. Also this is especially important on the last two channelers because the raid isn't that spread out anymore.

I'm usually tanking one of the last channelers and by the time the raid arrives at me, I've worked enough threat to focus 100% on interrupting. So once the raid begins zerging my channeler I only use shield block + heroic strike to keep global cooldown clear for shield bash.

 

thorin5

That's exactly what we do as well. Having only 3 warlocks on our first kill gave us a good idea of how quickly we needed to burn down the first 2 to avoid as many abyssals as possible.

With regard to channeler #5(bear tank) I believe we had the rogues(3) and the prot warrior who was the tank for #4 concentrating on volley interrupts and mages(2) and dps shaman(2) catching the mendings, ranged interrupts were on mending mostly in case of a cast during an earthquake. With that many interrupts, it's pretty simple to keep that last channeler locked down and still maintain high dps.

 

Aron

What we have found for us is the faster the first two go down the easier the fight is. When we dont have lust up after a wipe it becomes harder for us. So bloodlust on the first works. With less channelers up there are less problems with the locks controlling the adds. I agree when we use a bear tank on add one that does limit the problem of tank losing aggro but we still use two misdirects on him just to be safe and allow our dps to go all out at the start. We have killed him twice now and our strategy of killing the first two quickly seems to work.

 

Phalanx

Same for us on our first kill (and most successful attempts prior). Instructions to the DPS are to burn down the first two fast, then move on. I can't really think of a reason to save the Bloodlust/Heroism for the second stage (for us, anyways), he's got a ton of HP.

 

deets

Hey, I usually lurk here but I thought I'd post for some feedback. My guild and I are rarities as I'm a leader of one of those ZG and AQ20 guilds that's doing very well since the expansion. We're going to give Mag a try next week, as we've been killing Gruul for over a month and finally have the raid dps where I feel comfortable giving it a whirl. We need something else to do while cycling all of our people on erratic schedules through Nightbane and starting up SSC. No one in guild has seen or attempted Magtheridon, we've only heard/read about it.

Here's the question that I'd like some feedback on. Why not treat the five channelers as single bosses for five parties and take them down at the same time? This is not an aoe strategy, but rather kill them away from one another. One way to do this would be with a few feral druids and a couple prot tanks, a healer and hunter or warlock per party as well as two other dps. Two minutes is a long time for a five man group to kill a 240k hp target. You'd need to generate 2000 dps (200 for the tank, 600 for each dps class), which I am confident we are more than capable of exceeding even with kiting/cc'ing. The other way to do it would be to put tanks on an island with a healer, have the hunters and warlocks play safeties in the middle and cycle a pair of kill groups of chain bloodlusted dps around the room while leaving the channelers at 5% percent and a shaman behind to interrupt the heals of channelers not tanked by wars.

Having done MC hound packs, Razorgore, Tiger boss in ZG, Romulo and Julianne and other fights that emphasize subgroup play/control/simultaneous kills, it seems that the symmetry of five channelers-five raid groups and that the channelers grow in power as you kill them suggests to me a similar strategy.

I'm not worried about phase 2-3 of the fight. Our tanks and healers have a lot of gear and experience. Further, I think it would be easy to squeeze in an extra healer into the five group strategy if you pair them with a particularly strong kill group if necessary. The problem would be, can you control the adds and kill the channelers in time.

Anyone try this? Thoughts?

 

Skulli

You want to kill them as fast as possible to minimize the infernal spawn. The longer they are alive then more infernals will spawn.
And remember its 5 channelers. With 1 group each you maybe have 1 dps on each, some of the dps will need to controll the adds.

Phase 2 is all about clicking and keeping the tank alive. Phase3 is more or less the same.
Guess a big problem for guilds that want to learn Mag is the trash and the repsawn time of it.

 

• Erongg

There will be more infernals up as one person mentioned, but also, won't all 5 channelers still be alive when Magtheridon pops (or at least ~3 of them)? And how can a group of 5 people interrupt both the heals and the shadow bolts once the channeler reaches less than 50% health?

Finite Simple Group of Order Two

 

Trouble

You definitely don't want to kill them all at once, for a number of reasons.

First, the basics of focus firing down in any situation are to minimize total damage output. If you split dps then all your targets do damage for the entire duration. If you focus fire then you continually reduce the amount of damage you take. At one point, assuming equal dps, you will have six tanks to heal, all taking decent amounts of damage.

Second, if you do them one at a time you can control the heals much better. If you're moving the channelers away from their initial position as you dps them you can get them out of range of all the other channelers for healing, thus only requiring interrupts on the one being dpsed.

Third, if you kill the first two quick enough, you can eliminate 2/5 of potential abyssal spawns. Killing the third one shortly after means he's only spawning one abyssal, not two. Total upper limit this way is about 5, maybe 6. If you dps them all equally the theoretical upper limit is 10, maybe 15 if you're slow.

And finally, dpsing them all equally requires that you have six tanks, because Magtheridon will break free while all five channelers are up. The situational will be extremely touchy because so many targets will be tanking and taking damage at once.


The short version is that it'd be a giant cluster fuck. A minute into the fight you'll be looking at 5-7 abyssals running around in your raid. Two minutes into the fight you'll be maxed out on abyssals (is the max 10?) AND have 5 channelers up AND have Magtheridon up. Not pretty.

 

Coriolis

I'm wondering what do people do for specific positioning on this fight? I'm fairly certain our dps is the real problem (4 tanks+7 healers and yet we can barely down 3 before he breaks), but I'd still like to know how to position people. Specifically:

1)Does fear have max range, or does it hit closest person?
2)What is the max range on the nova?

I know the nova is outrangable but since the channelers are evenly spread alot of people have issues standing away from any of them (apart from the one being dpsed, and hence interrupted). This is further complicated by people having to not stand on top of each other so that you don't get double infernals wiping out people. I thought the best thing would be to have people evenly spread around the area of where the first add is going down and the tanks move their adds to the walls. Anything else?

 

Whitemane

Yes, it really does seem like dps is a big problem for you - getting 3 channelers down before Mag breaks loose is certainly doable but not a sign of good dps. Especially running with 4 tanks and 7 healers - how many warlocks do you have?

Sorry for not responding to most of your questions, but let me just say that all these concerns is something I never bothered with. I don't know if my guys were just smart and avoided any potential dangers from positioning or the fear, but it has never been a problem for us.

My thoughts after reading your post is that you have some dead weight. Then again, what works for my guild may not work for your guild and that might be the problem.

 

Stangg

as far as I was aware, there can only be 6 abyssals up at any one time. Channelers can only have 2 abyssals up at one time as well.

Just clarifying that point

 

vorda

Each channeler can have 2 up, but I've never noticed any other limit. I'm fairly certain we'v had at least 7 at one point, but I'll check again tonight.

 

Kazanir

This is a lie.

Edit: Unless it was changed within the past week.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

nataku

I had always thought channelers summoned an inferno every 30 seconds and infernos stay up for 1 minute before despawning, so it was possible to have up to 10 up if no channelers were killed 1 minute after engaging them. This is the main reason for maximizing your dps on the channelers as if you can kill a channeler before one summoned a round of infernos, there will be fewer that need to be controlled by the raid.

The patch notes don't really mention any changes to how the infernos are summoned though Blizz is able to prove anyone wrong at any time when they tweak encounters.

 

Dalranth

Figured it would be better to post this here rather then create a new thread.

Vodka killed Magtheridon on the test realm and released the Head Turn-in rewards:

http://www.vodka-guild.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2988

They also noted that he was still casting Blast Nova, even while Banished. They didn't note what kind of damage it did (If it stayed the same I have a hard time figuring out how they killed him with that much raid damage so consistently), so who knows if its intended or not.

 

• Arawethion

That doesn't seem likely.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Apparation

Heh, that should be interesting. I'd like to think they'd fix it before they patch live hopefully.

Brought 4-5 priests? /shrug

Apparation: PvE Shadow Priest

 

Pyria

Just to touch on the fear: I'm fairly certain it's the exact same fear that the Warder trash uses, which is basically cast on the nearest hostile that isn't the primary aggro target (i.e. isn't the tank), regardless of whether anybody else is above you on threat. You can test this fairly easily on Warders: Have some melee put out damage from max melee range with a healer on top of the Warder and the healer will always get feared.

The fear itself is fairly short so there's not much really worth doing about it beyond having a DPS warrior standing on the Channeler or fear warding your melee, but it's an interesting mechanic that I can't recall encountering before. Besides, it's evil fun making other people eat your fear.

 

◊ Penguin

This behaviour is the same for those fearing mobs in Slave Pens and Underbog. I enjoy standing at max melee and watching the other dps run around like idiots.

 

Ghando

Our experience has been that Resto Shamans are fantastic healers on the last couple adds. 2-3 Shamans spamming Chain Heal on the tank and occasionally on the ranged does a ton to reduce the danger of the volleys. A top-rank Chain Heal (talented) will do about as much healing every 2.5 seconds to that tank as a rank 8-9 HW would, so it works great. Shamans can also NS for the bouncing if you haven't killed the 5th add by that point.

 

Altima

Last night marked my guild's 4th and 5th hours of attempts on Magtheridon. Our DPS has improved greatly since we first tangoed with him, and we can consistently kill the 4th Channeler just as Magtheridon breaks lose. Last night, interrupts were good despite the presence of only one rogue, and nobody died to shadow bolt volleys.

The problem we are facing is people, especially healers, dying to Abyssals. We stacked the raid with five warlocks (though only one hunter) to keep the Abyssals under control. Most of the Abyssals are CCed immediately upon spawning through Fear -> Banish. At most, the Abyssal stays loose for 6 to 7 seconds, and that is if it spawns on the opposite side of the chamber. The warlocks tried the best they can to keep all the Abyssal tagged and CCed, but inevitably, during every attempt, an Abyssal would drop on top of a healer and 2 shots him or her. I feel that the warlocks were responding at very reasonable speeds, but are there any tips from the healers reading this board that let our healers stay alive for those precious seconds when the warlocks are running across the room, trying to CC the loose Abyssal?

 

Deris

Make sure your healers are aware of what is going on. HOJ, Fear, Warstomp all work on Abyssals, and those abilities alone should be enough to ensure healer survival. Have your Paladins really watch for BOP, or even taunt + HOJ (taunt range is much larger than HOJ). You can't rely on the Warlocks for everything, so everyone needs to protect each other. I run with Imp RF and no salv on for Mag, and most Infernals tend to look at me for a second before they get Banished/Feared, so this can buy some valuable time for your squishies.

 

KamPa

Most healers can deal with Abyssals on their own, until Warlock gets them under control. Paladins can stun or BoP/DS, priest can Fear and Fade if it fails, Druid can Cyclone and in case of Shamans, I see them attacking totems first, which gives time to move away.Or, you can have hunters place traps under healers, might catch one or two spawns right after they drop.
Overall, I found stacking locks to be fairly ineffective for us, we made much better progress with 3, than with 4, since they can't provide full dps for phase 1, and they might be doubling their tasks on add control. It's simply that you can't have locks do everything themselves, they might need some assistance at times and healers need some awareness as well.