Why can't we kill Magtheridon?
 

I'm looking for a little advice here. The guild I'm in is a fairly well organized one, tops or close to tops in progression on our server - we're certainly the leading Horde guild, as the Horde raiding scene is very limited. But we've been banging our heads against Magtheridon for over a week now and it feels like we're not making any progress, and it's bugging me. So I'm trying to figure out why.

I've read the Magtheridon nerfed thread, but it's mostly people talking about how the encounter has changed - we never saw him pre-nerf, and frankly, I'm glad. This is a strategy discussion, so I thought it would be ok to start a new thread on the topic.

On a typical Mag run, we take down 3.5 to 4 of the channelers before he breaks free, with minimal deaths (maybe 2 people tops?). We typically have 4 tanks and 3-4 Warlocks, so all the channelers have Curse of Tongues, Abyssals are feared or banished, and all that. Magtheridon breaks free, is picked up by our MT, and for some reason it feels like things sort of fall apart then - we get the "bouncy bouncy" effect where everyone is thrown around a bit, and before long people are running to the cubes to click. Invariably there are only 3 or 4 clickers and we wipe.

I believe our strategy is sound, but there are a few items I wonder about:

1. Is there a better way to avoid deaths to Abyssals? I can't tell you the number of times I have an Abyssal spawn on my head, only to have have a second one run up to me and smack me in the face. Yeah, there's an indication on the floor where they spawn, but is there any rhyme or reason to who they spawn on or is it really truly random?

2. The first cube rotation consists of cloth wearers - Warlocks and Mages. I don't think we have ever made it to this point with everyone in this rotation alive. So we're usually scrambling to get a "backup clicker" on one of the cubes (the reason tanks aren't on the first cube rotation is that the guildleader wants the tanks to be chain-disarming the last channeler). Typically this fails and we wipe.

3. Are we undergeared? We flask up and take our consumables, so I don't know what else we could do to improve ourselves other than heroic instances. We have multiple Karazhan groups, have Mulguar and Gruul on farm status, have killed Kazzak (but he's not being farmed), and have been unsuccessful at taking down Doomwalker. We raid 5 days a week, and I'm pretty sure there are a number of people (myself included) who don't have the time to run many heroic instances. Do we need to gear up in the heroics? Will that make a significant difference?

We've gotten a sizable group keyed for SSC, and I think we're going to try it very soon - my take on this is that the guild leader is afraid if we stagnate in one dungeon that people will get bored and leave or gquit or whatever (pure speculation on my part - but personally I don't think we're ready for SSC if we can't get close on Magtheridon). Is going to SSC an option (in that, do we have a chance for success there if we can't take down Magtheridon?).

Thanks for any input.

Uh, what are mages and warlocks dying to before Mag is released? If it's shadowbolt volleys then there's your problem right there. Your tanks and/or dps need to be on the ball interrupting.

Everything else seems fine--it's not really a gear fight I don't think.

5oMo1
o4..2o
...o3


Crude, but bear with me. o= Cube, M= Mag. o-3 Is near the entrance to hit room. Aside from warlocks and hunters controlling the Abyssals, I'll go over our strat with you. Our main tank for Mag, tanks Channellers 1 and 2. We bring them together @ the beginning so we can maximize DPS with Blade Flurry etc. We kill them in ascending numerical order, with one rogue and one mage watching Chan 2 for interrupts. By the time you get to even the 3rd channeller, EVERYTHING must be interrupted, as the shadow bolt volleys get intense to heal the entire raid through, don't miss your CS/Kick/ES/SB's, etc. Shamans blow Heroism etc on 3, and we generally get 4 down, and 50% on 5 by the time he breaks, no flask, just some DPS consumes, although I feel it could easily be done without :P

We generally try to use our Channeller offtanks to click, as they have next to no responsibility in the fight after the first stage. Don't even bother with an offtank, if Mag changes target from your MT dying, he'll cleave all your melee and any close casters.

Anyway, we use two teams of clickers, and keep rogues to 1 and 5 on the SECOND team, as we may still be busy DPSing channellers during the first Blast Wave, so they can move only a hair back and still be able to DPS, while clicking. Ranged/Stage 1 Offtanks cover 2, 3, and 4. You have to be able to react to losing 1 or 2 clickers, as it happens, just an aspect of the fight, adapting to loss.

Watch BigWigz BossMods timers for BlastWave, don't chance getting to your cube because Earthquake can knock you around, and don't bring idiots who can't click a box.

@ 34%~ we stop all DoT's, and around 31-32%, we stop all DPS, and wait for a Blastwave. Heal any clickers who lost HP due to clicking, and transition. @ low-31%, (BUT DEFINITELY BEFORE 30%!!) MT shield-walls, and everyone gets ready to slam HP Pot/healthstone, whatever, as you take around 6k damage burst.

Collect Girdle of the Pit and wonder what the fuck Blizzard's item designers were thinking.

Yeah, try to figure out who is dying pre-release and why, there really shouldn't be anyone dying pre-release. You also want to try and consistently get to 4 adds down before he releases.

While the fight has specific jobs for specific people (clickers, banishers, tanks, etc) people need to be very adaptive. Some tips I've found helpful:

- if a infernal lands near a tank, the tank needs to grab it asap for a few seconds. A warlock should be inc to banish it, but its better for a tank getting spam heals to be hit rather than a random raid member. I don't know if they are immune to pally stun or not, but if not that at least buys a second or two as well.

- pets are helpful to simply distract an infernal when it lands while waiting for it to get banished/feared. Hunter pets or even voidwalkers aren't bad choices.

- fear is a tricky thing. On the one hand it'll be gone for a while, but on the other when it comes back someone needs to be on the ball about getting it CC'd again.

- warlocks need to have a macro to keep the same one banished until it disappears. heres one I use:

#showtooltip
#show Banish
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Banish


Make sure you have enough healers by the way, the fight is a lot easier with 7-9 healers the first few times.

Think through your strat and tank rotation, the strat above is great and has a prot tank for #1-2 at once. We use a fury warr as our first tank, he DW's and doesn't even put on a shield (druid for second).

If that really is your problem, you need to get rid of the retards in your guild. You seem to be getting past phase 1 decently which is really key and only loosing a few people.

We handled emergency clicking quite solidly with 2 clickers missing in one team and 1 clicker missing in another. People took over on their own and clicking was covered quickly.

Something that helps is to make a macro, like this:

/rw Click Team 1 - Get Ready!
/Raid 1. A
/Raid 2. B
/Raid 3. C
/Raid 4. D
/Raid 5. E

One for both teams of course, post it 30 seconds before you need to click. That should be plenty of time for people to get there, discover any dead clickers and cover the cubes. And a macro like this isn't too bad either:

/Raid 3 4
/Raid
/Raid 2 5
/Raid
/Raid 1

Edit: Okay the forum eats spaces, but make a macro that shows the layout of the cubes so everyone is familiar with it.

Shout replacements over voice com if you need to or make people understand they need to be flexible on picking up on clicker deaths.

2. I guess it's all a matter of flavor, but the channeler should be down before the quake happens if you're really down to 3.5 - 4 before mag breaks loose. Using dps to click cubes in the first and being that insecure about getting it done properly will hurt your dps and in my experience, if you can stop the channeler from volley'ing, you should have no problem healing the damage he does.

3. You're getting the channelers down at a good pace, no problems there.

PS: This is not a dps fight, take it easy and focus on clicking properly.

When assigning Cube clicking, be sure to take into consideration to where Mag will be tanked.
Definitely assign back-ups. If possible, make the first rotation of cubes (often right before the last add is killed) furthest away from the last mob be ranged classes.

Rog/Rog/OT3____MT____OT1/Rog/OT2
______________Mag
Ran/SPst/Ran__________Ran/Ran/Ran
__________Hunt/Hunt/OT3

assuming 3 Rogues/Melee DPS, 2 Hunters (or very good Fire Mages), 3 OTs (OT3 was double tanking, OT1 is dps), 5 Mages/Warlocks and 1 Shad Pst.

Key points: 1) keep melee dps near Mag cubes; 2) if you have a shadow priest, have him on a side cube (or a melee cube); 3) have your longest ranged classes at the furthest cube; 4) back-ups must always be at the cube, ready to click, even if rotation players are still alive 5 sec before Mag begins to channel; 5) if you get better mileage out of it, put more ranged on cubes instead of rogues, but never put DD dps on back-up: it will tank their dps. Good cube clickers are dot classes (warlocks), autoattack fiends (dps warriors, hunters) and any prot spec'd tanks. The best back-ups are your beefy OTs... since they will be in tanking gear anyways, and they'll always need to be sacrificing dps to hang out near the cubes.

...

Before our first kill, we were getting about the same results as you. We made two changes.

One, we have a lot of people who love PvP/arena in the guild, so we made everyone realize it's incredibly easy to farm respec gold every week, and started forcing PvE dps specs Tues-Thurs when we raid. We went from getting 3.5-4 channelers down before the quake with pots to getting 4-4.5 without pots (depending on group makeup).

Two, we had everyone assigned to interrupt shadowbolts stop using abilities that use the GCD for the 4th and 5th channelers until the shadowbolt cast is interrupted (then go crazy). This helped healers be sure everyone's topped off...shadowbolts during the quake easily kill people because nobody can channel heals during this time.

In general, healing shadowbolts that get through take the most time and effort from the raid and cause the most deaths. Shadowbolts + infernal landing on the melee almost always results in a death or two, but even when mistakes are made this fight is easily doable.

You don't have to force the PvE specs, but I find raiding generally goes much more smoothly when everyone's specced for it. Either way, you'll find if you concentrate on interrupts you'll have a lot fewer deaths.

You're pretty bad at counting.

There really is no need for dps consumables here, number of channelers dead at any one point doesn't matter much aslong as :

You always have someone with a ranged interupt at each add once Mag is free, a heal or volley during a quake is very hard for melee to get interupted.

You can succesfully interupt everything they cast

Your clickers aren't people with important tasks on the remaining adds (or if they are, their cube is near the later adds)

Basically its all execution, thats it, killing adds fast means less infernals to deal with but other than that, if you can interupt succesfully, heal tanks, and click cubes you can have adds still up while mag is free. A very easy system to work on is to give each of 5 groups a cube, 1 person is backup (always at a cube at click time) 2 others rotate the primary click, backup only clicks if a primary fucks up in some way. If any of these people die there are 2 others in the group to cover. If you want to stack groups more efficiently and always use OTs as clickers then just set up a channel for each cube with 5 people listed to it.

Once your execution is good enough a long list of backups wont be needed, but until then having so many covering that you *can't* miss a click will help alot.

...

You sound pretty much on track to me. If the same people are dying every time you should try to replace them, and at the very minimum take them off cubes. With only 10 clickers required out of 25 people, there's no reason to have a retard on a cube. Also, try assigning backup clickers to each cube. Nobody should be dying in phase 1, but if a clicker does die someone should be assigned to take over.

I would also assign 1 rogue to run ahead of the "assist train" to interrupt shadowbolt volleys while your dps is in transit to the next add. If you find a problem keeping CoT up on the add, tell em to use mind numbing as well. That should cut down on a lot of damage being taken in phase 1.

It sounds to me like your problem is actually volleys + abyssals on the 5th add, and not just abyssals. We've had as many as 6 warlocks and 2 hunters one night (serious overkill, but we are lucky if we have 1 mage log on most nights), and we still had people dying after the 4th add before we prioritized interupts on the last couple adds. Usually people said they died from abyssals, but really it was a volley and then an abyssal spawned on them while they were already low. Healers are generally taxed on the 5th add tank and Magtheridon tanks so raid healing is low at this point.
I'd suggest just having you interupt people prioritze interupting the volleys on 4th+5th adds more.
More dps always helps too, but not at the expense of letting volleys fly. We use 3 tanks and 6 healers usually.

Dealing with infernals is mostly an art. Warlocks need to have banishes out immediately and hunter traps should be laid down whenever the cooldown is up. Things like blind, scatter shot, frost nova, fear, etc. will help a lot in controlling their splash hits. Of course, it'll mostly come down to attempting it until everyone's familiar with the frequency of spawns and movement patterns (most often towards healers). The infernal damage itself isn't fatal as long as raid healing is consistent at keeping people close to topped off and everyone tries to stay on the move.