I'm waiting for the fraps video of a Solarian kill with a sponge character standing there and dancing the entire time.

If people donate Primal Manas, it takes literally less than 30 minutes to get 400 AR.
Took me around 2 days solo.
The push to 500 (forgetting about MOTW and Flasks of Arcane Fort ftl) takes a little bit longer because you need to get Soulcloth pieces made, but you can normally just straight buy off the AH for pretty cheap.
Any sort of green helmet with the 20 AR enchant is huge as well.

We tried Solarion the other night the non-AR sponge method. It was, um, interesting. So we're piling up the materials to make 2 tanks worth of AR gear. I have two questions about this strategy. Do the two AR sponges literally spend the entire fight just off to the side? Is it possible to have rogues tank the priestess to ensure that the sponges just stand off to the side?

I ask because it would help narrow down a few gear choices.

The sponges stand on each other and do nothing, you can figure out the rest for yourselves

That's pretty much what I figured.

We had made fairly decent progress controlling the WotA in what I can imagine was the "proper and intended" way, but the arcane missiles which now are RSTS tore through the raid members waiting for the debfuff to wear off.

This fight is dumb.

We also used the 2 AR tank strategy yesterday. The day before we tried the "traditional" tactic and we were like wtf, totally fucked up fight and didn't even manage 75%. This is the first time we tried the Boss. Well we killed her after 3 hours of DPS optimizations, totally trivial.

Yep, this is the dumbest fight in the game right now. Our tanks didn't have the AR ready for our last kill so we just completely zerged her down. 59% at the first teleport, something like 30% at the next, and then we raced to finish her off before the debuff two-shot our entire raid. We played like total garbage and we can still win because we're good at mashing the dps buttons. Nice design.

Now we're just going to use the trivial and obviously unintended two tank method. Should be fun until they figure out what they want this encounter to be.

Well, I'm assuming they're going to let the debuff stack past 10, and call that a fix.

I'll have to agree, this is one poorly designed encounter. After a couple wipes (not using arcane resist soakers), we replaced a couple healers with dps since people got oneshot anyway, and literally zerged her down before the stacking wrath killed us. It was nasty and chaotic, but it got the job done.

That would be as ludicrous as stacking Hydross' mark to 500% because people were zerging the nature phase.

From all accounts, the Kael fight is awesome. Apparently a ton of time was spent on it and it shows. I get the feeling that everything else in TK25 was an after thought after seeing Solarion and Void Reaver.

Most of what I'd say has been pretty much covered and can be summarized in this sentence "Do you want us to use arcane resist? Do you want us to stack dps? We don't know, and we're pretty sure you don't know either!" (originally posted by Sebudai I believe). We've beaten the Astromancer post patch, using the tank "sponge" method just like everyone else, a tactic that pretty much trivializes an encounter with a rather cool concept, though horrible implementation and even more horrible tuning. Just wanted to state that if the fight is going to be changed again, I sincerely hope that the intentions of the developers become clear so we can actually come to a conclusion on what this fight is all about and act accordingly, because in its current state its a mix of "checks" (dps, resistance, positioning, interrupting) that simply...don't mix that well together.

Random Secondary Targeting System.

Its Blizzard's way of adding a bit of unreliability to the fight; so its not quite as much a matter of just going through the motions. A good example of this is Aran's spell casting. Basically you can maintain the hate of a mob on one person, but the RSTS ability is uncontrollable.

In 2.1 they changed her missiles to RSTS, so they can't be controlled on just the MT. I believe prior she only used to target people within the 180 degree arc in front of her.

Awesome, thanks very much.

During the Aran encounter we don't even have a tank per se, the ones we do have are just in DPS gear trying their best to agument whatever DPS we can put out. Do you really need a tank for this fight, given the way she's using her missles?

Like Aran, she will occasionally melee someone between casts. She hits harder than Aran. You don't want her splattering a rogue or running to a warlock or something.

A feral druid works perfectly since they generate tons of threat given how little armor Solarian has.

Well on Aran, its useful to have someone attempt to hold hate; I used to do that when I was a hybrid spec, it just helps to keep him from running around and makes life easier on the melee. I suspect we'll employ a similar tactic on Solarion, most likely a bear druid. (So weird to actually type "bear" so used to "bare druids" in honor of that long lost, yet hilarious druid guide.)

Damn, Gurg beat me to it.

My hope is that they just man up and say to themselves "we fucked this one up, let's just let them have it."

I hate resist fights as it is (honestly, when we got to rag, and I had to take off all my sweet gear and put on greens, that was pretty disheartening), and this one is even worse, because I am not sure it even is a resist fight. And the mechanics them implemented are very contradicting.

Last lockout it took 2 tries to kill her.
Tank, stack up debuffs to 2, better 3 before you run out of the raid.
Rince and repeat. Think we had 5 deaths in the end.
Our healers did a pretty sweet job on outhealing the missiles though.

The fight has gotten a bit more random sadly, the previous version was way easier than this i gotta admit.

Yep. I believe it was this one. The mutating injection that they gave him was that AOE on cleanse one. I dunno what they had in mind with this one but it probably would have made him a little tougher. Maybe combine the 2 so you had to run away AND get cleansed in 10 seconds or you would transform. Who knows!

Our 2nd attempt of grobbulus we thought people were going to transform into a chromaggus add, so we kept dispelling it for the first hour or so. Once we learned we didn't need too he just fell over.

Sometimes spell data mining is bad!

Department of redundancy department, IMHO.

We tried her for the first time tonight, decided to not use the soaker way because if Blizzard is consistant at all they will remove the debuff cap. We seem to do absolutely fine until the 3rd set of adds (Shes been 32-35% at this point) at which point the WOTAs all manage to gang up on one person and then instagib them and jump as 4 to another person. We seem to be totally fine until theres 4 WOTAs though.... we were also unflasked and largely unpotted and healer heavy (8).

Summary

Group A:
-Players with fewer than X stacks* of the "increased Arcane damage taken" component of the WotA debuff
-Players with the DoT component of the WotA, regardless of # of stacks. This takes precedence over the previous rule.

Group B:
-Players with X stacks or more* of the "increased Arcane damage taken" component of the WotA debuff, but not the DoT component.

* X is equal to the # of WotA's floating around in your raid group, divided by 2, rounded up. Specifically:

# of WotA DoTs floating in your raid // 'X'
0 // 0
1 // 1
2 // 1
3 // 2
4 // 2
5 // 3
6 // 3

Gonna try this suggestion next time from earlier in the thread .

We do not have our Group B outrange the arcane missiles, they seem to live fine with one stack, I dunno what to do with two stacks though. 20k in 3 seconds is prolly too much to outheal so occasionally someones gonna bite the bullet.

We also keep the melees in as their own group, if for some reason one of them gets the dot they move to group a then back onto Solarian. Melee dps is amazing in this fight, we CoR her and let the rogues go to town.

My biggest beef with this fight is definitely getting multiple dots on one person. Its a chain reaction of death since once one person has 2+ it remains that way since both jump to the same next person.

Killed her this week again in 3 tries wo AR gear.

The thing i start to wonder though is cause i never tried em:
1) Can you redirect WOTA to a pet actually?
1.2) Does dismissing a pet remove the WOTAs?
2) Does DI remove WOTAs or will they just jump to the next person?
Anyone tried that?

Either of this cases could make solarian way too easy actually...