This is what we're trying to do but I find your description a little confusing.

We place the raid in one spot. As soon as a person gets wrath he waits until it jumps to another person and then quarantines himself away from the bulk of the raid until 45 s have passed.

The problem comes in the aoe phases where it's not very good to be spread out. It's also a tactic which favors ranged dps (as usual)

Lets say you use 2 prot Warriors with as much Arcane Resistance as possible (450++) and place them on top of eachother about 20y outside a big caster group.

Then whenever anyone get Wrath of the Astromancer they close to one of the two Warriors, but not so close that the Warrior have the person dumping Wrath on them as their closest target.

This way, you will have 2 Warriors linking Wrath of the Astromancer back and forth which will in the end be a lot of DPS, but meanwhile it will make it possible for the rest of the raid not to worry about the Wrath too much and you should be able to kill Solarian before the Wrath on the tanks gets too bad.

We are trying this tactic in 2 days so I will give you the results.


Because basically we were attempting Solarian today, 3 prot warriors/7 healers and rest DPS, but we simply couldn't get her down fast enough and when we did get her to 20%, the current Wrath of the Astromancer debuffs wiped us.


Any thoughts on the tactic?

Sounds interesting keion, not too sure at the numbers behind it though. Is there a maximum amount of stacks you can get of the +% of arcane damage taken?

10?

http://www.thottbot.com/s33044

So 500% damage would be stacked up on them pretty quickly, by the end of the first AoE phase I would imagine, perhaps later though if she casts WotA a bit later. That is 3600 damage every 2 seconds from the dot itself, easily dealt with by the 450 arcane resist but the problem comes in when she targets them for AM. That will hurt for sure, is it fully resistable though? 21k ticks of AM are going to hurt even with 75% resist.

Just a silly idea here, but the biggest problem I seem to have noticed was the wrath sometimes stacking unto the same person, because 2 people give it to the same person that is standing closest to both of them.


What about: Spreading out around her in a big wide circle, making people pass the WotA to their neighbours in either a clockwise our counterclockwise rotation and keeping on doing so when she reaches 20%.

The only problem might be the AoE phase, but that should then be dealt with in greatest haste. Group up at 1 spot ASAP, AoE nuke the adds down asap. Spread out in the circle again.

Like this, in theory, the WotA debuffs would be spread out amongst the raid (ranged DPS and healers) as much as possible. (If a melee gets the debuff he should move to a person in the circle that doesn't have a debuff yet (if possible) and furthest away from the other people with WotA in the circle.)


Just an idea, even seems to me like a tactic Blizzard would have intended for this fight.

An Idea

For lack of better term:
Phase One = Solarian active
Phase Two = Solarian vanishes, adds spawn

During this Phase One, the raid will be maintain two groups. We'll call them Groups A and B:

Early in the encounter

When the fight starts, the raid is clumped as one group, known as Group A. Early in the fight (0-2 WotA's in the raid), all players who have the 45-second debuff but NOT the 8-second debuff separate from the rest of the raid and form Group B. Basically, if a player receives the WotA debuff, he remains in Group A until the DoT component expires, and then immediately moves to Group B. This ensures that the debuff is always passed to someone in group A, thus minimizing the possibility that a player will get multiple stacks early on. Very Important: Players in Group B who lose their debuff (the 45 seconds expire) rejoin group A.

Phase Two

During Phase Two, all players collapse to the center to AoE the adds down. The Group A and Group B rules are ignored.

Back to Phase One

Once the adds are down, the rules of Phase One apply again. All players with the 45-second debuff but NOT the 8-second debuff are clumped up in a group (Group B) and separated from the rest of the raid (Group A). The process repeats itself.

Midway through the fight

Once Solarian casts the THIRD WotA on the raid, the rules slightly change. Group B consists of all players with at least TWO stacks of the 45-second debuff, but NOT the 8-second component. Group A consists of all players with zero or one stacks of the 45-second debuff or any player with the DoT component of WotA. This rule is maintained, but players still continue to collapse for Phase Two. The process repeats itself.

Late in the encounter

Once Solarian casts the FIFTH WotA on the raid, the rules slightly change again. Group B consists of all players with at least THREE stacks of the 45-second debuff, but NOT the 8-second component. Group A consists of all players with fewer than three stacks of the 45-second debuff or any player with the DoT component of WotA. This rule is maintained until the boss is defeated.

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


It sounds more complicated than it really is. If the raid leader understands it, just have him constantly remind the raid. "Okay, Group B is now everyone with TWO or more stacks."

This method isn't completely necessary to beat this encounter, but I think it's the best way to handle WotA, if that's what's hurting you. How you decide to handle the AoE and whether or not you decide to wear AR is completely up to you.

That's exactly what we do there. One big camp within melee range. If you have the 8s debuff, you remain in the camp. As soon as it runs out, you run 10y-ish outside and let the 50% arcane damage taken debuff run out.

The problem with solarian 2.1 seems to be that if someone with X stacks of the 50% increased-debuff dies, he passes that on and the recipient gets X+1 stacks. If that guy now dies, we're at X+2. This goes up really fast if just 2-3 people die that way, you reach a situation where every guy getting that chained debuff dies due to the 8s debuff just being unhealable on most players. We had a few attempts where guys got passed up to 6-9 stacks. You just wipe really fast then.

The only solution we found to that is to let no one die with the debuff on. Basically you have two options:
a) Zerg her to 20% (voidwalker phase is still as hard as a voidwalker is useful to a warlock) with only two add spawns. That means you have three dps phases. In the last dps phase, a few people can die as the 20%&below phase is so easy. If you have that kind of dps, the healing ain't too hard during the first two add spawns.
We tried this a few times, with people just using the sta/AR trinket. We had 1 prot warrior, six healers, four rogues who all had full melee groups (just 1 enh shami though, but a resto shami for the 2nd group) and a MS warrior as well.
We just couldn't get there, our dps sucked too much. We only had two locks and three mages avaible so the aoe phases were a bit sucky, but was still ok with reduced mob hp.
b) Do it with four dps phases (30% and then three times 17% is fairly easy going). To survive long enough, you need a solid amount of sta/AR gear imo. Ideally we would've had 200+ unbuffed and 10k+ hp on every caster. Practically some people slacked as the AR gear requirement was something that took us by surprise. We still killed it, but wasn't exactly a clean kill. I got six stacks of the +dmg taken debuff passed right before she hit 20%.

Bokchoy, that's interesting and makes sense. One thought though, early on, three clumps always struck me as better. One ranged clump consisting of healers/ranged with no DoT and no debuff, one melee clump consisting of all melee who do not have the DoT, and one ranged clump consisting of people who had the DoT and now have the debuff.

Basically this allows a melee class to DPS Solarian while waiting out the debuff. If a melee class gets a fresh Wrath, they run back to the clean ranged clump, dump the debuff onto one of them, and then run back to DPS more.

Yes, that would definitely improve melee DPS. To be honest, my guild hasn't implemented this strategy since the patch hit. We kind of winged it for the kill. But yeah, your method is an awesome idea. Consider "melee range" as an alternative to "Group B". Having melee DPS sit 30 yards away for 45 seconds with his cock in his hand would be a terrible waste.

Anyways, even with a complex strategy involving precise positionnings to minimize wrath dmg, everything's gonna be screwed up at each ae phase. I don't understand the logic behind this fight. Is it a resist fight ? But why high dps requirement. Is it a position fight ? But why ruining every clever positionning with an ae phase where clumping up is mandatory. In my opinion, this fight is broken, the best way to kill it is basically to dps zerg her and pray for a bit of luck...

I disagree. I think that the conflicting mechanics is what makes this fight challenging. You want to take advantage of space and distance to contain wrath, but the zerg phase forces you to periodically clump.

This is a well-designed fight, but slightly out of tune.

We did something of a mix between your idea Bokchoy and Gurgthock's when we killed her the last time. Worked really nice. AR ftw in this fight unless you got insane dps to zerg her down.

The problem I see with this is that you're concentrating all the wraths in the ranged clump. Since the number of wraths in the raid increases with time, the most advantageous way to deal with it is to spread it out as evenly as possible. By having the melee run theirs back to the ranged, you're decreasing the number of people that the debuff can be spread to and increasing the speed at which multiple stacking occurs.

It's whatever your guild makes of it, I've talked to 2 guilds who killed her and we killed her ourself, with radically different strategies, one guild had 0 resist gear and full on dps zerg, one guild had dedicated resist people (like what keion describes earlier) and we had a medium amount of resist across the raid. Whichever way you do it, resist or lack of it is only a way to modify how you handle the wrath, which is the key element of the fight.

I can confirm that the tactic with 2 tanks with high AR works like a charm. Certainly easier than before the patch this way.

Wish I had paid more attention to it but I never counted how many wraths the tanks had. It never jumped into the raid though and we did it with 3 aoe stages.

Lotta really complicated strats here. We used the same strat as Iskaral, with 2 tanks in very high AR (I personally had 500 or so buffed). People deliver the wrath to those two tanks, and the debuffs bounce between those two. Healing was kinda rough on the 2nd tank cause she only had 400 AR, but the fight was still really easy. We're gonna aim for around 550-600 next time; it will trivialize healing the Wrath sponges.

Edit:
And to answer your question Gurgthock, once it reaches 10, it caps, and continues jumping between those two tanks. One tank can have multiple wraths on them; I've had 3 on me at the same time, in addition to a 10 stack of the increased arcane damage debuff. For most of the fight, a single shaman kept the sponges alive, and towards the end we had a paladin help out.

I can see healing through the wrath debuff itself not to be too difficult, but what happens if one of your sponge warriors gets targeted with the missiles? Seems like a 25% resisted hit would likely 1 shot them.

First of all, we just used this tactic and it worked like a charm. It makes the fight indeed easier than Solarian was pre-patch. Regarding the warriors being targeted with the missiles: it doesn't hurt early on in the fight, and they can shieldwall as soon as targeted later on in the fight.

Indeed, this is certainly a working strategy in the fight's current form. I suggest people try it with a little amount of resist on the raid (100 buffed) and it is quite a simple fight.

What we do with melee DPS is keep them in the entire time. If you have the debuff ticking or nothing on you then you goto the left side and if you just have the arcane damage increaser on you then goto the right side (so your usual triangle melee arangement).

Works great and easy to explain to melee who are used to standing in such arrangements (or better be by now).