Been attempting Lady Vashj for two nights now and have made very little progress and Im afraid we are missing something with the encounter. Phase 1 was extremely easy dps Vashj down while avoiding the shocks cast on members of the raid. In Phase 2 the melee breaks covering areas for the elementals with the hunters and 1 lock helping them. The rest of the range cuts to the middle around Vashj waiting for Striders and Naga. The question I have is what is the best method to killing the strider and naga and what is the dps benchmark? We tried kiting with a warlock and then with a hunter, but we are having problems keeping them consistently slowed and following one person. Trying to DPS them down fast we end up pulling them to the center fearing the range and tanks.

Group make up

Tanks
2 prot warriors

DPS
1 fury warrior
2 rogues
1 ench shaman
3 warlocks
3 mages
4 hunters
1 shadow priest

Healers
3 pallys
2 resto shaman
1 resto druid
2 holy priests

We were 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK before the patch and recently killed A'lar so I dont think its due to bad guild performance. Any help would be appreciated.

The DPS benchmark is kind of self-evident: Kill nagas before the next spawns, kill striders before the next spawns, don't let elementals reach Vashj, and kill the Tainted when it spawns. Do all 4, and you have enough DPS.

Is your problem really just Strider control? We have an affliction warlock kite with CoEx on full-time, with Mind Flay and such helping out, and paladins HoJ'ing when possible to let the warlock stop and build some more threat, or reestablish range. Any free warriors can also easily zerker rage --> intercept --> hamstring and get out to apply a nice reliable snare.

Is the Strider kiter dying? If so work on keeping it snared more. Are people pulling aggro on the Strider? If so, give them something else to do (typically DPSing a Naga) for a bit while the kiter builds more aggro, and/or give Tranquil Air to your ranged group to help out.

Last night before our raid comp got really bad we found a few issues/resolutions.

- Our Shadow Priest got threat capped on anything that a warrior was not tanking. So he threw up dots on striders and did dps on the naga.
- Just a few melee dps on naga also seemed to be a lot better than having Rogues on the water elementals.
- 6 DPS assigned to 2 sections of stairs should work better than the 4 per 3 we were using.
- Hunter or Lock kiting was working for us. Our Warlocks are all Affliction so they have CoEx.

It is all about delegation. What your raid comp looks like is pretty huge on how you can handle it.

It took our guild, several nights (2-3?) of learning before we killed vashj, its just one of those practice the execution fights until you win. Our biggest hurdle was getting from t2-t3 without having striders still up, but we overcame that..

We used warlocks to kite, and mages to cast frostbolt to slow + other snares, pretty much make sure your kiters don't pull the stryders through the raid. For some reason we always had a shadow priest chain die to striders. Getting through phase 2 consistantly is pretty much the main objective of the fight, keep a clear vent and only poeple who are throwing the orbs, or really in dire need of a heal talk. Stay calm, cool and collected even if you're feeling overwhelmed.

A good tactic is to burn down the first naga, strider strider, while tanking nagas off to the side, works decently, when raid isn't killing striders, dot up nagas, or damage them til striders spawns. Just make sure the nagas are either misdirected or pulled to the one tank tanking them all, as they hamstring making it difficult for the tank to move.

Quick note: The tailoring nets are just priceless here.

This is something suboptimal that I think a lot of guilds do. Pre-2.1, the only viable role for melee in phase 2 was on elementals. The Elites had a brutal 360-degree cleave, and obviously you can't melee Striders, so your rogues had nothing else to do except run around after elementals.

For guilds that learned phase 2 this way pre-2.1, it probably makes sense not to tinker with a system that works. But some guilds that are new to the fight watch the Method video and copy it without thinking.

But it should be basic common sense that low-hp mobs that move around are not optimal targets for melee DPS. A hunter with his pet can keep an entire quadrant clear of elementals without needing to budge, while a rogue can remain stationary in the middle, applying efficient DPS cycles to a tanked Elite.

For those of us who haven't seen the fight first hand and are curious, what makes the striders untankable/meleeable? I'm guessing an aura of some sort?

I watched the Method videos quite a while ago but I'm at work now. I checked out wowwiki, wowhead and thottbot for some hints but all to no avail.

They have a pulse fear that makes you run faster and is like a 8 secound fear. Only time we get melee near them is when a warrior pops his berserker rage to hamstring/conc it, after the Naga dies. We used warlocks with Curse of Exhaustion.

I can't comment per say on how well your strat would work but can compare it ours. First the Hunter should have a MD up on the first naga, unless your just stacked on DPS the strider will be up and have the warlock pick it up and use searing pain for threat. By the time the naga is dead the warlock should have considerable hate on the strider. Our Shadow Priest was 2nd on DPS and wasn't close to pulling it off the warlock.

We assigned 5 DPS to different directions, then we had 2 DPS warriors split on different sides because of intercept on the tainted. One thing that helped alot on getting tainted cores was the communication. We were just sloppy horrible at moving the tainted core to the pillar. When we would have to move it across the room it was just a MESS. Then something just clicked and it was like an assembly line moved it fast and effectivly. Your melee dps need to have a microphone call out location and ping the map.

/use Tainted Core

An obvious macro but useful.

With melee the way we worked it is if you were like a rogue and your add hit the top of the stairs you got off it and went for the next one, some dps up top finishing it. This is important because if they aren't at a decent position on the stairs they will miss the Tainted. One tainted miss is a huge loss. Also healing is honestly not hard in this fight, we had 6 and one dieing from a naga at the start of phase 2 and had no problems till the root + spore bat on melee in phase 3 (/wave they all died.).

All I can say is what I've experienced others have probably done it differently.

Might as well add some more : We also had a healer (me) in the middle taking damage so when the Nagas/Striders would spawn I could pull aggro on them instead of a outside healer and this would give tanks enough time to pick it up.

Grounding Totem in the tank group for phase 1&3.

It seems talking to two friends guilds this is how most guilds progress on this fight:
Day 1) Feet wet, not 100% on strategy see the boss figure stuff out, phase 1 goes smooth, and phase 2 is hectic 1-2 Pillars down just out of force, striders/nagas not dieing fast enough.
Day 2) Come back ready, new strategy to try, constantly seeing 2+ pillars down, possibly seeing phase 3. (Possibly killing her too.)
Day 3) Ready to go, communication is on, cores are getting handled, you see phase 3 maybe 1-3 times, and you have a dead boss.

Don't give up phase 2 is whats going to break your raid if you get through it for the most part phase 3 is easy even considering the enrage timer isn't to much to worry about, I believe we went 20 secounds into the enrage timer with 13 alive.

They pulse a fear that increases your movement speed by 150% (apologies, I can't recall the exact name) for a few seconds, every two seconds.

We managed to get our first kill last night but one of our biggest problems was people pulling hate on them from the other side of the room causing them to cut through the middle, fearing the Naga tanks who then went around obliterating people.

Lady Vashj feels a lot like C'thun v2.

This is what we discussed doing for our future kills. It'd probably be better all around, not just for elementals (nothing like melee getting rooted in spore bat splooge next to a static charge to ruin your day), but it still works. If you don't have a choice, warriors tend to do a lot better playing tag with elementals than rogues or feral druids, since they can use intercept and victory rush to awfully swell effect.

Well, having 3 naga or so left up tanked in the middle when the last core is used isn't bad either. Maybe our dps is just bad then...

Well, the problem with that is you spend the first 30-45 seconds of phase 3, when things are nice and easy, killing leftover spawns from phase 2. You really want to get on Vashj as quickly as possible at the start of phase 3, since that's when you're going to be getting the most DPS out of your raid. On our kill we had no striders and 1 naga up at the start of phase 3, and on a 1% wipe (that would have been a win save for a few silly errors in P3) we had 1 naga and 1 strider at 15%. We had a quite a few wipes below 25% that were basically all due to having too many mobs up at the start of phase 3 and not putting a dent in Vashj early enough.

While I agree that it's not "optimal" to have rogues on elemental spawns, our composition didn't really allow for much otherwise. We don't have enough ranged DPS in the guild to have them deal with both elementals and striders.

The Coilfang Elites in their current form are more or less identical to the Guardians on Lurker -- they just have a bit more hp.

Their cleave is pretty much a nonissue in 2.1.

Yeah, I guess it depends on raid composition. Though we just had one dedicated strider-killing group of spriest + 2x elemental shaman (stacking ToW and both WoA+TA) + 2x mage, along with another shadow priest in a group of healers. Those 6 players killed every strider with ample time before the next one spawned. (Obviously along with an additional warlock kiting each Strider.) We had 2 hunters, a mage, and a warlock on the elementals. 3 mages, 2 warlocks, 2 hunters, and 2 shadow priests isn't really "ranged heavy" I don't think. For reference we had one Elite up when the last shield went down, and phase 3 was pretty trivial since we could start heavy DPS on her right away, even though we'd never seen it before.

The whole fight is basically the Phase 2 => Phase 3 transition. If you can do that cleanly with no high HP adds up you should be set for the kill. Our first kill was on the first attempt of that night. Earlier this week it was our second attempt of the night (druid got aced by Multishot on pull)

[edit] Also, shadowpriests SW on adds that get through means they have near infinite mana from Spirit Tap.

Yeah, the striders can be netted.

Another little known fact is that you can kill the bats, though pretty much only hunters have the range and the attack speed needed to kill them reliably. Mages have the range, but often the bats move out of casting range before the cast completes.

This makes phase 3 incredibly trivial if you have two hunters dedicated to bat hunting, pretty much reducing phase 3 to 'phase 1 with a 4 minute enrage timer'.

Hunters are by far the best elemental killers. Long range, fast attacks, and a pet makes for a side clear of elementals very fast. I'll probably have us try all melee on naga, all non-hunter ranged on striders, and all hunters (we had 4 on our kill yesterday) on elementals next week with the info re: the cleave - seems a lot more efficient than what we've been doing.

We've found that Warlocks are the best at killing elementals, just put on Corruption, Siphon Life, and CoA and the water elementals are dead before they reach Vashj; soloing Tainted Elementals isn't hard, either. I've covered NW, W, and SW without too many problems unless I get 2 Tainted spawns in my area consecutively, then I start to fall behind on water elementals, but the melee who are killing Nagas can help play catch up.

The only problem we've found with stacking too many melee in the raid is the damage they take, especially in phase 3. Almost all of the spore bats shoot poison clouds onto them, combine that with an entagle+static charge and somebody is going to die.

We use an elemental shaman to kite the Striders, and then a shadow priest with 3 mages helping him. Frost shock and mind flay keep it slowed, and the shaman is able to generate a considerable amount of threat.

If we had 4 hunters in our raid I'd do the exact same thing, maybe with the help of one extra person.

I see people talking about the transition Phase 2 -> Phase 3, Phase 2 itself, but one thing I don't see, is people handling Phase 3.

Of the videos I have seen, Vashj is tanked in the middle of her platform just like Phase 1, melee in the middle, casters spread out around, but the problem there arises when the "enrage" timer comes about, you get poison globs going everywhere making it impossible to move without taking damage.

One thing my guild did, is tanked Vashj on the outer ring moving her around it, with the casters in the center, melee on her tail. This positioning allows for the raid to not break down when that "enrage" timer is met. When we still had bad transitions to Phase 3, we could still last over 1-2 minutes past when she should die just because the poison bolts were concentrated into 2 areas, and still lots of open room.

That allows for a little more sloppiness on the transition and still pull out a kill.

Was going to make a paint drawing, but it seems totally worthless to. It's quite possible to have melee dominate their spawns. We had myself and two rogues on a side, and the WF totem was in the middle. With it they soloed their own tainted elementals while keeping up with their own spawns.

Is group looting the cores with loot threshold poor/common clever use of game mechanics or cheating?