Usually we like to save our misdirects for the striders, since they seem to be the leading cause of death. We've found that leaving our two tree druids in the middle basically guarantees the naga will head for our tanks. Paladins won't get aggro because of their 4:1 heal:threat, and priests can fade if necessary. There's no reason naga shouldn't always goes straight to the middle.

Yeah, we put 2-3 paladins, depending on how many total healers we have, in the middle. They don't use salvation and then keep righteous fury up. As long as your outter ring healers are conscious about not landing a giant heal when naga's are due to spawn they should always head to the middle on a paladin where the tank can easily pick them up. The advantages here are you don't need MDs, if the naga hits the paladin once/twice it won't kill them, and you only need 1 tank in phase 2 total.

Healers getting splattered by recently-spawned adds simply aren't paying attention. It really should NEVER happen, considering that there's no burst damage in the fight. Check your timers, if a big mob is about to spawn don't load up a big heal, and call out where the mobs spawn so nearby healers can be extra cautious. We don't really have a strategy for dealing with heal aggro, we just tell everyone to be careful and yell at them if they aren't

I've scoured this thread for every little thing we can do for phase 2 and I thought I had a good idea of how many people to put on elementals, elites, and striders, and a good idea of which classes should go where, but we just couldn't get to phase 3 last night (our 1.5th night or so) but could get 2-3 generators down, usually 2 while things were starting to get chaotic and the 3rd while the raid was falling apart.

It just felt like we didn't have enough dps around to deal with stuff, like it was fairly balanced in that all three (elementals, striders, elites) were okay for the first minute or so, but then all three got overwhelmed. For reference,
elementals (6) - 2 x hunter, 1 x warlock, 1 x mage, 1 x dps warrior, 1 x rogue
elites (4.5) - warrior tank, 3 x rogue, 1 x shadow priest, 1 x prot warrior (when there's only 1 up)
striders (5.5) - warlock tank, 4 x mage, 1 x shadow priest

Dps was fine on the first of each add (the strider dpsers would hit the elite while waiting on the strider to spawn). I'm not sure what caused striders to get out of control exactly. It seemed like around 20-30% someone would pull strider aggro (which supposedly is due to lack of a secondary snare on the strider cause the lock needs more SP time) or else around the Tainted spawn time, someone would let 3 elementals or so through and then we'd have to clean them up, but it'd cost us 10% or so of the strider. Elite dps was fine the first time (dead on time) and less so for the second (maybe 5-10% at spawn time) and I think the third was where it got bad.

Our two shadow priests did very poorly on the meters in phase 2, but did well in phase 1. I know they were saying that range was the issue (though the naga spriest shouldn't be saying that). I can only hope that'll be fixed by more experience - does anyone have advice I can give to them?

Some things will probably be remedied through group setup, like normally we have an Enh Shaman, who would be on the elite with two rogues. We'll probably switch the destro? lock (previous strider kiter) with the affliction lock (previously on elementals) to avoid Tainted despawning and that should fix some aggro problems due to stronger dots. For the kiter, I'll also make a point of saying that Mind Flay/Frostbolt need to be up. Assignment-wise, the only thing I can think of is switching the naga shadow priest with the rogue, which might have some other problems. Tactics-wise, I'm not sure what else to do... maybe I can get the strider kiter to put CoR on the elite and maybe I can get the resto druid to put FF on it. I think the elemental lock was trying to put CoE on the strider as it passed, that's about all I can think of for synergy there.

Definitely people dying in p2 will spiral things, but for the most part, deaths are due to being new to the fight (like a mage getting cleaved or healers getting feared, etc). Some deaths were from like a double poison thing plus forked lightning, which I don't know how to deal with except for healthstones/healing potions. Usually though, it seemed like people died when things started getting chaotic on our good attempts, so I don't think that's the cause of our dps problem.

Does it sound like being more used to the fight will fix dps issues? I don't know if we have more ranged dps to bring really, but I imagine that would help out on elementals. It seems like we're basically taking everyone's advice aside from a few little tweaks, though maybe our raid composition is different than normal.

Basically, yes. DPS requirements of vashj p2 aren't that high, I'm sure it could be done with kara items only. It's all a matter of knowing the fight. When your players will be sure of what spawn, where, when, how they can dps better, where they can place themselves... it'll be way easier and you gonna kill her.

If you bring 4 poison cleansers and spread them out in her room, nobody should take a tick of the poison and would reduce your random deaths greatly.

We have experienced some strange behaviour from the Naga yesterday. What would happen was that occasionally a Naga would head towards the center, then suddenly make a turn and aggro a mage or warlock (me in one case) standing on the stairs. No heals or any action against the Naga on my part when it spawned, except proximity and perhaps mana regen from BoW/VT, although threat from the latter is attributed to the priest iirc.

Hopefully I can convince one of the palas to heal with RF up next time to prevent this from happening.

So in this thread somebody said that the Sporebats have 14k life, and another person said they have around 7k. Can anyone give the official word to this? My guild is going to be pushing Vashj in the next couple of days, so I'd like to be able to prep the bat-killers with the correct information.

The latter rather than the former.

We're doing this and it works very well, assuming that the paladin(s) with RF got someone to heal.
Both Coilfang Elites and Coilfang Striders goes straight for the paladins and it pretty much fixes any issues we had with nagas ganking our resto druid spamming hots.

Wowhead reports 9400 health: http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22140.

A question for those that have killed her, especially those that did it recently.While learning, how did you approach Vashj regarding healing? We typically bring 7 or 8 healers for most fights, but after a few nights with the Lady we have been trying to put more and more dps into the raid. Last raid we experimented with 6 healers (7) the day before, and it didn't go that well.

Even though we went with 18 dpsers, 6 healers and only one tank, we generally couldn't keep everyone alive on p2 for more than 30 seconds. Bear in mind we've been to p3 sometimes already, but the raid always crashes at transition, mainly because the lack of dps/control makes us have an additional set of elites spawn when 4th generator goes down. We usually have no issues getting the strider or elite naga in time unless someone dies on a given area.

So to be more precise, should we strive to keep a high number of dpsers and just adjust to it because it will be needed, or, at least while learning, bring a bigger number of healers to ensure we can have everyone alive during phase 2?

we used 7 healers for our first kill and 6-7 since then. we use 2 tanks main warrior and pally offtank. the ranged taunt is money for the naga.

I've always been a big fan of learning encounters stacking healers (7-8), and subbing in DPS as needed. So in the example of Vashj, if you're falling behind in P2 you probably need more dps. We typically ride dps heavy for the most part, but I've read and heard of alot of guilds never riding below 7. We go with 6-7 healers on average and bring in more if required. 7 is fairly ideal for a fight like Vashj. We only used 6 on our Kael kill.

As far as DPS goes, so long as you're keeping up on Nagas, Striders, and Elementals, you should be fine.

Here's our WWS on her (albeit a sloppy kill) if you're curious on healing, dps, etc..:

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=16879-17468

Shaft your dps warrior torpor needs more hit, just give him a heads up on that 17.2% missed attacks is very very high. It would increase his performance quite alot. Generally with the +3% hit talent he should aim for at first around 18% hit, then increase his other stats, and then back to hit. In my experience anyway.

If you're getting stuck on Lady Vashj watch my tactical guide movie, I made it to help out anyone getting bit stuck on her...

www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=42710

This is a tricky question to answer. It really all comes down to your particular guild's strengths.

Some guilds run encounters with 8 healers. I honestly don't know how they get anything killed.

Our last Vashj kill we ran with 5 healers. 2 Paladins, 2 Resto. Shams, and myself (Holy Priest). That was the lowest we've ever ran it with, and it was very intense, but it worked better for us than the previous night where we'd been trying with 7 healers.

There's a fine line to be found in "zerg" encounters between healing and DPS. It's kind of odd that by adding more (or better) DPS to a fight you actually make it easier on your healers than by adding more healers, but it's true. And that's true of Vashj, as people are pointing out. Once your DPS knows how to control the zerg, and does their job quickly and efficiently, a lot of your healing problems will fix themselves.

Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse here, but I might be giving the Elemental Shaman kiting a go on her. What do you do? Frost Shock every cooldown obviously, but do you have time to throw in LBs in between?
What happens if you get a FS resist? Drop Earthbind and pray that doesn't get resisted either?

We're had quite a few tries on Vashj yet we've seem to encounter this problem every time about when the 3rd naga comes out

What Happens is we're doing the 5 melee 1 hunter spotter for Tainted usually it's a Rogue Rogue Dps War Enh Shaman Rogue set up.

We keep the Casters up top S.Priest on the Strider Rest on Elites we get the first Naga down no problem switch to Strider . Strider down with about 5 sec till the next. Work on Naga by the time we get on the Strider we can't kill it before the next strider is out, is it the lapse in dps on this at that point.

Added on top of that usually the side that gets the tainted starts leaking a few full health one requiring people to pull off. Once the 3rd Strider is out things just go to hell by the time we're on the 4th core we have 3 nagas and 2 striders walking around.

Are we missing something here or is our dps just sucking?

Honestly, I wouldn't use melee to control Elementals. Why? Well, because elementals move and spawn over a large area, and any time melee spends not hitting somthing is wasted. There is no way a melee character can be really efficient with regard to the elementals...not even a Fury Warrior with Imp Intercept/Victory Rush. Put the melee on the Elites...since they need to be tanked anyway, you'll get very high performance from melee DPSing the Elites. Casters/ranged are best for Elementals. Many guilds use melee on them simply because they learned Phase 2 before the 2.1 patch...and at that time the Elites had a 360-degree cleave that precluded melee DPS. Also, if a melee character has to deal with a Tainted spawn, they're ignoring several normal spawns until it's dead. Once it's dead though...they can't catch up, because they have to cover too much ground on foot.

Basically, you want to split up your DPS more than you are. Saying "all ranged DPS hop between Elites and Striders" is a bit cumbersome, and any time you have people switching targets DPS is lost (debuffs need to be re-applied, need to re-position etc.). Keeping smaller numbers of people focused on single targets allows them to be very efficient, and that's really the name of the game with Phase 2. All your DPS needs to be as efficient as possible to meet the requirements. They're not SUCKING necessarily, they're just not being assigned ideally.

I kite the striders along with an affliction warlock (I get the first, he gets the second, etc) and it's pretty simple for me. Like you said, just frost shock every time it's up. When I get close to paladins who have free time they run in and stun it so I can get 2-3 LB casts off on it to give me that much more threat while I can, but even when it's not stunned I can run far enough between frost shocks to get a LB off every now and then. Remind your kiters to turn off salvation too, of course.

An elemental shaman is supposed to have maxed out spell hit, so resists will be a rare thing. Earthbind will usually work in that case. Personally when I've had mine resisted I just keep running ahead of it and the cooldown will be up again before the strider's in melee range.

Would you Do basically 5 on the stairs with 1 hunter to cover for them when tainted spawns

Warlocks/hunters/etc on them We tried that strat orginally then changed it i think we only had 4 on stairs with 4 on backup for them i think the biggest problem is that our helpers were helping too much on the stair spawn and not enough on the strider so we were behind on that.

It usually felt like it was just our 2 shadowpriest+ our kiting warlock on it whats usually a safe number of people on the strider to get it down effectively?

Wanted to thank the nice replies to my healing question and give some feedback. After some adjustments, we killed her tonight. The changes were:


* We took 7 healers, used shaman (a resto went) elemental;

* We used a paladin with RF to get aggro on the elite nagas;

* 4 poison removers on each "corner";

* 2 tanks instead of just one;

* Warlocks and Hunters on elementals to maximize dps time.

From many chaotic phase 2 tries, with things breaking down due to random deaths, we went to very smooth transitions to phase 3. Once there we actually hit the enrage on occasion, but ended up killing her with 10k raid dps. So the general advice of going for more control over dps certainly made full sense for us and I would strongly advise it to guilds learning the encounter.