We have two of our hunters on bats during Phase 3. That's their sole job on Phase 3 - if a bat is alive, they kill it. If we're lazy and hit the enrage timer, then they swap to DPS on Vashj just to help burn her down faster, but that hasn't been an issue recently although we used that strategy for all of our first attempts.

Another vote for ignoring bats.

We killed Vashj just last night. We simply ignored the bats and burned Vashj. When the goo got to be too much in the original tanking area, we kited her slowly around the stairs.

She died about 30-45 seconds before "enrage" if I recall correctly, with 3-4 people dead. I don't think of our raid as having truly amazing DPS either, although it is solid.

I suppose only 3-4 dead means we did a decent job avoiding the goo. If that's not the case for another raid group, killing bats may be a better option.

Anyone have some 1st time WWS parses for their Vashj kills?

http://elitistjerks.com/511320-post845.html

It's also very possible you got lucky on where the bat spit was located. I know for our first kill, the hunters had problems killing the bats (first phase 3) but we got very lucky on the poison placement and it not hitting melee too much or doing a melee poison+root combo that can be so deadly. Killing the bats adds a lot more stability and a lot less chaos for future kills being easily repeatable. It's by no means pure luck or anything even close if you don't kill the bats, I just think it makes it riskier than necessary of getting an "unlucky" set of poisons.

1st kill
2nd kill
3rd kill

how many weeks did it take for you to get your strat down? what is your process in learning and reviewing fights? How to you improve on mistakes?

How many weeks? What was the winning raid composition?

I've always wondered, why is Vashj tauntable?

Presumably to make grounding totems and blessings of freedom less compulsory to have available.

tried her for three ids ( twice two days and once 1 day) ... each raid was four hours .. so round about 20 hours ...

our raid consists of:

1x defwarri
1x feral
--
3x rougues
1x offtank
4x mages (3x fire, 1x arcane/ice for kiting striders)
3x warlocks
2x hunter
2x shadows
1x ele shaman
--
2x druids
2x shamans
2x paladins
1x priest (buffbot)

so basically 2x tanks, 7x healers, 16x dd


Yes, she's ... if grounding fails, or something, it's better to have two tanks .. although one would do it atleast for the P1 & P3

Do you have a WWS for this set of attempts? We have roughly the same composition and I'd like to see how much dps/healing each class was doing.

It lets you get through P1/P3 without Grounding Totem and Blessing of Freedom, or with mistakes from the people providing them. It's probably also a holdover from the days where she could mind control the MT and a few others simultaneously.

We had our first night of serious Vashj attempts last night, and it was pretty frustrating. DPS was pretty low all around. I'd attribute some of this to having two fewer ranged dps than normal (missing a mage and elemental shaman and were left with 4 locks, hunter, mage, 2 shadow priests), but it was still frustrating.

1. We needed one affliction lock to keep CoX up on the strider being kited, and while I'd like to have our other affliction lock on elementals, she said she didn't have the burst to nuke down tainted elementals when they spawned.

2. We had problems with warlocks pulling agro off our kiting hunter. This would happen at around 50% of the strider's health, so it wasn't a matter of getting the locks to let the hunter get initial agro.

3. Eventually we decided that we would simply have an offtank tank all the naga as they popped up and drag them with us over into phase three. I'm skeptical of this approach because it will tie up two of our healers for phase three, as well as creating a swarming pack of cleaving death when positioning is already going to be an issue due to bat slime. Is there anyone out there who successfully offtanks the naga, and if so, how do you deal with them in phase three?

Fair enough. However, we did kill her again last night with no trouble once we had a clean P3 entry. One dead at the end, Vashj died well before enrage.

But I won't try and argue the point further since we still just have two kills and I can see the potential virtue of killing bats.

1. There is quite a bit of posts in this thread in regards to affliction locks on elementals, they are quite preffered because of the DoT's. Probably just have to have her save her CD's for when a tainted spawns.

2. Why have the hunter kite? If you have a lock keeping up CoX you should just have them kite as well.

3. When first learning this fight the naga's will fall a bit behind as you concentrate on getting the elementals and striders figured out for your guild. Once you get those things worked out the naga dps will just fall into place. You definately don't want to just off-tank them into phase 3, at least not intentionally, as your phase 3 dps on Vashj will be brutal and you'll consistently run into the soft enrage. I would plan on getting consistent dps on the naga but don't really start fretting about it until the Striders are dying before another spawns and you aren't missing any tainted spawns.

There's no reason Affliction locks can't do elemental DPS and still not worry about Tainteds. The generally accepted positioning on the edge calls for 6 DPS'ers - with some sectors being bigger than others. All you have to do is give your Affliction Locks a smaller sector and put burst DPS on both sides of them, so that when a Tainted spawns they just call it out and receive emergency assistance from the 2 guys next to them.

We use an OT for the nagas so when vashj spawns, the MT can pick her up before she multishots the raid. The last 3-4 times we've killed her, the bats have bugged on us. About 20 seconds into p3 the entire center of the map will become completely covered in acid. We usually have a hunter knock out the first 6-7 bats until all dps is on Vashj (after finishing the last nagga). Has anyone else had the same issue? It's as if the bats temporarly bug out and spit on a large radius in an instant.

Here's our first kill:

Knight Guard Lady Vashj

We used two locks to kill the bats in phase 3. IMO this fight is all about quickly and cleanly getting through phase 2, and doing the p2->p3 transition without losing a chunk of the raid force. If you go in to phase 3 with your MT tanking Vashj and only 2 or 3 dead, it is in the bag.

We had that happen once, after a wipe during an enrage. Didn't really matter too much, other than the 'Oh Shit' comments in Vent and people freaking out, but after the poison wore off, the bats were normal.

I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure this happens when you have someone standing on the stairs in phase 3. Sort of a "Don't do this" type mechanism (like cloak blowing up Solarians bomb instantly).

We had multiple heartbreaker wipes in the 7-10 range today, and a few more in the 14-15% range.

We're consistently getting through phase 2 without a missed tainted and often with 0 dead.

We are... not getting though phase 3 well at all.

In particular, attempt after attempt, we were having issues with static charge-related deaths before healers and dps were back in towards the centre, and the melee NEVER lasted beyond 25% or so which was a definite problem. We're talking 5 melee plus the prot warrior tank, and we will pretty much never have less than that. They must be able to live.

We tried having hunters kill bats and having hunters just dps Vashj. We had to move Vashj more the latter way, obviously, but I didn't notice any real difference in either melee survival rate or the percentage we got her down to.

Does anyone have any kind of tricks we could be doing to improve on phase 3? We are holding onto the core as long as possible to give max dps time on adds before the next elite or strider spawns, so there's not much to do to improve on that sadly. The biggest issues simply seem to be healers having too much to do on the transition- healing the MT, healing the naga elite OT, healing static charge, doing blessing of freedom on the tank (paladins) and dropping grounding totems near the MT (shaman). And stuff falls through the cracks until the elites are down. And melee in particular still seems to fall through the cracks after that.

I'm sure after so many hours yesterday and today our healing team was simply burned out, and will probably be better when we come back next week, but still. Any tips appreciated

I'm looking for some kiter PoV videos if there are any out there or if someone is willing to make one and share.

I've seen elemental duty, naga tanking and ranged dps, healing and melee dps vids.

To see what a kiter does exactly to maintain threat and path the strider would be the missing piece in explaining the fight to people.