I blame the ferals.

How well do you think seed of corruption would work? Or are the bats farther than a 36 yard range?

They're at ~40 yards and move pretty quickly. The cast time would prevent you from using SoC if the distance didn't.

Ok, Here's our Scenario. We pushed her down to phase 3 a couple times tonight and otherwise would get 3/4 barriers down. THE MAIN PROBLEM we had was not letting tainted Cores guys despawn.

Our setup was as follows:
4 DPS on the naga elites (melee/1 caster due to comp. issues)
1 kiting Warlock with 6 caster DPS on the striders
3 hunters 2 Warlocks (1 affliction 1 destro) On the elementals

7 healers
2 Tanks

We had so many opportunities to have solid transitions into p3 but every single attempt at least 1 core despawn. I'm convinced its almost impossible to kill her having missed a core with the amount of stuff going on and the gradual falling behind in DPS that is going to happen. The naga would always die on time, with the first one dying with alot of extra time due to the free 10 seconds you get at the start. The fen striders WOULD HAVE died on time if we never missed a core, with the last one being at about 20% ish or lower when the 4th barrier should be down. The elementals are going good until a tainted core guy spawns and then it starts to fall behind until eventually one gets by and makes her grow.

Basically, how do we not suck at killing the tainted guys. Our affliction lock claims he cant solo one and we even have a couple hunters taht cant solo them and i feel that the lack of soloability is really forcing us to expend alot of DPS on the stairs that could be used up top. It feels like the DPS on the top is being stretched to the limit (esp. on the striders) and sacrificing anymore to the stairs would result in not enough DPS.

Break down what skills the warlocks and hunters are using on the Tainted spawns. If the warlocks are using dots to kill them, where thats and easy fix, if the hunters are using Aimed shot to much on the tainted, need to get them to start using more Steady shot and such, or work on their rotation.

Could also switch people around for an attempt or two see if its just positioning that's hurting, and could also swap assignments between the locks and rogues.

Playing a hunter in this fight ive managed to keep the stairs clear of any trouble, only time you should fall behind is when a tainted spawns and you need to move the core.

6k hp within 10 seconds, toss in every instant you have and its a win. (arcane, multi, steady) for me a normal steady auto rotation will kill it in time. Same for a lock, if he is in range, 2 dots and 2 shadowbolts should really do the trick, and is most likely even overkill.

Most likely problem is not being focussed on the water at the spawntime, usually at the 3th orso tainted people will be pushed up the stairs. Make sure there are ppl at vashj finishing off elementals, and tell the people on the stairs not to be affraid to let one go on low hp, priority is being able to nuke the tainted one immediatly when it spawns, not having to run to it and loose 30 % of the time available.

edit: listing abilities.

My guild spent just over 3 hours on Vashj, our first day on her. I researched the fight a good deal to find what would work for us and we ended the night using 5 ranged DPS distributed around the rim, 2 shadowpriests and 3 other ranged DPS on the striders, and 4 melee taking down nagas. 2 tanks and 8 healers supporting, and 1 COEx warlock kiting.

We got all 4 cores into their pillars via throwing once, though the fight is usualy out of hand right around the intended 4 core mark. We're still letting at least 1 tainted elemental despawn.

I was wondering, have any guilds considered spacing each and every mage, warlock, and hunter evenly around the rim? For us that would mean about 9 ranged DPS, and I assume that would mean each DPSer only has to handle ~1.5 columns of elementals. Folk would be required to turn and heavily DPS striders whenever the kiter brought it into range, in addition to the 2 shadowpriests who stay on the strider full time. This puts more people on the rim and means tainted spawns will be quickly dealt with, as well as it would be very difficult to fall behind on elementals.

The obvious worry is if strider DPS would be sufficient. Ignoring the 2 shadowpriests, we'd go from 3 ranged DPS full time on the strider, to 9 DPS each doing part time on them. I'm tempted to try this out, as it would enhance elemental control while potentialy keeping up the same (if not better due to spread threat) damage on the striders. I'm looking for opinions from those more experienced in the fight, or even those who have tried something similar.

Does anyone have a good birds-eye view shot of her platform including the stairs? I want to make some diagrams but can't find any good images (and seeing as we haven't downed her yet I have no easy way to create one of my own ).

Just PM me if you want other zones / colors / numbers and I'll drop you a link... I do recommend picking up GIMP for image editing and downloading wowmapview. With those two tools you can create images like this without much problem.

Oh god that picture reminds me I haven't done my Apexis shards Simon quest today!

Another excellent image editing program that's free is Paint.NET. It's like a free mini-photoshop.

I really dont see why you should have more than 3 hunters on the elementals after wiping on this girl for a few hours now. Can take 3 spawns easily as BM hunter, even if I have to kill a tainted spawn.

Then again, I do quite a bit of dps. :p

Group setup 2 warlocks, 2 BM hunters and shadowpriest.

Had no problems at all to keep my pet up with just mend pet so far. :o

Why does that image have 5 colored areas?

Our strat had five sections. As Errhellno said above, our DPS wasn't cutting it at all, I'll draw an image up with four sections instead of five after the raid tonight and update my old post.

Thanks for the diagram, you've got a pm!

And holy crap, there's a smiley?!?

Mmm yes, quite!

Here are several other images that people have asked for via PM. I'll post them all here in the hopes that some guilds are able to take advantage of them.

3 Sides:


4 Sides:


11 Sides:

We've been using the melee on elementals strat for 2 nights of wipes now. We can get to stage 3, but not reliably, and typically with too many elementals through.

I'm intrigued by the affliction warlocks/hunters on elementals but I'm concerned about an affliction warlock having the burst to take the tainteds down and get it looted before despawn. Has this been an issue, and if so, how do you deal with it?

Try using less healers, with an extra shadow priest. 1 extra dps on elites/spawns can make the difference. Just make healing a little more rough.

The issue we have with Vashj is this: normally, our good/great ranged DPS are able to cover for our stupid/bad ranged DPS (melee is always solid). Some people do great damage, some people do poor damage, in the end it balances out to decent damage and we kill things. With Vashj, that doesn't happen. EVERY single DPSer (every player for that matter) needs to be on his game 100% of the time or you wipe. It's getting pretty demoralizing : / We can consistently get 3/4 generators down, but by that point Vashj's lightning is hitting for 3.5-4k and that sucks healer mana dry very quickly.

We've killed Vashj twice now, so this post isn't about solving a particular part of the fight, it's about something we've had happen on 3 separate attempts this week which we can't determine the cause of.

Making the transition from the 4th barrier up into p3 we'll hold the Core as long as possible in order to clean up the nagas/striders/elementals so we can get on Vashj asap. We've had 3 wipes in late stage p3 because we had a Tainted Elemental either up as the last barrier was dropped or spawn at the same time the torch was clicked. No problem really, just kill it and move on, except for the fact that the Tainted Elementals kept spawning on their timer, so not only do we have Vashj and Spore Bats to deal with, but Tainteds as well raining poison spit on the raid which ends up killing people and turning kill attempts into 'release and run back'

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this, or if there's something we're missing on this one thing, it doesn't happen every attempt, but it happened 3 separate times this week and definitely want to avoid it happening again.

You must kill any Tainted Water Elementals hat are up before bringing the fight into stage 3. If you don't they will continue to spawn during stage 3. This happened a few times to us before our first kill.

We were mostly wondering if it's a bug so we can start annoying, all cap topics on R&D demanding "Bliz plz fix" or at least get them to acknowledge the problem exists.