2 Trees
1 Resto Shaman
2 Holy Priests
2 Holy Pallies
7 Healers
We are having real trouble balancing people out. Typically we get 2/4 generators down no problem, before we are overwhelmed with adds.
We have been having hunters basically hold their own sides with usually 2 supporting ranged, melee on naga, and the rest on striders.
In the middle we typically have both trees, and holy priest, then 1 healer per side.
We are having a lock kiting striders also.
There are a couple of main issues we are having.
1. Healer deaths
- loose adds usually
2. Striders Living
3. Missing tainteds
I'll throw up our most recent WWS at the end for any criticisms that may come from that.
We have tried rearranging people, covering different areas. Are we just having too low DPS overall, or any other pearls of wisdom, or weird things we are missing. Night 1 Night 2
What we did was use lots of locks to help with the striders, something like 6! We also had an elemental shaman as the kiter.
But the best part was the hunters who really kept the spore bats under control and made dpsing so much easier!
First off I would like to thank the people here a few months ago who of course helped me to down Vashj for the first time, but with things restarting many months later, we are here on Vashj again and were on a dead-end.
I will explain the troubles we are having, frequent in everyone posts I know but just so you know:
- Strider DPS, low side
- Missing Tainted Cores
- Naga's building up due to lost cores
- Elementals breaking through
I am not the guild master sadly and do not have overall control over the raid group and I do not have the same setup of people I had all those months ago.
Anyway, good setup one would think, but I need some advice.
The Strider group is usually
1 Warlock
4 Mages
1 Shadow Priests
The main thing I really need to know is if any mage who has done the Strider DPS before, what your DPS cycle is to get down the Strider's as fast as possible.
Should we keep with 6 Ranged on the Strider, 6 ranged on outside (with one feral), 2 melee on the Nagas and 4 healers outside and 4 healers inside?
Another question I need to ask, is with my current healers, where should I put them, and what should they heal, we tried 2 on melee / tanks, 2 on the striders and the rest on their allocated positions. Which healers should I put where do you think, noticably that priests cant remove poison but im not sure about them on the strider group healing.
My guild's been trying to get Vashj down for about 3 weeks now. Originally, when we first killed Leo, our goal was to kill Vashj/Kael before 2.4 hit. Although it doesn't look like we'll realistically have time for Kael anymore, we'd still like to kill Vashj ASAP before 2.4 hits so we can at least have 1 major victory as we begin T6 content. Last Sunday we got in a good 5 hours or so on her, hours 13-18 overall.
We can make it to P3 on about 30% of attempts, but we're usually in pretty bad shape. Multiple deaths, strider(s) up, and generally at least 3 nagas up. We do the fight with 7-8 healers usually. Tonight we had 2 rogues on the elites in the center, with the other DPS split around the outside edge of the circle, killing elems and striders. Healers stand at the torches, with a holy paladin running RF in the center. 2 DPS warriors focus exclusively on elementals in their section(s) of the stairs.
We generally get the striders down with about 5 seconds before the next one, but get backed up on the elites, and when 1 side starts leaking elementals, the DPS on the elites is basically zero until the strider dies or that side catches up on their elems. Also, we've had problems with nagas/striders spawning and gibbing the nearby whirlwinding warrior or C-heal-casting shaman.
Any tips that would help us down her faster and maybe get in some Kael time pre-2.4 would be greatly appreciated.
After one serious week and a few weeks of a thrown together attempts The Late Night Crew of Maelstrom has downed Vashj in a way that I don't think I've seen mentioned on this forum. Cant say for sure though.
Raid make up was the following
Tanks 2
Prot warriors
Healers 7
3 tree druids
2 Paladins
1 Priest
1 resto shaman
DPS 16
4 hunters 3 BM 1 MM
4 mages 1 ice 2 fire 1 arcane to KITE
2 rogues
2 fury warriors
2 warlocks
2 spriests
P1 tank and spank with pallies doing the blessing of freedom to help tanks stay on vashj, dedicated healers for the staic charge, nothing special here.
P2 for the elemental adds we had the 2 rogues, 2 fury warrriors, 1 warlock and 2 hunters all equally spread around with the three tree druids spread around the outside as well to heal them and toss cores. All the other ranged dps 4 mages, 2 hunters 2 spriest and 1 lock would help on adds till the first naga showed up, once the tank got aggro we nuked the naga down to at least 30% or so before the strider showed up. At that point all ranged moved to the strider with the arcane mage kiting and every tailor throwing up netherweave nets to keep it in place. Usually i would stay on the first naga till it was down send my pet to the second naga and switch to the strider. Every time a strider went down all ranged went back to the naga and we generally were able to have striders down and no more than 2 naga on good attempts.
Our four healers all stood by generators and healed the ranged dps/tanks/kiter from the center and dunked cores. All ranged dps stayed in the center as well following the strider around as necessary and picking up any elementals that made it to the top.
P3 hit and we had a strider at about 10% which went down quick and a naga at 40% which went down easy as well with the off tank picking up vashj. Our four hunters all watched for bats which came pretty slow at first so we shot the boss while one watched for bats and called out incoming at which point we killed the bat and then back to vashj. At 15% we ignored bats and nuked vashj and she went down with very little green goo in the way and about 20 of us still up.
With no melee on the naga, an arcane mage for kiting and melee on elementals despite going against some common knowledge we managed this encounter quite handily when everything fell into place and we finally got her in our first serious week of attempts.
So we all celebrated and had a wonderful time until things went sour and the hunter who had been recruited just 3 days prior ninja'd the t5 helm and then /gquit because the Raid leader disconnected in p3 and wasn't able to switch it back to master looter and we all wanted to cry.
(I realize you can't necessarily change all/any of this but I'll give my observations.)
Two tanks and eight healers is a lot of non-DPS in the raid. We learned and beat her with one tank, one feral in cat gear, and seven healers, and from reading this thread it's quite common for guilds to go with six healers. Our setup was three healers on the stairs (each covering two stair DPS - druids are nice for this, but anything works), three up top (one on the tank - we use a paladin with RF up to attract nagas - one on the kiter, and one - always a shaman for chain heal - on the ranged DPS), and one running around doing core relay. We had six DPS on the strider (including the kiter), six DPS on the stairs, four DPS on the naga, and one loose DPS mopping up loose elementals (covering for people who have to kill tainteds) and assisting with the core relay.
Hunters and demo locks are probably the best class for stair DPS, but mages and warlocks work fine too. Were I you I would probably put your warlocks and shadow priests on the strider (to take advantage of their synergies) and use hunters and mages on the stairs, with the extra mages allocated to strider DPS. There's nothing particularly different about nuking a strider as compared to nuking anything else - you stack scorch and then fireball (or frostbolt, or run your AB cycle, or whatever) while not standing in the naga cleave. Make sure the warlocks are using their curses (CoS and CoE on the strider, CoR and CoA or CoD on the naga) and that all ranged DPS up top never stop casting - as soon as the strider dies they should transition to nuking the naga without a pause until the kiter has picked up the next strider, at which point they swap back.
Mostly though I think you're being hurt because you have twice as many tanks as you need, and you're also running healer heavy. One prot warrior and one feral can handle all the tanking duties in the fight, with the feral contributing considerable DPS as well. A second feral isn't a problem as long as s/he has a good cat set, but the second DPS warrior is dropping your RDPS considerably. Dropping to seven healers and swapping the second prot warrior would get you another two DPSers, which, needless to say, is quite significant.
We've been learning Vashj the past 2 weeks or so, and had been pushing for a 2 tank/7 healer/3 melee/13 ranged set up. Finally got Stage 2 down, and had some brief progress into Stage 3.
Last night, with a lot of regulars away, we ran with:
2 Prot Warrior Tanks
7 Healers (2 druids, 2 priests, 1 shaman, 2 pallies)
7 Melee (3 rogues on Elites, 2 dps warrior on Elems, 1 Enh Shaman on Elems, 1 Feral on Tainted/Elems)
9 Ranged (3 Warlocks kiting Strider, 2 hunters w/1 on Striders, 2 Ele Shaman on Elems, 1 mage, 1 s priest)
Surprisingly, we had our 2 best runs, with a 9%, and a 4% finish.
Just curious, after reading about so much ranged stacking for this, if guilds who've downed her for some time still find themselves stacking ranged? Or does the above makeup still seem like feasible?
Again, wasn't our pre-plan to go with this, just happened due to heads available, but I might post in our guild forums that the original 3 melee/13 ranged dps was a bit of overkill, and going with our highest dps folks, and allowing a few more melee just might be the way to go.
We have found taking more melee doesn't matter so much as long as 2 things are true. First can you use those melee on the stairs? Some classes are better than others for that job, fury warrior is good for instance. Second do you have enough ranged to kill the striders in a decent amount of time?
9 ranged seems fine to me if you can put most of them on the striders.
Generally we had 3 rogues on naga, 1 feral on stairs and then ranged dps, but that was when we were learning it. Once we got it down better we could take more melee no problem.
So we had her at 12% on Sunday. I know 2.4 dropped but I feel like a raid has to down her and Kael to be considered a raid. Most of my guys agree so tonight she dies.
We ran 7 healers and put one on each stairsgroup as well. They were also spothealing the Forked Lighting. In fact, it's just the positioning that was assigned; they were pretty much FFA healers. We found that using anything BUT priests on the stairs would work best, since priests can't cleanse poison. The poison from the tainted elementals hurts and needs to be removed asap.
Hmm good point. Does anyone know if [Powerful Anti-Venom] works on this poison? Anyone know the exact name of it? The dispel works based on the level of the spell, not the mob.
For example, I know Anti-Venom works on Quagmirran's Poison Bolt, even though he's above level 60.
I have just a quick qeation about the phase 2=>phase 3 transition.
Currently, we have a 3% wipe as our best from Sunday night. We've been at work on her for a very long time and have made a little progress each night.
Conventional wisdom is that Ph3 is gg as long as you've gotten through phase 2 with the raid mostly intact. The problems we seem to have begin with phase 3 beginning and me (resto druid) getting shot in the face. We've dunked the 4th core with 25 people standing a couple of times but consitantly lose a healer or 2 immediately to het aimed shot. In general, we usually have 2 elites up with a prot warrior tank on each.
Ideas that have floated across our guild forums concerning this are :
1.) Have a feral druid who has been DPSing in cat gear switch to bear form and take Vashj to open Ph3. I don't like this as I don't believe in full cat gear (kara/T4/T5ish) can stand up to Vashj.
2.) Have that same druid taunt an elite off a tank and free them up to camp Vashj. Elites don't do near as much damage as Vashj and its all physical that they can better mitigate.
3.) Some combination of one tank multi tanking nagas by taunting off the other and freeing one up or grabbing Vashj in addition to the elite naga.
All that said, its a minor point in the grand scheme of things. Its critical to have someone grab her as soon as she pops and we have a handful of 10%ish attempts so far. If we lack one thing, I think its situational awareness and we lost too many peple to standing in the bat barf, healers not prioritizing targets, and spending too much or too little DPS on bats. For my part, I'm sick of watching phase 3 from the floor or doing it sans buffs and mana after a SS or battle rez.
I know this is old news but any direction would be appreciated.
I have just a quick qeation about the phase 2=>phase 3 transition.
Currently, we have a 3% wipe as our best from Sunday night. We've been at work on her for a very long time and have made a little progress each night.
Conventional wisdom is that Ph3 is gg as long as you've gotten through phase 2 with the raid mostly intact. The problems we seem to have begin with phase 3 beginning and me (resto druid) getting shot in the face. We've dunked the 4th core with 25 people standing a couple of times but consitantly lose a healer or 2 immediately to het aimed shot. In general, we usually have 2 elites up with a prot warrior tank on each.
Ideas that have floated across our guild forums concerning this are :
1.) Have a feral druid who has been DPSing in cat gear switch to bear form and take Vashj to open Ph3. I don't like this as I don't believe in full cat gear (kara/T4/T5ish) can stand up to Vashj.
2.) Have that same druid taunt an elite off a tank and free them up to camp Vashj. Elites don't do near as much damage as Vashj and its all physical that they can better mitigate.
3.) Some combination of one tank multi tanking nagas by taunting off the other and freeing one up or grabbing Vashj in addition to the elite naga.
All that said, its a minor point in the grand scheme of things. Its critical to have someone grab her as soon as she pops and we have a handful of 10%ish attempts so far. If we lack one thing, I think its situational awareness and we lost too many peple to standing in the bat barf, healers not prioritizing targets, and spending too much or too little DPS on bats. For my part, I'm sick of watching phase 3 from the floor or doing it sans buffs and mana after a SS or battle rez.
I know this is old news but any direction would be appreciated.
Make sure the tank is aware when the fourth generator is about to go down so that he can be in position to pick her up. He can pop shield wall if necessary for the transition until any naga he is tanking is dead or taunted off. The naga really don't hit that hard, so your OT should be able to taunt off the MT's naga before the transition and just tank two briefly while the dps burn them down (ie. option #3). Also, the shaman in the tank group needs to be ready for the transition and drop their grounding totem so that the tank doesn't get immediately shocked, which will cause her to run off and shoot healers.
Tell your OT to use aoe taunt about 5 seconds before the 4th generator is popped. All nagas are now attacking the OT, and your MT is free to pick up vashj. Now blow bloodlust, burn down the nagas, and finally focus on vashj. Also, thats very sound advise to remind your shaman to keep grounding down. A non-grounded shock could quite possibly actually wipe you and you definitely don't want that kind of hassle after you just completed p2.
Alternatively, you could just have a single tank OT all the nagas that spawn, with other tanks (including MT) working as pullers who bring new nagas to him/her. Since there should only be dps on one naga at a time, it's no problem threat-wise for most tanks to take more than one. This also frees up the other tanks to do other things such as watch over the general situation of the raid, work as core passers, etc.
In our guild, we also leave most of the naga on the OT during phase 3 and just take down Vashj. The extra time from not killing leftover naga helps a lot, and we've found that a prot warrior can OT 2-3 nagas with no problem. A feral druid can easily handle 4, possibly even more.
My guild has just started Vashj and we're definitely having trouble coordinating DPS on the striders and naga. Our average raid setup tends to look something like this:
1 prot warrior
1 prot pally or feral druid
5 melee dps (3 rogues, enh shammy and dps warrior)
10 ranged dps (including affliction lock kiter and 1-2 hunters at most)
8 healers (tends to be priest/pally heavy)
We put 8 ranged on the stairs to deal with elementals and 1 cleanup who stands in the middle. We've tried having people who can dot up the strider do it but it tends not to be enough damage. Would it be a good idea to have the stair ranged dps concentrate solely on the strider as it passes by with the exception being if a tainted spawns? I've read that the strider should die to dots alone, but we don't even seem to get it to 50% off dots. We're considering letting stair dps exclusively attack the strider as it passes by and using the naga melee dps to cleanup on the elementals that get by. We tend to have roughly 4 priests(1 being shadow) and 3 warlocks in each raid, 1 being a kiter. Their dots don't seem to make a serious dent and we get another strider up and wipe.
My guild has just started Vashj and we're definitely having trouble coordinating DPS on the striders and naga. Our average raid setup tends to look something like this:
1 prot warrior
1 prot pally or feral druid
5 melee dps (3 rogues, enh shammy and dps warrior)
10 ranged dps (including affliction lock kiter and 1-2 hunters at most)
8 healers (tends to be priest/pally heavy)
We put 8 ranged on the stairs to deal with elementals and 1 cleanup who stands in the middle. We've tried having people who can dot up the strider do it but it tends not to be enough damage. Would it be a good idea to have the stair ranged dps concentrate solely on the strider as it passes by with the exception being if a tainted spawns? I've read that the strider should die to dots alone, but we don't even seem to get it to 50% off dots. We're considering letting stair dps exclusively attack the strider as it passes by and using the naga melee dps to cleanup on the elementals that get by. We tend to have roughly 4 priests(1 being shadow) and 3 warlocks in each raid, 1 being a kiter. Their dots don't seem to make a serious dent and we get another strider up and wipe.
Really you don't need 2 ranged DPS on each side, the hunters should easily be able to manage a side each and a few other classes will be able to aswell. So give the two hunters a side each, if you don't have a hunter try and get a mage or destro lock to take a side aswell and see if they can. DPS warriors are particularly good on the sides so put them in an elemental group and take a ranged DPS for more dedicated DPS on the strider.
We have never had the elemental groups kill the strider, it has always been DPS in the middle fully focusing on it.
Firstly I would like to thank you all for the quality of the posts in this forum thread, it has really helped us when we were learning this fight and is an excellent source of information.
We got our first Lady Vashj kill on Monday night (14/04/08, post 2.4) and I thought I would share a bit about what we did and what we found worked best for us.
The WWS parse for the kill is here. Only valid for 2 weeks im afraid =[
We had spent many, many nights wiping on her pre 2.4. We have focussed on MH/BT for the past few weeks, and so this was our first night back at her since 2.4.
Phase 1 doesn't need much commenting, just spread out, keep tanks up, deal with static charge. Shaman in tank group for grounding totem works wonders.
Phase 2 we found a few things that worked well.
Firstly, each stair set of 3, north south east and west, (bar the north stair) had 2 dps allocated to it, and on the north stair we had 1 BM hunter.
Each stair group consisted of a healer (Paladin or Priest) and the elemetal dps'ers. Each pair of dps'ers had 1 melee and 1 ranged. We found this meant we didnt miss tainted elementals, but we did get as much ranged in the middle as possible.
Cores were done so that the melee looted, the healer stood at the apex of the stairs, and the ranged dps went to the generator. This made the cores go down relatively quick. If needed due to several cores on one side an extra step was added by having a resto druid at another generator to move it across the middle.
The rest of the ranged dps and the resto druids were situated in the middle. Each stair group has 2 macros. One to announce a strider location, one to announce a naga. This helps with pickups.
For the Naga we had the Paladin tank pick them up. Ranged taunt and the option of Avengers Shield makes them ideal for this role. Nagas were second priority for the dps in the middle, with the exception of the two melee that were on Naga at all times.
We found resto druids in the middle to be very effective at healing the lightning damage. In addition, the prot pally can cleanse those in the middle easily with decursive.
When the strider spawned it was kited by the elemental shaman. We have tried warlocks, hunters, mages. Elemental shamans are better, by far. More threat, more consistent slowing allowing for earlier dps.
Kiter has a macro to request dps on strider as soon as his threat is comfortable.
In addition in our experience nets are BAD. They should be for emergencies only. Spamming nets invariably gets people killed (strider turns and melees nearest person in melee range)
Using this strat in P2 we had striders going down with ~5-10 seconds to spare, and had 2 nearly dead nagas up at P3 start.
So, P3 transition was bad, the last core wasn't delayed and was dropped with nobody ready for it. Paladin picked up with only one death, and Strider was nuked, then Naga, obviously after the elementals were down. Heroisms at this point to get through this part. Vashj recieved one elemental on her at start of the phase when whe went loose, so 10% damage increase.
We had all three hunters on spore bats.
Didn't really have any troubles with the spores until around 15% and even then it wasn't that bad when she finally died.
Got messy sub 10%, probably with all the panicking as it was our first attempt in P3 where we didnt get wiped at the start of the phase.
Healers need to be on the ball keeping up melee and static shocks, beware of melee getting rooted in spores.
We switched the hunters off spore bats around 15%, till then they were doing fine. Admittedly we lost the paladin tank around 8%, who SS'd up, then the paladin again at 3 and the warrior at 1 making the last part messy, but I was surprised at how smooth the first 40% of P3 went.
Not sure how new any of this is, but I hope that these things can help another guild get her down, was certainly best kill I have experienced.
Currently my guild is stuck on Phase 2. We have all the teamwork and such down, it's simply a DPS issue on the striders (first one is only at about 20% before the second pops, and we have no extra dps to put on them, so by the time the last core rolls around, we're overwhelmed). Are there any extra buffs our strider dps could go pick up to increase their DPS enough to get those things down faster, like the silithus dust buff but actually practical? Our raid is already fully flasked/food buffed.
Currently my guild is stuck on Phase 2. We have all the teamwork and such down, it's simply a DPS issue on the striders (first one is only at about 20% before the second pops, and we have no extra dps to put on them, so by the time the last core rolls around, we're overwhelmed). Are there any extra buffs our strider dps could go pick up to increase their DPS enough to get those things down faster, like the silithus dust buff but actually practical? Our raid is already fully flasked/food buffed.
What kind of setup do you have on the striders? I have'nt done this fight in quite some time, but just by using an Elemental shammy doing the kiting+ all ranged going nuts on striders seemed to always work for us. You might just be having poor dps issue's if everyone is full flask/buff and going all out.
I wasn't really paying attention to who was particularly assigned last night, but we have a damn good hunter kiting them, and I believe it was four ranged dps on the striders, a lock, a frost mage, another hunter, and mage or a lock as the 4th, cant remember. We're not "undergeared" for the encounter really, our dps is just spread so thin as it is i'm trying to find a way for those five to pull out an extra combined 500ish dps.
Wait, you only have four dps on the strider? Most setups have around seven or more dps on striders. You're probably stacking way too many melee or too many ranged out on the sides. 4 dps on striders is unmanageable unless you severely outgear the fight. If you have too many melee in the middle (3-4 max, really), stick some of them (dps warriors generally) out on the sides and free up more ranged. If you have too many on the sides (8 or more?), move them into the middle, or at the very least have them help on dpsing striders while they come by.
Edit: if you have too many tanks or healers, just take them out. More healers can be somewhat useful, but any more than 3 tanks is a severe liability, and groups often make do with 2 (or even 1).
Wait, you only have four dps on the strider? Most setups have around seven or more dps on striders. You're probably stacking way too many melee or too many ranged out on the sides. 4 dps on striders is unmanageable unless you severely outgear the fight. If you have too many melee in the middle (3-4 max, really), stick some of them (dps warriors generally) out on the sides and free up more ranged. If you have too many on the sides (8 or more?), move them into the middle, or at the very least have them help on dpsing striders while they come by.
Edit: if you have too many tanks or healers, just take them out. More healers can be somewhat useful, but any more than 3 tanks is a severe liability, and groups often make do with 2 (or even 1).
I agree with Zliplus.
And remember, extra strider DPS can always turn and burn the naga when they get high on threat, so it's not "wasted" if you're killing the striders early.
What we used to do was as soon as the kiter had some decent aggro all ranged in the middle just burn the strider and then proceed on normal duties like passing around cores and killing elites. We also had all our melee (4) on the stairs with a ranged helping out. Sure, putting 8 people on the stairs isn't entirely needed, but the ranged people there can focus some DPS towards the middle.
So basically it was like this:
* Naga spawns - prot pally grabs it, middle group zergs it down. Meanwhile strider spawns and kiter picks it up
* Ranged group burns down Strider. Meanwhile you're also messing around with a tainted core
* Strider dies. During this time a new Naga has spawned and picked up. Middle group nukes it.
Ideally, the second elite dies as the second strider spawns. I think that one also coincides with the third elite. Just put some DoT's on the elite to give the kiter a few seconds builds aggro and kill it. Now, at the time we ran with a fairly light dps raid. We had an abysmally poor rogue, a so-so mage and two slacking warlocks. I think in phase 1 we were doing ~13k raid DPS on Vasjh at most.
With all the new badge gear, heroic MgT drops and the fact that there's 7 new easymode bosses to farm t6 level gear from, DPS should never be the problem on Vasjh again; it's all about coordination now. It's a shame really, because the tight DPS constraint in phase 2 combined with the required coordination is what made the fight so tough and much less repeatable than Kael.
It's no problem if you have 2-3 elites up; it is a problem to have 2 striders up.
03/18/08, 1:24 AM
and we all wanted to cry.
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