we have been working on vashj for a bit now (2-3) weeks. We usually run with 2 prot warrior tanks, 3-4 melee, 7 healers, and 12-14 ranged. We are slowly getting the strider kiting down, our best attempt was with a warlock kiting. We seem to be having the most problems killing the striders before another spawns, we put 3 melee on the naga full time and they are dying right as the next spawns. We have 2 dps on each side for elementals. We tried having 1 BM hunter by himself on one side but that didn't work out as he couldn't get the tainted elemental down in time and help didn't make it over there. We have 5 dps assigned strictly to the strider. My main question is would putting some melee on the sides and ranged on top help out with burning that strider down or should we have more of the raid focus on the strider and burn it down fast then return to their assignments?
My main question is would putting some melee on the sides and ranged on top help out with burning that strider down or should we have more of the raid focus on the strider and burn it down fast then return to their assignments?
we have been working on vashj for a bit now (2-3) weeks. We usually run with 2 prot warrior tanks, 3-4 melee, 7 healers, and 12-14 ranged. We are slowly getting the strider kiting down, our best attempt was with a warlock kiting. We seem to be having the most problems killing the striders before another spawns, we put 3 melee on the naga full time and they are dying right as the next spawns. We have 2 dps on each side for elementals. We tried having 1 BM hunter by himself on one side but that didn't work out as he couldn't get the tainted elemental down in time and help didn't make it over there. We have 5 dps assigned strictly to the strider. My main question is would putting some melee on the sides and ranged on top help out with burning that strider down or should we have more of the raid focus on the strider and burn it down fast then return to their assignments?
That's a lot of melee on the naga. How short are you on each strider? Melee can often do fine with the elementals - they have to run more but they get to loot the core right away. It might be that moving one melee down to the stairs and bringing 1 more ranged up to help with the strider/naga will be the difference.
Another thing that helped (I was the strider kiter) was having each healing pally stun the strider as it came by, and tell me in advance. Stuns let me do more DPS = more threat = more DPS from everyone else.
You can put a ton of ranged on the strider and have the extra just kill nagas when the strider is down or they're close to pulling aggro. That's the big advantage to ranged on strider - flexibility.
we tried moving a few melee to the sides last night and it worked out well, we got to phase 3 but i think now we just need to tighten everything up and we should have her down. Thanks for the help guys.
My guild downed Vashj for the first time last night after three nights (13 hours total) of attempts. Basic raid was:
2.5 tanks
7 healers
12 ranged
3.5 melee
We made groups with what we had on, and for the kill they consisted of:
Tanks:
2 prot warriors
1 feral druid
Heals:
3 holy palis
2 holy priests
1 tree
1 resto shaman
Melee:
1 Fury war
1 Enhance Shaman
1 Rogue
Ranged:
4 Hunters (ya i no rite? They have good attendance)
3 Locks (Destro)
2 Shadow Priests
2 Mages
1 Elemental Shaman
We set up the following groups for P2:
3 Elemental Group (2x ranged, 1x healer)
Spread out on the edge of the outer ring to cover the elementals/tainted on the stairs. Hunters and Locks need to dot up the striders when they are kited past, and DPS striders if need be before the second one spawns. In that case the melee classes on the naga pick up any elementals that get by. Palis and other range stand at the top of the stairs (except when a range goes to loot the core). The pali's are the middle men for core tossing, and used for elemental groups so that they are spread out and can hammer striders when they go by. If your locks are Affliction/Dot/CoEx or low on the burst, you can swap them with ranged from the Strider killer groups (like hunter/mage):
1 Strider Kiter Group (2x ranged)
We put one on east side and one on west side to ensure easy strider grab when it spawns. We've had the most success with Elemental Shaman + 1 kiting (usually a CoEx lock but wasn't on, so we used a hunter), Frost Shock is high threat, slows, and they have earthbind in case of a Shock resist. We put the palis in the elemental groups so they are spread around and can hammer the strider as it goes by
1 Elemental Shaman
1 Hunter
1 Strider Killer Groups (4x ranged)
We put all SP on Striders so they can Flay for snare, use nets, etc. The SP also use SW:P/VT/VE on Naga to help heal through Forked Lightnings, 1 even specced Imp VE for it, and strider killers help with naga with the time between strider's death and the next spawn. We always made sure to only have one strider up ever and switch all elemental killing ranged to the Strider and melee to any loose/close elementals if another Strider is about to pop. Can easily dot up the first naga since it spawns before the strider.
2 Shadow Priests
1 Mage
1 Hunter
1 Naga Group (2.5x Tanks, 3x melee)
MT stays in the middle and the other 1.5 tanks pull naga to the MT in the middle, calling out when moving it if need be so that people, i.e. generators healers and squishy strider killers, watch out for cleaves. Strider Ranged (i.e. SP) keep the Nagas dotted with VE up as well, and strider DPS switched to naga if there is time before the next strider spawns.
2 Prot Warrior
1 Feral Druid (helps pull naga to MT, DPS Naga and close elementals between Naga spawns)
1 Generator Healer Group (4x Healers, one on each Generator)
Need to watch for Cleaves from Naga that are getting pulled into center. Forked Lightning + Bad Cleave = Dead healer
2 Holy Priests
1 Tree
1 Resto Shaman
Observations
The biggest thing I noticed in this fight is the need for everyone to stay alive, and what seemed to help a lot was cutting down on unlucky burst combos that can easily gib people. Things like Multi-shot when static charged, some combnation of Forked Lightning, Tainted Poison Volley, and an unlucky cleave, combos that can nearly insta-gib most classes. Things that helped with that were SPs using VE, or even Imp VE on all adds in P2 to help heal through Forked Lightnings, and Vashj can be taunted so threat isn't really an issue, and VE can help heal through static charge. Generator and Elemental Healers also need to watch out when stuff spawns, especially the elemental healers, so they don't agg a naga and get 1 shot before it can be picked up. It wasn't an issue with Generator healers that can be easily intervened.
Being able to switch targets and get in a rhythm to pick up slack efficiently was a big help too. Knowing what needed to go down and in what order, and when to shift rolls. Like when ranged from the elemental group would DPS striders as they walked by in order to get it down before the next one and the naga melee picking up the elemental slack (Naga were our lowest priority compared to Close Elementals and Striders). Or the strider killers DoTing and DPSing on the Naga while they wait for another strider.
Getting the last core in before a fresh strider spawned helped a lot too. We also never had more than 2 naga up at any time. If Strider goes down early Strider groups switches to Naga.
Just a quick question. I read earlier in the thread that it was possible to group loot the cores if you set the threshold to 0. Has this changed? The post about it was from last year so...
Quick tip: A protection warrior can safely berserker rage, run in, concussive blow and run out the strider when it spawns to give the kiter 6s of stun to build agro.
Thanks for this thread, we downed Vashj a few weeks ago and have been killing her every week since. Unfortunately we seem to be having a hard time getting her down consistantly. We took 9 tries last night before squeezing out a very long at 1% kill. We do have a couple of new people each week but the things killing us don't seem to be related to new people.
Our general strategy is:
7 dps on stairs (4 melee and 3 hunters last night)
4 healers on stairs/core duty
2-3 healers up top
2 tanks
2 melee up top
7-8 ranged on striders
The first 3 elites and 2 striders are usually dead before the 4th elite and 3rd strider spawn at the same time if noone dies so our dps seems sufficient.
Some of the things that killed people:
Striders spawning on top of a tainted elemental
Cleave from elites on ranged dps up top
Tainted elemental + a couple bolts
Shaman in tank group getting static charged, running away from tank and tank getting gibbed by a shock
Stairs healer or dpser getting disconnected
A couple elementals getting through and healers unable to keep up with the higher spike damage
Does anyone have any suggestions for reducing the randomness of the fight or notice any other problems that I didn't notice? New people were: Sohnee, Dirtyoleman, Flawnt.
We're having our third or fourth night on Vashj tomorrow, and we've been floundering a bit in Phase 2. We know we have the DPS and the healing; we're not missing Cores and only rarely having wrong-target throwing issues; the Naga aren't a concern. The problem we're having is with the Striders ... something always seems to go wrong with them and we can't get them down fast enough. It's annoying, because we know if we can control them we'll be 6/6 by the end of the night.
With this mix, how should we best divide the DPS between stairs, Naga and Striders?
My thinking is that the stairs should be covered with three pairs of a Lock for DOTs plus one melee DPSer, the remaining melee DPS are put on the Naga, and the Mages, Shaman and the last Lock are on Strider duty plus Naga cleanup. The Locks on the stairs also DOT up the Striders and help with the final burn-down. This seems to fit with several of the strategies outlined in the thread, subject to the limitations of our setup.
Any input from people more experienced with the fight will be welcomed. We do have some small latitude in raid composition as some of us have raid-quality alts, but we probably couldn't get more than two of a second Shammy healer or third Paladin, one or two Shadow Priests, and a Hunter. Anything else I should have included but didn't, tell me what it is and I'll add it.
(EDIT: RL finally posted the raid team, amended my thinking to accommodate.)
We're having our third or fourth night on Vashj tomorrow, and we've been floundering a bit in Phase 2. We know we have the DPS and the healing; we're not missing Cores and only rarely having wrong-target throwing issues; the Naga aren't a concern. The problem we're having is with the Striders ... something always seems to go wrong with them and we can't get them down fast enough. It's annoying, because we know if we can control them we'll be 6/6 by the end of the night.
With this mix, how should we best divide the DPS between stairs, Naga and Striders?
My thinking is that the stairs should be covered with three pairs of a Lock for DOTs plus one melee DPSer, the remaining melee DPS are put on the Naga, and the Mages, Shaman and the last Lock are on Strider duty plus Naga cleanup. The Locks on the stairs also DOT up the Striders and help with the final burn-down. This seems to fit with several of the strategies outlined in the thread, subject to the limitations of our setup.
Any input from people more experienced with the fight will be welcomed. We do have some small latitude in raid composition as some of us have raid-quality alts, but we probably couldn't get more than two of a second Shammy healer or third Paladin, one or two Shadow Priests, and a Hunter. Anything else I should have included but didn't, tell me what it is and I'll add it.
(EDIT: RL finally posted the raid team, amended my thinking to accommodate.)
You are better off with too many people on striders than too many people on naga, because if the strider goes down quickly, the strider crew can simply turn around and burn a naga down in seconds before the next strider pops.
You have five casters total on your strider crew. Honestly, that should be suffcient, but if its not, I would take one of the melee dpsers on nagas and move them to stairs, using them to replace one of the locks, who could then be added to the strider crew. We have used rogues and dps wars on stair sections heavily, and although they might not be quite as optimal as a ranged dps, they have had no problems keeping up.
Also, are your pally healers stunning the strider as it walks by? This makes a huge difference, because a stun allows the kiter to stop, turn around and spam nukes, which gets threat up a lot faster and thus allows more and quicker dps. We don't use nets, except our kiter uses one net right at the beginning of each strider, just to stop it from getting to the middle and to give a few seconds for a couple of SP's. We have outlawed all other net use, but everyone understands when the one net per strider will be thrown, so they know that they need to be far away from the strider during the first 10 seconds after spawn.
When you start killing striders on time, the fight goes from impossible to possible. Once you start killing the striders with 10-15 seconds to spare, the fight goes from possible to easy, because the strider crew can just wipe out every naga and elem left standing between striders, and your healers are suddenly stand around waiting for something to do. So my main recommendation is, when in doubt, overstaff your strider crew.
This is the ultimate vicious/virtuous cycle fight. When one thing gets better, everthing gets better.
Tanks: Paladin, Warrior
Healers: 2 Paladin, 3 Priest, 1 Shaman, 2 Druid
Melee DPS: 1 Paladin, 1 Warrior, 2 Rogue, 1 Druid
Ranged DPS: 2 Hunter, 3 Mage, 4 Warlock, 1 Shaman
Any input from people more experienced with the fight will be welcomed. We do have some small latitude in raid composition as some of us have raid-quality alts, but we probably couldn't get more than two of a second Shammy healer or third Paladin, one or two Shadow Priests, and a Hunter. Anything else I should have included but didn't, tell me what it is and I'll add it.
Your problem is too many healers. 8 healers is easily 2 too many. Also, putting melee on the stairs is a good idea in general.
My suggestion for you:
Tanks: Paladin, Warrior
Healers: 6 (drop a paladin priest or druid) - be cut throat on this one for your first kill. Whoever routinely pays attention and knows their stuff, keep them
Melee dps: put 4 of them on the stairs
Ranged DPS: Put 2 hunters/locks on the stairs and add 2 shadow priests if you can (put 1 in the healer group). an elemental shaman or hunter works here too
For P2: Your most consistant best player among shadow priests and elemental shamans and hunters should kite the striders. Your paladin healer and/or your warrior MT (with beserker rage) should handle stunning the strider. Assuming your dps is similar to ours, your kill order will be elite, strider, elite, strider, strider, elite, (4 cores can theoretically be done here, but often 1 extra strider will pop). Make sure for your P3 transition you kill all the striders and click the generator with 15s remaining on the bigwigs timer for the next strider. You can run either 3 or 4 healers on the stairs. For the stairs dps, they cover the area between flags which are stairs 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 and 11-12. If you run 3 healers, each covers 1-4, 5-8 and 9-12. If you run 4, they cover 1-4, 4-7, 6-9 and 9-12 which leaves most of the stairs dps double covered.
Here's a few things with regards to striders that we found.
Ensure your kiter has a solid kite path. The more consistent that path is the easier it is for ranged to just stand there and nuke it. If they have to move around a lot because the strider is being kited too far from the center then their DPS goes way down.
The more stuns/snares you have available to lock him down the better. It lets the kiter increase threat faster which in turn allows all the ranged to go as hard as they possibly can on it, which is pretty much necessary. Use of heroisms on stacked ranged groups is also very helpful, but be sure nobody pulls agro.
If you have locks on the outside on stair duty they should try to help out whenever the strider is in their zone. Tell them to throw up some DoTs and even nuke it a couple times before it goes out of range.
We would usually tell our ranged to open up on the strider after it's spawned for about 15-20 seconds, leaving 40-45 seconds for them to kill it before the next one spawns. Open up a little sooner if your kiter can manage the threat. Letting a couple Naga's pile up isn't as bad as having 2+ striders roaming about fearing everything.
To make sure you're doing it properly find out if any of your ranged DPS have to hold back on striders, and if they do try doing one of the things mentioned above to aid in that. DPS uptime should be as high as possible on phase 2 as well, meaning less running around to get in range of the striders, etc.
To make sure you're doing it properly find out if any of your ranged DPS have to hold back on striders, and if they do try doing one of the things mentioned above to aid in that. DPS uptime should be as high as possible on phase 2 as well, meaning less running around to get in range of the striders, etc.
That leads to the other reason to have extra DPS on striders and less on nagas. Threat-capped DPS on striders can easily turn and hit the naga for a bit. Melee DPS on nagas can't ever help on the striders.
After 4 nights of wipes we finally took Vashj down. We had been having quite a bit of trouble with striders and naga killing people on spawn, and cores despawning. I ended up taking a screenshot of the room using WoW Map Viewer and marking it as so:
Numbering the area as a clock really helped out tanks/MD hunter to know where the strider/naga was popping up. Last night, everything just "clicked" for us, which lead to our first time seeing phase 3 which quickly turned into our first kill.
The big "win" strats for us:
Clock numbers, having people call out where something spawns by its clock position.
A frost mage on the Strider.
The stair DPS people setting their stair edge healer as their focus target for the core throw.
Everyone not talking on vent when a tainted spawns except for the person next inline for the core.
Naga being tanked so their cleave was "in" Vashj's hit box.
Overall, everything just fell into place which gave us our first kill!
If you wish to use the jpg file, feel free. Green dots are healers, blue dots are stair dps. Yellow is naga tank/melee dps area. I didnt mark where the strider DPS would be or the strider kite path because I didnt feel it necessary.
Our Raid makeup for the kill.
On the Naga:
Prot Warrior
Prot Warrior
Prot Paladin
Feral Druid (me)
Rogue
Rogue
On the Strider/Naga:
Affliction Warlock (kiter)
Spreist
Spriest
Mage
Mage
Marks Hunter
On the Stairs:
BM Hunter
BM Hunter
BM Hunter
Spriest
Desto Lock
Affliction Lock
Center Healers:
Resto Shaman
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin
Rim Healers:
Resto Druid
Resto Druid
Holy Paladin
Holy Paladin
My guild has long past Vashj, but from my memory the biggest problems were the striders. Our guild had great dpsers and in the end we only needed to put 1 dps per side (4 sides) to do the elementals as well as the tainted ones. (Usually 2 BM Hunters, 1 mage, 1 ele Shammy)
Whenever the tainted spawns, the elemental dpsers ignores the regular elementals and focus on the tainted. And regulars that are ignored and wanders past the rim will be taken out by the naga dpsers. After being able to have 4 dps alone take care of all sides, it was a breeze for us.
Hello all. My guild has finished its second night of attempts on vashj. I would like some advice on the strategy to know what you think we're doing wrong.
Group Setup:
two prot warriors
three melee (or 4) depends whos on but we pick from two rogues, ret pally, fury warrior, enhance sham
seven healers (2 resto sham, 1 pally, 2 holy priest, 2 resto druid)
12 ranged DPS (or 13)
Arrangement
1 BM hunter solo handling elementals on each quadrant.
1 healer west side (priest), 1 healer south side (priest), and 1 healer covering the back side roaming (tree, opposite of the entrance).
4 healers up top on center (pally with righteous fury up, two chain healers, one tree)
Tanks tanking nagas in the center.
Ranged in the center on striders
Melee in center on nagas until a tainted spawns. When a tainted spawns, the melee are assigned to assist on elementals that squeak by as the hunter handles the tainted
The problems
Healers on the outside get an unlucky poison+forked lightning. If a side healer dies, the hunters soon die from poison/lightning. The attempt collapses.
DPS is steady on the striders. We can consistently get two generators down calmly but by the time the second generator is dunked, either a hunter or his healer is dead. One a hunter dies, someone has to go try to pick up the elementals and the DPS in the center starts slacking. It all plummets from there.
What type of healers do you think are the best for the roaming/ramp positions? I tell the holy priests to keep prayer of mending on cooldown at all times no matter what. To get hit by an random lightning, the prayer of mending is golden. Especially if the healer is close enough to his hunter then it can ping-pong between them. Am I putting less-than-ideal healers on the outside? Would a paladin be better since they can bubble if they got knocked way down by poison/lightning?
Astolpho, you have 8 ranged on the striders, plus all melee on the naga ? That's a lot dps up top. You should get all striders and elites down with time to spare with that setup. If that's not the case, dps needs to really step it up.
We have 2 dps per quadrant, and space out the trees to battle rez in case a key dps or healer goes down.
We usually go into phase 3 with the last strider almost down and about 3 elites left with 5 ranged on the striders and 2-3 melee on the elites.
On SSC / TK gear level, you need pretty much your whole raid alive going into phase 3, so we make liberal use of soul stones and battle rezzes. We're running melee heavy (we're a semi-casual 30 man guild, so we pretty much take whoever shows up at raid time), and killed Vashj for the first time last night on our fourth night (none of us had killed Vashj before).
Tanks on top with one dps warrior (on elites) and 4 healers.
Enh. shammy kiting striders, 5 ranged dps on striders.
7 melee + 1 hunter on elementals, plus 4 healers (one in each quadrant).
After 4 nights of wipes we finally took Vashj down. We had been having quite a bit of trouble with striders and naga killing people on spawn, and cores despawning. I ended up taking a screenshot of the room using WoW Map Viewer and marking it as so:
I'd just like to give a big thanks to everyone who has provided information on this thread. Our guild finally got our first Vashj kill tonight after a total of around 9-10 hours raid time. A lot of useful tips and tactics I picked up from here so I'll share what worked for us:
Naga
To deal with the elites we had a prot war and prot pala. The prot war would tank all the elites while the prot pala grabbed them and took them to him. We had 2 rogues permanently stationed on the elites to dps.
Elementals
We had 3 teams of 1 hunter + 1 melee + 1 healer covering 4 segments of stairs each with no problems. We found it better to have each dps covering 2 segments each to minimise the amount of running required by the melee. We found that dps wars and feral druids are best suited for this job now that elementals are bleedable. DPS wars for the reasons already mentioned in this thread. As a feral druid myself, I found a mangle -> shred -> 3CP rip adequate for making short work of the elementals. I run at around 50% crit raid buffed so one move will most likely crit and the elementals usually die from the rip bleed damage before they make it the inner ring. We used 2 priests and a paladin to heal the dpsers, but i assume any healer would do.
Striders
We used an elemental shaman to kite, with a resto druid following him around the middle throwing hots on him and the prot war at the same time. We had 8 dedicated ranged dpsers in the middle with 2 resto shamans healing them. Our gear level is late T5/early T6 so we were getting the striders down with around 10-15 seconds spare meaning the ranged could turn around and dps the naga between spawns. Additionally, any elementals that slip through could always be quickly dealt with by a swift fireblast/shadowburn/moonfire.
Tainted Cores
We found the best chain for tainted cores was: Elementals dps -> Elementals Healer -> Resto shaman (Raid healer). The shaman would always stand next to an active generator ready to dunk the cores while healing the raid. Sometimes our prot pala would be an extra link in the chain if the remaining generators were too far from the elementals healer.
I think another key to this fight is communication. Its quite funny that someone mentioned using clock hours to indicate positions because we had adopted that strategy yesterday as well! Elemental dpsers would always call out on vent (or make a macro if they didnt have a mic) where the tainted elemental would spawn e.g."Tainted elemental, 11 o'clock!". This meant the healers would always be ready and in position to catch the cores.
Just before we'd dunk the final core, we have the prot pala taunt all the naga off of the prot war so he'd then be free to pick up Vashj as she broke out. We made it into phase 3 with 24 alive and proceeded to finish her off.
Our guild has been attempting Vashj for about a month now. We have been taking a focused approach to learning the fight. We can breeze through Phase 1. Our first attempts focused on elemental groups learning their jobs. We are now focusing on learning the Strider techniques better. I am the Warlock responsble for kiting the Strider and with some practice we should get it down. I was wondering, however, why it was necessary to actually kite the strider around the circle. Copied below is a post I made in our forums wondering about alternate kiting strategies for the Striders. I respect this forum immensely and would appreciate all constructive thoughts on my post:
I have been giving some thought to the kiting strategy though and have some ideas in regards to how to carry it out. For me, the biggest problem is holding aggro because the strider is not being slowed down enough for me to SP enough; I just don't have enough time to stand still which is why Tumama complained about pulling aggro. Obviously the striders have to be controlled and nuked as fast as possible, but in all my reading I don't see why it is completely necessary to kite it in a circle. Again, I think this is a paradigm that isn't exactly necessary. My thoughts assuming a similar group to Saturday (Warlock x 2, CoEx Lock x 1, Mage, Shaman, SPriest):
"Split the groups into two groups of three: CoEx Lock, Lock, Spriest/Lock, Shammy, Mage. I put Spriest and Shammy in separate groups assuming Frostshock and Mind Flay each cause more threat than and balance the groups threat out somewhat. From each group, have one toon designated as aggro, in this case the CoEx Lock from group 1 and the Shammy in group 2. At the beginning of Phase Two, Group one plants itself on the north side of the circle and group 2 is on the south (striders spawn points vary). The aggro toon in whatever group is closest to the strider when it spawns pulls aggro while everyone else in the group snares it with nets, slows, whatever (lets assume the CoEx Lock has aggro first). I spam Searing Pain as much as possible while kiting it a little becuase in the meantime, the other group, hearing the strider is up on vent positions themselves on the oppoosite side of the strider and goes to town. Once the second group is in position, the second group goes nuts and the Shammy Frostshocks the hell out of the strider and I stop Searing Pain. The Shammy should probably pull aggro and turn the strider around. At this point I lose aggro and start spamming Searing Pain again and the shammy stops Frostshocking. Rinse and repeat until the strider drops. When the second strider hits, whatever group doesn't have aggro grabs it and the group with aggro finishes it off then comes to unleash hell on the second.
We may have to hash this out more and maybe there are things I am not thinking of, but it seems like this may give us a lot more control over the strider than attempting to lead it in a circle. It isn't that hard to coordinate and communication should be easy. Once my screen no longer displays "AGGRO" I spam searing pain and stop when it does; similar actions for the Shammy. Whoever is on elementals in the area of the strider can dps it whenever they are free. If a core has to be passed to a generator near the strider, we just move the strider. If someone pulls aggro who wasn't supposed to, the aggro in the group opposite them steals it and people lay off for a sec. If done right, the strider should stay in relatively the same quadrant until it dies and provide the raid with level of predictability we don't get from the original strategy."
The problem with what you've described is the 130% ranged aggro threshold. The strider is going to move further and further towards the groups as the number of times it flips targets increases. It becomes a question of if you can do enough damage to kill it before it reaches one of the groups and fears them all over the place.
Personally, I think that you're over-complicating the problem. It's pretty easy for a warlock or elemental shaman to kite the strider around. It leads to a more predictable path and also frees up the attention of all the other people you have involved in your plan, in case elementals start leaking.
There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake
I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai
The problem with what you've described is the 130% ranged aggro threshold. The strider is going to move further and further towards the groups as the number of times it flips targets increases. It becomes a question of if you can do enough damage to kill it before it reaches one of the groups and fears them all over the place.
Personally, I think that you're over-complicating the problem. It's pretty easy for a warlock or elemental shaman to kite the strider around. It leads to a more predictable path and also frees up the attention of all the other people you have involved in your plan, in case elementals start leaking.
You're probably right and I certainly don't want to do anything to make this fight more complicated than it is already. I appreciate it.
That diagram was really useful and our guild is now using that positioning. Here is hoping for some success soon.
Glad that helped, I tend to find that making a custom diagram like that per exactly the strat we decide to use for each fight really worth the time. If they work for you feel free to use them.
<offtopic>
If you check that directory(http://11thhourguild.com/images), diagrams for other fights are always being uploaded/updated that might be of use.
</offtopic>
I will also note that the image location has moved.
First off, I'd like to thank everyone who offered help and advice when I asked a few pages ago. It was very much appreciated.
The strategy we finally decided on for Phase 2 is slightly different to the ones outlined elsewhere.
On the platform, the Naga tank is inside Vashj's hitbox as normal, facing north. The melee DPS are assigned to the Naga and occupy the north of the central platform; Strider DPS stand on the south side and kill adds as required. Striders are kited in an arc to the south of the west to east generators and back.
We divide the stairs into four sectors, and to each one we allocate a Hunter and a healer. The healers on the stairs tend to be the ones who cannot cleanse poison; in that way, everyone but the Hunters is in range of a cleanser at all times. Since stair healers use minimal mana (when in the role, I've started Phase 2 at 70% mana and been at 100% by the second Core), they can afford to heal their Hunter through the poison. When a Tainted Elemental appears, the healer calls his group number. At that point the melee break off Naga DPS and kill the regular Elementals until the Hunter has finished the Tainted.
Other than that, everything is business as usual. We haven't actually downed Vashj yet, but only because overenthusiastic people dunked the last Core without telling anyone or waiting for us to be Striderfrei. Our last two attempts got us to that point with no missed Cores and fewer than three Surges, though, so this plan is definitely viable.
04/30/08, 1:08 PM
Similar Threads
