So we went to mag tonight. All of our mellee died. Personally I died 3 times because of druids and boundless optimism. Examples of how I died:

Bounceback starts - I target and intervene a hunter. Bounceback continues, carrying hunter towards me, and by the end of it I am in front of Mag. Cleaved for 14k. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

Bounceback starts - I target and intervene a totem. Bounceback continues, I am tossed from the totem into a conflag fire, then to the back of mag. Meanwhile, our tank is bouncing against the wall. Mag adjusts, spinning his "front" towards the mellee at his back. We are all cleaved to death. All the while he is targetting our main tank.

Bounceback starts - I am nowhere near him, as I am due for a cube. I bounce merilly to the wall, and see our main tank bouncing along it towards me. Mag has helpfully alligned himself with the wall....


Has anyone worked out a repeatable and effective strategy for mellee dps to avoid the frontal cleaves that fire _during_ the bounceback? Short of tossing daggers at him, nothing I've tried seems to be repeatable. I always feel that I got "lucky" and didn't get wrecked by the bounceback. Not a fun mechanic. (I like being tossed. I don't like the cleave/mob pathing AI)

We killed all of the adds with zero deaths almost before he released. None of our deaths were to anything but the cleave, but we definitely killed a hunter/mage from max range, and we definitely killed multiple mellee. The fight, outside of the bounceback, feels very much under control and old hat, that said - we have never had this many deaths to cleave.

Advice welcome.

I stand on the left hand rear paw of Mags so I'm not directly behind him, and back as far as my backstab range will allow.

When bounceback starts (the popcorn starts to appears), I hold down "forward, turn left and control my vision/direction with strafe"(*) and jump and keep spamming jump until I get to the wall. At the wall, I turn around and normally can start running back to him.

Since coming across this, and showing my fellow rogues, we've had zero deaths from cleave.

We also haven't had any problems with Mags moving around as you seem to have. Our MT keeps him 100% still during the encounter. He tanks it with his back against the wall opposite the entrance.

(*) This was harder to explain than I thought, I showed the rogue team how to do this in game, so if it sounds confusing, it's pretty simple, kinda like a sideways strafe and jump.

I'll give strafing and jumping a try. I'm already intervening a far target, he just doesn't care.

We're tanking him between the first 2 boxes (with 1 just inside the door, and 2 to the left).

Wanting to clean up the last little nagging pieces of the fight. Dying on farm content is the for applicants =P.

Thanks pew.

You can steer the bounce, just move sideways. This can be done with turning your side to Magtheridon and strafe away from him.

He does not melee at all while doing the stomp/bounce thing. He may cleave immediately after, but never during it. As far as MT positioning, if I have my back all the way against the wall, I do not move at all during the bounce. We position him just to the right of the doorway, in between the south and south eastern cubes. Only reason this spot was selected is because it is between our first and second channeler kills.

For the tanks, if you tank mag between the cube immediately right of the doorway, and the next one, there is a joint in the wall for you to park your butt in. This will completely stop you from bouncing to any side

You have a timer. The timer shows when he is going to exit banish. When he exits banish, he immediately gains a threat table. Anything done pre-banish-emerge is ignored. Anything past the point that he can move goes on his table. So don't land a heal just AFTER he comes out. Simple as that. If your heal lands 2 seconds after he comes out, and you still get aggro, your tank is failing at his job. He needs to rethink his method. Hint: 100 rage and Shield Slam = win.

If you absolutely need to land a heal, at least be standing across the room, so that your tank has a couple of seconds to grab it. And for the love of all that's holy, don't be standing in the middle of a group of people, so your entire raid eats cleaves.

We had a couple of issues with this, but it all comes down to:
1) Your healers being smart.
2) Your tank knowing how to generate snap aggro.

Now that we've done it a few times, Mag doesn't even move. He un-banishes, and before he can take a step, Shield Slam lands in his face, and then the hunter misdirects once, and it's all the MT.

Watch which healers are pulling aggro on the transition. Then smack them up side the head and tell them to stop it. Or at least move them to the "south" of the room (where you come in) so that if he does aggro on them, he'll run in a straight line, presumably away from your raid cluster, and avoid ripping up too many people.

Thunderfury has nothing to do with picking up Mag on the transition, btw -- why would you think it does?

Having an extra tank that's done with his channeler intervene to Mag's target if he goes for a healer instead of the MT can help as well. If the tank on channeler nr 5 cant last those 3 secs without healing even with shield wall / last stand then a free tank can taunt off to effectively gain 14k extra health for the last channeler to work through. If it's such a big problem that would give you more than a few seconds to work with.

Magtheridon is a bit stupid like that, there seems to be a ~1s period of time after he unbanishes where he doesn't seem care about theat. Make sure everyone has their asses to the wall as he spawns, make sure no big heals are landing (might be rough if you're on the last add as he breaks). Tell your tank to run to maggies ass and start queuing heroic strike and then shield slam him ~1s after he breaks.

Get a misdirect too, it helps a bit.

The answer may be a bit less obvious. I've noticed that there's a split-second window when Mag first breaks free where he becomes targetable, but is essentially passive and will ignore any action taken on him. Threat-building attacks that you use during this moment will have no effect aside from damage. Tell your tank to hold off on that initial shield slam + heroic combo until he sees Mag turn and target someone, and not a second before.

This phenomenon is present in a few other TBC encounters, such as when Leotheras shifts from demon to humanoid form. It left me scratching my head how a shadow priest VE tick could pull aggro off a crit shield slam until I figured out what was happening.

edit: Beaten. Damn database hiccups.

The adds on Lurker behave in exactly the same way - you cannot fear them until they start moving.

As many have stated, the best way to handle this is to have your MT hold off on abilities until magtheridon aquires a target. A second tank intervening could save someones life and buy time for the misdirect shots to land as well.

We rarely have issue with this, I misdirect the tank and then use a distracting shot as soon as he's targetable, followed with an arcane & then generally an aimed. Perhaps it's the travel delay of the shot, or perhaps the threat-only nature of it ignores that small window, either way it seems to work pretty consistently (knock on wood).

We do something that works very well since the first kill : our shadow priests go as far as possible from magtheridon (but still in range to dps the current channeller). With VE/VT running, they almost 100% aggro magtheridon when he's unleashed. They fade while mag moves to them and if done well, your hunter had the time to missdirect mag on the tank.

It usually takes like 2 seconds for him to completely phase in to the fight.

I just spam sunder till I see the debuff hit him and then SS and queue herioc. I always have the healers move to the outside, and a hunter MDing. If my attacks get timed weird, and he turns on the healer, hopefully the hunter comes though <generally is enough to get him>. If not, you lose a healer. But you can do without one in phase 2.

My estimation is that I get him about 50% of the time, the hunter gets him for me about 40%, and the rest is a dead healer.

The subject is mentioned multiple times in this topic: Why can't we kill Magtheridon?

That would be where our MT was, and where we experienced the joyful slow-motion forward walking by mag that resulted in him spinning around to face our mellee while attacking our MT.

As I said above - we have had very clean kills up until last night, where we started to see odd positioning behavior by mag and cleaves mid-bounce.

Maybe he had a dose of wheaties. I'll update the thread if he does it again next lock. For now, going to try strafing and just write it off as "odd".

Hrm, not sure really. We may just be lucky but I cannot recall any of our melee ever eating a cleave due to the bounce.

I personally just start mashing jump and movement keys until I start moving somewhere and then hightail it out of his range as soon asd its over.

The only real problem we have with Magtheridon is he really, really, doesn't like our MT when he breaks banish. Our MT will throw a SS and a heroic on him and Mag will still just walk off towards a healer, coming back a second or two later. Sometimes we get lucky and he doesn't attack first. Sometimes we don't and he cleaves half the raid.
=/

Have a hunter misdirect the MT while he's spamming SS and HS. Make sure that Mag has someone targeted before you do this. As mentioned it takes a good 2 seconds for him to transition out of the banish phase.

My Guild has downed Magtheridon the 3rd time yesterday and we had lot's of wipes yesterday and the day before (mainly due to klicking issues and disconnets) but 2 times we had dds pulling aggro off the MT wich is not explainable for me.

Following happened:
We had only 1 Pala this weekend and I told him to exchange -aggro with manareg at about 80-90%. We had a little strange group composition: I (frost mage) had 2 shamans in my group.
At about 70% of Mag I used invisibility to completly reset aggro and I'm sure that I wasn't interupted in doing so.
I didn't have to click the cubes and gone all out of dmg after aggro reset (priest, 2 heroism trinkets, procs, ....) At about 50% I had a small series of 4k dmg frostbolts and suddenly Magtheridon turned around, made a few steps in my direction one-shotted me and returned back to the tank.
1 or 2 trys later we had the same with a rouge vanishing at 50 or 60% and 1 minute later got aggro and was killed.

There I tought that something must be wrong here and realized that we had some similar events before: We had 1 or 2 rouges got aggro the week before but we claimed that they didn't vanish correctly there (they said they did).
We also had a 1% wipe the day before wehre MT got killed at 5% and I got aggro, palas gave me BOP and I still had aggro (of course didn't get dmg) I used iceblock additionally and for a few seconds I had BOP and iceblock and aggro at the same time, where at least 15 other people where still alive.

It seems for me that Magtheridon is bugged and somehow resists aggro resets and aggro immunities.

I've also read the rest of this thread and I'm not completly sure that we didn't get aggro right after a banish but as far as I remember it wasn't after a banish.
Also the rouge and I were when we died the highest persons on Aggro List, if the aggro reset doesn' count.

Rogue.

Also, something I've never seen, would be weird if this only applied to Magtheridon. Maybe has something to do with what people have seen on Nightbane, where he doesnt change target if the tank is feared (Referring to the last part about BoP).

If your melee are dying to cleave, you can generally tell when he is going to bounce the room around. Run out to a safe distance...

It really is trivial if you put yourself at max range behind him and control your bounce by moving around...

The cleave thing was introduced a few patches ago, but it only killed a few melee who we have on pure dps duty only. Since we moved them to behind Mag, we haven't had a death.