If you have that many deaths on that trash I'm pretty sure you are doing it wrong - or could improve on handling it at least. We aren't that deep in SSC but rarely have more than 2-3 deaths tops (not counting the naga that knock people into the water because we still aren't good at those).

(Also fill out your profile before someone with a banhammer spots it.)

Added my Profile ^^

Im aware that there are flaws on my people, but actually 1 sleeping player here and there can wipe u in there pretty easy. Thats not what i call fun.

Only a few unplaned things have to happen, like the wrong ppl at the wrong time graved on morogrim, and its a wipe. Ppl getting graved right after earthquake and u have the next dead player.

Demons at Leotheras 3 times in a row on the MT healers, and so on.

Players getting instantgibbed by multiple AoE from npcs that popped out of their sheeps.

Heh, my turn to post about my guild's progression VS Void Reaver.

We killed Gruul but are having problem making him a loot pinata. We also got Magtheridon on the second night down to 71% which basically means that a third night out will probably be THE One. We aren't full decked out in Karazhan gear but we still manage to have a decently geared raid. We 25-man raid twice a week on average.

So with all this, I decided to go pay a visit to Void Reaver for a change. Gruul wipes are demoralizing people fast and we are lacking the tanking roster for Magtheridon. The results of our night out (9:30-00:15) in TK was 4 pulls on VR, the best being the last one at 67%. Our DPS ranged simply suck at moving out of harm's way. And the healers have the same problem than on Gruul (they cast, they stay static, they die). But what the heck.. we had a very enjoyable raid night. The kind we had back in MC and AQ days (BWL was different as trash were full-fledged encounters on their own). We got one epic on trash and one epic pattern.

TK trash are not that challenging. Mages and Hunters actually like to do all sort of stuff like kiting, sheeping, etc. Trying to find your own ways and positioning to clear the trash packs as fast as possible without losses is fun, at least the first few nights. Void Reaver itseld is a somewhat intense fight, but still easy to learn. You can brief everybody in 3-4mins over TS/Vent (which is always a pain on Magtheridon with clickers team and such). And based on our result, I know that 1-2 pulls were just what we needed to loot our first T5.

So we'll go back, soon. We'll keep focusing Mag, but we sure won't skip VR in the coming weeks. I'd say that if you can trust your raid to execute pulls and cc properly, have defeated Maulgar/Gruul and you've got a good balance of class, then go for VR, if only for the thrill of discovering something new.

Yea, my experience is similar to Aggrippa's. Our guild has been killing Gruul for a couple weeks, were gonna try Mag... but with 2.1.2, we decided to skip to VR instead. The trash went down easily enough, but VR himself... 3 shots, best attempt was 66%. I'm sure that practice will help us, but I'm not sure that we have the DPS to beat the enrage. Our guild's gear level spans from full Tier4-level epics to dungeon blues, pretty much... and the average VR guild pre-patch probably had a much higher gear level (since everyone had to play long enough to get heroic keys at least AND kill Mag.) It may seem much easier with this intended level of gear, but.... much rougher without? It's kinda like saying that Noth in Naxx is much easier than Vael in BWL because you took less time to down him than Vael, but of course if you take two guilds who are just branching out of MC and had them try both encounters... Vael would fall much much sooner. If all our players had nearly-full T4, we'd probably be golden, but this just isn't the case yet.

It scares me hearing about guilds going into all these places in blues still. I can just picture half the raid dying on every single trash pull or every RSTS boss ability because of such low stamina values.

This is definitely a big factor and a reason that removing the attunement requirements to SSC/TK won't mean that dozens of guilds start progressing through them. On our first VR kill we beat the enrage pretty easily, and everyone in the raid could easily survive getting hit by an orb with several thousand HP to spare. Pop a healthstone and you could survive 2 in a row. Guilds trying him without that much gear, and without spending as much time on fights that stress positional awareness are going to struggle, maybe to the point where they are better off just progressing naturally, by working on Mags first. Seeing all the trash-dropped epics, as well as the higher quality boss loot, is probably going to mean a lot of guilds jump right in and then hit a brick wall though.

Maybe Void Reaver isn't, but the trash to him is. I wouldn't enjoy a night of half the raid wiping to every trash pull followed by a few attempts at VR at the end of the evening.

The trash to VR is definitely a pain if your mages and locks aren't on the ball with cc and you have raid members who constantly break them to cause a lot of aoe damage on the raid. Leaving one of those demons or technicians around VR un cc'd for prolonged periods of time while dps'ing something else is asking for a few deaths with their fast bombs/saw blade attacks.

This seems to be the most relevant place to bring this up since I don't believe that this question calls for a new thread. If this is too off-topic please point me to a thread where this question belongs:

My guild took a peek into Tempest Keep for the first time last Tuesday and we easily cleared everything up to the VR's room. The VR trash is definitely a nice challenge compared to trash that we've been seeing in the game so far, but it's not the Mechanics that are giving us trouble (from what I read they seem to be the cockblockers of those pulls). Rather, the Devastators are confusing the hell out of me. I don't understand their aggro behavior. I'm assuming that their aggro dumps would resemble that of the Void Reaver's, in that they dump aggro when they do a knockback. Can this be confirmed? We attempted having an offtank with second highest aggro but the Devastator was still all over the place. By the time we get him down there's a good 5-10 people dead and still the rest of the pack to go.

I've never seen any sort of anti-agro behavior on ANY of the Void Reaver trash. I'm pretty sure your devastator tank either needs to put out more threat, or your other guys need to chill and let him have some time.

*blink*

I could swear they have some sort of aggro dump, they were the only mob (aside from the hawks, of course) that would leave the tank. I can't imagine that my raid would just turn into a bunch of aggro-ignoring idiots for one specific mob.

I have not seen a threat reducing skill on the robots inside Void Reaver's room, however, one of the other varieties of robot in the hall leading to him most certainly DOES do a knock back, which more than likely has a -threat component to it.

There are 2 kind of robots, those with charged hands and those who do the 5 secs 5k AE spell (and the 17k spell reflect thingy which I kinda like :p ) those with the charged hands I think there are 2-3 in VR room actually, and they do knocback and reduce threat, but just have your tank with fast intervene and taunt and it's easy.

The single robot pulls all have a de-aggro, similar to the robots from heroic Arcatraz from what I've seen. Just put somone back by the casters to taunt it back to the tank and you'll be fine (putting them in melee as an offtank won't work well).

The pulls with 2 robots have different mechanics to worry about.

Make sure you have a warrior on those: spell reflect for the win. You can reflect the Countercharge for 16k or more.

I like the TK trash (that I've seen on the way to VR), especially the bird packs in Alar's room. Knockback, "wheee". We just laugh while clearing those. If you have problems clearing the big birds on the upper level, have everyone stay relatively close to the tank, then put an OT far away from you. The birds will charge your OT every time, it's not RSTS.

Since we're far from a bleeding edge guild, and everyone and their brother hasn't cleared TK, I thought it was fun to go in and figure out the trash. Sure, the first clear to VR took awhile, but it was interesting to figure it out.

Considering that lots of raiders beating bosses in SSC/TK are casters in tailoring gear, I don't think the low stamina of people with lesser gear really means anything against VR. Sure, I die a few times in the trash clear to it, but I don't think it's something that an extra 1k or so hp will prevent.

We went into TK for Void Reaver last night (Sunday) for the first time, we've killed Maulgar a couple times, clearing Kara with 2 groups, and killed Gruul for the first time on Saturday. I still have 3-4 blues and I have MT (and killed) Prince -- some things are pretty hard to upgrade from the blue equivalents.

I think we had one wipe on the trash because we mis-marked something that wasn't CC-able in one of the early pulls. Otherwise only 1-2 people would die, if at all, by the time we got to VR we understood what we were dealing with and were fine on the crowd control. We got Void Reaver below 50% on our best attempt but had the classic problem of people not getting away from the orbs and losing DPS classes to those kinds of deaths. Also, generating enough tank threat seemed difficult for some, but I'm hoping to work on that.

Everyone was generally pretty excited though, it's the first "big raid" feeling we've had since TBC and it definitely reminds me of our early days clearing MC, or BWL, or later efforts in AQ40 and early Naxx bosses. Maulgar/Gruul feel more like Onyxia, single-event sort of things, without all the continuity of being in a "grand" instance.

Well, let's not be too "elitist" here...

We're talking about guilds able to clear Karazhan and having Maulgar/Gruul on near-farm status (at least Maulgar. Gruul is somewhat random). This also implies some heroic loots and a couple of items from honor/arena system here and there. Not just some random 25 lost souls in lvl61 gear...

The question was : is Void Reaver worth a shot, even if Mag isn't mastered yet? And the answer is probably that yes, attempting VR may be worthwhile. It can be motivating for a guild but if at first you don't succeed, well, don't cry for nerf and go back to Kara/Gruul to upgrade the gear. We are going back tonight after only three tries on VR on Sunday. If we do not kill him, so be it. But nevertheless, it's a very fun night out and that's exactly what the guild needs these days.

And by the way: there's no reason to wipe on every trash pack up to VR, even with RSTS (which incidently, isn't much of a problem if people move out of the orb's way). Maybe a wipe or two on a bad pull or other mistake, but nothing too dramatic.

We went in there and i can say that i had the same feeling Tharas posted here. Its just fun to have a "real" 25 instance and not just one or two bosses. We didnt kill him either (10 % enrage), but got some epics and nether vortex from trash so it was even worth it.
We killed Magtheridon last sunday the first time, so i guess we using the normal progression way, but if u get bored with Gruul, just try it out. We had a great time in the eye.

The guilds wiping on Void Reaver I wouldn't feel too bad about it.
You hear all the stories about guilds 1, 2, 3 whatever shotting him, and none of the stories about struggles. We got to him real late our first night and only got maybe 2-3 pulls, and have a low wipe. I theorycrafted the hell out of that fight that same night (I had graphs and shit going on - which won't be posted here, cause its sad) and determined how many tanks it would take to kill him before aggro loss at 8 minutes (with the old number of knockbacks which were higher).
Basically if you use four tanks you should never lose aggro - try adding that to your mix, with 8 healers, and you'll probably find yourself with a much tighter control over the fight.

We normally misdirect them to a tank, everyone in the hallway on the way to alars room. Tank them to one side of the corridor, and make sure one person is behind the laser-barricade things that are along the side (and furthest away) - as long as they aren't in LoS it'll turn, try and charge, give up and turn back to the tank without moving (you can get the same effect on the brutes in Gruuls Lair but as that is RSTS it's harder).

We went this week to visit VR for the first time, we planned on going there this week before they lifted the attunement requirements, so we have decent equipment (4 Bosses in ssc down).
It seems to me that Void Reaver is made significantly easier by gear. We killed him in our second attempt, however, half our raid was dead in the end, with several casualties before 50%. If we only had a couple of Gruul and maybe one Magtheridon kill on our belt, and were still wearing instance blues, he would have been much more difficult, and it would have taken us many more attempts.
So I'd say vor VR your raid needs either the awareness to evade those arcane balls, or the equip to kill him even if some of your players die because they fail to run away.

It's certainly a nice change of scenery for a raid, no matter where you are progression-wise, however, while the stories of VR being freeloot have some merit, they require a raid that is either pretty good at evading those balls, or has decent equipment. Otherwise, I'd say you're still in for a challenging fight.