I would say the new doomfire makes the encounter a lot more difficult. More spreading is a solution for doomfires, but it causes also new problems since healing and decursing is more spread. Getting combos like fear->Doomfire->Air burst can be quite devastating especially for nonhealer classes. Also doomfires spawning during fear are causing a lot of problems, it seemed than more often than not somebody got the DoT during fear. Stacking shamans might make a huge difference.

However, our DPS seemed to be much better because melee had a lot easier job avoiding the doomfires than before the patch.

Archimonde is definitely harder, but it's a lot more fun.

I don't think there's any way this will be a guaranteed one-shot, pretty much ever, but if you have everything figured out it shouldn't take more than a couple of tries. It's a nice raidwide execution check, but pretty much if he wants to wipe you, however slim the chance, he can.

I'm pretty sure on one of our attempts our melee were rapidly surrounded by a doomfire-burning star of David that quickly began to look like a satan star. I yelled something in vent along the lines of "pray to god melee", and we wiped shortly after. It was fairly horrific.

Archimonde will definitely be one of the hardest bosses to repeat in BT/Hyjal (although Failure mentioned on IRC that Mother Shahraz is even worse in that regard). But overall these changes to doomfire might actually bring some consistency to the fight as it requires everyone to execute against doomfires, rather than get lucky and avoid seeing them altogether.

Right, a lot of the "omg the melee got destroyed by doomfires, so unfair" is actually a product of someone who was 20 yards away and had a doomfire spawn next to them deciding to cut diagonally towards Archimonde to get away from it, leading it right to the melee. Then the next one spawns next to the melee, and they have nowhere to go. I tried to make an analogy of spokes of a wheel with Archimonde being the hub -- that's what the ideal doomfire trail will look like. If you're cutting across multiple radial lines to escape Doomfire, you're screwing multiple groups because it's cutting right through their positions. Just run away from him if at all possible. As more people learn not just how to avoid Doomfire themselves, but how to do so without screwing over everyone around them, it gets easier.

But still, you'll definitely have situations like a bad Doomfire+Fear causing someone to blow their trinket/racial timer, then 30 seconds later, another bad Doomfire+Fear followed by Air Burst and Grip in midair while they're burning. Depending on the class that happens to, stuff like that is going to kill you. And if it causes a Silence Soul Charge, that's probably going to be it right there.

Interesting, I'm still not convinced that doomfire follows players. Maybe it works like the heat seeker missile though, but it can definitely appear to chase someone, and then lazy-eye off into the woods.

The heat-seeking missile analogy is accurate I think. It unquestionably can follow players. If it's not really near anyone, then it'll just wander off in some random direction, which is what a lot of them used to do when they spawned on the side of the raid where no players were standing. And it won't sharply change directions, like a 180 cutback or something. But given the number of times I've run, zigging or curving my path, with a Doomfire following perfectly behind me for 5 seconds at a time, sometimes while feared, there's no way it's random. When it's locked onto someone, they absolutely can control which way it goes.

That is really interesting - thinking about the best way to deal with that initially seems to be have a wheel of players around him I believe - exactly as you described, moving outwards (assuming the dispellers can compensate). But to improve on that the question would be how it might change targets - if it does so easily you might be able to setup a doomfire wrangler, and just shoot the doomfires off into space, with one group of casters in a tight cone.

This is what I say about every boss though. :P

I'd say Mother Shahraz once you figure everything out would be a lot less random than Archimonde seems to be. Yeah you can get bad things like 3 people getting teleported inside of a couch and not being able to get out in time, but that's not quite the same as some of the killer combo's I've seen or heard of Archimonde pulling off.

The way we've been trying to deal with doomfire is having two loose "camps", one on each side, each with healers/dispellers/dps spread out sufficiently to avoid air burst. When a doomfire spawns, that camp moves away from it to a now-open area. We've had success with the strategy, but individual execution keeps killing us. On IRC recently Xi from DnT described TBC raiding as "Every 30 seconds, a pop up box appears on the screen of four random members of your raid asking 'Are you an idiot? Y/N'" This fight seems to be exactly that, and too many people in my raid keep clicking Y.

Has anyone tried Purification Potions as a save for Air Burst/Grip when the curse isn't dispelled fast enough? I've even considered telling all of my warlocks to use a Spellstone for this fight, but I don't know if that would work. Heh.

Hahaha, that's pretty accurate for a lot of fights, yes.

They're a pretty desperation measure. Low cast level, so the dispel fails a lot. It's a gamble. The safe bet is a health/prot potion to buy you a buffer until a decurser can get you. Purification, if it works, removes the curse; if it fails, you're probably screwed.

After thinking about it a bit the fight is a lot better now. It went from a fairly static-placement type situation coupled with individuals not being retarded to a more dynamic, adaptive fight (at least from a healer standpoint). This applies to decursing too since people will be 'on-the-go' a lot more due to the new doomfire mechanics. Before, when you got Grip, decursing would be more of a formality unless you were dumb, but now you actively need to look for your decurser early on just in case you got seperated due to doomfire/fear/etc. Lots of healing on people who may be in a tough situation, basically managing doomfire on the raid, since people ARE going to be taking damage. Before, especially with fear break devices (ward, totems, trinket etc.), you would have to be a bit dumb to repeatedly get hit with doomfire. Not a bad fight to end Hyjal, especially given the quick wipe recovery -- some of the random elements can be frustrating, but it's pretty fun.

I assume that most people struggling with archimonde now used to have everyone behind him right?

I'm just wondering if the fire acts differently for guilds who were already spread round him. We have always used a 3 group triangle around him with a decurser or two in each and always had the fire running in odd directions. I haven't been back there this week but I am hoping it won't act that much differently for us then what it used to.

Yeah, I have no idea how it works - I was just looking for outs for people getting air bursted out of decurse range and dying to grip. I assume that just shouldn't happen if decursers are on the ball, but if spellstone did work, it seems like it's worth giving up the wand slot.

Health/protection potions/healthstones SEEM like they should be enough, but you'd think a mage could never die to air burst either

I wouldn't say "struggling," but for reference we killed him two weeks ago for the first time, went in last week and killed him quickly (a couple of tries), and then this week it took a little over an hour. We did have to completely change our positioning, though.

If you already spread out like that you shouldn't have many problems. The real change for most guilds has been that for 2/3 of the raid it used to be "if you are anywhere near a Doomfire, you're dumb, stop being dumb" with only melee and a handful of tank healers seriously having to worry about it; now the whole raid is going to need to deal with Doomfire popping up right next to them at various points.

I'm wondering if those DPS victims were above 91% of the warriors threat? That would mean your MT does not have enough threat to overaggro Archimonde's new target while in melee range. This threshold has also been discussed in the Omen thread on this board not too long ago.

There is definitely no action needed to get him back if you have a healthy threat lead.

A bit OT, but all the warrior has to do is any action that generates aggro. When Maiden used to repentance the MT and run off to kill the paladin I would just use commanding shout. It generates some minimal amount of threat, but enough for the boss to remember you are there and come back after you. Doesn't matter what range the mob is from you as long as you have the most threat and are in combat with the mob.

First kill 8 and second kill 9 I think, if you struggle on the healing front get one of your magical dps to go play AV and take another healer :p

As a melee on Archimonde, it's very easy to avoid doomfires, even if they spawn underneath you. Comments like yours just make me worry, because it seems at least half our 'attempts' fail because someone feels the damage they took was totally 100% unavoidable and it wasn't their fault (doomfire dot and bursted, or doomfire + burst + curse). I guess you could say the other half is people failing to click their item. >_<

I said this to the other shamans on Archimonde last night after 4-5 attempts where it was cake for me to avoid. Boy that was a mistake, the next 3 attempts were some of the worst doomfires I have ever seen. Myself and another shaman were totally encircled like the middle of a Venn diagram between two doomfires with doomfire ticking on us leading to the most heart racing intense "oh shit we are so fucked" feeling ever, but somehow we survived. You can deal wit h that. If either of us had been airbursted or gripped without a decurser in range, we would've been seriously screwed.

Yeah, we definitely would but we're still pretty constrained by who we've got online and who we've got SR made for.

Stacking your tank with everything you can (like we do - our tank basically just ninjas anything thats an upgrade for him before most corpses hit the ground) and having improved LoH up a lot of the time (50% downwards to save wasting it on high% instalashmidair) helps a hell of a lot on Shahraz. Also getting a minimal amount of shadow res to save him instantly falling over if a FA + 8k sinister (? direct damage anyway) beam happens.

Our offtanks (me + another feral) use only around 275 shadow res which cuts down on the lash damage loads too (went from ~9k to ~7.5k as I was having to use 2 cloth pieces to cap out SR, and gained 8% dodge too). Offtanks should have enough health to be able to take off a couple of pieces of shadow res if it's gimping them a bit too much.