Yea it is absolutely amazing. I hope they do this more often in the future. Makes getting raids started on time very easy and also is nice for the people not currently in the raid.

Yeah, it's also a neat little token for everyone who's killed Illidan. Little reward that doesn't have huge gameplay impact.

The problem is that at the rate Blizzard patches things, by the time they figure out T6 attunement the T7 instance will be out (which if it doesn't have attunement from killing Illidan, means this backflagging is moot). That or most people who read these forums will have considered it a distant memory anyway.

So which BT Trash have you farmed/reset and what works best?

So much trash, so many hearts needed!!

Thanks

We had some trouble on the second-to-last pull before Naj'entus. It was a combination of two Coilskar Sea-Caller, two Aqueous Surger and two Coilskar General. If we had six tanks we would have tanked them all. However, we only had two tanks last try and had to use CC. Do you have any tricks to control this better? We always try to outrange the dispel but it the Generals manages to dispel before they come OOR. We wiped four times on that pack alone last timer, more than we wiped all-together that whole BT run.

Sap works on the Casters, trap works on the minions as does banish/hibernate on them too. I'm pretty sure trap/sap doesn't break due to the General's calls but 2 tanks is kinda pushing it even with that CC. How do you only have 2 tanks? People left I'm assuming or else you have no feral/prot paladins/warriors and that would suck...

MD the two Generals to the bottom of the ramp as you immediately CC (sap the one on the left, hibernate turtles, and poly the rest). Their CC removal has a 100yd range.

We had this combo with several various raid combinations (including 2 tanks) and if I remember correctly, we let druid (me) tank both the generals at same time with agi totem and food etc to stack up avoidance. Hunters / Moonkin made sure they are debuffed for -hit% and I think some warlock even popped voidy at start for the -hit% debuff. The other tank (warrior in nature res gear) tanked both the elementals without problems and we burned them down as soon as possible. The two naga mobs were sapped and after sap broke, then trapped (cause generals cannot remove sap / trap, but can remove hibernate / banish). Hope it helps a bit, though the 2 tanks setup is really pushing it.

EDIT: uhg, too late

We also sap every time on that pull.

As far as farming hearts goes; we only farmed the trash to Mother herself and the trash to Gorefiend a few times. Both are really easy and don't take anymore than 10-15 people.

We cleared those packs with 2 tanks last night (3rd on vacation and no one else attuned) and we just misdirected the generals down the ramp and dragged them to the far end of that room while we had mages, warlocks & druids spam CC on the other mobs until the generals were out of range. It makes those packs really simple once you get it done right, but we did wipe horribly for several pulls while learning them. Those Sea-Callers are absolutely brutal, combined with the surgers you'll see clothies getting instagibbed until you get them under control. Although, the Naj'entus trash is easier than the Kael'thas trash imo, I heard some horror stories about the Aqueous Lords, but I guess they were nerfed while we were noobing it up in SSC.

I totally agree that the pre Mother trash is the least painful in order to farm HoDs. The upside of the experience is the sheer amount of free flask tokens, rings, cloaks, ele shaman chests, recipes and gems that you aquire whilst doing it.

We just agreed a non DKP system where one person gathers up all of the BoE drops and at the end of a run, we all had one /roll. We just worked our way down the rolls, with people picking what they'd like from the haul. It worked out a treat. If you were lucky, you took away a free gem to use or sell (for exorbitant amounts of cash, obviously), if you weren't quite so lucky then there were usually enough Illidari tokens to cover most people. A free flask isn't to be sniffed at for half an hours work!

We did this over two weekends, running almost every half an hour until we had more than enough HoDs. We were never short of people to make the runs, funnily enough.

Not exactly. It's every couple of seconds, the game balances out the health between the 4 mobs. It's easy to see when we do it, because we have all 4 mobs showing on the MT windows, so Gathios and Zerevor might be at 5% while the other two are at 6%.. then suddenly they all jump up to 6% when the game "evens" the health out since it's linked. I think it rounds up in some situations there, it doesn't seem to be a perfect evening sometimes.

As to trash farming, we've had most luck with the Gurtogg trash. Cleared with as low as 11 people on weekends, though I'd recommend around 15 for the 8packs.
You can get by with some crazy group makeups (cleared with a single tank was probably the hardest).

I'd recommend 2 good tanks, 2 mages as a minimum unless you've got a fair amount of experience with the packs. On the big 8-pulls sheep both the blade fury guys because they're by far the most dangerous. Use any CC you might have sap/trap/fear all work really well, and tank the remaining mobs.

The other tricky pull with low numbers is the spectator packs - typically we have a holy pally tank up with consecrate for the little guys and one tank each on the big guys. Sometimes if we're slow he has to bubble off the healing debuff. The spectator packs are worth almost 100 rep each.


As for loot, we track raiding upgrades the same way we do during regular scheduled raids, just to avoid stupid loot inversion problems (e.g. people letting valid upgrades rot during raids so they can pick them up during trash farming for free, etc).
Tokens and Hearts go to the bank for redistribution as usual, and gems are /roll for need as a little incentive for folk to farm hearts for the guild.

We've 8-manned Shahraz trash all the way to Shahraz, for what it's worth, with one PvP spec warrior as our only tank, and 2 healers. It was just a random Friday night "hey I'm bored, think we could make some money doing BT trash?" experiment.

We'll probably try that when we get to Shahraz.

I did have a related question though - what is the consensus on resetting trash packs to farm them repeatedly?

Ah, really? We just assumed that one of Gathios' judgements was a Seal of Light type thing, and caused him to heal himself for some small amount which becomes significant over the fight. Never could find anything in any logs to confirm this though, always thought it was wierd.

Zone out for 30 minutes and wait for a soft reset.

I was referring to causing individual packs to respawn.

You can pretty easily pull the arena packs by bloodboil, kill all the little shits, wipe to the big guys, run back and repeat, makes for some pretty good farming. Depending on how many people you have a lot of the raid can do it nearly naked as well.

If you trap a spectator, you can drag it to supremus' area and cause it to reset on the scenery very easily - no wiping required.

But then you lose your excuse to farm trash naked... Cool trick though will have to try!

Using Banish on the sister packs is against the law.

In all seriousness I was actually trying to figure out how you were doing those packs with one tank, then I remembered they could be banished. Man we should CC more.