Zindel

That's a lot of potential loot to lose. It takes 2 hours tops to zone in BT and kill the first 3 bosses, and it takes less than 5 pulls per boss to learn. I could see going all Hyjal after 3/9 BT, but anything before that isn't such a good idea in my opinion.

 

Copernicus

The first three bosses in Black Temple are almost free loot. I can't think of a single guild on our server that didn't down all three within a few hours of stepping foot into Black Temple.

I think the most basic advice is Rage -> first three in Black Temple -> Anatheron and Kaz'Rogal. After that, I believe almost every boss has the same overall degree of difficulty for learning and execution. Azgalor and Archimonde are reccomended just because they drop Tier 6 and more loot overall. Also, it's very helpful to have the ability to swap people in and out as needed. Many fights in MH/BT go much more smoothly with class or healer stacking (Archimonde and Bloodboil, for example).

 

◊ vorpalblade

It took a while before our Archimonde kills felt like they got easier. First kill was well upwards of 100 attempts (maybe even closer to 150 or more.. it's kind of a blur now), second kill still took 20 or 30 attempts, but every week since then its gotten easier and easier. We've one-shotted it a couple times, and last night even with a couple new people it only took 3 attempts.. so it definitely gets easier and more repeatable as people gear up.

As for the cost of wiping, Doomfire can ease the burden for most of the raid.. but be patient if your tank starts feeling the burn. It is very difficult to have Doomfire cause the killing blow when you're tanking, especially when you're still learning and the wipe isn't called until the tank is already dead. I spent around a thousand gold in repairs for our first archie kill, and easily over 300 ironshield potions. I tend not to ask for handouts from my guild since repairs and consumables are a necessary cost of raiding, and I bear my burden like everyone else, but a few people insisted on donating to my repair costs that week, and it was greatly appreciated.

Just be wary that while the rest of the raid is celebrating their cheap repair bills for learning that fight, your MT may be nervously eyeing his or her shrinking gold supply.

 

Fellwraith

I'd echo what Anathor said, I'd consider Teron frustrating for the first couple attempts, but once you get your raid experience with handling the ghosts, it should be repeatable every week. Archimonde feels a bit more random, but I don't think my guild has mastered him yet either.

I'd suggest killing Rage, First 3 bosses in BT/Anetheron, Kaz'rogal, Azgalor, Teron Gorefiend, then Archimonde. Naj'entus is the hardest of the first 3 bosses in BT, once you get past him, it's basically free upgrades for your raid roster (not to mention reputation gains). Kaz'rogal has the hardest trash of all the MH bosses, but he's also pretty easy to kill once you get to him. Quite frankly, all the MH bosses are easy if you can handle the trash leading up to them. I think we managed to kill all of them in about 2-3 attempts on the actual boss, however, it wasn't uncommon to wipe a couple times on trash packs that we weren't prepared for (this was before DBM started announcing what was in every pack, the big necro/banshee packs can be rough without shadow resist gear on).

Most of the guilds on our server seem to be going with a 4/9 BT and 4/5 MH, then Archimonde approach.

 

Solomir

How many guilds in the first week that they down Kael end up with 25 people fully attuned to both the t6 instances?

My guild killed Kael late into the night right before 2.3 (we wanted pre-nerf bragging rights). Unfortunately, we then only had 23 attuned for Hyjal and it was too late to make attempts on Rage Winterchill. Following the reset, we cleared Tempest Keep in one night to attune a few more raiders. We then go to Hyjal and discover that a good 20% of the raid had not completed the majority of their BT attunement chain (at least 2 of them had not even started the Shadowmoon Valley part). We end up spending two nights in Hyjal downing Rage to Kaz'rogal, then go to SSC to get everyone on the same page for BT attunement. Last week, due to Thanksgiving, we had less time devoted to progression and instead focused on clearing SSC/TK yet again (we got some time to kill Rage and Anetheron though).
Yesterday night, raid time rolls around and there's an astounding 35 raiders online. Sadly, only 23 were BT attuned while several more were on differing steps of their attunement chains. 4 of them were Hyjal attuned and needed Al'ar and/or Rage Winterchill. 2 needed only Kael'thas and Rage Winterchill. 1 needed Vashj and 2 needed both vials.

A big argument about attunements erupted in Vent. Some wanted to clear SSC and TK yet again to get everyone attuned, while others (including me) advocated getting a raid into BT as soon as possible. In the end, the decision was to clear TK yesterday and SSC tonight and then work on Hyjal/BT after everyone's attuned. We ended up stopping after Solarian, postponing Kael to tonight.
Should I be frustrated that we're possibly leaving 3 loots bosses to rot again this week? Would it be better that we start cutting T5 instances from our schedule, even if it means leaving some raiders not attuned for another week (or two)?

 

shabee

Al'ar is much easier than kael'thas and both of them are easier to reach than VashJ.

So why don't you just go kill al'ar to get the 4 raiders attuned and in the next two instance CD weeks, go get kael'thas and vashJ seperately?

Also not being able to zone in T6 instance and getting "phatloots" will also likely motivate the raiders who didn't get their quest done to complete those ASAP.

 

Oafijev

We ran into the same problem of having to attune people weeks and months after we had killed Kael for the first time. A combination of returning raiders and apps meant that we couldn't not do it eventually. With our 5 day raid week, we had 1 night to clear MH farm bosses and 1 to clear BT farm bosses. Of the remaining 3 nights, if we spent one on SSC and one on TK, that cut our "progression" raids from 3 a week to 1. It's really hard to go back to SSC/TK if we're sharding most of the loot only to attune a few people, when we could be spending time learning new bosses in T6 content.

In answer to your question I'd say that you definitely should kill the 3 BT bosses because there are some nice upgrades there for relatively little cost. I'd go further to say that you should maintain as many progression nights as you possibly can at the expense of full-SSC and full-TK runs. It sucks for the people who aren't attuned at the moment but it benefits them too; by the time they are attuned (a couple weeks at most?), your progression will be further along. Furthermore, raid upgrades will help get those people attuned when you do go back to Kael. The people who are not attuned at the moment should recognize that it's for the betterment of the raid to proceed on with content at their personal expense - as long as you propose a reasonable plan to get them attuned shortly, they should be okay with it (if they're not, that's a different story).

As for a plan to get them attuned, I see from wowjutsu that there seems to be a guild on your server (<Impact>) stuck on Kael and a couple more with some progress in TK. <Paradigm Shift> and <Impact> have significant progress on Vashj. I don't know how possible this is since I'm not familiar with the guild dynamics on your server, but it could be beneficial to try and buy instances from these other guilds. On Monday, these other guilds might decide that what you have to offer might be worth more than another night on those bosses - especially if they don't raid Mondays (or raid earlier than you do). You can offer BT/MH gems (which they can't get otherwise and will help them immediately) - which you can get more of by spending more progression time. You can offer spots in your raid so their RLs can see "how it's done". Be creative. I think there's already some discussion on these forums about buying instances.

YMMV, that's just one thing that worked really well for us. (Thanks to these boards for bringing it to our attention )

 

Trouble

How come it takes a guild progressing through BT an entire night to clear SSC or TK? It takes us 2 hours at a medium pace now (full tier 6) to clear one of them and we did it in 2 hours really huffing it with a small amount of tier 6 months ago. Even with people not at 100% and a few noobs and whatnot I can't see it taking anywhere near an entire night.

 

Oafijev

Some combination of:
1) Not fully motivated/focused (why are we here when we could be in BT? To attune one person!)
2) People that you're trying attune are new to the fights and therefore less effective
3) At the time (1/5, 3/9 - no T6 and *that* many upgrades a week), not seriously outgearing the content you're trying to do
4) Fights that were tuned to be punishing and could still wipe you a few times even after a half-dozen kills (mosty KT here, but Vashj was still a bit of a crapshoot for quite a few resets), especially in combination with 2).

Or maybe your people are just better than ours

 

Boneitis

My guild went through this about a month ago, I can tell you how it ended up happening for us. 25 people killed Kael - 24 had Vashj Vials, so 24 people zoned in and killed Rage that night.

Obviously at this point everyone is sick and tired of all T5 content, especially SSC. And they did not want to go back. But we are not a 25-30 person raid. We are a 35-40 person raid. So I quickly did the math for them and showed that we had to attune more people now or we couldn't maintain a steady roster.

So what followed was 1 last Vashj kill and 2 more Kael kills (3 total). This got about 95-98% of the people attuned for Hyjal and a few stragglers still needed Karathress because they were lazy questers. After that we stopped doing T5 content for 3 weeks, knocked out 3 bosses in Hyjal and BT, got the gear and gems flowing in. And now we have a monthly scheduled key run, where we'll be keying up whoever missed a boss.

During those 3 weeks (this is the third week) people started to notice the "crap we gotta fill that spot, grab so-and-so... oh wait they aren't keyed" problem. So now there wont be as much negativity about keying people up. Also, this first push we've killed 3/5 Hyjal, got Azgalor to 50% on our only attempt last night (with 3 healers getting doomed in a row, at the start) and we expect to kill him this week. We've tried Gorefiend and aren't too worried about that either. Don't worry about initial progress in T6 content, it is easy as advertised.

Just get the people keyed now, progression and new fun times will happen. But the worst would be finding yourself at that 1-2 more attempts for a kill at 10:30 pm and you can't fill the raid because you stopped keying.

 

• giansm

Our last attunement run was when we were 4/5 3/9, and it took us about 10 hours total to run SSC + TK. The main reason was lack of focus mostly because of "grumble grumble we're just here to attune a few people" and "we should crush this content, I don't need to pay attention." We've actually never been able to clear SSC or TK in one 4 hour raid night, and always end up staying late or coming back to kill Kael or Vashj the next day. Hyjal is actually the first instance we've been capable of clearing in one night (it took us three hours yesterday) so our guild is probably just slow.

 

andastra

We took a while to clear SSC as well last week and we're 5/5 MH 7/9 BT at that point. I believe it took us a total of 4 hours. Explaining to app what to do and having undergeared potential main switches kinda made a few fights harder than they should be. And yes, people weren't as motivated.

As for Archimonde, we were just total fail learning that fight. It took us 5 weeks and maybe 150+ wipes. We just killed him for the fourth time last night and I think each kill afterwards took 4 tries at the most. Early on, we just had major problems even getting Archimonde low. Eventually, something just clicked and even bringing 1-2 apps, we can down him pretty easily.

The strat we settled on was having melee group at Archimonde's back and a 3 lock/1 druid/1 other behind that melee group that has half the circle around Archimonde to them. That group is supposed to be as self-sufficient as possible. The other 3 ranged groups/healers are spread out by group behind the MT. Each group was supposed to be self sufficient but are spread out in a way that it's easier for the MT to be in range of healers and decursers/healers in range to help another group if need be.

 

Karmen

It's been said before but Gorefiend definately isn't a push over, at least from what I can tell. Just spent a whole night on him and he consistently seemed to pick the worst possible people for ghost duty ie. our slowest learners. Plus you'll have normally reliable people forget to double check where their pet bar shows up or that they aren't using the default bar mod and just hitting the normal keys isn't doing anything. If the same 4-5 people got chosen for ghosts it would be a joke but unfortunately that isn't the case. Should have him tonight but if the RNG is really hating on us it could be long night.....

Late Night Raiding www.skeletoncrew.org

 

Layana

Don't worry about your slow learners getting to be the ghost people. Afterall they will have to learn at some point and it is probably better they learn now, when you are all still getting the hang of the enoucnter. Imagine having your "fast" learners get the debuff all the time at first, giving you an easy kill after a few tries. Then you come back and the slowbies keep wiping the raid. Thats more frustrating than having them to learn it now.

Astennu - FOH Boards

 

tobee

It’s not always the matter of slow or fast learning. For me it was important to keep latency minimal and fps high enough.
It’s not difficult to handle constructs. Only first person that gets it has it more difficult. Later on you have 2 ghosts at the same time and they can help each other.
Only someone who dies before turning into ghost can cause wipe. Rest should handle their ghosts.
Though we killed him few times we still wipe on him. I believe some people didn’t have a chance to become ghost though we did like 40 tries(few kills) in total.
We also soulstone/battle res healers with shadow of death.
I personally use keybinded macros with pet spell names on my bongos bars.

 

Kabale

We are 4/5 MH and 8/9 BT, we completely skipped Archimonde after a number of raids with little/no success. Wiping at somewhere between 70%-80% was really demorolizing, so we've just decided to focus on BT in an attempt to get an Illidan server first kill. I can't say I'm that bothered about it seeing as we've managed to get all the way up to Illidan (we were 2/9 when we downed Azgalor), but missing Archimonde's loot is certainly a pain

My advice would be to just continue in BT if you're wiping forever on Archimonde. Teron is easy once people have been a ghost at least once, and people have macros in case their spellbars mess up, Bloodboil is certainly a lot less random than Archimonde and is quite easy to one or two-shot after the initial kill, Reliquary of Souls... well there's no trash and it's all about execution perfection, and Mother Shahraz can be one-shot from the firsts pull.

 

◊ Quigon

Missing archimonde loot doesn't even compare to missing Illidan loot. Cutting your losses seems to be smart, but don't do so if you're making progress. Basically don't panic.

 

◊ Cathela

We tried this tonight on our first night of attempts on Anetheron. The triangle formation and tight clumping make sense for Carrion Swarm; what absolutely killed us, however, was infernals. They would land on one person in the clump and pretty much splat the entire clump. MD also seemed strangely not to work.

What are we missing? Is there a hidden "spawn time" on the infernals during which they don't have an aggro table (like that first second after Magtheridon unbanishes when MD'd shots have no effect on him?) Do people need to be more proactive about running from infernal targets?

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Anedris

Infernal targets need to run out of the groups towards the infernal tanks. The infernal falls on that person's head wherever they are when the cast completes, so as long as the target is able to get out of the group you won't have infernals landing on more than one person.

 

Revenj

I am conflicted about this. I am pretty sure the Infernal lands on the original spot and not where you currently are.

 

◊ Cathela

Okay, that makes sense. I knew we were missing something.

Incidentally, what angle does the Carrion Swarm cover? 60 degrees? 90?

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Whitemane

Incorrect, from the announce to the actual infernal spawns you can move it. You don't have a lot of time to do so though, so it requires people to be fast.

In general, I'd say it's a faster Solarian. Everyone clump up, tightly, and then whoever gets it runs towards the tank and the group he is in runs the opposite way. Failure in moving can lead to several deaths, but really at that level it shouldn't be a major issue.

 

Orestus

We've had infernals land all over the place and it has never really been an issue. I'm not sure clumping up is really the best strategy to be honest, that would seem to just invite a slow person to get a group destroyed by an infernal. We only micromanage the healer set up, we usually run w/ 8 healers on Anatheron so we set them up in 2 man groups to the north/south/east/west of the boss, so only one group of healers will get Swarmed each time. Everyone else we just tell to spread out around him and it works fairly well.

Thinking about it though, we really don't even have that many people to clump up in the first place. Our DPS as a guild isn't great, and we've found it takes us about 6 ranged DPS to kill the infernals, which happens out of range of Anatheron anyway. Since we have those 6 ranged, the infernal tank, and his healer (8 People) out range anyway, the MT and melee (7 people) naturally clumped up under anatheron, and the healers (7 people) already spread out, that only leaves 3 more people that need to spread around anatheron. I can't see us being in a situation where we'd have 4 or 5 people clumped up to get blasted by an infernal regardless. Maybe we do this fight wrong or weird though.

 

• constantius

We just make a circle around Anetheron, and tell people to "find a buddy". Every single person is supposed to be standing directly on top of one and only one other person. This cuts down a lot on weird angles for the Carrion Swarm ending up hitting 8-10 people. We consider a "good" Carrion swarm to be maximum of 6 people: 2-3 melee, and the targetted 2-3 ranged. You can't avoid the melee getting hit most of the time, since they're standing in on the boss and roughly half the Carrions will travel through them.

We just tank the infernals about 15' from our MT, and no-one moves. Tab, nuke, rinse, repeat.

And to reiterate what someone said above ... if you aren't running with Aggro Notification mods yet, stop being dumb and get them/one. The instant the boss targets you, start running toward your tank as the hunters throw up MD. You'll be 10' closer to the tank, and be out of the spot where it spawns; if you're especially fast, you can avoid taking the stun as well, which can/will save your life.

Even if you get hit with the stun, moving fast means you're less likely to take landing dmg + stun + fire tick + fire tick = dead. I started having a lot more survival on the fight when I started reacting *fast* to infernals in my area.

 

Whitemane

I'm usually the healer to the infernal tank, so I got the infernal and just went and stood near the tank. Bad idea, the fucker landed on me and then immediately hit me! So yeah, running is a good idea

Should also be said that we don't have anyone, except me outside range of carrion swarm. It would probably be better to balance it in a way that we can kill the infernal before the next spawn, but ... we don't.