This question is obviously for those who've found such sudden success on this encounter; whereas my guild has hit a wall of sorts. The question is simple, how many shamans does your guild run on the encounter? Im simply wondering if they're a large part of the difference between success and failure, or if we've just had a few bad days.

To set the scene a little, let me explain. After the trash nerf, as was the case with many guilds, we decided to put some more effort into Hyjal. We learnt and killed every boss the first night of pulls on each; Rage through to Archimonde. In BT, we've gone through bloodboil.

But Archimonde has been a completely different story. What is essentially a very straight-forward encounter is proving otherwise. The multitude of ways we've died is phenomenal. We've had the obligatory cratering. And despite the odd death or two from it now (like 1 in 20 attempts) it has largely been removed as a problem. We've had grip killing people because it was cast a second before fear sends them flying across the landscape away from decursers. We've had the MT die during fears if full HOTs arent up. We've had deaths from a person recieving Grip, and then being punted via Burst... thus OOR of any possible cleanse. Deaths from fear sending people on ridiculous paths through the fire walls. Deaths from the fires pathing so ridiculously that a person literally cannot move; encircled by fire...

We generally run one shaman (resto). There are no other raiding shamans in our guild (none yet attuned anyway), and our healing is generally paladin 'heavy' with 2 priests and a druid filling out the remaining spots.

To combat the above problems, we've tried a number of things:
-Paladins rotating bubbles/fear trinkets to break fear and ensure at least one person is available to heal during fear's duration.
-A mage, druid, shaman, paladin, priest group with tremor totem to heal the random fear/fire combos, cleanse grips and heal the MT.
-A druid out of fear range to save the people who get Grip + Burst, throw HOTs etc.
-Require everyone to bring the pvp trinket to save themselves in the "oh shit" moments where fear literally paths them right at a fire wall.

I announce incoming fears. HOTs go up, people move well clear of any existing fires. The raid is spread to minimise players affected by bursts etc. It doesnt seem to matter.

We've survived something like 8 fears without a single death before something inevitably goes wrong. And as those who've done the encounter will know; the probability of 'chain deaths' is quite high. Sadly, the best % we've seen is 50-odd. (DPS has never been an issue for the guild in the past either. We were a guild that killed Loatheb, never using world buffs, putting out 20k DPS. We killed the original gruul, so on.). I dont even want to state the number of attempts we've put on him the past few days.

So there's our situation. We're trying to deal with nearly 80% of the raid being feared every cooldown and the encounter is lasting way too long before probability kicks in and somebody dies.

Are shamans, and therefore tremor totems by implication, such a big deal on this fight? Or has my guild been having a bad few days and sucking it up? (I cant rule the possibility out, I managed to live through all attempts as a hunter, so maybe people are just not understanding the implications of failing to survive at all costs... or I was just lucky all day)

Any input would be appreciated. Our experience so far is proving Archimonde to be anything but the "Loot bag" that others describe him to be, and that videos show. And frankly, at this point I'm loathe to even bother attempting him next week before we attune another shaman.

We spread the raid out in a semi circle behind Archimonde. The decursers are spaced among the raid so that everyone is covered. We place a raid icon on their heads so that whoever gets grip knows exactly where to move to to ensure they are in range for removal.

Interesting analogy on the fire. Assuming that is the mechanic, it'dl be much more controllable. A line might devide the raid, but we've had that happen and it's generally not a problem. I'll get people trying that.

No luck on the fear ward either. Haven't had one of those since C'thun. We rely on our tank dancing every fear.

Our main problem with Archimonde was also positioning, for the most part. It seems that the camp method, standing in a mid circle behind him as to avoid the fire as much as possible (and maybe moving with it), is the way to go. I still believe that grip during the burst phase is absurd and sometimes a death simply cannot be avoided, especially if you are not heavy on decursers. We brought 3 shamans the first time as well (sadly we are missing a dwarf/dranei priest which would simplify things), but I will agree on the fact that you cannot entirely rely on tremor totems.

We intend to revisit him today, hopefully, control will be better.

By the way, question for those that have killed him. Do you find the PvP trinket worth a slot in this fight, considering the fact that is highly situational and can only be used around 3-4 times (considering the fact you even have the level 70 trinket that is) ? Shouldn't you attempt to control the fire better rather than relying on such a solution ?

It took us basically a full night before we killed him, same issues you're describing. We had 3 shamans, 2 resto and 1 enhance keeping tremor down in the melee group. We had everyone spread out in a semicircle behind him, 3 decursers spread out within that semicircle and a resto druid standing well behind everyone to help decurse/heal those that got airbursted.

Airburst is a 1.5s cast and you have a second or so after the cast before they're out of range, if someone gets hit with that and they still have grip then the decursing really was too slow. If someone gets grip right before a fear and it doesn't get cleansed quickly they probably need to trinket out of it to help the decursers get to them, but once again you've got a gcd or so from when grip is cast to the earliest you can be feared. If someone doesn't have their trinket up, they need to make sure to get much further from the fire than they normally would, even if it means running out of dps range briefly. Almost every death is in some way your own fault.

We had alot more of our wipes from fall damage, or people dying because they got grip right after the airburst and didn't use healthstones/pots to help buy time to get themselves back in range. Even on our kill we had someone die at 22% or so, and the MT died at 12%. Made for quite an exciting final phase with only 14 people left alive

Well, despite many guilds claiming he's free loot, we wiped many hours on him too, with 1 shaman only in the raid.
I do think the more shamans you have, the better you will perform. We wiped countless times because of stupid things like mt dying during fear for example. Only 1 tremor totem means you give it to the melee grp, which means you have to rely on trinket/invuln chains to manage mt healing, and it's obviously very dangerous.
Things we changed to get a kill :
- We put a druid 40 yard behind the raid. His main job is to decurse the 2 ou 3 people who get grip + air burst. This combo WILL happen and it killed us many times. The druid can at least ns heal + decurse to avoid this.
- We tried to dps very high. Archimonde is a very random fight, there's many things that can go wrong (someone cratered, grip + air burst + fear combos, mt dying to a spike, fear in doomfire... and so on). So, try to kill him as fast as possible.
- Everyone equipped pvp trinket. It will help you, period. Be it to dps more, to avoid a doomfire, to place the heal which will save your mt, it's the best trinket you can use if you don't have 3 or more shamans.
- HS / Pot life or shadow on everyone. Everybody in your raid should be able to heal himself of 5k dmg or so.

We didn't have time to do hyjal again this week, but honnestly, I fear this fight. I'm sure we won't oneshot him. I still find him hard, at least with 1 shaman only.

People should never crater.
Have people stand in groups with a decurse (druids including ferals can decurse!) should stop burst + grip from killing people 99% of the time.
You should never use a pvp trinket unless your about to run into a fire, bar 10% it is not a DPS encounter.
Your tank shouldn't be dying during a fear, have a priest shield on the fear (tot castbar) and use HoTs, that should be plenty - if hes dying to doomfire it might be better using firepots instead of ironshield. (reactively)
Obviously not that helpful if your lacking shamans but use bloodlust/heroism before 'phase 2' as you are immune to it then.

We wiped for over 3 hours with nonstop pulling before got the kill (and 1 and half hours on day before). Our main problem was lack of decursers online, 2 mages and 1 druid was not enough. We had almost 2 full melee groups and 3 shamans, meaning there was not enough tremors for decursers. We swapped 1 melee out and got second druid online and changed the groups so that all the of decursers and half of the MT healers got tremor instead of an UD rogue and some hunters that were previously in melee groups. We also positioned 1 druid way behind the raid for decurses/ranged healing. Suddenly people stopped dying and we got a comfortable kill (1 shaman died though quite early). However, I'm certain we will wipe on him a lot in the future also and he is definetely not free loot for us.

Good thing about Archimonde is that there's no trash at all, you can do try after try without any worries of respawns, and there's no 10 minute p1 like on Kael before the action really starts. I think this is a big factor considering how fast guilds have killed this. We propably wiped on Archimonde in total more times than we normally wipe on hard bosses before first kill, but since you can just corpse run and be ready for next pull in few minutes, wipe early in the fight is not that big deal.

We also took a different approach than Dawme posted earlier, we did not stack DPS, we stacked healers. We had 10 healers in total in the end, 2 druids were focusing on dispelling though. We thought a big amount of healers was needed because our pimped out MT was not able to raid, and our second MT was a lacking some gear upgrades. It turned to be a good decision, usually there was always someone who resisted fear or used trinket/Wotf. We also marked MT healers instead of decursers, so they knew how to avoid stacking up with other MT healers in order to avoid Air Bursts. In general, MT was usually one of the last persons alive when wiping.

I used the 5 min PVP trinket once in the fight, but next time I won't equip it unless I farm the 2 min version. As an undead, WoTF was enough in addition to tremor totem. With WoTF + 2 min PVP trinket you could remove almost every fear, 2 priests doing this would almost guarantee 1 healer always ready to heal MT (unless Air Bursted). Balances Fear Ward quite nicely.

hi

Is anyone doing this fight any different positioning wise since the patch?

We downed him pre patch and spent a few attempts trying him last night, and of course doomfires spawn on the raid much more frequently. Just curious as to whether anyone's doing anything different.

There is 2x as much fire now. The fight is still the same, but it just requires a bit more moving than pre-patch.

The fight doesn't seem the same really. Fires now appear to spawn about 10 yards away from Archimonde, as opposed to previously when they could spawn right on top of melee. They also only spread outwards away from him now, but still seem to "lock" on to people until you cut at a 90 degree angle. At least this is what I noticed when we did him.

Yeah, seemed this way to us as well.

Also...I might be crazy, but the doomfire dot doesn't seem to last as long - I ran into a doomfire during a called wipe and it ticked twice and fell off, after the doomfire despawned. I'd say its something that should be tested, but I doubt thats something anyone would want to "test" lol.