Just out of curiosity, do any guilds still do 180 degrees?

We do.

My guild was stuck on Archimonde for over a month. Over and over we would constantly have wipes for misc reasons, using 1-2 shamans. Thursday we went with 3 shamans (got a new app) and killed him that night.

The insanely dramatic effect shamans can have on this encounter is just...... World of difference when ~80% of your raid (3 groups with tremor totem, warriors, fear ward) can for the most part negate the fear. This fight really needs to be re-designed (even though I know it won't be).

Any guilds out there specifically trying to minimize the amount of decursers they use? On our first kill we had exactly two, a mage and myself and the mage died around 75% leaving just me to solo decurse the entire raid (I stand in melee range to proc OOC and to have range on everyone). It worked fine until we had a number of deaths at 12% or so and powered to a kill before a wipe. Our kill last night we had the usual 3 mages and myself, all of them putting decursing as priority over dpsing and their dps fell from 1200-1400 in other fights to 500-800 for all 3.
As an example if we had all 3 of them ignore cursing our raid dps would increase roughly 15-20% which is significantly less time for bad things to happen. I was worried about doing it with only 3 decursers originally but soloing it relatively easily makes me think we are just wasting time with 3+ and exposing ourselves to bad luck and lag-in-the-air syndrome.

Oddly the past couple weeks we have had a couple nights were exactly 3 people from all over the world would randomly get dced over and over again all night. Two of us were in the air on the last dc last Archimonde but luckily he was already at 11%.

Anyway, just wondering what the 'sweet spot' was for other guilds as far as number of decursers.

Shamans are really not nearly as necessary after they made the fear more predictable, and the fight overall is really not very random anymore. Emphasize survival over all else, warn frequently for fears, and for the love of god stay away from doomfires.

I couldn't imagine doing Archimonde with only one decurser. Didn't fear, doomfires and air burst cause OoR problems? Personally, I like at the very minimum 4 decurses; one in each group. Even then I still hand out purification potions to every non-decurser.

Hi there.

We had our first kill yesterday - was about our 30th try in total I think (4th hour of wipes).

Just echoing what some people have already stated here - calling out the fear timer, and just simply spamming on voice coms to 'move away from the fire' will do wonders for your raid group's survivability.

We went with 3 mages and 3 druids (2 ferals) decursing. 3 shaman too, but we moved around so much that the tremor totems didn't do a whole lot. 3 priests and 1 paladin, to bring it up to 8 healers (plus the two ferals, but I think they were even in feral gear, decursing).

We started off with the whole '3 groups, and a decurser behind to catch the rogues' positioning, but by the end we were just moving as a raid to the side that had the least fire.

Really, it got to the stage where we just had to heal the MT and 1 (sometimes 2) people with Doomfire.

Very cool, calm, and not as random as I expected (once we got past the 'random' deaths from not having Tears, trees sneaking up on people, 'lag'...)

I didn't notice any nasty mid-air combos, but I did make sure that most classes had purification potions for those 'oh shit' moments.

Nothing special to report on the fears really - we had 3 priests, so between our talent points we broke 50% of the fears, and we're all undead, with 2 minute trinkets (so that probably helped a lot).

But yeah, can't emphasise the 'stay away from the fires' bit enough. Stay away from the fires (waaaaay away), and you should secure a kill on this guy pretty quickly.

We even had an airburst on our MT at 15%! That was funny... ha... ha...

I sure hope he's repeatable next week.

Well, I'm feral spec and usually tanking so I have the feral talent to resist fears (which does work unlike SR on his fears), and I also have full gladiator resto gear from s1/2 so my unbuffed hp is something like 12k+ in my resto set. Between tremors+resists+trinket I am never feared at the wrong time, and in the event of a doomfire being in the way between me and a guy with decurse I just run right through it without caring at all throwing up barksin and some hots after I get to the guy.
Using pitbull and agro monitor, I can decurse anyone in range before they take a single tick, and also lifebloom the target of the air burst and maybe 1 guy next to him before it even hits them.

It's really rather easy with mouse over decurse macros, an agro-alert setup in your ui and a lot of hp. I'm also really situationally aware and know where most everyone is, so on the off chance someone does get grib+burst (when the burst didn't target them and they were out of range for the decurse which is rare) I just travel form towards them and handle it.
We also make everyone have purification pots just in case, but we've only needed to use one once. We tell people who are far away to run towards the middle should they get cursed to fix most range issues.

So, as you can see I have a lot of things going for me that a typical mage doesn't, including the fact that I'm in the middle in melee range with range on everyone (usually the opposite side of the melee to avoid getting bursts myself). I'm a little hesitant to solely rely on just myself to decurse, but I definitely think 3 mages on top of that is a total waste. I'll probably try just one next week.

I think you got lucky having only 1 decurser - that and your dps must be a lot closer in to the boss than our setup.
A lot of our ranged dps stands close to max dps range because it creates a lot more room for stepping away from doomfires. A quarter arc around the circle away from doomfire at 40 yards out is a very big distance. The same arc close in is too close.
That said, for us the sweet spot is more based on the fact that we have 4 raiding mages, and 3 raiding resto druids. So having an abundance of decursing isn't really a sacrifice - we're simply taking some dps and healers - and they happen to be able to decurse too.



I'm not sure we use a conventional 180 or 360 strat at all. We divide our raid into 3 - melee, and 2 ranged camps. The ranged camps are dps/heals/decursing together - usually a little under ~2 groups each.
They rotate independently around the boss like the hands of a clock in order to position away from the doomfire.
Perhaps this is what is understood by the 360 strat.


I have to say - while tons of shamans aren't necessary for a kill, more shamans means a lot more dps time on the boss. It's not surprising that the top 50 dps parses for archimonde have 3-4 shamans or more. A FW shaman in the melee group means your rogues get pretty close to 100% dps time on the boss, for example.



I did have one question about doomfires. Do folk actually still 'train' the doomfires? I hear a lot of folk talking about it, but we found it to be incredibly unreliable. We were able to 'control' maybe 20% of the doomfires. And the trainers were usually getting well out of position and gripped/dotted/airbursted really badly. The turning point for us was telling folk to *not* train the doomfires. Simply sidestep them and then get the hell away in preparation for the fear. This kept everyone comfortably in range of their decurser/healer while still being in range of the boss for better dps uptime.
Sometimes this causes insane lakes of fire on one side of the boss, but with a dynamic re-positioning strategy we simply put the entire raid on the other side of the boss whenever that happens.

We downed him yesterday evening after approximately 50 attempts. I would like to thank this forum and all posters who contributed to this thread. Your experiences helped us a lot.
For statistic purposes, we used 3 shamans and 5 decursers, 9 healers in total.

grip has a 60 yard range but does fear have any sort of range to avoid it?

I am sure there is a range on fear but for practical purposes I would say it is infinite.

I on the other hand, have been and I was definitely more than 99 yards away.

There is a range restriction. If you tank him a bit towards the mountain where you walk along from where he starts and then run through him to the mountain area behind him, you'll no longer get feared. I don't know how far that is. Could be 100 could be more. But there is definitly a range restriction. I noticed that during our firstkill where I had to run away often due to not having a fear breaker Shaman in my group.

The range is huge but not infinite.

We've had people feared in mid-air before. It is extremely rare but it can happen. Just another issue of overlapping timers that aren't really well tested. I think this has happened maybe twice ever? Unless others in our guild haven't mentioned it.

Poor choice of words, I didn't mean to say that I've never been feared after an airburst, I meant to say that occasionally I am out of range after the air burst.

Yeah, I understood you correctly - I was just pointing out that I have been feared further than 99 yards away.

Our guild finally killed him last night, and I can't tell you the relief it gave me. I won't even tell you the number of attempts we put in.

The fight is maddening. The previous night to the killshot, it finally looked like we got the "concept" of the fight down. However, almost every single time we would wipe to something that simply cannot be called user error. Airburst + grip, Airburst into a doomfire (somewhat controllable with tear timing), Priests Spirit of Redemption causing double soul charge, double grip (we had someone get grip back to back, ridiculous). It was everything I could do to keep my guild motivated to do this. We'd be perfect up until ~35%, then it'd hit the fan.

I know my guild is good enough to kill him weekly, but I feel like our killshot was a "stars aligned" kind of kill. No grip + airburst, doomfires that appeared to be spread out and manageable. Tank healing smooth. It was a perfect kill, no deaths at all, but it felt like everything had to align for that to happen. Bad fight design, imo. Hopefully 2.2 will change things.

Our group makeup was stacked for learning. 2 shamans; resto and enh (a good enh shaman can be amazing in this fight. Tremor totem near the tank and melee gives a healer a real good shot at keeping up the tank during fears without using any cooldowns.) Druid tank, because we have fear ward. Our druid tank took significantly less damage than our warrior tank did. We had, I believe 5 decursers. 4 resto druids and a mage (we respecced some of our other feral tanks, we love druids in our guild.) Decursing was not a problem, but for those who it is, we had a rule that if you got curse, you had to run towards archi, as he was the common point amongst decursers. We'd start the fight with raid icons over heads, but those got erased as they got airbursted. Also, we found that starting in a semicircle worked well, but ending in a large cluster that was equidistant from the two closest doomfires was most effective. Positioning was completely dictated by fire positioning.

Overall, I'm proud of my guild, but I do feel the death is 1-2 days overdue just due to poor luck.

How in the world is 2 shamans "stacked"? We bring 5 shamans to Archimonde pretty much every week. 4 if we must. A couple of times we even brought 6.

This is a bounding box issue. The fear's range is calculated from the center of Archimonde (who is naturally huge) while your hit range is calculated from your character to the edge of Archimonde's hit box. There's a few yards lost from the center to the edge of his model, which is why you can use a 100 yard range ability on him and not be hit by a 99 yard ability. You are almost certainly running 99 yards away from the center of Archimonde's model.

Wow. How often are people doomfired with that setup?

We learned/killed him with 1-2 shaman, and the incoming damage to the raid is pretty intense. We typically have somewhere between 60 and 70 doomfires hit people over the course of the fight, with no less than 4 people usually running around with the dot.

For our first Arch kill we had 5 shaman and me running around like a crazy person fear warding as many as I could between each fear (The magic number is 2). For our second kill I think we may have had 3, possibly 2. For us it didn't seem to make a big difference, though we likely bring more healers than most guilds for the fight. If I recall we had 9 healers plus me healing as shadow because I didn't want to bother dpsing while going in and out of shadowform every 25 seconds. For both kills we've survived 2-3 Soul Charges, though those stun charges right when you get feared towards fire are fairly terrifying.

Sadly a nonzero number. To be fair, we bring ~4 shamans to just about everything (we have 1 enhancement, 1 elemental, and 4 resto on our roster who are all very high attendance).