I think you missed a key part here. The druid who stands with the melee must get some sort of fear protection or a strategy to deal with fear - and he doesnt necessarily need to be in the melee group to achieve that. If they arent in the melee group, someone IN the melee group can dispel them when fear comes. We use a ret pally to do this, but you could put a holy pally in the group for same effect. Refer to posts on the previous pages for more detailed explanation of this. The sequences of events is this:
Fear wards on melee shaman -> fear -> ret/holy pally gets tremor totem dispel -> ret/holy pally dispells druid. This all happens within 1-2 seconds, before your druid is in any danger. It might sound complicated but its all very easy and happens fast, providing your shaman/paladin know what they're doing.
I think this would be the critical issue for my guild here, we initially had a restore druid in the melee group for decurse and MT healing duty but he kept dying from doomfire. (We did not fw him or fw the enhance shammy who died alot also in his group)
So we end up trying to put healers in between the 4 points but they mostly got chased by doomfire/unlucky airburst combos and as a result too many healers got cut off and MT died very often.
I think we might revert back to the original 4point strat posted way back in this thread on page 30 with 2healers per group and maybe 1-2more in melee group WITH fear protection full time. With this setup, even with 2groups being chased by doomfire and 1 getting airbursted, there is still another group with and the melee group within range totalling up to 3-4 healers being able to get on the MT immediately.
Coupled with the MT healers using vent more actively to communicate as mentioned by Joy and having the entire raid take minimal damage from proper doomfire control, I think the chances of success will be increased. Thx for the various advices given. Cheers.
I really don't get why you love melee so much on this boss. They are indeed less vulnerable than ranged to doomfires, but will very often get air bursted. The rogues have useful timers but they might want to save them for a worst case scenario, instead of using them to gain mobility.
If I look at my Archimonde kill yesterday, I end up first on damage as well as on dispel. Much like every week. If I had an advise to give about the lineup, it would be to stack chamans and mages as much as possible. A good mage just can't die here, he provides decursing and will have a dps activity much higher than other classes who have no other way of coping with the air burst than just running, and hoping not to be prevented from getting back by a doomfire.
Anyway, this is a quite fun event, it just requires a lot of attention, but I'd say it's still less difficult than Illidari Council. Just remember that the more you dps, the less you will face stupid deaths.
A little trick we have found invaluable for preventing wipes on Archimonde - Flask of Petrification.
If all else fails, if a Doomfire or a Grip is ticking on you and there is no way you are going to be able to save yourself (pot/HS or other 'oh-shit' abilities are on cooldown or out of range of healers/decursers or whatever) hit this.
It will take you out of the game for 1 minute and remove all buffs but if the choice is between living and dying then this works. Cheaper than wiping your raid too
Brilliant
Can you still be targeted by airburst while petrified?
I really don't get why you love melee so much on this boss. They are indeed less vulnerable than ranged to doomfires, but will very often get air bursted. The rogues have useful timers but they might want to save them for a worst case scenario, instead of using them to gain mobility.
DPS warrior can have almost 100% dps uptime on Archimonde and I regularly top damage done in this fight by a significant margin.
Fear? Zerker rage.
Airburst? Intercept.
Pure sword to legs action for a warrior. That's why they're good on this fight.
Yeah well ok, I thought mostly of rogues, and also shamans/druids ;p But yes you got a point about the fury warrior, it's just not so easy to stack, I believe most guilds have one, maybe two ;p They're still taking more damage from the fire if they fuck up, and have no survival timer to use in this case, making them more fragile than rogues. Every melee class has its strength and weaknesses on Archimonde, but I still highly doubt they own so much (or maybe consider changing your mages).
Yeah well ok, I thought mostly of rogues, and also shamans/druids ;p But yes you got a point about the fury warrior, it's just not so easy to stack, I believe most guilds have one, maybe two ;p They're still taking more damage from the fire if they fuck up, and have no survival timer to use in this case, making them more fragile than rogues. Every melee class has its strength and weaknesses on Archimonde, but I still highly doubt they own so much (or maybe consider changing your mages).
Warriors have defensive stance and high HP pools to start with to survive doomfire. It doesn't hit melee unless it loops completely around anyways, and you'll be in range of nearly every healer.
Intercept assures near 100% dps uptime on the boss (it does bug/resist sometimes though, meaning you have to run back).
Our kills have always been 2 rogues at the top, followed by me (arms for the first kill, tanked the 2nd kill, prot dps for 3rd kill).
Still, I wouldn't suggest more than 4-5 melee dps, simply because you'd get more air bursts on them, even when spread into 2 groups.
Highest dps? Your most skilled player, but if you use a strat like ours where the range's first priority is to avoid doomfire and decurse, some type of melee.
I really don't get why you love melee so much on this boss. They are indeed less vulnerable than ranged to doomfires, but will very often get air bursted. The rogues have useful timers but they might want to save them for a worst case scenario, instead of using them to gain mobility.
If I look at my Archimonde kill yesterday, I end up first on damage as well as on dispel. Much like every week. If I had an advise to give about the lineup, it would be to stack chamans and mages as much as possible. A good mage just can't die here, he provides decursing and will have a dps activity much higher than other classes who have no other way of coping with the air burst than just running, and hoping not to be prevented from getting back by a doomfire.
I dont love melee persay - we only have 1 melee group. But there is a massive disparity in the damage the 5 melee put out compared to anyone else. I am very suprised that a Mage would be able to be competitive, let alone, topping damage when the main priority is decursing but I will take your word for it.
He would have to be using a 'spread out all around Arch, dodge doomfires' strat to be that high on dps. Either that or his melee are terrible. The results sound impressive, but they come with a cost you didnt mention - its risky for range to try do that much dps - especially for players new to the fight or who haven't been farming Archimonde. Guilds that are learning the fight probably shouldnt try to copy you.
I dont think theres any need for range to dps much. Our melee (3 rogues, shaman, ret pally, fury warrior) account for ~60% of total damage to archimonde on a typical fight, theres just no need for anyone else to take any risks to push some extra dps - he'll still die well before the enrage. But again, if your guild is advanced and players know the fight in and out - people can afford to try new things like that
To repeat a comment earlier: Our mages (and other ranged dps arent much higher) usually do ~300-600 dps on archimonde and sometimes will do less damage than the protection warrior mt'ing him. Perfect! As long as they stay alive and decurse the whole time - they did their job. Archimonde will still die in 7-8 minutes regardless.
Melee dps the boss -> Range dance around Archimonde -> 6-10 minutes later, he falls over and dies.
Yeah well ok, I thought mostly of rogues, and also shamans/druids ;p But yes you got a point about the fury warrior, it's just not so easy to stack, I believe most guilds have one, maybe two ;p They're still taking more damage from the fire if they fuck up, and have no survival timer to use in this case, making them more fragile than rogues. Every melee class has its strength and weaknesses on Archimonde, but I still highly doubt they own so much (or maybe consider changing your mages).
Or maybe you should consider changing your melees ? ^^
95% of the players here confirm the fact that melees kill Archimonde, you are probably the exception that confirms the rule.
We often bring 1 group of melees for Archimonde, 2 rogues, 2 warrs and 1 enhancement shammy, all in the same group. They do around 60% of the damage if not more, all over 1k dps, sometimes reaching 1.3k+. Tremor totem pretty much annihilates the fear for rogues, CloS allow rogues to get rid of doomfire, and warriors take it very rarely. Only the shaman may require a bit more healing (especially if he lands grounding instead of tremor as our did last night ).
As for the fact they'll get air bursted more, air burst being random and having a casting time allowing players to spread a bit before it lands, I don't see why it would be the case. And even if air burst, sprint or intercept back.
As for mages being top dps, that means you use a very risky strat, unless you take 5+ mages. Dispells should be done by mages primary, as druids are quite busy healing and hotting what they can - and there is no way a mage can be top dps using so many GCD on decursing unless other dps classes don't do their job properly (I don't think a mage can beat a good affliction warlock as well for example)
As for mages being top dps, that means you use a very risky strat, unless you take 5+ mages
Agree with your sentiment. Either that guilds melee are terrible, or the so called top-dps mages are taking alot of risks. Or maybe that player finds a sweet secluded spot where he can dps for 10 minutes straight and never got Airbusted or have to move from a doomfire. Thats like Void reaver - its not very useful information - of course players who dont have to move much (when everyone does it constatly) perform relatively well on dps. Ironically though, I find it much more enjoyable playing archimonde on my mage as someone who just runs around decursing and watching doomfires - its the first real fight where dps doesnt matter, why not enjoy it?
But alot of new guilds come to this thread asking 'Whats the best way to learn/attempt archimonde?' or "How to we make our strat as safe/retard-proof as possible' and they need to take comments like that with a grain of salt.
It ist our 3rd week now, and the best try was 17% in the first week, we didnt get pass 50% in the second and now 11% last week. Its a really anoying fight, we didnt use a 4-point strategy, more a random spread-out of people, with 4 mt
healers(mostly 2 paladin/2 priests) behind the mt and 5 raidhealers, while everyone will spread in a semi-circle behind him. We had in the first trys only 3 decursers(1 Druid/2 Mages) but now we have 3 Mages/1 Druid all the time. We got about 3-4 shamans(1 enhancer/1 elemental/2 restoration). The rest of the raid setup is mostly 3-4 warlocks/1-2 hunters/4 melees.
We have only the mt healers fearwarded(works fine, we have mostly 2 holy priests/3 shadows) and with the pvp insignia we dont really have problems with the fear. I`m the mt and stance dance ist not a problem. Our main problem is the doomfire and the fact that mt healers have to run at a point to avoid df. Thats why in these <20% trys the mt mostly dies. Our tank position is about 40 yards from the mountain(buff spot). Im thinking to try out the 4-point strategy, but i dont know how much will that take until we are at this point what we reached now. In the description the 4-p strategy is very nice to read but im not so sure if that will work so fine for us.
Another problem is, the trys we make are very unrealiable: 1 try= 40%, then 5-6 trys with 90/80/90 and so on. I really don't want to get the kill in a "lucky try" and every weak afterwards to hope again. So do you have any ideas that would help us, or should we just try the 4-p strategy?
3p strategy, 4p strategy or cone strategy.. It all comes down to the same things: Quick and stable healing, fast decurse, no stupid airburst deaths and correct handling of fires and fears.
Quick and stable healing?
- Make sure that enough healers at any time can reach the tank which usually means make sure noone is stupid enough to drag a doomfire all around the place effectivly blocking healers. Also hots (gogo restodruids here) are awesome.
Fast decurse?
- Good positioning by mages is key to that, if more than 1 group can decurse their own group AND reach the melee/tanks it's very good.
Airbursts?
- Use tear sooner than later..
Doomfires?
- Lead them away from raid and be adaptive in where you stand, you can shift the position of a group based on doomfire so as it can still dps boss and heal mt.
Fears?
- Trinket/WOTF/Totem/Fearward. With all those things you shouldn't really have much problems with fears. The easiest way is of course to have a shaman in each group that is lightning quick and have ace timing on putting down the totem so it pulses with the fear-cast, fearward can save the tank. Always make sure to top of tank before fear aswell.
We never tried the 4p strategy, I think (as I did in my first post on this thread) that every raid will eventually come up with a strategy that works, regarding the lineup, the individuals strengths and weaknesses and the personnality of the raid leader.
Basically, we raid Archimonde with 4 mages when we can, 3 if we can't. 1 resto druid, rarely 2 (mainly because we only have one very active, having 2 druids would definately help on him), all the decursers are wisely spread and marked with a raid icon, so that we never lose time running after people, especially (and I want to stress on this point) with the new 40 yards decurse range, which helps a lot. Groups try to stay together, around the totem (when there's a totem), and don't hesitate to move if the position has too much fire on it.
What about melees then ? Well, they do not indeed try to spread and avoid the air burst, because doing so might endanger the MT if someone fucks up (and it happens, if noone ever fucks up Archimonde would be easier than Rage ), or on the other hand might run into a fire behind, which is also not suitable. So yes their dps is limited by their uptime, whereas mages basically only lose some GCDs decursing and blinking through fires. On the last kill, I ended up first on dispels with a total of 10, I believe the fight lasted around 6 minutes, the second was the druid with 9, and a mage with 8. It's not THAT much, 10 GCDs are worth 15 seconds of casting, and the time lost by people running back after an air burst is much more than that (even for a fury warrior I think).
Affli locks should do great also, it's just that when we don't have 5 chamans, they are in the MT groups, first for imping him, second because they are much less vulnerable to fire than other classes, being healed more efficientely and being able to drain life while waiting for some healing.
To the one who said your mages do 300-600 dps, well that seems very low to me, it's important to survive, but my credo is that the more you dps, the less it lasts, and my experience as a raid leader is that something will _always_ happen, sooner or later. If you dps a lot, that eliminates the later. Last time I killed it, Assessment told me around 1000 dps, which is still quite low for a mage, but there's not much reasons to do less, of course except if you're being really unlucky with fires.
When a friend trying this boss asks me for advice, there are just few basic things I can tell : focus on survival, adapt the strategy and positions to your very particular raid, and try to shorten the fight as much as possible, as long as you're not jeopardizing your survival.
Besides Vonwen, there is a high difference between dps and damage done, as some mods calculate the dps according to your activity. So you can have 1k dps, if you spend half of the fight running around decursing and avoiding doomfire, you'll have less damage done than the warrior with 800 dps who has 90% dps uptime. All our mages are around 1k dps on Archimonde, but with perhaps half the damage done by melees, who have 90+% dps uptime. (I'm sorry, but melee have higher dps uptime on this boss than ranged if both play well - mages have to stand still to dps, and they'll HAVE to move to avoid doomfire or to go decursing the guy who got air burst or whatever, whereas the melees can just keep dpsing moving around Archimonde to avoid doomfires).
Of course, if you don't give totems to your melees, nothing I can do about that =)
Yep yep I know how the mods work :p Well I guess each raid has its particularities ;p Our melee group is usually rogue*3 + enhance chaman + feral. If we have enough totems, we switch the feral with a fury warrior (or we just add him if we only have 2 rogues). But mages being able to output some good dps isn't the main reason why you want some, it's basically because decurse (win) + blink (more win) + maybe frost (super win although less dps). They just own the survivability contest within the ranged dps if they are not too dumb, and allow your druids to focus on the healing. Well at least if works for us
Whew, so basically 3 days on this guy so far...and it keeps getting more frustrating. We've been working with a 4 point strat. The first hour or so of each night is people remembering what they are doing. Few deaths to craters, few deaths to doomfire, few deaths to curses. Then we get that out of the way. Then for the next few hours we die to a couple of different things. The worst thing we are dealing with is MT death. At some point during the fight, 2 groups are out with fire, one group got airbursted and the last group just cant hold the MT up. Usually the first time this happens he uses his tricks to stay alive,t hen it happens again at some point and he dies.
It seems like if we got luckky he might die, but itd be purely up to chance. Using a 3 point strat only seems to aggravate this too many people being out of the fight issue. So, my only other option is to try a cone strat, and I havnt been able to find too much information on it. I've looked around for vids, and most i find for cone strat seem to be before the doomfire change. Are peopel still using cone strat still? Below I'll list my few fears and some questions I have about it.
Do people dodge doomfire or run out? It seems that straight up dodging doomfire is easy for some and hard for others, if its coming near you do you just run away like 4 points? Or try to swerve sideways a bit and dodge it? My other possible solution is that everyone in that area runs back until you figure out who its targetting, and then that person keeps running back.
In the case of that person running back, how do you handle decurse for him? Does it become an issue to the point that a mage runs back with him? Or is it really not so bad?
Is it safer to have the MT's back to the group, or have him on the opposite side? Bosskillers screams that you must have the MT face the boss away from the raid....but I cant find a logical reason for that, and it seems if the melee is opposite the rest of the raid, that theyd get doomfire trailed to them less often.
Positioning. If we have him near the mountain, does the mountain kill doomfires? If we place him near the lake(not close enough for him to get angry and nuke the raid obviously), do people use it to get doomfire off them? Is that a useful strat at all for people to run and take a swim? Are they easily healable there?
I think thats everything, long boring day at work today with not much to do, so I'll be trying to think of any other questions I have.
Whew, so basically 3 days on this guy so far...and it keeps getting more frustrating. We've been working with a 4 point strat. The first hour or so of each night is people remembering what they are doing. Few deaths to craters, few deaths to doomfire, few deaths to curses. Then we get that out of the way. Then for the next few hours we die to a couple of different things. The worst thing we are dealing with is MT death. At some point during the fight, 2 groups are out with fire, one group got airbursted and the last group just cant hold the MT up. Usually the first time this happens he uses his tricks to stay alive,t hen it happens again at some point and he dies.
Link the tank's armory and/or WWS report of some attempts. If he has scarab and Moroe's, I'd recommend using them. Scarab is on a 3 min cooldown and Moroe's is pretty much a 2 min cooldown shield wall. I'll comment more after I see his armory link.
This is the second half of the 2nd night. None of our usual WWS'ers were there last night.
MT is in full t5 sans hat, which he replaced with the chicken hat out of ZA. He's using ZA boots, Kaz' sheild, and autoblocker and moroe's for trinkets, he logged out after switching to pvp, so his armory wouldnt be too helpful.
Edit: MT is usually incredibly good at surviving, but we are getting stuck with fire groups out for pretty extended periods of time, and an airbursted team is out for at least 10 seconds while running back.
Yep yep I know how the mods work :p Well I guess each raid has its particularities ;p Our melee group is usually rogue*3 + enhance chaman + feral. If we have enough totems, we switch the feral with a fury warrior (or we just add him if we only have 2 rogues). But mages being able to output some good dps isn't the main reason why you want some, it's basically because decurse (win) + blink (more win) + maybe frost (super win although less dps). They just own the survivability contest within the ranged dps if they are not too dumb, are allow your druids to focus on the healing. Well at least if works for us
Oh, I don't argue on the fact that mages are one of the best classes to take for Archimonde (on paar with druids, and ofc around 10 000 miles behind shamans, we did it once with 2 shammies - never again), I just highly doubt that mages can be top damage done on Archimonde on a regular basis (ie. in more than a few guilds and more than once)
About the MT dying problem, are you sure druids and priests do whatever they can to keep hots ticking on the main tank, especially before a fear ?
I usually tell paladins to focus on the main tank, shamans to heal the melees and their groups, and druids and priests to heal their groups + hotting the MT. In this fight, because players have to move a lot, they also must be very flexible in their tasks : every healer is at some point a tank healer or a group healer, and each healer should always keep an eye on the MT (the use of /focus is very useful).
We use a 4 points strategy for the initial minute, after that doomfires usually break our setup and each group lives his own "life" around his decurser, with some interactions with groups in range of heals & decursers.
Tell your MT to not to be shy on cooldowns, he has a lot and some are usable more than once. Shit will happen, especially during your first kills, and he'll have to live a few seconds on his own (be it someone dying, a whole group feared in doomfire, etc). Communication between the healers and the MT is very important so the tank can be prepared .
What is wrong with your dps warrior? Why is a dps warrior eating 16 doomfires over the night when there are 11 attempts and hes in a shaman group and also able to break his own fear? Yes I know people kill themself on doomfires in a wipe, but you dont get to chance do that every wipe - and when you have more doomfires on you than attempts in total - something strange is going on.
One mage has done double the decursing of the others. Did your mages work out a 'you decurse and ill concentrate on dps' rotation because the highest decursing mage does almost 0 damage for the night. Just curious why they chose to do this? Did you assign that mage to look after melee - because if your spread evenly around the boss (you said your using 4 pt strat) the decursing should be fairly even as well - certainly not one player having double the others. If your having decurse deaths - is it because the other mages are assuming this mage will do all the work for them? (and maybe hes airbusted at the time and couldnt etc)
That night melee was getting doomfired a lot probably once an attempt or so, at least. People were really bad at letting melee know it was creeping up on them. I was in melee healing us all with tremor. I made it a point to focus on the next night and it was better. Of all the melee, our warrior does suck the most at avoiding doomfires.
Ultimaas is a decursing god. And often our highest dps mage, all mages are supposed to assist on melee and they say ultimaas is just faster and always beat them to it. He is incredibly fast, but I have talked to them about the issue, he isnt assigned to not dps, but he appears to be better at listening, i.e. decursing is always more important then dpsing.
This is the second half of the 2nd night. None of our usual WWS'ers were there last night.
MT is in full t5 sans hat, which he replaced with the chicken hat out of ZA. He's using ZA boots, Kaz' sheild, and autoblocker and moroe's for trinkets, he logged out after switching to pvp, so his armory wouldnt be too helpful.
Edit: MT is usually incredibly good at surviving, but we are getting stuck with fire groups out for pretty extended periods of time, and an airbursted team is out for at least 10 seconds while running back.
There are a lot of things you could do to improve your tank's mitigation.
- Avoidance wins on Archimonde, assuming you can keep 20k hp or more. If you look at the report I linked above, it shows me having avoided 72.7% of Archimonde's attacks, while Athen avoided 56% in that last pull. He took less damage per hit but I'm assuming that's because of lack of curse of recklessness on Archimonde. I'd get rid of the autobuckler for another avoidance trinket too.
- Shaman in the tank group, we usually have the tank/elemental shaman/3 healers in one group until we outgeared the fight. Grace of Air is a good bit of dodge, tremor to break fears on healers, and a resto druid here allows more healing on the tank.
- Ancestral Fortitude uptime. There's enough downtime for healer shamans that they can proc it on the tank using rank 1 LHW, 25% armor is huge.
- Cooldowns. Assuming scarab/moroe's, you'll be able to pop one cooldown every fear for 7 fears in a row. Usually you'll dodge/parry enough hits that you don't need cooldowns, but having scarab (3min cd) moroes (2min cd) last stand (8min cd) shield wall (30min cd) means you should have enough cooldowns to survive bad fears and bad airbursts.
Hmm...I'm really not sure how to get 4 healers and the tank in range of tremor totem. Especially moving in and out, unless they all hid in melee. How do you work that ?
Our healer shaman(xmas month has us down to one atm) rarely has any downtime. And if hes running out to avoid doomfire, ancestral is going to completely fall off. Although I imagine with him and 2 priests, its up fairly often just from normal spells.
I tried to make it clear that are issue wasnt him surviving through fears, but rather surviving through 2 groups out for doomfire and 1 group airbursted, leaving only 1-2 healers on him for a good chunck of time. Often if this synched witih fear, he'd blow CD's but it was already GG because of his lack of previous heals.
I dont mean to sound unnapreciative with that last bit, just wasn't really the issue we were having. Just seemed that there was a high chance for many healers to be out of range a fair portion of the time.
Edit: Perhaps however you work that shaman +3 healer group is the solution.
Why does the tank have tremor? He should be able to break his own fears. The melee group and 1 decurser/dispeller gets totems if we have 2 shaman, the decurser/dispeller gets a FW/trinket rotation in the middle if we only have 1 shaman. Since the fear is cleansable, just have 1-2 cleansers and have them in the totem group, they can cleanse it from others if it's an issue.
12/19/07, 12:52 AM
).
), or on the other hand might run into a fire behind, which is also not suitable. So yes their dps is limited by their uptime, whereas mages basically only lose some GCDs decursing and blinking through fires. On the last kill, I ended up first on dispels with a total of 10, I believe the fight lasted around 6 minutes, the second was the druid with 9, and a mage with 8. It's not THAT much, 10 GCDs are worth 15 seconds of casting, and the time lost by people running back after an air burst is much more than that (even for a fury warrior I think).
