I could live with Soul Charge being homogenized into one abliity. The different-charges-for-different-classes thing would be a cool idea if there was some kind of prioritizing or active decision-making on the part of the raid. As it is, there's little rhyme or reason to who dies besides some general rules of thumb like "healers can survive better" and "more HP is good." So why should one debuff in particular (the silence one) be so much worse? Soul Charge does a good job at punishing sloppiness...its damage on face won't kill anyone, but it has a huge de-stabilizing effect and tends to snowball into more deaths. It doesn't preclude killing him, just exacts a steep price for mistakes. That's not necessarily bad...but you are FAR more likely to wipe if you get the Silence debuff, and seeing as his abilities are mostly RSTS I don't see the point of splitting it up by class.

Really good thread overall. We've killed him twice now, but not this reset with the Doomfire fix. First kill we worked on him heavily one night, then the next we two-shotted. Second kill was after a fair amount of time wiping to the random stuff.

Last night we walk in and one shot Reliquary with new people in the raid, and then wipe all night to Archimonde. Granted there are a few people who are less than ideal on mobility fights that we have, one of them being a holy priest. (Had no idea about the double soul charge with SoR... Which makes sense as to why their deaths always seemed so god damn painful).

Honestly, until Illidan is totally on farm, I'm starting to debate if it's worth rolling the dice with this guy until everything else in BT/Hyjal, and maybe even TK/SSC is dead.

A lot of people initally reported the Doomfires not being all that bad, killing him after a couple of hours, etc. But, after reading this thread, I really seem to think it's not just us being worthless idiots constantly. This thread almost feels like I'm getting some sort of therapy from a group session at a clinic :P

Praetorian's idea seems to be the ideal solution. I love the fight and all the abilities, I just wish people wouldn't get the condemning combinations of them.

I have to completely agree with pudgeball. We wiped on him for 5 hours yesterday and our best attempt was around 73%. This totally feels like therapy now.

Let's not go nuts with the "luck-based, hard to farm" thing. The fight has a lot of random elements and a lot of things that can go wrong, but at its core there's only one raid objective: survival. If 25 people stay alive for 6-8 minutes, Archimonde dies. You CAN absorb a death or two as long as they're isolated and don't cause any more deaths. If your raid wipes for hours on end trying to bring him down, you should probably re-emphasize the importance of survival.

We've had two people fall through the world tonight on this when their fear breaks. No obstructions, open field. Very annoying to add to all the other BS.

This fight is so screwed up right now even more than it was prior to the patch. Oh and Cladnin, if you're running with people who are retarded, its 100 times worse, I'm sure. But even with people who are 100% on the ball all the time, the fight is still broken to shit and random as hell because of grip, fear, fire, bursts, all at once. Believe me, its happened several times. They just need to re-balance or change the mechanics of this encounter. It was obviously rushed out the door.

Fear + Fire + Curse + Punt + Falling through the world.

This fight wins the internet.

It was FINE last week, they f'd the goat with this patch. Hard.

I've heard multiple people say you actually don't have to do the 10% and he will still die. Any one else confirm or deny this?

This is my most hated fight of Tier 6 so far.

The 1 second fear as the tank is frustrating, since I have to go into low-aggro mode when the timer is up. Sometimes he delays his fear significantly (as long as 1.5 minutes, once) and I'm forced to chill in low aggro mode waiting for that fear to happen (although you can throw in a shield slam/revenge when he does an airbust).

The fears/tremor make it feel like Viscidus or 4H in that you're aiming for a very specific comp which you may or may not hit very often, depending on your guild (5 shaman for us would be 100% shaman attendance). We started tonight with 5 shaman and were making very good progress on the encounter for our first night. Once we went down to 4, and eventually 3 shaman, we got worse and worse. At the end we were trying to stack our 2 non-shaman groups with BM hunters and multiple dispellers who can alternate off using trinket+dispels. Even with that, it felt like a losing battle.

Air burst is actually the easiest part of the fight and I think people in general have no problems with this. We have had a few issues with peoples Tears disappearing, even though they didn't zone out, and when no one elses had disappeared. "Uhh.. oh shit.. oh shit.. fffff - my item is gone dude!". We did lose a couple people who got airbursted to the well, then feared down to the bottom and cursed while feared. Pretty much instant death there.

I can't imagine the fight with a decent amount of shaman. We tried it one night before the doomfire change, only for a few attempts, and we've spent *a lot* of time on it now. One night with a single shaman. A long Saturday with 2 shaman, and then tonight with 2 shaman. A lot of things we can work on, but the fight is so grueling to be honest. Sometimes we get 2-3 attempts in in a 10 minute span, other times we have solid dice rolls + better play and communication and do very well. It's a fight that feels a lot like Thaddius on original hardware to us, kinda. Either way, I both hate and enjoy the fight, but feel soul charge is a bit steep in that it almost ensures another death, and so on. If old doomfire was "easy mod", I can't imagine this boss being quite as bad as it is now. Our best is a few 40% attempts, but nothing to seal the deal this week. While a death simply doesn't mean a wipe, it sure attributes to it a great deal, and often will cause the death.

100% Shaman attendance for us means 3 Shaman.

When someone gets rezzed in the instance, the Tear poofs. So basically just have everyone run back every time.

I detest this fight. We only got to him this reset so we've never seen the old Archimonde. The last 2 days have been amazingly demoralizing. We've made decent progress in Hyjal/BT up till now and this fight just hit us like a brick wall. I'm glad this thread is here so we can at least see that we're not the only guild having issues with this encounter. For now I hope we direct our efforts to BT as I don't think our time is being spent very productively slamming our heads against this fight.

We finally got him again - 11% berserk wipe (people were screaming in pain like you can't imagine; it was amazing), and a 10% clean kill. The number of times I got instagibbed tonight was just shocking - lots of parries, fears followed by a 4-5 seconds to get 20k damage. The 4-5 second kills are definitely controllable, especially through hots, but many of the gibs simply were not. A parry during a fear is really brutal.

You get exceptionally good at this fight after 50 pulls - but the random factors will still determine if you're going to win. Winning makes me feel better about it, but I still stand firmly by the changes needed a few pages back that I posted. Yech.

BTW, die in doomfires - no durability (already stated, in case anyone missed).

The fact that he drops 151 loot makes it painful to consider letting his loot rot, but then again it's equally painful to wipe to him 151 times (exaggeration, yes) while BT is still open.

When we got Archimonde down the week before the patch, I predicted that next week we'd have a hell of a time getting him down again. Sometimes I hate being right.

We did get him down, but only because of quick ad-libbing and good luck on the part of some of our raiders, such as a fury war getting burst into a fire and switching to def. stance and shield walling just as fear hit, rogues sprinting through doomfire to jump into the well, and our MT getting into a parrying contest with Archimonde (no less than 5 consecutive parries from both parties involved). So much dependance on CDs being up and pure dumb luck it isn't even remotely amusing. :P

Definitely NOT looking forward to going through all of this again next week.

If this fight had trash (waves or respawns) or a lengthy c'thun-esque CR, I would probably have canceled my account tonight. Most of our wipes are still due to player error, but the occasional impossible to prevent death-wipe just makes me lose faith in the developers, I mean seriously. There are a lot of excellent suggestions in this thread and i'm sure there are dozens of ways they could hotfix the encounter that would get rid of the random factor and still maintain the level of difficulty it currently has (which is just fine).

Also, thanks for the info about the disappearing tears. We had a couple wipes due to that and I couldn't understand why it happened.

I honestly don't see the huge amount of randomness that others seem too. I'd guess 90%+ of all wipes are because someone messed up, with the other 10% being bad luck. It's just on this fight that one mistake someone makes is much more fatal. One thing I can agree on is the punishment for death is abit harsh. The silence charge will almost garuntee a wipe, the other two you can deal with to a lesser extent, but still when one person does end up dieing its almost always a chain reaction. Soul Charge should not be removed though.

If people try to do the fight like pre-patch (standing behind him) then I can see why they would struggle, the amount of fire damage taken was huge when we tried that the first time after the patch. Spreading groups out around him was much easier, and alot less fire damage taken by the whole raid.

The only thing I would like to see changed is his fear to be more predictable, make it go off between every 35-40 secs and the aggro problem will be fixed.

We actually half jokingly half seriously told our MT to just not do anything during fears tonight after he got gibbed by parries far too many times during them.

Overall, with our first kill being tonight, I don't think the fight is too horrendous in terms of design. We had two deaths on our kill (Shaman and warrior), and were able to pull through, but at the same time, those two deaths were considerably spaced apart, and the shaman came early on so casters were more able to adapt to the sudden loss of 3000 mana.

The maddening things about the 'unavoidable' deaths (which we had quite a few of, and even more totally and easily avoidable deaths that people wanted to pin on unavoidability) is that they really aren't totally unavoidable, it's just the perfect reactions and snap decisions necessary to survive some of them are just too precise for most/all people to make on the fly. After someone died, we could of course look back and come up with the perfect course of action that would have saved them, but at the time it just wasn't gonna happen. I dunno, I love the fight to death, but there just seems to be something wrong with it, even if the 10% beat down felt oh so good.

They should let the Doomfire be a lot more controllable, but still have the potential to do significant raidwide damage. For example, say Archimonde turns toward a specific person and fires off that doomfire at them - there's no random retargetting or swirling, it's just at them.
That person's job then is to run the fire away from the raid so nobody takes damage. Fears into the fires could still happen, but I'd rather take someone getting feared through a doomfire someone ran out than someone getting feared through 3 rows.

I don't have problems with the Doomfire itself, honestly. If I could, I'd want every doomfire chasing me during the fight - once you get it down it's easy to control. You can run it where you want, you can cut away from it and let it run its course, and you can make it a non-issue. The problem is you don't know where it's going to spawn and people just don't pay attention. "Well, the doomfire wasn't going toward me so I didn't move, but then it turned around and targetted me so I ran it through the melee in a giant ring."

Yeah we spent the last two nights re-learning the encounter and probably wiped about 50 times before we finally got him tonight. The fight is pretty ridiculous right now and I'm sure it will see more tuning.

I had a death tonight in which I was Air Bursted and hit with a mid-air Grip. I healthstone mid-air, click my Tears, land and take zero fall damage, immediately start running towards a nearby druid who lands a cure on me but the server doesn't recognize it in time and 1 second later I take the fatal tick of damage from Grip. Ridiculous.

Anyway, I think the current version of the fight is all about avoiding Doomfire. You're going to wipe to ridiculous shit every once in a while, maybe even 50% of the time, so you have got to control the damage your raid is taking from Doomfire to give your raid a chance the other 50% of the time.

Doomfire causes the majority of deaths on this encounter. Wether it's from Doomfire + Air Burst, Doomfire + Grip, Doomfire + Fear, Doomfire + Air Burst + Grip + Fear or whatever. Doomfire is almost always involved. Infact the main reason Soul Charge is so devestating is because usually there are a bunch of people at half life from Doomfire.

Tonight my raid was just taking way too much damage from Doomfire. I kept stressing how important it was for people to prioritize avoiding it above all else, but it didn't sink in until our last attempt in which I channeled the motivational speaker within and went on a 10 minute curse word laced rant about Doomfire. On our next attempt the raid literally took 1/3 the amount of Doomfire damage that we had been averaging each attempt during the last two nights. Some people took as little as 1/5 of what they had been averaging.

So, that's my take on the current encounter. The goal of any raid leader should be to get your raid to understand how bad Doomfire is. Classes like warlocks and hunters just need to get the hell out of the way, because if they take too many Doomfires the raid is literally better off raiding with 1 less person. It's just as bad if healers get it too, because if a healer takes too many Doomfires they are literally in the raid to heal themselves. I don't care if a non-decurser/non-healer has to run 100 yards away and do nothing for 30 seconds just to avoid Doomfire. It is just not acceptable for them to get the debuff if they can avoid it in someway. If they were feared into it they were standing too close to it, simple as that.

Melee do the brunt of the damage on this encounter, and the one good thing about the Doomfire change is it usually isn't very hard for melee to avoid it, especially if your rogues are undead. The goal of all non-melee dps classes is to just not be a liability. Put your curse or hunters mark on the mob and then don't take damage. Deal as much damage as you can but do not risk taking damage at any point. Period.

That's also part of the luck factor in the fight I hate though.
2 11-12% wipes (berserk timer hit at 10 minutes, instant raid death) with perfect control but terrible doomfires and Air Bursts on melee, versus the 7 minute kill with 1-2 Air Bursts on melee and virtually no melee unfriendly doomfire.
I know that it's obviously not a big deal, but it definitely can add up.

I think this pretty sums up my feelings as well. The attempt right before our kill I had the most unimaginable thing happen to me. I got cursed, followed with an airburst, followed by landing in doomfire, followed by getting recursed after landing on the ground.

Needless to say I died and caused a wipe, after downing a potion/healthstone and getting a decurse before I was airbursted.. I really don't see what else could have been done to save me.

We just killed Archimonde after working on him for a night and a half - not terribly long in raid time in comparison to say, Kael'Thas, but probably the most sheer attempts of any boss so far, considering how fast run back is and lack of trash.

I have to say, some of the deaths that seem random are very preventable. Most of the raid should be topped throughout the fight, taking little damage. Definitely a fight where you want to put on as much health as possible to minimize luck.

The fight is ALL about controlling the Doomfires, awareness of the Doomfires, and avoidance of the Doomfires. Every time a Doomfire touches someone, it's like taking a healer out of the fight for 45 seconds. When you run out of healers, someone is going to die.

The Doomfire is pretty controllable, though - once you understand the basic ways it moves and seems to select targets. You can usually lead them away from the raid pretty successfully. You REALLY need to impress on people that it's much more important to lead their Doomfire away from the raid, taking themselves out of the fight for 30 seconds, than it is to let themselves get touched by it, taking a healer out of the fight effectively for 45 seconds.

There are random components in the fight, but it's really about controlling the chaos.

Purification Potions save lives.