After spending a few hours on Archi last night, I feel confident confirming that the bugs are fixed. Doomfire didn't suck any more than usual, and the only time the tank got Air Burst was when melee decided it would be smart to stand on top of him. He seems to be back in pre-patch form.

Not sure they fixed everything seeing as how our MT got directly targetted for an air burst. She was top threat so wasn't an agro pull thing.

We did kill him before the fix, but we had several occasions of bossmods announcing an air burst on the tank, but not a single time that really happened. Are you sure that air burst really happened? Not to suggest you're stupid, but I had the exact thing happening to me, swearing over that air burst and being told that it didn't really occur (in my defense, I had been chased by a doomfire up to stormwind, so I couldn't really see what was going on).

Oh, she got bursted. Watched as she went in air, then died. Nothing quite like watching our MT fly through the air and hit the ground like a wet noodle.

Our tank was targetted for airburst last night, even while being top threat by a good margin. However, nothing happened (he didn't go flying or anything) so I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

We haven't experienced the MT getting air-bursted directly, but have had several occasions during our early attempts/kills that the melee bursted the tank by being too close. We haven't had a wipe due to this so far - just be sure your MT has tears and knows how to click, and be sure your melee can pay enough attention to chase after Archi when he starts to move, and you should be fine barring anything super-nasty happening (some have reported people being feared while in the air due to air-burst and thus being unable to click tears.)

As long as the melee/tanks are positioned correctly before anything like this happens an as long as the melee are quick enough on their toes to stay close enough to not trigger death touches, it just requires the raid to reposition after the tank lands and gets back into the swing of things.

We two-shot him this week so I don't exactly have a lot of data to go on, but it seemed like Doomfires were back to their pre-2.4 behavior. They would only turn very gradually in either direction.

We 2-shot him this week as well, fight wasn't all too bad, and that was the fastest that we had killed him. The first pull doomfires seemed to go right through the melee, the second one was more manageable.

We one-shot him this week. Behavior seems totally normal. Melee didn't experience any fire targeting them, the tank didn't get airbursted, etc. We had a couple of deaths and soul charges did not act unusual (I remember reading on R+D that someone said they were being wonky). And thankfully there weren't any Air Burst + Fear combinations that I heard whispers about.

They may have changed Air Burst so that rogues cannot Vanish out of it. I tried doing it just then and the tank got airbursted instead of me.

The tank getting airburst has always been a slight possibility. We've probably seen 2-3 the past 6 months or so. He'll target someone for a curse at the same time as he airbursts, and theres a small chance, 1/25ish, that he'll target the tank then.

If you were close to the MT on threat while you were at range, and then got feared into within 5 yards of the boss, your threat will exceed the tank since you need to exceed tank threat by 30% at range to pull aggro, but only by 10% in melee to pull it.

I tanked our last archie kill, post fix. While DBM announced 3-4 times that i'll get airburst, nothing ever happened. I consider it as a bug on the addon, probably because of the hotfix.

I saw one airbust on the tank post doomfire patch, it came at around 50% and no one was within 30% threat of him, you can heal your tank through airbursts fairly easily, so I would call it working as intended.

We were doing a full night of Arch the other night,

The fire was outrageous, we have yet to down him, we have never had a crater, but there is just fire everywhere and screws alot of people.

Had our firstkill yesterday (5/5 MH yay). Thanks to the community here. This thread was a great help for our efforts.

@The "new" Archimonde: We had during our 36 tries no airburst on our tank. The range of the doomfire is imho the same as before the patch (where we had our first tries).
Overall i have the feeling it was either a "Onyxia deep breath's more" warning or it was all fixed within the hotfix, because we had no tries between the path and the hotfix.

We always use 1 healer with the melee as a MT healer. That way you should have atleast 2-3 healers in range at all times.

Have any warriors noticed that with these fixes intercept works reliably now? Pre-hotfix, post 2.4 when they originally increased his hitbox and added that stupid invisible wall on the mountain edge it screwed up intercept most of the time (every now and then you could time it perfectly but I rarely ever got it to work). Last night we tried him for the first time since 2.4.2 and intercept worked every time I got airbursted. So I assume that's fixed now as well.

Everything in the fight felt like it should from a melee point of view.

We only do Archimonde after the quick Hotfix and we have no porblems with Airbursted MT. We only have in our history once time the MT goes ut, and that was maybe 10-15 sec into the fight, most of the people was still on the mount (melees and far away team).

You really need 2-3 healers on the MT at all times, as you've noticed. So the healers should be given a bit of latitude as to doubling back; it's critical that the MT not die, and somewhat less critical that the healer in question not eat Doomfire (they can heal themselves if it comes down to it). Undead priests are the obvious example of this, as you can break nearly every fear with trinket/WotF/Fear Ward (it depends on when you pre-cast Fear Ward before the pull and how long Archimonde sits on a fear cooldown each time).

It's really up to you what you do with the rest of the corner groups. For learning the fight, I agree that "run away radially" is the safest way of avoiding them, but as you get better at the fight and get better at understanding Doomfire pathing you can actually double back fairly often, meaning that there are more healers in range of the MT and more DPS on Archimonde, meaning that the likelihood of someone dying to "I got Air Bursted into the tree with Grip of the Legion and I lagged and it was weird" and wiping you gets lower.

After a few wipes last night I decided to move the East and West groups further south, making the four point stratagey into the three. Gotta say it was a marked improvement, 15% wipe.

I made the north group a self-sustaining group, SP, decurser, healer and MT healer, which worked very well, and spread the remaining groups S/E and S/W.

Hopefully he will die tonight

Down!. /weep

Huge thanks to the EJ boards as usual.

Just some info for any RLs out there.

After four nights of wiping, and some 12/15% wipes, we changed from the four point strategy (Groups in the N/E/S/W) to the three point.The groups in the East and West all moved closer to the south group, meaning we had:

North Group: Decurser - DPS - MT healer - Utility Healer (this group was self-sufficient)
South Group: Decurser - Shaman (Tremor) DPS - DPS - DPS
South-East Group: Decurser - Shaman (Tremor) DPS - DPS - DPS
South-West Group: Decurser - Shaman (Tremor) DPS - DPS - DPS
Tank and Melee in the middle as usual.

By having a big gap between the North group and the South-West/East groups, we managed to mitigate DoomFires substantially. We still got them, but spent less time molested by DF's than with the four point strategy.
Kept the Fear calls up on vent where possible, and I think most importantly, we all 'got' the fact that DPS is secondary, and being on your toes, avoiding DF's was primary.

Force the groups to act as units, 5 man teams, when you run from DF, you ALL run, and ALL run in the same direction, having 4 payers run one way and your decurser get cut-off by a DF is bad news.

If you are the RL, be prepared for compression marks on mouse, keyboard, and monitor, as well has forewarning your partner that yelps, howls and screams are to be expected for the duration of the night...

It is very tempting/easy to single out individuals who fail at surviving, the fight makes it that way, but staying 'relatively' cool, and helping rather than letting loose a string of abuse is the key imo.

For me I think this was one of Blizzards best bosses, no trash, multiple tries, and essentially a very simple tactic, avoid DF's, decurse, don't splat on the geography. Satisfaction was better than any before him, for me anyway.