I see that people think Doomfires are back to normal now after the hotfix. However yesterday we had them spawn under melee or run through us giving us practically no time to react, which never really used to happen unless someone was doing something clearly wrong. Is there something we should know positionwise that would help, like standing even closer to Archi and only stepping back when getting air bursted? We were standing right outside the hitbox graphic. I worry that taking melee and especially non rogues is too big a risk unless we manage to solve this.
We were using 4-point strat as usual, fires seemes to be more unpredictable in general but all in all I think our ranged groups did a decent job with the running.
EDIT: Strangely enough, next time we went the melee had zero problem with the fires. Maybe it was just us being incredibly unlucky, but they really felt completely different, like the hotfix hadn't happened yet.
Last edited by Lieska : 06/06/08 at 4:40 AM.
Reason: update
I see that people think Doomfires are back to normal now after the hotfix. However yesterday we had them spawn under melee or run through us giving us practically no time to react, which never really used to happen unless someone was doing something clearly wrong. Is there something we should know positionwise that would help, like standing even closer to Archi and only stepping back when getting air bursted? We were standing right outside the hitbox graphic. I worry that taking melee and especially non rogues is too big a risk unless we manage to solve this.
We were using 4-point strat as usual, fires seemes to be more unpredictable in general but all in all I think our ranged groups did a decent job with the running.
Try the three point, or at least having the East and West groups (if thats what you have) move more south, soon as we changed that we saw a massive change in deaths etc. As for DF's, I cannot comment as we only started on him a couple of weeks ago, so it all seems the same to me. Yesterday our melee were engulffed in DF's, and wiped, seemed to be the exception, and they were at max hit box range to avoid AB on the tank.
I see that people think Doomfires are back to normal now after the hotfix. However yesterday we had them spawn under melee or run through us giving us practically no time to react, which never really used to happen unless someone was doing something clearly wrong. Is there something we should know positionwise that would help, like standing even closer to Archi and only stepping back when getting air bursted? We were standing right outside the hitbox graphic. I worry that taking melee and especially non rogues is too big a risk unless we manage to solve this.
We were using 4-point strat as usual, fires seemes to be more unpredictable in general but all in all I think our ranged groups did a decent job with the running.
We've killed him twice since the hotfix went live(last week as well as last night) and have not noticed any change in regards to melee and doomfires. I suggest if you have them running right through you that your ranged give you a heads up on when this is happening.
We were also killing him before he was broken and from how he was back then, to how he is now I see no difference. You may just be having bad luck or your melee need to pay more attention.
I see that people think Doomfires are back to normal now after the hotfix. However yesterday we had them spawn under melee or run through us giving us practically no time to react, which never really used to happen unless someone was doing something clearly wrong. Is there something we should know positionwise that would help, like standing even closer to Archi and only stepping back when getting air bursted? We were standing right outside the hitbox graphic. I worry that taking melee and especially non rogues is too big a risk unless we manage to solve this.
I *believe* his targeting circle was resized with 2.4.2, up from the tiny targeting circle in 2.4. Therefore if your melee are standing just outside his targeting circle in 2.4.2, as they were in 2.4, they are now standing farther away than before, and thus in range to have doomfire spawn on them.
We encountered this problem last night (didn't get him down, still only have 1 kill on him) and simply told the melee to base it on their estimate of 2.4 positioning rather than staying outside the targeting circle. Since we didn't get airburst on the MT this *seems* to have worked.
Edit:
Er, I typed "hitbox" but I meant "targeting circle" - I've fixed it. I assume you meant targeting circle when you said hitbox as well.
Yes, I noticed the same things you mentioned on our last archimonde kill. We got him after 4-5 tries, but there were some interesting doomfire spawning/pathing issues.
I *believe* his targeting circle was resized with 2.4.2, up from the tiny targeting circle in 2.4. Therefore if your melee are standing just outside his targeting circle in 2.4.2, as they were in 2.4, they are now standing farther away than before, and thus in range to have doomfire spawn on them.
We encountered this problem last night (didn't get him down, still only have 1 kill on him) and simply told the melee to base it on their estimate of 2.4 positioning rather than staying outside the targeting circle. Since we didn't get airburst on the MT this *seems* to have worked.
Edit:
Er, I typed "hitbox" but I meant "targeting circle" - I've fixed it. I assume you meant targeting circle when you said hitbox as well.
I posted this several times on a previous page. His targeting circle -- and that of every boss mob -- was restored to 2.3's normal size in 2.4.2 (from it's idiotic 2.4 size). And the notion that people didn't immediately start standing someplace different with 2.4.2 than they were in 2.4 is laughable. It's human nature to anchor on that circle. People moved for 2.4 until they realized they were too close and they had to adjust again with 2.4.2 when they realized they were too far.
I posted this several times on a previous page. His targeting circle -- and that of every boss mob -- was restored to 2.3's normal size in 2.4.2 (from it's idiotic 2.4 size). And the notion that people didn't immediately start standing someplace different with 2.4.2 than they were in 2.4 is laughable. It's human nature to anchor on that circle. People moved for 2.4 until they realized they were too close and they had to adjust again with 2.4.2 when they realized they were too far.
It was probably your post I had in mind then when I recalled it during our pull. I definitely remembered seeing it on this thread. It was useful advice, too bad we still didn't repeat him.
We finally got Archi down last night after 40-ish attempts using the 4 point strategy. Managed to do it with 21 people aswell. Lots of great advice in this thread, thanks heaps guys.
We are just beating our heads against the wall on Arch. Having someone die to fire is causing most of our wipes, but I wanted to mention here some raid stats I can't quite understand.
In the 2 WWS I've linked below, you can see the MT (Samoorai) is taking tons of fire damage over the wipes. The problem is, thats me and I don't ever remember getting owned quite so badly by fires. I get in one here or there when it spawns on top of me, but I move right out of it and thats that. It doesn't follow me because I'm tanking. The strange thing I have noticed, is that quite of few of them decide to come right through me then disappear.
We do the basic strat everyone else seems to do in this thread, but we can not get it right. So, what gives, why would an MT be taking so much fire damage over time? I really don't understand. As always thanks for the help.
We are just beating our heads against the wall on Arch. Having someone die to fire is causing most of our wipes, but I wanted to mention here some raid stats I can't quite understand.
In the 2 WWS I've linked below, you can see the MT (Samoorai) is taking tons of fire damage over the wipes. The problem is, thats me and I don't ever remember getting owned quite so badly by fires. I get in one here or there when it spawns on top of me, but I move right out of it and thats that. It doesn't follow me because I'm tanking. The strange thing I have noticed, is that quite of few of them decide to come right through me then disappear.
We do the basic strat everyone else seems to do in this thread, but we can not get it right. So, what gives, why would an MT be taking so much fire damage over time? I really don't understand. As always thanks for the help.
I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but it's possible that while you don't take as many doomfires as other people, you are more likely to survive the full duration (presumably because you're getting healed and others aren't); it's also possible that when you get doomfired you get it multiple times in a row (I'm not sure if it counts as a separate buff gain if you manage to refresh it). Doomfire is going to hit the MT. It's inevitable. Doomfire is also going to hit other people occasionally (healers taking intentional risks to stay in range of the MT, DPS that aren't looking for doomfires sneaking up from behind, melee just getting screwed). You should heal those people when they inevitably get doomfired.
For comparison, our MT is #2 on the same list for the most recent kill I could find: Abilityoomfire - WWS
We are just beating our heads against the wall on Arch. Having someone die to fire is causing most of our wipes, but I wanted to mention here some raid stats I can't quite understand.
In the 2 WWS I've linked below, you can see the MT (Samoorai) is taking tons of fire damage over the wipes. The problem is, thats me and I don't ever remember getting owned quite so badly by fires. I get in one here or there when it spawns on top of me, but I move right out of it and thats that. It doesn't follow me because I'm tanking. The strange thing I have noticed, is that quite of few of them decide to come right through me then disappear.
We do the basic strat everyone else seems to do in this thread, but we can not get it right. So, what gives, why would an MT be taking so much fire damage over time? I really don't understand. As always thanks for the help.
we had our 1st kill last Week after a couple of wipes due airburst and fire deaths we decided to make a try without damage, let our DDs just try to survive until enrage.
We used a 4 Point Strat, but more and more it goes to a 3 Point, so maybe call it 3,5 Point
In this "No-DPS-Try" Archi went down to 45% (good game for no damage and just surviving i guess), but then our DDs realized that DPS is not needed to bring him down and things go better and better. I think that was one of the best ideas we had - show that survival is everything, and DPS is nothing. Calculated something around 7k Raid-DPS over 10 minutes should bring him down, so let them don't worry about that. Took us about 15 to 20 wipes on our first evening and addition 8 on our Kill-night. This week we 2-shoted him, with some raid members that were not there on our first kill.
So we went back for the first time in ages this week. We used to stand on the hill and kill him there. I'm not defending this or suggesting it was a good thing; it was what the raid leader wanted to do and so we did it.
This week, we tanked him where he stood and put a group to the north of him, to the south and to the east. We healed people if they got on fire. We told melee to stand at max-ish range and be aware of the fires and not to be crazy. We had a druid who hadn't run with us in like 3 months and a mage alt that had no gear to speak of among our fairly sketch raid. Our main tank has been with the guild about 6 weeks and had never seen Archimonde before. He's a prot warrior fwiw.
This has to be the most overrated fight ever. I mean we are an average raiding guild. We have killed Illidan a few times now. We have our share of moronic players and even our best players do moronic things. Let's discuss what problems you are having with this fight as reconfigured because seriously, if we can kill him basically for the first time in a grand total of 2 hours, you can too.
I mean, yes, we benefitted from knowing the fight mechanics from 3 previous kills. But we never really had to do the fight properly before. And, yes, we are well geared from BT, I suppose, but this is not a gear fight. I'm going to offer two tips from having been there:
(1) People dying to fire makes no sense. They shouldn't be getting burned and if they do (it happens), heal them. It's not hard to heal.
(2) The doomfires rarely rarely cross into melee and rarely sit there. Fight Archimonde from the edge of his hit box and if a Doomfire does spawn too close to melee, just move out for a few seconds.
I'd like to thank everyone who's contributed to this thread for all of the information. We (Wildly Inept Raiding) got our first kill of Archimonde last week after way way too many attempts, and the discussion in this thread was very helpful in tuning our strategy.
we had our 1st kill last Week after a couple of wipes due airburst and fire deaths we decided to make a try without damage, let our DDs just try to survive until enrage.
We used a 4 Point Strat, but more and more it goes to a 3 Point, so maybe call it 3,5 Point
In this "No-DPS-Try" Archi went down to 45% (good game for no damage and just surviving i guess), but then our DDs realized that DPS is not needed to bring him down and things go better and better. I think that was one of the best ideas we had - show that survival is everything, and DPS is nothing. Calculated something around 7k Raid-DPS over 10 minutes should bring him down, so let them don't worry about that. Took us about 15 to 20 wipes on our first evening and addition 8 on our Kill-night. This week we 2-shoted him, with some raid members that were not there on our first kill.
I can see from your WWS, that you guys take a lot less damage from doomfire than we do. That has got to be the key. When a doomfire comes at your groups does the whole group do a 180 and run, or only the person its chasing, while the rest scatter? I know we are having some problems with this portion too.
Suffer first problem you're obviously having is clear from your post. "The person it's chasing" implies your groups are spread far enough apart that you can actually detect this and makes me wonder why your groups are so spread. There is no advantage to that, but there is a good deal of disadvantage.
Second thing, everyone should go together >>away<< from Archimonde. "Scatter", whatever that was looking like, sounds like an awful idea that puts the group potentially out of range of its decurser and of its healer and means people can die from grip, let alone doomfire. A group together has no reason for anyone to die. A group all over the place has a bunch of people who might die.
Third thing, Doomfire damage is healable. Going to write it again. Doomfire damage is healable. That doesn't mean people should run through Doomfires. It does mean, however, that people should consider the fight in context of them.
I'm not sure this is useful, but here's our WWS Archimess
Suffer first problem you're obviously having is clear from your post. "The person it's chasing" implies your groups are spread far enough apart that you can actually detect this and makes me wonder why your groups are so spread. There is no advantage to that, but there is a good deal of disadvantage.
Second thing, everyone should go together >>away<< from Archimonde. "Scatter", whatever that was looking like, sounds like an awful idea that puts the group potentially out of range of its decurser and of its healer and means people can die from grip, let alone doomfire. A group together has no reason for anyone to die. A group all over the place has a bunch of people who might die.
Third thing, Doomfire damage is healable. Going to write it again. Doomfire damage is healable. That doesn't mean people should run through Doomfires. It does mean, however, that people should consider the fight in context of them.
I'm not sure this is useful, but here's our WWS Archimess
Well we have been trying to basically do "group hugs" on 3 or 4 points of the map in a circle around Arch and keep the group hug when running away. Each group gets a designated healer/decurser. Somehow, we still end up dying to doomfire. Unfortunately it hasn't been working for us and I really don't know why. I don't really get to watch it happen being busy with Arch and all, so I can't really tell if our groups are doing something wrong. I do think we need to re-iterate how important it is for the groups designated healer to make certain they are helping heal if a person does get doomfired. I think thats a very good tip.
Really the thing that is driving me crazy is we actually downed him the first night we ever tried him. Was on the 6th or 7th try. We've been back 3 nights since over two weeks for easily 40+ wipes and were lucky if we break 70% before someone dies. Very frustrating.
Edit: Something else happening recently was doomfires seem to be circling around instead of going straight. Is this a sign of people not sticking with their group (assuming the person doomfire is on is running straight back)?
From my experiences with killing Archi weekly for the past 3 or 4 months, the doomfires are a little tougher to deal with since the 2.4 patch (even after they fixed the really-really nasty doomfire bugs), they do seem to curl around onto the melee more than previously.
Really what it comes down to is asking how the first person died, 1 death will usually cascade into a wipe, sometimes a raid can survive 2 or 3 deaths and the 4th will start the cascade but no one should be dying. Find out what's killing that first person and fix it.
If its:
Doomfires - Were they feared when they ran into it? PvP trinket and fear break/immune skills (WotF, Tremor totem, Fear Ward, Zerk Rage, Bestial Wrath, probably others) can help with that. Were they not watching and it curled around behind them? Vent/TS communication can be useful for that, we always call new doomfire spawns with the general direction (N/S/E/W) and usually someone will call if a doomfire starts curling around behind a group. Also getting people to call over Vent/TS if they have the Doomfire DoT is very important. Some people are scared to call out because they know they've made a mistake getting the DoT, but if they stay silent and die it's a lot worse; as Mideci said Doomfire damage is healable if the healers know about it. Healers will have range problems, so getting people to call out early can help the healers get into range of people who need healing before they die.
Air burst craters - We've had problems with the Tears not activating straight away with some UI mods if they are keybound. Of course some people just suck, if that's the problem get them to practise off the cliff before starting the fight, if that still doesn't fix it boot them from the raid.
Grip - If they weren't in range of a decurser it's their own fault, we put raid icons on all decurses so people can easily find one if they need. If the decursers are being slow tell your mages to do nothing but decurse, on our early learning attempts we only had 1 resto druid so we told the mages that if they did any damage at all we'd be angry about it because they needed to be focused on decursing (granted, that's pretty extreme but its a good example of survival being far more important than damage).
The enrage timer for Archi is pretty generous, you can stack healers and still not have any problems getting him to 10% before his enrage, remember that the raid becomes immune to everything at 10% and you have a minute to finish him off which we've done with ~10 people alive after a wipe cascade starting at around 15% was saved by the immunity debuff.
You don't even have to finish him off. Once you get him to 10% he just dies after a certain time (this is most obvious when you chop him down to 1% really fast and then he just sits at 1% for 20 seconds and then flops over dead).
We used 10 healers to beat this fight the first time. Some of those were shadow priests, ferals, and a protadin (no one respecced) but we had 10 people in healing gear doing zero DPS. The number one thing to emphasize is that there is exactly one person who can die and it not be his or her own fault, and that's the MT. If anyone who isn't the MT dies, figure out why and make sure it doesn't happen again.
People will get doomfired. It is 100% avoidable (even for melee - it always goes out and then loops back through, so if they're watching - and if other people are communicating with them and telling them about potentially dangerous fires - they can get out before they get cut off) but no one will play perfectly, and it's not a big deal most of the time. It does become a big deal when people are burning during a fear or air burst though, as these things disrupt healing. The fire moves at run speed, so as long as you start running directly away from it before it reaches you you will never get caught (at least with run speed to boots; not sure if you can outrun it without that).
Thanks for all the great information in this thread. I figured I'd post a diagram that was helpful to our guild in the hopes that others will benefit from it. Obviously there are a lot of ways to skin this cat. This plan worked for us.
After banging our heads for 3 weeks on this guy at first going crazy and pouring a bunch of hours into him with many so close attempts, we decided to bring Fire Protection Cauldrons and and extra Fire protection pots and give them to classes who may use 2 or so in an attempt we then killed him that night in 3 attempts. Maybe it was the mental shift that if you caught a doomfire your no longer screwed or it was giving our healers time to get them up but it has worked and my guild has its share of morons that are also friends so being stiff with them was a challenge.
I ate doomfires before and didn't need the fire pot - just wait for it to tick then pop a HS, then let it tick again then pop a health pot. The worst ticks are at the beginning, so you are already past it - all you need at this point is a HoT from a druid or priest and you are all set now.
Of course you don't *need* a fire protection potion, but a fire protection potion prevents more damage than a healing potion does, so if you're going to use potions and you want to optimize them, you're better off using a fire protection potion.
Saw several people ask for blank Archimonde map screens so I figured I'd post some. Here's one facing the cliff w/ well on the right, another facing away from cliff w/ water on left.
I have a small question, that may prove unnecessary but I'd like to know.
According to RaidGuru and WoWWiki (those perennial sources of potential misinformation), Air Burst gives afflicted players an invisible debuff that stops Archie using Fear while an Air Bursted player is in the air. My question is: is this correct?
In the event that it is so, I'd be very interested to know if the debuff lasts for a fixed amount of time or if it is removed only when the player lands. If it's only removed on landing, then it's perhaps possible to almost entirely remove Fear from the fight by having a Priest use Levitate at the apex of their burst.
We'll be trying this tonight anyway, so I'll report my findings, but if anyone with more experience has better info it would be helpful to have.
05/21/08, 9:56 AM
oomfire - WWS
