it's actually a debuff, so popping it at bad times is even worse because you don't have the option to click it off (bloodfury is the same way)

Oh my mistake, I guess your way is probably best then.

While this is true, I hadn't really been planning around it because prior to that night we had had a dwarf priest in the raid for Fear Ward :-P. However, it should again not be a problem since last night we did TK and got a new dwarf priest attuned as well, so when we go back this week we should be set with FW for the tank, and able to use our druid for stability.

And while it is a 'survivability fight,' the more damage you do, the less time there is for something to go wrong.

I dont say azgalor is not repeatable all i say its just stupid that you need to pull him away form Thrall because Thrall is just too stupid and can die and you cant do anything about it. If you think this fight is ok and Archimonde fight is not ok than i just can't understand your logic?

For me the best thing Blizzard can do is to rework whole instance and make trash minor part of it and bosses the major obstacle or something similar. And for Archimonde fight its obvious that something needs to be change because there are too much people that think its broken (yes i dont think so but i like fight with personal involvment that are close to impossible).

Thrall just needs 365 FR; change nothing else.

Could give Thrall the ability to heal. I mean, Thrall is a shaman, and even if he has uber damage output, he should still have some heals to cast. Would make the trash that much more easy in the Horde Encampment.

I believe that would be one of the other npc's, the ones that drop the healing stream totem, or the Horde Shamans.

Thrall isn't specced Resto, so there's no way you could expect him to heal!
The real tricky part of Azgalor isn't Thrall - which is easily fixed just by the pull and afterward the positioning. It's more or less how well your raid handles randomness. Have your healers load up the tank with HoTs like old-school Maexxna or even Gruul.
The easiest way to keep your tank alive during Silence is to have him just turn auto-attack off and have supplementary warriors make use of Intervene. Azgalor not being able to parry means his attack speed won't increase and he can't frontload any considerable amount of damage while your healers are silenced. Threat shouldn't be an issue since your ranged DPS aren't generating threat due to silence and your Melee (assuming you have Melee on Azgalor) are dodging RoF half the time.

While that is generally assumed to do, make sure HoT's are up at all times, refresh before the last tick and such. We have found that one or two healers wearing a lot of SR helps so that the silence's are never a problem no matter what. The only problem is when the Doom targets are all healers.

I use ECB, eCastingBar, and make the target bar big and huge and in the middle of my damn screen and never take my eyes off it (except for glances at doomfire).

If you use Quartz, you can set the GlobalCoolDown bar to go off of stance changes and skills. Pair that along with a good unitframe that uses the Blizzard built in enemycastbar, and you'll have in my opinion a higher chance of catching more fears/interupts.

But thrall is a Farseer not a Shaman he doesn't know how to heal ;/
On the Archimonde subject, having 1 shaman and 1 decurser on each group, makes the fight really much easier

Back to Archimonde and the air burst/grip problem.

I've spent a ton of time thinking about this mechanic, and the best solution I've come up with is this. Since eredar/draenei are already known to have the ability to project an aura around them, have Archimonde have an aura with a 40 yard radius, to ensure that if someone is attacking him/healing people are likely within range of the aura. Have grip + aura = normal DoT damage of the grip until cured. If people are burst with the grip on them, they will be thrown out of range of the aura, and take no damage from it until the grip is either cured, wears off, or they are back in range of the fight.

It removes the random factor of grip hitting a player after burst or while they are getting burst causing a player's death (and likely wiping the raid) without gimping the base design of the fight. It also preserves the idea of player mobility being key to being able to win this fight, and provides a mechanism for raids with few decursers to still have some sort of viable plan to win.

Just seems like an easy thing to implement that would have the least impact in how the fight is supposed to work.

At any rate, just a thought.

We killed him today after like 3-4 tries (~30+ week before).
This time we had 4 shamans and that helped a lot

I've never understood why people don't use resistance whenever possible.
You don't *need* it on Gorefiend or Azgalor or Kaz'Rogal, but having people wearing even 3-4 of the epics makes all of them trivial in the healing department. Gorefiend especially.

That's exactly what I do to the tee, Death Wish and premature fear breaks are a DPS warriors only liability on the fight.
Besides agro of course, which is a side effect of never being hit by air burst I suppose.

I think 3 shaman is really the minimum you want to go with on this fight. 4 is better of course and 5 is ideal, and usually what we run with this for this fight.

If you don't have the shaman I guess I can understand the complaints.. we've stacked it so I can't really relate. We had 6 wipes last night and frankly all but one of them were easily explained by people in the raid screwing up in some way or another, not due to some RNG thing.

This fight is harsh on people dying. It should be, it's the end boss of a T6 zone. People really, really, really have to focus on survival first. There were quite a few times last night where I was just running directly away from Archimonde with a Doomfire in tow. I might have not even dps'ed him for a good 25-30 seconds. So what? I lived, and that's the primary objective. I was also already mentally prepared for what I needed to do if I got gripped+bursted too. Always, always ask yourself "If I got gripped + bursted right now, what would I do?" Or "If I got gripped right now, am I near a decurser?" -- this is a good question to ask right after a fear. The biggest aid to this I can say is mark your decursers with raid symbols. I always knew where they were at. When I'm flying through the air, I'm looking down at where those symbols are, because I'm assuming I'm going to get gripped on the way down.

This one fight moreso than any else is a complete paradigm shift in how you have to think. DPS'ing is just something I do inbetween surviving.

Finally, yes it's a pretty unforgiving fight for deaths, but it's certainly survivable. If you can just prevent anyone else dying after the Soul Charge, you can get things stabilized again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to some changes on the mechanics of Grip + Air Burst, but I still rather enjoy this fight the way it is. I love running scared for my life from a Doomfire. I love the feeling that I'm just an inch from disaster, yet surviving all the same. This fight challenges all 25 players, both individually and as a group, to survive.

We killed it finally (our 4th night on him) last night, 2 shaman - we are gluttons for hardmode I suppose however (0 sp :x). I'd say easily ~60 wipes over all these days, took us 14 tries last night, but our attempts got better and better. As it was said many times, no matter what your raid composition, the more you attempt and learn, the easier it becomes. Each night we were another 5-10% ahead on average than the previous night. What kind of sucks, our dps warrior got bursted, gripped and while he was ~150 yards up in the air, Archimonde turned and melee swung him for 11k. This caused a second death as well (druid). I think weekly this encounter will become easier than the last, with the sheer amount of practice everyone has - it's another huge communication fight for us (which is hard, we're bad at that). We pretty much had to treat it like an arena game, everyone had to announce what was happening to them throughout the fight. Definitely would not have won without that level of communication.

I feel Hyjal is quite devastating at first, everyone posts about how poor the zone is. However, after time I grow to like it a lot more than BT. We cleared up to Archimonde in ~3 hours this week, and our first Archimonde kill came on our 4th hour on him. Hyjal trash used to be brutal, I hated it. But as you get practice (ie: after your first kill), it becomes second nature, and even a single wipe isn't that big of a deal since you most likely won't wipe to the boss more than once (if that). Even the trash doesn't bother me in the least now, although I'm quite worried about repeat kills on Arch with 2 shaman.

I'm in the same boat. Maybe I'm a glutton for pain, but I can't wait to face Gruul's older brother with Gruul 1.0 mechanics. I really enjoyed the level of play for the original Gruul (obviously it didn't fit the raiding progression).

Archimonde is in the same boat. The proposed tweaks to Grip (no overlap on burst or tears removing grip) wouldn't destroy the gratification of downing Archimonde. Everything else about this fight can be chalked up to human error or controllable (fear + doomfire strike), which I can deal with.

Parry mechanics on bosses should probably be looked into, too, but I believe it's interesting in other play. Pets / NPCs should be less retarded where they attack from.

Yeah, this and Essence of Souls is still my favourite fight in TBC, maybe add KT too.

After seeing him again this reset I still don't think this fight is anymore random than most fights, i'd even say Mother is worse with the FA port locations, every death we've seen on Archimonde we've been able to point out what caused it, and it was because someone had messed up. The fight is all about communication between the decursers and the people who have Grip, especially when it's air burst + grip, although most classes have an easy way out of that combo. I think making it so grip can't be cast on someone in the air would actually make the fight way too easy tbh.

Mother also has a lot of stupidly random things, just really saying anything is "less random" than Mother doesn't make it good. Since I don't dps I can't comment too well on the Archimonde issues, but Mother has several stupid "you did everything perfect but now you're dead" moments. 2 healers in a couch early on, porting offtanks and gibbing the MT with lash, 3 people ported on the MT not having good resists on it at the same time as 2 melee's and a lash hit.

Archimonde may or may not be as bad as some people are saying, but saying Mother is more random in a bad way than other fights is far from making other fights okay. Cause really, even with micromanaging heals if Mother decides your tank is going to die, he's going to die. There's more or less shit all you can do she she melee's, parries the tank, saber lashes and melee's again, doing 23000 damage or more in less than a second, and worse when combined with a beam or FA.

Anyone have UD females who get feared through the world? Example:
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