Elerion

While there's certainly no requirement to bring 5, every priest up to that number simplifies positioning/movement considerably. I wouldn't do the encounter with 2 either, and it's not unreasonable to have 2 of a class.

It's not like it's 4HM bad, but it's the first TBC encounter I can remember where you pretty much need 3 of a class, and no other class can substitute.

 

Ghando

For a single-role class (Hunter, Mage, Rogue, Warlock) I guess you could field an argument that fights should allow for only two. For a multiple-role class three is absolutely fine; honestly, how can you possibly blame Blizzard for "requiring" three of a class that has two immensely strong and desirable raiding roles? The Gas Nova/Mass Dispel mechanic is the unique and definitive mechanic of the fight, and making it comfortably doable with only two Priests would just gut the encounter IMO.

<Bryne> >> MILKED TEAT 2, GHANDO NEXT <<

 

Vhex

Should limit that to 'players play.' We've had to have several of our members bot retired characers/geared alts on Brut and now Felmyst as well. Getting kind of sick of it but if that's the only way to keep a fight challenging, I suppose we'll bite the bullet. Being melee heavy is killing us on this one too. 4 rogues = sad times.

Anyways...

One question, is corrosion intervenable? Getting mixed reports from our warrior that the damage is but the buff but I'm fairly certain that there's just a delay, like he casts corrosion and then his next melee hit applies the debuff or something.

 

xyruul

We have 7 or 8 healers in our entire guild half of which aren't online on any given night it seems. Our first Felmyst kill was with 7 healers, 3 of which were a casual, an offspec and an alt. Really this fight just comes down to timing and reaction speed.
I wouldn't be so quick to discount alts. If some of your better players have a decked out pvp alt you should really use them. It's much easier to respec someones alt for a raid then to recruit some person you really only need for 1 fight a week and then have to deal with them subbing or not having spots the rest of the time.
I wouldn't bring too many dps alts on Brutallus or anything but they should do fine elsewhere.

 

cheebamonkey

We spent a long time on this fight trying to pin down optimal positioning within each of our groups to help with encapsulate, we tired the spread out/move in strat with gas novas and all that and in the end we realized that dealing with encapsulate is just like dealing with doomfires, you just need people to pay attention and run. In the kill video we have you can see that the group I'm in and dispelling is standing within MD range at all times and in fact isn't even close to being out of it. When we get an encapsulate in our group we run like frightened weasels and if need be we pop a healthstone or arcane resistance potion. There is a reason why you only get 1-2 encapsulates every 2 minutes.

One of the things that helped us a lot though on healing for encapsulate was to have our CoH priest spam CoH on the person with encapsulate for the first few seconds. Since the spell has a 15 yard range and encapsulate has a 20 yard range you are almost always hitting the people who are moving slowly.


For gas nova I'm noticing in a lot of videos priests are just standing there with MD ready. This is completely overkill. Shadow Priests can easily fit an MD into their attack cycle without alowing more than 1 tick on gas nova and so can holy priests.

 

• Snowy

I prefer not allowing any ticks on gas nova, just the initial cast damage. It's not only more damage, but it's a mana drain. Gas Nova and Encapsulate are the 2 dangerous things in the fight, the loss of DPS by standing there for a few seconds isn't going to make or break it.

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mek

While account sharing is an undeniable fact of life in raiding guilds, it's technically against the TOS so you shouldn't encourage it. A silly and mostly unenforced policy, but it's there nonetheless.

 

Crazytrucker

I do the calling for breaths for our raid. What I go off of is, if it isn't distinctly north(he flys way north), go north. If it is north go south. Also I watched a video of one guild(name slips me) who would run away from Felmyst in the air and then go the direction called. I think this is a good idea for any new guild learning it because it buys you more time to move and you can out range the 1k Dot.

 

Foofer

We use somewhat of an odd strategy for encapsulate. We do not run away from the player that gets encapsulated.

Our groups are stacked by group in sort of a "triforce" (with the MT alone at the top, 2 melee groups in the middle/side areas, 3 caster groups at the back) slightly over 20 yards away from each other. When a player is encapsulated, 2 priests heal the encapsulated player with COH and the shamans swap over. Our first two kills, we had 3 shaman, 2 priests and 3 paladins healing (for a total of 8 healers) and we felt very comfortable with the strategy by the end of the first night (not having people die anymore to encapsulate).

Our third kill was amazingly more rough as we had lost 2 resto shaman and brought in a resto druid (for a total of 7 healers) and took us a while to get down. We were constantly having the encapsulated player or the odd person in their group dying due to their group not being topped off. I think we'd be fine with 2 priests and 2 shaman (with a mix of 3-4 paladins/druids) but any less than that just feels like an uphill battle for our strategy.

We decided to stack up because it allowed us to continue putting out damage without having to move.



Some other things I've seen over the course of our kills:

We've had the MT get encapsulated on three seperate occasions. I'm going to go ahead and assume that's due to another player being above in threat. Anyone else experienced this and think otherwise?

We have had a prot paladin in for all of our kills and even delayed our second kill a night because we were missing one. It really trivializes phase 2 and I'd recommend bringing one if at all possible.

Rebirth during phase 2 is bad - at least if their corpse is in a breath... On our latest kill, I was asked to raise a shaman that had died for bloodlust. His corpse was in the cloud but I thought nothing of it, since normally BR'ing someone in damage is okay since the person being raised will spawn on top of the druid. Not the case here apparently. He spawned on top of me and was immediately mind controlled.

 

Natural

Our paladin tanked the skeletons as retribution spec with protection gear the first night. Next week he will use a retribution/protection hybrid spec. With enough gear and and control the healing in phase 2 is fairly easy on the paladin tank. This lets the paladin keep judgments up in Phase 1.

 

Setia

Encapsulate simply does not exclude the MT from its list of available targets. I do not believe threat plays any part in this. The MT is usually the easiest person to heal though, so we're not exactly complaining.

One thing we've had limited success with, is rogues popping Cloak of Shadows quickly in the second where they are targeted but have not been encapsulated yet. It's not guaranteed you'll get the timing right (as the window is very narrow and the GCD is likely to be in the way), and even then it's only 90% chance to resist, but it's worth trying.

 

◊ Praetorian

Healing a group through Encaps is pretty hardcore -- we sometimes have literally no CoH priests, so obviously that's not a strategy we'd have thought to implement, but I can see how it'd work.

And I think the tank can be Encaps'd, just like anyone else. It's not aggro-based, and really not a bad thing to have happen at all, though sometimes half-asleep who were expecting to see Felmyst turn before Encaps get caught napping.

 

Trouble

The main tank can most definitely get encapsulated. At first we thought it was similar to Prince's thingy where if someone is over the MT agro it makes the MT a viable target, but it's happened enough with no one above the MT that it's gotta just be possible for the MT to encapsulated.

 

Chasy

Confirmed, I've been encapsulated atleast two or three times while tanking.

 

• Latito

You can cloak out of encapsulate.. just like you can iceblock or divine shield. Doesn't need to be done before he casts, and as soon as you cloak he drops you back on the ground and continues attacking the MT with no more Encapsulate dmg going off. In fact, I would argue that cloaking AFTER encapsulate is on you would be preferable. That is, use the "removes all magical debuffs" portion of the skill as opposed to the "90% resist" portion. 100% chance to remove encapsulate or 90% chance to not get it in the first place.

I like how the first 3 (and somewhat 4) fights in Sunwell have a pretty substantial favoritism towards Rogues/Mages/Paladins. This is not to say you *need* *any* of those classes for those fights (assuming you have druids for Kalecgos), but they certainly cut down on the raid dmg by taking out a few spikes.

 

nontoxic

I've been encapsulated as well with nobody above in threat. One thing I noticed during encapsulate is that Felmyst does not attack the tank for the ~6 seconds of encapsulate. I believe this was something they changed in patch 2.4.1 but I could be wrong and just noticed it after the patch.

 

Nicarras

You have 3-4 'spare' backup healers just sitting around most of the time? I find its hard to keep healers geared/coming/in the guild, when for all BT hyjal you can do it with 7-8 healers. Now some guilds will have to pull out maybe 10 healers for this fight if they are having people die? And they need to be geared that well?

Seems like a tall order to have that much depth on your roster.

 

Trouble

I played as a shadow priest on this fight for our first two kills. I was able to keep a nearly full DPS rotation and hit 75% of dispels before the first tick. With how random the timers are, I think waiting there doing nothing is actually a net loss of mana and healing if you're able to hit the dispel at the rate I was.

 

constantius

If you allow a tick, you *really* screwed up. No matter what kind of a priest you are.

I'm holy (CoH) and I dispelled this week on one of our three groups. There were basically two situations:

1) Corrosion went off, I used 2 GCDs, and stood there waiting for the Gas Nova, removed it ~ 0.9 seconds after it landed (the Nova hitting inevitably gives me a pushback, so can't get any better than that).

2) Corrosion went off, I used 2-3 GCDs, and ended up being on GCD when the Gas Nova began casting. I began casting the spell the instant the GCD ended, and cleansed the Nova ~ 1.3-1.5 seconds after it landed.

Either way, no secondary tick.

If a priest manages to allow a 2nd tick in any situation but a "running back from encapsulate and got lost and was low and was spamming heals and <bad stuff here>", they screwed up. Fix positioning, fix assignments, whatever. Just assume it's something that doesn't have to happen.

I mean, basically, here's a timelime:

0:00:00 -- Gas Nova begins casting
0:01:30 -- Gas Nova lands on the raid
0:03:30 -- Gas Nova ticks for the first time

You literally would have to ignore the start of the Gas Nova cast, and keep on chugging with something big (like a GHeal started *just* before the Gas Nova begins casting) in order to still be on the GCD / not completed your MD cast when the tick goes off.

For shadow priests, it's easy: use Mind Flay, and /castcancel+MD. For IDS priests, it's easy: use GHeal, and /castcancel+MD. For COH priests it's *slightly* more complicated, since we're using instant cast spells that put us on the GCD, so you can easily cast a CoH *as* the Nova begins casting, with no way to interrupt it. In this situation, you STILL get the dispel off before the Nova ticks.

 

constantius

Something I'm curious about: how do most people deal with the green lazers of death? There's obviously some luck in who gets targetted, for kiting them away ... but has anyone made that portion of the fight 100% controllable? It's the one area of the fight where we consistently have someone 'forget' what they're supposed to be doing and get gibbed.

 

Crazytrucker

Everyone runs at the start and when the first lazer disappears is how we deal with it. Not the best but better than loosing people to it.

 

Urraca

When she takes off, make sure everyone is spread out. Stay out of the middle, use the tree as a divider. If you're on the right side of the tree and get beam, head right. If on the left, move left. That 'should' be the easiest part of the fight.

Some fun things happened to us on our second kill, one being the single worse wipe I've ever been apart of in WoW--caused by a single player. Felymst was at 1% in the air and we had 25 people alive, on her final breath of the battle our spotter had a miss call and all 25 of us got MCed and wiped within 5 seconds. Fun times!

This week, we actually had her enrage (bad group comp) and had 1 person alive at the end, because an enraged gas nova = 11k a tick.

I would say the key to this whole fight is positioning and the constant collapsing of dps + healers (hint: keep your mass dispellers spot static). Also, if encaps is your problem, make sure everyone is popping an AR pot every land phase.

 

• Snowy

Furthermore if your priests are dependable, you can just mark them so the groups always know where to go. Or mark someone dependable in that group where everyone, including the priest, knows where to go.

For green laser of death, we just spread out and keep moving until the first laser shows up, and we kite it away from the raid. Repeat for second laser.

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killets