Xavias

I think a lot of guilds overlook just how powerful Druids can be. Felmyst is a great fight to really show off their strengths.

Running with 2 Druids in our guild, the first thing I notice is that people rarely go down to dangeriously low health. This is very important in P1, especially just after a gas nova. While this can also be said about Chain heal, CoH, PON and renew, Druids still have a very slight edge in the fact that they can do all this at the cost of very little mana, provide more healing (considering Priests need to MD) and can still maintain heals during emergency/critical situations (such as a nearby encap) via automated hots. On top of that, they have two Instant heals that can be used on a harsh encapsulate (one being on a 3 minute cooldown of course), which is also a nice feature to have on your p1 healers.

The advantages of direct AOE healing that Shamans and Priests provide are not as apparent with Felmyst, as people slowly and predictably lose their HP rather than unexpected burst. In P2, Druids are absolutely golden. They can provide powerful raw healing whilst maintaining extraordinary mobility and run little risk of death. Which is pretty much exactly what you want from a healer during this time.

A question for other guilds who have killed Felmyst: Assume you have 2 Shadow Priests, which healers do you give an spriest to?

 

Foofer

Oh no, you most certainly can do it without AR as that's what we've done every week. You just need to have the right healing classes. This week we had 3 COH and 2 resto shamans and the 3 COH completely trivialized any encapsulates. With 2 COH you need to have enough raid healing to where any of the groups are pretty much topped off before an encapsulate (2-3 resto shaman, preferably...having only 1 shaman made it incredibly rough but it was still barely doable) - we had 2 COH for our first 3 kills. Our COH priests do not get a shadow priest on this fight and I can only recall one having mana issues, which is easily fixed with an innervate.

edit: fix on numbers

 

epiphenom

Not at all. So long as you keep the number of people hit down to about five, and everyone in the group is aware enough to employ Arcane Protection Potions and Healthstones when necessary, it's not particularly difficult to do, provided you have the right healers along.

 

Raencloud

We used standard group setup (3mages/sp/shaman and 3locks/sp/shaman) for our kill. Mana wasn't much of an issue that I recall; i think we used 2 priests and 2 resto druids primarily for HoTing groups, one of the priests was an alt in mostly pvp gear, and i believe the druids were keeping lifeblooms on the MT. 2 paladins focusing strictly on the MT and 2 resto shaman just helping with low people and the tank when needed.

 

Sholdak

We heal through it as well, with 2 CoH and 2 resto shaman. It's really not as difficult as it first seems, as long as no more than 5 people get hit by each encapsulate, and preferably at least one of those can bubble/iceblock/cloak.

Using the Kara AR trinket does help a bit, but isn't really necessary.

 

Elerion

Healers don't generally run oom on Felmyst. If you have decent AoE in phase 2 they will get up to 30 seconds of regen time.

Give your spriests to those that struggle with mana or get straight DPS boosts (locks/mages/hybridcasters) instead.

 

Xavias

I believe we took 3 Spriests last night, and were debating which healers would benefit the most with an Spriest. My stance was Druid, since Rejuv spam will oom them quite fast without one and provide much more raw healing (saving other healers mana). Others said Priests/pallys. We went with having no Spriests for Druids, which visibly showed on the healing meters, with Druids not topping. In some of our earlier attempts, where Druids had an spriest or they had an extra innvervate, they pretty much always did the most effective healing by a significant margin.

I may be biased, since I play a Druid, but I still think they provide the best candidate for a spriest in this fight out of healers, when there is one available.

 

Smoker

I believe our warlocks said that they don't need a spriest at felmyst since the ground phase fits perfectly with their manapool.

We give 1 to the mage group and 1 to the healers

 

◊ Cadfael

Yep, it's very doable. We do it that way also. The initial 3 seconds are critical but after that everyone has > 70% HP when the healers have switched.

We mostly have troubles in P2. Be sure to let different people play spotter just in case your normal spotter isn't there for once. It hurts having than an hour everyone getting MC'ed after perfect P1's.

 

Vodrin

I was doing all the calling for our guild and this one was the only fustrating one. (Heart attack incoming when it was 4th flight phase). Basically when you use the big red 'flag' draping behind him as a marker it becomes as easy as the rest. Make sure the person calling has full view distance and if hes infront of this flag when he starts charging his breath its going to go through the middle, if hes 1-2 yards to the left hes going to go top (big tree side).

 

Dokos

Best advice I can give for felmyst is take 10-15 minutes to talk with your raid about how to position and what to do in phase 2. Make people take part on this. Call out names and see how they react. If your healers don't realize that the safest spot to be in is behind a consecration there's something you need to fix.

We spread out forming a pentagon around the room. If anyone gets a beam they run it outside, no matter what. No one moves until the 2nd beam comes down. All you need to do after that is call one side to go to as the skeleton safe spot. IE. you get beams on the west and east side of the room you just call for your raid to go south or north and the paladin stands in between the skeletons and the raid.

Practicing this a couple times made our phase 2's very stable. People never get cut off from the center of the room as long as the person being targeted by the beams doesn't die.

 

delling

We finally killed Felmyst last night.

Very easy, once you get through the random, retarded, pathetic deaths to demonic vapor ('oh, green beamz is following me? lol, whut?'), and the deep breath caller works out the positions. (Two 1% wipes because he freaked out and called it wrong!)

Important bits worth noting:

• Holy priests totally own this fight. We had two holy priests up at 1 million effective healing -- the nearest shaman was at 600K. This is with shaman healing the melee, and priests on group healing. 2 shadow priests also did very well here (but very poor DPS, admittedly... but higher healing than the paladins assigned to tank healing).
• Less movement is a good thing. Keep static positions, only move for encapsulate. Don't do the move-in-for-mass-dispell thing. Arcane Protection Potions + Healthstones make this fight very easy... As someone else said, the cooldown/phases mean that you can nearly always have a healthstone + potion up for any encapsulates. Circle of healing onto the encapsulated person is also great.
• DPS requirement is really low. We killed at about 17k RDPS... Lots of melee (3 rogues, 2 DPS warriors, feral druid, enhancement shaman...). Just bring a standard raid with 8 healers (or 9 if you lack the holy priests/shaman) and it should be no problem at all. Don't risk anything. Give the tanks tons of aggro time in the flight phases (1 or 2 breaths... no problem).

 

Copernicus

Has anyone tried heavy Arcane Resist on the encounter? From WWS, Encapsulate damage can be partially resisted. With four slots (trinket, neck, ring, cloak) it's possible to get up to around a 38% resist rate.


Our main problem right now is with handling Encapsulates. It seems to be a combination of people not reacting fast enough to them plus the ability stacking with one or two others (Gas Nova or Corrosion plus Encapsulate can be brutal). Our groups are heavily stacked on top of each other because we only have three priests available. Everything else in the fight seems to be under control, it's just that about half the encapsulates a healer will end up dieing and then the fight goes downhill from there.

 

jimmyolsen

We were having similar troubles with encapsulates until we moved to 4-group set up. If you only have 3 priests available, it might be a bit more difficult, but the key is that everyone in the group needs to move as a group rather than scatter. If Group A is to the NE of Group B, when Group A gets Encapsulate, everyone runs to Group B and gets healed up there before running back. Drop the mass dispel in between the two groups in order to still hit people. Having a set place to run to improves CoH and Chain Heal efficiency which leads to less people getting dangerously low before another encap or gas nova goes off.

If you can get a 4th priest of any spec in, you should consider it. Having 4 ranged dispell groups instead of 3 means less people have to run during an encapsulate which improves dps, raid healing, and tank healing all at the same time.

 

Elerion

A 3 priest setup can have up to 9 groups covered by mass dispel without moving, with none of those groups hitting another group with encapsulate. It does require each group stacking up on eachother and requires semi-quick reflexes on running away, but it minimizes number of people affected by each encaps.

2 groups per priest is very stable. 3 is less so, with more precise targeting and positioning needed, and heals turning less efficient.

 

nataku

We've been a little light on priests lately, so we've had to make due with 2 holy priests and 1 shadow priest be responsible for dispelling.

As a result, we've been trying a three group positioning, with 2 range groups standing off to left and right of Felmyst with a holy priest responsible for dispelling those groups, and myself with a Resto Shaman and some hunters behind Felmyst and the melee group being my dispel responsibility. Groups try to spread out as much as possible at their spots, but inevitably, with 7-10 people near an Encapsulate, someone doesn't get enough healing and dies during it. Part of it is slow consumable usage though, but we're looking at arcane resist to make surviving Encapsulates on non rogues/mages/paladins easier.

 

Glasswizard

We tried this strategy yesterday and it actually worked very well except that we still have some positioning issues. Our problem was that we often only have 3 priests online (1 shadow + 2 holy, specced CoH for this encounter), so we set our raid up with 4 ranged/heal groups in a square around Felmyst with the melee group standing exactly in the middle of this square. One priest dispells the melees, the other two priests dispell two ranged groups each. As we wanted everybody to be able to heal everybody else the diagonal through this square can only be 40 yards long. The problem was that the melee group was often hit by encapsulate from other groups (or the other way round). How do you set up your raid exactly, so that only five people geht hit, but you still the healers have adquate range for keeping everybody alive?

 

Elerion

There is no way to set up 5 groups (EDIT: With a middle group) in a manner that both avoids encapsulate everywhere and allows healing range everywhere. You either have to let the middle group move to avoid encapsulates (and accept a lot of movement in case someone in the middle get encaps), or accept that the diagonal groups won't have heal range to eachother.

The latter is the most stable choice if you assign healers properly.

 

Foofer

We form somewhat of a triangle with the tank at the top. Two melee groups (doesn't necessarily have to be a melee group, but they are in melee range; our second group is generally a prot warrior, a prot paladin, a ret paladin and a misc. fifth) 20 yards apart behind Felmyst and three ranged groups 20 yards apart behind those two groups. I forget who exactly dispels who, but it's always three people dispelling so you'd have to work out which groups you want to overlap for each priest.

Knowing exactly where to stand takes some getting used to. On our early attempts the melee groups would be too close and hit each other with encapsulate. As time went on we started getting used to our reference points (boxes, etc.) and hitting other groups wasn't much of a problem.

 

delling

The best setup for 3 MDs is the one shown on the Bosskillers strat -- 3 ranged groups, a melee group at the 'focus' of the arc formed by the ranged groups, and a single tank dispelled by your protadin/holydin.

The idea is that the left and middle (or left and right, whatever) groups are within the diameter of the mass dispell of the melee. So one edge of the MD hits the melee, and the other edge hits the piled-up ranged at 20-30 yards behind them.

The is no real reason for ranged not to pile up on this fight, which helps you position the MDs a lot easier. People need quick reactions on encapsulates, but the danger of those is really mitigated by healthstones/arcane pots.

The only real problem we had was the shadow priests being quite close to the melee, and some of the healers that had positioned to be in range of everyone (due to some movement throughout the fight). Sometimes they had to move from an encapsulate that they didn't think would hit them... normally resulting in a death!

 

Glasswizard

Is the Felmyst hitbox big enough, so you can position two meleegroups left and right directly opposite or do have to do it somehow diagonally (something like front left, back right)? We sadly don't have the possiblity to bring only Tauren.

I was also thinking it would be quite nice to setup the raid as a pentagon with the MT directly in the middle. If everybody stands at maxrange (40 yard diagonals) that would equate to neigbouring groups being about 24 yards apart and the MT about 21 yards from every group. That would give a little more breathing room compared to your setup or a setup like we used last night.

 

Elerion

This is a dumb generalization. The best setup for 3 MDs depends on your class composition and your guild's strengths.

- 3 MDs can cover up to 9 groups (with the constraint that no group should be within 20y of another), so that's your maximum.
- Holy priests want to heal groups of 5 and do so with massive efficiency.
- Resto Shamans want to heal groups of 3+ and do so with slightly lower efficiency.
- Every melee above 5 increases incentive to separate melee into two groups.
- Smaller groups increase dps (less movement), lowers the difficulty of encaps movement, but reduces healing efficiency and average healers in range.
- There is very little incentive to stack more than 5 people on one spot. Exception being melee since space is more precious in the middle.

My current favorite for our typical setup is (r=ranged, m=melee) 5r/5r/5r/3r/6m/1t for a total of 5 groups + tank, but there are many other ways to make it work (we've killed her with a different strat every week, searching for optimal stability with minimum required priests).

 

Doctah

I had something really strange happen on Felmyst tonight, was doing the normal MD after a gas nova and I noticed it didn't go off... So here I am franticly spamming mass dispel and watching the gas ticks only to have 4-5 mass dispel graphics go off at once and half my screen basking in the blue and white shine, only to die with nothing in my combat log about any dispel.

Embarrassing to say the least since it looks like you goofed but anyone found certain mods lagging out causing this maybe? Pretty sure it wasn't server lag since no one else had trouble.

 

delling