Giske

Ah, I ment Vem last of course. Early morning post and all!

 

Clandestine

We thought this would be an issue when decided to try doing it in the reverse order, but since nobody in the raid needs to move at all in phase two if you kill Sacrolash first, you overall have much higher DPS. We killed her in something like 4:35 this week doing Sacrolash first, and our Alythess first kills were always around 5:15. We brought an extra healer for Sacrolash first as well. (10 vs 11). Overall, Sacrolash first is decidedly easier and just felt a lot more controllable. We brought a full melee group as well, so I'd imagine that if you could stack the raid with full ranged you could bring maybe 9 healers. I don't think we got a WWS of our kill but I'd assume the melee are taking significantly more raid damage than the rest of the raid.

 

thorin5

You'd be surprised about the melee damage, actually. We've killed them twice so far, both doing Sacrolash first, and looking at both WWS parses (First, Second) the melee took around the same damage as anyone else in the raid. I completely agree about Sacrolash first being more controlled as well, the only random factor is Shadowfury (and some ranged DPS deciding to jihad the raid :\), which isn't usually that big of a deal and is why all of our healers were wearing PVP trinkets.

 

Rathore

On our first few nights of attempts we tried both of the Red first strats, with limited success. I talked my guild into trying the Sarc first strat last night and had a few problems with it. MT healers kept getting stunned by shadowfury or conflag target was stunned by shadowfury and was not able to get out of range of the raid (i know trinket out of the fury and keep moving). All in all, it seemed like the kids getting to the raid with shadowfury was our problem.

I have noticed a few people mention the idea that as long as blue has a target more than 10 yards away the kids will ignore targets closer than that. Would it be possible to stack the mt healers on top of sarc on the bottom (with the melee and sarc tanks) and put the rest of the raid on top with one group(ranged dps) in LOS and the raid healers out of LOS. My first thought would be clearing debuffs via nova would a problem (nova might not hit the groups up top).

Assuming that doesnt work(im guessing no, since I havnt seen or heard of it being done) any advice on how to deal with shadowfury on the raid with the blue first strat??

Thanks in advance.

 

Giske

By using clever positioning you can remove shadowfury from the fight completely. No idea if its intended or not, but I'm not complaining.

 

Skulli

You are not talking about the wall exploit i guess?

 

Ramalama

Does anyone have info on the following occurrence in P2:

"Sacrolash begins casting Conflagration on <random ranged DPS>"*

Several seconds later, that person is shown as having the conflagration debuff, but does not take damage and can freely control their character. Instead the melee are afflicted by conflag, as if she did a tank-targeted or point-blank version of the ability.

It only seems to happen ~20% of the time, and while we have developed ways to work around this obviously I'd feel more comfortable knowing why and when it can happen. I've heard it called both a bug and a mechanic on other forums, but with no explanation either way.

* As per the built-in emote "raid warning", not DBM or a similar mod.

 

Skulli

Think thats just a bug.

 

Clandestine

It is most likely a bug which can occur at any point in phase 2 when Sacrolash casts Conflagration. It is safest to have your melee run out for every Conflagration.

 

Ramalama

Yeah, that's what we do. Melee and offtanks run one way, current tank runs the opposite. Conflag target (if melee) runs perpendicularly to both, toward the designated conflag zone.

Somewhat comforted to know that it's a bug, or at least that we're not the only ones that don't understand it.

 

Giske

No, I'm not. You just need to position your raid and Sacrolash perfectly and the images will despawn before they reach your raid.

 

Giske

From what we observed when this happened she changed target from her Conflagration target to the MT at the top of threat while casting. Its a bit hectic during phase 2, but you can see it coming this way and stay in and DPS the whole time instead of wasting time by running out every conflag. Also, you can have your melee trinket it when it happens as it very rarely happens more than once.

Its just one more thing that makes killing them in reverse so much simpler.

 

Dey

The positioning you're talking about doesn't eliminate the shadow images from the fight anymore. If you did this first week, I can say you're right, but the shadow images spawn timer has been increased (From my own observation of the fight), and they can now reach your raid even if you use the "Smart positioning".

 

aznxk3vi17

This. We tried a different strategy last night involving killing Sacrolash first. Our raid was stacked on the ledge up top. This, of course, meant that every raid member was in line of sight, thus the chances of one of the raid members up top being the initial Shadow Image target almost 100%. Every single image reached the raid, got more than a few hits off, and/or stunned the raid. Not sure if the tanks need to change their positioning, but range and line of sight is fickle enough anyway.

 

Giske

We did it yesterday, so no.

 

Rathore

I understand how to do this with a red first strat. Having trouble figuring out how to position blue/raid to remove shadowfury from the encounter in a blue first strat

 

Malazaar

It's basically the same if not easier since you can move Sacrolash and position her whereever you like.

Position Sacrolash below just ahead of the curtains and the raid above ... or vice versa.

 

Tyrian

Where precisely were your tanks positioning her, out of curiousity?

 

vorda

The Showdown movie is exactly what we do. The raid has a small chance to get hit because keeping the Blue twin on the same spot seems to be kind of hard (according to our tanks) but if the tanks do their job right, we haven't been hit with more than two stuns in an entire p1.

 

Rathore

Watched the showdown movie and Im seeing kids get to the raid pretty often, are they just unable to LOS sarc when they are about to use their ability and despawning? We did the same thing (except we split the raid group up top into 2 groups, one hugging each pillar) and sarc was tanked close to the same spot but we still ate plenty of shadowfuries, which is what was killing our attempts.

 

Kaidman

Yeah the furthest possible position I can think of is Sacrolash directly below with the raid exact same spot overhead in middle of the balcony. Shadow blades would hit the raid here though, so people do like Showdown's vid I assume, raid at one pillar with Sacrolash at the other. There are still going to be images in the raid though. Unless there is some kind of thinking 'outside of the box' positioning..

 

Hylo

Hmm, I don't quite know what you mean there. Shadowfuries weren't problem for us due to the positioning (we didn't use LoS to avoid/confuse them). We got 1 shadowfury on some attempts but usually even that wasn't the reason for a wipe. We did however get some melee hit from the images but they lived so short time after reacthing us that those 2-3 hits weren't problem either.

I really like our reverse tactic and believe it's about the easiest there is.

 

AriasImmortal

If you kill Sacrolash first, does the enrage timer change? Alythess just enraged 5 minutes after the pull at 25 for us.

 

thorin5

The berserk timer is the same regardless of which order you kill them in. On our first kill Alythess enraged at 6 minutes, on our second she did not after 5'10".

 

AriasImmortal

Interesting. We were told that it could have been someone running out of the room, but since everyone was on the bottom I don't see how that is possible. Anyone else ever see an early enrage?