• Intermission

I have not noticed increased lifespan. We use the same "group up at the top, tank down the bottom" strat that I'm assuming you do.

Dont get me wrong, we get plenty Shadow Fury in the raid, we had 5 last kill. 5 is unusually high though, it's often only 1-3. They are bound to happen when your tanks move around because of unlucky tank conflag and confoundings. Just need to make sure everyone is constantly ready to stone + pot + battlemasters trinket. And have your combat resses already assigned as the raid jumps down for p2!

The patch where they may have had their lifespan increased was the one that fixed FD. It was quite a few weeks ago. I dont think anyone noticed anything different, aside from FD working, during those weeks up till now.

 

SilentCom

Ok, thanks I didn't think that the life-span had been increased, but I wanted to make sure. I think we may try having sac tanked closer to the smexy curtains than the outer ring pattern on the floor, to try and alleviate more of those shadowfurys. We were only getting about 1 shadowfury in our attempts (about 70-80% most times), but had heard that some guilds are eliminating them altogether and wanted to make sure that it was just positioning, not a game mechanic, that was to blame.

 

◊ Silmeria

We killed Twins last night and saw no increased life spans.

In fact, come to think of it, I think it was actually our cleanest kill to date, and we never ate a single shadow fury up top.

 

• Daboran

Just a small question as to whether I should be bawling my healers out or not after tonight's first attempts at Twins (Sacrolash first, raid pillar-humping up top).

Healing:

3 x Pali and a Resto Druid on Warlock/Feral/Warrior tanks
3 x Resto shaman raid healing
3 x Holy Priest CoH/raid healing (1 on humped raid, 1 on melee, 1 on Flame Sear targets and raid healing if possible)

Our main issue "seems" to be people with the fire DoT dying very fast (hard to tell as I'm tanking) but I'm loath to take a raid healer off to focus them on single target healing as general raid health seems low at times. Do all the Shaman need to focus ChainHeal on Flame Sear targets when they appear or just 1 or two of themusing bigger heals? Yes I know this strategy requires a lot of healing, but having finally sorted out Conflag etc, the general raid healing seems to be the biggest issue now.

Healing assignments is definitely my weak-spot personally and I think I need some specific advice on who heals who and when.

 

• Intermission

I believe our healers assign themselves groups. When a person is assigned to a group, they spam heal anyone in the group who gets Flame Seer (priests Flash, shamans Chain, I think). When someone's group does not have Flame Seer, they help out the other groups, or generally top the raid up (Flash, CoH, Chain).

Make sure your healers dont have shit UI's. The moment Flame Seer is cast, they need to get those players topped. If they use Grid make them add Flame Seer as a debuff. If they use Pitbull, then they should be sweet already. Pitbull self-made raid frames rock.

Another thing that helps us:
Almost all raids have retarded people in them, to some extent. An example of retardedness is not being able to pay attention to your own HP and use Stones/Pots/Battlemasters as appropriate. If you run a mod that tracks raid deaths and the events leading up to them, you'll notice just how many people fail at healthstones. In light of this, we have someone call out when Shadow Nova is about to happen. "Shadow Nova inc, watch your HP!". This is when most people pop their stones if they are below 50% HP. If they have flame seer on while the call is made, they chug a fire pot, and get ready to stone. Also, if you do get Shadowfury its not a wipe! Quick heals and consumables can get you through it.

edit: another trick, chugging a fire pot when Flame Seer has just been cast on you can reduce the stack size of Flame Touched, as some of the Flame Seer ticks are fully abosrbed, hence no Fire Damage taken.

Having a shadow and fire cauldron dropped right at the feet of the raid members just before the pull is very handy.

 

◊ Silmeria

The first thing you need to realize is that nobody should ever die to the flame touch itself unless that person has been seared twice in a row before their flame stack was clear. If people are, then your healing assignment at the fundamental level is incorrect/being executed incorrectly. You can check this by looking into people's deaths of flame touch and see if they received any minute value of healing prior to a full duration flame touch death. Double flame sear needs individual assistance from everyone, whether it is some type of immunity (iceblock/divine shield) or a fire resistance potion.

Most every death on this fight is due to a combination of a flame sear + shadow nova or shadow blades. You pretty much need to keep your raid topped off as much as possible for when these conditions land (consequently, your DPS needs to be aware that if they're going into a nova/blade at lower than expected health, they need to get ABOVE that threshold asap). You will usually see these deaths trickle in one or two at a time, typically every nova/blades. Most people figure they're dying to sear overload, but that's usually masked by the gibbing caused by nova/blades.

Think of the above two cases as the necessary healing burden (outside of tank healing) and layer your healing to service it. You have a pretty good healing composition, so you have the tools. Chain heal is really good at handling sears (as is most any direct heal, to be fair, but C-Heal allows you a bit of redundancy in other areas), and CoH/PoH is good at keeping people above the danger threshold of nova/blades. The problem that I see in your assignments (at least, the part of the assignments you gave us), is that you have people dedicated to specific roles on a global scale. Try giving your healers multiple roles on a sub-raid scale (the post above mine is a good example of this) - make sure to assign priorities of course.

Also, make sure you understand flame sear mechanics. e.g, how many show up at any given time. Also make sure you are applying CoH intelligently - if you're mixing top/bottom side groups position wise, then CoH is not going to be as effective in servicing that group. Ditto on chain heal.

 

Dynalisia

Make sure you don't use fewer healers than you can afford. Doing this fight with 9 healers and then killing the second twin with 3 minutes to go before enrage after you've been wiping for three hours to various deaths is just not smart.

 

Bukama

does anyone knows, if you can amp magic on the entire raid?

 

Ared

This is pretty much fundamental to raid survival in a Sacrolash first strategy. I've been closely watching our attempts on Twins in recent weeks (there haven't been that many, took two pulls a few weeks back, one the week after and maybe seven or eight this reset just gone by) and have found that Shadow Nova is indeed the main killer in the ranged camp. A nova comes and someone is, say, under half health - bam, dead. If that person is a healer then it almost inevitably cascades into a wipe in fairly short order. The main question this raises for me is why these people aren't being topped up - there should be ample time after a Nova warning comes to make sure everyone can survive it. So far two main answers have emerged, both of which point to quite a number of people not really understanding some of the fundamental mechanics of the fight.

First of all, cooldown abilities - Battlemaster trinkets, Healthstones, Mad Alch/Rejuvenation/Healing pots etc - are not being used prior to Novas but instead are consumed in panic early in the fight when people start to get Flame-touched stacking up. This in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing but it feels as if some players are using HSs and things whenever they dip slightly low in health just so it'll show up on WWS that they have. We had something of a witchhunt a while back when it was blatently clear that some people were not using any of these items to ensure their own survival. There appears to be a lack of understanding about what is most likely to get you killed and so certain individuals are blindly blowing cooldowns for fear of being called out for not doing so. This, of course, means that when Novas come they have no way of making sure they stay alive if healing doesn't get to them in time (though that's another issue altogether).

Secondly, we sometimes have people die because ridiculously high stacks of Dark Touched render them unhealable. It has to be said that our strat doesn't really facilitate people easily clearing their debuffs - healers jumping from the ledge to try and get into Blaze of their own volition has wiped us in the past and people usually just expect to get a sear reasonably often rather than trying to risk getting into conflag - but there still seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how the debuff works amongst several of our raiders and complaints of 'I didn't get any healing' etc occur too frequently for my liking.

We've started to work on drilling the danger of shadow novas home over the last week or so so hopefully we'll see some improvements this coming reset.

 

Tyrian

Managed to get our kill, after taking on board much of the solid advice and suggestions in this thread. The hardest part about twins - really - is ensuring you have the correct ~10+ healers (Hi, Shamans!) recruited and geared up appropriately by the time you actually reach them. I feel sorry for guilds that raid with ~2 Resto shamans and dont manage to recruit any more by the time they get to twins, though...

Some random musings of what worked/didnt work for us:

- Warrior + Druid tanks for Sacrolash was vastly superior for us
- Warrior MT is in the melee group (with enhancement shaman) to help threat. All other groups using Tranquil air totem until heroism is called
- 5 Shamans in the raid (3 resto, 1 elemental, 1 enhancement) however id take six (4 resto's all up) if we were lucky enough to have them all online.
- Assign 5 raid healers to handle 5 groups. Make sure that COH priests are assigned to a group where COH will actually hit all members and they cast COH over the correct people to allow this.

Overall im quite happy with the 10-healer setup we finished with:

MT Healing:

2 Paladins Heal the Sacrolash MT
1 Paladin Heals the Warlock MT
1 Druid HOTS three tanks
1 Shaman Chain Heals through the Sacrolash tanks (Acts as a semi raid healer, giving melee extra chain heal bounces and keeping up Fortitude on the Sac Tanks). This Shaman is also somewhat flexible - and can switch to help heal any group if needed urgently (For example: If a group up top has several members with double flame sear and the group-healer can't keep up). However will go back to the Sacrolash Tank Chain Healing when raid damage is under control.

Pure Raid Heal:
2 Shamans keep two assigned groups alive through raid-damage
3 COH Priests keep three assigned groups alive through raid-damage

If we wanted to, we could cut the Shaman whos Chain Healing the Sac tanks out and go with 9. But why bother? Doing it with 10 healers and 2 shadow priests, 2-3 DPS dead early - Alythess still dies at 5.30 minutes. Never saw the need to cut back healers and make ph1 healing even more stressful, when the enrage time is almost pushover easy providing you keep almost everyone alive the first three minutes.

 

Koggel24

Hi I was reading through the post and didnt see this mentioned. We are running to prot pallys on twins and doing fine but last night we found that we would get a confounding blow then right after sacrolash would melee hit us with both weapons pretty much resulting in a one shot death if not topped to full health when it happened. Has anyone seen this happen?

I would just write it off as a bug or bad luck but it happen to myself twice and our other pally tank twice.

 

SilentCom

HAI! Our last twins tries were with 4 pallies in the raid, 3 resto druids, 2 shammies, and 1 coh priest. yeah...we are working on recruiting.

 

MaddHawk

Few questions that I didn't see any real answers for when I did a search in the thread. First, does anyone know what the timer is on Pyrogenics? I have noticed the warlock tends to do it immediatly after the first conflagrate cast and then in slowly increasing amounts of time after each additional conflag. Second, does Grand Warlock Alythess really stop casting conflag if you kill the shadow twin first? I had heard they stop but in review of Vodka's reverse kill video I noticed the boss mod kept announcing yet I couldn't see anyone really running out of the group. Last question I have right now, I heard that Blizzard was going to change the Blaze fire patch to no longer remove the Dark Touched debuff so the tanks tanking Lady Sacrolash couldn't jump in the Blaze left behind by the warlock to reset their debuffs. Is this true?

"The future will be better tomorrow."
-Sid Mier's Civilization IV

 

Tel

All but one of these questions are answered after the first few pulls on the boss. But for the sake of being nice, I'll help you with them.

Pyrogenics - seemed like a set CD timer to me, but its not really important enough to worry about further than that. Just have mages steal asap.

Stopping of conflag - Yes she does. It turns into Shadow Nova instaed, but early versions of bossmods didnt reflect this cast change. If she didn't you'd die very fast to flame touch stacks.

Blaze damage - do you have a source for this rumor? Otherwise its just that, an unsubstantiated rumor.

 

Tyrian

We used the exact same setup as you (3 paladin, 3 shaman, 3 COH priest, 1 druid) although I would prefer to take an 11th healer (extra shaman or druid) if we had available. Either is fine.

The key turnaround point for us (after raid healing failures) was very specific assignments. 22 people in the raid either have a in-group healer directly responsible for them - or someone else assigned to directly watch them and the other 3 MT's have their own personal healers. There is no 'ok healers, just heal whoever and try to keep the raid alive' - all raid healers have ~4-5 specific people who they are wholly responsible for keeping alive. You must take careful note of which groups are physically 'split' between top/bottom camps and assign the correct type of raid-healing accordingly (COH priest or Resto Shaman or Lifebloom)

For example, if you have a

Feral Druid
Hunter
Hunter
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin

You would need to make sure that your COH priest does NOT cast coh directed over the feral druid, as him being down the bottom will mean it not have enough range to hit the other 4 people up the top camp, and your group members will start to die. Same with a shaman, chain heal bounces must be directed at the 4 people up top. But COH priest or Shaman is a good option for raid-healing this group. The Feral druid MT obviously has his own healers - and doesnt require the raid healers attention at all.

Another similar situation is the Warlock MT group. Your warlock MT (who stands down the bottom) is possibly in a group with at least 1-2 healers (who stand up the top) because hes a waste of a spot in a DPS/spriest group - and the group is split. If your Warlock MT group looks like this:

Warlock MT (Lets say hes affliction spec, with an imp out for your warriors)
Warrior MT
Warrior MT
Resto Druid
Elemental Shaman (Dropping WF, acting as a agro dump)

Theres only two people in that group that need a raid healer assign, since the 3 MT's have their own personal healers: the resto druid and Elemental Shaman need someone to raid-heal them.

I would get the druid to lifebloom the first four (3 tanks + himself), and one of the resto shamans in another group can simply watch the elemental shaman in addition to their own group. This other Resto Shaman would ideally be one whos already healing a group that only has 4 other members up-top, like the FeralDruid+hunter group - for a total of 5 people to watch only. A COH priest would be a terrible option for servicing this Warlock MT group. You must be either using a lifebloom stack and/or Chain Heal for the 2 non-tank members. Its not worth assigning one full-time shaman just to heal 2 people either, so splitting it up and having 2 healers from 2 other groups watch 1 person each from this group - makes alot more sense.

In all honesty, we had some attempts with 11 healers (4 shamans, 4 COH priests, 3 paladins) that were a healing disaster and terrible compared to other attempts where we used the 'inferior' healing setup of 10 healers (3 shaman, 3 COH priests, 3 paladin, 1 druid). Why? Its solely because of the way we assigned Chain heal and COH to the raid. Bringing more raid healers in no way guarantees you will have better raid healing. You might even be better off going with fewer healers but cleaning up and adjusting your healing assignments.

Thats probably the best lesson I learnt with regards to healing setup for our time spent on Twins.

 

◊ Penguin

This happens often to me while tanking, sometimes she just doesn't turn away fast enough for her swing timer to not hit you. It's even worse when you eat the 8k confounding and then the MH+OH hits both crush. Usually what happens for us is the 8k confounding hit is immediately Swiftmended by the druid that's running HoTs on the tank. I'll still spike down to having ~5 or 6k hp, but get topped off quickly

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Dynalisia

In my experience almost all dps classes are going to be threat capped on this fight, allowing you to wait with establishing certain dps group synergies until phase 2. Our hunter group does not have a bear in phase 1 for example, making the grouphealer assigned to it a bit more efficient.

 

Tel

You can quite easily keep ahead on threat provided neither the tank or OT takes the first conflag (I know the tank shouldnt, but tell that to our agro happy warlocks). Playing our MT the other day on this fight we had rogues pushing a quite happy 2.5k dps and locks over 2k without being capped. Admittedly I had a top notch group for threat (2nd enh shaman, bear, one surv and one BM hunter) but even so there were no threat issues for anyone.

It is possible to do especially if you minimise the time spent moving her back into position. That being said, our bear does go and stand in fire if there's no blow/confounding CD coming up, and he's low on rage, as our warlock tank is only stood a few foot away dropping blazes all over the floor. This means he can really keep up on threat with the MT, stopping DPS from having to hold back.

 

Tyrian

DPS I can do varies hugely every attempt, depending on whether the MT/OT get conflag and how much she moves around/needs to be repositioned. Nevertheless, its all over in ~2.5-3 minutes anyway, even with we feel like we're holding back greatly for the first half of that.

 

Dejime

So we just had our first night on Twins last night.

Trying Reverse Twins a la Clearly's excellent video.

Conquered the ledge boss fairly easily, and got all set up.

Brought 11 healers, 4 COH priests, 3 resto shamans, 3 paladins and a resto druid. Assigned 1 paladin to each tank and a resto druid to keep hots up on all tanks.

Assigned the other 7 healers to heal raid damage.

Position seems to be the key here-I *think* we figured it out near the end.

That being said, people didn't conflag the group and managed to get out quickly, we didn't fail on the ledge boss more than once or twice (accidental auto-run ftl?) and healing seemed to work out ok. Sounded like the priests were flashing people with flame sear, COHing to keep their group topped when they could, with shamans bouncing chain heal off flame seared targets. I feel like once we get positioning down (IE-no more shadowfury stuns) this fight is pretty simple to pull off. The bosses themselves fall over quickly.

So, my main question:
@ COH priests: How do you heal this fight? Spam COH on an assigned group the whole time, or Flash people that are seared? Sear seems to be the only problematic part of this fight once you have positioning down.

Anyways, any positioning help would be appreciated, but I think we figured it out via help from the Fusion vid.If our healing setup seems wrong, please feel free to correct us.

 

khel

I would expect a more flexible raid healing strategy to be more effective really. If you have 3 resto shamans and 3 coh priests, why not assign 2 resto shamans to healing ranged targets with sear (chainhealing off them) and 1 to melee with sear (constantly chainhealing melee, prioritizing sears). If no melee have sears then the shaman can chain off the tanks to keep inspiration going. The priests can spam CoH from beginning to end...maybe with PoM's thrown in as they are guaranteed to bounce 5x. Resto druid keeping lifebloom + rejuv on all 3 tanks, 1 paladin on the lock tank, 2 on whichever tank has aggro at the moment.

CoH and chainheal are just too efficient on this fight to have priests switch to flash spamming imo. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would leave the sears to the shamans primarily.

 

Nyxta

I apologize if this has been answered before but I've been wondering if Shadowfury stuns just a few people or everyone that gets hit.
We've killed Twins on reverse order, stacking the raid on the right pillar, the images tend to hit us a few times they don't disappear before they reach us, but i notice when shadowfury hits i always get stunned for the 2 seconds so i thought everyone gets stunned as well.
People are telling me it's only a few random people. I've gotten stunned every time shadowfury has hit. Just kinda been wondering about that =/