◊ Repeek

Soon after hitting 80 I've had a chance to delve into some heroic instances. They're a refreshing challenge once again and I like to discuss tips and tricks for bosses (and their achievements) much like the heroic thread at the start of TBC.


Utgarde Pinnacle -
For the Skadi the Ruthless fight (think gauntlet + Felmyst) there is a room at the very end of the gauntlet, by the harpoon launchers. As soon as you engage the boss we sprint towards the incoming mobs before they get a chance to spread out and proceed to AE 6-8 of them down, then we gather up the rest and drag them into the small room (where new waves spawn) and AE that pack free from worry about the gas clouds. To complete the Achievement My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time - Achievement - World of Warcraft we simply wait until we've got 5 spears before launching them simultaneously.

The spears also stay in your inventory if you wipe so to complete the Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi - Achievement - World of Warcraft achievement just wipe when you have 5 spears

 

LiquidHAL

The most challenging heroic achievement I've attempted on is Watch Him Die - Achievement - World of Warcraft . The watchers cast a lot of random stuns, disorients, and group-wide damage, and hit pretty hard to boot, with a T6-geared group it seemed close to impossible to deal with everything. Tank could not take 5 seconds of damage while the priest was disoriented, and the cooldown is short enough so that trinketing is not really an option. Wondering if anyone has been able to do this successfully without being fully Naxx equipped.

 

Kumar

I have ran Heroic Utgrade Pinnacle too. Observations,

2nd Boss
The Rhino seemed to apply a DoT that ticked for 1500 per second. Just something for healers to watch out for. After a first wipe, it helped when everybody got feared when fighting the furlog. If the tank gets feared and you don't it pretty much one-shots clothies.

Skadi
The way we did it was to take it steady but still moved up at a good pace, avoiding the breath. When we reached the end, we brought the waves under control, it is important to bring Skadi down when either none or only 1-2 wave mobs are present and are close to dying. The timing seemed to be the most problematic thing to get down

King Ymir
Stop DPS during Bane. Easy fight, sort of a let down compared to the rest of the instance. He gets random powers from each ship in the room.

 

Xequecal

We beat Utgarde Keep and Pinnacle fairly easily, but we couldn't beat Gun'drak.

Moorabi was pathetically easy, not much to say here.

Drakkari Colossus was pretty moderate difficulty, as long as your group members move out of the slime puddles he makes in elemental form constantly it's not too hard.

Slad'ran was annoying, I'm not sure if this is a DPS check or if it's some other kind of mechanic we brute forced through. We were never able to handle the massive amount of snakes he starts spawning at around ~25% HP for very long, we beat him by just using Heroism and burning him down fast.

Eck the Ferocious is very easy mechanics-wise to handle but I should point out he has a fairly short enrage timer. It's not extremely hard to beat with 3 DPS, but it seems designed to prevent you from bringing 2 healers to the instance as you'll never beat it with 2 healers. Note that he spawns and attacks IMMEDIATELY after you clear the three-pack of murlocs, you don't get downtime.

The last boss of Gun'drak is a nightmare. We could not beat him. While he's in Rhino form (75-50% HP and 25-0% HP) he hits harder and faster than pre-nerf Brutallus. Max-rank HL spam with Judgments of the Pure up was NOT enough to keep the tank alive. I was probably undergeared, but single-target heal spam is the Paladin niche. I really, really feel sorry for Druids who attempt to heal this fight as I don't see how they'll ever keep up. With Heroism I was able to keep the tank alive through one Rhino phase, but had no mana for the second. I should also point out we had an uncrittable tank with many WOTLK upgrades and Sunwell gear. People who go into this instance with a crittable tank are going to be very disappointed as he will crit tanks for upwards of 25k.

 

Ralnar

We wiped once on Gun'drak's final boss, on the second go we didn't put any melee DPS on the boss during the humanoid phase since the whirlwind will destroy them. Other than that he went down pretty easy. We did manage to get the bonus achievement for Slad'ran thanks to bloodlust.

One instance I've had the trouble with so far on heroic has been the Violet hold, that place is either easy or quite difficult based on which of the random bosses you get. We had the void walker as our first pick and the RNG loved to pick the healer as person who needs to kill the adds, which wasn't quite achievable.

The oculus is also getting a thumbs down in the heroic runners on our server, the drake mechanic is really cool but since they don't scale with gear it makes a dungeon that will always have a fixed difficulty, that may be a bit too hard.

Overall, I have found heroics to be a good challenge and well tuned (with the few exceptions noted above) for a 2/6 sunwell pre-3.0 and 6/6 post 3.0 guild.

 

• adamb10

We did the old kingdom today and it was quite a challenge. The first boss is still awfully easy but the second boss the flame balls hit for alot more, like 3-4K and theres more of them. The 3rd boss, the adds have around 59K health so unless your dps is very good it will be hard to kill them before they get to the circle and gives the boss the buff(when buff hes hits extremely hard, hit me for 15K).

Theres a new boss in heroic old kingdom, in the mushroom area. Basically he spawns a bunch of mushrooms, both good and bad ones. When the bad ones explode you get a debuff that reduces your defense by 500 and reduces attack power. To remove the debuff you kill the good mushrooms. It's a pretty annoying boss, having to find good mushrooms & the longer the fight, the less good mushrooms that spawn. Overall the heroics I've done thus far seem a little overtuned for the gear level blizzard aims for.

 

Emily

Heroic gear doesn't seem to be a pre-req for Naxx, which by the sounds of things is allowing Blizzard to tune them (or at least their optional challenges) to be quite hard, without blocking progress. (At least that's what I'm picking up from people). This is good news for people who have less time for raiding and see Heroics as their main endgame.

 

Cascade

I don't think this is a bad thing. After doing the Oculus on heroic, I can say that the difficulty of the last fight is simply execution: timing your drake spells properly and he will go down ten times from ten without any probelms. I guess over time everybody will get accustomed to it, so the difficulty will perceivably lower and lower.

On the other hand, the other fights in the Oculus are very technical and I found them great fun to do, they pack quite a challenge. I think the Mage Lord is the hardest in there, we couldn't really get the pace and positioning right for the frostbomb since he just spams it so fast. We had some wipes and a very messy kill, because we had a full melee group for the run (no caster dps at lv80, them slackers .

Does anybody found some good way to properly manage that boss, so that melee would have a chance to do proper dps on him?

However, the shaman didn't care.

 

Bjork

I can just agree on this. This is the hardest content I've seen so far in Wotlk

Don't know if this thread is about spoilers, but but we did it with a group far from "full Naxx" (even though obviously well-geared), protwarrior, retripala, feraldruid, hunter and me (holypriest). I have no idea how to do it without two tanks, that's for sure - unless you outgear it by miles. Misdirection and two tanks were kind of needed for our aprroach.

I must say I enjoy very much these Heroic challenges, I can imagine going back with alts to repeat them later also.

 

Jagiya

Would Free Action Potions offer an advantage against the Blinding Webs / Web Wrap?

 

Bjork

We didn't use it atleast, don't know the answer to your question. It would be stupid if it did though.

Anyway, I think I've said enough by mentioning two tanks and misdirection. As the damage on the tank and whole group is pretty insane and you have random stun and confuse on top of it you need to find ways of avoiding it and control it more, that was our idea. I'm sure there are a lot of ways of doing this, we just had a feraldruid and a protwarrior in the group so it was pretty much given what to do.

I guess holypriests also have it easier, as we have this amazing 31p talent.

 

Vodos

I went there for the first time last night and we even managed to do Share The Love - Achievement - World of Warcraft and What the Eck? - Achievement - World of Warcraft on the first try. I only tanked him while we were waiting for the prot warrior to get impaled but the damage really didn't seem that bad. Of course our group setup was well suited to go for this achievement since we had prot warrior, feral (tank gear), resto shaman, retadin (in healing gear) and a moonkin.

Also his forms aren't hp based but on a timer. We probably spent up to 10 minutes waiting for everyone to get impaled, thanks to the RNG.

 

dukes

Similar situation to Flowercow - I did it in a different group than him (prot warrior, ret pala (healing gear), moonkin, demonology warlock, holy priest) and we did a similar thing of waiting 10 minutes to him to impale everyone. It was close at the end, after the pala taunted to get the warrior impaled and got gibbed instantly, so the lock had to go demon form to taunt, ending up killing it 2 man. Healing didn't seem that bad, but then we had two healers. Would definitely recommend using two healers for now, and you want at least one other class that can tank it for a little while to get the MT impaled.

Has anyone done the Less-rabi achievement? We tried it but his cast time gets really silly later on (starts at 3 seconds and halves every cast, immune to curse of tongues). I think it's just a gear thing to be able to get him down quicker to reduce the number of casts he can do.

I'm certainly enjoying some of the fights with achievements, certainly makes you think a bit more for some fights, and the tone of the heroic bosses is generally more interesting than in TBC anyway - a lot of TBC fights were effectively just 'tank and spank' style, while most of the fights in WotLK have some interesting mechanics to make the fights more fun.

 

Ashaera

Did him with a full melee group aswell - Theres no enrage timer to worry about so its just about finding a working strategy & sticking to it.
I was tanking & immediately pulled him to a pillar (as that seemed to match the timers for his explosion), after that there's really not much to it. Melee has to be careful & keep moving out while tank drags him out of frostbombs, they will get time to dps if the tank is fast & drags him properly.

Id stick to the inner part of the circle to give your melee a chance to run along the outer part when needed.

----
With that being said I'm still not gonna go Ocolus again anytime soon as it requires alot more practice than most other heroics.
Some are very easy : Violet Hold, Utgarde Keep, Nexus, Halls of Lightning+Stone, while some of the others have maybe 1 boss that could give your trouble.

Overall I guess they are tuned as I would have expected & aslong as you have a proper tank then theres no reason at all to go normal mode on lvl 80.

 

zoombini

For pure rep/badge grinding, is there any consensus as to which heroic is the quickest? I'd like to be able to squeeze out a heroic as much as i can, but i usually only have 1-1.5 hrs to play at a time . . .

 

sovelis41

Violet Hold and Azjol'Nerub are incredibly fast.

I'd argue Violet Hold may be faster simply based on its BM style and the fact that it's right in Dalaran.

[e]These aren't going to give you the most volume of rep/badges, but if you're looking for speed, here's the ticket.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Yeoldelock

We have our tank stand on a Good mushroom and nobody kills it. That way, hopefully, a bad one won't spawn right on top of him.

Magic, AOE and special attacks do not count for killing the Good mushroom. As a Warlock with a 40 DPS dagger, this made it a challenge. We found a way around it: So long as I get a hit on a Good mushroom that another player is also killing, I get credit and the debuff is removed. So when our Resto Druid was wacking away with his staff I would help him out on the same one, and it would remove the debuff for both of us.

The Ret Pally in our group also mentioned that if you kill a Good mushroom after you remove the debuff it would give you a double damage buff, but I am unable to confirm this.

The boss also has some threat weirdness. I pulled hate twice from our very good tank, and the second time was AFTER I Soul Shattered.

 

Shatter Combo w/ Fries

Violet Hold:
RNG decides the dificulty of the zone for you, the first two bosses are random and about half are extremely easy tank n' spanks, and the other half are relatively complex. A quick note on the actual mechanics of the zone:
-You get saved to the instance after the 6th wave and before the first boss.
-I suspect you will always get the same bosses per raid ID if you wipe, or we (and wowhead posters) got the same one by chance (~16%).

Zurumat the Obliterator (shadow):
-Looks to clearly be the 'hardest' in both execution and damage.
-If your dps do not back off, they will stack healing debuffs on themselves, up to 100%, and will die soon afterward from the heavy AoE damage.
-Theoretically, up to 3 people in your group should be able to see and kill the 'totems' at any point, but it is pretty random in practice as far as I could tell and you will probably have to rely on one person killing it (which really shouldn't be a problem anyways).

Our other boss was the arcane based one, who was very easily conquered by the strategy of pressing the 'w' key on your keyboard.

Final boss is very easy- just fight it like any other dragon in this game (stand at his sides, and out of aoe) and you'll be fine.

Azjol-Nerub
-First boss is simply a light gear check for your dps, you need to kill fast enough to not get overwhelmed.
-2nd boss is the same tank n' spank/don't stand in fires, quite easy.

Anub'Arak:
-Genuinely a difficult encounter for the expected gear level. This fight is similar to non-heroic but is just plain hectic damage wise and relatively complex (more complex than anything in any TBC 5 or 10 man zone, for sure). It's a long fight, we were doing it at probably 7-8 minutes. People will probably look back on this post in 6 months and laugh at that amount of time while they farm it in under 45 seconds, but we literally leveled to 80 hours before we tried him for the first time, so no snickering.

First phase:
-He himself is not too bad, he casts pound on the tank, which will easily one shot almost anyone who gets hit by it and should be avoided by everyone standing 15 yards in front of him, including the tank who should shift to one of his sides as it is casting. It is not hard to avoid but the only hitch is that he will sometimes cast it immediately after popping out of the ground on a random person. The best way to avoid this randomness death-trap is before he is going to resurface, have everyone spread out to the edge of the room except the tank who stands in the middle ready to pick him up.
-You need to dodge the impales coming out of the ground, but there is a decent grace period (~2 seconds).
-His aoe is pretty serious but should not be a problem to heal through for your healer, who will be able to just spam heals with no interruptions besides avoiding the impales.

Second phase:
-He will submerge every 25%, and adds come out.
-No need to go through the list of the specific adds, it's mostly irrelevant and they all are equally dangerous pretty much except for one exception:
-The Anub'ar Venomancer: If two of these guys are on your group and they get several poison volleys off, it does serious damage to everyone and you will be unable to heal through it. I would recommend killing or CCing these guys as the top priority if you have poor poison removal abilities within your group.
-Anub will resurface after you kill the guardians.

How to cheese the encounter:

 

Russta

With regards to Violet Hold, you do always get the same bosses if you wipe. We chose it as our first ever heroic and had to apply some strategy to Xevozz after we wiped. You can completely avoid his suck in teleport move by intelligently kiting him along the top part and line of sighting his orbs. He will be dead as he hits the far stairs if your DPS is decent.

If you get Ichoron, the only thing that makes him tricky is sometimes the healer can out aggro the tank while you're fighting the Globules due to the 99% damage reduction.

I've been a little surprised at how easy heroics have been so far. I was expecting them to be harder than Naxx but they're honestly on par. It's best to think of Naxx as a 10 man heroic that takes a few hours longer.

By far the hardest boss we've done on heroic so far is Herald Volazj. The best advice I can give is have the healer kite theirs around, the tank just tank his and pray both of those hold out while the melee kill theirs and can come help you.

Skadi's gauntlet takes a lot of coordination and his Whirlwind is ridiculous but Utgarde Pinnacle is alright to do after initially thinking it was hell reincarnate.

 

Mem

Something one might want to consider when farming reputation: you can do this in VH pretty well by resetting the Instance without clearing it completely. While you cannot raise your badge loots this way, it is a really fast way to grind rep. On the other hand most heroics can be done with old raid gear pretty well and upgrades will trickle in very quickly, at least for the hardcore crowd.

I think in general the tuning is ok, seeing how powerful ilvl blues are. If anything, some are a bit on the easy side - on the other hand, some can really challenge you even without doing achievements if your group comp is suboptimal or don't play it safe. Some things that might happen though is having tanks being killed by crit streaks if they haven't upgraded their gear completely.

Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom seems to be one of the more difficult heroics - the prince can nuke a group pretty badly (though I think some of our problems there were a result of our general brute force strats) and the herald is just hilarious - we had some good laughs when people had to kill a resto druid or me as a resto shaman. As a healer I just try to kite the dps zerg in order to preserver my mana - since even stoneclaw works pretty well, its a very easy strat to pull of as a shaman. If you are dps on this fight, kill the healer first. Otherwise changes are high you wont survive insanity.

 

dukes

Has anyone had some, er, 'interesting' behaviour in Azjol Nerub heroic? We killed the first boss, moved on to the second (Hadronox) and killed the 3 large champion-spider-things before him. Then he wandered up the ramp, got swarmed by 20 mobs (as normal, at least as far as I've seen), and managed to die to them, then despawned. We ended up with no boss to fight, and just ran straight through to the 2 guys before Anub'arak. I'm not sure quite what happened, but it was very strange :/ I assume that he's supposed to be immune (or takes heavily reduced damage) while killing the little spiders, and then you can fight him, but it seems like it bugged out. It's very weird to have the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title without actually having all the basic heroic achievements completed :>

 

mek

I (tried) to do Violet Hold daily today, and I see that the ethereal Xevozz is still as silly as he was in beta. We got him for the first boss, after a few wipes I wanted to reset the instance, but Blizzard has cunningly made Violet Hold heroic save you so you can't change your bosses. This is an exceptionally difficult fight, the only way we managed to down it was by cheesing LOS on the balcony to kite the balls and minimize teleport casts (this requires LOS, apparently). The real kick in the balls (yes, I went there) was when we wiped on the 16th wave of trash, and discovered that you have to start back at wave 1 and even fight the bosses again, who respawn with a generic name (and no loot)! We quit at that point, really absurd punishment and totally out of line expected dungeon behaviour. If there is one part of this fight that needs to go, it is the "enrage" mechanic where crossing the balls causes the boss to instantly kill your party. It's frustrating enough to deal with everything else in this fight.

Ahn'kahet last boss was much more challenging the second time I did it, due to our class compositon: with both a priest and a druid, the Twisted Visages healed extremely frequently, and none of our dps were capable of killing a single one, let alone myself or the tank. We tried making the druid sit in bear form when the boss casts Insanity, but oddly the druid clone, which did APPEAR to stay in bear form, would still cast nourish. Our solution was to make the druid log out for the duration of the fight, and 4manning it was simple. 2manning it would probably be even easier.

The trick to Oculus last boss is indeed properly timing use of Time Stop and Evasive Maneuvers. (Neat trick: for some reason, PW:S increases the drake's hp by 12.7k) It is a tough boss because one player not doing their job is a wipe. I can't imagine trying the heroic achievements for not using a colour of drake... well, maybe no ruby, but no green? How is that possible? I suppose 5 bronze drakes rotating time stop? Actually, now that I think about it, that might make for a quick and easy kill...

Finally, Gun'drak: the snake boss is the worst thing in here, I didn't have too much trouble healing the rhino boss, EXCEPT for one attempt where he charged me and decided to melee me for 20k. Fortunately it never happened again.

 

Russta

When you see the dragon walking to that cell, have your entire group move to the right set of stairs with the healer ahead of you. Make sure he comes to you directly and not up the stone ramp thing and as soon as he's at the top of the stairs go ballistic. When you see the orbs closing in, begin kiting. You can't just kite without any thought though because if you do that, the orb that lags behind can go up the stone ramp and cut you off. By the time you get to the stairs opposite where you started, the orbs will despawn and he'll call a new set. If you have half-decent DPS, he'll die at this point. If he doesn't, just kite back the other way. It completely trivializes the fight unless you get bad luck with an orb lagging behind awkwardly or your tank sucks at kiting smartly.

I've yet to do heroic Gun'drak without seeing the party completely destroyed on the snake boss. The best strategy right now seems to be kill him before you wipe which is stupid but mildly humorous.

 

dukes

I'm surprised - we didn't really have any trouble with the snake boss, and even got the achievement (two people got wrapped about a second after he died). Just go absolutely all out on the boss, and gank the shit out of the snakes with aoe as they come. This might have been easier as we had both a moonkin druid (typhoon, starfall), a ret paladin (divine storm), and a demonology warlock (demon form) for aoe to keep the snakes under control.

I've only done it once though, so it's probably quite a biased opinion.

 

RootBreaker

He doesn't take reduced damage from them. He usually puts leeching poison on them and heals through their attacks. One of the achievements for Azjol'nerub is to kill him before he webs the top doors and prevents more creatures from spawning, which presumably means that you kill him while he's still gaining life from attacking the leeching poison.

It sounds like the leeching poison wasn't working in your instance. Maybe he missed several of the little guys with it or it just bugged out.