Loken- After two hours of wiping and a lucky kill one night, 2 hours and calling it the next and then an additional hour of learning on the third day my group came to some base conclusions.

Nova hits hard, but is perfectly predictable and easily survivable.
Arc lightning sucks, hard
Damage aura is easy to control, but taking larger ticks from it leads to getting gibbed by arcs

The nova is tuned quite tightly, getting out of it, and then back in in time to dodge the pulse and potential arc gib was unreliable at best.

Stand well in his target model, (even ranged) Burn him as fast as humanly possible. Eat the nova's, heal lots.

Priest healers obviously excel here, but its pleanty do-able with druid/shaman. Paladins are ill-advised.

I don't understand the issue with Loken. We never had any problems with him after the first pull(with all different classes of healers used later). Everyone clump up obviously so that you take minimum damage from his attacks. Tank the boss at maximum hit range, with everyone clumped at the tank. With that extra "free" distance, no one will take any damage from his nova if they react in time(which isn't hard), and then run back in and repeat. Our healers call this fight "boring" when done properly.

About the Anub'Arak heroic achievement:

This definitely has been something that has been bothering me for a while. I've theorycrafted a few possible solutions, though, and will probably be trying them soon. One possibility, as has already been mentioned, is to use mindnumbing poison or something similar. This doesn't really seem to help unless it does something more than merely increase the cast time on his abilities. However, here are some things that might:

1: It may be that the timer for anub'arak is based on how long you are actually present in the encounter. If you die intentionally and use a soulstone (or something similar) at the end of the fight, you may get credit.
2: You can actually kill the adds faster by having one person stand outside the room (possibly 2). This would increase the speed of the encounter, theoretically. The person would have to be fairly strong to solo them, though. I could see a death knight doing it. It would have to be a class that has good armor and has powerful self healing. I don't see this as the intended way to do the encounter, but rather a clever use of game mechanics. It's also rather limited in terms of class composition.
3: Spell reflect pound. Never tried this since we presumed it wasn't a spell, but if mind-numbing poison increases the cast time, it may count as such.
4: Taunt just as he submerges. This may cause him to cancel his submerge.

Note that these are merely suggestions, and they may or may not work.

The paladins who find the fight "easy" the first time must be fluking the correct positioning because if you clump up without being at max hit distance the multi-target Arc Lightning is huge, as has been mentioned several times before. Can we have less "stop being bad" posts? These are not the official WoW forums.

The people who mentioned having a problem with him did not use this method. The fight is not hard, it's just not immediately obvious what to do.

Just got Loken last night for the first time. It was the first time i healed it as a druid (the other attempts i was boomkin with a resto shammy healing.) It was definitely the most fun i've had healing thus far in the xpac. We did the standing on the tank, move when the tank moves thing. started with the tank on that circle right in front of the boss, and ran directly down the stairs on each lightning nova until we hit the pillar, then started moving right and the boss was dead on the next move-in. No deaths, but goddamn i felt heroic with that healing! I still don't see how non-HoT based classes can handle that encounter, i didn't stop casting instants through the whole damn fight, moving or not.

It really relies on all 5 groups members moving extremely quickly when that cast starts, and getting right back in afterwards. At the same time, we got the achievement to kill him in 2 minutes, but that is probably a function of our tank wearing full northrend epics already, and our DPSers being pretty darn good at their job.


I also found the Halls of Stone encounter with Bronzebeard pretty epic, and haven't managed to finish it without wiping at the same time the event ends. seems to be a bit of a gear check, IMO. Our tank was pretty stellar, too.

for the last boss of An'Kahet, the entire group found it impossible to outdamage my HOTs when trying to kill me, so i had the bright idea that i'd switch to cat form just as he's casting insanity. They proceeded to curse at my cat form chain casting nourish.

I just have a hard time believing that this is the correctly tuned intended solution, considering the rather strict group composition that it requires and most likely always will regardless of gear, at least through foreseeable gear levels in this expansion. It's a really clever solution, but I just find it odd that Blizzard would intentionally put something like that in the game.

However, you have to be careful to not get him below 33% before he's finished casting the first Insanity. We had him to 20% and it resulted in Volazj immediately casting a second Insanity leaving everyone to deal with eight images. Needless to say, that was a wipe.

Well that's the point. You go through 2 insanities at one time, saving a lot of time. We realised it's probably easier however, to do it the other way around: a normal insanity first, then go from 33% to dead for the second.

The key to Loken is you can reduce the damage from Arc Lightning tremendously. You can clump your group up, and whoever gets the arc lightning immediately moves away from the group (but not distance themselves further from Loken, of course). This way the 3-4k only hits one person, and doesn't spread to others. Then as long as you move away from the nova in time, it's not very stressful on the healers.

Also, I have never succeeded at surviving an insanity phase in the heroic version, haha. Maybe that's because I'm usually going with a Pally healer, and good luck CCing them long enough to kill the rest of the group.

BTW, does anyone else find Mage-Lord Urom (the 2nd to last boss in The Oculus) really annoying on heroic as melee DPS?

It's been said before in this thread, but I'll repeat it because it truely makes the fight easy:
When insanity begins casting (it's a long cast time) have your healer run directly to the entrance as far as he can. Have all your dps and tank run the other direction, towards the exit of the instance. This will put you around 100+ yards from the healer, enough time to burst a few down before the healer gets back. A hunter in this situation can also easily trap the healer because he knows the path it will take to get back to himself.

Okay, ran Gotta Go today in Azjol-Narub, and tried a lot of the suggestions that were came up with. A few things I found out:

-Anubarak cannot be taunted while going down and prevent him from summoning his adds.
-We tried keeping 1 DPS on the outside, but it didn't prove to be anything different, if anything, became less efficient.
-I respec'd ret to try and help DPS but that didn't help either.

We used a hunter, prot warrior, holy paladin, mage, rogue as our group setup. We did find out however:

-Mind Numbing from rogue and hunter trap stack
-You need to DPS an entire phase (75% to 50%) in that 9 second pound/locust swarm.

I do think we lacked DPS, and perhaps a heroism/totems could have helped. We got him from 75% to almost 59% about w/o heroism, though I'm not too sure as if that's still the way to do it.

Should be able to solo heal it, just apply 3 stacks of the poison to as many targets (including boss / whelps). We did 3 bronze, 2 green for Ruby Void achievement and was pretty much same strategy, except a bronze was tanking instead of the red. We had one of the green dragons get healing aggro and kite the whelps.

Oops, I don't think I made it clear - in retrospect my post was a bit vague.
We killed it on our first attempt after I swapped over to solo healing.

Yes. I'm happy I can at least help with a few heals instead of nothing at all or dying while trying to do DPS. That AoE is Firemaw's Flame Buffet on crack.

It's also important to note that releasing after death but accepting a ress removes your dragon, much like Tears on Archimonde.

I don't know if it's been mentioned but the insanity is line of sightable. You can tank him right next to one of the pillars on either side when you enter the room. The cast is long enough that even the tank can get out of LOS. If someone is slow and gets snagged by the cast, you'll most likely have all 5 members in one realm to kill off the add(s).

Some other fun tips and tricks for those trying to get heroic achievements done:

For Watch Him Die you can have a hunter volley two guardian packs and multishot another and kite to the entrance. We were able to kill the boss in that time without lust (used lust on our first go at it and wiped, silly us). The hunter got the achievement all the way at the entrance while dead.

For Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi (and the other one, but that's easy), you can run through the gauntlet event, collect your harpoons and leash. You will keep your harpoons after leashing. We finished the boss with nearly a minute left on the timer.

For Consumption Junction, he adds a consume for every person or mob in line of sight of him. I think if you have some sort of boss timer it will track consume time, but we just had everyone but the tank run out every 12 seconds or so. We tanked him in the cubby to the left of his stairs. I think he was at 4 stacks when he died.


Most of the achievements seem fairly easy to do except for Gotta Go! which I'm sure most people have figured out. We went at it for a bit with feral tank, enhance, rogue (mind numbing), hunter and shadow priest and the lowest we got it was 3%. We came back with an elemental shaman and we were easily getting it to sub 50% before first burrow without lust. The instance servers crashed before we got lucky enough to get a 26-30% cast.

Is that the Drakonid? If so there's a really easy way to avoid all the aoe in that encounter, with pretty obvious visual cues to which side he nukes.

There are alternatives. We tried doing the gauntlet only for an hour or 2 but found it insanely difficult to live through a gauntlet run or somehow managing to pull it all. However... If you can either get 2nd boss (Caster guy, looks like gothik only recolored) to spawn at the doorway to the house, or drag him over there when he spawns, you can end up with a fully spawned front half of the zone when arthas arrives at the houses. So continue on and do your timed event with Arthas - when you get to the gauntlet, do not talk to him (this allows the gauntlet to respawn). Plow gauntlet, get drake. Then you can do 1 shot at pulling the entire gauntlet, if you wipe, no big deal. Zone back in, round up all the zombies you left up in the front. We've ranged from 30-45 zombies up in the front half of the zone. As mentioned above though they won't respawn so you've got one shot. Pull em all, get em clumped etc, then run through the houses and you only have to deal with the first half of the gauntlet since you will have all the zombies from the other side etc. Just time it so you pull the gauntlet right as the zombies are coming out of the house for optimal timing etc.



And to you guys who are getting "Gotta Go"... christ that shit is hard. We tried with a few different group comps and just could not get him to blow through a burrow phase. Apparently doing 125k damage in 6 seconds is harder than it looks.

We just trained the 85 zombies in the earlier half of the instance to the gauntlet, killed them, then killed the first 15 zombies in the gauntlet. This requires you to kill the 2nd boss at the end of the first area(so you don't have to kill the now non-respawning zombies on the way there.)

edit: looks like I was beaten.

Comments to a few things I read here:

Zombiefest:
Can be completed after the first Boss befor the 6th wave spawns.
Just pull everything, leave one person behind, while you pull new Zombies will already spawn which are pulled by the player left behind.
This is the only way to get more then 100 Zombies if you dont want to try it in the gauntlet event.

Ahn'kahet Endboss:
This is totally possible if you have the right setup with 2 Insanity phases (Dunno if its really possible to Out DPS the 2nd DPS cast).
We did it with DK, War, Rogue, Rogue, Shaman.
The Rogues can Vanish right at the end of the Insanity cast an poissibly avoid their adds immidiatly helping someone else.
This isn't needed thought, we did it with 2 ppl using CDs in the first phase, 2 ppl in the 2nd phase.
Took a total of 1:55 to kill him.

Watch him die & Gotta Go
Need suggestions here, we tryed Watch him die a whole evening, out best try with kiting tactics was 16%, trying to tank the watchers etc. never worked out, we always wiped at the disorients.

Gotta Go I have no clue, maybe having 1-2 ppl outside who can still auto-attack through the Web.

Occulus
The 20 minutes thing is tough, you need to chainpull, avoid the most of the dragons. You should plan at least with 4 Minutes for the Final Boss only.

The Void Achivements:
Emerald Void is cake, just leave your group healer heal from the Ground and only use Ruby or Ember Drakes.
Ember Void we did with 2 Rubys and 3 Emeralds, think its possible to do 2 Void achivements at one time by picking only Ruby or Ember drakes and having your group healer heal the stuff.
Ruby Void might be hard with the adds, we'll try this today.

Regarding Loken: a well geared shaman, priest or druid will be able to heal through his nukes. Yesterday we had severe serverlags in the instances resulting in a wipe on him using a more conventional strat. Bruteforcing is probably not recommended if you are sporting only BC and leveling gear though.

In occulus you can do two achievements at the same time using only green drakes and kiting him. However there is a certain risk he will evade if you fly too far away when he uses his ultimate, resulting in a reset. Since nuking him down with greens only is a rather tedious afair I'm not sure it was wort the effort tbh. I think we had three or four low percentage tries where he evaded, each taking about 5-10 minutes.

Volazj's Quick Demise - Without doing any LOS or running away a huge distance we found this one quite easy by using 4 dps and tank (me, feral druid). Went through both Insanity phases, no skipped phases etc and had 20-25 seconds to spare on the timer. We had an enhance shaman that healed a little while in the normal phase, rogue kicking mind flays so the tank didn't take too much damage. Most of us are geared in 10 and 25 Naxx gear though.

Zombiefest! - We came up with the same solution as Sebudai. After wave 9 we met up at the house where Arthas meets your group after wave 10 boss dies. We had a mage kite the entire first area zombies (85 total, we came up with the same # as others have stated). The other four of us killed the boss and cleared the event through the house with Arthas. After Chrono Lord dies kite the zombies through the house and kill them in the alley while starting that gauntlet.

Hadronox Denied - Are most just burning him down between a poison? Planning to take in a 4 dps + tank and begin a burn right after poison kills off the spiders on him. Our first attempts were with 2 healers 2 tanks 1 dps. One tank held all the stair mobs while rogue and feral druid dps Hadronox, but the tank at the stairs gets overwhelmed pretty quickly. 9% was our best attempt with 2 tank 2 heal setup before our second tank had to log.

Gotta Go! - Are the cast time debuffs stacking and 100% necessary to stack them? It's been stated multiple times that people are getting a 9 second cast, but math shows 1 mind numbing isn't going to make the cast 9 seconds.

No. It's the humanoid who chain casts Frost Bomb that you kite around in a circle. And then you find yourself trapped between two pillars, snared, with your Sprint and Cloak down, and he's getting ready to cast Arcane Explosion .