My guild fights Firemaw one of two ways:

Method 1: 1 MT with 1 OT taunting off the wing buffets (and doing nothing else).

Method 2: 1 MT with 2 OTs taunting off the wing buffets (and doing nothing else).

While this strategy has worked for us in the past, lately we have been wiping on Firemaw repeadetly.

We generally wipe when the MT gets moved out of LOS from healing due to being hit by a wing buffet. Also Firemaw will sometimes "stick" to the offtank even though he is doing nothing but taunting and wearing the wing buffets. Taunt seems to get resisted alot and I dont like the fact that we can wipe due to an unlucky resist or two.

My question is, do you think their is a problem with our strategies? Are these strategies good ones?

If your MT being punted causes him to go LoS of healers you likely have bad positioning.

On the wing buffet topic its probably best to have 1 person primarily taking wing buffets so people know who to heal, and to minimize the people hit by shadow flame in the event he casts it instead of his wing buffet. And 1-2 people backing them up in case of taunt resists/etc.

Thanks for the info, just a couple of questions...

How would you have 1-2 people backing the OT up without exposing them to the shadowflame?

Should the offtank have his back to a wall or is it ok for him to be thrown back?
How many Wing buffets can/does your MT take before he loses too much aggro?
I sometimes find Ctraid's timing to be off sometimes (for the wing buffets), is this ever an issue for anyone else?

This one has been driving me crazy for months, firemaw is still the toughest fight in bwl for us due to this. everything else you can plan/counter but still not closer to a solution on this one. it gets messy after the offtank healers has been forced to move into los of firemaw a couple of times because of this.

will definitly try to implement xi's tip with just 1 offtank and 1 backup instead of 2 offtanks at all times (they rotate and move out of los to get rid of 10+ debuffs and to confuse offtank healers aswell)

1xdruid standing out of los and charging in to off taunt looked pretty cool last time but it would be sweet to make this fight a bit more stable than that.

any suggestions/explanations?

Flare x2

Our OT frequently gets thrown into the middle of the room. This creates the only danger in the encounter because your MT can be ported, and needs to shield wall/last stand/lifegiving gem probably as soon as the teleport lag occurs.

As for the OT's. If you assume your MT has the 25% front cone, you can give your dps a 25% back/side cone, and that leaves a 2 25% cones for your primary and secondary OT's.

We position him in such a way that the OT's healers (you only need 1 or 2) are on 1 side, and the MT's healers on the other side. Their vision crosses in an X. The only time we ever tend to lose an OT is if they get knocked back into the middle of the room with a decent flame buffet, firemaw stuck to them and a shadowflame inc. I'd probably expect to lose an OT or two from time to time until you get the encountered mastered and your tanks geared up a bit.

In terms of specifics its rather difficult for me to relate to people doing progress because we're at the point where its loldpszergs and as a rogue I don't back off until my flame buffet is about 1k.

Being an Arms/Fury warrior I can relate. It gets very tedious running in and out and in and out, and then he drops a Ring of Blackrock.. Which makes it worse.

We position our OTs so they get knocked back into a corner to prevent firemaw from flying in the middle of the room. If you picture your MT tanking just to the left of the doorway, he's on the left side of that mysterious gate that never opens. We have our OTs on the right side of that gate ( the one that never opens ) where they turn firemaw ~90 degrees and take the wing buffet. I hope that made sense... its the best way I can think of describing it.

The only problem with doing it this way is that you gotta have healers take some flame buffets in order to heal your offtanks. We usually assign a priest and a druid to pop out every once in a while and toss a few heals and HoTs on them.

Other than that as everyone has said, you're definitely on the right track. The biggest problem we had when we were learning the fight is losing the tank to serious spike damage, a combination of a thrash, shadowflame and high flame buffet tick can be lethal. Once the MT dies, it usually all spirals down from there.

There are a couple of interrelated reasons why Firemaw is sticking to your OT. We had this problem a couple of times too.
Maybe your MT is simply not generating enough aggro, or, your OT is generating more aggro than neccasary. Now, as far as tanking goes, its stupid to have a strategy which says "dont let your OT gain too much aggro". Also, keeping in mind that the OT is taking wing buffets regularly, there is no reason for Firemaw to stick to him... your MT just needs to do a better job.

We have 1 MT and 1 OT. Taunt getting resisted is an inconvinience, but it hasnt been a problem for us yet because our MT does a fine job.
Firemaw is an interesting fight for us. We relied quite heavily on OOC rezzing, therefore the last patch made the fight slightly harder. However, we wer still able to get him first try last reset.

The one thing that screws us up, is the "awkward" shadowflame. Once in a while, even when Firemaw is directly facing the MT, he does a shadowflame that decimates entire ranks of rogues.. infact, the shadowflame visual even looks like it has hit the MT, but it hits the rogues for some reason. Previously, this wasnt a problem due to OOC rezzing, but my guess is an "awkward" shadowflame like this could severely cripple us in the future.

Heya Revenj! :D

I'm pretty sure that firemaw sticking to your tank is a result of a delay in the actual aggro reduction on its target. So when it hits your offtank, firemaw keeps chasing until he realizes that your aggro has been reduced, then turns back to your MT. That's the most likely scenario IMO, but it could be a freak combination of crits / misses that keeps your offtank ahead of your main when firemaw starts chasing.

There really isn't any reason for your offtanks to be attacking or using any abilities other than taunt in this fight. Taunt takes their aggro up to the top of the charts anyway, and you're risking one of those freak accidents where the offtank crits a few times after taunting and the MT misses 2-3 straight abilities at the same time.