From what I'm seeing from attempts today you do double damage against the hearth, which also transfers over the boss. Pretty tightly tuned boss I must say, had like 20 seconds left on the enrage timer. If you don't have solid melee dps this fight will be a pain, as they will be doing the most damage since ranged will be having to pull off the boss to kill scrapbots.

Ignis is STILL bugged beyond belief, don't see how guilds are killing him when he's one shotting a raid member pratically everytime he slag pots.

You don't need solid *melee* DPS for XT-200. There's nothing stopping you from assigning only part of your ranged DPS to killing the bots, while the rest remains on the boss. Provided you have enough AoE-ranged to dispose of the bots effectively, the DPS-composition of your raid beyond that matters little.

From what I saw yesterday, Deconstructor is difficult but not insurmountable. It's actually quite well tuned, which is a bit refreshing from Lich King content. I'm not too sure about the hard mode, though. It seems like resetting his health, plus a health boost, without resetting the enrage timer would be very difficult indeed.

We tried a few attempts at Ignis but it seemed quite buggy. We were also having a really hard time igniting the golems. Our tank couldn't manage to position them so that they would take fire damage without also soaking a few thousand dps/sec himself. I'm not sure if it's intended that he position them so they're in the fire and he isn't, or if the tank is supposed to just be healed through it.

I agree, it's a shame that there's no other way to keep the golems in the fire. If only there was something you could do that allowed the tank to not stand in fire!

We had several Slag Pot gibs in our 10-man Ignis tries last night, which really put a crimp in our learning the fight. That aside, the timer between adds is pretty tight, and lacking a reliable root makes control pretty tough. We attempted to have the tank drag an add through the pit and tank at the edge, with the add in the fire and the tank out, but their hitbox is pretty small and the margin for error was almost nonexistent. I'm sure it'll be easier with more people capable of rooting in the group. On the tries without gibs, it became a matter of being overrun and having the add tank die to a bunch of pissed-off golems. Once the bug is fixed, this fight will still be a coordination check, but a far more doable one.

By comparison, Razorscale was quite fun, and well-tuned for an early boss. The only annoying aspect of the fight that I could see was that the entirety of Phase 1 amounts to potential Kel'thuzad ice tombs at any time. A combination of fireball + blue fireball + 1st tick was pretty much a death from full health within ~2-3 seconds, especially on a stationary healer. We got around it by moving as much as possible, but even normal consecutive fireballs on anyone with less than full health would frequently cause a death. Still, it's far more controllable than the Ignis pot of doom.

Also, on Ignis, can I safely assume it's intended that immunity effects used during the Slag Pot kill the debuff entirely? It appeared that Cloak of Shadows and Paladin bubble would remove the debuff and stop the incoming damage, though the person would still be stuck in the pot for the full duration. Also, voiding the debuff in this way indeed resulted in not getting the haste buff that follows, which would make sense.

One more observation: Fire resistance turns out to be very potent for controlling the damage spikes in these fights. The 130 from Paladin aura was predictably causing 10-30% resists on almost every fireball, slag pot tick, etc. I suspect it was chosen for these early fights to make abundant use of a damage type that didn't have stackable resistance gear readily available, so they could fill their role as gear/skill checks and not be trivialized via resistance. Most of the really nasty damage in both of these fights would be far less dramatic if you could get over 300 fire resist with 2 pieces of gear, a la Sapphiron. Granted, you could still use your leftover BT gear, but I doubt the severe loss of stats would be anywhere near worth it.

We spent a couple hours on Ignis on Tuesday evening in an admittedly non-optimal group, but regardless took a nearly BiS Warrior Tank, a Druid tank, and a moderately geared DK (fresh 80 to replace our old DK Tank).

Although Ignis is being killed, we just felt that the outgoing damage from Ignis' white damage was not reasonable at that point because of the job required of the offtank, the Slag Pot, and the unavoidable AOE fire bursts. We had several attempts in which a tank with what, natural buffed HP of 39-40k would eat Ignis white hits for 30-40k, making the likelihood of a 2-shot very realistic. I saw some posts on the R&D forums where others experienced this so I hope we're not the only sane people out there seeing these hits.

I know about the golem buff bug which was supposedly fixed, but we didn't even get any golems down as he would spawn up to 3 of them in the first minute before the off-tank could get any molten.

For some reason I just feel that Ignis is perhaps a little overtuned in consideration of his position in the instance. Yes he's optional, but he's in the starting "wing" and I guess I might be a minority in thinking that this should be the wing that gets raids "feeling" a ramping Ulduar difficulty.

This was our difficulty as well. We were having a bit better luck with Chains of Ice over root, but it was still exceptionally difficult get 20 stacks. We'd get up to 19 constantly and then the scorch would end.

We experienced similar problems on Wednesday night. Ignus hits seemingly way too hard, to the point that he might need to be re-tuned. Have people really been downing him?

It doesn't make much sense for BIS tanks to get two-shotted consistantly. It's not as if there is any gear to get elsewhere, this is the second (basically) boss in t8...

I have about 43k hp raid buffed, and actually stacked an extra healer in our raid just to try to compensate for this. The healers were able to heal through what appeared to be fairly significant damage spikes until the raid started taking massive AOE, and then it would fall apart.

It still feels killable, just needs a little bit of tuning perhaps.

Which makes sense, considering the hard modes. Back then, the end boss(es) acted like the hard mode of the instance. It also made loot from some of the early bosses on the next instance undesirable as they're just sidegrades mostly of the end boss loot from the previous tier.

Judging from what my guild has done so far, it seems Flame Leviathan is tuned to be a Naxx difficulty boss and then it ramps up quickly after. I'm thinking they might need to tune Flame Leviathan a little harder so it'll be a bridge from Naxx to the next Ulduar bosses. Otherwise, it's too much of a pushover then doing the next boss is a rude shock.

You say that, but you are wearing full 7.5 gear, not the mostly tier 7 gear a "10 man guild" would have going into Ulduar10. Blizz is theoretically tuning Ulduar10 for groups that didn't do Naxx25, Sarth25 with drakes, or Malygos25, eh.

You may already have factored that in though - we beat him around 5m15s in Ulduar10 last night (after we failed to form a 25 man raid lock thanks to instance server issues with Ulduar25 last night), so I imagine a good "10 man guild" could just hit the enrage timer for a kill.