Phase3 is REALLY healing intensive, and in a fight where you can't afford any extra deaths due to aoe raid damage, Divine Guardian rotations are REALLY nice.

Also, I would save bloodlusts until sub-50% so you can carry it into execute range and your healers can benefit from hasted heals.

6 healers is pretty standard, but the ramp up in difficulty to 25 man is a gigantic leap up from the 10 man version. Static disruption hitting the entire raid for 5k and tanks getting oneshot without cooldowns really puts alot of pressure on healers.

What else can it be governed by than hitrating? I'd be surprised if there was some hidden dispel resist mechanic. There certainly isn't in PvP (as shown by the item buff and debuff bug).

A prot paladin is also going to be hitcapped and it's not unrealistic require to have one of those three available in a 25-men raid. Especially on hard mode, the last thing you want is multiple healers using GCD's to dispel a debuff. On any other mode, it's a non-issue.

We did this last night with 5 healers and 2 tanks, the extra dps was VERY noticable, and with proper CD management healing is possible.

Healers :

2 druids
1 priest (holy)
1 paladin
1 shaman

Priest was healing the dotsoakers with groupheal (helped by shaman in the last phase). Paladin was dispelling himself as well as healing. Tank was continously hotted/shielded, and all that could spare the GCD preloaded big heals for Fusion Punch. I did the fight as ret and made sure my SS was on the tank as well.

Tanks:

Druid
DK

Both with enough resistance to get 20% resist (flask + totem + an enchant afaik)
We killed him ~10 seconds after the druid died second time (druid-dk-druid-rogue avoidance tanking).

My Guild is a "Casual" Guild, means that we raid 3 times week, 3 hours, 9 hours/week and we just do 10man.

We killed Ironcouncil Hard Mode, Steelbraker last, and we are pretty much sure that we will do XT Hard Mode on this CD without problems.

But Our problem is, Our Group is Heavy Melee Group, Our Setup is:

Warrior (Tank)
Druid (Resto)
Shaman (Resto)
Feral Druid (Off Tank and DPS)
Rogue
DK Blood
Ret Paly
Warrior Arms
Hunter
Warlock

As a small guild, we dont have much choice, we have 11 raiders, and our 11o raider is a Unholy DK.
Hard Modes like Hodir gives an unfair, in my opnion, advantage for a caster group. i wanna know if any guild already killed him on Hard Mode with that many melees and what Strat they use??? and what the avarage DPS of your melees on Hodir Hard.

Another problem is that we dont have priests on our raid, it means NO Mass Dispel. Another "Bring the ppl, not the class" FAIL.


We wanna focus on Hard Modes and wanna know what fight is really viable for us. We have most of us geared on 10man Ulduar gear with a 25 Naxx gear gained on pugs.

From doing it with the same number of melee, melee are amazing on Hodir. Haste beams have a huge impact and fire has almost none, so all you really need to worry about is getting storm clouds to them. WWS from our Hodir-10 hard-mode kill shows a Rogue at 9k, a Death knight at 7k, enhancement Shaman at 6.6k, 10-man geared death knight at 6.4k, offspec Arms Warrior 6k, then a sharp drop with our casters - 4.2k and 4k. Neither were mainspec DPS, so that could have been part of it.

We did it with only a little time to spare on the three minute timer, but we could have handled the buffs, etc, better than we did on that attempt, too.

Honestly, I'd rather do that fight with melee stacked than with casters, because I have to worry about dragging him so he ends up with a moonkin by a fire with casters. With melee, all that's strictly necessary are the haste pillars and the storm cloud (although any fires we can get help, and help with my threat).

Melee don't proc Singed from Toasty Fire - Spell - World of Warcraft. Hunters are probably the best class to have stack it because they don't benefit from the moon beams as much.

It depends on the type of melee you're using, i've certainly had Icy Touch and Death Coil start the singe stack(double size debuff icons for your own stacks make this really obvious) and keep it rolling. Whether attacks that hit with magical damage such as Posions, Envenom, Frost Strike or Scourge Strike also put the debuff up i honestly don't know.

Icy Touch and Death Coil are ranged attacks. That is why the stack singed.

I was under the impression that a 'resist' message related to resistance based failures whereas a 'miss' message related to +hit related failures.

This is certainly the case for PvP. Is it different in PvE?

That's not really a good example though. Most 10 man fights are going to favour whichever type of dps you have most of, since in general melee bring melee buffs and casters bring caster buffs. This is doubly the case for Hodir where you have 6 people in melee range to be a target of storm cloud vs 2 ranged dps. So your melee are getting tonnes of buffs (you sound like you have them all covered with that group) and most of your storm clouds, and vice versa for your ranged.

I never said that it was a good example of caster DPS vs melee, I just said that it was an exceptionally good fight for melee DPS. Which it is.

regarding hodir: we've farmed hodir 25 hardmode for a couple of weeks now (3 staffs so far, yay.), and even though it might be true that normal melee attacks dont stack the singed debuff, we have never had trouble with it falling of when there was a fire near the melee.

The only thing which wipes us now on that fight is mage-npcs being thrown away to the other side of the room and stacking the fires miles away from anyone.

A prot paladin is not going to be spell-hit capped.

How demanding is 25 man hard mode Hodir?

We've had a couple of hours on hard mode Iron Council and are getting very close, within a couple of % but in the end had random deaths spoil our final tries last reset. I'm hearing that the DPS requirement is higher for council than it is for Hodir though, is that true?

Additionally a prot paladin is usually not melee hit capped.

Hodir is more about spreading buffs properly and avoiding icicles/freezes than burning him down, like Steelbreaker. Mess those, and no DPS will save you, at least until you completely outgear him. Additionally, it might be bit challenging to heal at first, since using more than 4 will gimp your DPS quite a bit. But, if you already tried it that way, it shouldn't take long.

For Hodir we assign 3 range dps to free the 2 mages and the 2 shamans.

Except at pull where melee free the moonkins, moonkins and priests will be freed by the mages special attack.

This macro will put the 8 raid symbols on the mob, the 2 priests have Square and Skull because they are usually used by BigWigs or DBM for the Storm Cloud players.

This one is the template for dps assignment on iceblocks dps after each flash freeze.

It saves time and it helps to ensure that the 4 most important NPCs should be efficiently freed. The quickest you free them the quickest the Toasty Fires and the Storm Clouds are back.

This evening we got nuked by lots of

Energy Orb - Spell - World of Warcraft

during one of XTs heart phases.... what on earth is that? (I got the spell number from the combat log... the text it was called "Energiekugel" (german client), and the damage corresponded to the wowhead information).

I suspect it might have been healable if we'd been expecting it, but.. well.. we weren't.

Even wowhead doesn't list where this spell comes from... any ideas? Bug? Or was someone standing in an untargetable position or something equally dodgy?

Thanks in advance for any hints


EDIT: Urr.. it appears this happened a few times in the fight, and only broke our heads at this heart phase... is this possibly the gravity bomb effect? The light bomb doesn't even do close to this damage. People didn't seem to be standing near enough together for the gravity bomb explanation to really fit, but nothing else is coming to mind...

He spams those energy orbs on each of the scrap piles, presumably to discourage war stomping on top of them and the like. They shouldn't be hitting elsewhere.

If you click on "See Also" you get this spell linked:

Energy Orb - Spell - World of Warcraft

"Energy Orb
Unlimited range
Instant
Fires an energy orb at a random pile."

I would guess it fires TO one of the four piles. Supposedly it is from preventing you from tanking the XT on top of or close to them. We do tank him well between those piles and we never ever encountered that spell. Given we do only raid U10, this may very well occur on U25 (though I raided U25 twice in a "PUG" raid compsed of twinks from leading raiding guilds from my server, and I never saw this effect). Try not to get too close to that piles and see if you get rid of that spell.

Edit: damn, too slow...

It could be possible (I haven't tested this yet) that Blizzard made their range much bigger in the patch in order to make it so you can't tank him between the piles and stop the adds from spawning on that side. I haven't done it yet this week to test it, but that could be what has happened. I'm sure some guilds could have still done it that way and just healed through the damage as well, but it would make sense as it always seemed strange to me that you could eliminate half the piles.

This explanation fits perfectly... we've always tanked him near one of the scrap heaps (the one right of the steps, for what it's worth), because then we don't get any adds spawning from there. We had a different tank on XT this week, so I guess the previous tank had been positioning him "differently" without thinking anything of it.

Thanks to those who replied

Edit: Ulduar-10 in all cases for us... I've neer been in Ulduar-25 and as far as I know nor have any of my raiders. The behaviour - in paticular the non-spawn of adds at a nearby heap, may well be different between 10/25 man.

EditII after seeing thefatman999's comment: We this week, as previously, only tanked him near one pile; if the positioning was different at all, it would have been that XT and his tank were closer to that one pile, certainly not further from it, and certainly not between the two right ones. However, it's entirely possible we've been healing through it in the past and the *area* of the explosion has increased; again, I'll check, but the fact that the first death to this, our pala healer, was actually a fair bit distant, may lend credence to this idea.

EditIII after checking last weeks wws: Here, only the tank was getting hit; the melee DD (Who, in the heart phase, are practically on top of said tank) were not. This week, all the melee DD and even the nearest healer were being hit, as was the tank. This, as noted, lends credence to the idea that something about this ability has been tweaked - the targetting behaviour / effect radius / similar of the orbs, perhaps. wowhead lists an effect radius of 15 feet; I assume this extracted from the current game data files somehow. Is it possible to check what these values were pre-3.1.3?

EditIV: Tried the "tank him between two piles" variant mentioned by a few people here on friday, and were immediately succesful, and for the first time got NO damage from the energy orbs. So I guess everything points to it really just having been a change in how our "new" tank positioned him, rather than some game change