Your statement regarding Hodir being melee unfriendly is just plain false. Our hardmode kill last week had a Rogue at 9.2k, myself (Enhance) at 7.3k, and our normally-tanking-DK came in at 6.7k with his secondary spec. The key person in this fight if you're melee heavy is the tank; he has to make sure that Hodir is always positioned such that there is a beam of light behind Hodir for the melee to stand in.

As for the rest of the hardmodes, so far I haven't seen anything that suggests raid stacking of ranged/melee is necessary to beat any of them. I will have to reserve judgement on Mim and Yogg, since I haven't attempted them yet, but so far decent play, regardless of class, seems to get the hardmodes down. And in case you're wondering, yes, my guild is a 10-man guild; we do not run 25 mans, though we do have plenty of Naxx25 gear from PuGs.

Umm...Hodir is absolutely melee unfriendly (well, not really unfriendly, just biased to casters). There is never any reason for casters to not completely stomp melee on that fight by a very large margin. Your melee might have been pulling close to 10k DPS, but casters can get in excess of 14k.

That being said, there is no reason that you can't do the fight without stacking ranged/melee. Most of the fights are tuned to require a fair balance between the two groups; having a group stacked in either direction will tend to hurt you more than help you.

We killed XT just fine yesterday tanking him between the scrap piles on the right side. We didn't get any spawns from those two piles and neither did we get nuked by those energy orbs.

So from my experience they didn't make this strategy impossible by a range increase on the energy orbs.

Ditto in reverse - we used west (left) side, per our normal setup. No scrap pile explosions on our side of the room.

Regarding Hodir - excessive stacking of casters or melee just increases likelihood that any given moonbeam has a snowfall on it. The more melee or ranged have to dance out of them, the less they're able to leverage that buff. More melee = more chance per moonbeam for a snowfall, same goes for more ranged. I'd think a good split of both would minimize required movement and allow greatest raid DPS.

we are a bit late on 10-men Hardmode, but we are now working on Mimiron.

After a dozen of pulls, we handle the flame better but the damage input on the raid during P2 is still massive.

For healing efficiency I requested that all ranged (group 2) stay as close as possible from me in order to optimize the raid healing.

But one of our player (a mage) has flame kitting duty and having one player separated seems to be an issue for the overall healing.

Is it better to keep control on flames or can it be ignored ?

During phase 1, I had the feeling that the Napalm Shell was hitting very hard and the healing required is bit stressful, especially when the MT was under plasma. With a heal lineup made of Paladin, Druid and Priest, the direct healing on either the MT or the Napalm player was an issue when happening at the same time, any suggestion on this ?

Try if you can improve this with your holy palading utilizing Beacon of Light. Let him put it on the MT and make sure he is able to pump in full Holy Lights on the Napalm target without anyone sniping heals on that target. Make sure he knows how to use Hand of Sacrifice, too.

Unholy DK and Frost DK can perform very well on Hodir.

This would be because while most melee benefit from the moonbeam and stormpower they get little or nothing from Singed. Unholy and Forst DKs, however, benefit greatly from it. This means they have all three buffs helping them and unlike casters they can move or jump without stopping DPS.

Any class that can do 8k+ on Hodir can be considered as performing well. The only class that do less, at least on our tries, are DPS warriors(arms and fury) and bad geared offspecs. All other melees classes can sustain the 8k+ so it's not that big of an issue, but if you stack melees, you'll have a harder time compensating for the tank/healer/bad offspecs to reach the timer, when a couple of 14-16k mages/locks would help a lot.

The "issue" with stacking melees is the amount of people getting caught by the nova when it happens, and the amount of icicles falling down on them forcing them to move out of the beams/fires very often, when ranged can at least spread out a little bit more. However most melees usually get better returns out of JoL which helps a lot during frozen blows, and they don't lose any DPS if there's no fire around them because they can still DPS while moving.

Did they change flame Leviathan to give a Runed Orb per tower left up btw? Yesterday we did 2 towers and got a stack of 2 orbs and then a 3rd orb on it's own. I'm wondering if you now get an orb per tower than the usual chance of getting an orb also.

Looking at the Hodir section of WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish indicates that while casters are usually on top, but everybody can usually put out obscene dps as well. The top 50 rogues averaged 13,521DPS.

We did 10-man +2 as usual this week and only got one orb.

I think it is safe to say that some guilds leverage for specific performance and that tends to be unduly reflected in any "top XX" listing. Using a priority system to bring buffs to a location and giving healing and other tricks to certain classes can affect your performance dramatically and if you really want to push it, then it can be quite silly. Due to the threat mechanics, I imagine some guilds even like to spike a specific person for reasons other than pure ePeen.

The Hard mode is obtainable now in many ways and I am hardly shocked that some guilds tend to leverage melee while others leverage casters. To me though, it seems the fight was intended to leverage casters and especially Mages. It is also probably the easiest way to meet the new timer. Whatever is working however is what one should run with of course.

Had a couple of questions about "I choose you, Steelbreaker", or hard-mode iron council, and since their isn't a thread for it i figured i'd post it here.

So, we have been trying hard-mode off and on for a couple weeks now and have been having varying amounts of success. We absolutely stomped the 10 man version in 2 attempts, and laughed at how easy it was, but have been hung up on the 25 man version. Since we just finished XT hardmode 25, i figured we'd go at this hard-core again.

First night we tried Runemaster Molgeim --> Brun (lightning guy) --> Steelbreaker. Once we got the hang of it we were making it to P3, aka Steelbreaker, easily. Random deaths from Static Disruption happened here or there, and we figured out how to use soakers for the static shocks when working on Steelbreaker, but we could never manage the DPS to kill him before all of our tanks got smashed. Note; we did have a mortal strike affect on him to halve the healing.

Our best attempt was ~20% with 3 tank deaths and the first one popping with a soul stone to pick up the fourth tanking rotation, the wipe was nearly at the 2 minute mark. The fight is virtually unhealable at this point and any random death from anything is a wipe. We are considering dropping from 6 to 5 healers, and we do have a little better DPS now then we did 2 weeks ago, but 20% is a lot of health to burn through.

Last night we had the brilliant idea of doing Brun --> Molgeim --> Steelbreaker. The other raid leader and I figured this would be the solution to our dps short comings. As we could time the dropping of a rune of power as we killed Molgeim and proceed to bloodlust and melt Steelbreaker in a hurry. We estimated we could kill him before the third tank death with this setup. 2 hours of attempts later and we didn't even make it to P3, which i don't really understand. Static disruption is exactly the same and doesn't affect damage from rune of death. The only thing that is even REMOTELY harder is that steel breaker could occasionally get a rune of power in P2 and clobber the tank, but healers should have to deal with far FAR worse in P3.

I flipped through about 15 kill videos on youtube and it seems like every single one does the Molgeim --> Brun --> Steelbreaker order. It just seems like the dps for P3 in that order is....excessive. Off-hand math shows we would have to do 14 million damage or so if we were to kill him around the fourth tank's death, which would happen around the 1:45 mark. That's an average of 133,000 raid DPS, which seems much larger then we are capable of handling for 1:45.

I'm looking for advice on kill order, and anything else I'm blatantly over looking here.

Steelbreaker casts Overwhelming Power starting from about 10s into the phase and then on every tank switch (which should be just shy of 30s). If your fourth tank dies at 1:45 then it seems you are switching too early. Either aim for 12 million in two tank deaths (~100s, 120k rdps) or 13 million in three tank deaths (~130s, 100k rdps).

Kill them medium -> small -> big, otherwise the raid damage from Rune of Death and Rune of Power from Runemaster greatly outweighs the DPS boost from a leftover rune going into phase 3.

We use two tanks and 5 healers, and we soulstone both tanks. The entire raid stacks up on top of Steelbreaker for phase 3, minus 3 high health soakers for Static Disruption who are spread 10 or so yards apart away from the stack (warlocks usually, shadow priests work too). Heroism when the first tank gets the debuff, second tank taunts with ~4 seconds left, first tank dies. First tank uses soulstone, gets buffs and heals, taunts with ~4 seconds remaining on second tank's debuff, etc. We go through 4 debuffs and usually have 10-15 seconds remaining on the fourth when we kill him. If you can keep the tanks up for 4 debuffs you'll win.

Yeah what we will do in phase 2 is have the secondary tank taunt Steelbreaker for a quick second and then have the primary tank quickly taunt it back. This ensures that the secondary tank is second on the threat list for phase 3 and saves ~2 seconds of DPS time (2 seconds may not seem like a lot, but there was at least one kill where we would have wiped had we not done it this way).

During the second to third tank transition we make a judgment call. If one of our ranged soakers is second on threat we simply let the debuff expire and let them get the 200% damage boost before the third tank taunts it back. I mean you might as well have another person doing double DPS if you're going to wipe anyway in 30 seconds. You can do this for a third to fourth tank transition as well (if your guild plans for it, *we don't*). Obviously if a melee is second on threat we have the 'soon to be' tank taunt off with ~2 seconds remaining on the debuff.

But yeah, don't undervalue those extra few seconds you can gain from simply having the debuff expire instead of taunting prematurely. A lot of kills are right down to the wire!

We had a lot of issues with him moving even slightly when we tried to simply taunt or let the aggro shift after pre-taunting, so to avoid Meltdown damage we stand in a triangular formation of Tank / Tank / Raid. The next tank taunts with just enough time for the first guy to run out far enough not to hit anyone with Meltdown. Strictly speaking it's always going to shave a couple seconds off here and there, but it's very reliable and allows us to use a fourth tanking phase when needed (since he won't get gibbed by Meltdown + melee swing straight off).

With regard to Assembly of Iron - Hard Mode; I'm just curious if anyone is aware of the period of time between Steelbreaker acquiring a target and for that target to receive the Overwhelming Power debuff. Is the debuff instant upon the target switch?

In my experience with 10 man, it takes about 2-3 seconds before the debuff is activated on the person with agro. We experiented some with a moonkin taunting from max range, but decided it wasn't worth it (messy positioning) and just did it with a normal tank switch + CR on the first tank (druid that went cat after the rez).

In our experience on 10 man, it's instant. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

[23:05:49.749] Corithian afflicted by Overwhelming Power from Steelbreaker
[23:06:44.562] Corithian's Overwhelming Power fades
[23:06:45.140] Steelbreaker casts Overwhelming Power on Gnosis
[23:06:45.218] Gnosis afflicted by Overwhelming Power from Steelbreaker
[23:06:45.484] Bullguard casts Taunt on Steelbreaker
[23:06:45.609] Steelbreaker afflicted by Taunt from Bullguard
[23:06:58.827] Steelbreaker casts Overwhelming Power on Bullguard
[23:06:58.921] Bullguard afflicted by Overwhelming Power from Steelbreaker


There seems to be a cooldown on it, though, so this will not only get you more DPS, but also buy you more time.
Later edit: This is just one log, but by glancing at last week's attempts, it seems to be instant as well, or at least within the first second.

On a related note, we also toyed with having our first tank, a paladin, DI some random raid member instead of dying, which didn't buff Steelbreaker, but after having a lengthy (he had me wait for half an hour while he asked the dev team, apparently) discussion with a GM, that's considered an exploit and will be (has been) fixed.

Well, just thought I'd report in that we managed to get it down Monday evening with some sub-optimal raid configuration. Had a couple of healers flake out on us so we tried 5 healers/3 tanks to start off with the "traditional" order of Molgeim -- Brun -- Steelbreaker.

Didn't work. There weren't enough heals in P3 to get us there, so we had to make a call, had our best tank, a feral, respec healing, and our best DPS DK (me), respec to tank steelbreaker. Never expected it to work in a million years especially considering i have almost zero Ulduar-25 tanking gear, but we made steady progress.

Our tanking rotation on Steelbreaker was DK first, with IBF used and AMS for one of the fusion punches. Then prot pally, with some outside and all personal tanking cool-downs popped. Prot warrior, all remaining outside survivability cool-downs and personal CDs used. Then DK again after i popped with a soul stone, Blood tanking spec, vampiric blood, IBF, AMS, everything and the kitchen sink to stay alive as long as possible.

We killed Steelbreaker literally the second i died. I got the achievement as i was falling to the ground. Right before our kill we had a heart-breaking wipe at 50k HP left on steelbreaker that was entirely our own fault, our raid leader was celebrating the "kill" at like 0.5% when i blew up and wiped us. The silence on voice was epic.

Some things i learned while doing the fight; P3 is COLOSSALLY more difficult then the previous 2, and the DPS check is remarkably high. A marginally geared DK is greater then a fully geared warrior or paladin tank for third or fourth tank. 3 tanks/6 healers and it's possible to kill it in time, but it's really really close.

I still contend that doing Brun -- Molgeim -- Steelbreaker is the "Optimal" order, as riding that rune of power for 45-55 seconds when DPS'ing Steelbreaker would trivialize the DPS requirements. I have no idea why this didn't work out for us though.