KamPa

Some mobs in the gauntlet hit fairly hard, it could be somewhat dangerous without CC. It's mostly first 2 packs, especially since you have to heal on the move for a while.

I don't really see your point about DKs and hard mode. If your Arena group is falling behind, DKs won't save them. Gauntlet - there's 3 mobs at most, plus you're better off focusing healers than AOEing. And once you get to Thorim, why you need more AOE? Plate doesn't matter, as all the dangerous stuff is magic, in both modes. I can see some classes being good for that mode - and all other actually - but it's too early to talk about that

 

Hellebore

We got him last night after two nights of learning, the things we found made the biggest difference was having a warrior tank in arena (shockwave stuns), throwing specialized rogues and 2 locks casting shadow fury on every add wave as well as an unholy DK for AoE +13% spell dmg. Our 2 rogues had dismantle macros for the big guys, so we just grouped them and AoE'd them down.

Tunnel DPS was made up of 3 mages, 2 hunters, 1 shadow priest, with a feral tank, healers being a holy priest and holy pally.

Two things that our shadow priest (Taichrune) in the arena mentioned was he found standing on the edge of the circle (adds tanked in the middle of it) and AoEing inwards worked well for him, and also that he chain mind controlled one of the adds in phase 3 and found that he did more dmg using it's attacks than he could do himself.

WWS traces for anyone interested are here:

Learning night one: Wow Web Stats
Learning night two: Wow Web Stats
Kill: Wow Web Stats

 

Tanoh

Be careful though. A few seconds after Thorim jumps down there will be continous lightning all over his platform (to prevent people from standing there nuking him). We ran into this issue when one of druids swapped to cat form and ran to hug Thorim as we were running out of time. The rest of the gauntlet crowd died on his platform when we got up to it a bit later.

 

Spifli

Has anyone noticed some weird numbers on the Impale Ability from the first few Packs in the Gauntlet on 25man?

The Spell reads "Deals a vicious attack that causes the target to bleed profusely until healed past 90% of its maximum health. Deals 1750 damage every 2 sec. for 1 min or until removed via healing."

But it seems to have a On hit effect + the dot when not healed to full.

Andee is DK tank in gauntlet
It doesn't seem to stick to the Main tank Either, it sometimes (even though they didn't have agro) got applied to melee dps, which pretty much one shot them.

 

MatsT

The "vicious attack" part of the ability consists of 150% weapon damage, according to wowhead. We don't use any melee dps in the gauntlet, but i have seen it hit pets pretty often. If it hits people who doesn't have aggro I think it's safe to assume that it's a bug as that kind of damage isn't really possible to survive for some classes. Curiously, Felhounds seem to survive the attack without problems.

 

Spifli

Yes, pets also seemed to get attacked by the Impale and I don't think a felhound was out agro'ing our tank.

 

FractalLaw

We're still having some issues with chain lightning on stage 2.

We use a modified version of KT melee positioning for it. We normally have 10 to 11 melee, counting tanks. I know that this is a little high, but it's what we've got to work with. We place the melee at the points of a triangle around him, with one tank at each point. One point is to the west, while the others are to the north-east and south-east.

The melee groups rotate as needed to avoid lightning charge.

We're still losing some melee to chain lightning when he's around 8-10 stacks or even sooner if the RNG is against us and we get chain lightning as melee is repositioning due to a lightning charge.

We also risk losing tanks to chain lightning due to an unlucky spike, if the chain lightning cast comes near the transition for unbalancing. We can reduce the chance of that by stacking the tanks on top of each other, but that increases the number of melee DPS on top of each other, meaning that they are more likely to die early.

Our issue mainly becomes one of DPS at that point as it's not exactly easy to keep tanks up once they get to 14 stacks or so.

Any advice on keeping melee alive would be much appreciated.

 

woo-haa

You can try doing a 4-group instead. This works for KT, but I'm not sure if Thorim's hitbox is the same. Also, the lightning charge doesn't ouright kill anyone. We're thinking of doing a 4-group without moving out of lightning charge next time.

 

Cryect

4 positions does work and would be how we are able to fit 10 in comfortably. The lightning charge can outright kill someone if the charges are stacked just a little since its 17k-20k before the stacks on him. Lightning Charge - Spell - World of Warcraft

I need to do something useless.

 

FractalLaw

We had tried that once, but our melee said that they couldn't quite get in a good spot.

I'll have them try again, thanks.

 

woo-haa

Are you sure that Lightning Charge damage is increased by Thorim's buff? I can't show numbers from WWS and I don't know how to use WoL, but we had this around 2 minutes into the fight with Thorim:
[23:55:16.363] Thorim Lightning Charge Puls 18285 (O: 877)
I guess the O: 877 notates resist. Shouldn't this number be alot higher if LC was indeed affected by Thorim's buff?

 

mox512

Personally don't thing grouping melee will solve the "Chain Lighting" problem.
Really, i don't have any tactical advice.
The only thing i said to my melee group is "Don't stack on each other, and keep 5 yards from tank, and no fuzzing, find your spot and stand still.", and its worked.
In my terms "fuzzing" means dragging you char left, right for yard or 2, you know PvP rogues love this style of play.
Fight requires constant repositioning of the raid, it's in to the easy way to maintain some sort of order.
Probably you need to show ability tooltip in raid, so every one understand the problem, and watch over themselves.

 

◊ Repeek

For those having issue with the Arena in phase 1, have your tanks stand underneath Thorim's stage, all the mobs that drop down will make a b-line straight to the tank (and anyone else who is underneath the stage).

 

Hellebore

Our positioning was a 3 group triangle all at max weapon range, with marked people at each point (MT, and 2 sharp dps), both off tanks stacked on the MT, and we had 6 melee spreadbetween 2 groups and while a lighting hit on a melee group hurts and needs healing fast it we lost no one at all to chain lighting.

We did run NR totem so that might have helped break the chains up, looking at it we had 21.8% mitigation and 13.2% missed on chain lighting so that might be useful.

MT had DBM range frame up and told people off on TS for not moving from him.

 

FractalLaw

O would actually be overkill, meaning that it really did 19162 damage.

That's in the middle of the normal damage range for charge.

Interesting; it may not be increased by his buff after all.

That said, it's really the chain lightning that's the dangerous part of phase 2, but if we didn't have to have melee move it might make keeping positioning tight easier.

 

Grungo

How are people handling Lightning Charges on the tank's position? My initial thought was for the tanks to rotate out of the way of them, but in all of our attempts at that, melee would have to scramble to find a safe spot where they wouldn't rotate into a Lightning Charge themselves or get a tank gibbed from too many Chain Lightning bounces. Inevitably we'd lose most of the melee pretty early in the fight.

Is it safer to have the tanks just keep him stationary and eat any badly placed Lightning Charges? It seems like it wouldn't take too many stacks of Thorim's buff before Lightning Charge + a melee swing (or, Lightning Charge + a melee swing + Unbalancing Strike, or Lightning Charge + a melee swing + Chain Lightning) would instagib a tank. Should we be trying to heal through Lightning Charge on the tanks, or should our melee just be more pro at rotating in synch with the tanks?

For reference, we're rotating through four tanks, since we've got 4 people in tank gear from P1 anyway, to maximize the likelihood that whoever is next in the rotation will have cooldowns available. The current tank and the one on-deck are stacked on top of each other, with the other two waiting at range to reduce Chain Lightning damage on the tanks.

 

ankah

Has anyone tried to MC a evoker, and if so, how did it work? Seems like a lot of healing and damage potential.

 

KamPa

My attempts at MC usually ended with Pummel from that big pack of dwarves and released mob going straight for me. Do you stand somewhere on the sides before attempting this?

 

mox512

You can't MindControl Evoker during first phase due to pummel.
MC on second phase works great.
This Evoker provide +20% haste to the controllers party (not raid).
And also has high melee damage. On a successful fight MC'ed Evoker will be in top 5 DPS on Thorim.

 

◊ nathanbp

Did you just heal the priest doing the MC through lightning charge?

 

Torrential

Lightning charge isn't much to worry bout up until 6ish stacks. And if you get a disc priest to bubble him they're probably fine to 9ish. Given that Chain Lightning is random target and could potentially hit somebody shortly after a lightning charge it's a good idea to top people ASAP of course but I see nothing that would really put the MCing priest in danger.

 

sovelis41

Pretty sure it's the Warbringers that have the haste aura. The Evokers have the heal and damage shield.

Aura of Celerity - Spell - World of Warcraft

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Gourd

It's the Warbringers who grant this aura (aura of celerity, which has a 30 yard range and is party-only), but I was not moving out for the lighting charge while MCing. A disc priest shields me beforehand, and I'm healed up afterward. However, I am dropping the add once he reaches 6 stacks so that I don't get 1 shotted.

 

Lamprey

This is the first fight that has been a major cockblock for us. Took him to phase 2 for the first time tonight and hit 38% and then proceeded to not make phase 2 again for then next 2 hours.

Gauntlet is completely smooth, but we do have 9 players doing it. Gauntlet is full ranged dps. Arena has a Pally and DK tanking with all melee assist training evokers and casters assist training champions. We AoE but we're definitely prioritizing the focus fire over just mass AoE. Tanks are split in middle but about 10 yards from one another holding adds. Main problem is we're not killing fast enough and this coupled with too many commoners debuffing tanks so they can't hold aggro and we lose it consistently around the 4 minute mark.

We are disarming champs, but we only have 1 rogue and 1 dps warrior so we cant keep it up all the time. I think our main problem is just that we're running with 8 healers as that is what we've done for everything up until now, but this fight seems to need about 6 tops.

Fun fight, but damn it's getting frustrated after a lot of hours wiping to him.

 

Arantes

This has been said before in the thread and is worth repeating: if the gauntlet is smooth and you're losing it in the arena, add people to the arena. Your first attempt may have been lucky if the later ones were done with the same split.

The adjustments we went through on 25 man first added people to the gauntlet then switched one or two out for more burst DPS while keeping the numbers equal. So my advice would be to reduce your gauntlet group by 1 and then consider switching players in and out if you have some DPS with burst capacity in the arena.

One other ting to keep in mind about the gauntlet is that pulling mini-boss two quickly can help your arena team immensely. If you're comfortable in the gauntlet you may not be getting to the second mini-boss quickly if you are handling his adds as they come to you. Take the initiative and pull them AND the boss, avoiding new spawns. You can sheep the healers on the way up to the second boss and deal with them after he's dead.

If the gauntlet is smooth and the arena is not, maybe you simply need to force the issue on the gauntlet - lose one DPS AND pick up the pace, all with the aim of helping the arena group last.