Not really clear to me why a guild that does 10 and 25 would change tactics depending on raid size. Since not kiting works just fine in both (every argument in favor of for 25s applies to 10s, perhaps to a different degree). Similarly, if you can kite in 25s, I'm sure you can in 10s. To each his / her own.

We have been getting some weirdness with Vezax on 25 man recently and would liek to see if it's just us / our rogues failing, or a common problem.

Is anyeon else seeing un-interuptable Searing flames being cast, followed immediately (0-1s) by a second one ? Suprisingly, this usually wipes thrml fustating, especialy as one fo the rotating interupters. It feels as if the Generalgets Desynced from his cast bar, realises, then throws a tantrum.

The other oddity i see soemtimes is his cast bar light up with a "searing flames" cast, but no graphics show, and it aborts itself after 1/2 a second or so.

I'm thinking these two are related, but i've not seen any bug reports or suchlike around them.

We are going to swap from Kiting to Pain Suprssion / Bubble rotation tonight (No DK Tank) to see if that helps solve these issues, but have You seen this happen too?

I've never seen uninteruptable Searing Flames, however he always chain-casts Searing Flames if he doesn't get interupted as far as I know.

Probably some shaman earth shocking?

Not to discourage, but PS isn't that good for Vezax. Surge is 10 seconds, and PS is 8 seconds. Your tank will almost certainly take that one big hit. Guardian Spirit is similar, too. A warrior tank with 45k hp is easily oneshot (literally) during surges, and it might happen more than once during the same surge. You should couple these with something else, maybe each other. They do help and you will get a kill if you try hard enough, but the tactic is not foolproof. I like last stand more than these two, the tank will be taking those 50k hits, but at least it's healable.

As for your interrupt issues, I think the problem lies with your enhancement shaman. If your shaman interrupts a spell as soon as Vezax starts casting it, your next rogue is likely to have 5 seconds remaining in his kick cooldown; and if the boss starts casting again in 1.5-4 seconds he won't be able to kick. Your first rogue probably has used his kick too, and you will have no interrupt for the next 2-3 casts. Tell your shaman not to cast earth shocks.

Apologies if this was obvious, but it fits what you had described.

Our interrupters just make sure to try and stay inside the center of his hit box during surge. There's really no reason for melee to be at max melee range or the outside edge of his hit box at any point during the fight, anyway.

Requesting advice for General 10 man (Hard Mode)

For three weeks now our 10man group has been wiping on this boss. We are highly geared (full Tier 8.5) and competent (plenty of hard modes down on 10 and 25). For some reason however, we simply suck at General 10 hard mode.

Our set up:
DK tank
Disc Priest
Holy Paladin
Fury warrior
Rogue
Mage
Lock
Shadow priest
Hunter
Hunter

The DK is doing what all DKs do- popping cooldowns on Surges and not kiting.
The Disc priest heals p1 by standing in Shadow Crashes and popping shields. He enters p2 with about 40% mana
The Holy Paladin heals in P1 only during surges or when the tank is below 30% health. He enters p2 at 80% mana
The range DPS run in and out of Shadow Crashes and dps as hard as they can.
We use Shadow pots at 50% of Animus health during p2 to save healer mana.

Main issues we encounter:
Healer oom: We have tried this with three healers but still get the same result- we run out of mana before the animus is dead. WTF are we doing wrong to oom ourselves like this?
Slow DPS: Very often, our dps dont get shadow crashes for long periods and dps is nerfed. As melee, we maintain a consistent 4.4k dps, but caster dps can vary between 4k and 9k. How can we ensure more consistent crashes so as to maintain consistent ranged dps?

A variety of set ups I have seen depend heavily on resto druids- I have seen little mention of holy paladins. Is our group composition incorrect- do we need to change players or perhaps start kiting? Do people have tips they can offer on how to maximise HPM/DPS with this setup?

Healer OOM is pretty simple: either overhealing, or your DPS isn't fast enough. How long is the Animus phase going before the problem comes? How low is Vezax at the transition?

Kiting would help with healer mana if damage taken were the problem, but I don't think it is. It would also cause your casters some havoc with positioning in the crashes, which it sounds like they're not great at if losing crashes happens "very often". The simplest way to be consistent there is to make sure that everyone standing at shadow crash range is clumped together.

I think perhaps our group doesn't have a good raid makeup either. Anyone have any tips? This is what we ran with:

DK blood tank
Feral druid [had him dpsing some attempts, and tanking animus some attempts]
Resto druid [meleeing for clearcasting procs]
Disc priest [shielded in shadow crashes / penaced out of them]
Boomkin [swapped to resto some attempts]
Rogue
Hunter
Warlock
Mage
Enhancement Shaman

We also had a paladin buddy kings us outside.

We're all full 25 Uld geared, most of us with 4set 8.5, yet we wiped on him for two nights, for a total of 6 hours. We tried three healing 1 tanking, three healing two tanking, two healing one tanking, two healing two tanking. Our main problem seemed to be our disc priest going oom by the time the animus came out [our druids were usually at about 60-70% mana, while the priest was at about 20-40%], and consequently lack of heals.

We usually had vezax at about 30% with three heals, or 10-15% with two heals by the time the animus came out.

We also had a few issues with the aggro table of the animus. Our hunter was mding to the tank, and our rogue threw up tricks, but it seemed several attempts the animus just went straight for a ranged as soon as he was attackable.


Any tips/advice? Would bringing in a holy paladin to heal p1 be better than the resto druid/disc priest setup we have?

Can someone please explain to me the intricacies and the how-to of a disc priest seemingly solo healing all of P1. We are still on normal mode, so, in essence, normal mode is just all P1. There has to be more to it then stand in shadow crash zones and spam shield with penance thrown in. We've had more wipes then I care to admit.

We handle the surges just fine, it's just the normal damage where a tank will spike, and go from 100% to 0% in 2 consecutive hits. We as healers are at our wits end on how to deal with this.

As a resto druid, I've done both: Melee for cc procs and also cast lifeblooms from shadow crash. I am positive I can last the entire fight with zero saronite clouds, even though we are only attempting normal mode. But our disc priest seems to always be calling for saronite clouds, and I feel we are missing something that would make this fight trivial.

If this has been asked to death, I apologize, and if a PM answer is more appropriate, I do welcome them.

Thanks,

Edit: I should add this is for 10-man.

It is basically impossible to kite in hard mode. We got our hard mode kill last night finally. The fight is tuned very well. One ranged camp. Ranged camp moves all at once for crashes. It's a very simple fight which requires some real mana management skills for P2.

If it helps you healers, our healing comp/strategy was:

DK MT
Warrior OT for the Animus

Priests (x2, one holy one disc): All they do during P1 is put shields on people and the holy Priest throws out the occasional POH for random downs damage from crash. They are both at ~ 70-80% mana going into P2. During P2, both of them are responsible for healing ranged. The disc Priest switches his attention to helping MT/OT heal.

Druids (x2): We stand behind Vezax and melee. Clearcasting procs and during P1 our order is basically: Rejuv, Regrowth, Lifebloom on the MT. During P2, both of us move in front of Vezax so we can reach ranged. We melee the animus and Wild Growth help heal the ranged with our holy Priest. Toward the end, melee need a little bit of help too, as JOL won't cover everything. I toss a Rejuv on each melee and go back to healing ranged. We make sure a Rejuv is up on both tanks as well, so we can Swiftmend if needed.

Paladins (x2): Their job as always is just to MT/OT heal, and that's it.

We've observed the same thing regarding shadow crash timing during critical points like the Animus burn, though we haven't been able to determine if it's just extremely poor luck or if there's something we're not doing right. We typically have 10 people in a ranged camp about 30 yards away or so, and wowhead claims that shadow crash has infinite range, so we don't think it has anything to do with positioning. One of our raiders suggested that it has to do with Vezax randomly selecting a target for shadow crash, checking to see if the target is in melee range (after the minimum ranged requirement is satisfied), and then canceling the cast if the target is in melee range, sort of like how Kalecgos portals would fail to spawn if a player stood too close to a hedge.

Has anyone else experienced this, or come up with a workaround?