Thrawnseg

Since he is open now, I might as well start.

In phase 1, what are the "accepted" configurations for the raid to stand? We tried the door area last night for a hour or so, but everytime a tank dragging to sara would get stuck, he'd clip and we'd be overrun. Or a cloud would come close and someone would clip it. We were running 1 tank, 5 ranged dps to middle with the rest in one place and could get to about 30% on phase 1. Is that the favorite way? In 10's, we found everyone standing on sara and moving out to be the best. We also tried to intentionally spawn a add at the start, with different degrees of sucsess. Everything led to us going to P2 with 2-4 guardians up.

Do people move around the room with the clouds? Or would the middle work on 25 also?

Phase 2 seems quite easy if you send a shaman down with 2 groups to BL them since the 'sated' debuff doesn't bleed through the ports. This gives the first 2 groups extra time to dps the brain, especially if you get the lich king room first.

 

• Falk

If people are clipping clouds, no amount of different strategies are going to help. Fix that problem first.

 

mako

The strategy I've had the most success with is simply standing right at the doorway and using 2-3 "tanks" (one is typically a DPS DK in frost presence). In this position, only the tanks and the few players responsible for finishing the adds are even capable of triggering a cloud.

A group of 3-5 is assigned to finish the mobs, and consists of a dispeller (shadow priest) and high direct damage players (destro lock, fire mage, hunter). The tanks set up a sort of relay and start moving when the mobs are at 50%, if not higher, and dps switches to the next mob once the first is out of range.

By the time the tank/mob reach Sara the finisher team is able to kill the mob very quickly because it's at or below 20% (and covered in dots). The third tank is used if we decide to spawn two adds at the start. We find spawning an extra mob immediately upon engaging helps significantly so long as DPS is not split.

Phase two brain-room is best handled by melee since they lose virtually no time switching from tentacle to tentacle. Using two groups for lusting two phases would imply sending ranged down as well, which would probably lead to falling behind on crusher tentacles up top. I haven't seen the need to lust in the brain room when the portal-group is able to enter in a timely manner since my guild has 10-20 sec of brain DPS time to spare in the 3rd portal when we knock yogg into phase three. For learning the encounter, lusting on the Stormwind illusion, or third portal is a good idea (which ever happens first).

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Evanaescent

I don't think there is an "accepted" (that I'm aware) of configuration that will work for everyone. This absolutely above all seems to me do be a fight where you have to do what works west for YOUR guild.

For what it's worth, we use the "door area" strat. 2 tanks. One tank gets the first spawn, another tank spawns an extra. We kill the first spawn first, then the extra spawn. At that point tanks alternate collecting adds, which leads to a rhythm (once we did it right) of one add consistently coming to us and being pulled away. We don't use fixed positions at all. We prefer to huddle near the entrance, but we move as a group (all 25) if needed.

As already stated, you can't clip clouds, period. You'd be surprised how much time you can waste dancing around a set of clouds and still live, particularly since you're going to have a consistent stream of adds. There is nothing wrong with tank A running around a cloud and taking 10 seconds to get there safely while you beat on tank B's mob. Worst case scenario, A and B arrive in the middle at the same time, you kill A's add, you kill B's add right after, and tank A has taunted the freshly spawning new add. In normal mode at least, this absolutely won't kill your tanks, the explosions aren't that bad.

What will wipe you either immediately or eventually is blowing up an add early or getting an extra add. Whenever we kill an add too early or spawn an extra cloud, we almost always wipe it out because the level of DPS you need to recover is usually too high.

It sounds stupid, and it probably is, but stay out of the clouds. The worst you can do if you do this is have a couple of adds up at the start of p2, which isn't the end of the world.

For phase 2 we just use a melee zerg in the brain room with a single heroism while ranged stays up top. Based on how I understand the fight mechanics, killing the brain faster, while being nice, isn't that much of a net gain. Your real goal is to kill the nine tentacles in the basement as FAST as possible in order to get 'access' to the brain. Once you've done this, you provide valuable time up top for the ranged to catch up, and in fact it is a common strategy to actually wait to bring yogg down to 30% at the end of the 3rd (or 4th depending on DPS and strat) teleport so that ranged can finish off as many tentacles before you start the last phase.

Unless I'm mistaken, there is no advantage that translates up top in doing 30% damage to the brain in a teleport versus 20%, or whatever other set of numbers you want to use. You want to simply get there as fast as possible.

Also, for the different rooms, we use a basic clockwise zerg rush for the stormwind and dragon rooms. For the icecrown one we send a team of melee left, forward, and straight. We found that going in a circle there was just lost DPS time. Definitely make sure your AOE heavy melee are spread out, with a good strategy we found that the icecrown map was our best, giving us 35+ seconds of brain time.

 

woo-haa

Seems like most guilds deploy a two-tank strategi for P1 with each tank dragging their adds into Sara to blow it up. We use a different strategy which, for us, seems much more efficient. We run two tank; one standing in on Sara all the time and one on ranged group. Melee also stands on Sara. The middle tank will taunt every add he can so melee can do slight AoE. The ranged-tank picks up any stragglers, and the middle tank taunts these adds into Sara.

With this setup melee will always have an add to DPS and will never have to move (well, a bit, but it's basically following the inner-most cloud clockwise). This makes clouds a much smaller issue for both tanks and melee.

 

jjj

Maybe I'm not understanding the mechanics of the fight correctly, but isn't the reason to to put as much dps on the brain as possible is to get to phase 3 ASAP and leave yourself with sufficient time before enrage? Unless you're saying that the enrage timer is very forgiving, which would be comforting since we've only gotten to phase 2 a handful of times.

Regarding the brain room: we tried doing a huge zerg clockwise around the room but it seemed there was a lot of wasted dps, in the sense that the tentacles have very little hp and you have 3 or 4 people killing those things while the rest are just running along. Unfortunately I can't do much Web searching here at work, but can anyone confirm the HP of the Influence Tentacles?

In any case, one strat i saw had each dps "assigned" to a tentacle to take down and I think we may try that strat this week.

 

Bonemage

We were experimenting with a configurations with 2-3 tanks, 1 tank near the door holding the adds, using a DK in frost presense to pull a taunt an add out of the group by the door when it was low and another tank grabbing halfway to get it the rest of the way to Sara, with an Elemental Shaman(short coolddown interupt), Hunter and Mage to finish. Then we also tried the DK in tank gear(since he would be holding adds longer) along with the other tank just taking turns grabbing and pulling them in every other. The second strat seemed to offer more control, however the couple of clean times we got to phase 2 seemed like we could've used more dps. Also does anyone have a count on how many adds beyond the 8 killed on Sarah should be up with no extra spawns if you transition efficiently? Its rather hard to know if we spawned any extra if you didn't see it and with no combat log entry for it.

 

Copernicus

On our 25-man kill, with a little refinement, we had three extra spawns. On the previous attempts, even without spawning additional adds beyond the first, we had four extra spawns.

Reducing the number of guardians down to three after phase one had a very dramatic difference for us. We went from gradually falling behind on tentacles to having all the tentacles cleared at the end of every brain phase.

 

inthedrops

The sooner the brain is exposed, the sooner all the tentacles become stunned. I believe no more spawn until the stun ends as well. This is the time when tentacle DPS is at it's best. What he's suggesting is to delay bringing him below 30% for as many seconds as you can spare so that the tentacle groups can get a few more seconds to clean shop.

 

jjj

I read through his post again, and it's more clear to me now what he was saying. However, I'm still curious what other guilds are doing to get those tentacles down so quickly. Even though we only got a few chances to port in and try our hands at tentacle hunting, it seemed that a zerg around the room seemed the wrong way to go about it. Again, we're still learning the fight so it could be something else that we're doing wrong.

 

Evanaescent

It really depends on the room. For example, in the dragon room, you're basically forced to run around in a circle since you can't go through the middle. In my opinion sending one team left and one right does you no good, you end up with a bunch of dead tentacles and you're at the opposite end of the brain room. I think in this case it's better to go around and overkill in a zerg.

For stormwind and icecrown you absolutely can and should split up, but I think one DPS per tentacle is a little too refined and possibly not even the best idea. It's really dependent on your group makeup. For example, in the icecrown map myself and a blood DK (I say this because we run with one, not that blood are best - any DK would probably work) can take out a group of 3 tentacles in basically 3 GCDs between kitty swipe and heartstrike. You don't want to overdo it and send 3 DKS and a war at a group, but you don't want to leave some poor melee banging on one tentacle and then moving to another.

For icecrown it seems best to send groups of 2 DPS to each of the 3 spawnpoints. That leaves 1 healer and random DPS to fill out whatever is killing things slowest. Spread the aoe around.

For stormwind again I don't think going left and right is that optimal, but since you can go through the middle you might have better luck sending your weaker melee (ferals, rogues?) north so that your 2h melee can follow them up behind with one shots. I'm not even sure if that's optimal. What I can say is that we go around in a circle clockwise, and it's basically "attack once then move". This is overkill obviously with this much melee, but it seems to provide the least amount of wasted time.

Icecrown is definitely the easiest map. If other groups have suggestions on how to get a few extra seconds out of the rooms, aside from gear, I'm definitely eager to hear them.

 

Xunwael

The only real trick I've noticed is to make sure you have a tank or something run in and out of melee with hte big ones to interrupt their channeled damage reducing debuff, making them recast it.

[edit] Ah, you meant inside. Well, I still think it's a good tip for those outside, took us some tries to figure it out.

"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law

 

Copernicus

Use eight melee DPS. We were able to do it with two Ret Paladins and zero Enhancement Shaman. It's also good for teaching your melee to stay sane.

 

KamPa

I was wondering about killing all tentacles before phase 3. In 10 man, it's trivial. In 25, we usually have couple tentacles up in phase 3. It's not a big problem, certainly not worth going on the opposite side of the room to kill them, while you could easily cleanse their debuffs. Maybe if we'd drop to 4 healers, everything would be dead, but that also limits cleansing quite a bit. Can you ground some spells to ease things a bit? Mostly running around while feared is a problem, as well as Constrictors grabbing random people. There's barely enough time to kill Crushers, certainly not enough to clean all lesser tentacles. Trying to break -20% with tanks is quite risky, they do hit very hard - then again, maybe I overestimate them. Usually we'd just send tank with his cooldowns active to tank it for few seconds and retreat, once damage buff stacked too high. Just how hard do they really hit?

 

Beace

Our first week we consistenly had 2-4 spawns up when the fight went from phase 1-2. Previous week and this week things have felt smoother, and if everything works perfect we have 1-2 up. This is very much up to how fast and efficient you work, and might not really reflect on if you spawned extra adds or not (though if you find yourself with 4 adds up, you almost certainly did)

 

Jalhar

The enrage timer is quite forgiving if you do p2 in 3 brain phases, much tighter if you do it in 4, thus the need of quite solid dps on the brain. It is indeed a good idea to delay the transition to p3 as much as possible by timing dps on the brain so he goes under 30% with only a few seconds left on the cast, to give time to the tentacles team to finish as many of them as possible. (We had 0 tentacle left on our first kill, 2 on our second.) However, we experienced yesterday a strange bug doing so : YS entered p3 when brain was around 28%, which caused one additional crusher to spawn outside and all melees who were inside to go insane.

As for phase one, we did our first kill with a "moving" strategy, whole raid grouped moving around the room dodging clouds and staying not too far from middle, and our 2nd with a "staying at the door" strategy, with 2 tanks and 3 - 4 ranged dps moving in. The second strategy has the advantage to reduce a lot the chance of the cloud clipping , as only 6 7 players need to really pay attention to clouds, while having the drawback to have almost always 3 adds up at the end of p1. The first strategy is in my opinion more efficient dps wise and allows to have only 1 2 adds up for transition, but needs to have 1 player well aware of the clouds pattern to lead the raid in correct places, and 25 players able to dodge clouds (which is muuuuuch harder than it sounds...^^)

As for phase 2, I'm curious what healer do you take for the brain team ? We use druid or priest at the moment, as a lot of healing while moving is involved, but if we didn't have any enhancement shaman it would be more problematic as having heroism is useful to have only 3 brain phases. On the illusion subject, I noticed the Icecrown room is indeed the fastest but also the most dangerous for melee dps, as the tentacles do hit quite hard, and with all the LoS issues this room has, the healer might not be able to heal in time the poor kitty that jumped in the middle of 3 of them.

I'm also curious to know what setup balance do raids use on YS : we went for 2 tanks, 6 healers, 17 dps (7 - 8 melees), which is already a rather low number of healers, but it felt like we could reduce it even more without any issue, even in p3. Being a healer I find it a bit frustrating, and it's the only criticism I would do to a fight that is otherwise rather well tuned and quite enjoyable.

 

Vaccine

Are you using BoP on people grabbed by Constrictors? Saves a ton of DPS which can be added onto other tentacles. That said having a couple of corrupters up for P3 isn't anything to worry about. You shouldn't be having Crushers up though, that's the rationale behind having your melee sit in the brain room waiting for the call to finish it on the 3rd wave, give your ranged extra time to deal with the last stunned crusher.

 

kriS411

Well, we killed Yogg twice so far, but still I'm curious how do you manage P2 with only 3 portals?

We usually send 7 melee, 1 hunter, 1 healer into the portal. At roughly 35 sconds left brain DPS starts and we manage to take down 18-24% of the brain. At 5 Seconds left everyone leaves the brain room.
We never did it so far in 3 phases, our best try was 35%.

Our melee DPS is pretty ok (at elast our melee are stronger then the casters), maybe 2 are a bit weak - but still, we are just doing to low DPS, or is there anything we miss?

I'm kinda scared of trying Yogg with less then 4 keepers, we hardly beat the enrage so far...

 

Lyssa

You're lacking one dps in the portals, that's how. There are 10 portals - use them all. We divided group 1 and group 2 for the portal groups: group 1 consisting of 3 hunters, holy priest & ret paladin always went to the left inside the portals; group 2 consisting of 2 rogues, 2 dks and 1 fury warrior went to the right (my guild currently sports 0 enhancement shamans). Dividing the dps on the sides meant for us that it went a lot faster as there's less running needed.

In phase 1 we put all the melee with 2 tanks in the middle. You can easily avoid the clouds in melee if you just learn how to move. In melee there's always two clouds circulating, and you have to move around once every ~15 seconds; you just walk through Sara to the other side of her. In the beginning tries we tried having the whole raid staying at the doorway and tanks taunting and bringing the mobs to Sara, but we found it to be a lot easier like this (no risk of mobs dying from dots before they reach Sara, no risk of them not being interrupted). The rest of the raid just stays spread out outside the middle circle however they please as long as they stay away from clouds.

You can use pets to interrupt the Crusher's casts, so if they've too much +dmg buffs up for tanks to handle, just sacrifice a pet and kill them quickly (or have every dps stop casting for 3 seconds and reset the buffs).

Setup was 6 healers 2 tanks 17 dps (6 melee).

I uploaded my video from our first kill if it's of any help to anyone (melee & ranged POV). (Yes, HB when one of the mobs is not yet picked up was a bad idea from my side..)

 

KamPa

It's not like we didn't kill him and were overrun, but there's lot of things to improve. Crushers weren't a problem, but Corrupters start to add up after a while. It isn't that bad with Mimiron debuff, but without it, it was quite a mess(and since no hm talking, I'll end it at that). Things generally slow down after 1st portal, since there's barely enough time for melee to kill couple tentacles and they have to go for the brain again. I figured out BoP works, but didn't really test it much.
We generally kill off nearby tentacles in P3 and keep decursing anything else. There's not much healing beside some rare spike from fresh Guardians. However, this is 'easy mode' after all, so improving basics is needed for something more challenging. Seeing that you have to hold back dps in phase 1(unless pulling tons of extra adds), and phase 3 isn't very complicated, it's all about P2.

 

Ayreon

Out of interest, how many healers do people usually bring for Yogg (with all keepers)? We had 4 on our kills but based on the kill where I was healing, it seemed to me even 3 would have probably managed.

 

Kemeran

We are to the point that we are trying to refine our technique for P3. We have had attempts where we get perfectly clean into P3, and by clean I mean no crusher tentacles left up and no corruptors either, and have 6 melee on the Immortals, but we still get overruns by Immortals. We've called out for ranged DPS to help with Immortals, but once there's more than a couple of them up, there seems to be no way to prevent a wipe due to the empowering shadows buff they put on each other even with every single DPS'er we have on Immortals. Does anyone have any worthwhile advice for positioning, or DPS allotment for Immortals, and on how exactly empowering shadows works? Is it just a mechanic to punish you for having a couple Immortals up at a time, or is there something that can be done about it.

Our problems aren't really a thing to say "get better melee" Our guys get us to P3 in 3 portal phases and are good players, we need some technique help or knowledge of what we're doing wrong.

 

Denic

6 DPS sounds light on Immortals. I think our first kill we had 8 melee, 10 ranged, 5 heals and 2 tanks. Initially we had our melee on Guardians, but we quickly found that with all the tank repositioning, shrinking hit boxes, and generally cluttered area that it was much more efficient to stick ranged on Guardians with melee on Yogg.

If you're getting to P3 in 3 portals you won't be risking enrage by over-compensation on Immortals. Hell, at that point the only thing that can really wipe you are the Immortals, or a gross mishandling of Lunatic Gaze.

 

Torrential

We had 5 healers and I plan to use 4 next time. The only time healing seemed to be an issue at all was the tanks in P3. The initial hits from the Immortals are pretty big but they very quickly become non-threatening as their health drops.

We sent one healer into the illusions and I think he sort of hand his hands full at times but that gets better as your brain teams gets better at avoiding skulls.

It is quite odd that 4Yogg is so un-healer reliant. Having just more more MOAR dps to kill tentacles, and thus remove much of the damage/debuffs is better than bringing a healer to handle the cleanse/healing.

I could see getting away with 3 healers being possible but unless you're having serious DPS issues I'd probably call 4 a safe minimum. We had ~1:30 left on enrage using 3 tanks and 5 healers.

Just for info: In P3 the 9 Illussion DPS were on Yogg and the rest (8) were on Guardians. Twice we had the entire Yogg team turn and join on the Immortals to whittle their growing number. When Yogg was at 4% everybody ignored guardians and nuked Yogg. Tanks used cooldowns and healers used everything available to keep them up.

Our Brain/Yogg team were all melee and ranged were all killing immortals, that mean they could all face away from Yogg almost 100% of the time.

 

Kemeran

I'd gotten information that Yogg did a knockback on melee so we've not tried to put melee on him. Is there something that has to be done to prevent that knockback, did it get taken out, or does melee just do a lot of running back in? Or was I misinformed about a knockback to begin with?