All our Yogg team was melee and I never heard a single thing about a knockback or any complaints at all from them about any sort of anti-melee mechanic.

It only happens if the melee run inside his model. There's no need to do that.

We initially attempted a phase 1 strategy of having tanks drag the adds over to Sara while the ranged stay beyond the clouds entirely; this led to a lot of trouble with stopping DPS in time to allow for the adds to get there, and reduced our DPS because they had to stop frequently to do this. Since then we have everyone dodging clouds, and tanks always standing on Sara unless they need to fetch a distant spawn. DPS time is much stronger, and with an extra spawn on the pull there's never more than 2 of them around.

For the 10-man, this is doable with one tank even which will make the P2/3 DPS mark very easy to hit for anyone in 213/226 gear.

Make sure no one baby spiced Yogg..

Yes, that's the voice of experience =/

Baby spicing Yogg in P2 can improve visibilty, you can see caster tentacles easier, or brain linked people.
But never ever baby spice his brain during the visions, it shrinks and is out of range for your melee.
Was a very funny phase.

Yogg do for sure a knockback in P2, not sure in P3.

After 1 night of wiping most of the time in P1 we change ou're strategy: Tanks and Adds stay all the time in the middle. Range moved on the outer circle. Big problem dragging Adds in the middle was an additional Tank needed, DPS Lost in the Transaction time and lots of Adds not killed near Sara ( Yoggy kill Vid - Caster View) .

In P2 we often sacrifice a Pet or Treants works well (even Mirror Images, but that is more risk because of lack of control). And remind after every Portal phase everyone to refilled the Sanity Buff. P3 is a little tricky, you can partial do damage in Lunatic gaze if you only turn to him when the cast is finisched and you start a new one. We have some tentacles left, but decurses was no problem. Ou're entire Meleecamp stays near the boss, so that AoE Abilities from Melees affected Yogg as well.

We normaly raid with 6-7 Healer, but on the kill whe only have 5, one of them (Druid) go down for Portal phase.

Concerning Phase 1:
At first we tried to copy all the strategies that worked for other guilds, but we hardly made any progression.
Then we tried to follow the clouds that were moving clock-wise with two camps, one for melees exactly on Sara and a second ranged camp at mid range.
You just have to follow the clouds. No up and down movement is required and thus it is both save and optimal for DPS.

With this easy strategy we made it from "hardly come to phase two" to "all of our tries reached phase 2" with zero or one add up.

You'll need only one tank and 3-4 Healers for phase 1, but with this setup phase 3 might be quite hard.

4 healers is perfectly doable provided they are on the ball; we generally run with 5 but could easily cut back 1 if we really thought it was necessary. As long as dispels are fast, people are dps'd from the constrictors fast and everyone has good situational awareness then the raid damage in phase 2 isn't incredibly high.

You will need two tanks for phase three though, otherwise two full HP guardians will more than likely drop your tank before healers have a chance to react. That, and the guardians will eventually start to spawn at a faster rate than he can pick them up resulting in an eventual wipe. We have two dedicated tanks and a kitty druid who jumps in to bear if clutch taunts are required in phase three.

Have we established the spawning behavior of Immortals in phase 3? I see frequently that they increase in rate just like those in the first phase, but my own observations seem inconsistent as we either stay consistently with two adds alive at any given moment or get overrun if too many focus on the boss.

Delete Please

I call this an exploit. It's not that phase1 is too hard once you figured out how to avoid clouds.

As a Paladins Judgement spell counts as a 'ranged melee attack' you can use it to interupt the deimishing power channel without any risk of melee hits in return.
I was doing this tonight as protection, sitting out of melee range and alternating judgements on the crushers with another paladin.

As for the Illusion tactics, we have each dps in the illusion team assigned a specific number,each number corresponds to a specific tentacle in each illusion. Each tentacle is killed by one dps, and has left us with up to 40s on the brain before which is a lovely full heroism and 2 shattering throws.

Currently we have a Protection warrior go down to apply sunders to the brain, is this worth it or it is better to get the fury warrior to provide sunders and take an addition dps down?

I'm not sure it affects all the Guardians, but rather I believe it is targeted on one Guardian who will then heal others nearby. Can anyone confirm this?

For phase 1 we do the traditional clump near the door strat. We use 3 tanks, though one is just a DPS Druid in Bear form. The Bear sits in the middle and taunts adds onto him before they die, with a ranged group to finish them off. We've won with attempts that had 0 adds up, and up to as many as 5.

For P2 it's all about practice and coordination. We are ALMOST at the point where melee can do the Brain in 2 portal phases (I believe we were at 36% at the end of the second brain phase tonight). The worst is Icecrown, middle tentacles; there will often be two skulls on either side of them, making it VERY difficult to dps the tentacles without getting hit by at least one. Often we simply zerg them down and take the hits. Originally we had a single healer come down with us, but now we simply have a hybrid (Ret Pally or Enh Shammy) toss heals and cleanses as needed. Melee zergs Corrupters as much as possible between brain phases, and prays that they don't get Constricted.

P3 we have the whole raid stack on Yogg's face. We put all ranged on the adds, and when melee turn around they are advised to DPS the adds as well. I've read that going into a Sanity Well in P3 causes an additional add to spawn, but I did not witness this happening at all on our kill tonight (wasn't paying attention on previous kills). If you have a sloppy P1-P2 transition you can Hero to zerg down the P1 adds and usually have Exhaustion gone midway through P3, makes finishing him in a hurry a bit easier. Not sure how the heal mechanic works, don't think we'll find out until we attempt him without Thorim.

Overall my favorite fight so far (especially as melee).

Is it confirmed that the guardians spawn rate in P1 is directly related to the time spent in that phase rather than Sara's HP?

Based on my experience during the past 3 weeks, it seemed like the guardians would start spawning faster once we got Sara below 50% or so, regardless of how long it took us to get there. If that were true, then popping an extra giant at the start of the fight would serve no real purpose in terms of survivability.

I didn't test that theory and I've no real data to back it up. It's just an observation and I'm wondering if that's really the case.

I also didn't notice an increase in Immortal guardian spawn rate in P3. We seemed to have no more than 2 at most during that phase (usually one is almost dead. never two at 100%)

p.s: I've only done the fight on 10man

Let 4 guardians pile up close to each other before Empowering Shadows is cast. You'll see multiples of the healing buff on each guardian until you split them up.

I haven't seen anything to indicate it's time-based. Spent 3 hours yesterday in 25man, wiping over and over again in phase 1 before we finally reliably got to phase 2 every attempt, and it was apparent to me that the mass add spawning isn't time-based. We first believed that it was time-based and started deliberately spawning them to test this out. We would have had 8-9 adds up barely over a minute into the attempt - whereupon they'd start spawning like crazy without anybody touching clouds - and other times, where we simply killed them as they appeared, it'd take minutes for the spam to start. The spam always started at the point where we only needed to kill one, or at most two, more adds to get to phase 2.

I expect it's either based on sara's health (as in, they start mass spawning at around 35% or so), or it's based on a counter (where they start mass spawning after x adds have appeared). I never saw mass spawning before 35-36%.

Probably false, it's just the illusion of spending more time in a phase and the probability of making errors working against you.

As you can see, there's roughly a 15 to 20 second CD between normal guardian spawns. We force an early one and end up with an extra one going into the transition in this particular split.

Is there a technical possibility to spot player blind to green clouds besides directly watching him/her? So far I haven't seen any combat log event pointing at stepping into green, but such thing would surely reduce raidleader pressure.

Does it consider as a bug, as a feral druid, when the constricting tentacles captured me, it force me to drop my feral form and i am unable to shift into another while it swings me around. I felt quite helpless if others a little slow on helping to release me while they focus on burning down crusher tentacles and leave me swinging there, all i can do is try to moonfire spam a little and swing my staff on the tentacles in a helpless cow form.

The heal in phase 3; every 45 seconds Yogg casts Shadow Beacon (this is what the emote is for) on the add that have been alive the longest and it's a buff that lasts 10s. If the add is not killed within those 10 seconds the buff will expire and put Empowering Shadows on all friendly targets within 20 yards of said add (incl. Yogg himself and the add with the buff). So if you're just on top of the adds they will never ever heal and there is no need to spread them out, it's only when doing it without Thorim it becomes necessary.

Sometimes I saw the buff on two Immortals but it only happened when we were falling behind or had spent a long time in phase 3 so I cant say for sure when/how/why it starts to target more then one add at the time.

For anyone having trouble with phase 2, what got my guild the kill was increasing the time the brain is frozen (duh). We had our melee killing tentacles in the brain, as I think most guilds do, and our first night on him we used a zerg strat, where all the melee ran in a circle around the room, killing the tentacles as we went. This resulted in around 30 seconds of freeze time, usually less. The next night, we tried something quite different. We basically put one melee on each tentacle. The logic behind this is kind of counter-intuitive, but it makes sense. Basically, killing one tentacle doesn't do anything. It is the same as doing 4k damage to each tentacle (I think there's 10). So you want to maximize your DPS time. If you have melee down there, the time spent moving is time spent not dpsing, for the most part. So the longer you spend on each individual tentacle, the more DPS you do, assuming most tentacles are getting DPSed.

When we started doing this, we gained 10+ seconds, consistently getting 40 or more seconds of freeze time. It significantly improved our DPS up top, as a side effect. Also, since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, (apologies if I missed it) the "eyes" in the brain act like Yogg's cast in p3, in that you only take damage/lose insanity if you are facing them. If you strafe intelligently, you can get through almost all of p2 without losing much insanity. Incidentally, this is good practice for the hard mode.