Zindel

The phase one adds spawn every 20 seconds from 100 - 60%, every 10 seconds from 60 - 40%, and every 5 seconds from 40% onward. Time has nothing to do with it. I remember our very first pull lasted something like seven minutes in phase one.

 

Jazzer

Our personal testing says otherwise.

We spent one attempt to figure out exactly if it is tied to Sara's HP. The entire raid sat by the door, nobody got anywhere near a cloud, and we killed them off one at a time as they came, not worrying about getting them near Sara. Sara was at 100% for the duration of this test.

Spawn times were as follows:
0:10 - First spawn immediately

0:30
0:50 - Next 3 come 20s apart
1:10

1:25
1:40 - Next 3 come 15s apart
1:55

2:05
2:15
2:25 - They end up coming 10s apart indefinitely
2:35
2:45
...

First cloud triggers immediately. The amount of time it takes for a guardian to spawn after the cloud being triggered is 10s, hence the first add coming at 0:10.

We found this pretty valuable because it allowed us to determine if we were getting an extra add somewhere.

I was getting tired of people in our raid saying "They spawn based on her HP, I was watching it." So I set up this test to clear it up once and for all.

Every wipe is a learn.

 

rahba

Did you test if intentionally spawning more changes the rate or is the normal spawn rate fixed? We've only been spawning one extra initially, I know a lot of guides suggest two but the extra MCs seemed to cause problems.

 

Shkarn

I'd be curious to know this, as well - we tried to get some testing in last night, but we weren't able to tell. We've hit a bit of a wall in phase 1 when it gets to around the 6th add - we tend to get overwhelmed then or push it over into phase 2 but have around 5 guardians still alive, which causes many problems. I can't tell if the add buildup is related to dps being slow at weakening them before we move them to the center, or the tanks being slow at moving them to the center.

We've tried each tank shuttling their own adds, and we've tried having a "taunt line" of one tank at the door, one in the center, and one taunting off the door tank and then the center tank taunting off the middle tank. The former seems to be a lot safer in that we don't get the taunt immunity, but it also seems slower when it comes to moving them down.

Does anyone have advice on how to actually speed up the shuttling process? We've been moving them at around 40-50% and by the time they get to the center, they're at about 15-30% based on DoTs and mind controls.

 

Szynszyla

Ask yourself, are you guys doing nothing for few seconds between adds in phase1? If the answer is yes you have to work around that. You don't want to do nothing and be bored waiting for new add.
Your tanks have to predict when the next add spawns, when your current one is gonna die and pull accordingly so you never have 3 adds alive unless 1 is about to die. This way, you should have more dmg done in shorter time frame, not reaching the moment when adds start to spawn like crazy.

Basicly you want to keep steady flow of the adds, we did it more or less like this on our 1st kill.
Enter room:
Spawn yourself 1, 2nd add timed coming. When 1st one is about to die, spawn new.
3rd one timed is coming, 2nd add is dying and 4th one spawned on purpose is coming again. When 3rd one is about to die pull new one again. As long you don't reach a mark where you have 3 adds alive and noone is about to die you are fine.

I can't tell exacly how many we spawned on 1st kill but i think it was 3 or 4. After some practise we were consistently reaching phase1 with maximum 1 add which just spawned during sara speach or we had noone.

We used stationary tactic, after understanding that the clouds are like planets around central sun, just every planet has odd orbit compared to the closest planet. The only people that have to move are the tanks, and raid once few steps back untill furthest cloud from center pass. Since the furthest cloud has longest orbit, you should move the raid only once, we figured out the best time to move is 2/3rd add death, thus you want the furthest cloud to be at 3 o'clock when you enter the room.

 

jjj

We use the shuttling process, and just to get an idea of our composition, we usually have a prot pally, a prot warrior, a cat spec/geared druid in bear form, and a dps geared DK all picking up adds. I think moving them around 40-50% may be a bit too early, as we usually start shuttling them around 30%. You don't want your tanks spending too much time down near Sara, waiting for the adds to be killed. Best case is your tank gets the add down to Sara and it dies almost immediately of getting within range of her.

How do you finish the adds off? I guess it depends on if you use the "raid-clumped-near-the-door" strategy, or if you use the "raid-near-the-center-dodging-clouds" strategy. If you've got everyone within range of Sara dodging clouds, I can see why you'd want to start moving the adds around 40-50%, as you've got the entire raid dpsing adds from 100-0%. We clump near the door, and usually have a team of 2 mages, a hunter, and a shadow priest to finish adds off near Sara. Seems to work well for us.

 

Corkscrew

For phase 1, we started out originally with the "melee in the center, ranged dodging clouds outside, kill adds 100-0 on top of Sara" strategy, and were having lots of trouble with cloud-touching, both from melee and ranged.

We decided to switch for a while to the shuttling process, with our two tanks dragging their own adds to the center. I will say that this had the advantage of making people overall better at dodging clouds, since it's a lot easier to keep an eye on them when there's less to deal with. However, the downside of this was that bad cloud positioning could force a tank to have to take a circuitous route to the center, which might or might not mean the add dies early if the dps assigned to finish adds off was overzealous. This also resulted in an aggro pull as well on occasion, which is disastrous since it is a huge slowdown to the entire process.

Ultimately, after getting clean Phase 1s maybe 1 out of 4 times with this method, we went back to our original strategy. I think the time spent dealing with less clouds, or maybe just experience with the fight in general, made us better at dodging them, and with the center-oriented strategy we were getting clean Phase 1s 50-75% of the time.

The major issue with this strat is if one of the melee gets Sara's Fervor, the debuff that increases damage taken by 100%. If that happens, that melee needs to get the hell out of the center ASAP, because the add explosions when they die can very easily be a one shot, and if it happens to come right after someone else has "died" for whatever reason and been frozen by Hodir, they won't get the same protection.

Done right, even with the increased spawn rates, Phase 1 should end with 1-2 adds up, with the second or third one that was about to spawn preempted by the clouds fading as Phase 2 starts. Any more than two adds up as Phase 2 starts makes the rest of the fight that much harder.

 

jjj

This is a very interesting strategy, and I am very curious now about whether spawning adds on purpose affects the rate of spawning, as asked a couple posts up. Where do you position the raid, and I assume you have the entire raid dpsing down adds from 100-0%, rather than "weakening" them, and having a team of dps finishing them off in the center?

 

Szynszyla

Ranged, healers were positioned either at the furthest cloud orbit or one closer so were melee.
General idea was, add 40-50%, melee switch to another mob while ranged finish the previous one. With steady flow of adds, your melee dps is very likely to be high due to low downtime of melee.
Tanks were keeping the mob around middle orbit cloud, once their add would be low they would pick their way to the center. We didn't used taunt to center method. Just rotate the tanks on picking the mob and calling to spawn new or not.
Furthermore, i think if you have 2 choices. Pick full round way to reach center with add low or get into the cloud. Go into the cloud. It's safer and the dps increase, becouse if you take around way you gonna have 0 ranged dps likely. 3 adds alive is not an issue, just focus fire.

How does the add spawning effect normal timed waves? I have no idea but we've been able to keep steady flow of adds when we were spawning 3-4 clouds on purpose. You just have to be aware that at some point, you have to predict next time spawn to not get overwhelmed.

 

Jazzer

We've been forcing one extra add on the pull and it does not seem to effect the spawn rate of the non-triggered clouds. We've been using timestamps to determine when we get extra clouds, and after 'catching up' to that extra one at the start, the spawns have always came in the same intervals like I had posted.

Every wipe is a learn.

 

Chichilol

I have a question about phase 2. My guild killed yogg last night, but we had problems with our warrior tank getting 1-shot by the crushers when he was trying to interrupt the 'diminishing power' channel. I know how the crushers work damage-wise, but I'm wondering if it's possible for him to interrupt without getting hit?

Hint: I know about heroic throw/feral druid.

 

PsiVen

Yes, it is possible. The tentacles only melee while 'casting', not while 'channeling'. Run in and hit them right after they finish the cast, and get out immediately. They do have a "crush" attack they use sometimes, but you won't catch any melee swings if you're quick (and don't jump).

 

Yotz

Something the 10man group I run with has taken a liking to is stacking the entire raid on sara in P1. We are traditionally melee heavy, and I currently cannot see the clouds in their correct locations (apparently a known bug) so this came from trying to make avoiding the clouds fool proof.

As soon as we tried it we are getting to P2 flawlessly every time. It makes it a lot easier to get all the interrupts, especially with minimal ranged interrupts, and puts the dps time closer to 90%, up from what I would say was 20% when we tried avoiding clouds - for melee at least, which speeds up the phase considerably.

Our healers were holy priest and resto shammy, and seemed to have no problems keeping the raid up as long as dps was mindful to only kill adds when everyone was topped up. Rogues feint, and warriors def stance etc helps minimize the aoe damage taken also, particularly if you are taking double damage.

Im not sure if the damage would scale too much for this to work on heroic, its a fool proof way to avoid clouds and maximize dps time if your healers can keep up though.

 

mek

Explosion + volley will kill almost anyone in phase 1, so that stacking strat would require absolutely perfect interrupts.

As an aside, I was crushed while being held by a constrictor that spawned on top of a crusher tentacle tonight. Something to watch out for.

 

Arghoslent

I only charge/run in to interrupt when they are channelling, and I got one-shotted last night, so I don't think your theory is 100% valid. I would love to be proven wrong though. It's really annoying to die like this.

 

katholas

Pet melee attacks also work to break crushers channeling. We ended up using Shadowfiends and our DK tanks Ghoul to interrupt the crushers. You end up having to sacrifice the pet but its pretty much worth eliminating the risk of losing your tank to a crusher 1 shot.

 

klüger

that is _a lot_ of pets dying...


As far as I know, the crushers get a stacking melee-dmg-buff when they get hit by/in melee. This means that if say a moonkin has used treants on one when it comes out of stun it can oneshot the tank if he goes in before the treants are dead. I personally make sure to only use treants on crushers if stun time is above 30secs (or if there is a corruptor nearby that i can send them to 5secs before stun wears off)


supported by this quote from Meloku on wowhead.

 

katholas

I think you misunderstood the idea. That buff gets applied to the crusher upon taking ANY damage, not just melee. It stacks to 99 extremely fast when focused. Basically what we ended up doing is burning through the crushers full bore w/o jousting by the tanks. When the portals open and all the melee head downstairs we sacrifice a pet to interrupt the crusher giving the melee enough time w/o the debuff to break the illusion and stun the tentacles.

Each crusher only gets a few seconds of keeping the debuff up and only before the melee drop down into the brain room. Probably not doable this way once you start dropping watchers(especially mimiron) but it makes the fight a lot less dicey for the tanks who would otherwise be risking death by jousting the crushers to cancel the debuff.

 

Telemont

Yeah, that was me, and that's Hearsay, so don't take it for fact (I've never actually done the YS encounter, so have no evidence firsthand. However, the damage/haste is a very short duration buff, certainly).

(But I guess it's right, via others experience)

 

PsiVen

It does happen from time to time, but I can usually attribute it to lag: sometimes the crushers appear to have melee'd a target a solid 20 yards out which is preposterous because their hitbox is tiny. One of our rogues has an excellent screenshot of himself getting gibbed by one while DPSing a Corruptor 30-35 yards away.

If it's happening consistently, you just have to be quicker. I don't wait to see if my attack landed, or wait for an autoattack swing. I just strafe past spamming an instant and if it doesn't land I go in for another pass. Another great way to get one-shot doing this is by having two tanks trying to joust the same tentacle, so make sure you communicate before going in.

 

Varuk

My personal theory about crushers killing people ~20 yds away is that if you get close enough long enough for it to begin it's swing timer it finishes the swing at the end of the timer and hits you no matter how far away you are at that point. And so, the trick is to just never get close to the crushers.

 

Serelynn

In P2, my guild prioritizes killing Constrictor Tentacles when they spawn. This allows the buff stack on the current Crusher Tentacle to fall off part way through which results in a net damage boost to the raid since a tank can safely joust a bit longer until the stacks build up. Generally, ranged damage is able to kill the Crusher Tentacle before a second one spawns if the portal team is getting to the chamber and stunning the tentacles quickly enough.

The problem my guild is experiencing is poor luck: a Crusher Tentacle spawning where the portal group exits. It just seems like the group inside of Yogg-Saron would need to leave early while the tentacles are stunned to avoid being killed upon exiting.

 

jozga

You can counter this to some extent by having a tank use a CD and tank the Crusher until melee are safely away from it - a bit risky but better than all your melee getting ganked.

 

• Chicken

There's little risk to it if the Crusher is not being attacked at the same time, they don't start hitting hard enough to be a serious threat to your tanks until the focused rage buff stacks into the 30ish range.

With regards to people getting hit by Crushers while not next to them, were they being hit with normal attacks, or with the spell Crush? If it's the latter, as far as I've been able to discern it's behavior it's simply a frontal cone AoE that the Crushers cast at the same time as their melee attacks, because of which your tanks jousting them should be careful to not have anyone behind them (Or others should be careful not to be behind the tanks). The range on is 23 yards according to WoWhead.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

burlyman

We've been using the 3 tank, raid at the door, shuttling adds to the center approach for Phase 1. We have been sucessfull doing this, but are running into dps issues in Phase 3. If we wanted to drop down to two tanks, how viable would a dps specced/geared DK in frost prescence be for taunting the adds to the middle?