1 ranged may very well be not enough for one or zero watcher helping. But in general your brain group should reach the brain with 40 seconds or more left on the madness timer, which will prevent new spawns and enables even the melees to dps the crusher tentacles. You can even instruct one or two melees from the brain group to come out as soon as the brain is reached and help with the crusher tentacles.

How many healers are you running? Its actually possible to do Yogg+1 with one healer (not saying its easy, but its definitely doable), and if your second/third healer can spec for DPS that might solve your problem?

Having one healer only seems a bit extreme in my opinion.

Letting one of room melee coming back early may be the solution in order to not be overwhelmed by tentacles.

Arcane mages are extremely good at the brain room as well. We also have had better results with using Boomkin's over hunters, but our hunters are generally pretty weak.

The main problem with Hunters in the brain room (especially with no Sanity wells available) is that the floating skulls and their Sanity glare doesn't mesh well with having a dead zone and being required to look in the direction of the target.
Classes without these restrictions are, in my opinion at least, better suited to dealing with the illusions.

That said, Aspect of the Pack can prove beneficial if you're going without Mimiron, allowing for faster access to the brain once the illusion shatters.

It takes a little practice, but hunters actually fare extremely well in the brain room. Using proper positioning, hunters can attack the back tentacles quickly from positions which do not trigger skull damage. It *does* heavily favor assigning tentacles though, since the assist-train run-around method is 100% terrible for ranged in general. The advantage of using hunters over caster types is that they benefit from all the "melee buffs" and should thus yield more damage on the brain.

Everything I've experienced says the skulls are random.

We got our first heroic Yogg kill last night. It was actually very clean and quite beautiful from a raid leading perspective. Two portal phases to get the brain to 30% (using heroism). Even with the extra time, we were still pushing enrage when Yogg went down (~30 seconds on the timer).

We had 18 DPS and 5 healers. I put 10 on the brain and 8 on the guardians. We had two locks, a mage, a ret pally, a warrior, two hunters, and a couple ferals on the brain. There were 3 DKs, 2 boomkins, a rogue, a shadow priest and an enhancement shaman on the guardians. I lost a DPS somewhere in there, but anyway. What sort of distributions are other guilds using? Does anyone have suggestions for optimizing the output of ranged DPS on the brain?

Thank you.

We use 2 tanks 5 healers and 18 DPS (or sometimes we run it with 3 tanks). When setting up the raid I try to get 9 melee for the Illusion room, but they're perfectly interchangeble with hunters or as mentioned, arcane mages.

We generally just leave the brain at ~35% in the second portal phase so we can buy ourselves some extra time to clean up the room of corruptors (crushers should be dead already) and position ourselves either west or east of Yogg. I prefer a more controlled transition between P2 and P3 for the portal group instead of nuking as hard as you can, the *just* make 30% in the second portal and then scramble for positioning.

Anyway, what we do in phase 3 is have one protection paladin (but a DK would work as well) just grab all the adds and the second tank will taunt one off and we DPS that one down. We all pile up close to Yogg so melee AoE (rogues, DK's, rets mostly) hits both Yogg and the Immortals. Initially we have all the ranged and the DK's on the guardians (and only, like 6 people on Yogg) just to get stuff under control. While positioning and starting up the tank rotation routine we found that often we'd have a third guardian to deal with so we just make sure the immortals are completely under control and then pull DPS off of the Immortals on Yogg. Generally speaking, anyone that has DoTs puts them on Yogg and just nukes guardians otherwise and melee with AoE use it as much as they can.

I don't think our raid DPS is very high (we utterly fail at Council hardmode, for example) and the only time we actually saw the enrage was on one of our Three Lights attempts. Are you sure you're not standing in front of Yogg (which is where the melee exits the brain room), because parry and dodge cripples your melee DPS on him.

It sounds like you're doing poor synergy with DPS on the brain/guardians. You put 2 locks and a mage on the brain, but put your shadow priest and boomkins on the guardians. I'd think you'd want to put either all casters or all melee on the brain, so that they can get the DPS increases from debuffs. Also, shadow priests do a lot more to the brain than the guardians due to time for dots to tick etc.

As for how many to put where - I think we put 8 DPS on the brain(shadow priests, warlocks, and some other casters) and 10 on the guardians at the start, and then if we were doing fine on guardians I'd swap one person at a time (remaining casters) over to brain

Even with 3 brain phases we had 30 seconds left on our first kill.

In your place, I'd fix synergy first before I did anything else.

That could be a lot of the problem. We have been positioned at the front of the room for the most part. We also had some strategy communication issues before the attempt. My second tank wasn't paying attention and instead of tanking on top of Yogg he went for the door like we had in previous tries. /facepalm

Does the dodge/parry problem exists in P3? Should melee dps on the back of boss?

We are progressing on Yogg-Saron 25man and we already managed to finish pretty smoothly P1 and P2 in 3 portal phases, but our dps was not enough to finish Yogg-Saron before enrage ...

We assigned all melee on Immortals (aprox. 9 dps) and rest of DPS on brain (mostly casters and hunters). We can still cut one healer (5 is more than enough) but it can be still not enough ...

Our guild only a few weeks back got our first 25man kill on YS. I've been reading this thread and I must say that I hadn't realized that having the raid (and melee dps on YS) positioned near the door was causing significant DPS loss through parries and dodges. We did notice that DPS was an issue on the first kill, and on our second kill last week as well, but we ended up working around this by aiming to kill the Brain in 2 phases. We run the usual 5 healers and two tanks and I was definitely scratching my head as to why we were failing with the Enrage timer whenever it took 3 Brain Phases to get to phase 3.

I do happen to have a log of our most recent YS25 kill during which most of our melee were on YS in phase 3. It might be helpful in verifying the Dodge/Parry issues that might occur when melee is grouped on the side of YS that is closest to the door.

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay
There is parry problem. But bosses dodge 6.5%(bofore expertise) even when you attack behind so you can't speak about dodge problem.

Yes, 5 healers is more than enough and I think with 4 watchers you can even afford to go as low as 4. While three tanks is a bit safer in phase 1 and convenient in phase 3, it can be done with 2 tanks as well, leaving you 18 DPS slots.

As stated, the dodge might not be an issue as he seems to dodge from behind as well, but parry definately is. However, since you're putting casters on Yogg as opposed to melee the problem shouldn't exist since spells can be neither paried not dodged.

I'd go as far to say that using melee on Yogg is much, much more efficient because melee don't need to face Yogg while casters (mostly) need to. The Lunatic Gaze is extremely annoying for casters and given its frequency can reduce their dps to as low as 50% as what they normally do. In return, casters (and hunters) are actually quite efficient on Immortals because of their range which means they spend exactly zero seconds moving in phase 3.

So to make phase 3 a lot smoother and to have a shot at 3, 2 and 1 Light(s) in the Darkness, I'd advice you to

1) Melee on Yogg, ranged on Immortals. Pull DPS off Immortals as allowed.
2) Warlocks and Shadowpriests maintain DoT's on Yogg (they don't need to face the boss to apply those)
3) Position east or west of the room (or north, but it's a long walk for the melee) to nullify parry
4) Safe heroism/bloodlust for phase 3. It might be nice in a good illusion phase, but you should be able to clear phase 2 in three portal phases without bloodlust/heroism.

I can't speak for other melee classes, but Retribution Paladins need to face Yogg to melee him or use their two highest priority attacks. If we're on Immortal duty, however, all we need to do is stand next to the tank and melee the adds from the front - we don't have to move or even turn.

There are plus sides to either division of labour, but putting the melee on Immortals allows for constant DPS - and hence better control - of the adds. Putting ranged DPS on Immortals does not automatically solve the problem of their having to turn away.

We take a shaman (Enh or Resto) with us (the melee) into the brain room and blow Heroism/Bloodlust on the brain if we have favorable visions so we can get through P2 that much faster. This means melee don't have it for P3 but we don't need it to drop the guardians and it allows the casters to have Heroism/Bloodlust for Yogg in P3.

Sure. However, the specific problem that was put on the table was "Yogg enrages in phase 3 because we don't do enough DPS to it". Saving bloodlust for phase 3 is a fairly obvious solution to get it down quicker.

To be fair, any guild with some Yogg experience can easily clear phase 2 without the use of any heroisms or bloodlusts even with only 1 or 2 watchers helping. Portal DPS is not so much about DPS, but about getting long stuns which is just a matter of efficient DPS and experience. If you need it up top to get an extra crusher down your problem is not DPS on the brain, but it's getting long enough stuns.

Although, to be honest, we do actually put our DK's on the adds because DK AoE is just so crazy.

You have a problem with that and I would be puzzled if your casters didn't mention it, but the people up top also get the Heroism/Bloodlust cast in the brain room. It doesn't happen always and from what I could tell it depends on the vision you get in the brain room and also the position of the people up top. I've had it happen that half the casters got it, half didn't.

What we do is we pop BL on the first brain phase, and sometimes cast it even for casters if it looks like they would get use from it, to avoid the situation mentioned above. This way you get another BL around 1 min before enrage.

All of the above I mentioned was for 1 keeper up, so we're talking about 3 brain phases.

The physical location of the yogg brain room is directly below the Yogg room with the vision rooms spread around it as a circle - You can test this on a mage by blinking into the Conservatory of Life and falling through the world. On your way down you will see all the yogg visions as well as the brain room - you can even end up landing inside one of the visions.

Which makes it easy to blow Heroism for just the portal people if you have "favorable visions" (like I said) meaning you don't snag the people above you with Heroism's range.

As long as you have two paladins in the raid deafening roar should never silence. Also concerning lust; there is no reason to use lust in P2, if your portal group has assigned portals and tentacles and is getting to them on time they do not need a lust and top won't need a lust. If anything we found ourselves often waiting around up top for 10 seconds after everything had been cleared and this is with 0 watchers.