Factual e-peen correction: Ascent tried FF after learning that we did it successfully that way -- Jager has said as much. We've done it that way since before our first kill, and often have zero drakonids alive at any given time during phase 1.

And Minhjaal, yeah, I'm serious. We had various mixed DPS+CC+kiting strats that we had used before, but NA's earthbind totem highway struck me as much more elegant and stable. We've used that method for 7 months now.

i think everyone focuses on Earthshocking them now hordeside ever since the NA video was released.

If you have a shaman it is perhaps the most fun fight for you in 40 man (not including AQ or Nef)

Wow, thats impressing. Untill i read this i thought our DPS is really good at phase1, since we have not more than 2-3 drakonids at each side. I wonder how you managing that.

There's a touch of group competition going on during phase 1. Both sides want to be able to say that they're having to wait on each subsequent spawn. It's when someone fails to assist that we get behind and people get yelled at over Vent.

Brute forcing the event is best way :o

I remember trying to do the earthbind kiting method.

All our shamans would get dazed and die instantly.

We went to kill groups in each corner and suddenly there were no loose mobs running around unless someone was slacking. And it was a ton of fun being a little 5 man death squad.

I love Razorgore, I love running around knowing I have like 8-10 angry mobs after me and they can't do anything.

Yeah, I think a lot of what you see with guilds' approaches to these fights is a reflection of those guilds' strengths and weaknesses, and their composition.

For Nef phase 1, we had literally zero people in our raid with any sort of snare talents. We have no mages specced Improved Blizzard, no hunters with Entrapment, etc. If we had people with those specs, we probably would've tried AoE a bit more. We had Green Drakonids our first week or two also, which are basically immune to Earthbind. Without any effective way of really containing them, we pretty much wrote off AoE entirely from the start.

Nef phase 1 was probably the most frustrating fight in the game, for me, to learn, just because it offered absolutely no feedback whatsoever. We had no fucking clue what you were supposed to do. I remember hours spent trying to kite the drakonids with piercing howl and coordinated heal aggro and such, trying to see if maybe something would happen if we survived for long enough.

Most painful are memories of trying basically the exact strat we use now, around September 20th or so, and calling for wipes right around the 2-minute mark as the 5th and 6th Chromatics came up, because we were losing control. Back then, the conventional wisdom (haha) was that you needed to kill 10 Chromatic Drakonids to start phase 2. We had to have literally been two or three kills away from making him land, but turned away from a DPS strat for a few days because we thought we weren't even getting 2/3 of the way to where we needed to be. Ugh.

My guild's general philosophy towards this type of thing has been "if it bleeds, we can kill it". The first thing we always try in a new encounter is to kill the enemy as quickly as possible, ignoring all elegant strategy or control. We add the control and elegance in as needed, but only enough that allows us to continue stabbing/smashing. It works suprisingly well. A good example is our first attempt on ebonroc where we boneheadedly fought through what must have been three million health gained through shadow and killed him after 20 minutes. We added the taunt rotation later. I view it as the first test of a quality encounter: if we can't beat it by caveman stab/smash then the fight must have at least some depth. Needless to say, Ebonroc failed miserably (Flamegor did too, haha!).

So when we saw Legionnaires and found out they had all these nifty abilities when MC'd, we thought "oh that's neat" and then proceeded to kill them as soon as they came out of the gates. Of course the dragonkin weren't handled so easily.

Yeah, we're like that too. Our comparative strengths are awesome rogues, warriors and mages. We lack a lot of the finesse some of the best guilds do. We can power through a lot of content simply by reacting on the spot and doing high dps. I guess it's because we have a ton of old quakers on board. I'm the only old EQ'er going "Can we PLEASE try some tactics this time? ...oh never mind, that worked".

We are still learning the Razorgore encounter but I would have to agree with everything said so far: It is very unique and exciting, and really pushes us to work together and gel as a team. Tonight we go back for (I think) the fourth official night of attempts (fourth time was the winning rip for us on Ragnaros).

Things that have helped us so far include that PW:S on the Shamans to prevent daze (tonight I think we're going to enchant a few more Shammy boots with the Run Speed) and we are still having our MT act as the controller.

If we have five shamans, should they all be kiting? So far we have had a backup in the center, covering additional heals on those shamans as they get hit and to pick up if one dies. In fact, I think on our last attempt we may have had six shamans, but only four designated kiters at the start...

Also...someone alluded earlier to yelling in vent to pick up slack...and this is something we are noticing as well; some of our corner groups are so effective right now that the rogues are worried they aren't helping enough...ie they've totally blown through the spawns and want to help out in some other capacity...if all the mages are killed and all you have left is Legionnaires and Dragonkin while a few eggs remain...should the rogues be put on some other task?