We've not really pushed for the hard(hard)mode yet, but as always we try to make our attempts as close to the way you would try to execute it if it were proper hardmode. Anyways, what seems to be the key for this fight is how you handle the demolishers. Due to not wanting to make the pyrite problem too harsh, we only go with 3 dps on top of the Leviathan and usually one of them has healing capabilities like an SP or Ele shaman.

A)

3 people are loaded into chopper sidecars for when demolishers launch gunners. As we engage, the demolishers launch at the earliest convenience and the choppers drive over to the demolishers so the chopper passenger can jump into the gunner seat and take over pyrite loading. As the topside dps gets launched off the Leviathan, choppers speed over and pick them up. The passenger waits until the new gunner gets launched onto the Leviathan. Full circle, rinse and repeat.

However, this version takes 3 extra people from other duties and that can perhaps be a bit harsh. You dump 1 chopper and 1 full siege engine because of the 3 extra people.

B)

This rotation requires no extra people, since the plan here is that the demolisher driver tries to be near a pyrite barrel when the passenger is launched so that the driver can jump into the gunner seat and reload pyrite himself. We've had some issues with this, people have had their vehicles just despawn if they go into the gunner position by themselves. Not entirely sure why that is, but that's the reason we've not pursued this strategy further. To me it seems like the best way to do it, except it might be a bit dodgy with all things going on and you might get forced to move and thus drop your pyrite stack anyway.

C)

We've not tried this, but it seems to me that loaded with 50 pyrite shortly before the gunner gets launched you should be able to last 1 minute and 20 seconds firing one pyrite barrel every 8 seconds. Even at 40 pyrite, you should be able to last 1 minute and 4 seconds. That probably requires dps up top to clear all turrets in 40 seconds, which might be a bit much but at this way you can launch 4 people up top. I can see from our WWS though that we are not making the dps requirements at the moment to do this, but that's with only 3 so 4 might do the trick.

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For 25 man, A is a possibility but it's most likely going to be using too many people for this in 10 man. Which make me think that either B or C is the way to go. Another possibility that I considered was having demolishers picking them up, but unless the Flame Leviathan has predetermined spots to launch people to, it seems a bit dodgy because you are going to be rotating people into different demolishers and may even end up not having a guaranteed pickup for one of the dps'ers coming down.

So far we've not really been too happy about spending time at Flame Leviathan, partly because the rotation here is kinda dodgy and people feel there are other more important hardmodes. However, I actually really like this fight but without some more solid info on it I doubt I can entice people to actually seriously try.

Every time I've tried B, I've lost the demolisher. There was some discussion in the Ulduar thread about it, but no consensus on why it was happening. Some felt it was that during the 'hop', the HP of the tank would drop below 0. This doesn't appear to be the case as there are reports of them despawning with more than enough HP left. Of course, B would be my ideal situation, if it turns out to be a viable tactic.

C seems to be the current best choice, but it does rely a bit on luck (which I hate). If a demolisher is targeted by FL without a passenger, they will most likely lose their Pyrite stack. That is, if they even get away in time.

A good way to counter this is to stun FL as often as possible to keep his speed buff low (while keeping up as many 10 stacks of pyrite as possible). Our method is to stack the pyrite to 5 (half energy), have our passenger reload the ammo and then pyrite - launch - pyrite to get them up without losing the stack. It's then a matter of keeping the stack up with your remaining pyrite until the player returns (if he returns).

We are also in a similar position where people do not want to 'waste' the whole night on the first boss, especially while we're still gearing up. We normally just down two towers and continue. Due to this, I have less experience with the Freya tower than I'd like. What methods are people using to handle the adds without splitting off too much dps from the boss?

We used Strategy C and managed 3 towers last week. Keeping the pyrite stack up while your gunner is gone on the demolisher is....difficult, you need to be really conservative with with the pyrite. The dps needs to be on the ball as well getting to the chopper and back to your demo as well, or that stack will drop.

As for the Freya tower adds, i found that parking my demo in a flaming tar patch and firing from there took care of most of the small adds, and the gunners on the siege tanks were tasked with dealing with the rest.

Strategy A has occurred to me as well, but i want to hear others' opinions of how effective it was before i go and suggest it to our raid.

The health on FL seems to scale in a manner I didn't expect either.

0 towers = base HP (70 million on heroic)
1 tower = base + 50% (105 million)
2 tower = 1 tower + 50% (157 million)
3 tower = 2 tower + 50% (235.5 million)
4 tower = 3 tower + 50% (353.25 million)

I'm not really sure if that's what is intended. I'd be interested to see some parses of 4 tower kills to see kill duration time and raid DPS. We managed something like 890k raid dps on 3 tower, and i can't imagine that being anywhere near enough for 4 tower, you'd need 1.2+ million raid dps.

With regards to A, you can skip a step at the start by having a passenger pre-loaded into the launch arm of a Demo and a second passenger in the normal gunner spot. Makes the start of the fight slightly smoother.

We have not worked on FL+3 yet in the 25 man, but using 2 turret killers we are getting FL+2 down consistently. Generally 3 stuns in a four and a half minute kill. This enables us to only have two empty Siege Engine gunners positions among the vehicles. What vehicles are people dropping to get to 4 turret killers? 1 Chopper, 1 full Siege, and 1 siege gunner?

This.

Consider only launching 2 people each cycle as well. I recommend dot classes, as they can dot up all 4 turrets and both warlocks and spriests can take care of themselves with respect to damage. So with 5 demolishers, here's how it breaks down:

Demos 1, 2, 3: Driver + Passenger. They never launch, and are focused completely on keeping a 10 stack of Pyrite rolling
Demos 4, 5: Driver + Passenger + Loaded Passenger.

For Demos 4 and 5, you launch them immediately at the start. Then those demos can go around their normal business of getting a 10 stack rolling. When the Shutdown is about to be over, that means the 2 people on FL are about to be hitting the ground and returning to those 2 demolishers. The passengers should load themselves at that time, and 2 bikes ferry the ejected characters back to the demos. Launch the new 2 people, start the cycle all over again. The key is don't load until you know the next person is about to come over to hop in. That way you get maximum value out of your passengers, and it shouldn't be too difficult for all of them to keep 10 stacks rolling.

For our case, we had the 2 demolishers marked so we knew where to return to. One of them was the shadowpriest demolisher, and the other one was the warlock demolisher, so that there was always a warlock+shadowpriest paired up for launching. We were all in the same group, so it meant that the warlocks could get a bit of help healing via VE as well. It's fairly trivial with these 2 classes though.

Also regarding the FL HP scaling, why is that surprising? It's multiplicative, not additive. Each tower gives him 50% more hp

How fast are you getting turrets down then? I can see the benefit of dot classes for sure, but still it seems it would take quite a bit of time to get all the towers down. It's a total of 260k damage?

Unfortunately we dont have it logged, since FL isn't really great for that. It felt reasonably fast though, I'm pretty sure it was less than 48 seconds. (the span of 2 devouring plague cooldowns) An afflock+spriest can stack a lot of dots on all 4.
I'll be sure to time it next week, when we do +4.

C is definitely doable, but extremely hard. We had countless wipes while trying to perfect this for our 10man hard mode kill. If you count the fact that you need to keep your 10stack up even if he chooses to chase you then you are beginning to see how finely tuned this fight is for 4 towers.

But all it takes is practice.

While I honestly havent done it with 4 towers in 25man yet I feel that that might possibly be easier. You simply have more people to pick up the slack if one of your demolishers lose their stack while being chased. Also a smaller percentage of your pyrite stackers will get chased on any given fight.
There are of course some very different and very real new challenges that present themselves in a 25 man environment.

I've only done +towers on 10 man, but experienced the vanishing demolisher bug while trying strategy B as well. That's what I'd prefer to use, but until the bug is fixed obviously can't. Strategy C worked for a +3 kill, but was extremely tight. Next time, we're planning to try a strat similar to A. One demo will have a permanent gunner and won't be launching anyone. The second vehicle will rotate two people through the gunner's seat and turret killer. We're planning to only use one chopper in order to have the extra person in the demo. In 10 man it only takes ~3k dps to bring down both turrets in 40 secs, which would be 8 stacks of the speed buff. If we can rotate it that fast, I'm hoping we can weather the loss of one tar patch.

Regarding losing your pyrite stack while being chased, we've started waiting to stun him until he starts chasing a demo or he's too fast to avoid, whichever comes first. Its helped us avoid the majority of the problems.

With regards to Option B, it was a viable and working strat until it seems as of the latest patch. I was one that used to jump seats all the time while my passenger was killing turrets. It was fairly easy thing to do as long as you were near some Pyrite that was already shot down, not currently kiting him, and not near any of the orbital defense attacks. It took all the matter of about 5 seconds to press the hotkey to change seats, target the pyrite and hook it in and change back and continue rolling the stacks.

Now the 4 times I tried to change seats, the vehicle just despawned and I would die so that option is pretty much a no go now.

As for C, its possible to stretch the pyrite out over the 80ish seconds but they would have to overload him within about 20-30 seconds because they will spend a lot of time parachuting off of him, getting picked up and then returned to you. Plus your passenger doesnt have a whole lot of time to get you refilled before its time to launch again.

Option A seems the most viable for anything above a 2 tower kill. Forgo'ing 1 Chopper and 1/2 Seige Passenger(s) is the way to go. Having 2 demolishers acting as the launchers with an extra passenger while the other 3 fully concentrate on stacking pyrite. 3 Demos with a 10 stack of pyrite rolling will do about half of a million damage every second and nearly a million per second during stun phases between the three.

It would of been helpful though if blizzard left the kiting like it was on the PTR to the Seiges as that was what they were designed around doing (along with interrupts) and the Demolishers as the main source of dps and the Choppers as utility. Kiting as a Demolisher (especially if your rolling a 10 stack) is a huge source of dps lost. If you were at max range and he had very little stacks of the speed buff on, you could maybe maintain it by moving in reverse but more often then not, you would have to turn away and have the stack drop.

Regardless though, Blizzard did an excellent job on the fight and the tuning of the hard modes is pretty good now.

There is no reason to stack people into your demolisher. Simply put the faster your 4 people on FL kill the turrets the faster they come down, (use mages to blink OR the dismount script) and get them back in the demolishes ASAP. As long as they top off demos, and you have good pyrite control you are ok.

Turrets are amazing at dealing with adds and keeping things organized in, my experience, it's not worth sacrificing them to keep 100% up time on pyrite for all demos, though you should have a very high uptime no matter what now that they fixed many (though not all) of the bugs involved with this fight.

What's the script command for dismounting?

/script VehicleExit()

That script is really interesting. I saw s movie of a guy that just magically dismounted and walked into his demolisher. Gonna have to try that next week.

As for foregoing a chopper or siege gunner for 10man kill I suppose you could make it work due to having higher dps on boss and quicker stuns, though we managed to learn it without for our 4t kill. What you lose though is some serious control of the plants. Those choppers are essential at kiting and slowing the plants and getting them into ignited tar. And the second siege gunner nails the coffin on the plants so the demos never have to worry about them.

We only launch one porson up at a time with the second demo gunner filling pyrite and providing speed buff for better refilling until first shutdown, then he jumps in the cannon and is ready to go flying the second FL wakes up from shutdown. Now the first demo gunner has about 30-40 seconds until the second shutdown to help his demo driver get enough pyrite so that he can nuke away and still have the ammo to keep his 10-stack up the next time the gunner is sent to shutdown.

The trick lies in making sure you never lose your stack, even while chased or not having a demo gunner. To do that you need excellent plant control and good awareness of the speed and range of the FL should he chose to chase you. Also a cold head to reapply pyrites just in time so as not to lose the stack while not wasting ammo. 220-230k dps on each of the demos is what you should aim for. If you can manage that then you are home free after about 4 minutes of kiting. (some of that damage will be from aoe on the plants)

I've only done a dozen or so attempts at 10 man 4 tower but I'm assuming the principles in the 25 man are the same - to keep pyrite stacks up at all times and chain system-shutdowns.

One thing I noticed in 10 man is that I frequently get down to 1HP on top of the FL but I never die until I hit the ground and some add starts beating on me / a rocket hits me. Has anybody had this experience on 25 man? If so, there's probably no need for healers unless choppers are failing at picking up the parachuters.

99% sure this is just a UI issue, happens all the time, if you turn on friendly name plates you can see the real values for other people up top, no solution for yourself however.

The only way I can see you keeping a stack up is if you're at MAX range when he chases you, then there might be enough time to turn around once during the chase but otherwise ... I just don't see it happening. So if someone who has experience doing this amazing feat could explain how exactly you spin a tanker around on a dime would step forward

How prone are people to getting meleed by adds? I mean unless they just spawned, you should be fairly safe if any of the siege gunners has tagged the plants. I'm just thinking it should be possible for the demolisher to drive a bit close and the dps'er to run over to his demolisher if you do the dismount trick, because that would avoid a lot of crap.

It depends on when you get chased, if you get chased right after an overload, and you're standing at almost max range, you can easily backpedal your way until the switch and keep your stack up. If you're getting chased on the last switch before an overload, then yeah chances are your stack is dropping or you're getting rammed.


I'm interested in hearing from people who have first experience, is 10man actually harder than 25man for 4towers? It seemed like freya's adds control is much easier when you can afford tanks/choppers in each corner, or close to, than when you only have 2 tanks/choppers to begin with, with the choppers having to pickup overload people and the tanks being chased 25% of the time. We tried a bit to get 10man down but it seemed quite complicated, while in theory 25man looks easier. Haven't downed either though, only 3towers on each, which is relatively easy as long as you destroy freya's tower, but while there's quite a few 25man hard mode videos around, I don't think I've seen a 10man one.

It really is as simple as turning around and shooting him every once and awhile when being chased. Obviously the farther away you are the more you can do this, which you should be anyway as a Demolisher.

When I get chased for example it usually takes him a good ~10 seconds to reach me (because I'm backing up while he's doing it). When he gets too close I ask for a speed boost from my passenger so I can make some headway. During this time I can usually turn around and sneak a pyrite in to keep the stack up, in which I immediately turn around or risk getting attacked by the boss. Sometimes I can do this a second time, but as mentioned it all depends on how far away the boss is from you when you initially get targeted. Keeping your pyrite stack rolling when being chased as demolisher depends on a few factors; distance from boss when targeted, distance you can back up before hitting a wall, and of course the time remaining on an overload. I can usually keep a pyrite stack going when I get chased, but I can't say it's 100% achievable every time.

Remember also that it's safe to turn around in the closing seconds of being chased because he picks a new target with ~5 seconds left on the debuff.

edit: And from my experience the 10m version seems much more difficult then the 25m version. Mostly because the adds have the exact same health in both versions (possible oversight?) and you don't have the luxury of extra siege engines running around to mop the adds up.

Not what you asked exactly but Numpad 5 is the default key bind for Exit Vehicle and there is a Vehicle Controls section of Key Bindings where you can change this too. (Other options include Previous Seat, Next Seat, Aim Up, Aim Down, Aim Increment, Aim Decrement)

While I wouldn't go so far to call either 10man or 25man hardmode "hard" per se, I would say the 10man is much more RNG based than the 25man do to the lower vehicle pool to choose from. But the hp is scaled WAY down in comparison to the 25man. It's not a simple well, there are 15 less people so the boss is only going to have 40% of the HP, the damage outbput by the demolishers is very similar to the 25man, so you do 25man amount of dps, where it counts.

Also realizing that there were no 10man hard mode vidoes up there we uploaded our kill at YouTube - Tigers VS Flame Leviathan Hard Mode 4 towers. Even though we were extremely unhappy with how our first kill turned out =) We make several bad mistakes and in the end only luck out. We even had a good chunk of luck on how he chose chase targets the first couple of minutes so it should have been a lot smoother. The pyrite stacks reset to 1 twice during the encounter and there are melee hits from leviathan. All in all i suppose it shows that you dont need perfect execution to win, just a lot of practice. He is alot easier now after about 50 wipes at least.

What Tojara above me says is very true and very important to realize for demo drivers. As an example, both demos should be starting in corners where they are confident that they can pull this off if he starts chasing you. You can see me perform this at about 3:40 in the clip above, allthough again it is not done correctly, he actually manages to get a melee hit just as he is switching targets.

Also, overloads should be coming every second to third chase anyway, so the speed increase shouldnt be that noticeable. We stalled the shutdowns sometimes when we felt we needed to fill up more pyrite before launching the shutdowner, but I dont think we ever went more than three chases before a shutdown anyway.


Remember about the adds and the siege gunners. the gunners dont have any aggro. The plants cant target them so the they cant peel plants off other vehicles.