Flame Leviathan - The Pyrite Challenge!
 

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.

--

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?

It's fairly fast with a warlock and a mage. We did it in ~20-25 seconds in 10 man, but we were only trying 2 towers up.

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.

My 10-man group did 3 Towers this past week by dropping a motorcycle and just cycling shadowpriests (I'm shadow, our other priest went shadow for FL) It's a much better trade to cycle people through than to risk having your demolishers lose their 10-stack.

I can see the benefit of the 4-up for speed on the 25 man, but it seems to me that the risk of having stacks drop is pretty high, and you've got a soft enrage timer before your choppers die simply from the environmental damage.

What's the script command for dismounting?

/script VehicleExit()