Cranberry

As a note, do not let Velen run OOM. We mana burned him to see what would happen (pre-3.0) and he started meleeing me (a t6 protadin) for 8k+ very fast.

 

Ayreon

This is what my friend who recently lead a raid to kill the Horde leaders had to say about Cairne Bloodhoof. I don't believe he posts on these forums.

 

pdpi

Doesn't your friend's post fly against the conventional wisdom that boss-level mobs are (level+3) for effects of combat table? Or is there a minimum effective level built-in that I'm not aware of?

 

• Daboran

Ranged/Healers can easily outrange Starfall and their spot makes the best place to tank the respawning guards. Basically a tank and spank once you have this sorted out. Tyrande is the easiest alliance boss in my view, though she can be tricky if alliance actually defend her and coincide their attack with Starfall.

As with all lvl83 bosses, high +hit is a must, along with bleeds - bring feral/rogues specced for bleed damage. The Ferals can AoE tank the guards and dps in between.

 

KamPa

Racial bosses aren't 73, far too many resists and glancings for it to be true. Seeing that elites guarding them, as well as SotA Battlemasters are 80/81, we just assume 83.

 

Carmak

There was a discussion about boss level two years ago as well, and that time it seemed like the faction leaders where 73 just after 2.0. Having them 83 now is consistent, but it also indicates that boss level only means that a mob is much harder than his peers. Boss level inside instances might be better defined, but I don't remember what the conclusion was.

 

Illundai

Sylvanas' Fade is preventable by Faerie Fire and she can be seen with Detect Invisibility. Just have a Boomkin/Resto druid spam Faerie Fire with spellhit gear on and she becomes absolutely trivial even with a melee tank.

Cairne is also pretty easy IF you have 5-6 or even more tanks with Sunwell gear chaintaunting. We didn't regem our tanks at all, but we made them swap in all the hit gear they had, also eating hitfood of course. Make sure they all have a Draenei Aura as well.

Thrall is also incredibly easy in theory, but of course he's in Orgrimmar so you may get a lot of resistance here. His Chain Lightning doesn't chain if you tank him away from everyone (not even to melee) and he seems to not do anything besides that. Vol'jin is a joke now, I solo'd him down everytime he spawned (although he drops nice money! ) and shouldn't be your main concern.

And well, Lor'themar is just a joke. Doesn't even do anything except Arcane Blast (I believe it's that?) as far as I'm aware. Maybe some Cleave, but very boring all the same.

 

KamPa

He mana burns random people, but it's too weak to notice.

 

Whitemane

We tried Magni the other day at 5 am, but were unsuccesful. We had 4 tanks.

He sounds a lot like Cairne Bloodhoof, the only exception is that instead of gibbing a single person he will gib the entire raid. Yes, that's how fun he is!! His knockback ability, should it go off in the raid which it will eventually given how long the damn fight take, will kill everyone near him. It even hits so hard that you can not reliably have any other melee near him, except for the tanks.

The combination of these two things make Magni Bronzebeard, at least from what I've seen, a total joke. His knockback ability is the most devastating of all the racial leader abilities since it makes it necessary to bring an extraordinary amount of tanks and makes it impossible for any other melee to get near him. Maybe if ret pallys and warriors wore pvp gear they'd be able to survive the knockback?

At least, as Horde, Magni is your only real concern.

Velen - Range tank him, he's a total pushover.

Tyrande - Starfall is nasty, but you can out range it but that is very problematic if there is a serious alliance presence. Can be somewhat negated by lots of heal spam, we had 3 resto shammys, 2 holy priests and 2 deep resto druids. It did the trick. Hits fairly hard.

Vrynn - The whirlwind is not so dangerous in itself, it won't even kill rogues but they will be so low on hitpoints that they can be killed by PvP easily. Have to watch out for the heroic leap into raids if he decides to couple it with a whirlwind, combined with the stun of heroic leap it can kill the raid. So try to spread out a bit. Watch for the battlemaster, we ended up pulling him but never saw where he was positioned on the way in. We tanked him in the room to the right of his throne room. Tyrande hits harder really, wtf?

 

• Chicken

As far as I've been able to test boss level mobs have a minimum effective level. They will always at least act as a mob of three levels higher, but will act as a level higher than that if your level is lower than their base level. Bosses in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are always at least level 63, bosses in Outland (and in SWP) are at least level 73, while bosses in Northrend, as well as the racial leaders now are at least level 83.

I haven't fully confirmed that it works like this, but I spent some time trying out Mind Vision on my Priest (Who is level 61), and I saw a far higher resist rate than expected on Doomwalker, Doom Lord Kazzak, and the Alliance racial leaders. The level numbers aren't exact in other words, though they are most certainly higher level than your level + 3 if your level is low enough, and these level numbers seemed the most logical.

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

 

Blutelf

We tried King Magni Bronzebeard with 40 people tonight. His knockback ability will indeed hit all melees around him for around 14k on plate. This will reliably one-shot everyone who is not a tank at level 70. In addition to this, it's also an aggro reset for the current tank at least.

There is a house near Magni where we considered pulling him to, but you absolutely can't fight him in crowded space due to the knockback.

From the description, it sounds like Cairne Bloodhoof is the Horde equivalent. Good fun. This will really require some raid stacking.

 

◊ gwystyl

My guild partnered with another one to get everyone their Black War Bears and got it all wrapped up 2 nights ago. One thing I haven't seen mentioned but could help is that some of the leaders can be Dismantled by rogues. Sylvanas and Lorth'remar are both vulnerable to this, but Thrall and Cairne are immune. We just set up a Dismantle rotation using similar macros to the ones we all know from chaining drums.

The most annoying of the Horde was Sylvanas, but that was because of the room's layout and how easy it is to evade bug the mini bosses and Sylvanas herself. We only had her blink and never re-appear once (first pull), but thereafter it was the additional adds Sarah and Lyrlia that caused a little bit of trouble, particularly because of the AOE fear which can lead whoever has aggro on either one to run off the platform and cause the npc's to evade and reset.

 

Whitemane

The only difference really being that Magni can "accidently" kill off large parts of the raid in one go, besides that - the same! That's really the big issue in regards to these racial leaders. I wonder how many alliance and hordes have their warbears, I really wouldn't be surprised if a lot more alliance have it than horde. Of course accounting for population discrepencies. Sorry for the tone, but I am slightly bitter

 

Rane

The better part of Magtheridon horde has a war bear now, me included. The obvious pros of a 90-10 horde/alliance faction discrepancy .

We found the only real challenge to be Magni Bronzebeard. We wiped on him once, then went to kill Velen to let the present Alliance players cool off a bit and returned a few hours later for a successful kill. The basic tricks have been explained, we stacked about 8 hunters, with 4-5 tanks and other dps. Magic dps was mainly concerned with keeping the Alliance out with the occasional frost trap/flares at the entrance by the hunters to discourage people from entering.

I can say it really did feel good to kill them, finally a challenge again after that week's Sunwell.

 

Jalhar

You may a bit wrong here, as Magni only drops aggro from the main tank as far as I understood, whereas Cairne drops aggro on every tank around him, making him a lot more sensible to taunt resists thus more difficult to keep stable than Magni, with the drawback Magni can kill a lot more players than Cairne in a few seconds. We successfully did Cairne last night with no less than 6 T6+ tanks taunting (and dying ^^) like mad. We had around 70 deaths in the process and had to use an OOC rezzer full time.

The other horde bosses are very easy in comparaison, we had Sylvannas bug and reset once then decided to follow the advice to tank her downstairs in the back of the room, it worked well. The faerie fire trick is quite interesting, I thought a world boss would be immune to everything else but the armor reduction, nice to see I was wrong

 

Sahael

My guild completed this about a week and a half ago and I believe we determined that Magni actually does a wing-buffet-like ability that drops threat on anyone who gets hit by it (which could be 1 tank, or all of them, depending how you are positioned when it goes off).

 

Emeraude

Can anyone confirm that multiple raids get credit for a City Leader kill even if one of the raids doesn't get the tap?

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CX81UJZ8
For the lurking Phoenix Wright faithful.
What is the most important thing to you? Won't you grant me the pleasure of taking it away.

 

◊ arison

I can confirm they do not get credit. Only the tapping raid gets credit.

 

bracul

At least some of the non-tapping raids will get the credit for the kill once you swap people between your raids. This may be considered a bug/exploit or somewhat, but apparently it does work for some people.

I've heard of 4 40er raids to get full credit because they put like 5 people from the tapping raid into the others and let just everyone damage the boss in order to get the health bar from grey to red. Once that was finished, nearly everyone got credit from the kill.
Apparently I've also heard of just 40man downing the bosses, but that would be from my alliance-experience. I really don't know whether 40man from the Horde would be enough to meet the "requirements".

 

Angeron

Front page article here is proof positive that 40 people from the horde 'meet the requirements'. Yes magni is considerably harder than any of the other 7 leaders, but not so much that a coordinated and geared raid can't beat him as long as they stack hunters.

Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.

 

• Intermission

Magni's knockback is a 10 yard range AoE, and it drops threat on all who get hit by it. It really is difficult. We attempted with a raid of 70 people (they had just under 100 alliance defending, 3 raid groups, as seen by an alliance alt). It turns sour quite fast.

The basic plan for the PvE aspect is this:
- Current tank stays in melee range.
- All other tanks stay 15 yards away, spamming taunt every cooldown.
- When a taunt goes off, the new current tank takes him to his tanking spot and the old tank joins the others taunting. (this happens around once every 25 or so seconds, with ~6 tanks).
- When he does his Knock Away, hope it goes to one of the recently taunted-off tanks who was not in Knock Away range.
- After a while however, healer threat is simply more tps than a tank can generate and swap around by using this system. Your raid needs to be VERY fast at moving away from the Skull (positioned on Magni's head). The hunters/healers that get aggro need to quickly run to Magni and die, until a tank is back on the top, or a taunt actually works. This is when a raid wide instant death can happen, when that process gets sloppy. (or when Alliance cyclone your main tank very close to the Knock Away timer, which is very random).

In addition to the PvE aspect, Magni's room is far harder to deal with alliance, compared to the Stormwind King (Tyrande and Velen are a joke regardless). With the Stormwind King, you can drag him into one of the side rooms and block off the Alliance at the entrance. However Magni's room is nowhere near as deep, and the entrance is shallower, opening into a large expanse that alliance can roam around in.

Also, effects such as Cyclone (kill grounding + cyclone) are far more devastating on Magni than on any of the other Alliance leaders. A Cyclone roughly before a Knock Away would have a very high chance of a wipe. A couple of Sunders on a tank and he approaches one shot range during Magni's Avatar buff. It doesnt help that the guards also sunder your tank, and it's much more potent than a warrior's sunder. I highly recommend your tanks using a PvP trinket, as Kidney Shot/Bash/etc or undispelled HoJ leads to tank deaths.

I cant speak on behalf of the Horde leaders, but in an attempt to express the difficulty level of the Alliance leaders by comparing them to well known fights (in their 2.4 versions), it would be something like this:
Velen: Prince
Tryande: Prince
Stormwind: Council
Magni: Kil'jaeden, with the adds from Muru also joining the fight.

We intend to go back with a raid force of roughly 120, combining 4 or 5 of our servers guilds. We expect slightly more than 120 alliance defending by the time we're engaged with the King, as it will probably be relatively peak server time. So the plan is to have a 40 man raid inside Mangi's room, and 80 others outside his room fighting off alliance. The 40 inside the room are also mostly for alliance ressers and flaggers, and hopefully 8 or so tanks and hunters (as our previous attempts have only had 4-5 of each).

 

stauros

I think we finally have our strategy down for tanking him. It's very similar to yours, and we saw steady progress on him. More importantly, it was very stable except for a few times when RNG would rape a tank or taunt resists. Another thing, we went from 4 hunters on one attempt (55% in 24 minutes) to eight in the next (14% in 21). It really is amazing how much better they are at dps'ing these high level bosses compared to other classes. We should have had him tonight, but we eventually got overwhelmed by Alliance. I think there's a good chance we'll get it tomorrow. We'll be adding two more hunters, hopefully.

 

Jalhar

I doubt he is considerably harder than Cairne, they share the same annoying ability (aggro wipe), with some specificities (cleave, aoe, mortal strike, avatar...) They are probably more or less on the same level. Only someone who attempted the 8 bosses can really judge the respective difficulties of alliance and horde leaders tho ^^ If there is such a person browsing this thread, it would be nice to hear from him

To be a bit more constructive, what do you think these bosses will be at level 80 ? I'm afraid they will be a bit "too" easy, as 5.5 million HP is not really that much considering all classes will be able to dps, not only hunters. For example, a raid with 20 dpsers, 3000 dps average, will need roughly 90 seconds to kill a leader...The element of surprise will be the most important thing, the defense won't have the time to organize itself, which kills the fun of such encounters.

 

• Intermission

Absolutely. I really think they will buff the HP at least. 25 minute instance boss fights were abandoned long ago, but I feel it works very well for faction leaders. I hope they up their HP to around 20 million HP in the first minor patch post-WotLK release. The fight would still be quick, and nowhere near as long as the level 70 versions, but at least it should give the opposite side a chance to fight back; making a fight of it rather than a surprise attack.

 

Whitemane

Yeah, if they really do keep the hitpoints as is you need a defense force ready as soon as they engage - if you hear "Omg raid at Thrall" he's already dead by the time any kind of resistance is put up. You'll have everyone running around on warbears if that's the case.

I think it's hard to judge the difficulty of each boss, but with Magni it's more than just the difficulty of just him. Try and also consider the city he is located in, the toughest Horde boss is located in a ghost town. Everything but Orgrimmar is a ghost town really. Magni is sat in undoubtedly the most populated alliance city and things can get real ugly really quickly. So it is indeed difficult to judge entirely how Cairne and Magni stack up, although I would dare assume that Magni is the tougher one. Even assuming that they are the same, Ironforge is a vastly more difficult town to "invade" than Thunder Bluff. Also since you can't deploy any melee, which are usually some of the better dps, you can be sure that the fight will last long enough so that you will see plenty of alliance.

Magni does drop aggro from all tanks around him though, not just a single target.