We did something similar to the one above, 1 group with ranged dps, a cpl healers, and offtanks (they are naturally not in the ranged group doing ranged, but up close and personal) and on the other side we got the tank healers + rogues running inn and out doing damage between sweeps.) and on the top, tha main tanks (and I think some others probably a healer, I'm a tired hunter so I stand plunking my gun with a big earthworm blocking my view for whom exactly stands there). Anyway, main point is to not get healers sandblasted) I like the fight, wild and unpredictable (many theories on the 1 1/2 - 3 min submerge, but nothing ever pans out). And when you get to 20% with 0 dead (still not a common occurence though), and subsequently slay him, you feel you've really done something, which most other bosses lose very fast efter the first kill.

I'm in Drauk's guild and since it's such a loveable rogue fight mightaswell add some comments. Even with salvation I was finding the whole attacking between sweeps waaaaay to sensitive, a few swings and I would very often have pulled aggro and died. We basically decided after a little while that it was just a waste of a rogues DPS using it up in a more sustainable phase, whereas burning him down at 20% is far more important as sustaining tanks at that point is somewhat more "difficult" so increased raid dps against him at that point is more vital. I have'nt been using damage meters for a few weeks now but I'd wager money that our rogues are'nt in the top 10 given we have some very strong ranged DPS players aswell. I tried feint spam's and vanishing yet I could still easily pull aggro even when being extra-careful, might just be my poor luck but I can't say it endeers me to the encounter, most of our rogues end up trying to sit out for Ouro since it's generally (in my/our view) a wasted slot use, certainly compared to an extra ranged DPS slot or healer.

Naturally I spend most of my time making sexual inuendo based comments with warriors and other rogues in one of the little alcove's till I have something to do. I do find the whole 90s / 180s thing to be somewhat random, though I think relying on 180s uptime to get a kill is purely down to lack of experience on the encounter.

We had the worst luck ever yesterday. First attempt he burrowed on 20% which of course resulted in a wipe when he came back. Second attempt teh same thing happened. What are the odds? oO

You realize that its extremely easy to prevent that? The only tools you need are a watch and a mouth.

Zero if you do it right. It's not like it's some mystery when he's going to submerge. If you're cutting it close, DPS out.

Of course, we never had a problem with it before, it just happened twice in a row and both times we thought we could make it before a submerge. And we didn't. Bad luck, and from now on we make sure that he burrows shortly before he hits 20.

This is basically exactly what we do as well.

We have every warrior stand west of him(initially) and fight for aggro. All of our ranged DPS stands behind him and to his left( basically south-east) and goes all out, attempting to build aggro aswell. Our MT healers stand directly to his right(north). I'd say our ranged DPS takes roughly 3/4's of his Sand Blasts. My best guess as to what causes him to submerge early sometimes is a gap between the threat levels of someone that is not in melee range of him and someone that is in melee range of him. If someone outside of melee range has too much threat it seems that can cause him to submerge, even if there is someone in melee range of him. It's tricky, though, because you need the ranged DPS to have the highest threat to prevent Sand Blast from targeting your warriors and reducing their threat, but at the same time Sand Blast is constantly reducing the threat of your ranged DPS and making it harder and harder for them to force Sand Blast to target them and not the warriors. I dunno, maybe what we do makes no sense at all! I have no idea. It seems to work. We can kill him with just one submerge, and I can't remember ever going past two submerges on a winning attempt.

Also, any other horde guilds out there using Searing Totems placed within melee range of him? :)

Rogues' final spot on the DM depends entirely on where the bugs go. Will they chase the MT healers, who we stand with, or the casters? If it's the latter they just get feared/dealt with by casters and we do nothing. I guess it also depends on how many times he submerges and thus how many bugs your rogues get to attack. And then how well they do with dodges/resists after 20%.

As I've said to my guild, this is the only fight in the game where I feel like "Hey guys, thanks for bringing me along, this is neat!". My spot could be empty and it would be the same outcome.

Ugh we had him do non-stop 90s submerges in 5 tries. It was our second Ouro kill and it was painful, slow, long and very boring. If there's a trick to getting 180s uptime, I want to know what it is! :)

We use the Y-strat, but we stick all the tanks on him on one prong, with healers to the left and DPS ranged to the right. As for class setup, we usually do Skeram/C'thun in one night (we did this reset, all first time, clean kills) then come back the next day for Ouro and Visc, and then we bring mages. Lots of mages. We try to get 3-4 rogues for the 20% bit, whoever of them wants their DD legs, the rest sits out and farms for their DKP instead.

It's pretty 50/50 who gets the Sandblast, it's either Team Warrior or the ranged DPS classes. Last kill was pretty shitty with the 90s submerges everytime so we only had a few left in the end, but our first kill last week, I think we had 75% of the raid up.

Viscidus was killed first attempt (second kill also) which was pretty funny. We got him down to 9% and we thought we'd get another split as we figured 5% was the breaking point. Turns out, it's 10%. Hilarity on comms "watch carefully where the blobs go so we can DPS fast!" "Hey guys, he's dead..." "Oh, yay!".

I will suggest it for our next kill. That just might be a nice amount of DPS over the course of the fight.

Hmm, I'm surprised to see so many guilds having trouble with this one, I personally think he's one of the easier fights in the zone, definately not Twin emps level.

We use a tank rotation strat a bit similiar to CQ, but we have every warrior doing threat without any predefined tanking order. Caster DPS in one direction, healers, hunters, rogues and the offtanks in another and the current MT in a third direction. With windfury on tanks and tranquil air on rogues, they usually can do pretty much dps after giving tanks maybe 30 seconds to build up threat. Casters go all out all the time and make sure they have over 4.6k health to stay alive, and the healer camp basically never gets hit by sand blasts. All of the sand blasts hit either the caster camp or the current MT, and since sand blast only hits one tank at a time, rogues can do quite significant amounts of damage without going above offtanks in threat. We can get him to 40-45% on the first 3 minutes.

It works very well until 20%, when it's a bit dangerous when you cannot know on which tank he is going to turn after the current MT gets sand blasted, so all warrs pop shield block after each sweep and sand blast and are ready to use a potion and turn him into position. Sometimes we lose tanks there, or when the current MT gets swept away, another tank gets aggro and then the old MT runs back into melee range and gets aggro again, he might get squished too fast for the healers to be able to react. In situations like that we run to the danger of losing tanks fast one by one if they and the healers react too slow. Or the current MT might die just before a sand blast, which means he will turn to the offtanks and sand blast the healers; however, I can't say I've seen a death that couldn't have been prevented by the tank reacting faster to the burst he's about to take and the healers being on the ball also.

If everything goes well enough during the last 20%, the sand blasts will only really hit the tanks, maybe once the caster camp if at all, and we have rogues doing melee dps all the time. He dies pretty fast and smooth.

As for the 1.5min vs 3min uptime, I have no idea either. On our first kill(we didn't use rogue dps then) he burrowed 6 times or something, but it didn't really seem to matter, as with spreading out far enough no one really should take unmanageable amounts of damage during burrows. Nowadays he usually dies with 1-2 burrows. My guess is it might be related to the dps done, but who knows.


Oh, and we initially tried having sand blast dummies on one side and the main raid on another, but it just lead to the dps being very low, and even then the main camp would get sand blasted at times. Basically the idea with having sand blast dummies is to play it safe, meaning being able to control where the sand blasts go and lessening the amount of healing needed, but in fact it's far more dangerous than just having casters go all out in one direction with just enough hp to survive sand blasts since your healer camp will get sand blasted, plus the dps is much much weaker. We also initially didn't have any warrior rotation so we couldn't use rogue dps, but since it made the last 20% a bit too random we improved upon that aspect, which made it a lot smoother. I don't think there is any randomness about this encounter that cannot be controlled.

Long time reader but first timer poster here, hello everyone from Archimonde-EU.
We killed Ouro twice now with a strategy a bit different from everything I read on this thread or on any other boards. Off course we use 3 packs in Y like everyone but our three packs are :
Top left : 2 ranged dps grp + 1 healer grp at max healing range
Top right : 2 ranged dps grp + 1 healer grp at max healing range
Bottom : Warriors (they off course don't build), 1 healer grp, rogues

As you all know, SandBlast is a partial aggro wipe. I don't have any specifics numbers to backup this, but I think it is something huge like 30-40% less threat per SB. So basically, with our strat, we have 3 major advantages :

- We always know who is going to get hit by sand blast, it's absolutely perfectly regular :
Left DPS pack
Right DPS pack
Left DPS pack
Right DPS pack
.... during 1:30
And IF we have him up for 3 mins or longer (see below), the very first sand blast after the 90 sec mark will hit warrior + healers. It is always like that so it's easy to prevent (free action pot right before the 90 sec mark for example). And it goes on like this every 90 sec.

- There is always some DPS going on since we never have more than half of our ranged dps stunned into a sb.

- Warriors healing is very easy because they are knock backed by swept near the healers so no risk of range problems.

There is, however, 1 major risk. With this strat, mt healers + warriors will take a sand blast during the enrage phase. That's unavoidable because of aggro wipe mechanics. But since we know when it's going to happen, it isn't generally a very important problem. Just need to have nature pots on and 1 or more healer on free action potion (or pvp trinket) to heal.

Now about the submerge timer. We think that burrow time is linked to your dps somehow. We noticed that when we get Ouro to 76%- at the first 90 sec mark, he almost always skip the mark and goes to 180 sec. We even have it stayed up for 270 sec during our last kill (first submerge @ 34%, gg easy fight :) ). But this is not 100% reliable, he will sometimes burrow even with a good dps...

I like Ouro. Fun fight with very tricky mechanics to study and understand, multiple possible strats. The only problem I have with this fight is that it's way too easy to bruteforce it with 40 flasks + 40 zg + ... without even understand the basic mechanics of sandblast.

We have managed to keep Ouru up for 3 mins everytime for the past 3 weeks using a little "trick". I don't know if we were just lucky, or what we are doing is an exploit, but it seems to work. However, we usually have a full raid up at 20% but barely win with 5-10 alive, so relying on keeping him up for 3 minutes every time isn't the key to winning.

I don't understand why people are opposed to having the ranged dps classes eating sandblasts. With 15+ healers there should be plenty to go around. Seems a lot more dangerous to me to have a warrior getting hit by it.

Nothing wrong with having the ranged dps eat sand blasts, however, if you wish to have rogues meleeing, you will have to have tanks doing threat and eating sand blasts as well. Also, during the last 20%, it's a lot better to have one warrior at a time get hit by it than ranged. Since sand blast is a 2 sec cast time, the warrior will be topped off before it hits, and won't generally be in danger of dying to it. The casters, however, can die quite fast if they get a 4.6k sand blast and have a few dirt mounds quaking them at the same time, and while they will generally of course stay alive by using nature prot potions, the fight is perfectly doable without the use of those, and I believe a tactic should not be based on the use of consumables if it can be avoided.