Concerning the 25man heroic version of Twin Val'kyr. Although we've killed them twice so far, our kills are far from clean and it always ends very very close. I've read multiple times about the existence of an 'easy strategy' for this boss. Unfortunately nobody has told anything about it so far and I'm not even sure if there is any 'easy way' to kill them without much struggle but nevertheless it inspired me to think about the fight a little bit more.
The strategy we use at the moment is to tank both twins in the middle of the room and spread out all of our casters and healers circular around the boss to cover the entire room. Their job is to dodge the wrong orbs and catch the good ones so that no orb will get in the middle of the room. At least in theory this works quite well but in practice people often get hit by an wrong orb and die. This often starts a chain reaction and it'll end in a wipe. I don't want to blame solely our strategy for our failure, most of the time it's just a player's fault. But especially since I've read that there is a foolproof way to kill them, I thought about the following idea.
My idea of a clever strategy was to let the whole raid clump up in one spot and bringing some players in full resistance gear (shadow and fire resistance) standing a little bit out of the camp eating all orbs. This way nobody would have to care about orbs and the fight seems quite straightforward. Using full resistance gear, healing the people soaking the wrong orbs shouldn't be a big issue. The only flaw in this strategy seems to be vortexes, because it requires a lot of movement. However, it should be possible to just heal through it using aura mastery + divine sacrifice + healthstone I guess. In addition, many classes can further reduce their damage taken for a short period of time significantly (bubble, barkskin, iceblock, dispersion, shieldwall, cloak etc.) so that healing through it could actually work.
Basically, I'm just curious if any guild uses such a strategy or any other uncommon strategy.
Try to minimize the number of people you rely on to "soak" orbs. Most strats I've seen rely on the majority of dps clumped up (to maximize powering up) in either 1 or 2 groups with a few soakers positioned around the groups to snag opposite colored balls. This way you can put your best soakers on the outside to protect the relatively worse raid members.
My idea of a clever strategy was to let the whole raid clump up in one spot and bringing some players in full resistance gear (shadow and fire resistance) standing a little bit out of the camp eating all orbs. This way nobody would have to care about orbs and the fight seems quite straightforward. Using full resistance gear, healing the people soaking the wrong orbs shouldn't be a big issue. The only flaw in this strategy seems to be vortexes, because it requires a lot of movement. However, it should be possible to just heal through it using aura mastery + divine sacrifice + healthstone I guess. In addition, many classes can further reduce their damage taken for a short period of time significantly (bubble, barkskin, iceblock, dispersion, shieldwall, cloak etc.) so that healing through it could actually work.
That's exactly how we do it. Everyone (both tanks, too) gets white aura, 4 soakers get black. We also ignore Light shields entirely, so people do not move at all, except for Dark Vortex. We didn't use resistance/stamina on soakers on our first kill, but changed that later(just stamina). It's so much easier when you have 30k hitpoints and can survive two ball explosions - sometimes you pretty much have to risk it. Your dps is usually negligible when you're running around that much, might as well have someone in tank gear. Myself, I just shield, spam PoM and Holy Nova when doted. Of course, we only grab Dark orbs, and let Light ones through.
For White AOE, we have 2 DKs use AMS and grab black orbs, while soakers change colors. Dispersion if it's really messy. On Black Vortex, Retris(we actually have 2, silly us) burn bubble and blow every orb around the raid, while we also use Mastery - including Holy Pala who also bubbles and keeps healing. On second Vortex, we use Dispersion/whatever spare cooldowns we have.
The main weakness of this is ignoring shields - but I guess you can improve that part easily. If your soakers are doing fine, the only dangerous part is Dark Vortex. Berserk timer *shouldn't* be an issue even if they heal twice - you lose 15% each shield, but damage bonus should make up for that.
E: I don't think that's the "easy way", since I guess you could kill them much faster by changing colors on shields. Then again, it's only 4 people that are involved in grabbing orbs, and few more that do their part during Vortex. Otherwise, it's pure tank and spank. So, what you're looking for is probably much simpler.
In our most recent kill, I was assigned to lock down the Holy Priest. However, from the moment we pulled, for the duration of the entire (19 minute) fight, the mobs continued to target me. Occassionally they'd break off to target one of the Warlocks and Mages (as they should), but for the rest of the fight they insisted on staying on me. It trivialised the fight quite a bit (except for the fact I was too busy kiting the group to interrupt the Priest), as I was specced for Shadowstep and I had Ghostly Strike+Evasion+Prep+PvP Gear+Rocket Boots+Sprint available to avoid them. In relevance to your Feral Druid, it seems that sometimes they just insist on killing one particular target (at random?) with no logic behind it whatsoever? Traditionally we've seen them aggro onto Mages and Warlocks as a priority (as they're the king CC'ers) followed by the Rogues (as they're dishing out the most interrupts) but in this particular anomoly they defied that logic.
We also had something similar today, where one attempt every non-caster decided they were going to attack one of our feral druids and stuck on him for half the fight, 'till eventually he died to some rather overwhelming burst damage. He wasn't really doing anything except stand there and try to kite them around, so maybe it's just a bug in the AI that controls them or something. He was the highest HP member of the entire raid so it doesn't really make any sense to attack him.
We also see them focus warlocks very frequently. In our kill the only person who died was one warlock who was murdered 4 times in a row by assist trains shortly after being ressed. Lucky for him he had soulstone on himself, and the raid contained 4 druids. But atleast that makes sense, since they're squishy cloth.
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law
This week, as a feral druid I specced completely to tank and was just being used to lockdown the DK we had. I found I could practically normally tank the mob. Very rarely did he move off to attack other people. Thing is, at one point they started assist training me and I had the DK, Warrior, Rogue and Ret Pally on me. At this point I ended up just tanking them all with the healers massively spamming me and practically no one else took any damage.
The only thing I could figure MIGHT have caused something like this is the continued application of Infected Wounds/FF/Demo Roar. If the code is treating infected wounds as a new debuff every time its renewed it might mesh with the whole "lot of agro from CC" code and cause them to stick better.
Going to try again this week. But tab targeting through them and applying infected wounds to all via maul + glyph and mangle did seem to hold them almost all on me (and trivialized the fight as long as the wound poison got cleansed off me).
This week, as a feral druid I specced completely to tank and was just being used to lockdown the DK we had. I found I could practically normally tank the mob. Very rarely did he move off to attack other people. Thing is, at one point they started assist training me and I had the DK, Warrior, Rogue and Ret Pally on me. At this point I ended up just tanking them all with the healers massively spamming me and practically no one else took any damage.
The only thing I could figure MIGHT have caused something like this is the continued application of Infected Wounds/FF/Demo Roar. If the code is treating infected wounds as a new debuff every time its renewed it might mesh with the whole "lot of agro from CC" code and cause them to stick better.
Going to try again this week. But tab targeting through them and applying infected wounds to all via maul + glyph and mangle did seem to hold them almost all on me (and trivialized the fight as long as the wound poison got cleansed off me).
I notice that when I get focused while in cat form, if I go bear form to tank the damage, they stay on me permanently - when they switch to someone else, they go almost right back to me.
Is it possible that it isn't that they don't have an aggro table, but that its just reset very frequently? The 5 stacks of lacerate and the constant Mauls/Mangles/Faerie Fires seem to have kept the melee mobs on me full time, even when I'm not specced into IW.
On the beasts, not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but there seems to be a strange behaviour concerning the breaths and if the target escapes it prematurely.
Notice the 2 breaths that stop short both target me and I HoF out of it. Will need to check this out on the next one when someone else who gets targeted with it and I HoF them out of it.
Not really something that's needed, but it does takes some strain out of the healing which can only help.
On the beasts, not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but there seems to be a strange behaviour concerning the breaths and if the target escapes it prematurely.
Notice the 2 breaths that stop short both target me and I HoF out of it. Will need to check this out on the next one when someone else who gets targeted with it and I HoF them out of it.
Not really something that's needed, but it does takes some strain out of the healing which can only help.
If you are a class that has the ability to remove stuns you will prematurely end the breath, lowering the strain on the healers. This only applies if you are the person targeted by Icehowl for the breath.
Abilities I know work so far are: Every Man for Himself, Hand of Freedom (with Divine Purpose talented), Ice Block and Divine Shield.
Try to minimize the number of people you rely on to "soak" orbs.
Also to be perfectly honest any strat that revolves around letting one of their heals go off is severely flawed. Allowing a fight to go on longer than it has to is generally bad practice for any encounter. Prolonging this encounter increases the chance of individuals dying. Personally would like to see the enrage timer tightened so at BEST you can only dps through 1 heal. The actual dps requirement right now on this fight is so relaxed that people can still kill them with purposely letting heals go through, or doing a more intended strategy can focus alot of their time simply surviving (which is fine).
In the end any strat you can perfect to guarantee 0 wipes every week is ultimately an acceptable and half-decent strategy.
Neither buff states it increases specific types of damage (Holy/Shadow/etc), and some examination of World of Logs for various guilds on Twins show either buff is a flat 50% increase.
If this is true, it would be more advantageous for DPS to all be Dark to maximize this effect. Anyone see a flaw in my reasoning (or tooltip is wrong)?
Rock: "We're sub-standard DPS. Nerf Paper, Scissors are fine."
Paper: "OMG, WTF, Scissors!"
Scissors: "Rock is OP and Paper are QQers. We need PvP buffs."
Neither buff states it increases specific types of damage (Holy/Shadow/etc), and some examination of World of Logs for various guilds on Twins show either buff is a flat 50% increase.
If this is true, it would be more advantageous for DPS to all be Dark to maximize this effect. Anyone see a flaw in my reasoning (or tooltip is wrong)?
Also to be perfectly honest any strat that revolves around letting one of their heals go off is severely flawed. Allowing a fight to go on longer than it has to is generally bad practice for any encounter. Prolonging this encounter increases the chance of individuals dying. Personally would like to see the enrage timer tightened so at BEST you can only dps through 1 heal. The actual dps requirement right now on this fight is so relaxed that people can still kill them with purposely letting heals go through, or doing a more intended strategy can focus alot of their time simply surviving (which is fine).
In the end any strat you can perfect to guarantee 0 wipes every week is ultimately an acceptable and half-decent strategy.
I'm not crazy about idea either but I haven't cooked up one I like better yet. We tried fighting both near the orb opposite of the color we possesses so that we could click and immediately switch in the event of a shield on the other twin. The problem seemed to be being too close to the wall for our soakers to not get gibbed by a bad string of orbs. 'Death by orb' was vastly higher being near the corner compared being more centrally located. Maybe there is something related to soaker positioning we could adjust to improve this, I probably didn't give this as much attention as was warranted. Vortexes are much more painful in the middle, however. I hate being dependent on so many cooldowns to survive them.
We played with the twins a little bit last night and our healers have complained about our healing strategy. We've been running most content fairly healer light (5-6), how many healers are people running for this fight, and what makeup?
We tried having our priests reglyph for Prayer of Healing (for the added HoT), which seemed to help. Perhaps we are missing something fundamental about the fight, but the general raid damage is significantly higher than normal, reminding us a bit of pre-nerf Eredar Twins.
Healing is no where near as intensive as ET or that much more difficult that any other encounter in the zone. 1 Pally can keep up both tanks, not to mention raid damage is entirely controllable and up to you and your strat to minimize.
Healing is no where near as intensive as ET or that much more difficult that any other encounter in the zone. 1 Pally can keep up both tanks, not to mention raid damage is entirely controllable and up to you and your strat to minimize.
That was sort of my assumption, the healers likely are just mishandling the damage and we can fix it with the soakers. I suspect the problems are mostly people getting the "Touch" debuffs and not getting to their portals and pretending it happens.
One note on Faction Champions: Those that are having issues might want to focus a bit heavier on the dispelling. We altered our strat to essentially having me (Ele shaman) spamming dispel on the burn target while watching interrupts on one of the healers. While I "felt" like I was adequately dispelling while DPSing initially, going almost completely DPS off made a huge difference. Between that and the various "Ele" CC effects, it felt pretty effective and might be something to consider for guilds struggling with that encounter.
That was sort of my assumption, the healers likely are just mishandling the damage and we can fix it with the soakers. I suspect the problems are mostly people getting the "Touch" debuffs and not getting to their portals and pretending it happens.
One note on Faction Champions: Those that are having issues might want to focus a bit heavier on the dispelling. We altered our strat to essentially having me (Ele shaman) spamming dispel on the burn target while watching interrupts on one of the healers. While I "felt" like I was adequately dispelling while DPSing initially, going almost completely DPS off made a huge difference. Between that and the various "Ele" CC effects, it felt pretty effective and might be something to consider for guilds struggling with that encounter.
Actually, I think he was pointing out your raiders might be taking too much damage do to poor play and/or bad positioning. Val'kyr Twins damage is more comparable to Felmyst.
Originally Posted by arison
Everyone should start from the same place and rise based on their abilities, desires, and schedule. No one plays MMOs to *be* powerful, they play MMOs to *become* powerful. It's the journey, stupid. The rarer loot is, the more cherished it is when you get it, but only so long as there is a reasonable expectation to get it. The rarer loot is, the better it feels when you kill a boss or when $AWESOME_TRINKET drops.
This has been covered a bit in here, but does anyone else feel like they're doing the FC fight just fundamentally incorrectly? (I'm only talking about 10 here, I haven't gone in for 25 yet).
We've been attempting ToC-10 every week since it was released. We've downed the first and second boss every week, and we've downed FC-10 exactly once (the week Valkyrs were released). We easily downed the wonder twins after downing FC.
It seems to me like all of the posts (and strats) all over the web are pretty much variations on a theme, but I feel like there's something missing.
We've taken groups with multiple forms of CC (Druid, Mage, Warlock), and tried chain-CC. We've tried ignoring CC and basically just trying to keep the healers spell locked or seperated from the kill target. In general we are trying to focus fire one target and then move on to a second, but we usually don't wind up killing the first target before they just chain us to the radiator and grape us.
We've tried 0, 1 and 2 tanks, we've tried 1-2 healers + 0-1 mass dispeller, we've tried burning all of our cooldowns to kill the first target. Our rogue has been out for a bit, and we haven't replaced him yet.
I still feel like there's just something we're missing, like "oh, you should have one person on each target and pile the last 4 onto the kill target". Has anyone found a strategy that's radically different than: "Lock up two targets via chain-cc and burn one down?"
Please don't reply about FC-25, from everything I understand it's not even the same fight.
Please don't reply about FC-25, from everything I understand it's not even the same fight.
But forming your strategy is handled the same way in principle, whether it's 10 or 25.
The principle is: Be mindful of how other guilds have successfully done it, but aggressively persue a strategy that you think will work best for your guild and its players.
It sounds like your trying everything other people do, but which of those strats actually compliment what your players' and raid comp strengths are? You didn't mention any of that in your post. Consider who your best players are (dps? healers?) and whats your raids strength's and weaknesses are (amazing dps, but poor healing and cc control? great cc but poor dps?) - and go from there.
There is no magic reason the first NPC shouldnt die if you're attempting to zerg him. Hes either getting healed too much, or your DPS is too low for the first 45 seconds. Both of those could be the result of a number of reasons - stop after each fight and work out what they are. The closest strategy to what you seek would be the "Just FOK everything and burn down all the mobs" strat, which will soon be obsolete. Everyone else will be using a strategy that involves CC, interrupts/snares/kiting, and Focused DPS - with the main differences between them being how much of a weighting is assigned to each.
We played with the twins a little bit last night and our healers have complained about our healing strategy. We've been running most content fairly healer light (5-6), how many healers are people running for this fight, and what makeup?
We used 7 - 2 trees, 2 holy priests, a disc priest, a paladin and a shaman. I'm sure it's doable with 6 but going with 7 made the healing a lot more stable for us.
I still feel like there's just something we're missing, like "oh, you should have one person on each target and pile the last 4 onto the kill target". Has anyone found a strategy that's radically different than: "Lock up two targets via chain-cc and burn one down?"
I can only report from my strict 10 man experience. For us, the success of the FC encounter heavily depends on the group composition (theirs and ours). And through incidence a have a very good example to support this: first week on hard mode we face the following group:
- Tree + Shaman as healers
- Warrior and Retribution as melee dps
- Warlock and shadow priest as caster dps
Our group was holy priest/holy paladin/tree for healing and several melee as dps (we had no ranged dps that day and no one the respec). We noteably had no rogue, no warlock, no moonkin present. We failed horribly that night (spent about 4 hours). Basically, every time the warlock decided to hellfire and the warrior decided to whirlwind simultaneously, we inevitably lost 1-3 melees. Additionally we could for our life not shut one of the healers down to kill the other, even when assigning CC meticously. We even tried the "just CC the healer and burn something" strategie, but failed horribly, because even the occasional heal was enough to nullify our DPS and of course the warlock/warrior combo just wrecked our melees.
Next day, we got a warlock in our group and a moonkin. Between banish, fear, cycle and root there suddenly was not much hassle. They went down in the first try. That said, I would like to add that this most certainly is not to be attributed to the players, because all of us are at least decent enough players to not fail on basic things need on faction champions. On both nights we had excessive purge on our focus target as well as defensive dispel on our group (priest's mass dispel, me cleansing UA silence from him, me doing about 150 single dispels on the successful try).
There may be guilds with such skill who will beat every composition with every composition, but in general this encounter is significantly more dependent on which classes you bring than the other recent encounters we fought. So whenever we face the faction champions and just see no chance with our current group, we do some stuff in Ulduar and come back next evening with a different composition.
I still feel like there's just something we're missing, like "oh, you should have one person on each target and pile the last 4 onto the kill target". Has anyone found a strategy that's radically different than: "Lock up two targets via chain-cc and burn one down?"
Please don't reply about FC-25, from everything I understand it's not even the same fight.
One thing that is very comparable with arena pvp is that you must , both put a high damage pressure on the focus target and high amount of CC at the same time.
Usually if you follow the strat "1 player -> 1 npc" your perfectly fine in 25 man (normal) since you usually have enough dps left on the focused target . In 10 man (especially in hard mode) if you use every dps to CC, your main target won't go down fast enough.
The key here is to find which players can keep a target locked (via sheep/fear) and is able to dps at the same time. A focus sheep/fear macro can be usefull if your dps aren't familiar with those.
As a mage I usually put my focus on the main target and use a /cast [target : focus] fireball macro and keep my sheep targeted to be able to resheep quickly if there is an early break, it also allow you to sheep an other target once the previous one is immun.
If you realise that some players can't multitask (and are just "watching their sheep fade" while doing nothing) you should just have them full dps the main target.
I can only report from my strict 10 man experience. For us, the success of the FC encounter heavily depends on the group composition (theirs and ours). And through incidence a have a very good example to support this: first week on hard mode we face the following group:
- Tree + Shaman as healers
- Warrior and Retribution as melee dps
- Warlock and shadow priest as caster dps
Our group was holy priest/holy paladin/tree for healing and several melee as dps (we had no ranged dps that day and no one the respec). We noteably had no rogue, no warlock, no moonkin present. We failed horribly that night (spent about 4 hours). Basically, every time the warlock decided to hellfire and the warrior decided to whirlwind simultaneously, we inevitably lost 1-3 melees. Additionally we could for our life not shut one of the healers down to kill the other, even when assigning CC meticously. We even tried the "just CC the healer and burn something" strategie, but failed horribly, because even the occasional heal was enough to nullify our DPS and of course the warlock/warrior combo just wrecked our melees.
Next day, we got a warlock in our group and a moonkin. Between banish, fear, cycle and root there suddenly was not much hassle. They went down in the first try. That said, I would like to add that this most certainly is not to be attributed to the players, because all of us are at least decent enough players to not fail on basic things need on faction champions
So. respect intended here. You died to Bladestorm (the thing you call Whirlwind) and Hellfire. These are avoidable by moving away from both. The Bladestorm, in particular, is trivial to move from and 1 tick of the Hellfire kills no one. You had melee dps aplenty, but apparently no one could interrupt the Hellfire or stun the warlock. You had, apparently, no Death Knight to chains-kite the enemy warrior and no Warrior of your own who could intercept/stun/otherwise annoy the ret or warrior.
Your multiplicity of melee also could neither lock out the druid's nourish casts (his only cast-time spell) or lock down/stun the shaman. And you could not purge the druid's hots despite your priest's presence and obvious dispel skill the next time.
You drew the enemy shadow priest, who is entirely worthless, and thus basically got to fight 10 vs. 5. You died for many hours and were obviously frustrated. But let's just agree your group had a pretty off night on some pretty basic aspects of WoW playing, despite your statement to the contrary.
In Regards to Twin Valkyrs strategie that was posted above.
Poster stated:
* Stand in Middle
* All be in white
* 4 Soakers being in black takes all black orbs.
* Dont switch unless Dark Vortex being thrown.
Sounds like a good strategy from simplicity point of view. However adding this
* At every Special ability Cast move bosses(and raiders) to black orbs.
* If needed Switch to black aura.
* Move to middle again
* Soakers switch aura if necessary.
Would that not minimize the flaws in the first posters strategy? Since special ability is on a timer its kind of easy to move to orbs just in time for the abilities?
Have not tried the ToC HC Twins yet but coming soon i hope.
09/20/09, 3:56 PM
Similar Threads
