Malleus

Do you have logs for this? TTBOMK, Icehowl doesn't hit the tank - or anyone else - when he's using his breath, as it's a channeled ability.

Incidentally, the cold breath counts as an immobilise effect. It can be removed with Every Man For Himself, and therefore should be removable with any other freedom effect as well. So even if Icehowl does swing when he's breathing, any tank gib can be avoided with a Hand of Freedom. I don't know if the breath gets re-applied if you stay in it, though, I always got out of the way. I shall test this next week if I can.

 

Houjit

Pure speculation, but I wonder, when the final boss of the Coliseum is unlocked, how many guilds will extend their raid lockout from the previous week and jump straight to the last encounter (and then into hard modes) or whether Blizzard has put something in place to stop it.

 

Emeraude

None, the normal modes are quite trivial to any raiding guild at that level, and the Heroic modes require execution, and give you a limited amount of attempts, IE not throwing yourself at it for 12 hours, so there's no point in rushing and not planning it out. I'd expect more guilds to pull a boss once or twice, stop, figure it out, then come back and kill it with the right strategy.

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.

 

Imua

Oops. It's not simultaneous - my apologies for the misunderstanding.

But, the cold breath is an immbolize/freeze that may take out more than half your healers. Their first response is probably to shore up the people that are low/taking damage, so when Icehowl turns to beat on the tank, that lapse can easily cause a tank death.

It's mostly a heads up for other folks. He will wake up, turn, and breathe on a portion of the raid. Once he's done breathing, he will start to beat on your tank. Ideally, you mitigate the number of healers that are hit by the freeze/incapacitate effect. Don't panic - make sure your tank healers are still on their assignment.

 

Blayze

My housemate bugged that phase by doing just that, meaning he and his group skipped the entire mounted phase.

 

Tinwhisker

As I speculated in my original post, Blizzard has confirmed that once all five encounters have been unlocked on normal mode they will all be available for heroic mode play. Meaning you can face all of the heroic mode bosses as early as September 1, and begin possibly discussion here of all of the heroic mode encounters on September 15 unless posting guidelines are altered between Sep 1 and Sep 15 (which I expect).

I will say though that before anyone decides to start posting on Sep 15, they should check the sticky as discussion has to actually be opened officially by the moderators.

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> AC hardmode

You're a lot of DPS, you know that? You wanna' earn 14 achievement points the hard way?

 

Duilliath

Here's a nifty li'l pointer to make P2 of the Black Knight a bit less explosive - Grounding Totem absorbs the Corpse Explosion from those ghouls.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

rbbrdckybk

The beasts of northrend fight seems to be about as difficult as Ulduar 10 normal modes.

We're a very casual 10-man guild that only spends 2-6 hours raiding weekly. We don't have Yogg down yet, and have only done XT hardmode (not attempted any others).

We were able to get the beasts down in about an hour of attempts. This is with no prior knowledge of the fight, and 2 PUGs in our group. We used 2 healers.

Phase 2 (the worms) took us the longest to figure out. Once you know what it going on though, it's pretty easy. If you read the strategy beforehand and have mostly decent players in Ulduar10 gear, I imagine it wouldn't take you more than a few tries.

 

gcbirzan

As we found last night, getting 3 healers makes it way easier to faceroll through the whole thing.

 

mclem

Does that fail the "I've Had Worse" achievement?

We made an attempt at that achievement yesterday. I believe no player got hit by a corpse explosion - and Recount appears to bear that out - however, a hunter pet did. We didn't get the achievement; I was mildly surprised since I was expecting pets to be exempt from the requirements. Has anyone seen evidence otherwise, because I'm not quite certain Recount was correct?

 

Falcon213

Pet's aren't exempt from Kologarn's eyebeams for If Looks Could Kill, so its highly possible that the same applies here. Since totems are currently dying to the explosion, I'd guess they also count.

 

• Snowy

We've speculated that the same thing happens at Mimiron if you're going for the part of the achievement which requires nobody hits a mine. We definitely had nobody trigger a mine (Failbot was clean) but didn't get it. Pets wouldn't activate the mines, but when they blow up naturally if a pet was around them, they'd get tagged.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Kilted Raven

Having had our first run in tonight, the Northrend beasts seem well tuned for guilds progressing through late Ulduar, I'd agree with previous statements about it being a bit more on the tank and healers, we found phase 3 to be quite spiky sometimes. We went in at the end of a raid night with no plan or experience, and it was 5 tries to clear it (as a 10 man Ulduar guild with Keeper level gear).

P1 isn't going to challenge any reasonable Ulduar guild who can clear the gear hurdle. Simple tank swapping, fire avoidance and add clearing, atlhough the Snobolds are a fun way to present the gimmick. No real advice here from our experience, it's pretty straightforward.

P2 is the tricky one, mainly working out who has the debuff and moving appropriately. However, we've had a few instances of dps spiking out very fast in P2, the incoming damage is reasonable. The fairly standard tactic of eliminating one of the worms seems workable, Ulduar geared healers should be fine to handle the soft enrage that follows.

P3 is easier than P2, The breath weapon freeze is easily mitigated by a simple left/right/centre split for your healers, and the charge avoidance on the yeti is very simple. It's a straight line charge, and apart from one player who doubled back because he thought he'd gone the wrong way, we never lost anyone to this. Once you get to here you're pretty much home free. The only issue is as other posters have mentioned, the Yeti does hit hard and your tank can spike out if you're not being proactive with your heals. Stack up regens during the stun phase because the tank seems to take a whack or two before the breath weapon hits. I'd say Phase 2 is the hardest of the three simply due to the movement and assessment needed to get your debuffs correctly cleared.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned here, unlike the 5 man joust fights if you fail on any one of the beasts you need to restart from the beginning, including any beasts you'd previously defeated, a'la Violet Hold. The phases seem to be linked, there's no combat break between for rezzing and/or drinking that I noticed.

It's a nice fight. Challenging, but doesn't feel quite as RNG as some of the Ulduar fights. 3 triumph badges and 2 x 232 drops from 10 man standard. Not sure how PUGgable it is, so far PUGs on our realm have cleared the first beast but seem to be wiping out on the twin Jormundgars.

It's a long fight though, I'd put it around the 10 minute mark for an appropriately geared group, so a late fight wipe can be particularly galling.

 

TSplodey

Our second group discovered last night that Beasts has a 15min enrage timer, due to doing P3 with 1 tank and 2 healers (dont ask heh). Its a standard hard enrage of bonus damage and faster swing speed, so if you lose a lot of dps before P3 its most likely a good idea to wipe and start again.

 

gcbirzan

If by that you mean you're stuck in normal mode late Ulduar, then I could agree with you, just barely. In my experience, however, on 10 man, if you bring 3 healers, you can just faceroll through it. I do, however, strongly disagree with the latter statement, we had our tank gibbed by Icehowl with 60k in .7 seconds on 25 man. Other than that, fights in Ulduar are hardly 'RNG', unless you cound the old Vezax and shadow crash dry spells.

Overall, the fight is really easy and not much of a gear check, we one shotted it with a lot of people being clueless about the mechanics. I really think there's a disconnect between what I expected from the next instance after Ulduar (i.e. not a fight easier than all but Flame Leviathan fights in Ulduar) and what people 'progressing in late Ulduar' and PUGing it call 'well tuned'.

 

Cranberry

This was actually resolved in 3.2, from what I understand - if anything, he's been spamming it and they had to hotfix down the rate.

 

Frozenn

10 man beasts is about as hard/easy as XT hardmode on 10 man.

From a 10 man guild perspective. There is an incredible amount of tank damage coming in in phase 2 and 3, with large amounts of raid damage in phase 2. The dps requirement is pretty much identical as well, if not slightly higher. Tank gear requirements are higher than any easymode in ulduar, definately.

And to add a relevant question to the thread, do 10 man heroic award trophies, or are 10 man raiders stuck with the badge only t9?

 

Tinwhisker

Yes but I believe trophies will drop in 10man heroic mode.

10man Normal (Badges) = 232

10man Heroic / 25man Normal (Badges and Trophies) = 245

25man Heroic (Tokens) = 258

You're a lot of DPS, you know that? You wanna' earn 14 achievement points the hard way?

 

Jagiya

Probably worth mentioning that the Northrend Beasts encounter can be solo tanked reasonably easily by a Paladin. I did it yesterday after two of our raid members disconnected for the entire fight; one of them being the Offtank. I waited until Impale reached 6 stacks, and used a quick taunt+bubble+cancelaura macro to remove the Impale, and we used GS/Sac when I reached 5 stacks again. Gormok died soon after, although the healers were still spamming heals on me into P2 as the Impale was still ticking. Tanking the two worms was pretty delicate, as I had to ensure that I kept dropping the poison clouds safely without breathing on the raid, and running back and forth to deliver burning bile to the paralytic targets.

Another note is the "Upper Back Pain" achievement - if you get the Snobolds on your melee, it has no effect whatsoever. The silence doesn't prevent them (as a Rogue at least) from attacking (unlike Conservator's Grip), so if you want the achievement, you're best just leaving them on your melee for the entire fight. Don't forget, you have to keep them alive until Icehowl is dead, not just Gormok.

I'm not quite sure if the Snobolds prefer ranged targets though, as in 3x 10 man kills I only saw Snobolds jump a melee player once.

 

Spink

We found that the trick with the Snobolds was to kill him before he'd thrown the last two of them off his back so they were just walking around on the ground and a tank could pick them up.

 

Sillia

The 5-man version seems pretty buggy. I've seen double spawns of faction champions (first battle, two troll hunters, two undead rogues) happen more than once. The duplicate appears to still be the 'mount up and fight' AI.

The loot table seems really deep. The second encounter has boss-specific loot (I believe the melee trinket only drops from Paletress).

The ghouls that the Black Knight summons in the third encounter periodically reset all threat and choose a random target to attack. They can still have threat built (or be taunted), if memory serves properly Omen was reading ~10k threat to their selected targets. The ghouls are also kind of buggy; I've been in situations where the Black Knight would go from phase 2 to 3, but his ghouls did not explode (they may have been stunned from a shockwave or something), and continued to run around attacking random people.

Some of the loot appears to still be buggy. [Edge of Ruin] and [Marrowstrike] are itemized like they are lv219, but the weapon DPS is still as if it was 213.

 

Talgog

Delete your cache folder. They are 219 weapons.

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

We had 3 people in melee range (2 tanks, 1 ret pally), and they were still getting Snobolds. If there is a preference (I doubt it) it's probably not a strict "greater than N" cut-off like Vezax or Mimiron.

 

Cranberry

I suspect, given that they're linked, he's looking at WoWHead - which is also inaccurate. Check the comments, both items have their proper stats laid out.

 

Duilliath

//edit: [deleted]

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)