So last night I was amazed that we even had a 40-man raid present on a patch day. We got started almost an hour late, but better than nothing =)

So we roll into BWL and say "Hai Razorgore, hand over the loot and we won't get rough with you". To our great surprise, we got our asses handed to us. Shaman kiters got torn apart, followed promptly by healers. After a few more tries, we noticed the following strange behaviors:

1. Legos, Mages, and Dragonkin seemed to have a healthy amount of aggro on totems when they spawned. They would IMMEDIATELY attack corner EB totems, causing a lot of problems with the consistency of the kite.

2. Their aggro everywhere else just seemed inconsistent overall. Dragons and Legos were jumping on our casters for no apparent reason while kiters were still up, and yet even after bandaging myself and others repeatedly, I'd be one of the last to get run over by the assist train.

3. Shaman and Hunters both reported that the mobs felt much harder to outrun. Hunters took to a figure 8 pattern with the dragonkin in order to stay ahead of them.

The most significant part of this seemed to be the broken totems. It just felt impossible to keep EB up in the corners. Since all our mages respecced frost while we're learning Nefarian, we decided to try a temporary "Bunch the legos up in the middle, spam rank 1 blizzard, and have 1 mage hold aggro with IAE" strat, and while it felt like it could work, we were again having problems with FUBAR'ed aggro. Legos wouldn't peel off the shaman who dragged them to the middle, and would then be peeled off by the mages using rank 1 blizz, rather than the AE mage. The other guilds in BWL last night reported similar problems, all of whom normally kill razorgore every week without incident. Only one reported killing him, and that was with only 1 hunter, 2 tanks, and a few healers alive. I like a lot about this patch, but Blizzard's need to screw up every non-Naxx instance along with the patch is not one of those things >=(

We ditched the totem strat about a month or two ago. Killing everything but the dragons is so much more fun. Id suggest that you guys try it. We just found the totem strat to unreliable over time due to mobs hitting them at inopportune times.

Well if this change was intentional and they aren't planning on fixing it, we may have to. We've considered swapping to the brute force method as well, but have been focussing more on getting people geared and pushing Nef than relearning Razorgore. I wish they'd document it when they make intentional adjustments so we don't waste raid day wiping over and over on a farm status boss going "wtf?".

If i remember correctly this also happened with 1.10. Thats when we eventually said forget it and went with brute force after trudging through it the old way.

We switched to a pure DPS strat after we got moved to a new server, kiting is so damn unreliable when there is no lag =P

As the previous posters said, kiting is extremely unreliable. I had been pushing our guild to move to the DPS strat, and after a whole night of wipes of kiting Razorgore strat we 1 shotted him the next day with the DPS method. So much more fun and you actually get to put your good DPS gear to use.

The best part of the DPS strat is when groups start stealing each others' mobs cos they've got nothing to do.

I've not done bwl yet, but from encounters in ZG and just soloing world content I have not seen a change in totem aggro.

I don't think totem agro has been changed, but something was stealth changed in this encounter. We did razorgore last night, and we've had him on farm mode for a couple months. We kite the legos and dragonkin, almost perfectly. Maybe a healer and a kiter dies, but that's it. Last night was absolutely stupid. As a kiter, it was a lot harder to get my mobs to stay on me. The healers were complaining as well, saying the same amount of healing(they only cast PW:S and HoTs) is getting them agro much sooner.

Since abandoning the kiting strat upon 1.10's release, we have continued to consistantly kill Razorgore in 1 pull, no exceptions. Killing all the legionnaires and mages is not as undoable as you might think. It requires everyone to be at the top of their game and let nothing survive, but with a reasonable amount of gear from MC and BWL, it is easily doable.

Also, don't give up on your first or second try of this strat. It takes patience and concentration, and it's exceptionally vital how you set up your four groups for maximum dps and crowd control.

The reason this strat is so much more viable than kite is there is more room for error. If I accidentally break a poly'd legionnaire in my corner, whoops, my bad, I can tank it away while the mage is mowed down by my group, I can toss down a healing stream totem or even possibly get a small heal from the priest in my group, and boom, we are right back into clearing our corner.

In the kite strat, if one kited Shaman falls, or one bad heal goes out that pulls unneccessary aggro, it starts a massive chain reaction of deaths until you raid is completely eating dirt.

I haven't seen any issues with totem aggro either. We use the kiting/earthbind strat on Razorgore, and there were no problems with the totems at all last night. Kiting seemed normal too.

The 10 range bonus does not work for hostile totems.

The talent Totemic Mastery states; "The radius of your totems that affect friendly targets is increased to 30 yd."

The three piece of Earthfury states; "Set: The radius of your totems that affect friendly targets is increased to 30 yd."

Largely misleading tooltip, yes. Anyway, the point is it increases totem range for friendly targets by 10 yards. So, for example, Tremor Totem goes from 30 yards to 40 yards, meanwhile Earthbind Totem stays the same from 10 yards to 10 yards.

I don't know how it makes the mobs more angry by increasing its range for friendly targets.

When kiting, instead of running down the stairs, jump of the edge were the platform and stairs meet.
Also we dont kite the mages we have a rogue as main assist for every corner and mages burn them down. As far has priests grabing aggro make them kite till the get a fade up.

Last night, while grinding on the invasion, our group was killing a Shadow of Doom, with a ghoul add, which diseased someone. There was another ghoul ~20m away, not aggroed. As soon as i casted a disease cleansing totem and it dispelled the debuff, the unaggroed ghoul ran to it and destroyed it.

So it seems totem casts have proximity aggro ... on non-aggroed mobs.

Thanks for the responses. We'll give our kite based strat a few more tries later on this week, but if it's still not working out, we'll probably switch to something a bit more reliable.

Totems have always had this issue when I have used them, now it is worse with a 10 more yards of range (a least on Friendly totems).