This is going a bit far back in content but my guild is having an odd problem with tech packs. To give you a little back ground we have killed Nef and we handle pretty much every boss with relitive ease (we one shot all but vael, chrom and nef). So we've been clearing them for a while but we still manage to wipe on them every week. Basically our strategy centers around us having one extreamly good pally who distracts the goblins and keeps them ocupied while we kill off the locks (hunters kite the spellcasters and we off tank the overlord). Now if the pally dies for one reason or another it's pretty much a wipe, and since he's having schedule conflicts with raiding and work now I'm thinking we need a new aproach ot this strategy. We've tried having other pallies do this same tactic but the results are usually pretty dim and for us killing the techs first usaully results in lots of caster deaths because of people being unable to either avoid the dynomite and the lock AoE or it just taking to long to kill the techs and having to deal with too many felgaurds afterwards. Anyways what say you?

I'm a mage. I kite em Pro. /flex

It's really easy, just make sure the mage keeps moving in circles while spamming Arcane Explosion. As long as he doesn't stop and there's someone there to remove "Bottle of Poison" from him (and heal the occasional damage he takes) all is cool. In my experiences, if I fail its relatively easy for another mage to pick it up.

Our usual tactic for the pulls is:

DPS warlocks hard (and first!)
Locks on Banish duty
a warrior kites the spellbinder around with a priest watching (despell poly morphs, etc - Killed last)
mage kiting / mages on goblins (mages usually drop AOE as soon as the warlocks are down)
and finally the main tank takes the Drakonid, killed before the spellbinder.

EASILY the hardest part of this is making sure you don't grab warlocks or the spell binder in your AOE. Blasting the first goblin you see usually does the trick for me.

Splitting the warlocks to either side of the room out of goblin AOE range is crucial to our strategy. When the warlocks don't get split, people die trying to move them away from the goblins and being smacked by rain of fire. Polymorphing some of the goblins as they come through the door way works pretty well to keep the bomb damage down too.

This is precisely my guild's leet strat. If you've got a PoM/Blastwaver its even easier to get that first agro (and subsequently keep it) on those goblins... if you're careful.

Damn.

The things you never knew eh...

I just tank the tech dudes and have everyone ranged AoE. It's pretty much the same thing though- keep whomever tanking constantly moving and in range.

I knew, but haven't seen the point. Since we AE, why keep a small number polyed?

Is the agro table on all the goblins joint? I haven't really thought about better ways to do them.

Pretty sure their agro is based mostly on range until someone has built sufficient agro. On the Vael ones I can beat one down about 30% before it will turn and lock on me usually. With no one else hitting it.

That aside, same strat. Mage runs in circles and AE's.

I read awhile back that it was possible to drop a Stoneclaw totem in the middle of them and they'd just chuck bombs at it and never kill it. Never actually tried it, but maybe that's the justification for nerfing WF=P

Curious, why kite the spellbinder? He (or she in some cases) can be offtanked quite easily. After warlocks get nuked hard and techs rounded up and aoed or chased down and ganked, we put all melee on the spellbinder and all casters on the overseer. Usually it turns into a competition over who can kill their mob first and help with the other. Admittedly it's a bit humiliating when you're going all out on this puny elf and suddenly 6 mages and 4 locks come running and start staffing/daggering your mob. Damn fire weak drakonids.

We do this once we've killed the techs and the warlocks but kiting them has never been a problem for us. It sounds basically like we need to teach more people how to kite the techs. I am going to have to try the range aggro for the techs just to see if it is based on range or total aggro, because the pull is usually what decides our fate.

Pretty sure the goblins have a shared hate table, but other than that it's normal (not range dependent). They throw bombs at the top of the hate list, provided that player is not currently moving. So have your mages run around using instant aoe if they have aggro, or tank them with a war as suggested above. If you have one mage you think can handle it easier than the rest, have him open with Flamestrike POM Flamestrike before the other players start aoe, and after that have him do arc-exp or CoC while moving - shouldn't be too hard.

Incidentally, their bombs are fire damage, but it doesn't seem resistable at all.

That's probably what our strat will evolve into. We had a very very hectic start to these fights and finally ironed out a pull and kill order that worked for us. We just made our first Nef kill last Sunday (yaaay!), so it's not like we've been farming these mobs for months.

We had some struggle with the goblins aswell, after patch 1.11 and that you can not split up the lab packs anymore.
Now, we are defining one mage, that has the most fire res gear and most hp for "tanking" the golbins, while all other mages will just do blizzard or similar.
This strategy worked quite well, whereas tactics like running in circles around the goblins didn't for us.

Oh, and laying a frost trap before the pulls helps in seperating the goblins from all other mobs, since only the goblins are affected by the snare effect.
It is essential that no warlocks are in range of the goblins when the mage starts tanking/kiting/whatever.

Fire resist gear has no effect on the damage you take from the goblins BTW. It's strange, but although Fire Ward absorbs the damage, it's not affected by FR gear. Only use is to help mitigate the damage if you get caught in a rain of fire or a flamestrike from the warlocks / spellbinder.

Mages spaming AE are by far the easiest to handle the goblins, but it's quite doable by basically anyone (Hellfiring them is exciting!). As long as the kiter loops around them, they should take litterally no damage, although if the gobs are stuck on a corner for whatever reason, the can take nasty spikes.

As to the bombs being uresistable, I've never worn any substantial fr for those packs, but I can't recall ever having resisted the fire damage.

We assign a hunter to every spellbinder, wyrmguard and warlock (except for one) and let them kite these mobs while the dps kills goblins and the first warlock. The hunters then release the mobs one after another. (Sometimes they prefer to kill the spellbinder by themselves).

Similar to what we do horde side. The warriors sit out of Line of Sight, hunter pulls the mobs. This ensures that the warlocks come all the way into the killing area instead of stopping to cast out of our melee range. The warlocks get pulled in, and the goblins then tend to just stop near the broodlord position or along the wall in Firemaw's room (depending on which stage of the clear we're in). The goblins tend to just stay there as long as nobody screws with them too badly. If you're horde, you can have your shamans drop a stoneclaw totem nearby - they'll aggro onto it and throw grenades at it instead of your raid, doing no damage to the totem. We usually just have 1-2 mages then run into the pack and spam arcane explosion to kill them while a couple of healers keep them up.

A good rogue can offtank a spellbinder indefinitely (Gouge, Kick, and KS to stop flamestrike, which is their major damage component) with a paladin as their only healer. We'll usually just use a warrior to offtank them, but since we also use a warrior as our goblin decoy (PH/Demo spam), if we don't have 6 warriors we're left with an extra binder on double Spellbinder packs.

So I'll usually just offtank the spellbinder until a warlock is dead, that warrior comes over, taunt-vanish, and do as normal.

The spellbinders don't hit particularly hard - you can have one warrior tank 2 of them without too much trouble if you're short on warriors. Kiting them around seems like inefficient use of dps classes instead of taking down the warlocks faster.

The spellbinder polymorph (squirrel) spell targets the closest person on their hate list that is not the current aggro target - obviously within range. This means the tank will never get squirrelled, but he can deliberately get someone else squirrelled by appropriate positioning. Aside from the obvious humor value of repeatedly getting a hunter turned into a squirrel, it's actually useful to know how to avoid having your healer prancing around and squeaking at you instead of healing.
If you're a high-dps melee class, you should try attack the spellbinder from max melee range so that a lower dps melee guy gets polymorphed.

These are minor optimizations, but fairly easy to take advantage of.