I was just curious on how other guilds do DPS wise vs Thaddius. We've recently started Thaddius this week, and yesterday after getting our strategy down and in place, we had a few attempts around the 50% range before someone disconnected and wiped us. But heres the catch, we're normally hitting the 50%-ish mark with about 1m left before the enrage. I'm assuming this isnt normal DPS vs Thaddius. I'm fully aware that execute dps will pick melt him down pretty quickly, but I dont see us hitting 20% before the enrage.

Now we're not using consumables yet, but I don't see how a few consumables will make up for such a lack of damage. We must be doing something wrong.

We normally do very little damage before the first polarize, and then slowly open up so the tank can build up before we go crazy. By anychance is a polarize an aggro-reset?

Your strategy needs to induce 17-19stacks on your entire raid or you won't kill him in time. Remember your damage dealers are hamstrung somewhat by NR gear, so they need every bit of multiplier they can get. We don't use any unusual dps consumables though - you just need mongoose/giants/GAE.

And no, polarity shift is definitely not an aggro wipe. It would be a much harder fight if it were.

All 3 of our kills have been right on the enrage. Though our most recent kill would have been 15-20s ahead of the enrage, but 2-3 people disconnected on a shift around 25%, including myself.

If you are getting him to 50% with 1 minute to enrage, that probably means you still have quite a few people dying. The difference between 19 stacks and 10 stacks is huge.

NR gear you say?

Is that to allow the healers to DPS a little or just ease their mana requirements?

The latter. I use more mana/consumables on this fight than on Patchwerk by far, and that's with the whole raid in 100 NR buffed. We can kill him in 4:30 with the NR gear if no one dies, and NR gear helps with that.

no. the reason you might see thaddius turn and smash people on the run-through is because thaddius' melee range is much smaller than his hitbox - so a rogue might melee away at him, but be considered "at range" when it comes to aggro mechanics, so a rogue might be 15% above the tank but not pull aggro because he's not at the ranged aggro threshold (30% above the tank's generated threat), but when he moves into thaddius' actual melee range he gets aggro because he is above the melee aggro threshold (10% aboce the tank's generated threat)

That can happen quite easily if you have multiple fire mages on the raid.

We usually kill him just after enrage, sometimes before his first CL, but usually after. Only killed him once so far before the enrage when the stars lined up correctly. We don't use NR gear, but I definately see why you would. Typically we blow 1 NR pot on Mages / Priests to conserve some mana.

If your DPS is lacking, what type of lag are you doing the fight in? We had attempts before we started potting where we pushed him to the 5 minute enrage, but he was at around 50% because of the 2-4s lag spikes. If you're confident that everyone in the raid has the strat down, don't even bother attempting him untill 12-1 CST, and you should see your DPS increase dramatically. Think about how easy it was to DPS Vael that first time after they fixed the graphical issues, Thaddius is no different.

Yea, our guild likes to have the healers play "wack-a-mole" on this fight and hope that we don't let someone die from a spike :P

On a more serious note, you can be behind in dps as much as 8% (at least from what we have done) and make it up with reckless/deathwish executes. It gets quite frightening when thaddius enrages, wipes out a side, turns around and looks at your side, then dies. It can get close!

We don't use NR gear at all but I can see how it would help, if you were lacking healing. We generally run a somewhat healer heavy raid, but I guess make up for it through normal DPS gear. Oh yeah, I recommend consumables to make up for stacking slack, but once you're good at stacking consumables aren't necessary. Besides a Flask on two tanks, this fight can be done consumable free (well, besides normal mana/healing potions).

It's not even possible to practise this guy on our server. And practising at night isn't going to happen, so I dont see us killing him until they somehow fix it.

The guilds that farm it, are you constantly killing it late at night or what?

Yea, we were told more than half a year ago that we would get new hardware but we never got it. So, I take it the encounter plays out just fine during prime time aswell then? Are you on the hardware that will run the expansion?

It's far from perfect, people still d/c a lot and we all turn off pretty much all our mods, but if you turn down your settings and mods it's definitely doable in prime time.

thanks for the advice and tips.

We're also running on old hardware, last night we easily had 4seconds lags during primetime. It became better much later in the night around midnight. But hopefully we'll stick it out and finish him off tonight.

We also didnt use any NR gear, im assuming you guys only use epic pieces?

I believe in 1.12 the range/melee agro mechanic is going to change slightly. If a person has 130% agro and was at range previously, he/she must take a hostile action now while in melee range in order to get agro from the boss. This I think was changed specifically to address Thaddius.

Wow, that's obscene and massively favorable for ranged classes. :(

So it's impossible to pull ranged aggro unless you're a total idiot? That can't be right

You misunderstand.

Picture a fight like the Twin Emperors: Hunter pulls aggro (Don't ask me how it happened, it did), emperor runs after them, while rogues are running to the other side of the room. Hunter FDs: Rogue catches aggro because the MT is in "ranged" position, whereas the rogues are now melee and have top aggro.

Essentially they're just changing it so that you need 130% aggro to pull aggro from range, and changing the position of the mob relative to the position of the player won't change the threshold needed (ie. Broodlord clusterfucks where all the casters get raped because one pulls aggro and the others are at 115%).

I really hate this fight. We haven't killed him in weeks though we have gotten him to under 5% each week several times. Basically we have one hour of attempts to get him, before the fight is flat out impossible. Even then we have severe lag and LDs.

And lately we just haven't been able to get a raid on early enough on the weekend to take him out. He is far far easier when the server isn't under load. Which is how we killed him the other times.

I figured It was either me missing something or some similar craziness. Still, that seems like an amazing boost, it's no longer a threat to the other other casters if one over-does it. (beyond the ae wipes the raid or something similar). Thanks for clarifying.

Why does it worsen with wipes? Are you saying there's a memory leak? Or is it just that you start raiding early and after an hour you're in prime-time?

If I'm understanding the threshold change correctly, it's not going to change scenarios like the Broodlord scenario (one caster pulls, others die). The reason that occurs is that many ranged casters are above the tank in aggro. They don't pull because of the 130% threshold. Now if a single caster pulls, and dies, Broodlord asks himself who he hates most. Since the casters have more aggro than the Tank, it's going to be a caster. It wouldn't matter where the casters are or where the tank is. If the casters have more aggro at that point, Broodlord is going for them. The 130% is a threshold for the mob to decide to switch targets, but if the mob is already looking for a new target, so the 130% threshold plays no part.

It will obviously help a great deal on Thaddius though, making the encounter a bit safer for casters.