Tonight we did our first attempts on Maexxna. Ended up with 6% on our best attempt.

Thing that stings was we could have had that 6% if not for losing some key people on web wraps.

Through our attempts we would from time to time run into line of site issues trying to heal those that are wrapped. Some folks would get wrapped in spots where we could DPS the web, but were unable to target them for healing so they would either die from the DOT damage, or be low enough that the fall kills them.

Is there a trick we are missing or is there a possible change to how we handle the wrapped people to mitigate this?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :)
--Griggs

los is a bad bug, but if you got good priests, try and get them to target people in mid air, then shield and renew them and if they are stuck oolos that keeps them up
i know that healers assist with the meaxxna addon is very helpful for the healers on wraps

The cocoons drive me nuts. Our guild tries to handle best we can by making all the clothies pop a NR pot while they're in the air, because they most likely won't survive. The guys the in center can be healed with trouble like 95% of the time, so we put a shaman (me) on anyone in the center area. The left side is the absolute worst with LoS issues, so a priest primarily covers down on it with a druid backing him up, and as soon as someone lands there he puts HoTs on him and heals till the LoS occurs, then we just hope the DPS can get him down. The DPS on the left side is beefed up a bit to accomidate that. The right is like 50% no problems and 50% LoS issues, so we just put a single priest on that side.

But yah, I'm at a loss as to how that encounter is *supposed* to work. Are we supposed to be able to heal them or not? And if yes, Blizz needs to fix that crap because its ruining Maex attempts when all your DPS is dead on the wall.

Edit - as the post above mentions, you can grab a mod called HealerAssist and then get a Maexxna plugin for it that pops up the names and health of the 3 people in the cocoons so that you can target them the second they get the debuff for the cocoon. Have your wall healers use that and it helps out a lot.

I really think the bug is in that the people on the wall are losable at all, and that it's intended for the players to not be healable while wrapped.

Anyhow if you approach your strat from the viewpoint that none of the webbed people are healable and tune your strat accordingly, then the fight becomes much easier.

We have 4 mages assigned to AE spiders and 9 ranged DPS for web wrappings. We also have a druid or priest assigned to each general area (3 spots) for the web wrapping. They toss a HoT in mid-air. The far back and left is the worst one for LoS. The rest can be healed. So we start on the back with extra ranged DPS since it's the most important.

Also, don't bother getting them off the wall sub-enrage.

Hmm... so you just ignore the wall entirely and attempt to kill her before your entire DPS is dead on the wall?

Uh, no. The exact opposite actually.

heh ok, misunderstood what you meant in that case. I thought you were saying "just let them die" and I didn't see how that could work.

We've found you can't heal people on the west wall other than for a few seconds right when they're put up. We sort of triage them and have the ranged DPS stacked heavily on the west wall as healers can keep the people on the north and northwest walls alive easily enough.

We usually split 4 on AoE (3 mages and a lock generally), then 2-3 on the north/north west section, whatever's left on the west wall. We generally run with 12-14 ranged dps, leaving, so that gives us 5-7 allocated initially to the west wall. And of course whenever a wall is clear, they'll move to an adjacent side that needs help.

At 30% we ignore the walls and just burn Maexxna down before the second Web Spray. Unless we get incredibly unlucky with who gets web wrapped we have no trouble at all getting her down. If 4+ of our high DPS end up getting web wrapped we'll generally have to go through a 2nd Web Spray (MT death) and let Maexxna bounce to our OT -- he just stands there beating on her in Defensive stance with his DEoI for secondary threat, swapping in a shield at 30% in case I die.

We still AoE the spawns past the 30% enrage. We found they cause way too much chaos if ignored.

We have everyone bring 1-2 Nature Protection potions. As they are flying midair, have them drink one. That, plus some quick moves by the healers, ensures very few, if any, deaths.

I am of the belief that the fact that you can even heal them is a bug. They should be out of LoS. We approach the encounter with that in mind. However, that is just an opinion. I have yet to see any official response. Though I find it curious to know that they changed Faerlina in the 1.12 patch but not Maexxna.

What about Faerlina did they change? I haven't been on PTR myself, but I couldn't find anything about a change in the patch notes.

chug a nature pot mid air before you hit the wall

It's definitely a LoS error, not a "Target is immune" kind of error like with the Veil of Darkness that you see on some Naxx trash. If it were intentional I think you'd see a similar implementation to that curse.

If you look at the room there are webs kind of jutting out from the west wall that the targets are getting LoS'd on. These salient webs aren't present on the north or north west walls -- rather they're just part of the wall texture. I think what's happening here is the Web Wrap puts them just barely on the other side of that web texture, which for some reason ends up obfuscating LoS when it probably shouldn't.

As for actually using it as a healing method on the fight, it'd just demolish your priests' mana pools, as the web wrapped people wouldn't all be in the same group. Regardless it's easy enough to just stack your ranged DPS on the west wall and get them down in time.

If the fight is changed (or "fixed") so that you can't heal any of the webbed targets I think you'll find it's monstrously more difficult without a stacked raid to the point that it'd require a retune. You could probably manage to use NR pots (they'd be more or less mandatory with this change), but getting Web Wrapped more than twice in a 2 minute period would likely spell death for you.

--

On a tangent, as the MT I remembered being able to hit Shield Block right before a Web Spray (the 8 second stun) and still block the first two hits in spite of the immobilize. This week I definitely couldn't. Is my memory off or was this changed? I felt like I had a lot more close calls than normal too and ended up just Stoneshielding after a few sprays.

You no longer take Dmg from the RoF if you've moved out of it's proximety, ie: You'll take 0-2 instead of 2-4.

I donno, last run we only lost 2 players pre-enrage and we don't use nr pots. Our entire strat revolves around "keeping people alive" since we found for our guild it to be nearly impossible if we go into enrage with multiple dps dead, while entirely trivial if we get to 30% with all our dps up.

We have dpsing maexxna the aboslute last priority for everyone except for rogues (all ranged does wall, mages does wall + spiders, warriors does spiders+maexxna). Last fight lasted 5:15, which seems to be a reasonable timeframe.

I agree it would be a bit harder, but would probably put it's difficulty with where it's intended to be, and still doable unpotted.

You just wouldn't have enough ranged DPS to get them all down in time I wouldn't think. We also have all our ranged DPS on web sprays or AoE, warriors on AoE + Maexxna, rogues on Maexxna. Even then our wall healers stay very busy.

Unless you're running with something silly like 20 ranged I just don't see it happening sans heavy GNPP use.

How do others think making wall targets unhealable would impact the feasibility of the fight?

Just off on a tangent, is there are 2 people already webbed, does Maexnna web an extra 3 or just an extra 1?

You're considering leaving people webbed on the north wall and just healing them through the fight? I don't think we've ever had people live a full 40 seconds stuck on the wall to find out. It'd be an interesting strategy if it worked I guess.

thanks for all of the responses. i think allocating more ranged dps resources to the wall, especially the left wall, is our answer -- we only had 7 ranged dps on the web wrap at any given time, and we had two less hunters on the run than the usual. and i'll have to talk to the healers, but pulling one priest for web wrap healing on the left side, targeting someone as they fly up on the wall and before they get out of los, sounds like a good idea to me. our druids have their hands full usually.

Hm. there's a strat I had not considered. Anyone know if that works?

Our current method has 3 hunters watching the west with Shaman+Druid healing, and 3 warlocks watching the north with Shaman+Priest healing. The further south people get stuck, it seems it's more likely to have LoS issues. The only times we have people die are when someone didn't get healed after a Spin, or multiple people from the Web Duty groups get thrown up.

One thing you can do is, if a healer gets wrapped sometime between 50%-30%, let them die and throw them a Battle Rez before a Spin during the Enrage. They can accept the rez after the Spin, and heal the Tank while everyone else is spun.

It tends to be extreme north or extreme south, or anyone who's webbed on the lower parts of the areas that have LOS issues. have your hunters or your web team learn where the LOS spots are and get those taken care of first.