Skeram is still giving us trouble, in what seems to be a point where we ought to be well past him. It has always been an iffy encounter. The raid leaders and I agree that we are still missing a fundamental part of the encounter.

I don't think it's due to the basic understanding of the strat. Polymorphs/Sleeps are very fast on MCd players. DPS is off on the split so the tanks get a chance to pick up. Rogues are positioned near the tanks to eat the MCs.

I think it might be due to tank positioning...

With our positioning set, all players in the raid alive, everyone looking good on health and mana, we consistently wiped at 25% over and over last night, as the split came in. What it looked to be due to is continual EarthShocks to a particular platform (we label the platforms, as you face Skeram prior to the pull, A-B-C left to right). Platform C seemed to continually get 2 or all 3 of "Skeram"s and ESs came in too quickly, knocking out healers.

The obvious thought is: Oh hey, that's easy to figure out. Your tanks are picking up the wrong adds, leaving one untanked, and it is ESing the healers/ranged attackers. Our tanks, however, insist they were tanking the right ones.

So our feelings then shift to the actual placement of the tanks, which if you are looking directly down at the platforms from the overhead, are one tank in the central/central-north part of the platform, and the backup tank at the base of the staircase.

But...if Skeram splits are sending those duplicates to the stairs, do we really want to have the tank farther up the stairs to pick up quicker? Say about half-way up? My feeling is it may be the half-second/second that the backup tank loses trying to pick up an add that allows Skeram a free Earthshock before he is tanked.

Also as a side-note...we may have a hunch that there is a possiblity the tanks on one sore platform may not have taunted, perhaps a combination of no-taunts giving them "extra" time to collect aggro, coupled with having to run farther to pick up the adds would have been enough to cause the ESs.

Thoughts?

We actually try not to have tanks use taunt on Skeram. Picture the scenario that a tank taunts a Skeram duplicate, then the duplicate teleports to another platform, still taunted. Now the tank is out of melee range, so he gets earthshocked.

What we do is to have the main tanks pull their Skeram back once one shows up, then the offtanks move up to where they were, to get ready to pick up the next one.

If you look at the floor textures on the right and left platforms, you'll see there's a small square just about big enough for two chars to stand on side-by-side.
This is the teleport destination for each platform.

I normally run this encounter with 6 tanks, I put 2 on each side platform and 2 in the middle. I tell the two side platform tanks to stand on the square and make sure to assign which tank is taunting first. When Skeram ports to one of the side platforms, the tank is standing under the center of Skeram's model, so he begins within melee range. His taunt/Sunder/Slam lands and Skeram is considered tanked and in melee range instantly - thus we get zero earthshocks on a port.

If a tank is off position and taunts from far away he usually gets 1-2 earthshocks as he runs towards Skeram, 3 if he's slow. This has been the leading cause of tank death from what I've seen.

Also, because the tank starts in the center of the mob model after the port, Skeram adjusts his position slightly to the tank - making him off-center compared to the port location. This helps your second tank target the second port because the models aren't exactly on top of each other.


I have to admit this encounter still occasionally wipes us - sometimes you get stupid combinations like 3 port to one side with both tanks mind controlled - that's often ugly.

My amusing anecdote from this encounter - last week I accidentally changed the raid icon during the fight, causing the raid to attack the real skeram after a split resulting in a second split while some of the adds were still up. For some reason nobody noticed and we wiped with 4 or 5 skerams running around.

Some other odd things that were happening in the fight Kerulak is refering to:

1. About 90% of the time when he ported he would do 1 arcane explosion. There was never more than 3 people on a platform. If this was being triggerd by the people on the railings being to close he would have done more than one arcane explosion. I don't think pets were triggering it because I dont recall seeing them dieing and I am pretty sure warlocks weren't resummoning their imps mid fight. Could it have been totems? 3 people + 2 totems in range when he ports so he is doing 1 AE which kills the totems causing him to stop AEing?

2. The tanks on the outside platforms were reporting that skeram or a clone would port to the normal spot then instantly run for the stairs where the healers were on the railing. This would happen so fast that skeram or the clone would not be fully visable prior to getting to the stairs. To anyone watching it happens so quick it looks like skeram was actually porting to the stairs instead of their normal spot.

This is making it practicly impossible for the secound tank to pick up the secound one that ports to a platform. By the time they hit tab he is on the stairs AE/Earth shocking our healers. Next time we are going to make sure we have shields on the tanks prior to 75%/50%/25% to hopefully lessen the healing agro.

We are also thinking of putting the secound tank by the stairs to be able to pick it up. That doesn't feel like a fix though it feels like there is still a fundemental issue not being addressed. Why are the secound ones that port to a platform not getting any proximity agro from the two tanks and rogue standing right on top of them? Why are they beelineing it to the healers so fast that they are not even fully visable before they arrive?

My guild actually has had this same problem for the last few weeks, taking far, far too many attempts at Skeram to down him before moving on. It seems there have been alot of small things that caused bigger problems that have been addressed here already.

If a warrior taunts and then the copy blinks, he's gonna be Earth Shocking that tank for the duration of the taunt, usually 2 seconds of this is enough to die.

Having a warrior directly on the spawn point is imperative, and shifting the copy to the side so the 2nd tank can see a second copy blink in is a huge help for multiple Skeram platforms.

The rogues and the 2nd tank should be back by the stairs so that Skeram is definatly gonna go for the tank on the platform, and we move into position after he appears. The 2nd tank stays back to pick him up if he starts running toward the stairs, or to pick up a 2nd copy on the platform. The rogues just need to stand closer to the tank than anyone else to get the MC, as I often get it while running into position.

I haven't figured out the random Arcane Explosions, as he doesn't spam them, but they do go off every so often.

Anyone tried this with NR on tanks?

Also, one thing that gets us a lot is the "backup" tank dying due to healers not being ready for it... keep them aware the backup tank will be there ready to go, and you'll be generally better off.

Further, a dps strategy helps tremendously... communication!

I remember we had issues like this too, so we started telling our tanks to not be afraid to grab multiple Skerams on splits. We've even had one tank tanking all 3 images for a few seconds with all the healers on him. So long as he can keep aggro on all 3 and hit them frequently enough so that they still consider themselves "in melee", they'll never earth shock. Cleave, tab/sunder.

Followed by a swift, frantic hammering of the Shield Wall button.

We have had similar problems with Skeram after 1.12. Since starting AQ the middle of this summer, we’ve had pretty consistent wins. There was always had a modest mortality rate on warriors due to chain shock at the splits, but it was survivable.

Post 1.12 the splits pong like madmen around the platforms chain shocking the bajezus out of the warriors. I think it’s a change similar to time lapse no longer forcing a tank switch, in that the agro doesn’t seem to clear 100% and the splits might even inherit the threat list from the real Skeram.

What finally worked for us last night was adding the accountability of first & second tanks on each platform instead of a free for all mode. This helped cut down on the shock spam death that was caused by a 2nd split coming in late. Similar to what has been described above, have the first tank try to move his mob slightly off of spawn point to make it easier on the 2nd tank. Also, to buy some time on the 75.50.25 splits just prior to popping we also made sure to get all the warriors shields / hot’s to absorb some of the shock spam spikes. I suppose that adds risk of a heal tic pong, but we got away with it last night.

Also, make sure you assign a fire control person to lucky charm the first add to die.

Quigon- would you suggest a Huhu MT balanced level of NR or max it out like a wall member? We fiddled around several attempts with tanks at both levels but had problems with low hp pools on the maxed out runs and questionable resists at the ~200 level.

I've noticed this happening to us, too. No idea what's causing it, as nothing changes in his vicinity post-teleport, and he doesn't continue to AE. It can't be totems, as they're immune to AoEs, so they wouldn't be destroyed by it anyway (same for imps, which are always phase-shifted).

I think we've had this happen too, although this one seems to be fairly obviously server-lag related (we've had all sort of apparent server-lag type weirdness lately, like the worms on fankriss appearing to spawn three at a time right in the centre of the room headed straight for the healers, etc). Even if we could pin down exactly what's causing this, i'm not sure there's a lot anyone can do about it, other than pray that we get our hardware upgrades soon.

Pretty simple, take all your combat logs, calculate the damage done by physical, damage done by nature, and then come up with the exact value of what to wear... thats for max mitigation.

Now if you want practical purposes, obviously this fight is all about burst since the actual physical damage is weak as hell. In that case, you would want to go 315 NR, so that the "burst" is basiclaly 0.

But i'd be careful for the pseudo resist like huhu's spit... where you can't really resist the earth shock, and that i'm not sure of... I'd assume you can though.

I'm willing to bet you could heal shamans tanking 3 skerams at once without earth shocks... so NR gear on warriors is probably not gonna be all that bad.

That will kill your tanks faster.

The mob scripting seems to only allow for one tank / copy of this fight. There is a check to see "is my target targeting me?" if he is, check melee else earthshock, if my target is NOT targeting me, earthshock.

I've tried using 5 man type split aggro when 2 appear on the same platform and the other tank is mind controlled or whatever and all that happens is I get earthshocked by the one I'm not targeting regardless of range.

That's when the aformentioned "hit AE-taunt and Shield Wall" works :)

We haven't had a situation where three copies teleport to one platform in a while though. The rest of the advice is sound for the normal situations: have 2 tanks per platform, tank 1 takes the first copy and moves it off the teleport point so tank 2 can see the second teleport. When either of the tanks gets mind controlled, you're slightly screwed and someone will die unless you have a rogue/druid tank the free copy. But the basic premise is that you need to have the tanks ready with AE-taunt and SW for those "oh ****, I'm gonna die" situations, SW will cool down by the time you'll need it at Huhuran.