Hey everyone, I don't post here much but we hit c'thun for the first time last night and I'm looking to gather as much information as possible before we head in there again friday.

Currently we can pretty consistantly get to phase 2 with ~3-5 people down. We have made it to a weaken stage a few times, but too many people die during phase 2 to get much further.

Once we hit phase 2, we have ranged DPS 1st priority to scattershot/counterspell/earthshock/ect the giant eye tenticles and then to dps the smaller eye tenticles. DPS giant eye/claw tenticles if smaller ones are down.

Melee's priority is to jump on the giant eyes and DPS them down while stunning/cast interrupting them, while (or if) ranged is DPS'ing the small eye tenticles.

We have 4 tanks in 4 quadrants to pick up the giant tenticles

What I notice is that if we have everyone stick to their positions, the giant tenticles don't go down quick enough. If we have melee dps break off to kill the giant tenticles, the small eye tenticle spawns end up killing people.



I'm just looking for advice on positioning and "assignments" that may help us out. What I think will probably help us out and will try next round is for everyone to keep their phase 1 start positions through to phase 2. Melee close to c'thun/small eyes, ranged stagered in the middle, healers in the back (and tanks scattered into their quadrants still). When a giant eye pops, only the melee near it (max of the spawn point and the two adjacent groups) move to kill it. Ranged DPS that can reach it from where they are can DPS it, otherwise everyone stays in their positions. If you're not killing a giant eye, your're killing a smaller eye, lastly the giant claws (still adhereing to mages/hunters/shaman cast interrupting them as soon as they spawn however).

Any advice/criticism is cool.

Best way to do it is to run the fight like a Benny Hill sketch with all your DPS looking around for something to kill. Giant claws and Giant eyes spawn alternately every 40 seconds, with the small eyes spawning every 40 seconds at the same time as the giant thingy spawned.

Its entirely possible to kill all the small eyes (these should be top priority) and kill whichever giant thingy spawned before the next set of small eyes + giant thingy comes up if you have all your DPS piling on it. Nevermind the fact that the melee get hurt by the claw's AOE attack, just get them in there, heal through it and pound those things into the dirt.

5 seconds before every spawn, every caster should head back to their assigned corner and butcher the SMALL tentacles. Wherever the giant thing spawned they then head there and kick the crap out of it.

Melee can help out with small eyes when its a Giant Claw's turn to spawn, but they absolutely have to jump on a Giant Eye as quickly as possible and Kick (the rogue skill, no pun intended) and stun the living crap out of it so it doesn't cast.

When the casters return to their spots they should be aware of where the giant eye comes out and counterspell/spell lock it QUICKLY.

My former guild put melee on the small eyes surrounding C'thun, while having casters put together a counterspell rotation on the giant eyes. If a Giant Eye spawned near me, I would Vanish/Cheap shot to buy a bit of extra time for the interruptors/silencers to show up.

Assigning quadrants works well, but make sure your dps is comfortable with roaming. If the room has four quadrants, dps should still be willing to cover up to half of the room if something spawns.

Put all your healers and ranged as close to C'Thun as possible. We'll stand them all in the black fog (if you get close enough to C'Thun, the small eye spawns won't hit you with a rupture).

This does several things, assuming everyone actually does stand close.

1. Giant tentacles only spawn under people, so you won't get tentacles that spawn at a back wall. This means it doesn't take DPS 5-10 seconds to get there from across the room. This will significantly boost your DPS on the tentacles. If you've got a mod that gives you a 5-10 second warning before small eyes, you can tell melee DPS to go ahead and attack tentacles, they just have to immediately go back to positions when the warning pops up.

2. Pretty much everyone is in healing range, since the healers are basically in the middle of everyone, which means lots of out of party healing.

3. You'll have more people close by the giant eye tentacles as well. They should be controlled more quickly.

The downside to this method is that when you're slow on the giant eye tentacles, it's gonna hurt more. As you're learning it, make sure someone pays attention and warns the raid a few seconds in advance that you're going to have a giant eye spawning so that everyone with a stun starts watching for it.

The upside to this method is, even with people down, you should have no problem DPSing down the giant tentacles before the next group of small eyes pop up.

Something like this? (excuse the ghetto illustration heh)

Only problem i see with the situation mentioned above regarding the tightly packed raid around c'thun (besides if your slow cast interrupting a giant eye you're screwed) is: Will hunters have enough range to hit with their bow? I'm not too familiar with hunters, but know they have a range limitation where they're too close to use a bow.

If you have a competant group of raiders, the giant eyes should never, ever, EVER cast. When its time for the eye to come out, the Mages/Warlocks should be split up around the room, watching EVERYWHERE for where that eye pops up, Counterspell/Spell lock its 'ass' to give the rogues/warriors enough time to approach it and keep it Kicked/Stunned until it dies.

I've noticed that since 1.12 there are times when the Giant Eyes can instantly beam when they spawn. I'm talking "still loading on my screen" speed, but I've only seen it twice so it could have been a fluke.

The casters and ranged DPS should be covering about half the room, centered on where they were at the start of phase 2. Melee can wander around a bit too, but they must always be back at their "home positions" every 30 seconds so that they can interrupt and kill small eyes. With up to half the raid attacking a large claw or tentacle, they drop fast.

They will. A couple of them might need to back up a few steps, but that's not a big deal, since the tentacle already spawned. And yes, that picture is a pretty good representation.

How important is it for mages to have Improved Counterspell (for Phase 2 specifically)? Is it a huge help, or just a bonus, or totally unnecessary?

It's definitely not necessary for the make or break success of the fight, but it does help significantly especially, if you're still in the learning steps of phase 2 of the encounter.

The big eyes are pretty quick on shooting, so if you manage to counterspell it you should hit their nature school automatically. I'd say imp counterspell is convenient, that's about it.

For my former guild's first kill, several of our priests voluntarily specced up to Silence in Shadow to help out. And this was before the change that made the giant eyes fire off pretty well immediately after the spawn.

Is iCS essential? No. But it's a huge help.

So the feeling I'm getting is that it would definitely be worth it to have iCS as one more card in the deck; a means of shortening the learning cycle and getting C'thun on farm. Once you've got a solid farm, it becomes more trivial.

My guild has only killed him twice, but we didn't really find any success with Phase 2 until we started isolating ourselves on the north side of the room. Basically we spread out in a 180 degree arc on the side of C'thun opposite the entryway into the room. Since the Giant tentacles only spawn under players, we are able to concentrate all of our dps on the giant tentacles to kill them quickly. Melee dps easily kills the Northern small eyes whenever they spawn, we assign 4 hunters (since they don't have a silence/CS) and 2 warriors to hang out on each end of our 180 degree arc, and then head down and kill the south eyes when they spawn each time.

With this strategy we've found that our DPS on giant tents is so quick that we get a good amount of breathing room in the encounter. When we are humming and it works well, we typically have about 15 seconds of rest time after a giant eye spawn and 10 seconds of rest time after a giant claw spawn, due to our dps killing them so fast (since basically the whole raid is DPS'ing each one) Once each giant tent dies, we make sure to tell eveyrone in vent to spread out again (to minimize Ground rupture damage) and if its an incoming giant eye spawn we have mages, warriors in berserking stance, and locks w/ fellhunters looking for giant eyes and spamming a "/target giant eye" macro.

Couple other things that helped us that weren't mentioned:

1) Curse of tongues on giant eyes. Gives your interrupters a little more margin for error.

2) Normal Nature Protection Pots (NOT greater) helped us get from 5-6 dead in phase 1 to consistently getting there w/ 1-2 dead. Since normal pots are only 1 liferoot and 1 stranglekelp, they are incredibly easy to farm (I average about 60 an hour). Our entire raid drinks these like candy on stage 1. Basically if you have one up it means you won't die to a double eye beam or if you get chained. Obviously helps out in the stomach on stage 2 as well, and as far as I know ground rupture is nature damage so you can absorb that too.

yes, the north side strat is imo superior to the spread out all over. assign 1-2 mages, 1-2 locks, and all the hunters to kill south side eyes (have hunters w pets out too once p2 starts) as they spawn. everyone clumps up on north side, either spread out a bit or close to cthun. You should be able to get to weakened states on the first or second try, and killing cthun within 1-3 nights with the north strat.

heres a video detailing exactly what to do

http://youtube.com/watch?v=SBRTcxVu2pY


oh everyone should have BigWigs/ora2 or La Vendetta installed so the eye spawns are on timer bars instead of yells/raid warnings. Its 100x easier to position for eyes with bars showing exact times instead of trying to remember what raid chat said 10 seconds ago. Also never have any healers stay in the stomach more than a few secs, and no DPS should stay very long. Its important to coordinate stomach tentacle deaths with a clear (or only 1 claw) on top. Nothing spawns while cthun is weakened but anything already up will stay up (its obviously important for raid leader to call out switch to cthun when weakened, and if a claw is still up tank+healer stay on it)

We do the north strat as well, just have our groups from phase 1 collapse to the north on each respective side. (Groups 1-4 are northwest, groups 5-8 are northeast) This means that giant eyes/giant claws will ONLY spawn in the north, and hence a lot closer to a lot more people. For the small eyes, we assign people to take care of the south ones and they are ready for each spawn.

The advantage is a giant eye is always going to pop around a bunch of people that can stun/interrupt it, so clumping up your people isn't a concern at all.

I added a timer bar to the RDX mod we use that says, "Vuln when this hits 0!" It hits 0 at 22s into each 30s cycle. It's really helped out a lot with timing--much better then the Vent-based information relay between stomach and topside to try to figure out what's going on. Now the stomach just has to say "vuln is coming this cycle" and we can be ready for it.

Nurru is on the money with this. It's a change that occured a patch or two ago, but the giant eyes can often spawn and fire instantly - yes it may be scientifically possible to silence/cs them, but in reality no player is quick enough to do so before the eye has actually materialised on their screen.

The rationale behind the central 'clump up' strat makes perfect sense and would definitely increase efficiency and healing capacity. However, the issue that Nurru has raised would also be my number one concern with this approach. We simply have a bunch of roaming, rabid melee dps, and ranged dps only deviate from their normal positions a little bit so as to always keep the small eyes locked down.

We've been doing the North strat for a couple nights now, and the problem that we're having (besides people needing to L2P and not letting Giant Eyes eye beam) are the Southern tentacles. I believe we're assigning something like 4 mages to the southern 3 tentacles, but it feels like that they just aren't dieing fast enough. It's not so much that they are directly killing people, but instead they are draining healing resources and forcing attention off the Giant Tentacles so that we eventually get overwhelmed by Giants. For those doing the North strat, what classes do you typically assign to southern tentacles? Do you have those people move into position before or right after the tentacle spawns?