My guild just started attempting Noth this week. All the people we've talked to, and all the strategies we've read about the fight say that we should put our ranged dps on the adds while melee focuses on Noth. We figured this would work out well for us because our ranged/melee dps is usually very balanced. We tried this strategy, however, and dps seemed to be lacking in all areas of the fight. Waves of adds were spawning before the previous waves were killed, and Noth was only hitting about 85% before the first teleport and 65% before the second.

This is somewhat confusing to me because we generally run dps heavy. Our first C'thun kill was this week and he hit 39% during the first weaken. Our first Faerlina kill was also this week and we killed her with one add still left to be sacrificed. Since I keep hearing that Noth is on par with faerlina in difficulty, I really feel like we have the dps to do it... We're just lacking something in terms of strategy.

After a while we tried to have all dps switch to the adds when they spawned and then resume DPS on Noth, the end result was about the same (85%, 65%). We ended up deciding to just offtank the adds until he blinked and then have all dps focus on the adds.

This strategy seemed to get us a lot more dps on noth, and have better control on the adds, but we ended up with OOM healers. After he returned to the room for the third time, we just offtanked all the adds that spawned and let dps focus entirely on Noth. He was at 20% with a minute left, but all three offtanks died to the 4 adds on them and we wiped shortly after.

Is there something we are missing about the fight? It felt a LOT harder than Faerlina and, from what we hear, it isnt supposed to be. Is there a more efficient way we can split our dps and still be able to put enough on noth?

we have all of our dps on noth while he's on the ground, and AOE the skeletons during the teleport.

there's a movie of it on our site if you want to check it out :-P

Like all fights, your dps will increase as you get better at the fight - and learn positions.
What you need most, is more practice.

Noth IS a lot harder than faerlina... as of 1.12.
This was not the case before 1.12. And thats where you heard whatever from.

Warlocks on adds, using dots and rotating around is a decent strat. Grouping mages by spec on adds is also a valid one, with a lock for each. We usually had 3 ranged dps per corner, and 1healer for the tank. For the 3rd teleport, another healer would help each offtanks, depending on the mana, and everyone switched to the boss.
There's really no secret, however dpsing harder on noth helps, and you need a good tank so you can start dpsing faster after a blink. I'm pretty sure you can get 60% of his life before 3rd teleport, but you really need to go all out.

I could tank 5 adds at once with only one healer, but my gear was a bit over what you'd expect from an offtank, and I had full toughness(I was MTing patchwerk too), so with 2healers each, you should be able to do it.
If you're a heavy dps guild tho, if you can't get noth to like 40% before 2nd teleport, it's probably because people are playing too safe so as not to pull aggro. Tell them to go harder, use buffs. For melees you can go all out until a blink, only ranged should stop a bit before blink because bolts might hit after the blink. Give the tank 4secs then go all out again(you can auto attack and feint if you're a rogue).

Yar, have Warlocks run around dotting everything, helps a lot. Basically full out DPS, we use more consumables on Noth than we do Grand Widow.

We have split ranged on adds, melee on noth and generally all adds die before next spawn, and noth is ~45-50% before his second balcony port.

After he returns we have everyone nuke him down and then clear up the 9 adds that have spawned by then.

It really is just a matter of everyone paying attention properly and maximising damage at the right times (ie not right after a blink). Having tanks die with 4 adds on them worries me though, either they are in dire gear (some of our offtanks are in bwl/aq gear and fully dps specced, we have no issues) or your healers need to learn how to heal.

We use 3 corner tank and tank noth in the middle. We assign 6 dps to the adds. The rest of our dps go all out on noth, but aren't allowed to use any form of DoT (including ignite). As such, we assign up to 3 fire mages and 3 warlocks per corner group (they just assist the tank in their corner). Part of our normal group setup is a standard instruction that cleansers/decursers prioritize their group in decursive so that there's no doubling up causing a missed decurse, as such it's messy to stack more than 1 mage per group for us. You should find this is sufficient to burn the adds well before the next spawn.

Rest of our dps goes on noth. We found our dps wasn't sufficient when people paid attention to raid warning mods (they get overly cautious when the blink timer is up), so we actually made everyone disable them for the fight. Just tell your dps to open their eyes and cancel their cast if he blinks. For us with BoS, on alliance, even if a mage gets off say one late bolt, as long as your tank gets cripple dispelled fast and can get in there quickly with a primed HS/Shield Slam combo he'll snap agro back and cover your caster.

We stick 3 ranged DPS (Mages/Locks) with a Warrior/Priest/Paladin in each corner. The Paladins keep JoW up on each add and we single-target them down in corners during the first two down phases. There's usually enough of a pause in between phases where the melee/hunter DPS can clean up the adds if a corner was slow.

In the 3rd down phase, we kill 1 or 2 of the corner adds, then switch all the DPS to Noth. The 3rd down phase lasts twice as long as the first two, so even if Noth is at like 55-60% when he comes down again, you should be able to kill him.

with our full-dps on noth/AOE during teleport strat, we actually sometimes kill him before the second teleport, and we've actually never seen him teleport a third time.

How we do it:

All melee dps on noth. 4 warlocks put all dots on each of the 3 adds. Assign other ranged dps equally to each corner to assist on adds (only during blinks or if DPS is low because a warlock dies somehow, resists, etc) Fire mages must be careful with ignites on Noth (spend time putting up imp scorch to help immolates when blink is incoming).

If you end up with 5 warlocks in your raid, they can kill the adds no problem without help, but it's kinda wasted since other ranged DPS have to stop during blinks anyway and could be helping on adds, so having one warlock shadowbolt spam on noth is good if the other 4 warlocks are pro enough.

One of the most important things is to keep the adds out of the raid during the teleport. The cast time interruptions from their shadow AOE reduce ranged DPS significantly and usually cause melee to be doing cleanup when he's in the room and mages are decursing. This hurts more than anything, IMO...several % per teleport if you're behind. It is 100% possible for everything to be dead before he gets back....make sure it happens. People will figure out little things as you practice that will increase efficiency and it will happen.

Also, making use of shackles during the 2nd teleport is key because it allows everyone to down the guardians quickly since nobody has to pay attention to the shackled mobs (including the tanks). Break shackles immediately after the guardians are down and keep everything unshackled, tanked, and out of the raid so casters can channel spells on new mobs as old ones die so no time is wasted.

100% dps on Noth after he comes back from 2nd teleport. If you're getting 4 skeletons on your tanks, your DPS isn't high enough.



For the people who AOE during teleports, what about the skeleton cleaves?

I'm on a 1-man crusade to get all guilds to bring 4-5 warlocks on this fight and have them kill all the adds (while Noth is on the ground at least) with COA, Corr and Immolate while having every other DPS class focussing on Noth.

Normally it takes 3 DPS classes per side (Mage, Hunter, Warlock usually) focus firing each add to bring them down before the next one spawns. Thats 9 people doing a job that 4-5 warlocks can accomplish. 6 of those 9 people are far, far better at A) not pulling aggro and B) single target DPS (our DOTS get bumped off easily).

If you don't have a lot of Warlocks then DEFINATELY suggest to all of them that they should be DOTing all of the adds as opposed to focus firing with Shadowbolt etc. Warlock DPS goes through the roof when we start laying all our DOTs on several mobs at once. The 1.12 lifetap change made this strat even easier to accomplish. Before I was heavily pressed for time to get 9 DOTs on the 3 adds then lifetap back to full. Now I've got enough time to throw shadowbolts at whatever one is 'lagging behind', DPS it down with shadowbolts and still have enough time to get full mana before the next wave.

It also sounds like you're not opening up soon enough on Noth after each Blink. Try to open up sooner and sooner getting a feel for just how much threat your tank is capable of generating. You've gotta pull out every last ounce of damage you can before each time he blinks.

We assign ranged DPS to the corners as well. 9 is a bit much, if you have good DPS; we use 7. A good Fire Mage pair can just barely keep up, with a bit of help from the Priest in the group, or someone from the 3-group who gets done early. This leaves a lot of DPS for Noth. We kill him with 90 seconds before the third port, 60 if people are sloppy on Blink.

you mean cleaves during the teleports themselves? we have 3 warriors assigned to the corners who tank all of the skeletons until the teleport, and everyone else stays out of cleave range then. when noth teleports, those tanks bring all of the skeletons into the middle of the room and everyone else moves out, and the mages/warlocks all aoe (along with the occasional volley! /flex). it's really not hard to keep those warriors up from the cleaves since no one else is taking significant damage then, and the rogues and remaining warriors take down the other adds as they spawn, with assistance from the casters/hunters when the skeletons are dead.

ANd just to make sure that AOE is targeted AOE (eg blizzard), not Arcane Explosion, Nova, etc.

Our ranged dps just generally dpses Noth until two skeletons are up and then kills one of them. Once it's back down to one we go back to Noth. We're pretty lazy about it I think.

well yeah :) blizzard/flamestrike/rain of fire. you're certainly going to die to cleave if you try to AE, and even more certainly if you try to hellfire :)

If you backup -just- far enough, the cleaves won't overlap. Of course, that requires warriors with eyes in the back of their head.

It took us a couple weeks to get this fight down and we started killing him the last 2 times at which point, the raid started dying to adds and we just say, fug it, wipe and collect our loot already.

Cleave hits hard enough that you don't want skeletons stacked in a way they'd hit 3warriors. However, with competent warriors, you could probably position all the skeletons in the center then get out of the center yourself, in a triangle form around the skels. It seems a bit more complicated than killing them as they spawn tho, since you'll have champions spawning during the AE probably which can turn pretty bad(they have this AE shadow thing that delays heals).
If you kill mobs as they spawn, there should be no one but offtanks getting cleaved tho, you can pickup skeletons almost where they spawn and have them stay there np.

On the last phase, I would usually chug an armor pot(the 250armor ones) if things looked alright, then I would use lifegiving at 3mobs, last stand at 4 and shield wall at 5, with major healing pot when stuff goes wrong. I never died before noth was dead, just spam shield blocks and demo shouts as fast as possible and make sure you face the mobs. (yea it sounds stupid but some warriors have problems facing multiple mobs at once for some reason. Take a step back, wait for repositionning, take another, everything should be facing you).

P.S: from what I remember, on my 9.8k armor or so, cleave was hitting for an average of 800. They cleave like every 10secs or so, so it's not horrible dps, but they have a bad habit of syncing their cleaves so you take insane burst damage when you get cleaved by 3+skels at once on top of normal melee.

I'm rather wanting to try this AoE strategy Ego, sounds like it may work for us. Have to get back in there :) Can atleast give it a couple of goes.

Have a warrior per spawn point. A Shaman+Priest looking after the warrior. All DPS on Noth, Targetable AoE down everything after he goes to the balcony.

At first our guild shuned this strat because we dident see anybody else doing it this way. After using it for a few kills, this way is VERY effective. Even if you are not a aq40 geared guild, you should still have plenty of time to dps him down at the 3 min teleport if you use this.

if you want to see a rogue's-eye view of the fight our way, it's the third link down under "old videos" on the left side of www.lostanarchy.com.

a couple other things - our priests help control the additional spawns during teleport phases with Shackle. we promote each priest and assign them a raid icon so they can identify which add is "theirs" when they go to heal and then back to reshackle. we actually don't kill all the adds during the second teleport (if we get to it) - we keep the second wave shackled away from the middle and just kill noth.

I've been getting (or trying at least) the warlocks to DoT the spawns both at their "assigned" corner and the corner closest to it, as a way of reducing the frequency of pulling aggro on the spawns. I'm not sure that we'd be able to kill the mobs just through doing this though...