Our guild has recently stepped into Gothik's room and after devising a plan we got the encounter down pretty well.

I am however curious how other guilds manage the control of the Trainees on the Living side. We assigned three people (warlocks) to the Trainees, they seem to manage fine until the last wave. Perhaps they can't kill them fast enough, although the AoE does hamper them during those waves.

I was just curious if you all zerged down the trainees as they spawn or had an element of CC when it comes to trainees, besides the fear which we currently employ (shackles on deathnights). Mages rarely have time to attack anything but Deathnights and Riders.

I am interested in other's responses to this question as well.

Currently, our living side wipes b/n 3rd and 4th horseman...and its usually because those damn little guys are running around killing our priests.

We currently kill every deathknight on left side, first 2 on right side, then shackle rest.

If dps is an issue, the priests on the side can always assist a warlock and throw up a shadow word pain. Our mages usually have time for a quick scorch to help out the warlocks though.

Mages can also sheep the mobs.

Uh yes, you sheep trainees. Even if you can kill all 3 every time on the live side, you're telling me your dead side can handle three trainees every 20 seconds on top of all the other spawns, for the entire last two minutes of Phase 1? Ours certainly couldn't.

I give all the mages (A) and they each make a macro to assign a unique raid target to their sheep to allow them to keep track of which mob is theirs as they wander. I don't think you ever want to sheep all 3 trainees in a given wave, but rather 1-2 from a few of the later waves, both to throttle the rate at which they spawn on the other side, and to maintain control on your side.

Becomes alot easier with more priests and mages. We had 7 priests on my guild's only kill so far. Mages cc trainees, and they get feared when possible too. Mages have their own symbol to show their sheep

We pretty much wing it, usually with 6-10 trainees alive by the time gothik comes down - we kill every DK from the left barring the last one, and the first two from the right - shackle the rest (6 in total). When Gothik enters the room we burn down a couple of trainees to smooth things out, and when he's on the undead side, we kill a deathknight and some trainees to allow for shit to happen :)

Our living side is usually terribly unlucky though - how does your guild cope with the random charges of the Deathknights? I'm sure everyone has experienced deathknights being locked in place, but still landing and intercept stun, a hit and a mark on a caster 20 yards away, effectively killing him when the next rider spawns.

shackled ones dont move

I have never seen a person charged get hit by the DK or marked if it was shackled during the charge only the stun.

I don't think you would have all 8 symbols used by mages or that would be rather mage heavy of a raid. I for one give 4 to priests for use on 5-6 DKs and the rest go to mages who can also distinguish their polys through use of turtle/pig/sheep differences.

We had a night recently where everything went wrong, and Gothik just felt harder than ever... We saw this happen to one of our mages. The server was lagging terribly that night (also that night...), so I guess the state of Magtheridon EU might have something to do with it happening. The mob is in the nova on the platform, but the mage 20 yards away gets a hit from it, and then dies to a trainee... good times :)

Thanks genius. If you have 5 DKs standing in the exact same spot, its kinda hard to know which one you're assigned to.

Also, I guess splitting the marks in half would work. The priests could have 4 marked, 1 unmarked and the mages could use 4 for sheeps and have a few mages sheeping unmarked ones.

Then press G

not like a priest is supposed to target other mobs.

Target last target simply targets by name - unless something has been changed since the days of learning razorgore, it's useless for situations with multiple mobs of the same name.

G targets your last target.

We have a warrior on the right spawn point who helps with the trainees that are being killed there, and taunts the spawned DKs and pulls them off to the side for shackling, so that they don't get shackled on top of each other, and otherwise helps control anything that might have gotten loose. At that point, it's not difficult to distinguish between shackled mobs once they have a fixed, unique position.

Edit: Gurg beat me to it.

The other reason I like to mark all the trainees is that, unlike shackle which tends to get spam-refreshed, sheep breaks sometimes as mages are DPSing other things, and it's extremely helpful for the mage to quickly pick up which humanoid is his and, at the same time, for warlocks to know that they really shouldn't put corruption on the trainee running around with a diamond on his head.

Plus it lets me know at whom to yell when a trainee is beating on me. :)

I have just tested this with 4 different skeletal horrors in duskwood. it always targeted the correct one when pressing G after targeting a friendly player.

As for us, we have a warlock do the north spawn, a rogue the center one and a full dps warrior doing south. The full DPS warrior also tanks the spawn wave 20 DK, so he should have a healthy amount of Hitpoints in off equip.

weird, we use icons for shackles only. The only time you should ever not kill trainees is when they will come with a rider, so when a rider is about to die on living, it's best to fear CC those (we use 2-3 locks on 2 trainees, and have 1-2 warriors on the right spawn)

Mages can keep track of up to 6 targets on their own. sheep, sheep/detect, pig, pig/detect, turtle, turtle/detect.

This won't help if you're not refreshing sheep and letting it break, but if you set up some type of cycle it's pretty easy to keep a sheep refreshed. ex: fireball/scorch DK, fireball/scorch/fireblast rider, refresh sheep, fireball/scorch DK....etc.

Do Deathknights stick properly after a Taunt? We've been learning live side with one Warrior and a stack of cloth wearers.

The farthest we've been getting is somewhere around the 2:40 Deathknights before things unravel. The biggest problem with the Deathknight so far isn't that they kill people, it's that they get Shackled right on top of the spawn point and cause confusion when the next one spawns. We'll probably try out the Taunt thing tonight.

Do you Frost Nova before Taunting? How do you keep them from charging away from the Warrior while he's moving? We've always feared the Intercept too much to do anything besides FN-Shackle without ever letting them move and inch.

We use nova rotations on the live-side DKs to keep them from charging, with a paladin or warrior nearby to eat intercepts if they move. Raidicons are for mages.

Select your heal->click your target. Won't change your current target.

The need for cc appears once the riders start coming. If ya send a bunch of students at the same time as a rider you're going to screw the dead side.

As a side note, this is the one fight in the zone that I really hate.