I did a bit of searching and couldn't quite find an answer to my question, so I apologize if this has been covered before.

I'm wondering about aggro on the Thaddius fight, particularly for DPS Warriors. With the tremendous amount of damage you can (and need to) do on Thaddius, how do you avoid passing up the tank in aggro? As a rogue, I can vanish & feint, so I'm not too worried about myself.

Does the MT really generate that much more threat from the polarity damage bonus? I've been under the impression that while DPS helps threat, most of it is from abilities (Shield Slam, Revenge, HS, Sunder, etc).

I could swear I saw someone mention that being at your max melee range is out of Thaddius' melee range and thus considered range. If so, is it just the additional threat 'penalty' from being at range that allows you to do so much damage without pulling?

It helps that you can taunt him. We occasionally have a situation where someone (almost always a fire mage) goes over the MT threat, but we find it's pretty rare, so yeah I guess the damage bonus does help a lot with retaining aggro.

No, for Horde at least, fury warriors have to be quite careful. And fire mages have to be really careful not to get a five-digit ignite. Our top warriors on this one tend to be the ones with Fetish of the Sand Reaver, timed for safe early burst while the tank is getting aggro, and then again for recklessness executing near the end.

Ah yeah should have noticed our whopping 1 dps warrior does equip a fetish for this fight :p

The MT should wear 5 set wrath, and time his shield slams so that they never fall on transitions (thats a 3 fold loss in that shield slam's aggro), make sure all 3 damaging abilities are always on CD (shield bash, shield slam, revenge), and HS is always lit with a weapon faster than 2.0.

Doing all that theres only 1 warrior and bursted mages that will catch me. Use your tranquil air appropriately... make high aggro and low aggro melee groups - generally based on gear.

Even then, people only die from aggro at 2 points - early in, when we can still get a nasty string of misses... or under the execute range.

The beginning is when you wanna trinket and control... after about 30-40 seconds the MT should be about 20% ahead of the pack.

Shield slam is going to be very valuable here obviously... Maybe consider having another warrior w/the MT with a better battle shout...

As an Alliance Fury Warrior, I've come close to pulling aggro, KTM reported around 98% aggro before I started to cool down, but it's usually the Mages who get pwned.

Thank you for all your input guys.

If you've ever wanted to see a fire mage get punched this is the fight for it.

We have our rogues vanish after the second polarity and then go full throttle for the entire rest of the fight without feinting once. The Fury warriors definitely have to watch it, but tranquil air for the first two Polarities will ease the start up a little. Having the MT's TF proc for 1900 does help a bit too.

Our MT is pretty awesome , he has a TF how ever ....


I HS spam from the get go

Are you having your tank in the camps to get polarised? Because ive never seen any aggro problems when we used that strategy. However before when we killed him, we had a different maintank; with a thunderfury, who would put on a few choice peices of high stam dps gear to increase his damage output (Girdle of the mentor, r13 legs/chest, r14 shield). However, he has since quit and our new maintank was not able to keep up with the fury warriors and fire mages, so we get him to stand in camp on some charges.

Because he could hold aggro fine without the damage buff, and it seemed unneccesary to put him at risk of polarity charges. I forgot to mention that we are alliance, probably quite a big thing to miss out. I'm not sure if a horde tank could do it, but i'd imagine that it would be more difficult.

I imagine you could find some positionning that allows your rogues to perma use backstab if the tank doesn't move on pol shift. Something like a Y with the tank at the bottom. Don't know if its hitbox is enough large to do that though, and I doubt the tank would be able to keep aggro without the buff.

You're missing out on a lot of damage from your MT, and potential aggro. I doubt our MT on Thaddius would be able to out-aggro 10k executes and 30k+ ignites without the charge, even if he does play well. The tank is probably the person LEAST affected by single people blowing up (Which can still be saved to a kill, obviously) due to having higher HP and several dedicated healers.

Usually if someone blows up at a bad time, its mages with bad luck who get nuked by CL right after that bite the dust, not the MT.

I often get the "33k ignite :/" reply when i ask mages what killed them on Thaddius. I guess they arnt coordinated enough to not stop an ignite that is getting to high. I cant remember anyone else then the firemages ever pulling aggro.

Speaking of aggro on this fight. Has anyone ever had any problems with aggro in phase one? It has hapend more then a couple of times that Stallag goes for a lock when both tanks are in the air and oneshots him, even tho the lock claims that "i was just wanding".

All your pure DPS warriors should have a fetish by this point, and from there it's a simple matter of Fetish/DW on the first transition, then saving Fetish/DW/Recklessness for the execute stage, even as a horde fury warrior.
If they don't have fetish, and agro continues to be a problem, just have them wear heavier NR gear rather than wait at the start of each transition. Same damage output as doing nothing, and lightens the healers already over burdened load (trust me, they don't want to use Major Manas if they don't have too).

Heh phase 1 is fuckin scary...
In our first tries we did normal but easy dps, got aggro/thrown and stuff and wiped the raid.
After that we were really scared of aggro and did "only white dps with chain feint", but this meant that phase1 took like 5 minutes...

Then we discovered that the mobs in phase1 seem to target a melee right after the throw(but before he targets mt2), thus it seemed that we got aggro when we actually didnt...

With this in mind we (the rogues) started getting more cocky and tried "white dps with chain feint and snd up at all times", this however put us over the line again and we got aggro...

At the end yesterday i did "white dps with snd between every second feint", this seemed to work decent.

I guess a threatmeter would help on this boss... not much use when the tanks dont use it tho...


Regarding phase2:
Try 1:
No dps before first polarize, snd+berserking+bf after first polarize = aggro = dead.

Try 2:
No dps before first polarize, snd+ss after first, bf+bers+botsg after second polarize = ok.

Ar+vanish later.

bers+botsg? English please :(

Just curious if anyone is using a feral druid to tank this?

I should have known someone would try to make this a feral druid thread. Well played good sir.

Berserker + Badge of the Swarm Guard

Keeping aggro on the MT shouldn't be a problem for alliance at all, the only "true" time we've ever had some issues was with Fire mage's getting a couple of crits at around 90%, otherwise its a pretty easy fight from aggro standpoint. Keeping the MT out of charge or swapping just seems kind've dumb to me.

http://files.filefront.com//;5542516;;/

Movie of our first Thaddius kill from POV of a Fury warrior, check the Zerk/DeathWish/Exe spam at the end, without pulling aggro - Salv is your friend :)

Stromni

I did a 3k scorch crit after the first polarize. This was all the damage I did to Thaddius that fight, and somehow, 2 seconds later I was getting 11k ignite ticks. We had a firsttimer in the raid who did not understand "why using fireballs after first polarize was a bad idea". With some slow starting and use of Fetish, aggro is generally not a problem for our mages if we can keep out of melee range. Dw fury warriors have more trouble.

Yesterday we also got somthing we wrote off as a bug, because we couldn't explain what happened. A bit out in phase 1 the 2 tanks were thrown to the opposite side, but while the tanks were in air, stalagg ran off after the tank he had just thrown. He was halfway down the ramp before the other tank landed on his podium, and subsecuently whiped us all with the tesla coil. This has only ever happened once. Is there some possibility of a huge aggro disparity between the tanks?