Heya people

We're currently learning Thaddius, and us mages are trying to finetune our dps. We only got firemages, usually 6-7 of them in the raid. We have a little trouble adjusting our dps without aggroing Thaddius. How do your mages go about doing this? We've tried scorching, we've tried fireball, it always seems to build up an ignite pulling aggro. We've tried waiting with real dps till after 2nd polarity shift, and we still got aggro (a 26k ignite mind you).

What I usually do is mix scorch and AM spam for the first minute or so before opening up with fireballs. We all try to pop combustion between 40-30% so by this point aggro usually isnt a problem. Also, having the MT taunt during a transition helps a ton too (ignite ticking while in melee range ftl).

(Being alliance helps too :D )

First, are you alliance or horde? It does matter here (no not for balance, yech). If you are horde, you should get TA totems and change the groups around if necessary to get them. Maybe even bring extra shamans. The melee may find themselves not even needing WF due to aggro limitations until much later in the fight - hell our melee run TA and no WF. So TA is going to be critical here - shamans galore!

This all depends on your guild too - some guilds have a more even mix of DPS so some don't have ot press max... others have a huge discrepency between best and worst of a particular class. Ours tends to have large discrepencies - so we need the TA. You may not. This extends to mages.

Apparently thaddius is tauntable - but that should not be neeeded (i've never had to myself).

Rotating who is doing the ignite is critical... the point is that the mages need to understand that any other mage's aggro should be treated as their own - when someone bursts too high, cut the ignite off for all 7.

We're alliance. And 20 min after I wrote the post, we killed thaddius (10 sec after enrage, phew). But your advice is very welcome, so we can optimize mage dps.

Pretty sure the melee rule only applies if you swing a melee weapon.

To my knowledge, it's any action taken in melee range, which would include ignite ticks during polarity transition. (Maybe grounds for your speculation that ignites refresh threat per tick.) That's been our observation after losing a mage during transition and the mage not exceeding the 30% cap. Should be easily tested.

This is a semi-off topic question and I wasn't intending to hijack the thread, but I didn't think starting a new thread about the same boss for a question with a simple answer would be a good idea. Has anyone got tips for the initial positioning/moving of Thaddius? We're having our MT back him up a bit (we use the diamond strat) and he tends to not move with the tank, and just ball lightning and kill him.

On topic, I'd think limited invulnerability potions are amazing on this fight. Mage pulls aggro, pops invuln pot, tank taunts. Or at least that's what I'd think would be nice, our mages are lazy and don't farm them.

We have our tank grab him and pull him to Thaddius' right (left facing the back wall) as we use the diamond strat as well. DPS before the first polarity shift is insignificant so missing out on that ~5-10 secs is not a big deal.

The invuln pots are certainly useful but less so on Thaddius. Due to the relative ease in being 1-shot, the close proximity, and aggro gain warnings from Chain lightning, you'll end up using them at the wrong times or not in time. I have mine hotkeyed and on our first learning attempts was unable to pop them on time.

Fetish of the Sandreaver

What I do on Thaddius to successfully do high DPS, but make sure that ignites do not get out of control is I have a macro that basically puts a line in raid chat, and mage chat in all caps calling for mage DPS to stop, and tank to get ready to taunt/Paladin to get ready to BOP me if I pull in the next couple seconds. When I see ignite ticks skyrocketing, I jsut tap that macro once or twice and it usually saves me in time, and other mages do the same. Also as a team, we established that we'll only chainscorch, so that ignites do not build up too high, we save mana, and we don't all combustion fireball spam at once sending one mage to hell!

Those would be my suggestions, and as always do whatever you can to avoid running in melee range of thaddius when transitioning, even if using blink to get to the other side. Limited Invulnerability pots, etc as others suggested also help.