Yup, I also prefer the absorb absorb way. First, 5361 hp is not trivial for horde mages/priests. We do loatheb without world buffs most of the time or with mulgore / ony because, well, nobody is still motivated to do anything else than libram mobs in zg, so even with zanza and such, 5k3 is not easy. And I really don't like the bandage sequences in this fight, this is where bad things happen : a healer who doesn't heal, spore fuckups, ect.. and.. no dps during bandage = bad (no dps, ignite fading, fire vuln fading...).
In my opinion, if you can't kill loatheb in in 5:00/5:30, then you just aren't ready for the fight. Either something is wrong with your spores grp / rotation, or you're just simply not geared enough. The aim of the fight is not to survive 6 mins, it is to kill him in 5. And killing him in 5 mins is really not that hard even with raids less than optimal (7 priests during our last kill, 15 healers which is way too much, without any world buffs), just perfect the spore sequences, this is where you win or lose the fight.

You could always have a Druid (Healer) bandage a high crit mage to keep your ignite / fire vuln up and running, as has been previously entioned in other loatheb threads.

This makes no sense. Absorb Absorb has even higher HP requirement. See Gurg's post on page 1.

Who cares what the aim of the fight is? This thread is about surviving loatheb, not how to DPS him using or not using world buffs. There's a whole separate thread available for that discussion. The people having discussions about how to best survive the Dooms as long as possible are the ones who likely aren't as lucky as your guild with weapon drops up to this point. Just because they can't do the fight in 4:30 doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. A 5:38 kill (which I had last week) with world buffs is still just as legit as your super-fast-whoopdy-doo kill without buffs.

And 5400 health is NOT hard to achieve for a horde mage or priest that should already by that point be geared in enough T2/2.5 and T3 combinations to have a decent amount of HP - not even needing the ZG buff to do so, you should be able to hit that with just the readily available farmed foods/pots/etc.

That it does. We just basically aim to pour in as much DPS as we can by 5:00 because 15-sec dooms send us to hell pretty fast, hence we use an order that requires only 2 bandages. Technically we can have healers running around bandaging people at the 5:00 doom, but at that point (from 4:20 actually), our DPS needs full focus on Loatheb.

Er, this wasn't directed at me specifically, but I'd just like to say that we survive Loatheb much more reliably if he doesn't get past 5:00. Maybe that's just us... take it however you wish. :X I didn't mean to start an e-peen flexing war, in any case.

I just wanted to point out that even with the higher HP requirement, the consumable order we used allowed most of us to stay alive long enough to do the job without world-buffing, other than two disconnected healers, a mage who clicked a gem instead of a healthstone (rofl) and some unfortunate guy who screwed up somewhere along the line. I guess we had BoK though, so YMMV.

The thing is that the Absorb Absorb strategy makes it less likely that you survive even until 5 min. You need more hp and you won't get to use lucky potion absorbs (even if your first pot absorbs 3250 you take a new one overwriting it).

Also, having 15 healers isn't that bad because you can have some priests doing PoH on mages so they won't have to bandage at all.

The addon is still around, we got Heigan down last night so a few of us stayed around to get comfortable with the healing rotation and play with a couple different mods; we ended up deciding on LV for this. We tried the Bigwigs addon, but ditched it for the same reasons Malan mentioned earlier in this thread.

To my knowledge, none of the patch changes should affect the functionality of this.

ignore post i'm retarded