Digo

I at once love and loathe this fight. The pure amount of shit going on, the fact that you actually get to use crowd control in a raid setting, combined with a multi-spawn fight where a single baddy with 2 billion HP isn't the focus makes me pretty happy with the general direction the raid game is going. However, I find that the amount of detail that goes into setting up your raid for this fight can be frustrating. If we don't have 6 mages, 7 priests, and at least 7 warriors, the night almost always ends in tears. I also find it kind of disappointing that for being one of the hardest fights in the game, his loot table is so lackluster.

Anyway, what is your ideal raid setup for Gothik and how overboard do you go with consumables?

 

Nurru

We often do it with 5 priests, 5 mages and it's fine so long as a priest doesn't get gibbed by a loose deathknight. It means we have no priests on dead side though. As for warriors, I've never seen us adjust our raid or say "We don't have enough warriors" on Gothik, I suspect we've been doing it with our usual 4-6 per raid.

We don't use any consumables outside of the normal raid buffs and pots people may feel like using, though when we learned it we gave dead side arcane protection potions.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

◊ Praetorian

We used to buff way too much for this fight, until I realized that the buffs were largely immaterial to the outcome and that it was all about execution. We've wiped to Gothik with Loatheb buffs and we've killed him flawlessly on the first attempt with no consumables more substantial than mana pots and some Giants/Mongoose on the dead side.

I won't do Gothik if we don't have six priests. We don't need seven -- seven is nice, but not a huge deal. Mages don't matter as much: Six is optimal for our strat, but having 4 or 5 doesn't change too much really. We probably could make it work with only five priests if we absolutely had to, but I want no part of that.

A typical raid group for us for Gothik will be 6 warriors, 6 priests, 6 mages, 3 warlocks, 4 hunters, 6 rogues, 4 druids, 5 shamans.

Odds on "live"side, Evens on deadside.
One warrior at each spawn point on the liveside, and then two mages and a warlock assigned to each spawn point as well. I stay over there to coordinate and heal (and get all loose trainees on me instead of priests with my sweet heal aggro), and the remaining slots are filled with healers (priests preferably, up to 7 if we happen to have 7).
Deadside is all shaman/druid healing, with all the other warriors/rogues/hunters in the raid.

Having fewer mages is no big deal to me -- we just have a warlock by that spawn solo the trainee that ordinarily would be sheeped if we had an extra mage.

I can get more specific about spawn orders and such, but the OP was mainly about group makeup, so there you go.

Gothik is among my favorite fights in the zone, along with 4H. (Fun fact: The designer who made Gothik and 4H also made my least favorite fight in the zone. Go figure.)

 

inveratulo

and that would be ... grobb? gluth?

crappy troll knocked out the DSL now it takes 2 minutes to get to tits

 

snape

Wow. P's insight makes me want to change what we do. O.O

Currently, we use 6-7 mages and 6-7 priests, 1 warrior, 3-4 warlocks, and half the paladins on the live side.

Just put everyone else on the dead side.

We generally have 18 on the Live side and 22 on the Dead side.

 

Nurru

Our strategy is fairly straightforward on living side, I admittedly have entirely no idea what happens on dead side. It works fine with 4-5 Mages and 5 Priests, but a lot of our dps is also supplemented by the fact that we bring 4-5 Warlocks to nearly every raid.

We have a mage (Frost, since we have 2 frost mages in guild) at each Deathknight spawn. When a Deathknight spawns it is novaed as it appears and then is hit with CoC to slow it. From there a priest chain shackles it as we kill it so it cannot charge. For the first three waves of Deathknights and trainees we have our caster dps split between the left and right spawns with priests. After the third spawn the Mages move over to the left side and all Deathknights on that side are still killed. From that point on all right side Deathknights are shackled by one of the five priests. Trainees that spawn after that first Rider are feared by the 3-5 Warlocks we have and killed by dots. Mages each have 1 trainee in the rotation that they know to poly on spawn. With this strategy and 5 priests it means the last Deathknight on the left side won't have anyone to shackle it so for that one we use hammer of justice, intercept and careful frost novas to keep him from charging anyone.

Oh, and we have 1 Warrior on Live side. The rest I assume are all running around like crazies on Dead side.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

◊ Praetorian

Loatheb. (Actually the same designer did Grobbulus too, but I actually like Grobbulus -- it's a fun fight and I like the concept. It's just too easy.) I just can't wrap my head around how the same person produces the ultimate "skill > consumables" fight and then turns around and makes a "deposit gold for epics" moneysink. :(

Edit: (BTW, to ward off any conspiracy theories, my knowledge about who designed what, etc., comes from interaction with devs on the Naxx PTR.)

 

◊ Praetorian

Yeah, this is the part I don't like about 5 priests.

On liveside, we kill the 1:00 and 1:25 DK pairs, and then shackle the right DK at 1:50, 2:15, 2:40, and 3:05, while nova'ing/killing the left DK with a priest whose job is, as you noted, to chain-shackle everything on the left while it dies. At 3:30, which is the final wave, we then shackle both left and right spawns, and just burn the last Rider down. We could rely on Nova to keep one of the DKs controlled until the Rider goes down, but I'd prefer not to. Fortunately we have lots of high-attendance priests so I don't think I've ever actually had to seriously try this fight without six. I also like the fact that after 3:05, we do not kill any more DKs, which helps deadside catch up if they've fallen behind at all, since you can offtank horses and kill trainees quickly, but you can't afford to keep Spectral Deathknights alive because of their abilities, which can be problematic if you have both DKs and trainees to deal with.

 

◊ Drauk

How did you found about designer ? Insider in Blizzard :) ?

Fun is for casuals

 

Nurru

The frost novas on that DK are more of a last ditch effort to stop them, two Paladins are usually enough to hold him in place. The risks of breaking CC with those novas are too high. I could definitely see wanting more priests or reworking the strategy without being able to use HoJ.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

◊ Praetorian

From above:
As we were messing around with Patchwerk on the PTR, the designer was watching and asked if we'd help him test the other encounters he'd designed. I'm trying to recall which other bosses had designers in common -- IIRC Faerlina and Noth were done by the same person. I think.

 

Malan

Both involve raid-wide decursing encounters, go figure.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

snape

And both are easy fights! :dance:

 

Nurru

You must have not tried Faerlina pre-fix.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

snape

Actually, we did - killed her about 4-5 times before the RoF nerf. But - she's still easy now (wasn't then by any stretch).

 

Donzilly

I guess if there's a gothik thread going I might as well post our wave order. We've only spent 3-4 hours on him so far but this is generally what we were doing live side last night from a mage/priest POV.

We had a stack raid last night 7 mages/7 priests/ 2-3 locks; I guess if we only had 6 mages we wouldn't sheep wave 5- just make it easier on dead side/locks I guess. This seems really ideal as I broke down each wave.


) All three traines
2) All Three trainies
3) All trainiers
4) NORTH DN (nova) then SOUTH DN (novaed)
5) If 7 Mages (FIrst mage sheeps)
6) North DN (novaed) then South DN (novaed)
7)nothing
Kill NORTH DEATHKNIGHT (nova)- (Sheep 2)- South Death need needs to be taunted w a macro/ cannot use nova otherwise cc's break (not positive on this)- SHACKLE #1
9) RIDER- Pop trinket/combustion- kill this bitch
10) Sheep #3
11)KILL NORTH Death knight (NOVA)- SHACKLE #2
12) Kill RIDER (SHEEP 4)
13) KILL NORTH DEATH KNIGHT (NOVA)- SHACKLE #3
14) SHEEP #4
15) Kill RIDER
16) Kill NORTH Death Knight (nova)- SHACKLE #4
17) SHEEP #5
18)Shackle #5 North DN; KILL RIDER; Sheep #6; Shackle #6 North Death Knight
19)Sheep #7
20) KILL NORTH DN (NOVA/then 2nd nova- No shackle is avaiable)- Shackle #7 SOUTH DN
21) Killer RIDER
22) mage/locks kill south trainie

I do have a question about control Death knights though: What do you do to use each time. For us we didn't frost nova south knight after the 2nd pair of them. Can a warrior sucessfully taunt and prevent them from charging?? I assume we nova north DN's- our rotation just broke down as people died/got charged etc.

http://ctprofiles.net/2303173

 

Digo

I actually like Faerlina. I think it's a great mix of movement, multiple mobs, sporadic curing, lots of spot healing, and a more interesting game-over timer than "Uh oh, 7 minutes are up. You die." I think Noth is also well-designed except for the stupid raid-wide curse. I thought we learned from Chromaggus that spam curing is bad?

Anyway, I think our biggest issue with Gothik is that we run with so few (2) warlocks, so we can't gradually fear kite them. Instead, the trainees die too fast and overload our dead side. It's pretty remarkable that they designed a fight where you actually want to slow down your DPS to avoid wiping your raid.


ed: typo

 

◊ Praetorian

I don't get why you'd start CCing trainees so early. Until Riders start coming down, the DPS on deadside should have no trouble at all staying ahead of all the spawns. If we have six mages, here's what we do:
0:10 -- Kill 3
0:30 -- Kill 3
0:50 -- Kill 3
[1:00 -- DKs start spawning every 25s]
1:10 -- Kill 3
1:30 -- Kill 3
1:50 -- Kill 3
[2:00 -- Riders start spawning every 30s]
2:10 -- Kill 1, Sheep 2
2:30 -- Kill 1, Sheep 2
2:50 -- Kill 1, Sheep 2
3:10 -- Kill 3
3:30 -- Kill 3

 

◊ Praetorian

But it's not raidwide -- it's the 15 (?) people nearest to Noth. It's not really that bad because you can control and predict who will get cursed. It's pretty easy to set up non-spam assignments that will get the raid cleansed with tons of time to spare. Sapphiron on the other hand, I have no damn clue how you do without Decursive.

Edit:
You can strategize around that. Let's say you have six mages and two warlocks. Until the riders start spawning, your whole raid can just kill all the trainees that spawn. So just focus on the last six waves. Just break up each wave such that Warlock 1 solos the last six spawns on the lefthand side, Warlock 2 solos the last six spawns in the middle, and your six mages each sheep one of the spawns on the righthand side. That'll throttle the rate at which they die, while still ensuring that all 18 are accounted for.

 

alfredo

As a druid, Gothik is probably the most intense encounter in Naxx. The only consumables that we have consistently used in our Gothik kills are Arcane Protection pots for the melee on the dead side. The entire dead side takes a pot when the second rider spawns to nullify any trainees that spawn at the same time. They really provide a nice cushion for the druids/pallies during that hectic last 90 seconds.

 

Humbaba

100% off topic, but if you've never clicked on the link in Digo's sig, you should. Thanks Digo, now my co-workers thing I'm crazy from laughing out loud randomly at my desk.

 

◊ Kalman

We refuse to do Gothik without 6 each of warriors, priests, and mages, and if at all possible bring 7 priests/mages. All priests are on live side, all druids are on dead side. Paladins get split as needed (typically have 1 live, 3 dead to give devo to the live side tanks).

I really, really like the Gothik fight. It's hard, but the difficulty is entirely provided by the player - if you do what you need to do, you win. If you don't, you lose. Randomness really doesn't enter into it (except the one time we somehow managed to aggro a Spirit of Naxxramas through the gate right as Gothik came down).

 

Digo

I don't think that it's entirely independent of randomness. We've had a horse, rider, DK, and 2 trainees spawn on the same pile (back of the room by the healers) subsequently. It got ugly real fast.

 

Tuco

We used to do it without world buffs/flasks, but after two kills we wiped for a night then did it again after Loatheb and easily one shotted it. Without heavy consumable use you have to really be sharp on not only having perfect frost nova/sheeping/shackling execution, but also DPSing as well.

With our loatheb buffs we can just go in and even though we still need to be on top of shackles/novas, our DPS and sheeping doesn't need to be quite as tip top to defeat the encounter and it's a lot easier.

Once your raid is pretty good at the encounter, there's no reason to not wait until after Loatheb to do it(Unless you want to practice 4H or something) It's not required but it's a lot easier.

As for raid makeup, I don't really think it favors classes that much more than other encounters once you have 6 mages/priests/warriors, though I'd prefer to have 7 of each. Generally we have 8 warriors anyway for 4H.

 

kais[bo]

buffs/no buffs does not help all that much. world buffs are 100% not needed. the key is that EVERY knows what to do. not wait for main assist, whenever a mob spawns, you have to know what to dps. fast targeting is the win. we had attempts where a mage did 80k dmg and another mage 25k, both having 100% the same job. thats the biggest problem imo. :)
we actually split the raid up 18 living, 22 dead side cause dead side is much more random and at least for us its much tougher. on living we typically have 7 priests (or 6 priests + 1 druid), 1 warrior, 10 mages/locks while 2 locks deal with the trainees left + right. middle trainee either gets killed by dps casters or CCed. if we don't have enough mages/locks, we put dps warriors or rogues on the trainees. locks is superior though as they can dot DKs/riders while doing their job.