ICC Crimson Halls - Blood Queen Lana'thel (Normal) - Page 3

Fargom · 01/25/10, 2:12 PM

The 10 man healing requirements seem rather high, as noted earlier in this thread. As embarrassing as it is to admit, we countered this by using 4 healers. As long as your dps is high enough you can easily get away with a 2 tank / 4 heal / 4 dps setup. Just use heroism/bloodlust once the 4 dps are vampires and there shouldn't be any issue with the enrage timer. We used a paladin / priest / 2x resto shaman setup, and once most of the raid was a vampire the two resto shamans went to ghetto lightning bolt spam.

Certainly not the design intent, but it is an easy way to get over the hump on 10 man. I guess you could also have a boomkin or elemental shaman heal until midway through the fight. Honestly, I'd expect a nerf to the damage output on 10 man, I don't think it’s reasonable to expect people in 10 man gear to keep up with the damage.

As for the 25 man version we found it particularly helpful to spread out our druids and have them all tranquility on the second fear, we would have paladins / priests use cooldowns for the first fear. Also remind your raiders that anyone who *can* heal should be healing while they are spread out, Sure, an enhancement or ret paladin isn't going to make a huge difference, but more HPS on the raid is never a bad thing during the air phase.

Morwen · 01/25/10, 2:14 PM

Originally Posted by zh4990

Please excuse any confusion, but if I recall correctly, the damage of the bolts themselves was a special type of shadow damage, something non-resistable via buffs (like Mirmirons spellfire). My comments about aura mastery were regarding the shadow AURA that she pulses. I don't have my logs handy at the moment, if you have evidence that the bolts themselves are shadow only, and are resistible to a large degree by shadow resist buffs, I'd love to see that.

The bolt initial targets are quite the opposite of non-resistable, they are actually hyper-resistable and you will routinely resist 75% of it when you have Mark of the Wild, you can verify this with WoL's log browser queries.

The splash effect also does not look like a pure shadow resist check as it can hit for full value (though 10% is more typical) and normally you would never get 0% resists with 130 SR.

Allara · 01/25/10, 2:22 PM

Originally Posted by xmod2

While on the subject of add-ons, has anyone had issues with Bartender or other action bar add ons in the fight? In 10 man I was able to see the bite bar fine using Bartender, though a hunter in 25 man was complaining that they weren't able to bite (of course after being the first one to get the buff each time.)

Does said hunter also have trouble operating vehicles? The possess/vehicle bar is typically the same. It's easy to have a misconfigured add-on such as Bartender or Macaroon not show you this bar (and typically just as easy to fix), but I would have thought players would have worked through these issues by now.

All players who run the risk of a broken vehicle/possess bar should fix the issue before attempting BQL. One way to test this (among many) is to ride the drakes involved in Aces High! - Quest - World of Warcraft.

Tinwhisker · 01/25/10, 3:07 PM

Originally Posted by Exemplar

Blood mirror replicates damage taken by the first target on to the second target. Blizzard basically avoids double-dipping tank stats. The first MT avoids an attack - no replicated damage. The MT takes damage, reduced by armour, block, talents, stance, etc - this reduced damage is replicated.

This would lead to the best MT (or MTs - Delirious Slash swaps) having the most avoidance/mitigation (reducing their damage and the damage taken by OT), while the best OT mirror target has a huge health pool to soak everything that damages the MT.

It also means that your OT doesn't necessarily have to be fully tanked up. In our 10man we have a DK put on some of his tank gear but stay in DPS spec and Blood Pres to OT. We weren't really fighting the enrage before this but the added DPS was quite noticeable. For any group that is struggling with the enrage it's worth considering. It's similar to dropping tanks or healers for additional DPS except that you're not dropping anything and gaining a moderate-DPS class.

Elerion · 01/25/10, 3:32 PM

We had a hunter (using Bartender) that said the bite did not show up where his vehicle controls show up, but instead showed up on Bar 1 Button 1. A lot of people with bar mods have Bar 1 hidden and possibly unbound, so make sure they unhide it just in case that's where it shows up.

Drakkan · 01/25/10, 4:51 PM

In terms of who gets bitten first, in all 9 of our 10 man attempts it was the ranged player with highest threat who was bitten first. Warlock or mage depending on the attempt.

Is it true that if you use a macro "/cast vampuric bite" you could bite another player immediately after being bitten yourself? It would speed up the chances of MC but it would save you from the 2nd air phase where most are running into difficulty and make healing easier quicker.

We have two attempts left tonight, I would like to figure out a way to get by that 2nd air phase.

Moshne · 01/25/10, 5:01 PM

Re: Shadow AM

The bolts during the airphase are Spellshadow damage, not Shadow. Chaining Shadow AMs doesn't have much of an effect on the damage taken. It appears to use your arcane resist if you use Shadow AM to avoid it.

We were using AMs on our first attempts and got about 45 resisted ticks during the first air phase, when we stopped, the average was almost unchanged.

Re: The Bite

Even if the macroed /cast worked, it would be clearly unintended and get patched out quickly. I'm not sure its a good way to learn the fight when you'll get blocked and have to relearn it later, when it counts and your wipes will be taking away from attempts on Arthas.

Re: Delaying the bite

The delaying the bite does work for desyncing the airphase, but we found it was cutting our enrage time extremely close. If you were to put your biter/bitee in the same group and fear ward the shaman in the group to drop a reactive tremor you could solve the problem and not require four fear wards to do it. Granted, if your DPS makeup is high enough to not require it, by all means stagger the bites, but we were finding ourselves running up against the enrage with a couple late deaths. Having a bit of insurance in the form of 6-8 extra seconds of 16 vampires would likely have pushed us over the edge.

zh4990 · 01/25/10, 5:10 PM

Originally Posted by Moshne

Re: Shadow AM

The bolts during the airphase are Spellshadow damage, not Shadow. Chaining Shadow AMs doesn't have much of an effect on the damage taken. It appears to use your arcane resist if you use Shadow AM to avoid it.

We were using AMs on our first attempts and got about 45 resisted ticks during the first air phase, when we stopped, the average was almost unchanged.

Please explain: when you refer to "the average" do you mean the average bloodbolt, or the average tick of her aura? What evidence exactly do you have to indicate that the blood-bolts are affected by arcane resist, or is that simply a feeling you have due to the fact that there are very few ways of stacking arcane resist viably, and you see everyone in your raid taking about equal damage?

RootBreaker · 01/25/10, 5:37 PM

Originally Posted by zh4990

Please explain: when you refer to "the average" do you mean the average bloodbolt, or the average tick of her aura? What evidence exactly do you have to indicate that the blood-bolts are affected by arcane resist, or is that simply a feeling you have due to the fact that there are very few ways of stacking arcane resist viably, and you see everyone in your raid taking about equal damage?

I assume he means the average bloodbolt was unchanged. The aura is straight shadow damage, so it should have its damage reduced by a shadow aura mastery. However, bloodbolts deal spellshadow damage, which is a hybrid of shadow and arcane damage. It's similar to the spellfire damage that mimiron deals with his hand pulse, rapid burst and plasma ball.

Kuku · 01/25/10, 5:40 PM

Originally Posted by Moshne

Re: Shadow AM

The bolts during the airphase are Spellshadow damage, not Shadow. Chaining Shadow AMs doesn't have much of an effect on the damage taken. It appears to use your arcane resist if you use Shadow AM to avoid it.

We were using AMs on our first attempts and got about 45 resisted ticks during the first air phase, when we stopped, the average was almost unchanged.

Whether or not this is true, I'm still seeing some huge resists during the air phases on Worldoflogs reports. You're going to see similar resist counts (not amounts) because pretty much every bloodbolt should have some amount of damage resisted. Aura mastery will simply increase that amount.

So, clarify on that, if you would. Otherwise, look at a log of the fight and see that resists seem to be effective during the air phase.

zh4990 · 01/25/10, 5:56 PM

Kuku, you mentioned that you would have a chance at getting back into Blood Queen tonight. If possible, would you mind asking one of your mages to slap on his mage armor and see if his incoming damage is reduced in any way during the air phase? If the bolts work off arcane, he should take slightly less damage. If that is the case, it might be worth while to look into cheeseing the mechanic somewhat. For my part, I'm going to have my pallies spec into divine sacrifice for at least one attempt this next reset just to see if there is any noticeable reduction in raid damage. As iterated before, I feel that the trick to this encounter is less the bite order and DPS check as it is handling air phase damage.

ciopo · 01/25/10, 6:18 PM

Originally Posted by Morwen

The splash effect also does not look like a pure shadow resist check as it can hit for full value (though 10% is more typical) and normally you would never get 0% resists with 130 SR.

It being friendly fire damage might be of any relevance?

Moshne · 01/25/10, 6:23 PM

Originally Posted by Kuku

Whether or not this is true, I'm still seeing some huge resists during the air phases on Worldoflogs reports. You're going to see similar resist counts (not amounts) because pretty much every bloodbolt should have some amount of damage resisted. Aura mastery will simply increase that amount.

So, clarify on that, if you would. Otherwise, look at a log of the fight and see that resists seem to be effective during the air phase.

I'm saying, looking at the logs with Shadow AM, and the logs w/o AM that I'm seeing the same amount of resists. Yes, there are substantial resists (due to Arcane resist being on MotW), no, I don't see a significant change in the amount or degree of resists. If Shadow AM worked properly, there would be no reason for them to make hybrid spell damage, but this is precisely why they made it.

To clear it up, I'm not saying it works off of Arcane. I'm saying it works off of Shadow AND Arcane. It appears to use whichever is the lesser stat for you, using AM makes Arcane your lower one. I used logic to come up with the fact that it was Arcane because the game tells you its "spellshadow" damage, just like some of the damage on Plaguewing fights were shadow/nature, clearly indicated by the name of the spell school.

Using my logs from last night, I'm seeing 40-50 ticks of partial resists per air phase with and w/o AM, and I'm seeing 1-3 total resists per air phase. That is convincing enough to me that the AMs aren't doing much, if anything.

EDIT: To make sure I'm clear, I'm talking about the spell "Twilight Bloodbolt" cast by BQL, and "Bloodbolt Splash" the friendly damage from player to player, both are hybrid spell damage.

EDIT 2: I obviously can't have a fully scientific test, as we were being massive fuckups on the earlier attempts. This means there were more casts of Bloodbolt Splash due to us not spreading out. The fact that the resist numbers aren't significantly higher works AGAINST AM working well, as we'd expect more resists due to having more casts as well. Once I get out of class, or stop listening to my professor a bit more I'll pop it into a spreadsheet and gets some percentages. I'm perfectly happy if it turns out I'm wrong, as it means our pallies have a use for their AM, but our data and anecdotes of survival rates don't seem to indicate any change.

ciopo · 01/25/10, 6:49 PM

Cheking our logs.

Aura mastery doesn't seems to have any noticeable effect on the bloodbolt splash damage, the average %resist don't fluctuate to a relevant point

Out of 734 hits, of which 176 while under aura mastery, the average %resist was 20% both with and without aura mastery.

Now checking twilight bolt itself, will edit later.

Same goes for twilight bloodbolt, aura mastery don't seems to have any noticeable effect on its damage, From my logs i can also confirm that it seems to have an abnormally high resist rate, to about 60% average.

Next week i'll use the resistance flask and will report the outcome.

hypothesis: the spell isn't considered level 83, but something lower? it's the only thing I can think of that would explain this odd behavior.

Kazekan · 01/25/10, 6:55 PM

Whether or not AM in fact effects Twilight Bloodbolt and thus the Bloodbolt Splash, I would say the air phase is still the most optimal time to use AM as it is pretty much hands-down the most healing intensive part of the fight. If it does nothing other than lower the incoming dmg from the basic Shadow dmg pulse, it's better than nothing.

While the lowest we got her was 19% on Sunday, we still have 6 attempts left and are pretty sure that we have a fairly good chance of downing her tonight, especially since our raid comp on Sunday was far from perfect and our hero timing was atrocious. As far as the air phase goes, we have pretty much got it down to no deaths and are just trying to figure out what will work best for our raid in terms of bite timing.

For the first air phase we have one of our pallies pop bubble/DS/AM and have our 2 priests Divine Hymn. For the 2nd air phase we have our other holy pally do the same, and our druids use Tranquility, even the ferals. This of course makes keeping everyone above 50% HP or so much easier during that phase and has given us a clean transition back to the ground phase in preparation for the upcoming bites. We'll see if we can pull it all together though.

Silmeria · 01/25/10, 6:55 PM

Originally Posted by Moshne

To clear it up, I'm not saying it works off of Arcane. I'm saying it works off of Shadow AND Arcane. It appears to use whichever is the lesser stat for you

This is correct, we saw this effect as early as Marrowgar with the flames which count as "cold fire" damage, meaning you have to AM both frost and fire to successfully increase your total chances of resistances.

It is no different when it comes to blood bolts with its respective schools (and with one school acting as arcane, then you are effectively blocked from increasing your resistance chance).

Kuku · 01/25/10, 8:53 PM

Nevermind, then, I was reading the school type as the type of damage... but the school type is not consistent with the damage dealt. That is unfortunate.

zh4990, I probably won't be getting back in tonight, after all. If that changes, I'll certainly try out your request.

Tinwhisker · 01/25/10, 10:53 PM

I'm with Kazekan here. While the Bloodbolts are not affected by Aura Mastery (Shadow) because they swap to using Arcane resistances to determine their damage, the Aura Mastery will have a dramatic affect of the AoE pulse of Shroud of Sorrow which ticks for 4500/2 before mitigation. That is reason enough and more to use it then as that phase is often the linchpin of the fight.

Graul · 01/26/10, 7:06 AM

Delete

Lileith · 01/26/10, 11:04 AM

I'm usually bitten first on our 25 man attempt and noticed that delaying the second bite isn't necessary at all. If you stick your target and button smash the macro (1 is sheep for me so I just have "invalid target" message) you can get your second bite (button smashing again) just a few millisecond before the fear of the phase2.

This was done with around 150 ms ping. May not work if your ping is too low/too high. It's just the traditional server lag that occur very often in pvp (double warrior charge, counterspell used but cycloned...).

Fallenangel · 01/26/10, 12:34 PM

Regarding the high resist rates, this was also the case for the stacking scarab dot on the Anub encounter. Not sure if any work was done on that case, but resists of 70-80% were pretty common (which is good, seeing as the tooltip damage on that dot is quite insane).

Cobs · 01/26/10, 3:07 PM

Originally Posted by Fargom

The 10 man healing requirements seem rather high, as noted earlier in this thread. As embarrassing as it is to admit, we countered this by using 4 healers. As long as your dps is high enough you can easily get away with a 2 tank / 4 heal / 4 dps setup. Just use heroism/bloodlust once the 4 dps are vampires and there shouldn't be any issue with the enrage timer. We used a paladin / priest / 2x resto shaman setup, and once most of the raid was a vampire the two resto shamans went to ghetto lightning bolt spam.

4 healing is certainly viable. In my 10man kill last night we 3 healed but our dps were
-Hunter (first bite 14k, usually ~9k in 10mans)
-Enh sham (secondbite 11k, usually ~7k in 10mans)
-Lock (third bite 10k, Usually ~8k in 10mans)
-Fury war (third bite as well only did 5.5k, was a fill in someone playing a spouses toon)
-Mage (like 3.5k it was late and we were scraping the bottom of the barrel for alts just to get attempts in)

Basically our mage and fury war added up to less than a single DPS from a main raider. As mentioned you can always have the 4th healer switch to deeps after the third bite. We had plenty of time left on the soft enrage as well, I wish I had a wow meter or WoL to post but this is good fro some anecdotal evidence.

alienangel · 01/26/10, 3:20 PM

Originally Posted by Allara

Does said hunter also have trouble operating vehicles? The possess/vehicle bar is typically the same. It's easy to have a misconfigured add-on such as Bartender or Macaroon not show you this bar (and typically just as easy to fix), but I would have thought players would have worked through these issues by now.

All players who run the risk of a broken vehicle/possess bar should fix the issue before attempting BQL. One way to test this (among many) is to ride the drakes involved in Aces High! - Quest - World of Warcraft.

FWIW, my Macaroon deals with Vehicle bars fine, but various encounters (including BQL) don't use vehicles, and use a Possess bar instead. I believe the Aces High daily is a regular vehicle, not possession, and wouldn't be a good simulation for this.

I did create a Possess bar that as far as I can tell works fine in other instances of possession (e.g. the alliance quest in Howling Fjord that makes you possess a bird and fly around stealing eggs) or ToC5 with the paladin's hammer, and the bar shows up fine during BQL's Frenzied Bloodthirst, however it had a nice empty button where I expected a bite button. And while I had made a macro to /cast [name of spell here], I made the mistake of putting that macro on a bar which macaroon hid during possession...

I have subsequently read that for the possession bar to work on the fight, you need to make sure the bar contains a button assigned to action ID 121. I haven't gotten to test this yet, and probably won't put my raid through a 3rd wipe testing it unless I find a way to make Macaroon and Bartender co-exist peacefully.

Regarding the logic behind who gets bitten first, given the number of contradictory observations, isn't it plausible that it's just a simple "random from the top 3 on threat, disregarding misdirects, and not including people afflicted with Blood Mirror"? Either that or "first recorded on aggro table other than tanks" seem the most likely remaining explanations. It's definitely not "3rd on aggro" as a lot of people claim, since there's no shortage of counterexamples to that theory.

Dochas · 01/26/10, 3:48 PM

Originally Posted by alienangel

It's definitely not "3rd on aggro" as a lot of people claim, since there's no shortage of counterexamples to that theory.

I don't know, there is the possibility that the counterexamples are wrong, that people aren't watching the threat bars close enough possibly.

We split our attempts into two nights (we had some alts filling in first night and it just wasn't working). First night we weren't really sure of the mechanics but our hunter kept getting it. We looked at logs and such and went in thinking we could force a bit on who we want.

Turns out we could. It was 3rd on threat every time. At first we had a couple mishaps, we had a mage assigned as our first bite, he popped cooldowns and got an MD while the rogues tricked the MT. What happened was he ended up in second with a warrior in 3rd on our first pull and me in 3rd on our 2nd or 3rd pull with the OT in 4th or 5th. Those times obviously the bite went to the warrior and to me respectively. Once we saw the problem we had 2 tricks on the MT and 1 on the OT and after that every attempt was exactly the same. MT OT Assigned Mage threat order and the assigned mage getting the bite every time.

One thing to note is if your threat meter doesn't show current threat for people with temporary threat reduction abilities, that could be skewing your observations as things like mirror image seem to have no effect (when I got the bite I was 3rd in threat but had mirrors up so technically my threat shouldn't matter but BQL seems to not care).

Rhaegal · 01/26/10, 4:08 PM

Originally Posted by Cobs

4 healing is certainly viable. [...]

While I don't doubt that's true, the DPS requirements for 4-healing in strict 10-man gear would be pretty demanding. Last night we had a heart-breaking 0.8% wipe to the berserk timer when we were almost out of attempts, despite deliberately setting our bite order based on individual DPS, and saving Bloodlust until after the 3rd bite. There were a couple things that didn't go perfectly that attempt, but it would have been a close win instead of a close loss had everything else gone perfectly, and our DPS aren't exactly slackers. (Edit: to be fair, one of our DPS last night was an alt, but he was the last DPS bitten anyway, and was still ~4.3k for that attempt.)

The biggest difference for our healing between the first night of attempts and the second was Dampen Magic. The first night (Sunday) we did not use Dampen at all, and the second night (Monday) we used it on every raid member on every attempt. Comparing the logs from the two nights, every person who was there for both nights had the average Shroud of Sorrow reduced by ~150 (some lower, some higher, correlating fairly well with resist and damage reduction talents), or ~5%. Unless they stealth fixed her aura on 10m between Sunday night and Monday night, Dampen definitely works on the aura in this fight, and anecdotally, the difference is noticeable, and I'd highly recommend it to any 10m group who's having trouble meeting the healing requirements with 3 healers, obviously providing they have a mage available.