How is everyone dealing with the second air phase in 10 man? We are having difficulty with that part because we have 4 people trying to bite someone when the fear goes off.
Not to mention the fact that we can't spread out for her bolts when trying to bite and the combination of the bite and her shooting bolts kills most of us.
I am 99% confident that I've figured out the mechanic for who is the first bite target.
I have about 15 attempts on Lana'thel recorded with Fraps. I went through each of them one at a time, and checked the positions on Omen Threat Meter and Recount (Damage Done), in the couple seconds up to the time she bites someone. I wrote these results out and compared them.
My result is this: The bite target is randomly chosen of the top 2 on threat, not including the tanks.
Every single video I have recorded supports this.
The fact that it is threat based explains why it is normally hunters/mages/warriors who get bitten first. We did have our healer get bitten once, but that was when we told 1 person to go all out on DPS and we told everyone else to basically not do anything. Obviously the healers still had to heal, and our most threatening healer was bitten.
The best strategy that I have determined for ensuring a smooth fight, is to have your best DPS/threat melee (usually warrior), and your best DPS/threat ranged (hunter or mage), pre-pot a Potion of Speed, and pop a cooldown or two at the start of the fight. Any competing hunters or mages should go a little slow on DPS and not pop any cooldowns for that time. It doesn't matter which of the melee or ranged get bitten first, their first bite target will always be each other. All other subsequent bites can be predetermined and will not change. Your goal is have the melee infect other melee and your ranged infect other ranged.
I have 99% confident that I've figured out the mechanic for who is the first bite target.
I have about 15 attempts on Lana'thel recorded with Fraps. I went through each of them one at a time, and checked the positions on Omen Threat Meter and Recount (Damage Done), in the couple seconds up to the time she bites someone. I wrote these results out and compared them.
My result is this: The bite target is randomly chosen of the top 2 on threat, not including the tanks.
Every single video I have recorded supports this.
The fact that it is threat based explains why it is normally hunters/mages/warriors who get bitten first. We did have our healer get bitten once, but that was when we told 1 person to go all out on DPS and we told everyone else to basically not do anything. Obviously the healers still had to heal, and our most threatening healer was bitten.
The best strategy that I have determined for ensuring a smooth fight, is to have your best DPS/threat melee (usually warrior), and your best DPS/threat ranged (hunter or mage), pre-pot a Potion of Speed, and pop a cooldown or two at the start of the fight. Any competing hunters or mages should go a little slow on DPS and not pop any cooldowns for that time. It doesn't matter which of the melee or ranged get bitten first, their first bite target will always be each other. All other subsequent bites can be predetermined and will not change. Your goal is have the melee infect other melee and your ranged infect other ranged.
There is evidence in this thread of an hunter bitten after having feigned and being far far from the top four position.
How do you explain it by your theory?
bind thou to thy lords from the end of the earth that rise to the field of the heavens
I've got a few questions about the 25man version of this encounter:
1) How are people dealing with the air phase? We seem to be doing great on the healing requirement in that no one is dying before the first air phase, but we seem to consistently having 3-4 people die while we're all in a scramble to spread out. Is there any trick to mitigating this damage? Is "assigning spots" worthwhile here?
2) Can anyone who's downed her give an idea of what the DPS pace *should* be at the first air phase? Part of the problem right now is that we're not finishing the fight with everyone alive the entire time. Obviously, that is a major concern, but it'd be nice to know what benchmarks we should be hitting. Right now we're anywhere from 60-65% at the first liftoff.
There is evidence in this thread of an hunter bitten after having feigned and being far far from the top four position.
How do you explain it by your theory?
Well, if the evidence is not based on a Fraps recording and is simply based off of memory of an eyewitness account, that has to be taken at face value. Not proof.
More significantly, however, I will say that our hunters never used Feign Death and our rogues never used Tricks. My evidence holds true so long as you don't use those abilities.
It's possible that Feign does not affect the threat value that Lana'thel is basing her first bite on. Omen is, after all, just an addon, and doesn't dictate the internal mechanics of the fight. A lot of testing would have to be done to document the exact behavior of Tricks/Misdirect/Feign Death on this fight with regards to the fact that the bite target is based on threat and they all affect threat.
But like I said, we never used those abilities on the DPS (MD/Tricks went to the main tank), and we got consistent results supporting my theory.
I've got a few questions about the 25man version of this encounter:
1) How are people dealing with the air phase? We seem to be doing great on the healing requirement in that no one is dying before the first air phase, but we seem to consistently having 3-4 people die while we're all in a scramble to spread out. Is there any trick to mitigating this damage? Is "assigning spots" worthwhile here?
2) Can anyone who's downed her give an idea of what the DPS pace *should* be at the first air phase? Part of the problem right now is that we're not finishing the fight with everyone alive the entire time. Obviously, that is a major concern, but it'd be nice to know what benchmarks we should be hitting. Right now we're anywhere from 60-65% at the first liftoff.
If my memory serves me, that seems to be about right for DPS. Remember that your raid DPS is going to keep increasing at an ever growing rate as more people are bitten.
As for assigning places, yeah, that's not going to work. The fear will make sure that it doesn't. One mistake I've seen a lot from raiders when presented with this "spread out" type of mechanic is that everyone runs to the edges or to the back, having no room in those areas and leaving the middle and/or boss platform wide open. When she lands she still has to run back up to the tanks which gives everyone enough time to get back into position when P1 resumes. When done right, the whole area should look like a checkerboard of raiders. Put your camera in low earth orbit and snap a few shots during attempts to see what's going on.
Some tips about the spreading out, yes there is a fear but with things like fear wards, dispels and tremors it shouldn't be full duration. We typically have BQ tanked slightly toward the back where she starts with the melee in that area, casters who are getting the bites on the left and healers on the right. This can give you a general idea of where to spread out to.
We also typically push a little more of the responsibility on melee to move out the way as the healers still need to heal and the casters can still dps, melee just have to worry about not killing people.
The other thing to remember is classes have defensive cooldowns, if a mage doesn't have someone trying to bite them at the time, they can sit in iceblock; rogues can cloak (if you don't take the damage you dont splash the damage so you can have rogues stack up); etc.
The biggest component is just people paying attention and not panicking. You have a few seconds to get spread out but people panic and just start picking random directions and end up on top of each other. Use the area right before the boss to practice if you need to.
There seems to be a misconception in this thread that mages who pop MI before the pull cannot be bitten. This is not true, as I always pop mine pre-pull and am usually the one to be bitten. It seems that she bites the highest (or I guess one of the top two) non-tanks on threat DONE: images, tricks, misdirects, and feigns have no effect.
Logs for any non-believers: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Our kill shot is on the 28th, unfortunately some wipes were not logged so you may want to check the 26th or 24th.
There is evidence in this thread of an hunter bitten after having feigned and being far far from the top four position.
How do you explain it by your theory?
Can people here please stop making and quoting unsubstantiated claims. Just because someone said they saw it cannot be enough for a community that cares about getting it right. Just because someone posted it on the internet doesn't make it true. A few days back I worked through some videos on youtube for this fight that had omen and you could see who got the first bite and I got the following result:
The number denotes where they were on threat when BQL emoted just before the first bite goes out after removing tanks/offtanks from the list. The one's with asterisk marks ones were even after viewing the movie several times I'm not 100% sure I got it right; I encourage anyone who wants to to check my values. So can we move on to an analysis system that stems from evidence first, then analysis like we do for most every other thread on these forums? If you've frapsed your own then just upload the first 20seconds of 10 fights or what have you.
** Edit: added seven new fights to the list
Last edited by cheebamonkey : 02/02/10 at 1:58 AM.
Can people here please stop making and quoting unsubstantiated claims. Just because someone said they saw it cannot be enough for a community that cares about getting it right. Just because someone posted it on the internet doesn't make it true. A few days back I worked through some videos on youtube for this fight that had omen and you could see who got the first bite and I got the following result:
The number denotes where they were on threat when BQL emoted just before the first bite goes out after removing tanks/offtanks from the list. The one's with asterisk marks ones were even after viewing the movie several times I'm not 100% sure I got it right; I encourage anyone who wants to to check my values. So can we move on to an analysis system that stems from evidence first, then analysis like we do for most every other thread on these forums? If you've frapsed your own then just upload the first 20seconds of 10 fights or what have you.
So your results obtained by checking videos shows evidence which corroborates mine. That the first bite target is randomly picked of the top 2 threat, not including tanks.
The number denotes where they were on threat when BQL emoted just before the first bite goes out after removing tanks/offtanks from the list. The one's with asterisk marks ones were even after viewing the movie several times I'm not 100% sure I got it right; I encourage anyone who wants to to check my values.
OK, I did, and my results don't match yours at all. On the Exodus video a melee is bitten, but #2 non-tank at that time was a Mage. On the Aegis of Fire video it was the #1 on threat who was bitten (and is a 10-man anyway, mechanics might change). The Dark Pact video doesn't start until after the first bite and we don't see who got it. The Myth video shows a Lock being bitten who had been first non-tank on the threat meter a moment before but was 6th when it happened. There are two Hunters at the top on the Burning Sensations video and you can't tell which one was bitten. Oddly, Reign's and Warfare's videos have ranged DPS as the top two on threat but a melee gets bitten. On the Serious Casuals video it was visibly the #2 threat that was bitten, but with only one data point in favour and fifteen against I'm ready to attribute that to lagging meter output.
Anectodal but on an alt 10 man run that I helped on my main priest, the healers were continually bitten first. We had two holy priests and a resto druid. I was one of the priests. The first time it happened I thought I just casted too early or some such. For the next 3 pulls (it's an alt raid after all) I didn't cast anything for the first 5 seconds of the fight, and I was on the very bottom in omen or anyone else's threatmeter, and still she bit me first. I proceeded to cast fade before I started casting (again waiting 5 seconds after the pull before I casted anything), and she finally didn't bite me. She did however bite the other priest, who also didn't cast anything for the first 5 seconds, but he didn't cast fade.
After much debate and forum reading, both of us priests just faded and started healing late. She bit the resto druid first instead (who was also well below all the dps in threat).
Threat wise, we had 2 DK's, 1 hunter in the raid. They were well above all the healers everytime. So unless our threatmeter was bugged, here's an outlier for your data.
How are people handling the healing in 10 man? The raid healing required is so much higher than any other fight in the game so far. I've seen logs where people are 2 healing it, and that seems insane, but maybe there is something my raid is missing.
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We did few tries with Holy Pala & Disc Priest, pretty hardcore, but doable. We were able to get her to 7%, unfortunately without dps or two due to some fails on purple thing, we are going to kill her this reset keeping this strat. So, i think that it should be possible in future by any healing combination.
Anyway, i think that bite priority should be slightly specific in case of duo-healing this encounter. I would say that retribution paladin with glyph of divine storm in melee heavy group is a miracle. Shadow Priest should be also great -> shouldn't require any heals after getting a bite.
OK, I did, and my results don't match yours at all. On the Exodus video a melee is bitten, but #2 non-tank at that time was a Mage. On the Aegis of Fire video it was the #1 on threat who was bitten (and is a 10-man anyway, mechanics might change). The Dark Pact video doesn't start until after the first bite and we don't see who got it. The Myth video shows a Lock being bitten who had been first non-tank on the threat meter a moment before but was 6th when it happened. There are two Hunters at the top on the Burning Sensations video and you can't tell which one was bitten. Oddly, Reign's and Warfare's videos have ranged DPS as the top two on threat but a melee gets bitten. On the Serious Casuals video it was visibly the #2 threat that was bitten, but with only one data point in favour and fifteen against I'm ready to attribute that to lagging meter output.
I Fear you may not be looking at the same moment I am for determining threat. I'm stopping the videos right when I see the boss emote "know my hunger". In the Aegis of Fire video you said it was number one of threat but in this picture http://i.imgur.com/YNAoI.jpg (28 seconds into the video) you can clearly see the hunter in the group gets bitten (which is supported by the hunter then going on to crush the rest on dps for the next minute) and being second on threat behind the feral (who was not tanking FYI, as ca be determined from the raid frames denoting only two druids, one of which is obviously resto and the other obviously in cat form).
The dark pact video I marked as uncertain. Yes the video starts after the bite but it's right after an there are only two people who could possibly have had the highest non-tank threat, both of the hunters, so the number is either 1 or 2. Or we can simply drop it from the list altogether.
For the Myth video, there are two Myth videos, one has a warrior getting bitten first YouTube - Blood-Queen Lana'thel - 16500 DPS+ , where unfortunately the warrior (who is the one frapsing the video) does a silly style camera move to show he gets the buff making it impossible to see his threat exactly at the time of the emote. My giving him a mark of 1 was based on him having the 1 position right when the camera shifts away, about a second before the debuff goes out, and barely being in second when it comes back, about a second after the debuff was applied. Assuming the person who passed him up did threat during that second they would have been behind him when it went out.
For the second Myth video, YouTube - Blood-Queen Lana'thel - 25 man by Myth the person bit is obviously Xbowjobber, the hunter, based on damage and on the fact he looks like he's in shadow form. Pausing the video right when the boss emotes gives me this picture http://i.imgur.com/0oeVi.jpg . Here we see Xbowjobber second on threat behind two tanks and someone else.
In the burning sensation video the hunter bitten was Shadowalker who is second on threat behind either Guran or Cors. These are the only three hunters in their guild with good enough gear to be the hunters in this video and the person who gets bit, starts doing insane dps in the first minute, and the one second on aggro both have a name much longer than the one in first. http://i.imgur.com/AS7j7.jpg
For Warfares video the first bite is obviously a priest, just look at the debuff on the raid frames, and when the emote goes out there is a priest second on threat behind a hunter and the tanking palidin. http://i.imgur.com/tdHPh.jpg
In Reign's video the first bitten is the hunter Minilion as evidence by the dps done in the first minute and him being all black and radiating evil the whole time. At the time of the emote I get http://i.imgur.com/pJhbg.jpg which puts him firmly in the second position.
On a larger point though the way I'm checking any video is to first figure out who gets the debuff. The easiest way is to watch the damage meter but there are visual clues as well, eg the boss running to the target (not always but sometimes) and the player looking like they are in shadow form. After I've figure this out I go back and play the video without looking at the threat meter until I see the emote, at this point I pause the video and check to see where the bitten player is.
Originally Posted by Moozhe
So your results obtained by checking videos shows evidence which corroborates mine. That the first bite target is randomly picked of the top 2 threat, not including tanks.
I'm glad you noticed; I put my internal data up because you came to the same conclusion I did but felt there was a need for checkible evidence. The reason why I though, and still think, it is likely to be a random process instead of some set algorithm is based on two main points about blizzard and about programing. First if you are designing something new it makes no sense as a programmer to make this new thing calculate or keep track of a new quantity when you can use existing values. So any theory that includes something like "I think the bite goes to the person with the highest 'true threat' or maybe it's damage + healing - range from the boss" I put almost no faith in. Secondly from experience blizzard doesn't like to make fights where major mechanics are completely controllable, they like things being random, and I think with good reason. Random aspects to fights make them more interesting.
Last edited by cheebamonkey : 01/31/10 at 12:33 PM.
OK, I did, and my results don't match yours at all. On the Exodus video a melee is bitten, but #2 non-tank at that time was a Mage.
Just going to correct you on this... The hunter gets bitten first. You can see him turn all glowy and purple. His name was Kripparrian and he was 2nd on threat (not including Burter who was their DK tank and 1st on threat) the instant the bite went out. The person above him on threat was Davlncl, a rogue.
The mage was above him before hand but he pulled ahead at the last second.
Yesterday we tested the fact that the first person doing damage to lana'thel after the tanks would get bitten. We tried with 2 hunters, the first shooting the arrow would FD and even being far down the aggro list or the damage done, he would get bitten.
We tried it like 5 or 6 times, with 2 different hunters everytime, and we were able to know who would get bitten first everytime.
I know I have no log to provide and that it might not be considered a fact, but it worked for us, if that can help to find the way it works.
I'm pretty sure almost everyone here has tried the "first one to damage BQL" approach and found it not to work. It's by far the easiest one to test. Logs/videos of your attempts would still have been interesting, though, as repeated patterns like what you experienced makes it easier to analyze.
The "first person to damage her gets the bite" fallacy is an easy post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake. I'm not going to speculate on whether or not Feign Death is working to wipe threat on the "bite table" because I have no clue if it is or isn't, but hunters generate a ton of raw aggro and your peek at the aggro table and damage dealt like better coincide with her selecting the target, not the actual bite, since the timing of those is not identical.
Regardless, 8 pages in, there is no clear answer. One of the few things we can unequivocally rule out is "first person to deal damage". This is proved by countless points here, especially those that describe healers getting bitten.
This is a search with ambiguous data and people are trying to find a "best fit" to explain the answer. The closet we have is #1 or #2 on threat, chosen at random. That might well be wrong because it's largely based on analyzing videos from guilds that have killed her and thus we've selected on the dependent variable here. We know that in guilds that kill her, the #1 or #2 threat player gets selected with something approaching certainty over a small, not-yet-statistically-overwhelming sample. That's not a real sample for a lot of reasons, but it's better than nothing.
We also know that many guilds can reliably ensure that 1 of 2 pre-selected people gets the first bite by using (a) their intrinsic damage dealing ability (b) tricks of the trade or MD.
What you want to do is try to take advantage of that and be prepared for an unexpected outcome. And we want to keep looking for the true answer. Poorly controlled experiments that reach conclusions that have already been disproved are like the "Onyxia deep breaths more" meme -- not helpful to anyone.
It's time to remind everyone about Occam's Razor -- the simplest solution is usually correct. Onyxia, for what it's worth, deep breathed only after she moved (in the original lvl 60 version) with some percentage chancee. Every theory that was ultimately wrong about deep breath was much more complicated and -- in retrospect -- ridiculous (why would the amount of DOTs on her have anything to do with anything?).
And it's worth noting that pointless attempts to figure out why she deep breathed were especially pointless because at the end of the day, all you had to do was get on her side and you would take no damage from it.
These lessons apply here. Goose the threat of the person you want to get bitten using misdirect/tricks, make sure the tank holds aggro using those abilities, and assume it'll be one of your top 2 damage dealers and plan around that. That will serve you well a huge portion of the time.
This is a search with ambiguous data and people are trying to find a "best fit" to explain the answer. The closet we have is #1 or #2 on threat, chosen at random. That might well be wrong because it's largely based on analyzing videos from guilds that have killed her and thus we've selected on the dependent variable here. We know that in guilds that kill her, the #1 or #2 threat player gets selected with something approaching certainty over a small, not-yet-statistically-overwhelming sample. That's not a real sample for a lot of reasons, but it's better than nothing.
Note that if you want to show that she is randomly picking between the first two we should be seeing something statistically equivalent to half #1 and half #2. If what we're seeing is mostly #1 with some #2 it's unlikely that she is just randomly choosing from the first two.
Our ten man guild cleared her the week but things were pretty tight towards the end. We didn't really have any strat for directing the bite - all the DPS went hell for leather and it was usually the arcane Mage or hunter who got bitten - we found placement of subsequent bites to be more important.
My question here is what are other guilds doing with regards to dampen magic. If I understand the mechanics correctly the negative healing effect of dampen magic is applied once to the HOT but applies for every tick of the aura. Is this correct? Are other guilds using it?
My raid leader was reluctant to use it but our clear was with half the raid dead - so it may help
So 14 pulls, and no clear answer on the bite mechanics but we can state with near certainty that at least some kinds of threat are relevant. First of all, our ret paladin could be selected when he used Righteous Fury, and never was selected when he didn't. Second of all, our death knight running frost presence got selected routinely, our death knight not running it didn't.
There is something sufficiently potent or odd about hunter threat that our hunter could MD on every pull and still be chosen. Hunter MD-ed the tank and generally I tricksed the tank, while the other rogue tricks the Death Knight that was running frost presence.
On an unrelated note, we pretty much blew up every time during the fear. Leaving aside how stupid it is to have the 2nd bite phase and the fear align, I'm interested in any useful ideas here. Yes, we tried to delay the first bite and allow for time to the biters and bite targets to be broken from the fear or have it end. That certainly helped to unalign them a bit. Enough? Hard to say, so many others died at that point it was getting silly.
We had two priests and two shaman total and were tending to fear ward the biters in the hopes that would help. But some actionable ideas on how to get people where they need to be and how to handle the fear would be appreciated.
01/29/10, 11:23 AM
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