What do your Mages do to get the most mileage out of this? We were running some dry runs yesterday and couldn't quite get it to click.

We give the Mages the first Spore, then they can immediately run back to the main raid camp and try to get this going. We have our three 650+ +dmg Fire Mages trinket and unload Fireballs to open (if this Ignite can be kept up, it's worth more than Rune of the Dawn).

After that, though, what do people do? Ours kept coming down, far from the 90 second giant Ignite that I'd envisioned. Do you assign certain people to Scorch just to keep it up? How many Mages are you bringing before this is viable at all?

If it does go down, do you try to stop for a second and set up another one?

What about Frost Mages? If the massive Ignite-rolling is successfully maintained by some people, the marginal value of Fire crits for everyone else is 0. So you really want the rest of the Mages to be Frost.

Are you simply trying to get your Ignite to do stupendous amounts of damage, or simply dominate the top spot on dmm's? We had four mages and one frost last night, and while the ignite slut rocketed ahead at the start (and kept the #1 spot through the whole fight), our fury warriors were hot on his trail - we were packing Rend and DMF though.

Having four of your fire mages engineer it so that the ignite dominates the dmm shouldn't be too difficult. How you abuse it to the extent that we saw in that vid Gurg posted in the Loatheb DPS thread, is another matter entirely.

Wait, what's the difference? Just trying to bring him down quickly.

We downed him for the first time last night and tbh i didn't take any extreme measures to keep it up. I put mages in G1 and G2 for spores and then i left them at it.

Don't have the exact damage list, but i know the ignite dropped 1 time, but i talked to one of the mages who said it was quickly up to 5k and rolling again, so he didn't see it as much of a problem.

The 2 mages who split the ignite placed #1 and #2 without much suprise.

We only had 4 firemages in raid i think, so i wasn't really suprised to see it drop 1 time.

Imho, sure, Ignite is nice and i might be selling us short by not optimizing it... But i was more focused on our dryruns to get the entire raid working and getting us below 65% before Doom 1.

Once your at sub 65% do 1 run all out with Shadowpots, HS'es, bandages and shit. You honestly don't need to push everyone past Doom7 or whatever your aiming for, just let them get a feel for bandaging and so 1 run. Then gather up world buffs and devestate him...

How many mages did you have? We usually have a 5 stack of ignites stay up almost the entire fight, and only fall when the mages have to bandage, and we generally do loatheb with 7 mages. I don't think any of our mages use scorch, although we do get world buffs, so our mages are all above 90 crit on their fireballs.

I'd say its not viable unless you have at least 7, at least thats the case for my guild, we've done it with 5 and we've done it with 8, and for us 7 was the magic number. When we did it with 6 mages or less the ignites would just fall all the time, but as soon as we started to bring 7 we would see that one mage with 3x as much damage as the guy below him. When mages are scorching they're really losing a lot of damage, so you really don't want mages scorching just to roll the ignite, because its gimping their dps way too much, its much better to just bring enough mages so they can all fireball and keep it up the whole time, that way you lose no dps.

I know a lot of people let other people break spores for their mages, and have other people bandage their mages, so that they don't lose as much casting time, although my guild has never tried this. Oh yeah, and innervate them.

Well like I said - getting your ignite to stay up the whole fight and take top spot isn't really that difficult if your fire mages coordinate (I can't speak with any degree of precision as we just told our mages to go crazy with Ignite and they did).

However, in the vid that Gurg posted, the mage is getting innervates, bandages, you name it, and the amount of damage he does is completely bananas.

As far as I understand it, Ignite at Loatheb is one of those things that generally will always be a great dps boost. However, if you want to seriously minmax it, the damage you can potentially get out of it is enormous. Most people don't go to these lengths because they simply focus on raid dps, as opposed to just the mages.

If the goal is simply to get him down, then don't focus too much on your mages. 5 or 6 fire mages should absolutely guarantee a strong ignite roll, after that stack up your fury warriors and rogues to beef up your overall raid dps.

I don´t know how many Fire mages you have in the Raid, but from what you´re telling it doesn´t seem to be enough to keep it up. We haven´t tried Loatheb yet, but if you run the numbers the ignite is very unlikely to fade before the buff runs out, if you have at least 3 firemages keeping it up (even with Fireball).
Nevertheless if you experience it not to be sufficient, scorch should help a lot, because you practicaly double the chance of keeping it up, while losing about 200DPS per mage.

I´m curious about the responses here too, because unfortunately we only have 3 Firemages in our Raid while planing a similar approach.

Hmm, ok. We had 5 Fire Mages yesterday, will try 7.

Out of curiosity, where does this 65% figure come from? We got it from 71 to 68 or so practicing last night; it will probably be 65 as soon as we bring a better class distribution. But it seems like something closer to 60 would be more in line.

I really don't like this fight, and don't want to cut it close at all.

Assuming you'll roll an 4k ignite and that each fallen ignite is worth about 5 ticks of lost ignite damage (10sec), it'd mean 20k lost damage each time ignite falls. This is probably a bit harsh number, as ignite is probably going to catch up quickly if you are able to roll it for minutes at time...

Assuming you can keep the ignite up with just 1 break instead of 3 breaks it'd mean about 40k more damage, is it more than what one mage looses if he just scorches trought the fight to ensure the ignite? You do the calculation, as I don't have enought facts about the fight not being there myself. :(

edit:
It's probably the executes. If you have like 3-4 dw fury's dealing insane damage, sub20% goes a lot faster because of them smashing constantly critting executes...

Just for relevance: http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...&q=exo+loatheb

As for how to handle it, I'd think that would be obvious. Use Power Infusion and Combustion such to get massive crits rolling at the start, aiming for something in the neighborhood of 4k. Then Scorch to keep it going, and make sure that your mages aren't all stopping for Spore at the same time, and have some people (warlocks who handle their own health, with DS, maybe?) bandaging fire mages at your bandage points so that it never stops.

Even if the individuals involved are sacrificing their own DPS somewhat, keeping a 4000/tick ignite rolling is more raid DPS than they could accomplish acting separately trying to maximize personal DPS>

I got it from these boards, it's in alot of threads... 65% if your gonna worldbuff... 60% if you wanna go without. Without doing the actual math i just went with those numbers.

Our earlier tries (we only had 1 real night on him, and then like 3 spread out hours at end of raids) had him at around 70. Last night i just switched out 1 more hunter for a warrior (and i guess people got the spore rotation down more and more) and we went like 68...66...65...

Then 1 run with Shadowpots and so on... Dont remember % there.

Then we world buffed (Hakar, Darkmoon, EPL-stam... No Onyxia since heads were up). It was honestly a massacre. He dropped at like 4.55, before Doom7. At that time we had like 5 ppl (who obviously fucked up) dead but we would have easily lasted 20-30 secs more.

Btw, since i asked this in another thread and also used it in my estitmates... We used NO buffs besides Fortitude (kinda useless cept on Tank tho :p) and mark of the wild to get him to 65% at 2min mark.

And as i said. With worldbuffs, flasks and the whole shabang he dropped at aprox 4:55 with 5 people who fucked up and died.

Edit: Probably should mention we field 8 warriors... We had ofc the MT protspecced, but also our primary OT prot and then 1-2 who are 11-15 prot... But the execute spam was kinda intense.

Sry for the derail, but your servers don't match. @_@

Our Ignites rolled much longer the day I decided to just spam Scorch while the other 6 Mages did Fireballs.

Ghostz: Thats because when i made the profile Tarren Mill (EU) was a new server and i guess EJ's forum-app hadn't updated it so i couldn't choose it... And as we transfered from Burning Legion i choose that instead.

All fixed now and i added some other missing stuff. So thanks for pointing it out :)

Not sure where the 65% marker originally came from (it's in one of the many Loatheb threads on here), but it's definitely accurate. If you hit 65% consistently, the exact same raid with Onyxia/Hakkar/dps buffs will down him before 5:40. This is assuming every one gets the spores in the correct order and noone dies needlessly.

Getting Rend/DM/DMF/etc is basically just to guarantee an onslaught. Short of something calamitous, any of these extras will push you well over what's needed.

From our kill last night, I'd suggest always taking the time to get a rend's head if your horde. We took 8 warriors and 8 rogues just for shits and giggles, but no matter how many melee you've got the haste buff is tremendous in this fight.

I'm not a mage, so take my input accordingly, but I will share some facts from our first Loatheb kill last night.

I noticed 2 mages were very low on the damage meter, so I sent them tells asking what was going on. One was on scorch duty, and the other was FB mixed with scorches. I decided to try an experiment and have NO mages spamming scorch and just go nuts with fireballs. Our mage DPS went up over 120 DPS per mage consistently after that.

Yeah, was just wondering about any practical details of how many Mages/how much Scorch people find themselves needing.

Excuse me if I'm a bit off here, but it's my understanding that ignite only disappears if no fire mages get a successful crit for the entire 4 second duration of the buff. It seems extremely unlikely that, presuming at one fireball hits from each 5 mages in a 4 second window w/65% crit (all conservative figures), the odds of not one critting and keeping the buff up is (0.35)^5 = 0.00525, or half a percent chance for each 4 second window. Seems that scorch/fireblast duty probably is unnecessary.

I'm guessing the main risk would be when the raid is called to bandage, and all mage dps ceases for a few seconds. In this case you probably want to organise having your mages stagger their bandages, perhaps two groups with the group not-bandaging on scorch duty.

My understanding is that once ignite is stacked to 5, all successive crits overwrite an ignite on the stack (Please correct me if I'm wrong). For that reason, last night I had 1 mage dedicated as an Imp scorch debuffer. He was supposed to fireball as much as possible and only scorch enough to keep the debuff up.

It seemed to work fairly well, but ignite did fall off a few times. I noticed that I got a few resists at a bad time as well. However that was our first night of full attempts on Loatheb. We finally ended up with 6 fire mages on the last attempt and looking at the meters it was obvious that ignite was switching off to different mages, so there is room for improvement.

I remember reading a few months back that Ignite works that the first 5 crits on an Ignite chain is what sets the value for your ignite ticks, and any crits after that is only for rolling (keeping it alive). Which makes PI/ToEP/etc very powerful to start any ignite chains.

As far as ignite rolling, we just use 1 mage chain-scorching in a 7th group and 5 mages in our 8th if we have 6+ mages that night (going from 8-7-6 and down for spore buffs). I don't know how well this does for keeping ignites up since I don't really pay attention to how often it drops but I do remember our scorch mage being top of the mages.

3 posts above mine: It falls off very often with only fireball spam because of lag between the client and the server. The actual time window you have is closer to 3.5 seconds (or 3 in an extreme case).

2 posts above mine: No. The original 5 crit values (the original value on the Ignite) is the one that stays for the duration of the Ignite. If one of the first 5 crits is a scorch, it cannot be overwritten with a fireball of larger value - all it does is cause the original damage to go for longer. Note: The only ways Ignite damage can be modified after the initial 5 crits are buffs/debuffs having nothing to do with the Ignite itself (Curse of Elements, Nightfall, Imp Scorch re-application, etc.).