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.

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.

Btw: We have healers designated to bandage mages (and other ranged too). Guess that helped alot in keeping it rolling. But my main motivation was just "I'd rather let a healer skip 10 more seconds of DPS then let a range-DPS to it". That it helped the ignite-epeen was just a bonus :)

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.

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.

Generally, if you hit 60% at the 2min mark, if nobody seriously screws up, you'll have Loatheb dead at around the 5 minute mark. Thus, people tend to aim for the 65% mark without flasks/world buffs or whatever else they use on real attempts to guarantee enough dps (world buffs are usually more than an 8% damage increase, but killing Loatheb in 4:40 is a good thing). I'm sure you could muster up a kill getting it to 62-63% at the 2 min mark with buffs.

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