to make a long story short me and my guild have been smashing our heads against noth for so much time that we actually start having nightmares about him.
we think we have the right strategy, and on our best tries we brought him at 13% or 14% and a few times around that percentage.
now, i really don't understand what's our problem:
° wrong strategy
° execution
° just a matter of numbers and consumables
so here it is: our RDPS is pretty much always between 5k 5.2k , depending on raid composition (we don't stack, and we aim at repeatability of our kill). Is this actually enough or we need more?
( i take it that if it should be enough we'll work either on strategy or on execution)
1. I dont think DPS should be much of a problem on Noth. Our first kill we had 30 secs left, and last time (2nd kill) we had over a minute to spare. With mostly the same raid, we only had 20 secs left until Patchwerks enrage.
Is all your DPS focusing on Noth for the last phase? Are a lot of them dying? Is the blink being handled well? (This can make a fairly large difference, since DPS can only continue once he is back on the tank)
our % progressions on every teleport are around these numbers: 80% - 65% - 35% - 13% - wipe
we control the adds (we kill them mostly by using dots) and we do DPS on Noth everytime until it's 5s left for blink to be ready.
edit: i think blink is being handled quite good, with a hunter always shooting him with distracting shot after a blink thus making him run towards a corner , so the tank has time to go and grab him before he goes for other players
our % progressions on every teleport are around these numbers: 80% - 65% - 35% - 13% - wipe
we control the adds (we kill them mostly by using dots) and we do DPS on Noth everytime until it's 5s left for blink to be ready.
If you're DPSing out completely when he's due to blink you're going to be hurting. Sometimes he waits up to ten seconds longer to blink -- you're saying you don't DPS him during that time? I'd recommend minimizing the number of warlocks and firemages on Noth -- put them more on the adds. Hunters can feign and frost mages can ice block if they get aggro on a blink. Have a spare warrior with full rage going into a blink so two people are trying to grab him. Trust your tanks to pick him up ASAP.
Also, are you offtanking adds during his third downtime? You should.
Aim for something closer to 55% by his second teleport, then offtank the skeletons (assign an extra healer to each corner so the warriors don't die) and burn him down.
Edit: Oh, you're Horde? Drop Searing Totems directly underneath Noth at all times. Trust me. :)
are you sure you are having everyone focus on noth after he comes down from the second teleport and just off tanking the skellies? you should be able to kill him even only getting him to 65% before the second teleport, might be rough but certainly duable.
The strategy I found worked the best was to put 3 warlocks on dps for adds when Noth is on the floor and nobody else. Their instructions were to just keep Corr, CoA and maybe immolate on all the adds at all times. Our ranged DPS stopped hitting noth at the 5sec blink warning and if they had mana or whatever popped a few fireballs or multishots into adds, but otherwise they were all on Noth. Melee of course never lets up dps on Noth - they go right up to the blink.
During the balcony phase we just assisted the corner tanks to clear the remaining adds and shackle/tank assist trained down all the spawned mobs. Second balcony obviously get the Guardians dead first, then do the same thing with the rest.
The basic idea is, your corner tanks are quite capable of tanking 3 mobs simultaneously, so you trade off dps time on the adds to the balcony phases to buy more dps time on Noth. When we focussed on actually keeping the adds killed all the time, I found our raid standing around during the balcony phase waiting for spawns - which is simply wasted time that you can buy for Noth dps if you set things up properly.
Anyway, your raid might be suited for a different strategy - this is what I found worked for the group I was with.
Edit: one relevant detail - our MT (me) tanked Noth right in the middle of the room. I found that 20 people were getting cursed no matter where we put him, so the middle position was superior because all the ranged dps were always in range of a corner spawn spot *and* Noth simultaneously. Same goes for decursers and healers. Just a minor optimization - the conventional strategy is to tank Noth way over in the far corner which I found to be significantly less optimal.
What is you raid makeup for Noth? We normally have 6 rogues / 3 Hunters / 2 DPS Warriors on Noth with 3 casters (mages/warlocks) per corner on the adds. We use our MT Warrior and a Feral Druid to tank Noth because Feral Charge is sexy in this fight. After balcony 2 we have all dps on Noth with the tanks offtanking the adds with stoneshield pots at the 2 min mark and one priest per.
The basic idea is, your corner tanks are quite capable of tanking 3 mobs simultaneously, so you trade off dps time on the adds to the balcony phases to buy more dps time on Noth. When we focussed on actually keeping the adds killed all the time, I found our raid standing around during the balcony phase waiting for spawns - which is simply wasted time that you can buy for Noth dps if you set things up properly.
you pretty much hit the nail i guess.
we rarely have more than 1 add up for each corner and it happened a few times that the raid was waiting for the spawns as you said.
As for raid makeup , we want to make it repeatable, so i don't want to focus much on that aspect.
We use 3 Ranged, 1 Tank, 1 Priest per corner. 2 Tanks on Noth, we hold him in the SE corner. Warlocks pretty much DoT everything that spawns (CoA/CoS/CoE + Corruption depending on corner)
During the first teleport, the OT moves to the NW corner (nearest the entrance) to Stun the 2nd Champion in that corner and help tank (priest shackles it after the stun).
On 2nd teleport, OT goes to NW corner and MT goes to NE corner to stun/tank the guardians. Everyone focus's on the guardians first, and priests shackle Champions. Once Guardians are dead, move to Champions.
After this, everyone except the corner tanks and their healers focus's on Noth. It's fairly common for us to go 80%-55%-0%
Small tricks: As Gurg said, searing totems help a lot. If you're using the totems, encourage your DPS to attack for longer and just watch for the Blink - He will sometimes kill people, it's a waste of DPS if you stop too early just have your druids ready to Rez and get your tanks to react quicker to the Blink (make sure your priests are dispelling the cripple).
The entire Plague wing is very light on Healing required, you really only need 10 "healers" for Noth and Heigan, and having a few healers with hybrid gear and/or spec will help you more than they'll hurt. I say hybrids instead of more DPS classes because the extra dispelling, totems, and rebirth really make up the difference here. I DPS for the first and second downtime on Noth (innervate early and usually have to rez a rogue/fury war) then switch to helping heal a corner tank and Innervate a priest during the 3rd part.
our % progressions on every teleport are around these numbers: 80% - 65% - 35% - 13% - wipe.
Wow, I'm curious - are you actually surviving 3 full porches (teleports) and then wiping during the 4th teleport? If that's the case is there a new add type that spawns or is it a repeat of the 3rd porch?
Originally Posted by Metalmilitia
we control the adds (we kill them mostly by using dots) and we do DPS on Noth everytime until it's 5s left for blink to be ready.
The blink warning shows when his cooldown to use blink is up. So I'd have the raid DPS longer (closer to the warning, say stop at 2 seconds). The main thing is to have range not have any missiles in the air as blink cooldown is expiring.
A previous thread here on Noth offers many insights into DPSing Noth. My guild certainly has had troubles when he was slow to use blink and/or we had a lower raid DPS overall.
I'm not sure RDPS is really relevant on this fight - unless you can get the mod to filter only dps on Noth himself. % stats at each balcony are really a good indication of how well you're doing.
For interest sake, check out http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8433
Elendril posted a video of the no-corner-dps strategy with the group-them-up-and-aoe during the teleports. It's quite a fascinating vid to watch and inspired a lot of strategy modifications for my group - such as realizing you can dump a lot of dps from the adds onto Noth and still perform a clean kill. The AOE strat probably has lower RDPS than most - with the exception of gigantic spikes while Noth is on the balcony.
There's basicly no heal requirements on the encounter that all of perhaps 6 healers require untill the 2nd port to the balcony, at which point Chain heal shines, so get them in hybridish gear if they have it (hi 2 U, stormcaller),a nd saving enough mana to hit up some Chain heals into general dps packs to handle the mage issues. So make sure they're nuking happily, as well as priests/druids.
All corner dps off corners and on noth right at the port back in, going balls to the wall as soon as humanly possible. Priests chain smiting if healing is okay, ect.
Make sure you put a 41 prot tank (if you have one) on Noth, this fight highlights the power of Shield Slam better than any other I can think of.
Oh, and please put http:// on your profile under guild name.
Edit:
Wow, Maex, TE, ect down..yeah, you're not undergeared. Are you losing people at some point?
Originally Posted by bartolimu
It makes me want to hit Marge Thatcher on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
The strategy I found worked the best was to put 3 warlocks on dps for adds when Noth is on the floor and nobody else. Their instructions were to just keep Corr, CoA and maybe immolate on all the adds at all times. Our ranged DPS stopped hitting noth at the 5sec blink warning and if they had mana or whatever popped a few fireballs or multishots into adds, but otherwise they were all on Noth. Melee of course never lets up dps on Noth - they go right up to the blink.
During the balcony phase we just assisted the corner tanks to clear the remaining adds and shackle/tank assist trained down all the spawned mobs. Second balcony obviously get the Guardians dead first, then do the same thing with the rest.
The basic idea is, your corner tanks are quite capable of tanking 3 mobs simultaneously, so you trade off dps time on the adds to the balcony phases to buy more dps time on Noth. When we focussed on actually keeping the adds killed all the time, I found our raid standing around during the balcony phase waiting for spawns - which is simply wasted time that you can buy for Noth dps if you set things up properly.
Anyway, your raid might be suited for a different strategy - this is what I found worked for the group I was with.
Edit: one relevant detail - our MT (me) tanked Noth right in the middle of the room. I found that 20 people were getting cursed no matter where we put him, so the middle position was superior because all the ranged dps were always in range of a corner spawn spot *and* Noth simultaneously. Same goes for decursers and healers. Just a minor optimization - the conventional strategy is to tank Noth way over in the far corner which I found to be significantly less optimal.
Hehe, we do it pretty much the complete opposite:
1. Ranged DPS focus first of all on the adds in their corner (every group is assigned a corner) and on Noth if they can. The adds will generally be going down just as the next one spawns. Melee are 100% on Noth ofc. If you have your tanks getting piled with adds, you are going to have it rough on the teleport phases. Also, your healers will get drained on mana pretty fast.
2. Our tank found it easier to tank him in the SE corner since there is only 1 direction he can blink. Regarding the curse, I think he will cast it on the 15 (or 20? :O) closest- so you will also have a better idea of who will get hit. Im pretty sure every ranged class could reach both noth and their corners... its a small room.
I believe we got to 29-30% before 2nd balc last night (60ish on first balc) ..That's the highest I've seen for us and not sure how..probably higher melee count? What I'm saying is if your raids working in sync well you can really beat him up fast. Searing totems make it very trivial for the potential lost time in blinks :|, have your ranged hit adds on the blink window then straight back etc.
Typically 'good' targets are 75% b1, 50% b2..then burn however is what we go by.
Back when my guild started killing Noth, we aimed for a 3 wave kill, and did that for several weeks. To pull that off he needs to be at about 10-15% when he teleports up the 3rd time.
It seems that you guys might be stacking too many people on the skeleton adds if you're having them wait for respawns occasionally. They should be barely keeping up with the spawns, so that your Noth DPS is maximised. Also as othe people have mentioned, hunters don't need to stop DPS at the blink warnings. Have all your hunters stand ontop of a second warrior, one of them is bound to pull aggro on the blink. Have the second warrior pick him up before he reaches the hunters and drag him back to the tanking spot. Alternatively you can put your hunters in the corner behind Noth, and they will pull noth back to the MT if you prefer to use just 1 warrior tanking him.
We run around 5.5k RDPS if I recall correctly, Fura's (Curse's) Noth Video shows about how much RDPS you need to pull off a 3rd port kill.
Fura's vid is a kill after the third balcony. Most guilds never get to see the Constructs that spawn in that balcony phase because they kill him after the second balcony.
I think their % figures go something like 80->50->8->dead.
The kill is pretty clean - I think they only lose 4 people to the chain cleave that the Constructs put out, combined with the arcane explosions of a second round of Guardians. Pretty sure they kill him before the third balcony nowadays :D
11/15/06, 5:30 PM
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