Tell me about it. I guess this is aimed at raid leaders mostly.
At the end of our practice night (Monday), we were restless and had to do something besides pull him for 2 minutes and reset. We'd been having rampant tank deaths until about an hour earlier, and I was concerned. They pulled it together though, so we used 2 GSPP each and watched maybe 38 people last until 4:40. We really needed to have some fun before the end of the night. We used 3 GSPP's each, a round of healthstones, and stock DPS buffs. Got him to 13% with a Rogue d/c and whole bunch of assorted mistakes (really wished I'd fraps'ed it--maybe 5 deaths at Doom 6, stuff like that, and I bet there were missed Spores I didn't see).
Tomorrow we're going back with Flasks, Warrior respecs, Head/Heart/DM buffs, a Nightfall or two, Lucky Rockets, emergency Lightwells, and a lot of enthusiasm.
I know it's going to be pretty crazy from my perspective. Although there is something somehow fun and novel about the whole process of the preparation, I'm not entirely looking forward to the actual pull. I've really always kind of wished it didn't exist.
Lots of people have gone through this. Did you succeed or fail? How'd you feel while it was going on? What was like in-guild right afterwards?
Arawethion, man you won't need any lightwells with that rotation you have ;) It worked perfect for us.
We did the same thing though, got him to around 78% with no buffs, decided to shadow pot up to try the rotations and full DPS out. Ended up doing 3 potted dry runs, came back 2 days later with world buffs, wiped at 3% on that Monday, went back on Wednesday and tore him apart.
People were really really apprehensive about the fight at first. Everyone wanted to work on thaddius first, but I was convinced that loatheb would actually be a faster kill once I had it researched out, so I forced the issue.
After the first wipe on that Monday there must have been like 150 posts on the forums about how to improve DPS, what everyone did wrong, I saw TONS of people farming their butts off for stam buffs over the next 2 days. Probably the most the guild has pulled together for any kill, ever.
The thread topic is in reference to the first buffed-to-the-teeth pull, right?
Nothing in the game prior to it came close. We have a couple of people who randomly could disconnect at the first doom (and no one on the benches that we could bring in and teach the rotations all over again due to time constraints) so that contributed a lot to the tension.
We'd done a couple of runs on him the previous night to get the rotations down, but called it due to 5-6 people consistently disconnecting.
On the kill night, we had a near-perfect 6% consumable run, then we ported to Stormwind to buff up. After a little consideration, we decided ZG buff -> port to stormwind for Onyxia head -> LHC would be the best route. Someone was on the Katrana Prestor part of the Onyxia chain and bugged out Bolvar though, so we sat a good 30 mintues in Stormwind waiting for it to un-bug before deciding to skip the head buff altogheter.
Back to LHC, marching across EPL as a full 40-man raid to the North Tower for the HP buff has to be the highest point of the guilds' endgame experience so far. After that, zoning into naxx, buffing up, getting HP consumables on everyone (yes, Chimaerok Chops x 40, no less >_>), and the pre-shadow pot, and my hands were literally shaking. We KNEW we could do it... and we knew we'd probably gone overkill on the amount of buffage. Still, it was like a high-rollers' gamble, and everyone there knew how much was at stake. I've never had the healer channel so alert. Ever.
So we get ready to pull. I'm thinking again of all the shit that can go wrong - all it would take is for 1 healer to stuff up, or a couple of DPS likewise and missing spores. Or an overeager warlock pulling aggro. Or the MT disconnecting. Or me panicking and screwing up the consumable announces. Tank starts his countdown. When he ran in, I was half-expecting alarms and loud roaring to go off when Loatheb aggroed. Instead, things kinda anticlimactically proceeded like normal.
The moment of our kill (5:07, 39 up, no disconnects!) was met with more cheering than probably even our first C'Thun kill. And yes, it's the best feeling ever.
I think most guilds would have success on their first world-buffed pull provided they did their necessary homework due to the sheer fact that everyone is so pumped up that you get 100% alertness. Barring any disconnects or severe stage fright by key people, there's always a substantial safety margin on the encounter. It doesn't detract from the overall feeling that so much is at stake, though :P
Edit: Just wanted to add that with the amount of HP we ran with at that pull, we potentially could have had people screwing up one bandage and one healthstone and still survived. So the margin of error on consumable rotation was there as well for the chronic panickers in the raid.
Edit edit: Also on a side note, on that first world-buffed attempt, my PC started chugging -really- badly, to the point of the whole screen freezing for a couple of seconds on the application of each doom. No idea what did it, and it happened again the subsequent week again on the world-buffed pull. I'm probably going to restart my computer from now on right before that final pull, just to be safe.
World buffs are amazing because you can screw up in so many ways and still get the kill. We've had three kills so far, and our second kill was the ugliest you could possibly get without a near wipe. Tanks spiking so hard, people missing their spores. This fight's very doable with world buffs, but with it, it gives you so much cushion it's ridiculous.
For us, most of the dry wipes come from the tanks spiking too much and coming close to dying or dying itself but when world buffs come, our MT has about 13k HP so it's real, real hard to mess it up.
But regardless, I'm talking about our second kill, not our first. Our first was real intense since we've never world buffed for any first kills, and if we had buffs, it was because our DPS wanted to epeen on the meters really. Everyone's ultra concentrated and doesn't want to screw up, but it makes for the greatest feeling when you see Loatheb hit the floor.
Painful. Loatheb was still pretty new at the time, and we didn't have the commonly known DPS benchmarks that we did back then, so we weren't quite sure how we'd fare when we really went all-out. I think Loatheb took three days total. The first day we downed Heigan, I went in with a group of like 20 healers, 1 tank, and no one else. The idea was to use PoH combined with bandages to last as long as we could without using expensive consumables, in order to see the timing on his abilities. This also let us test different approaches to a healing rotation.
We went back with a full raid a couple of days later and did repeated dry runs with only bandages and maybe health pots or tubers used, until our healing rotation was solid and we were collectively wiping time and time again to the 3:10 or 3:40 doom. I forget what % we'd been getting him to at different breakpoints, but I remember being supremely confident in our DPS. We always had great DPS. Excellent fury warriors, rogues, mages, etc., with solid PvE specs, full AQ-or-better gear, who approached Loatheb like a big competition. I wasn't worried.
At the time, we were not accustomed to using world buffs for kills, and we didn't have a heart/head available that night anyway. We used Supreme Power on every mage, but nothing else beyond the basics. We'd had the good fortune of testing Loatheb on the PTR back in June (he used to start casting Doom right away, and do it every 25 seconds...oops!) so we'd been hoarding shadow pots for a while. We had 400 or so banked.
Our first attempt was a 6% wipe -- I recall the sense of dread at around the 4min mark when I realized that we were behind pace, trying not to say anything about it and just keep everyone focused. I hoped that maybe execute range would turn things around. But no, it didn't. 120 GSPPs later, we were picking ourselves up to try again.
That time we wiped at 4%. Then at 3%. After that, we were down to ~40 total GSPPs left for the raid, having come in with around 400. It was painful just how quickly they'd all vanished. I expected our stash to last for weeks, but instead it was all gone in a single night. I'd said going into the third attempt, that it would be our last since we'd be out of GSPPs if we failed. But people wanted to go again, so we ported back to town and rummaged through the AH, alts' bank bags, and so forth, and managed to scrounge up the GSPPs that we needed. He finally died at around 5:40, and most of our raid dropped dead not long after.
Yeah this was one of our most underwhelming kills as well - loatheb and then grobbulus for least exciting. It was nice doing it, but it was just "going through the motions". Other kills didn't feel that way.
This seems like a very apt thread to make my first post in.
My guild has just started Loatheb, we have had one night of "dry" runs consisting of getting the healing/spore rotations right and letting the DPS get a feel for the fight. We have been dropping him to less than 50% before we all die at doom 3 with no DPS buffs at all.
After a few consistent attempts where we were all dying together and the DPS was improving I called a potion test run. We popped the pre-fight shadow pots and had the consumable rotation ready. However, we didn't get casters to flask as the raid was almost over but the melee were potted up. We started the fight with people fully focused and started pretty well, we must have been at about 50% just as the second doom hit, when disaster struck. Our MT disconnected and somehow died at 47% (avoidable if he was able to use a healthstone/lifegiving or shield wall) causing us to wipe.
It was still quite encouraging for me though as we should be able to put out the DPS if the Mages/Warlocks flask up and we fully optimise the Ignite (as shown in another thread on these forums). We do plan on using world buffs though, as soon as we get a low percent wipe.
We didn't have that much practise on him tbh. We had probably 2-3 hours spread out and then we came up on a whole night (or, 4h atleast) last week. It went to shits... Healing didn't work, we couldn't reset him, DPS was lacking and i was just immensly frustrated. So i said to the healers "Fucking sort it" and i ported all DPS out of there...
We came back next reset after clearing whole AQ and Naxx to get some more DPS-gear... Suddenly things started clicking. We did use Stoneshield pots on tanks and alike even for testruns, which i feel stupid for not using earlier. Suddenly we had like 3-4 healers without cooldown all the time and our DPS went from 70ish to 66... Then to 65... And tank was nowhere near dying. We did one run with pots and alike, but people were missing HP's to survive (or they just slacked on pots imho.)
We then ran around and got Hakar, Darkmoon Faire and EPL buff and then buffed our fucking asses off...
The feeling when i was counting down was pure fucking panic. I knew that 1 healer could botch it all... We started at it and at the 1.5 min mark i looked on our MT and his hps... He was -11800... That was NO fun at all, a splitsecond i saw 40 people crying together... But suddenly he got like 2 heals and was back up.
Consumeable use was shoddy... Doom 6 killed of 5 ppl... Loatheb fell like a rock at about 4.55... We could have last atleast 1 more doom. Prolly could have taken 15% or so more with the people we had.
For me tho it didn't feel THAT monumental. We hadn't spent endless nights wiping to him which made it a tad less special... Thaddius was a greater victory for me and my guild i think.
All in all we spent a grand total of like 260 Shadowpots (2 runs) and i'm guessing we're at somewhere like 750 still left. I like :)
Our guild had about 2 practice nights of completely dry runs before finally potting up with the flasks and the gspp's.
That pull, the real one, was a very anxious 5+ minutes. We didnt kill him. we got to 1%. Since we expected to fail (well, maybe not expected, but accepted the very real possibility), it wasn't exactly a heartbreak.
The next pull, we killed him, and havent failed since. I just about wanted to puke after the actual first kill. We were left with 4 people standing (and I was only alive because i had used a soulstone). We have never done world buffs, in part, i believe, because we never had them working up to the first kill, so we weren't in the mindset that we needed them.
I still enjoy the rush of it, but the first kill itself, knowing how much was on the line $ wise, was something that only our first ony and rag kills have matched. Nef, C'thun, and the horsemen were not let downs, per se, but they did have a component of knowing that you're going to kill them when you get to 15% or so. For them, once you're there, you're pretty much home free. Beating the clock on Loatheb, however, is a bit iffier, in the event that people screwed up their bandage/healthstone/gspp management.
On a related topic, it's pretty amazing to me how easy a hard encounter gets after you do it right once. Twin Emps and C'thun are probably the ones that we had the hardest time repeating. Gothik is up there too, but not quite so bad, and I might be underestimating the 4H. So far we've only had 2 kills, but this week it seemed sooooo much easier than last. Now for 3 days of wiping to sapph :D
The single biggest factor for us at least, was the leash info that we found here. We spent an entire night drilling through the 2min phase, nailing 65-67% every time and just tweaking tiny details like healer order, spore order, group setups etc. The fact that we probably only died about twice in the entire night meant that we had tremendous momentum and virtually no downtime between attempts.
The following night we got the raid together and had a couple more dry runs, before setting off to get world buffs. We got Onyxia, Hakkar, Wickerman and Tower, alongside typical dps buffs for everyone. The tension in the raid right before the pull was palpable, with the MT repeating about 17 times not to pull aggro before the spore, and to keep calm for the next 5 minutes. I think everyone has an unusual sense of what's on the line, and as one of our officers would say, "you can actually smell the focus".
The next 5 minutes kind of went by in a flash, and he was dead before most people even realised it. It's incredibly tense, but for me the world buffs basically were there for our raid to know we were going to kill him. There wasn't a single person in that raid that doubted we'd do it (perhaps mistakenly), and surprisingly there were no screwups despite never having actually practised the full consumable order. It was by no means the same as our C'Thun kill or even the Thaddius kill (which just felt immensely rewarding when it was done flawlessly), but it still felt good.
Our most recent kill we decided to just get silly, so we took 8 rogues, 8 warriors, 6 mages and Nef/Hakkar/Rend/DMF/Tower. Loatheb's like really expensive junkfood - it's not wholesome or rewarding, but that doesn't mean you can't have some fun with it.
I had us practice at the end of each night, with about a half hour before the raid was scheduled to end (and sometimes after). Never any consumables. I thought that if the healers couldn't keep the tank up until the dooms started killing them, and the dps couldn't knock him to 55% without buffs we weren't ready to spend a fortune on consumables. We didn't know about the leash thing then so we just wiped at 60% or so quite a bit; people HATED doing it. Wiping to a boss with no hope of beating it, just for practice, isn't a morale builder I guess. We did that over and over until finally the spore rot was so flawless we got him down to like 45% one night without any consumables at all, and kept the tank up without any hiccups. I had us port out (never mind that it was near the end of raid time), get darkmoon, ony, hakkar, etc. We came back and absolutely annihilated him, the first shadow pot used having been used on the kill.
The next week, over confident and with no darkmoon or ony buff (fucking trans >.<), and an idiot rogue who died at 3 minutes because hes that bad at the game (he apped to the OP's guild actually when we benched him, Sunken ring a bell?), we wiped at 1%.
Its more a feeling of relief when he dies every week. And when you see that you spent all that effort, cleared out a whole zg, actually dragged yourself to ony (or cascaded someones nef, thx unstoppables!), spent 80 shadow pots and 40 healthstones and whatever else, to get 2 hybrid leggings and a ring of spiritual fucking fervor, you wonder if it was all worthwhile.
The single biggest factor for us at least, was the leash info that we found here. We spent an entire night drilling through the 2min phase, nailing 65-67% every time and just tweaking tiny details like healer order, spore order, group setups etc. The fact that we probably only died about twice in the entire night meant that we had tremendous momentum and virtually no downtime between attempts.
Have your MT run to the door and strafe side to side so that Loatheb repositions. With any luck, he'll reposition himself partially through the door, and he will reset. Alternatively you can pull him to the door and then run through him and "push" him backwards through the door to achieve the same thing.
It basically allows you to practice the 2min drill repeatedly with no deaths, and no downtime.
As someone said its pretty crazy how different people's experience on a first attempt was.
I know half of our raid was shitting bricks at the time of our first pull since we had nowhere near enough practice with consumables. Sure, the healing order was "fine", but we still had the tank die from time to time, and what would happen if the healers had to think about consumables and remember their time to get the spore? We had only 1 attempt with just shadow pots that ended somewhere around 20% with a decent number of missed spores/consumables.
Going in with the whole 1 try mentality and that if one person fucks up, it could be the end of a ~3k gold attempt and what would probably be the only attempt of the week, it had people pretty wound up. We ended up completely overkilling it (7 mages, 7 rogues, 4 fury warriors with Ony/DM buff) and the fight ended with like 7 people down somewhere in the 4:30-4:40 range.
I personally liked it a lot, the shadow pot and consumable usage puts more on the line for your try, so it builds up some pressure. You can't just get up and say "Alright, res up, buff up and lets go again!" after a wipe.
I know half of our raid was shitting bricks at the time of our first pull since we had nowhere near enough practice with consumables. Sure, the healing order was "fine", but we still had the tank die from time to time, and what would happen if the healers had to think about consumables and remember their time to get the spore? We had only 1 attempt with just shadow pots that ended somewhere around 20% with a decent number of missed spores/consumables.
Going in with the whole 1 try mentality and that if one person fucks up, it could be the end of a ~3k gold attempt and what would probably be the only attempt of the week, it had people pretty wound up. We ended up completely overkilling it (7 mages, 7 rogues, 4 fury warriors with Ony/DM buff) and the fight ended with like 7 people down somewhere in the 4:30-4:40 range.
Ours was somewhat similar. After a night or two of dry run wipes, and comsumable test runs, we really had no idea where our DPS was as far as pace went, but given other encounters we generally thought we'd be fine. The impatient people were crying "lets get world buffs and hit it," while others were saying "its not 100% perfect yet, let's dry run til it is." Anyway, we got Ony/Hakkar buffs, people loaded themselves with every consumable imaginable, and we went.
I admit I was pretty nervous sitting there with stupifying buffs and the prospect of losing them all to one person's stupidity. We hadn't used world buffs since C'thun days when they lasted through death, so this was somewhat new. Killing him that try was a pretty huge relief.
I think that preparing for the first Loatheb full-buffed try was one of the best things in wow so far ( i REALLY cant understand ppl whining about world buffs and loatheb ) .... Beeing fully buffed and runing through STV praying that you dont get AP > POM> Pyrod by the local alliance mage was really fun.
Hmm.... we used about 11 Shadow pots each before the final attempt ( 11 pots from first starting loatheb + 3-4 pots used on the killing attempt... so total 15 pots to kill him ). We got him down...
Next week we came in ... coupple of tries ... world buffs ... 1% wipe :) .. That was really fun :)
You can blame loatheb for what you want... but is a unique encounter wich marks your whole week.. You know loatheb day is coming and you start to feal nervous :)
I actually really like the fight - I love how hectic it seems. It reminds me of the first few times you step into Razorgore's room and try to use the shaman earthbind totem kiting method, and there's just tons of mobs running around. Its controlled chaos when it works out properly.
I still hate this fight to this day for what it did to me back when we were in the run-up to the first kill. Our general sentiment was anti-world buff (how could Blizzard be so cruel as to actually <almost> require world buffs to kill this boss)? So we trudged on for a good 2 weeks without them - flasking mages for every night of attempts. I think we wasted probably 500-800 GSPP before we bit the bullet and got world buffs and absolutely owned him.
But as far as Vent memorable moments, the screams upon the death were some of the loudest yet. And it bothers me from a design point of view that you can't "1 shot" this boss (well, you can, but it is beyond any sort of risk I'm willing to take) because you have to test your heal rotation and spore rotation a couple times before going to get your buffs. This is diametrically opposed to how we can 1 shot Gothik, which I consider to be a much more difficult encounter.
This fight just made me really really emo in the opening days when I'm generally not that way. I wrote things frequently in Officer Chat like "We'll never kill this guy" or "Well, here's where our Naxx progress stops." It just brought out the worst in me - and every failure just made me want to turn off the computer. (And I still don't enjoy the fight; Ignite rolling or not.)
We did dry runs the first night concluded by a shadow potted run (without flasks or heavy dps consumables) and we wiped at 30% or so.
The next day, we did dry runs again during 2 hours to perfect groups and spore buffing, then we used everything but world buffs and .... 1% wipe. Port to orgrimmar, ony buff, he died easily around the 5 mins mark.
2 weeks ago, we wiped 5 times at 1% on him without world buffs before finally kill him. It was painfull :)
Last week, 30 mins before raid end time we decided to try to one shot him (no heal rotation try or anything), we ported to mulgore, got darkmoon buffs, one shot him and one shot thaddius. Good end for a raid night which was awfull (ever wiped 2 hours in a row at heigan ? We did.).
I like loatheb. Obviously the whole world buff thing sucks but the fight is a blast.
We spent half a night learning it, we did Loatheb later than most so we just stole the strat. After I made the mod to dictate healing rotation it was pretty easy for the healers, though we had an occasional tank death(no world buffs). DPS learning to spore took a bit longer.
Our first world buff pull was also our first GSP/HS pull, and we wiped, then wiped again, then killed it (no world buffs). I think the next time was without world buffs.
we go in every Wednesday with world buffs(alongside ProBaddies, Ret and Validus apparently, I imagine a few weeks LoH will join our forces in lagging Stormwind to hell and back) and one shot it.
But yeah, I think our first pull of Loatheb wasn't nearly as bad as our first pull of 4H, which, like most people I imagine, was accidental from the huge aggro range of 4H =D
But as far as Vent memorable moments, the screams upon the death were some of the loudest yet. And it bothers me from a design point of view that you can't "1 shot" this boss (well, you can, but it is beyond any sort of risk I'm willing to take) because you have to test your heal rotation and spore rotation a couple times before going to get your buffs. This is diametrically opposed to how we can 1 shot Gothik, which I consider to be a much more difficult encounter.
Hmm, I don't think it ever occurred to us to do any "dry runs" since our first kill in August. When it's time to do Loatheb, we just get world buffs and go. I don't think we've wiped on him with real world buffs in ages -- only when we happen to not have a heart available and the heads are already up in Org (coordinating world buffs on a server like Mal'Ganis sucks). Maybe that's because the way our rotation works we can effectively "test" it while running around STV and getting to the zone.
That's a good idea, Gurg - you don't have to be in the room to test the rotation I suppose. However, we sometimes get new healers in the raid (even at this late stage) and it's useful for them to see it once or twice before "the real thing". But assuming everyone's been there, you're absolutely right...just test it in STV.
11/16/06, 2:12 AM
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