I am quite aware of all the threads about the 4hm and the strategies etc. But we've been stuck on the 4hm for about 4 weeks now (fucking raidstacking is doing my head in, I can tell you that.)
The thing that wipes us is either a tank death or a healer death. It all crumbles from there on. We've used multiple strategies for both tanking and healing and I am going to go mad soon.
We use 2 seperate rotations on the tank side of things. 4 on Thane&Mograine, 4 on Zeliek&Blaumeaux. The tanks on Thane & Mograine are in fire res, to minimize the amount of damage taken from Righteous Fire. The tanks on Zeliek & Blaumeaux are the best void dodgers and drink shadowpots if they must. Taunt resists have not yet been an issue with this strat.
The healing however, needs fixing, I believe. Let me try to explain. We have a seperate healing rotation, existing of 6 healer pairs and 3 patching healers on Thane/Mograine with their own seperate rotation. They move in an endless A->B->C->D pattern, moving towards the next corner when the next healer pair shows up. This way healers will never be subsceptible to taunt resists and will never get more than 3 marks. The only risk of them dying is due to void zones (How ironic, since that's the easiest to avoid, but ok they usually fail.). The 3 patching healers move in a Thane -> Middle -> Mograine rotation, patching up where they can. They help out on the tank in Mograine's corner, since he hits so hard. On Thane they help with DPS healing. In the middle, they heal the passing tanks/DPS.
I don't think is a bad tactic, we've gotten Mograine down to 15% using it. But! There is allways something going wrong. Be it the healing rotation getting buggered due to a healer not moving in time or be it dying on a voidzone.
Another issue for us is that we do not allways have 15 healers without alts. And goddamn, our best geared warrior alts are the ones of our priests.
I'm getting close to despairing, since the amount of time we've spent on them is getting near rediculous and is severely demotivating my guild. I'd like to kill Kel'Thuzad before the expansion and the time is running out to do so, unfortunatly. I hope someone here is willing to help me find a new strat, or pinpoint the flaws in our current strategy. We've spent so much time and money on this fight that I'm beginning to think I'm retarded for not being able to see what's wrong.
Guilds killing the 4hm in 3 days of practice makes me believe there is something I'm missing. A tactic that makes it so that one error isn't the end of the attempt. I sincerely hope I can find the help I need here.
All the other aspects of the fight is working and me being a warlock and not making any progress while not making any mistakes from my own is starting to really annoy me.
Also, reading that guilds do this fight with 12 healers makes me want to slap my head against a wall, since I cannot see how to do so.
One person can easily heal a tank on any horsemen except mograine where you probably need 2. So even with someone in the pair dying I don't see how you can lose tanks to anything but tanks screwing up void zones or 4+ tank healers dead.
Well, it doesn't end straight after that. What I mean is that the rotation continues, but once they come to Mograine with the single healer, the tank usually dies. I know in 'theory' the patching healer should be enough to support the healing on Mograine, but it usually isn't. It gets even worse when more than one healer dies, though.
We just reached 4H (but haven't gotten serious time in on them due to the holiday). Planning to use the same healing strategy you described. In the 2 hours or so we've played with them, it looked promising (but very preliminary, the longest we've lasted is about 10 Marks). I'd be interested to hear how it works out for you.
What exactly is going wrong? You mentioned Voids. That independent of strategy--you need healers that can survive before you progress at all, really.
The only other thing you mentioned is people not moving in time. What causes that? People not being totally on top of the strategy, or something else? Are good healers whom you'd trust to be sharp getting held up by something outside their control?
People don't seem to grasp the fact that you move independant of whatever, if you get 3 marks, you move. However, that doesn't seem to allways work if the next healer pair isn't on the ball. We've lasted till about 18 marks or so using this strat (I know, Mograine shouldve been dead then, but oh well.) Healers seem to have become better in dodgin the void zone, but every attempt or so someone claims that an invisible one killed him.
What you've just laid out is, completely and precisely, our 4H strat. Two 4-man rotations on each pair of horsemen, six pairs of rotating healers, and a triangle-rotating trio providing backup at Mog/Korth/middle.
The strat definitely works. The healer rotation should never be slowing down or stalling -- that's the first thing you need to troubleshoot.
Here's a tip for the absolute best 4H micromanaging troubleshooting I've come up with: Use a mod like Nurfed Raidframes that shows you raidwide debuff stacks at a glance (AGUF and others can do this, but the stack # tends to be so small on those displays as to be illegible -- not so with Nurfed) and take a Fraps and examine it very closely. Go over it repeatedly and watch what the healer mark stacks look like as the fight goes on. It should simply be 1,2,3 of one, then onward to the next corner, and 1,2,3 there, and so forth. In reality, if the rotation is getting screwed up, the mark info alone will enable you to identify exactly where the delay was introduced, and who was involved, and then you can try to figure out how to make sure it never happens again.
Anyway, given proper execution of the strat on a macro level, the only real area where failures can occur is individual Void Zone issues, but those can and will cripple any strat. If your Blaumeux tank stands in a Void Zone and dies, and Blaumeux runs to the middle of the room, you're going to be fucked no matter what strat you use. Make 100% sure, first off, that no one is ever dying to a Void Zone that spawns under them. That is trivially avoidable with the use of any number of mods (personally I've found IMBA with the combat log range cranked up to >100 to be the most reliable overall 4H mod out there), just making sure they move as soon as Blaumeux casts Void Zone.
As for healing, the place to drop healers is actually in the six rotating pairs. A single priest with good t3 gear can solo-heal a rotation -- start him out just after Mograine so that he only has to solo-heal on Mograine twice at most (and by solo-heal, I mean, of course, alongside the patch healer in the separate triangle rotation), and once Mograine is dead, healer mana is no problem. Just make sure that any priest you put in a solo group is one of the ones who basically never dies to Void Zone (you know who they are, just as you know who somehow always dies to them). The extra DPS will speed up the fight and make up for the missing healer or two, in my experience.
Good luck on Sapphiron if getting 15 healers on is a challenging though. :(
Well, it doesn't end straight after that. What I mean is that the rotation continues, but once they come to Mograine with the single healer, the tank usually dies. I know in 'theory' the patching healer should be enough to support the healing on Mograine, but it usually isn't.
For a start, you might want to figure out why this is so. Two healers should be able to handle a tank on Mograine--he hits hardest, but he is also the only Horseman with no environmental concerns, so you can just plant yourself and concentrate on the tank. Healing Mograine is also different than healing on the other three, as there's much more burst to worry about. I always have a hot up and a gheal waiting to go off on a Mograine tank, and if I mistime a cancel, hot + flash will keep him up while the second healer's queueing a big heal. But regardless, two healers on Mograine should be enough, if they're not just reactive healing.
It gets even worse when more than one healer dies, though.
This is true of most any 4H strat. :) When tanks/healers die, it starts a slow cascade to the end; the only difference is that you usually have extra healers you can swap in in a pinch.
People don't seem to grasp the fact that you move independant of whatever, if you get 3 marks, you move. However, that doesn't seem to allways work if the next healer pair isn't on the ball. We've lasted till about 18 marks or so using this strat (I know, Mograine shouldve been dead then, but oh well.) Healers seem to have become better in dodgin the void zone, but every attempt or so someone claims that an invisible one killed him.
<insert ascii of the headache man here>
Mograine shouldn't be dead after 18 marks unless you use some variant DPS strat or have a Kel-geared raid with world buffs or something. I'd say 25 or so marks is a more realistic target for Mograine going down.
Make sure all your healers know who they're relieving, and have all of them set up macros to use via tell or say to inform the pair ahead of them that they've been relieved. Also, I'd try not to stress the "move after 3 marks, period" aspect of it. Instead, it should be "move when you get bailed out." If someone moves after 3 and the pair behind them were delayed, a tank will die. To repeat from the other thread:
If you use those healer positions, then everyone is always standing such that they have the shortest possible run to get to the next corner once relieved, and the rotation goes smoothly. So, again, don't stress the "3 and then out" aspect so much as the "stay until relieved" aspect of it. Assuming that you get your first backup pairs in motion after the first mark hits, that approach will automatically yield a 3-mark-per-corner result, but it's much more intuitive and lets the healers pretty much ignore their own mark count entirely and just focus on healing and watching to see if they've been relieved. It's like a tank rotation, basically, except with healers there's no such thing as a taunt resist.
Our strat only actually uses 13 healers but some in the middle on reserve call/battle rez duty is very useful in compensating for deaths.
Edit - Looking at that picture is there any kind of positioning reasoning behind the sequence of horsemen around the room for you. we do about the same with just zeliek and blameux swapped.
(Thane and Mograine are probably pretty obvious since those are the sides they start on)
Get your healers (except ones on mograine) to have a symbol on each group, as soon as the group at xx horseman sees the symbol entering healing range of their tank they should set off to the next healing group.
Your strat is sound, we use an almost identical one except we fairly heavily stack healers so that we can sacrifice 3 or 4 to the god of invisible void zones. Normally 17 healers, 16 in groups (2 of 2 healers with a lock, 4 of 3 healers) with one standing in middle topping up tanks and dps who mess up bandaging. Just keep working on the execution
Thanks for some nice info and input there, I'll make sure to forward this thread to our healers.
It is very true that someone allways dies on the void zone and blames it on it being invisible, however I was looking for something that makes it so we can live without them really, having some kind of backup to someone being stupid and dying. Guess I was looking for something that doesn't exist.
Oh and getting 15 healers isn't -that- impossible, however it is very hard if you need 2 of your priests to switch to their warrior alts. At least. ;)
If you use those healer positions, then everyone is always standing such that they have the shortest possible run to get to the next corner once relieved, and the rotation goes smoothly. So, again, don't stress the "3 and then out" aspect so much as the "stay until relieved" aspect of it. Assuming that you get your first backup pairs in motion after the first mark hits, that approach will automatically yield a 3-mark-per-corner result, but it's much more intuitive and lets the healers pretty much ignore their own mark count entirely and just focus on healing and watching to see if they've been relieved. It's like a tank rotation, basically, except with healers there's no such thing as a taunt resist.
See, I tried to stress the 3-Mark schedule. I feel like, if we leave it up to "move when you get relieved," more uncertainty can build up. The two opposite rotations can fall out of sync, etc. And there's no advantage to taking off 1-2 seconds earlier; you just take a double-Mark. Like you said, it's the same as the tank rotation--there's no particular reason to line everything up with the Marks, except that it makes a convenient clock.
I guess I'm just more comfortable keeping everything as regimented as possible. In my experience with my raid, mistakes only get ironed out if I can say, "we wiped because person X was supposed to do Y at time T," otherwise learning wipes are often wasted (example--we learned Gothik very quickly).
In response to your comments above about UI, I just wanted to ask, what bossmods do you guys use (and what raid frames do you use)?
Thanks for some nice info and input there, I'll make sure to forward this thread to our healers.
It is very true that someone allways dies on the void zone and blames it on it being invisible, however I was looking for something that makes it so we can live without them really, having some kind of backup to someone being stupid and dying. Guess I was looking for something that doesn't exist.
Oh and getting 15 healers isn't -that- impossible, however it is very hard if you need 2 of your priests to switch to their warrior alts. At least. ;)
Don't be too quick to write off the "lol invisible void zone" stuff as weak excuses. When you get to go DPS Blaumeux more often than not you will die to one at some point too. It's a known bug, and a bad one. You can tell when someone runs into the corner and plows straight through the middle of a void zone that's been sitting there for a minute. Some people are dumb, but no one is that dumb. If people are dying to void zones that were just dropped, they're being stupid. But if they're running through ones that are already down, they really can't see them. I find that it helps, as a healer, to call out void zones that are dropped right in the path of the entry-exit routes for tanks and healers, just so people know that if they can't see one there, something is wrong and they need to be super-careful and hug a wall or something on their way in.
Oh, and on a separate note, please fill out your guild/server in your profile if you'd like to continue to read and post on these forums.
The thing that wipes us is either a tank death or a healer death. It all crumbles from there on. We've used multiple strategies for both tanking and healing and I am going to go mad soon.
We use 2 seperate rotations on the tank side of things. 4 on Thane&Mograine, 4 on Zeliek&Blaumeaux. The tanks on Thane & Mograine are in fire res, to minimize the amount of damage taken from Righteous Fire. The tanks on Zeliek & Blaumeaux are the best void dodgers and drink shadowpots if they must. Taunt resists have not yet been an issue with this strat.
Your basic strategy is reasonable, but you need to make sure you are troubleshooting the correct thing. If the only thing your healers are dying to are void zones, that is normal. We did a couple of things to compensate. At this point, most healers use Bigwig's (any timing mod that tells when void zones will drop will work), which helps quite a bit. The other thing was experience, and calling out the ones that die to void zones regularly. Get upset when healers die to the visible void zones, but don't worry about the invisible zone deaths.
The other thing that we stress is constantly topping off the tanks (and DPS classes). Sounds like a big "duh" right? But most healers are conditioned by the time you get to the 4 Horsemen to do a good job of conserving mana and not overhealing. On this fight, they should start to lean more toward letting those heals go. Outside of Mograine, mana usage isn't that extreme, but spikes from taunt resists (extra marks), Mograine, momentary gaps in healing rotation, etc and the limited number of healers can mean that a heal is 4-5 seconds away. (It's also nice on Blammo to have 5-6 seconds to move around without throwing a heal to be sure you avoided a void zone.)
While you're learning it, do everything you can to get 15-16 healers. If you get 16, have that one sit in the middle healing, but move quickly into one of your rotations if a healer dies (should be someone that's done of of the rotations before).
I personally save my potion cooldown for a major mana pot until Mograine goes down. If he goes down and our raid is healthy, I will drink a shadow pot as I go into Blammo to reduce my risk of dying to a void zone.
I personally save my potion cooldown for a major mana pot until Mograine goes down. If he goes down and our raid is healthy, I will drink a shadow pot as I go into Blammo to reduce my risk of dying to a void zone.
Why bother at that point though? You have a wealth of extra healers at that point and at least for me the potion is more expensive then my repair cost.
I personally save my potion cooldown for a major mana pot until Mograine goes down. If he goes down and our raid is healthy, I will drink a shadow pot as I go into Blammo to reduce my risk of dying to a void zone.
Why bother at that point though? You have a wealth of extra healers at that point and at least for me the potion is more expensive then my repair cost.
We've killed them twice, and with some more experience, I'll probably stop. But for right now, it's better for the raid if healers stay up. 15-16 healers is massive overkill when you're down to Blammo and Zeliek, but it means that people can stay focused on their normal cycle of healing and not have to spend time thinking of adjusting.
I have never done 4h so i have some few noob questions to ask while there is a pertinent thread up.
How much do the 4h attacks hit for? Other than the taunt bonus that comes with the T3 armor, could an 8/8 T2 tank (in theory) tank them? Also, how long would you say a standard kill takes? Sorry for the off topic questions, but these are things that are hard to find (and trust) on wowwiki.
I guess I'm just more comfortable keeping everything as regimented as possible. In my experience with my raid, mistakes only get ironed out if I can say, "we wiped because person X was supposed to do Y at time T," otherwise learning wipes are often wasted (example--we learned Gothik very quickly).
In response to your comments above about UI, I just wanted to ask, what bossmods do you guys use (and what raid frames do you use)?
Well the problem is the potential downside in either scenario. If someone screws up and you have a set 3-mark rotation, then you have an outright healing gap and that will almost surely cause a tank death and thus a wipe. If someone screws up and you have a move-when-relieved rotation, that'll cause a momentary cascading blip where some healers take a fourth mark (not the end of the world, and not fatal unless they fall asleep) on their way out, but if you have your positioning properly set up, you can rotate in less than 12 seconds (closer to 8 or so) and thus quickly get things back on track.
As for mods, I find that IMBA is most accurate because it's all being parsed locally. Bigwigs has a tendency to screw up at times when you have 40 people with different latency all reporting events at the same time and trying to sync them. IMBA's alert text for when Blaumeux drops a void zone is also quite handy, I find.
For raid frames, as I said, for 4H, there is no more valuable resource for a raid leader than frames that will accurately and legibly show the debuff stack of every single person in your raid at a glance. Both for troubleshooting, and for making on-the-fly calls when needed. Being able to see at a glance who doesn't have a Blaumeux mark when a relief tank/healer is desperately needed there is just a tremendous benefit. I used Nurfed for this, and while the overall raid package is lacking, I still haven't found another set of frames that offers this simple feature regarding debuff display. RDX, last I checked, didn't show stacks properly and tended to lag a bit in updating its display. AG_UF can show debuffs but it does so alongside buffs and rendered in such a minuscule print as to be useless.
I have never done 4h so i have some few noob questions to ask while there is a pertinent thread up.
How much do the 4h attacks hit for? Other than the taunt bonus that comes with the T3 armor, could an 8/8 T2 tank (in theory) tank them? Also, how long would you say a standard kill takes? Sorry for the off topic questions, but these are things that are hard to find (and trust) on wowwiki.
Watch some videos. An 8/8 T2 can definitely tank them. Mograine is Ragnaros (pretty much literally -- his special ability is a clone of Ragnaros) and anyone who can tank Rag can tank Mograine, and none of the others melee any harder than a BWL boss.
I have never done 4h so i have some few noob questions to ask while there is a pertinent thread up.
How much do the 4h attacks hit for? Other than the taunt bonus that comes with the T3 armor, could an 8/8 T2 tank (in theory) tank them? Also, how long would you say a standard kill takes? Sorry for the off topic questions, but these are things that are hard to find (and trust) on wowwiki.
Watch some videos. An 8/8 T2 can definitely tank them. Mograine is Ragnaros (pretty much literally -- his special ability is a clone of Ragnaros) and anyone who can tank Rag can tank Mograine, and none of the others melee any harder than a BWL boss.
I guess i haven't looked recently, but 4h videos were hard to come by. The first video posted i have, but its from the PoV of a rogue that dies early (from a naga with ashbringer? what spell is that?). Ideally a video from the point of view of a tank or healer would help illustrate the rotations.
If 2 of the 4 horsemen do fire based attacks (meteor + rag like attack) do you have your tanks throw on some FR, or is it not worth it?
If you'd read any of the extensive, extensive, extensive discussion on 4H strats, you'd know that. Fuck, the answer to the question about FR is in the first post of this very thread.
One of our 4H tanks on our first kill was wearing 3 or 4 pieces of Wrath, 2 pieces of Dreadnaught (bracers/shoulders, I think), and is generally *not* the best geared tank. He's also DPS specced, and didn't (at the time) have a Lifegiving Gem. Was he a bit harder to keep up than other tanks? Yeah. But it's doable.
Tank gear should not really be your issue here.
(And I'd agree with Gurg on this: having run BigWigs, LV, and IMBA on this fight, IMBA was by far the most accurate.)
edit: He was also wearing a couple pieces of DI, as we run a full room tank rotation.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
If you'd read any of the extensive, extensive, extensive discussion on 4H strats, you'd know that. Fuck, the answer to the question about FR is in the first post of this very thread.
Sorry, im at a computer science lab right now and didn't read the whole post. Sense KF is so far from 4h i haven't really bothered to read much on them other than the curious 'what does that boss do?' reading on wowwiki. Thank you for the video link. download those bad boys once i get home.
I have never done 4h so i have some few noob questions to ask while there is a pertinent thread up.
How much do the 4h attacks hit for? Other than the taunt bonus that comes with the T3 armor, could an 8/8 T2 tank (in theory) tank them? Also, how long would you say a standard kill takes? Sorry for the off topic questions, but these are things that are hard to find (and trust) on wowwiki.
There's a decent amount of info on most of these in the big long 4h thread if you want indepth answers, but to your questions:
2) Yes, its pretty easy. I tank them with 5/8 tier2, AQ Shield and other assorted epics/blues.
1) They usually hit me for just over 1000 IIRC.
3) Varies anywhere from 12-20 minutes, depending on how many dps decide to die to voids or how stacked your raid is with healers.
Also, on some other things posted earlier. Arawethion, you mentioned something about a leave when you're relieved rather than at a set time being a better way to approach the healing rotations. Wouldn't that cause a ripple effect through your rotation? I'm not too sure how the rotation actually works since I haven't really drawn it out, but if the groups in the middle leave at 0s, get to their spot at 3s, then that group leaves at 4s, gets to their spot at 7s, the group there leaves at 8s... etc... by the time you get all the way around, you may have some serious timing problems. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something. I just figured that everyone should just top the tank off and head for their next spot as soon as the 3rd mark hits.
On the topic of invisible void zones. The first 2 weeks of tries, it felt like every other void was invisible to people. We'd hear "damnit, invisible void" or "what the hell did I just die to?" at least 5-6 times per attempt... and the attempt didn't even last 20 marks. We'd have the same people die three attempts in a row and claim that the void they died to was invisible every time... Although Gurg is right in that its a known bug and its a pain in the ass, they're nowhere near as common as most people think. I've tanked on the Blameaux rotation pretty much since we started doing our strat, and I've run into a total of 5-6 voids that are invisible. Thats through countless attempts of just going back and forth on Blameaux/Zeliek.
Sorry, but rotating through all 4 horses seems like an awfully long run to me. When we tried it like that I'd always take a mark while still moving in position, while with our current strat I am already standing there and casting my second heal and have time to use a dreamless sleep pot before going in again.
By the way, one shaman/paladin can keep the Koth tank alive without problems and shaman + priest is enough for Mograine.
11/27/06, 11:48 AM
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