We fell ever so narrowly short of the goal, but it is possible. Here's the highlight/lowlight of our night, a horribly grainy clip from one of my many many Fraps:
There was another 4% failure, and more sub-30% than I can count. If we'd had world buffs, he'd have died. Or, hell, if we hadn't been retards and lost our Darkmoon Faire buff right away in the zone, he'd have died. Or if we'd prepared with a handful of other unusual consumables ahead of time....
I don't want to give away too much, really, because there's still a huge challenge out there for a group of 20 insane enough to try, and I'm sure there are people looking for things to fill their time post-Naxx who would be interested.
Yes, you need to raid-stack. Yes, you need to do some weird stuff with raid setup and positioning in general. There's a ton of theorycraft to it.
Basics:
With all 5 priests up, Hakkar's damage and health are multplied, bringing him to well over 1,000,000hp, and makes him do things like this to a Dreadnaught-geared tank:
10/31 00:44:33.859 Hakkar hits Tehax for 2581. (crushing)
He has five Aspects thanks to the priests, including an AoE silence that does heavy physical damage, an AoE poison, a stun, a complete aggro wipe, and a 250% attack speed Frenzy every 15 seconds.
It's not a fair fight, nor is it balanced, but it's fun, and it's hard, and requires a lot of thinking outside the box. It's basically a full-fledged tier 3 20-man encounter. Give it a try sometime -- I'm curious to hear how others find it.
I'm admittedly disappointed that we fell short, and it would've been cool to accomplish this before the upcoming skill/talent changes, but it was a hell of a lot of fun trying.
(Also, thanks to Cryect for a really customizable and all-around excellent mod in IMBA -- modifying the Hakkar module to account for all of his abilities took me all of ten minutes and worked on the first try.)
So THAT's what was implied by 'final /flex of the year'. A real pity though. =/ I presume you guys will be going there post-talent revamp just to do it?
So THAT's what was implied by 'final /flex of the year'. A real pity though. =/ I presume you guys will be going there post-talent revamp just to do it?
If it's doable, probably. The revamp changes a lot of things though
How is healing set up for this? I'd presume Hakkar starts pasting them one by one regardless how many tanks there are rotating aggro. My curiosity is irreversibly piqued!
That's seriously impressive. Are there documented Hakkar kills with *any* priests left alive? People talk about it a lot but I haven't heard of any guilds in particular doing it. (Did EJ, as a warmup/learning exercise, or did you go straight to the main event?)
The fact that this is doable (barely), with minimal clearing required, would turn Hakkar into a really neat tier 4 onyxia. I suppose wondering about a second loot table would be wild R&D speculation...
Very impressive. I always wondered if this could be done, apparently so. I imagine this would only get easier with 2.0.
Big grats
With TBC? Sure. 2.0? Not quite so clear-cut on a fight that is the most aggro-sensitive since Broodlord circa July 2005. What do you think happens to warrior threat generation, especially while building threat as an OT and needing to produce their own rage? What happens to hunter DPS? What happens to mage threat generation? And so forth. It'll be interesting to see, but all the new variables certainly complicate an already complex picture.
This is something I think we first got the idea to do 2-3 months back, when we zoned into what we thought was someone's unfinished ZG run for a Hakkar-only instance, except there was a mixup and it actually only had Jin'do/Broodlord dead. We were in for a nasty surprise when we reached Hakkar, but it got us thinking. Since then we've put five nights, with a couple of weeks in between each, into throwing ourselves at this, flasks and massive consumables and all. It's been a fun diversion.
Very impressive, I didn't expect to see this be doable. I'm sure everyone wants to know how you got around the aggro wipe... Hunters healing with bandages and then FDing maybe? :P
That's seriously impressive. Are there documented Hakkar kills with *any* priests left alive? People talk about it a lot but I haven't heard of any guilds in particular doing it. (Did EJ, as a warmup/learning exercise, or did you go straight to the main event?)
The fact that this is doable (barely), with minimal clearing required, would turn Hakkar into a really neat tier 4 onyxia. I suppose wondering about a second loot table would be wild R&D speculation...
We could kill Hakkar with all the priests up except for Arlokk with complete ease. Arlokk is the real bitch. Alternately, we could handle him fairly easily if you kept Arlokk but took away the AoEs. Combine the two, and that's where the challenge lies.
I have always thought this to be totally impossible.
According to thottbot:
Jeklik: 1200-2000 AoE damage + 8 seconds silence
How often does he do that one? What range? Can you really leave the tank alone and run out of range when this happens? Or do you set up some sort of healing chains?
Venoxis - 800 damage poison to the raid
Well, not that hard to counter unless it is done every second.
Mar'li - 6 second stun and complete aggro wipe
Is this just for the MT or for everyone? Im guessing just the MT
Thekal - Enrages, increasing attack speed by 150%
As you said gurgthock, he does this every 15 seconds. Is it a frenzy effect or an enrageeffect? if it is a frenzy then you should be able to counter it with 2-3 hunters. 3 for safety if someone fails.
Arlokk - 2 seconds Gouge and aggro wipe
Well, can be countered with tank switches.
I have not been thinking that much about this, but this is how I picture it:
3 tanks - For being able to counter gouge, stun and mc.
around 10 healers - For being able to heal the huge amounts of damage output and make a rotation of going out of LoS/out of range
7 DPS where 3 is hunters if you can tranq the frenzy.
I think that this should be enough, the hard part must be to handle all the tankswitches and the silence...
Very impressive. I always wondered if this could be done, apparently so. I imagine this would only get easier with 2.0.
Big grats
With TBC? Sure. 2.0? Not quite so clear-cut on a fight that is the most aggro-sensitive since Broodlord circa July 2005. What do you think happens to warrior threat generation, especially while building threat as an OT and needing to produce their own rage? What happens to hunter DPS? What happens to mage threat generation? And so forth. It'll be interesting to see, but all the new variables certainly complicate an already complex picture.
Not knowing all the aspects of the fight without the priests dead, and the raid setup, I can't comment on how it is going to change. But I assume that the same questions can be asked for many raid encounters, not just Hakkar.
It's always awesome to see something like this done for the thrill of the challenge. Everyone loves seeing the impossible becoming possible and that is what happened. I would love to see a vid of this that you mentioned. Are there any plans on releasing one along with some other juicy details on raid setup and the like?
What would be interesting is if his drops were itemized differently if you left the priests up, but I think due to extensive datamining since ZG was released that's not a possibility is it?
haha, that's an awesome project. I like that Blizzard actually made it "possible" as well, instead of just having him insta-gib you if you go near him with the priests still alive.
I was waiting for someone to give this a serious attempt, but I seriously didn't think it would be possible.
We had a similar experience turning up to what we thought was a cleared instance, only to find myself and one other tank couldn't hold agro (despite having 13 x the threat of DPS/healers who were pulling the gro). It turned out it wasn't a cleared instance and it was the gouge. It got the discussion going on if the fight would be doable with some, or even all, of the priests up ... our conclusion, was probably not :p
Pretty impressive that you were able to get him so close.
I have always thought this to be totally impossible.
According to thottbot:
Jeklik: 1200-2000 AoE damage + 8 seconds silence
How often does he do that one? What range? Can you really leave the tank alone and run out of range when this happens? Or do you set up some sort of healing chains?
Venoxis - 800 damage poison to the raid
Well, not that hard to counter unless it is done every second.
Mar'li - 6 second stun and complete aggro wipe
Is this just for the MT or for everyone? Im guessing just the MT
Thekal - Enrages, increasing attack speed by 150%
As you said gurgthock, he does this every 15 seconds. Is it a frenzy effect or an enrageeffect? if it is a frenzy then you should be able to counter it with 2-3 hunters. 3 for safety if someone fails.
Arlokk - 2 seconds Gouge and aggro wipe
Well, can be countered with tank switches.
I have not been thinking that much about this, but this is how I picture it:
3 tanks - For being able to counter gouge, stun and mc.
around 10 healers - For being able to heal the huge amounts of damage output and make a rotation of going out of LoS/out of range
7 DPS where 3 is hunters if you can tranq the frenzy.
I think that this should be enough, the hard part must be to handle all the tankswitches and the silence...
He has some convenient architecture on his temple, if the silence is LoSable, that should be a problem either. Gouge will suck tho, coupled with a second aggro wipe, the stun, yer gonna be a bit screwed unless your raid consists of druids/warriors any of whom can tank if they pull aggro >.<. Could always get that silence resist neck for the raid too =) in case you cant LoS the silence.
Ahh, without the details on the abilities from someone who has tried it, we are not theorycrafting! we are smokecrafting =).
There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.
He has some convenient architecture on his temple, if the silence is LoSable, that should be a problem either. Gouge will suck tho, coupled with a second aggro wipe, the stun, yer gonna be a bit screwed unless your raid consists of druids/warriors any of whom can tank if they pull aggro >.<. Could always get that silence resist neck for the raid too =) in case you cant LoS the silence.
Ahh, without the details on the abilities from someone who has tried it, we are not theorycrafting! we are smokecrafting =).
I believe that if the gouge and the stun would happen at the same time it would not be that hard to counter. Would be worse though if you got first tank gouged, 2nd stunned and then the 3d got mindcontrolled... 4 tanks?
I don't really think that you could avoid the silence with LoS, rather with outranging it...
But yes, we need some more info on the abbilities! Cmon Gurgthock give us some more, need to theorycraft a bit here :)
Remember back in the day when Hakkar was a 15 minute snoozefest ending in free loot?
Well coincidentally, we(my old guild) were in a hurry one day and decided to leave Jek'lik up when taking him on. I noticed that we had no problems at all with healers being silenced despite being fairly close to the MT(and, subsequently, Hakkar), so either it is LoSable, or it has a very short range. (take note of where the healers are in Gurg's picture)
As for the Mar'li stun, I have to wonder what the cooldown on this is. I imagine the key is probably to make sure your tanks simply aren't getting hit with it. How do you do that? My guess is KTM and, if neccesary, creative use of Invuln pots. It's highly dependant on the cooldown of the ability and whether or not he uses it immediately when it's up, but I have a hard time picturing this as doable if you can't count on him wiping aggro with a set frequency.
"They're Dragon Kill Points; not Dragon Feed Points"
Sitting on a laptop so I can barely see it :S but it looks as 3 tanks. Wouldnt 4 tanks be better? Or would that just make any locks or mages really lame for this due to a really low aggro cap? Its just that if you get one tank gouged, one tank stunned and one sheeped...
It seems as he frenzies and not enrages. If it's every 15 seconds as gurg said it should not be a problem with 3 hunters. Possible with 2 but then you have zero room for error.
What I want to know is the silence. How long does it reach? Can you counter it with LoS? If you can counter it with LoS you could probably set up something like firemaw where the tanks are in LoS while Hakkar is out of LoS.
But how do you handle the poison then? Are you just skipping 4 players for poison? Would 16 people with poison and 4 people without negate each other or would you still do some damage to him?
12/05/06, 4:06 AM
