Warning for Ashen: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• Vykromond · 08/27/09, 4:11 PM

Post: Crusader's Coliseum - Gladiatorial Combat Without the Annoyance of Arenas
User: Ashen
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
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Original Post:

Originally Posted by Mordekhuul

We had a ton of problems with Faction Champions this week, to the point we started wondering if something changed in the fight. Apparently not, or folks would already be talking here, though.

Is the difficulty that different depending which of the 14 champions show up? Our 25 man team one-shot it the first week it was out with very little prep and last night we wiped half the night on it.

It's all dependent about your approach. If you correctly analyze the danger each one poses, the difficulty, at least on normal, is fairly equivalent. Odds are, because you facerolled it last week (which is good, no blame here), you didn't get a chance to accurately breakdown what the dangers were in the fight.

I felt like folks were doing what was asked of them, and probably doing it in a more coordinated way than last week even, so it just felt odd to be losing folks so quickly (ret paladin + rogue + warrior assist trains killing healers in 0.5 seconds, etc).

We had those 3 and the DK on our first week. We wiped the first attempt, killed them the second, but after working out a strategy around them. They need lots of control and it needs to be done appropriately.

I ended up going prot instead of ret and trying to wrangle the rogue the whole fight with taunts and stuns, as did another tank or two on different melee, but in the end by the time we got 2 of the champions down we'd be down by 5 players and at least 2 of them healers. Sheep wasn't effective, given the prevalence of key class DPS abilities that spread AOE and the propensity of mobs to wander through melee range.

How many healers do you run? And you probably shouldn't be the one trying to handle the Rogue. With our experience, the best solution was to put our Prot. Warrior on the rogue. They have a greater range of abilities to control the rogue.

We also had a lot of trouble trying to kill the shaman first...his heals were uninteruptable most of the time, somehow. I wouldn't think the disc priest's shield would be up long enough with 12 DPS on the shaman to prevent many casts, but we had folks punching their interrupts every cooldown during casts and being baffled by the amount of heals he got off.

Probably Grounding Totem. If it's melee interrupts that are missing, then I'm not sure what people are doing wrong. We never seem to have any major issues of that kind.

The key here is to have proper control on those melee faction champs. They are your worst. Kill two of the most dangerous healers first, or one if you're far too melee heavy. I tend to sacrifice several of our DPS for pure control roles while we burn down two of the healers. It's about control on that initial bit, zerging doesn't help anything.

I usually have a rogue on the target we're killing, a rogue on the other healer (or a DK / another class for better interrupts and more DPS pressure on the 2nd healer) and then DK's / Arms Warriors / Prot Warriors controlling the various melee classes. Kite using traps and actively watch who those targets are going for. Use peel CC's when they get close to a clothie, and keep people aware of their positioning and abilities.