Ulduar Hodir (Hard Mode)

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Though it won't be obvious unless you're paying attention to Grid or chat, this was a pretty rough pull. The pull occurred before we called it so initial potions either weren't used or were locked out at the end of the encounter. Several players were hit by Flash Freeze. We failed the timing of the misdirect and tricks I normally need at the beginning, which led to a couple early aggro issues. However, this illustrates how important a benchmark system is -- we were a comfortable 5% ahead of where we needed to be on our timers, and even with the slowdown from lost DPS we were confident we would finish it.

Can't wait, giggity goo

Looking forward to see how to do this better since we just beat him with 1second to spare on normal.

Fun part was that my weapon broke during the first 30seconds and I had to tank him without a weapon >.<

You charge in with a Yellow weapon? But i'm also interested to see how it's done even with all the issues mentioned.

It was not like I charged in knowing it was yellow. (new UI, I seem to have removed the durability warning guy)

Movie up, and available to donors.

Did you stack ranged dps at all here?

Your strat seemed to favour them - since you kept him in one place it seems to be luck based whether the melee get the star light buff or not, and as you noted the storm cloud was given to the ranged groups here.

It's sensible since the casters gain one more npc buff than the melee-but would the strat need to be altered for a more melee heavy group? (say a ten man group with a 50:50 melee to ranged split)

What kind of hit/expertise do you run with for doing this fight? I noticed that you said you wear 3 pieces of frost resist while tanking... My threat is generally very high (~9k patch in threat gear, for example), but swappin' out my normal tank pieces for resist kinda scares me on a fight like this where casters are hitting for 60k a pop.

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Originally Posted by Wallert

Did you stack ranged dps at all here?

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We just generally stacked DPS, up to the point we had healers respecing. We keep too tight a roster to switch people out based on ranged or melee.

Aye me and our other holy paladin both went ret and we did our hard mdoe kill with 3 healers. Had a bubble/divine sacrifice for every frozen blows though.

Cider,

I noticed you used Deep Wounds spec for this and I'm currently having issues holding aggro. Is it a must to go UA spec for this?

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Originally Posted by Titangrip

Cider,

I noticed you used Deep Wounds spec for this and I'm currently having issues holding aggro. Is it a must to go UA spec for this?

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This is just a bad fight for UA. I originally thought it'd be a better one, but any DPS/TPS gains you get from the spec are wiped out by the lengthy Flash Freeze casts and FrR gear.

UA is something I'll try to touch on in a news post, but I need to use it on Vezax before I can articulate a full thought process on it.

Would it be safe to assume you wore no FR for the Hard Mode and just maximized TPS? I've been wearing two pieces for normal encounters to ease the learning curve, but I've been contemplating leaving normal gear on.

Awsome video, realy good job!

btw ciderhelm by the look of your inventory, someone likes to save gear :p

If you're having issue with threat visit Veneretio's blog, he has a great Mage trick for situations like this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arnold

Would it be safe to assume you wore no FR for the Hard Mode and just maximized TPS? I've been wearing two pieces for normal encounters to ease the learning curve, but I've been contemplating leaving normal gear on.

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Can't speak for Cider but when I did it our tank(a DK) started in resist gear but ended up going normal gear...combination of a cooldown plus paladin divine sacrifice every frozen blows made us unable to tell the difference in damage taken but threat was better.

Maybe it is because my guild runs 2 full melee groups, but we find tanking him in one place is very ineffective. Our rogue did 14K dps last night, and me as feral did 11K, with 2 ranged dps at 12K.

Maybe I am missing something but why would you effectively lock out 1/2 your raid from getting a crucial buff when you can kite him from beam to beam?


O.o as im typing this you just said you used 3 healers ok that explains things a little but still confused as to what advantages not moving him gives when i see plenty of disadvantages.

Also even with 4 healers our warrior tank uses 3 pieces of frost resist and 4pc t8.

Nice video, as always.

One suggestion: Mages can absolutely demolish the dps meter on this encounter, warlocks as well to a lesser extent. Something about the buff stacking just works well for them. Stacking mages / warlocks for your first kill can help out, as they are capable of 15k+ dps. We try to prioritize that mages get Storm Power.

One thing we noticed when doing this with mages that can produce said numbers is that threat is an issue. The simplest solution was to ensure that the tank (we have our DK MT handle this encounter) gets Storm Power, especially the first one early on. Otherwise ranged just need to use their threat clears at the right time.


Oh some kills we have gotten 2 flash freezes, some you get 3, it's just random like that. If you get a third it will be so late in the fight that you may not want to break out the npcs again.

Our mages were always at the top...right behind our ele shaman who was #1 on most attempts and the kill.

Me and the other holy paladin that went ret were pretty pathetic though ;-(

Here's a useful tool, shows highest dps for each boss, broken out by normal or hard mode. Let's you sort by class too.

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

One Mage on Hodir broke 20k dps o.O