Originally Posted by Aliena (25-man)
Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Ulduar raid guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll explain the strategy we use for the 25-man version of One Light In the Darkness, the hard mode needed to complete Glory of the Ulduar Raider.
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Even more so than in its 10-man version, succeeding in this fight is mainly dependent on your raid's efficiency and synergy. As for raid composition, since this fight is not very healing intense most guilds tend to bring 2 tanks, 4 healers and 19 DPS. Especially while you're still learning this fight and your efficiency is lacking you'll need a lot of DPS. In this particular video we're running with one tank and 5 healers, though.
The fight mechanics remain the same compared to the normal mode fight, but with three keepers down you lose many buffs that you may have gotten quite used to. For one light, you'll still have Thorim assist you but have to make-do without the remaining Keepers. This means your raid loses the following buffs compared to normal mode:
* A 30% damage increase, 10% from each keeper
* A 25% movement speed increase
* A 20% increased healing received buff
* A 20% damage reduction
* Sanity Wells - there are none. At all. 100 sanity is all you have for the whole fight.
* Hodir's ice tomb saves
Additionally, all tentacles in phase 2 attack twice as fast and cast three times as fast.
Now let's go over the various phases. In phase 1, you have to kill 8 guardians of Yogg-Saron near Sara to bring her health to 0 and trigger phase 2. As you can see here, we chose to dance through the clouds in phase 1 since it eliminates a lot of unneccessary moving of the guardians and chances to kill them too far away from Sara. However, if your raid members are prone to touching clouds or wandering off by themselves into their own little world far away from healers, you may instead choose to have your raid remain at the entrance to the room and have your tanks drag in a guardian when it's low on health.
Should you choose to dance, your ranged group needs to remain together as best as they can. You may want to designate a reliable leader that people can follow to avoid clouds. Also, with that method your melee need to run out before a guardian dies or they'll take a big damage hit that may or may not kill them. With either method you'll have to have reliable melee interruptors. You want to reduce outgoing damage as much as you can, since you don't have a lot of healers to deal with as is.
Should someone receive both Sara's Fervor and Sara's Blessing at the same time, make sure to pay close attention to their health. After Sara transforms, phase 2 is triggered. Kill all remaining guardians on the phase change.
For phase 2 you have to split your raid into an upstairs and a downstairs team. The downstairs team will consist of 10 people that take the portals that periodically spawn around Yogg. One person downstairs should be a healer unless you're incredibly confident in your abilities. Melee as well as hunters are most efficient as downstairs DPS. Both teams have to move together as units, this is crucial to success in this fight. The upstairs team should have your tanks, the remaining healers and ranged DPS. especially dot classes like shadow priests and affliction locks are incredibly valuable on tentacles.
Your upstairs team should have the following priority system for the various tentacles that spawn: Constrictor tentacles before crusher tentacles before corruptor tentacles. Freeing people from constrictors is always the number one priority, and dot classes should be rolling their dots on any tentacle in range. You may choose to tank the crusher tentacles for a little while to minimize the uptime of Diminish Power, but make sure your tank gets out in time before the crusher's Focused Anger stacks too high.
Make sure to watch out for Death Rays on the ground. They are not candy bars. From the time you see them popping up until they start actually damaging the ground, you have about 5 seconds. Also, you'll want to avoid chaining Malady of the Mind by moving away from the first person that gets targetted by it. The more sanity you have left for phase 3, the better. Dispels, cleanses and decurses are of utmost importance and will keep your healers upstairs more busy than the actual healing will. You just can't afford to have a raid member take a chunk of extra damage or be impaired in their movement.
The downstairs team should be assigned to specific portals ahead of time with the exception of brain-linked people that should just take the portal nearest to them. They should also be assigned a specific areas in the memory rooms to kill the influence tentacles as quickly as possible. Ideally you want to take no more than 25 seconds so you have plenty of time to damage the brain. Also, while the gate to the brain room is open, every tentacle upstairs is stunned which means for the duration there's no diminish power debuff and your upstairs team should be able to clear out most if not all tentacles before your downstairs team pops out of the brain room.
The melee team has 30 seconds in between portal spawns that should be used to help out on any close-by corruptor or constrictor tentacles, but do make sure that they're ready at their assigned portals before they spawn again. Efficienct DPS in the memory rooms is key. You should aim to take Yogg to 30% in no more than three portal phases. While it's doable in 4, your upstairs team may get overwhelmed.
Watch the induce madness timer closely. You can't afford to have melee team members go insane.
As long as your upstairs DPS is able to keep up with tentacle spawns, you shouldn't have a problem triggering phase 3. Assign a meet-up spot ahead of time so your melee team can walk straight over to the rest of your raid instead of having to look around. If you run with less than two tanks, set up hunter misdirects so initial aggro won't kill anyone.
We kill the Immortal Guardians between the ranged group and Yogg himself. Usually we have melee assigned to them since they can DPS the guardians while facing their back to Yogg. The ranged team and dot classes build the brute force of DPS on Yogg himself in phase three, but depending on whether DPS on either target is lacking we may ask someone to help out temporarily.
As per usual, have healers face away from Yogg at all times to avoid Lunatic Gaze altogether and have everyone else watch their sanity closely. If a raid member is low on sanity, it's better to be safe than sorry. While you can do more DPS facing Yogg, you can't do any when you go insane and get killed by your raid members. Not to mention you may do annoying things such as fear your raid members while mind controlled and have them take additional ticks of Lunatic Gaze.
You really don't have to worry about Empowering Shadows much unless you're doing Alone in the Darkness. Just keep burning down the guardians quickly as they trinkle in.
Occasionally, Yogg will use Deafening Roar which is an 2.3 second cast AoE ability that deals around 8000 damage to every raid member and silences them for 4 seconds. Should you have a raid member reforging the legendary mace Val'anyr, this is also your chance to throw your shattered fragments.
If you have a new guardian coming in right before Deafening Roar, you may want to consider having your tank or a healer use a cooldown to ensure he doesn't die during the silence period. Hots are also very useful. As long as you keep your DPS split so that the guardians die consistently and Yogg goes down steadily, this is a controlled phase that just requires good tank pick-ups and some communication.
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