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I see that most guilds started heroic progression with Halfus. I can't find much about the fight or strategy, what I got from vids is that all drakes are up, and all skills are used by the boss.
Also, Priest healers with atonement seem to be incredibly facilitating this fight, apparently cause the heal didn't have a cap, and smite was hitting the boss really hard with the drakes' buff.
Anyone care to share some info about this fight, and strategies being used?
Is that guy the easiest hard mode on 10? using the term loosely. How geared must everyone be since the strat seems to be free 4 drakes + pray for 2 minutes that things go well.
sadly, nothing is very easy without stacking your raid in 10m heroics
bring a disc priest or two + 3 tanks and it'll be a joke though
We should be downing nefarian soon enough, our server has like 5 guilds that can do hardmodes but they can't even down one because 10mans are nearly impossible. Guess we'll just enjoy our 4 hour full clears and get fully geared up in preparation of sweeping nerfs once paragon clears everything and life can return to normal for 99.9% of the raiding population.
Are all fights really that hard in 10men right now? Honestly, only fight I looked at on hard mode right now is Halfus, what changes on Conclave and omnitron?
You didn't specify whether you're trying to do this on 10 or 25. I can give some advice for 25 based on the strategy we used; there's many tweaks that can be made to this depending on what works best for your raid.
We ended up with five tanks, though we did many attempts with four and it's definitely doable. One tank on time warden, one tank on the whelps with the storm rider misdirected to him, one tank on the nether scion, and two tanks swapping back and forth on Halfus at around five stacks. Killed time warden first, after which point the time warden tank goes and releases slate and also moves into the rotation on Halfus tanking, storm rider killed second with incidental aoe bringing down the whelps before we switched to Halfus. Only dps on Halfus from the start should be your disc priests smiting and your two interrupters for shadow nova; usually those four plus the aoe got Halfus below 60% by the time the other two drakes were dead. At 50%, you need to be prepared to deal with the stuns. PW:B over the tanks, pop aoe heals (holy radiance, healing rain, etc) before the stun goes off, have tanks use cds. If you have holy paladins, have them use their bubble to heal through the stun (but they have to bubble before the stun is cast); you can also use bops on healers so you always have one able to heal. We also would have a tank aoe taunt right before the stun and pop all of their cds. There'll be a shadow nova right after the stun; mages should help cs that.
Gotten 2 kills on Halfus 10 Heroic so far. Both times had slightly different group comps.
1st Kill - 2 Tanks, 4 Healers (resto shammy with hit talent on interrupt duty) and 4 DPS.
2nd Kill - 2 Tanks, 3 Healers (resto druid + 2 x disc smite spam) and 5 DPS.
Strat was to pop Whelps, Storm and Scion at the start. Then add in Time Warden when whelps are at 10%. Drake kill order was Storm - Scion - Time.
Hope this helps.
Don't you release the slate dragon last and just ignore him? the additional debuff and the 12 second vulnerability from halfus woulda done good I think.
Tried it for one attempt this week where we did release the slate after Scion died. But Halfus hit 50% with Time warden around 25% hp and Slate at full hp, which led to a wipe. The AoE knockdown that Halfus did every 30 secs with Slate up did feel a little more problematic. Under 50%, tank swaps with 2 tanks wasn't a problem, usually at 4 stacks of the MS we'd trade off on tanks, maybe sometimes the tank might reach 5 stacks before other is ready to taunt.
Maybe I missed something since it was only 1 attempt. But with 2 Disc smiting the boss (iirc, they were averaging 16k to 18k dps each on halfus), we weren't in danger of hitting enrage and just left Slate out of the equation.
How do you do this with a standard 10man without disc priest or raid stacking? wait for the nerfs or until were in 80% 359 gear?
Thank you all for the answers, you we're all very helpful xD
Probably gonna start trys on him next week. I will post the results here.
PS: really forgot to post that I raid 10men xD
Same here. We started trying halfus heroic this week and we dont have an active priest so we are have a lot of healing problems atm.Quote:
Originally Posted by gacktt
Good luck with other hardmodes, there are some good reasons almost all progression guilds went back to 25 mans. And having all your team in 359 won't help either if they aren't the right classes for that boss or another.Quote:
Originally Posted by xKill
Just check some heroic halfus logs on wws, there's not a handful of kills without at least one if not 2 disc priests (3 tanks helps, too). If you have a shadow just have him respecc, hitting more or less four buttons isn't to hard (painsup/raidbubble/smite/poh).
Halfus can also be cheesed very nicely with large numbers of paladins as Bubble and BoP both can be used to remove the healing debuff with some quick fingers on a cancelaura macro. You can eliminate the healing debuff completely with 2 prot pallies until the Scion is down making things much easier.
Everyone I've seen seems to do it similarly with the drakes killing either Whelps > Scion or Whelps > Storm followed by the other and Time while ignoring Slate (the 12 second stun is really useless since by the time you get it, it doesn't help). Halfus himself is way weaker than the drakes too so theres no point in letting a drake out that you don't need.
We're about to give him a go in our 10 man though and I think we'll try with 2 tanks, 3 healers and switch it to 3 tanks, 3 healers if we have trouble. DPS doesn't seem too bad on the fight, especially if you have fire mages and warlocks to put out their crazy numbers from spreading dots off halfus with bonus damage.
I never quite understood the Smite priest, someone told me its an exploit too. Apparently the healing from Smite ignores healing debuffs on you so you can spam heal a tank on Halfus with good positioning and never worry about the debuff?
Smite healing with Atonement spec used to ignore MS effects but was hotfixed.
Cause Halfus takes extra damage due to the number of whelp/drakes you release, Smite Healing is really good here. With just whelps/storm/scion, that's 150% damage increase on Halfus. Smite away and get 16k to 18k dps/hps.
Ah glad they caught that. Yeah its still really good cause of the damage boost causing increased healing like you said. The extra DPS really doesn't hurt since the enrage can be kinda tight depending on your comp and gear.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quave
It is heroic modes, they are tuned around raid stacking. Just as most strats in 25 man call for 5 tanks and 8-9 heals, 10 mans will need to stack as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by gacktt
We tried halfus 25 HM today with 3 warri 1 paladin tank. We get to 50% with no problems and kill storm/time/whelps then halfus.
The major problem comes with aoe stun/dmg in the sub 50% phase which often kills the raid or the tanks.
How do you keep the tanks alive? Cooldowns when on which tank? Do you still have all tanks on one spot? Do you taunt the drakes away from the tanks when roar comes?
Any ideas?
EDIT: Any confirmation that smite heal going through malovent strikes debuff is hotfixed? Cannot find anything regarding this in the blueposts.
Well since Halfus himself isn't putting out any dmg when casting furious roar the only tanks taking dmg are those tanking the drakes.
Have drake tanks use CD's plus external cd's. Also having pally's bubble and heal through the stun or bop another healer so they can heal through the stun obviously helps a lot.
Yes the Hotfix is live (Atonement and MS effects).
I've only done Halfus Heroic in 10s and not 25s. But we don't push halfus below 50% unless Storm, Scion, Time and Whelps are all dead.