Ulduar Iron Council (Hard Mode)

[forsakee]

For this hard mode it just requires killing steelbraker last.... Could you go about this normally and work on SB first geting him to 20%ish. Then kill the other 2 adds then finish the fight? Does he heal up? Or could you do this and still get the credit for hard mode

[Jorge]

Each time one of them dies, the other one(s) heal to 100%.

In other news, thanks Cider for the well done explanation, we adopted the positioning for our 10 men kill. Two tries and the big one was done for.

[Gatsuz]

I have a question exactly wich cooldowns were used,i mean for first fusion puch,second,and so on
1 Per fusion on tanks?,or a combination of 2 cds for 2th-3th-4th tank??
If u could answer me this please and thanks beforehand

[Ciderhelm]

1st tank: Me, no cooldowns except maybe Shield Block.

2nd tank: Druid, no cooldowns that I'm aware of. Maybe Fur Wall.

3rd tank: Me, Shield Wall, Pain Suppression (Priest), Last Stand/Enraged. Overlapping so the whole thing is covered.

4th tank: Druid, Divine Sacrifice x 2 (Paladin), Bear Stand.

[Ramnath]

Me, Shield Wall, Pain Suppression (Priest), Last Stand/Enraged. Overlapping so the whole thing is covered.

This is exactly what I did I used my cooldowns to cover the whole thing. We just earned our first 10m hardmode kill last night. I was the second tank as our resident druid tank is typically the MT. We only needed one tank transition.

Also, we killed Brundir first as we found it easier to deal with the interrupts and raid wide damage with me tanking him and Molgeim.

All in all it took us 5 total pulls to get it down.

[Pwnanapuddin]

Question about the encounter in general. As we found with our group, you can completely avoid the Fusion Punch via Anti-Magic Shield because it is considered a negative effect. Would a DK tank be able to pop this right before a meltdown to perhaps block the damage is applied at the end? or is it too supermassive to avoid/mit through those means?

[shelbert]

Question about the encounter in general. As we found with our group, you can completely avoid the Fusion Punch via Anti-Magic Shield because it is considered a negative effect. Would a DK tank be able to pop this right before a meltdown to perhaps block the damage is applied at the end? or is it too supermassive to avoid/mit through those means?

Meltdown just kills the tank, there is no way to avoid that effect.

And seconding the following quote, the extra DPS seconds you get from this approach is a great help:

I would make a note that the range on meltdown is small enough that if the tank is at max melee range, and the dps are directly behind at max melee range, nobody has to move to avoid meltdown. Additionally, if the 2nd tank taunts Steelbreaker during P2, he'll already be 2nd on threat, so you can buy a few seconds extra seconds by just waiting out the first tanks meltdown, and not taunting that swap.

For cooldown usage, we've found that the 1st tank doesn't need any cooldowns at all, the 2nd tank needs cooldown coverage only for fusion punches, and the 3rd tank (and 4th if you're going that route) need cooldown coverage fulltime.

[Gale]

Wow it sounds much more complicated in 25man. We two shot this in 10 man with little thought other than we might need to revive the tank, we didn't and killed him with 15 seconds to spare on the second tanks timer. Albeit I do believe the tank timer is 1 minute in 10 man.

Steelbreaker is MUCH more demanding in 25 than in 10. I managed to 1-shot the 10 man kill with a pug that was mostly formed through the trade channel.

Something that Cider doesn't mention in his video is JoL, it's very useful for fights like this one.

[Kavaren]

Slightly off-topic here, but I was wondering how your gemming was going Cider...even with DR and all.

[Libertarian]

What I don't understand is why you guys don't leave runemaster up for phase2, stop dps low, and wait for a blue rune?

[Meloree]

What I don't understand is why you guys don't leave runemaster up for phase2, stop dps low, and wait for a blue rune?

We've tried it that way and found it both less stable and less repeatable. While it works, you have to stop, and wait for a good setup, sometimes for a good long while. All the time you're waiting you're draining healer mana, and risking "bad luck" wipes. If your dps can't cleanly meet the requirements for Molgeim first, it can buy you a little extra, but doing it in 4 phases isn't too hard on dps, and doing it in 3 isn't really asking a lot from a geared raid.

--
Meloree, <Edge>, Garona

[fr0d0b0ls0n]

Flask of Petrification works on Iron Council?

Have been said that the tank doesn't heal the boss. Is considered an exploit?

[Meloree]

Flask of Petrification works on Iron Council?

No.

--
Meloree, <Edge>, Garona

[Myko]

Why does the ranged soaker with Static Disruption run into the raid after being debuffed?

[mymF.Mirex]

Theres another thing you can do if you dont have 2 geared tanks and which is extremely powerful in the 10 man version:
As soon as you have killed both Brundir and Molgeim (we kill Molgem 2nd to get a blue rune), have a Moonkin switch to feral = bear. Then use "Barkskin", eventually get another external CD and taunt Steelbraker. You will get the "Meltdown"-Debuff and will hopefully survive this due to your higher HP and the use of Cooldowns.
The Maintank needs to taunt immidiately after this (if this fails your attempt is mostly over at this point) and there you go:

NO dead Tank after 60 seconds, healers dont need to switch targets, no CDs used till 60 seconds.
An extremely powerful Druid, as standing in the rune (50% more dmg), having the Meltdown (200% more dmg) and Bloodlust/Heroism ---> 16k DPS or even more.

This way we managed to kill him in 57 seconds with 2 Tanks, 2 Healers and 6 DDs, even though it took us like 20 tries because Phase 2 with both Steelbraker and Molgeim alive means heavy damage is dealt to your entire raid.

EDIT: A disc-priest is a must-have in this fight.

[Tanksforus]

We did it no disc priest, Holy priest, druid and shaman healing.

!st tank get buff run away when 5secs left next tank taunt.
Battle res 1st tank, buff 1st tank, second tank run when 5secs left on buff.and 1st tank taunt. = Win . Make sure that the Punch spell is dispelled as quickly as possible becouse it hits for like 15-20k per .05 seconds

But u dont need extra people to get the buff, we did it just over 1min 10seconds

[Mahntor]

We did it in 10 man's by killing molgeim first, then a mage goes and gets decent aggro on steelbreaker, after Brundir dies, we wait for 1st tank to die, then make sure the mage stays at max range and 2nd on aggro, he then gets the meltdown and 2nd tank needs to taunt asap. Made it very easy.

[Shindig]

Hey Cider, just wondering what the music is called you used for the video want to use it in a video of mine.

[Ferim]

My guild is having alot of trouble doing this hard-mode in 25-man. It seems like RNG is against us, because we've had a hunter, get static disruption and then the other 2 debuffs all at the same time. Currently we have 2 holy pallies, and 1 ret paladin in our 25-man, is it really THAT important to have 2 ret paladins, we can never seem to get both of them on at the same time.

[Roknroll]

We did it last night (2nd night of solid attempts) using the general strategy posted here. World of Logs report is linked below. Our raid comp was:

2 Tanks (druid and DK)
6 healers (2x shaman, paladin, druid, disc priest, holy priest)
6 melee (2x DK, 2x rogue, retadin, warrior
11 ranged (3x warlock, 2x mage, spriest, 3x boomkin, elem sham)

That comp is far from optimal, it's just what we had. Our enh shaman DC'd for the night so one DK had to get improved icy talons which dropped his dps for that fight. Also having 3 boomkins was far from optimal DPS.

The first key to this fight is the transitions and set ups to just get into phase 3. We first gave this a try weeks ago with no real plan, and bad positioning in phase 2 constantly wiped the raid with Static Disruption. We killed Runemaster first, and when he's at 10% we hold off and wait for an overload. Once that goes off, they are positioned together and everyone stacks in Steel's melee hitbox next to Stormcaller. We used 3 soakers (spriests are the best, otherwise warlocks) so they got out at range. Make sure they don't stand behind the Steelbreaker tank (for when he runs out), and make sure they don't stand too far out that they don't get healed.

Our phase 3 strategy was to use 2 soulstones or 2 battle rezzes (1 per tank) to give us 4 tank phases. The first night of attempts we had 3 tanks and 7 healers, and our dps was nowhere close to enough, while tank/raid healing didn't seem to be a problem. We figured that even with dropping a tank and a healer for 2 more dps, we still would need 4 tank phases. To kill him in 3 tank phases the raid needs 126k dps, and to do it in 4 the raid needs 108k dps.

With everyone stacking (melee at steel's back and ranged standing on the steel tank), keeping the raid and tank up was no problem. We never had tanks coming close to dying until the 3rd one. Both shamans just spammed chain heal on the tank, which would keep melee and ranged up. Judgement of light also covered about 30%-50% of the melee healing. I was the holy paladin and non-stop HL spam on the tank put out amazing AoE healing with Glyph of Holy Light. The glyph heal accounted for over 50% of my effective healing, which is huge considering how much damage i'm healing the tank for.

After the first night, we found out there were 2 things preventing us from sucess. First was that we didn't have enough DPS even if everyone survived. That's when we dropped a tank and healer and picked up 2 more dps (roughly a 10% raid dps increase). Second, we really struggled to keep the Static Charged soakers alive during the 3rd tank (and never made it with all of them into the 4th tank). After the 2nd tank dies, there will be 2 people at all times taking 9k-10k evey 3 seconds (after resistance) from the nature aura and Static Disruption will hit for12k when applied.

We saved all our big cooldowns for the transition into the 4th tank and then the duration of the 4th tank. Since we only had two tanks, our druid went first and didn't use any cooldowns (doesn't need them). The DK went 2nd and used IBF just before his taunt, and then AMS on the first Fusion Punch. Both of those are on short timers so they would be back up when he tanks in phase 4. It's also important that your tanks don't resurrect during high damage times. Have them watch for ticks of nature aoe dmg and res just after one. Also, rezzing a couple seconds after Fusion Punch goes out is helpful.

Once the 2nd tank died, we had 2 dedicated healers for the soakers (disc and holy priest). Still didn't use any raid cooldowns for the 3rd tank phase. Just before the taunt into the 4th tank, we popped bubble and divine sacrifice. When a second before that wore off the ret paladin popped his bubble and divine sacrifice. The DK was also using his own cooldowns, and he got pain supression. The 20 seconds of divine sacrifice were absolutely key to have in phase 4, otherwise our soakers would have died instantly. During the 4th tank, they took 14k-15k from Static Disruption when it was cast, and 9k-12k from High Voltage every 3 seconds.

[20:04:27.187] Steelbreaker Static Disruption Esmèralda 14259 (R: 3675)
[20:04:27.187] Esmèralda afflicted by Static Disruption from Steelbreaker
[20:04:28.328] Steelbreaker High Voltage Esmèralda 4650 (A: 7381, R: 788)
[20:04:31.343] Steelbreaker High Voltage Esmèralda 12031 (R: 788)
[20:04:34.390] Steelbreaker High Voltage Esmèralda 9470 (A: 2561, R: 788)
[20:04:35.593] Priscylla's Static Disruption fades
[20:04:37.187] Steelbreaker High Voltage Esmèralda 12031 (R: 788)
[20:04:37.906] Steelbreaker Static Disruption Jimbogankedu 14259 (R: 3675)

We ended up with about 109k raid dps for all of phase 3, and killed him with 7 seconds to spare. Oh, one other thing, we always blew heroism as soon as the first tank got Overwhelming Power. On our kill, we decided to use heroism as soon after the 2nd tank rez (start of the 3rd tank phase). No reason not to do that, since one person dying is a wipe anyway and it gives heroism during the execute phase. It's also a huge healing boost when you need it the most.

World of Logs
Entire Fight
Phase 3 Only

Keys to this fight:
1. Get a good transition/positioning going from phase 1->2 and from 2->3
2. Amazing raid dps (110k for 4 tank phases)
3. Keep the Static Disruption soakers alive during the 3rd and 4th tank phases.