If it's far from a PVP encounter, but still "kind of [looks] like one", then how would this be described? I am not familiar with many bossfights where DR is a factor (for a moment I almost brought up the Moorabi fight in GD, but then remembered that the transform cast time is not tied to DR but how much health he has), please educate me if this is not the case. The 75% reduction in AOE damage is a hard pill to swallow after Blizz has trained everyone to just gather groups of mobs together and AOE them down. (Linking trash pull strategies are poor descriptors, but I'm willing to bet this is the first thing most groups attempted if they had NOT seen a strategy before engaging these mobs.)Originally Posted by Vulgrym
This is clearly a PVP-style encounter as it forces people to take into account several things that normally do not apply in a PVE encounter:
-DR on CC
-Almost a complete lack of an aggro table (almost)
-a nasty buff (75% AOE Dmg reduction) for the enemies that is a clear departure from the current Blizzard mindset.
I'm willing to say we perhaps just did not have the DPS to clear this fight, or that we still don't have a complete grasp on the encounter. My post wasn't intended to be a "OMG, I hate PVP!!" statement. Perhaps instead of choosing to interpret the post like that, someone could have offered a bit of advice for a group that continues to admit that this PVP-style encounter gave them a rather hard time.
Forgive me!
FoK interrupt (throwing specialization in combat tree) specced rogue ftw - no crowd control required. over 70 interrupts and wound/crippling poison on all...good for razorscale adds too. i died of course like i always do but after the heals and several other faction guys were down and it was not hard after that. Having the priest on mass dispel duty rather than healing is helpful too.
Last edited by priapus; 08-24-2009 at 07:04 AM.
Three elements are key to this encounter:
Crowd Control
Dispells
Not panicking
After we got these three things sorted, they went down fairly easily
there is one thing to remember is my exsperience, only in 10 man for my part..
but think PVP..!! it is essential, think pvp..
Use all inttrupts, stuns, bubble all pvp aspect of your char EVEN in pve spec use em when ever you can, i played a frost mage and didnt have High dps in this fight in 10 man, but i surely slowed, kited CS the mage boomkin etc.
And our fight we where left with only 2 dead.! and that was our second try only .! so it can be done if ppl think PVP and not PVE
we noticed the champions are tauntable for the duration of the taunt. also large burts damage can also redirect their attention. had all the warriors go prot. they work much similar at the very least like rogues by keepin the mobs stunned up. Spam the heck outta the 'taunt bad guy button' and this makes for plenty of room for the remaining dps and heals to do their jobs
Hand of Reckoning does work. As a Ret Pally I kited the Rogue with HoR and JoJ. I fully dotted him up with SoV to keep him from vanishing on me. On the few prior failed attempts he was running wild killing our priests so I decided to simply HoR him right at the initial pull and just kite him around the outside of the arena. I changed to my PvP offspec for a little more survivability, reduced fear, improved Righteous Fury, reduced HoP cooldown, the improvement to HoF etc. etc. I kept SS up on myself and was giving myself instant heals the same as I would if I was in a BG or whatever. I did need a heal from time to time but didn't feel like I was in too much danger. The further I kept him from everyone else the less likely he was to change focus. I noticed some diminishing returns but the DR seemingly would reset every so often and then I'd stun him. . .
In our kill we took down the Shaman first, the healing Priest 2nd and left the Holy Pally for last pretty much. After two of the healers were dead we swithced to the Warrior because he seemed to be eating the cloth wearers up the most with Bladestorm and whatnot. Then we focused rogue so I started kiting the DK around a hunter's frost trap which was hilarious for me because I hate being kited around that stuff in arena. Whenever I saw someone that was low on health I'd change focus to burn down the guy with low health and then switch back to kiting which is a lot like I would do in the BGs. Have my friends do all the dirty work and then I swoop in for the killing blow.I can't remember what order we killed everything else in but at that point it's easy sauce anyway.
We actually 24 manned the successful attempt as it was getting late and peeps were starting to log off to go to bed. No point in me mentioning that I guess.
In regards to this being a PvE or PvP fight, I can say this: The experience I've gotten in BGs and Arena has made me a better raider. It improves one's situational awareness. I for one, think this is the most fun fight thus far and I hope to see more like it in the future.
--It didn't occur to me at the time but I would think that Righteous Defense would work as well in between HoR cooldowns, which I believe are only 8 seconds to begin with. I'll try this on Wednesday and get back to ya.
Last edited by Belfast; 08-25-2009 at 07:02 AM.
I have good tips, my guild tried this for 3 days with few tries, we were having a lot of issues on the first 2 days. Got this monday on the last shot.
If you didnt manage to kill yet, read this:
-Dont give up. Put your guild to do it as max as you can.
The basics of this fight:
-Assign the ccers and most important, keep em alive at all costs. If they die is unlikely that you will pick it up with a good pace. Make clear to the CCers that first come their survival and then comes the CC.
-Tanks ARE GOOD on this fight. They can take out the meeles from the game and the meeles are the big couse of wipes if not controlled. We assigned 3 tanks for 3 meeles.
-If you get the resto druid, lock him down. The combo Banish/cyclone is the best in game for locking down, it wont break. Have the druid learn how to lock down a target using the bear and cat form. We killed the druid for last.
-The rogue needs to be controled. CC on him is not good, have him tanked by a prot warrior or a dk or have him killed fast. We killed him after the holy priest. On our many many wipes, ppl always complained about the rogue killing 1 by one. If your guild cant manage scape from him, have him controled and killed fast.
This fight is all about practice. I almost gave up, but after you understand the fight and keep trying, gets easy. After the 25, we got the 10 man in less than 20 minutes. Rolled over em.
To all the people QQ'ing about that it's a PvP fight:
I haven't played a single arena match in my entire life, last bg was i think a wg a month ago, but this boss is really just another test of your (and moreso than other fights this raid) team's abilities.
You still play against a computer. I'm speaking from a healer's perspective, you wouldn't stand in a PvE's boss' melee range if you knew he could throw a ww, no? Maybe treating this encounter as a boss dropping aggro one would help?
Ok, maybe it requires you to think outside your normal framework, but given so much complaining about how easy wow is is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is not the first fight where dispelling is important (heigan, noth), not the first time where you will get mob's attention (Wolf or Supremus I think).
But it's still a computer programmed to do certain things, which once known and gotten used to will be as trivial as the previous fights.
It does but you will still need to stun from time to time. I did the same thing last raid.. I took the rogue as my little friend throughout the entire fight. used HoR and RD. When it would go immune I would stun then taunt again when the stun wore off.
The prot warrior put his Viligence on me. Since I was being constantly attacked and he just taunted everything in sight. (mostly the ret pally, warrior and felpuppy) Basically he did nothing but stand near the edge of the room and taunt. Everytime I got hit his taunt came up. He was able to keep them on him. Thus taking the melee out of the fight. Our healers just kept us alive. This allowed the raid to focus ont eh casters and healers.
Last edited by Widdox; 08-25-2009 at 10:41 AM.
The only thing better than being able to tank, is realizing that you no longer need to prove that you can.
Here's a nice strat for frost mages to CC one melle for the entire fight.
For this u need to go full frost, get all the abilities that increase chill duration.
Target the Pally, warrior or maybe the DK. I only tested it on the ret pally.
Start by casting polymorh on the pally, try to be far from everyone else, this way its less likely the adds will attack you and your frost novas wont break the other players CC. In all my tries the paladin was in right of the formation. I flanked him to cast the cc.
After the first 9 secs of poly, cast it again, u will have more 5 secs. Meanwhile u cant try to help dpsing the other adds.
When the poly is about to fade, cast frost nova. He wont move and he doesnt use BoP or hand of freedon, he will only cast a ranged ability that will cause 8k dmg. Frost nova have a 8 sec duration, cast deep freeze when it reaches 1 sec. This way he will be cc for another 5 secs. By the time deep freeze fades, the diminish return will also fade.
Start the rotation again, using poly, poly, frost nova, deep freeze. If your frost nova is in CD, cast cone of cold to slow him.
If any other melle attack you, use Ice Block immediately.
With this strat, u wont help much on dps, but will null one of the champions.
We only lost 3 members in this fight, and this was our second night of tries.
Last edited by Zortrax; 08-25-2009 at 01:38 PM.
From our experience we found it easiest to have alot of DPS classes, spec into PVP specs and use those abilities durring the fight. Shadowfury, FOK interuption, Typhoon, Etc. Being that the mobs have a limited CC duration the gain of all these new forms of CC made the fight much much easier. Of course chain fears, and Banishes on some of the targets as well as any other CC type moves. The fight was very fun and challenging.
Of course sticking to - Burn the healers first worked as well, although we opted to take out the rogue after knocking out 2 healers to stop his random extreme damage.
Alas, I just don't get it. I've read the vast majority of posts on this; some find the fight a breath of fresh air, others a lazy and cheap attempt at variety. Personally, I confess to being with the latter group. I hate this fight and don't want PvP in my PvE encounters.
I understand people are arguing that it's not a PvP encounter, but it really is. Diminishing returns, a complete lack of threat or reliable CC and people being continually locked and stunned are all hallmarks of an arena fight.
It has no business in PvE.
Those who say "they are NPC's who don't do anything you wouldn't expect" are badly missing the point. I don't expect a mage to start using Fan of Knives in arena, either.
Saying all that, this is TankSpot's least useful video to date. I understand the Coliseum is not of the same magnitude of Naxxramas or Ulduar, but this video should, in my opinion, be redone - it contains very little of use and, unfortunately, is inaccurate in places. It also doesn't highlight the most salient points that we found when we finally got this encounter down.
To me, here are the main points to note (10 man):
1) The six NPC's consist of two melee DPS, two ranged and two healers. No more, no less.
2) The two melee DPS are by far and away the most dangerous of the six and MUST be managed.
3) Your raid MUST understand the importance of saving itself and showing durability, vice reliance on healers and just nuking. An immobile player will be a dead player very quickly.
Here's how we did it:
Raid makeup was two tanks (warrior and paladin), two healers (discipline priest and druid) and six DPS.
We used two tanks and had each one take one of the melee enemies. While Taunt suffers from diminishing returns, you can still use other abilities to keep these mobs away from more vulnerable raid members. As a protection warrior, I have Concussion Blow, Shockwave and Intimidating Shout with which to lock down mobs and you should never underestimate how good Demoralizing Shout and Thunderclap are in this fight. If you're good and want to start switching stances, Hamstring is also tip top. Spell Reflect should also always be on cooldown.
The healers have to die first and I recommend picking the one with the lowest armour first. Application of the Mortal Strike debuff helps wonderfully, while a designated interrupt should be assigned to the one that is to be killed second. We also had a warlock use Curse of Tongues on the healer currently being killed. If the holy paladin happens to be part of the group make up you're faced with, they will bubble themselves or their team mates when they hit 30% health. Have Mass Dispel or Shattering Throw ready for it. Believe me - the fight loses 70% of its difficulty when the healers die, so all of your effort should go into this.
Take a holy/discipline priest and tell them to spam the hell out of Mass Dispel. Honestly. One healer is enough to top off people getting attacked while the fight is going on and Mass Dispel will see your raid with more freedom. Look for an average of over 200 dispels throughout the fight.
Do not bother with too much CC after the pull. Things like Polymorph and Death Coil could be used on random enemies to avoid diminishing returns, but CC is not as helpful as you may think. The exception to the rule in this case is Piercing Howl - it's terrific.
In any event, I can summarise by saying:
Kill the two healers first.
Lock down the two melee as much as you possibly can.
Spam dispels.
Stay mobile and work to survive.
I have loved Project Marmot from its inception and our guild wouldn't have gotten through half of what it has without it. The videos on this site are required viewing for all of my raiders.
But this one needs redone. Seriously, I got almost nothing from it and it is, in fact, flat out wrong in one of its most fundamental assertions (the part about one healer).
Same here AkeberOur raid leader is one of those people that hate pvp the most in the guild, but he loves this fight. As does the tank team. Dunno why though. Got the 25 man kill today.
Some bad mistakes in the beginning resulted in alot of people dying so in the end it was 3 of the tanks, 3 mages, 1 resto druid, 1 holy pally and 2 random dps fighting. Ofcourse the resto druids combat ress was on cd and the shamans had ankh cds >_<
Took us 16:25 mins to kill ^^ No trinket though :/
Noraxe
Magtheridon EU
we beat this last week, this week we could not kill the totems in 25, did anything change?
I have to agree with Zeelviren on this one, i don't think the 10man video really gave me any useful advice other than we'd be facing 6 mobs.
Our 10man tried the Faction Champs for the first time last night and got our asses handed to us on a plate.
I must admit there were a lot of mistakes made mind you, it certianly does punish players not used to doing arena. Every spell in the book has to be used on this fight and a lot of PvE players who have spent many a month refining dps rotations are just not used to the requirements of this fight.
Still an interesting fight none the less and a bit of a refeshing chnage i guess.
First of let me say i only have experience with 10 man. Mass dispells and FoK is a god send in this fight. Focus fire also helps to shorthen the agony.
But most important thing with this fight is mentality.
Problem today is that everyone in PvE is a slacker and those that say otherwise should just look at boss fights. Players on normal bosses train so many times that they know what ability comes at what times, what to do in response to that and so on. And once you master a fight (read know it by hearth) you can slack all you want.
This fight is different in nature, as all fights should be imo. This fight represents a boss that has random abilities on aproximatly same level as players that uses them in same fashion as players and responds on our abilities acordingly.
Why is this fight impossible for many? Becouse they are used to bosses that are easy. The moment they face factions champions they a petrified becouse they actually have to play 100% like imo bosses should be played.
So change mentality, dont whine but rather start knowing your class and work as a team and this boss will fall naturally.
I'm guessing the opponents you faced had changed for last week to this week. One of the "problems" with this fight is going to be the differing combinations of opponents you face each week.
We had this group last night, and after few attempts we decied to call it, We have a problem with your strat just because the facts that rogue was raping the hell out our healers, there are few things we didn'nt do, like being spread enough or letting the NPC to gather up, so my questiong is:
How effective is to assign tanks/kitters to babysit the plate wearers and that rogue? we have 2 prot warriors (that can go DPS but we choose not to, due the better CC/stuns in prot) and 2-3 hunters that can kitte things very well, would you say:
Shaman > DK > Priest > Rogue? > Casters?
We found that the druid is easy to control using locks to banish/fear and a shamman to purge spam the DPS target to remove HOTS.
We think that killing 2 healers on a row will increase the dmg on our raid and will make things easier for our healers/CCers.
Any suggestion?
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity. - Albert Einstein
so the totems are still killable... just cant be targeted with macros...
Downed this again this week on 10-man. Compared to last week though, this week seemed a whole lot easier. We cleared this from first boss to the twins in under an hour. We were expecting this fight to take a lot of time, since last week, we wiped a few times on this. But this week, we did it with one try. Has this been nerfed?
How we did this was to burn down the healers quickly, while having someone kite the rogue and the warrior. Two plates that had taunt abilities (Warrior and Deathknight) were assigned to do this. Chaining the rogue consistently and notifying the raid of it's current target really helped keep his damage under control. Same thing with the warrior.
Anyone else find this encounter a lot easier now than last week?
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