Coliseum Faction Champions

[LazarusAdam]

Downed this yesterday on 10 man

Opponent composition:
Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman, SV Hunter, Arcane Mage, Frost DK, Arms Warrior

Order of Destruction:
Shaman, DK, Warrior, Mage, Paladin, Hunter's pet(although kinda unnecessary), Hunter.

Was kinda smooth. Take down one healer, and keep up a constant barrage of interrupts and stuns on the other while the rest of the group got burned down.

[Bebelo]

Guild: Os Intocáveis

Our 10 man core had no problems with the encounter, after 1 wipe on the first week we defeated them with 2 casualties. This week we had it 1 shotted.
Group we faced was: Holy Pally / Resto Druid / Enhance Shaman / Hunter / Lock / Mage
Second week: Resto Druid / Holy (?) Priest / DK / Warrior / Rogue / Mage

Both times were pretty much standard PvP priorities... We tried locking the druid on our first attempt, but CC just won't hold him enough. Banish is dispellable, and is too short after the first application.

We decided to focus him down first, moving to the Enhance Shaman / Rogue as a second target... These were the most dangerous DPSers, Rogue can Shadowstep+Fok (or fu**) a clothie very quickly with the aid of wound + cripp poison, and the shaman needs one person to be stomping totems all the time, nearly locking one person down as long as he's alive.

A melee heavy group proved to be far harder than our first week's encounter, best ways to keep them slowed were Piercing howl+ Frost Trap. Entangling roots and Chains of Ice will only cut it if no one on their side can dispell (They are extremely efective at doing so). Even so, any member being focused by 2 melee is most surely dead if not protected immediately.


Our 25 man group got pounded endlessly both weeks. We still didnt score kill on them. This week we had the best results with a unusual strategy.

Their raid was: Rogue / Warrior / DK / Ret Pally / Resto Druid / Resto Shaman / Holy Priest / Mage / Hunter / Shadow Priest

Our strategy consists of a chain-use of Death Grip, isolating one of their healers out of their range at the very start of the fight.

Our raid was at the extreme opposite side of the room, with a DK, a hunter and a warrior in the middle of the room.

1- The DK starts the pull with DG, the warrior immediately charges+Swap defensive+Shield wall + Challenging roar and Piercing Howl Spam. Meanwhile, the hunter has to set the frost trap in their path. After they start ignoring the warrior, it's the time to use Intimidating shout.

2- After the first DK used DG, a second one, on the side of the raid uses it right away. Our Skull was the resto druid, we had to burn him down with Blood Lust in 20 secs or so, before his group could aid him. We had a rogue using his stuns, followed by Silence. It was enough time to burn him down in every try.

Notes: Our middle Map DK was frost specced, so hungering cold was also used to hold the team down before the Intimidating Shout.

We still couldnt defeat the 10 of them after burning his 1st healer. Their melee, specially the rogue, can burn down clothies very quickly.

Dispelling our next focus kept me (Shadowpriest) locked in almost every GCD. I had 90-200 Dispells in every attempt. Not dispelling those HoT's / Earth shield makes it impossible to burn anything else down.

Yet, our best try was killing Resto druid then the rogue. I guess the best third would be the shaman, since his instants need someone perma-dispelling and his totems need someone fully dedicated to destroying them.

[Halgreg]

We finally downed this in our guild last night on 25-man. One of the strategies we employed was doing man on man coverage for the targets and having everyone else rest of the raid focus on their healers one by one (druid, shaman, priest). Hunter, Mage, and Shadow priest were controlled by dedicated ranged folk while the melee (Rogue, Warrior, DK, and Ret Pally) were "tanked" one on one by tanks and plate melee. I was on the Ret Pally to dispel any shields he put up with shield slam, and I stayed in prot spec.

I had a lot of fun with this fight. I cycled in every stun I had (improved revenge when it lit up, concussion blow, shockwave, tauren stomp, warbringer charge), Shield Bashed for interrupts and the daze snare effect, disarmed, and intimidating shouted, as well as kept him debuffed with demo shout and thunderclap. If he was still getting away, I regularly taunted to keep him focused on me and to lure him into a position where I can do revenge on him. Shockwave, Intimidating Shout, and even Challenging Shout were good to keeping a group of mobs (if he happened to run into a group) distracted while the focus fire group did their job on their healers.

All in all, it comes down to the fact that they have 10 and you have 25. If you assign people to "cover" them to keep them busy, then assemble the others to really burn down their healers, then you just muscle them out by sheer numbers.

Ah yes, one last thing. If you do decide to go this route, wear a set that will grant you rage from the damage you do (i.e. a DPS focused set) because otherwise, you will most likely get rage starved.

[Wingnut]

All three of our 10 man teams destroyed this, but when we got to 25 man, it was a completely different story. As soon as we pull, the NPCs zerg our healers. We tried alot of different methods, but the healers are just getting destroyed. Tried several different angles of cc too. Funny thing is, we one shot everything up to this fight.

[jaydee]

Tried this again on 25-man last night. We managed to down this last week, but not last night.

For the rogue, what we did was have me try to keep him away by cycling through taunts, death grips and chains of ice. It's pretty effective, just be sure to save death grip for when he shadow steps.

Most we were able to achieve was down 2 healers, (Priest + Holy Pally) but by the time we were drilling down the Resto Druid, half the raid's already down.

It's best to have the dangerous Melee bosses marked, and have your cloth-wearers ready to run whenever they see the mark close to them.

The warrior Bladestorming within the pack of DPS drilling down the heals is also a bad idea.

We then thought about having 4 DKs opening up with 4x armies, but that ended up with half the raid DCing

Next attempt, I'll spec for Hungering Cold and Chillbains for this fight. Just for the sole purpose of kiting/cc.

[Dwaermathrax]

I hate to say but our guild is getting ROFLstomped by the 25 man version of this. We have 2 clears of the 10 man for each of 2 different 10 man groups.

I understand to have tanks lock up melee, and cc everyone else. But, I feel like we are failing at the CC. Could someone please treat me like I don't know anything about raid leading and explain who they have CCing and in what order? We have at least 2 of every class in our 25 man. It seems like the Hunter's cool down is too long and the druids doesn't last long enough, bleh. I think I just don't understand CC as well as some of you.

Thanks!
DW

[rambaral]

I'm not sure I mentioned this here yet but we had over 200 interrupts from Fan of Knives spam on our kill. The ability to do this will be removed in 3.2.2 but for this week at least it's very valuable to know. (Aliena noted it in her movie as well)

The number of interrupts from FoK is inflated due to a bug in how it gets parsed, I believe it's around 7 times the actual amount IIRC (still alot).

The fact remains though that FoK will break CC, so using it to apply poisons/interrupt is a judgment call on priorities. The ability to interrupt is indeed going away in 3.2.2, so another judgment call is if you want to use it now - making it harder when it gets removed - or to go ahead and get used to it not being there.

One final point is that thrown spec (making FoK able to interrupt) is deep in the combat tree, not something a PVP rogue would have in their build, so if you are having your raid spec PVP for the fight, that ability likely won't be there.

[Daimon]

After a late night of wipes (4-5) We went the next day and was 1 shoot, this is what we learned:
In 25m or 10m the golden strat is: use tanks to taunt the plate wearers and the melee (Rogue/Shammy/Feral) even they behave as PVP taunt works wonderful, I was "tanking" the rogue and basically when I got the inmune and he was going for a clothie, then /charge /CB and taunt again when breaks and start all the taun spam. Even when they just focus you for half a second they won't return to the same previous target therefore they won't hit a player more than once.
They rly behave sort of PVE in that matter.
Do not put too much CC in each since you want to nuke the healers, just control the 3rd healer and have everybody to random CC the mobs and kill the 1st two or do healer>dps>healer>dps.
We killed: resto shamman>rogue>Disc Priest> DK>Warr>Ret > casters
after the plates are dead you win. SP, Lock, mage and hunter didn't pose any difficulty at all.
After the healers kill the plate melee ASAP and you win, controlling the rogue is very easy for a prot warr.

[Nicole]

The odd thing is that you guys always talk about the melee being the most dangerous, such as DK, ret paladin, Warrior, Rogue, but when we look at our meters it's always the locks, mages and shadowpriest being top on damage out of the enemies, even when we don't have tanks on the melee. I wish there was a way to find out which enemy has the most killing blows, because maybe that would be a better statistic to look at, but for example one of our Holy Pallies said the mage 2 shot him.

[Grawr]

We found the melee tended to do higher damage out put in a shorter space of time, where as the casters were doing constant fairly low damage. ie burst vs sustained, with the sustained showing up higher on the meters but being much easier to counter. Having both tanked and healed this encounter I can say it's kinda hard to heal through a melee burst on a holy priest when you're locked out of your spells.

[Brittmari]

I'm baffled by the people who post that this is a pvp encounter. The most common argument is that the mechanic of diminishing returns on cc is in effect. This is a boss fight, right? What other boss fights allow cc at all? So if all the Champions were immune to cc, that would make it a pve fight?

Another argument is that there are 10 bosses. So that makes High King Maulgar and Fathom-Lord Kalithress pvp fights too?

Random aggro tables and different threat mechanics are nothing new either.

Stop thinking of this as a pvp encounter, learn each npc's abilities and vulnerabilities, look through your spellbooks at all the abilities you don't have on your bar and you'll be 90% of the way to defeating the Faction Champions.

Nicole: Another reason the ranged do more damage to your raid is because they are ranged. They select a target and start doing damage. The melee have to move to their target before starting damage, and if your raiders are any good, they are already running away. So there is much more uptime on ranged npc attacks than there is on melee npcs. As far as seeing Killing Blows from npcs, you should upload your combatlogs to World of Logs and you can see quickly how each person in your raid died. Not really statistics, but very useful for your purposes.

[jaydee]

Downed this tonight on 25 man on a single attempt with just one person dead but b'ressed. This is the outline of the tactic that worked for us.

1. Identify the dangerous melee bosses (Rogue, Warrior, Paladin, DK) and each of these bosses get one healer assigned to them.
2. The assigned healers should have "target of target" enabled so they know which raid member these bosses are going for.
3. These healers should heal whoever these bosses are targeting, preempting any attempt to burn down any raid member
4. A peeler/kiter needs to be assigned to these dangerous melee bosses as well. Prot warrior stuns and DK kiting talents are extremely useful here, as well as the talented Death Grip (chillbains + death grip works great against the rogue's sstep).
5. Keep interrupts on each of the boss healers.
6. Burn down the healers one by one.
7. Make sure you don't let the warrior lose within your burn down group.

[LazarusAdam]

I think people are misconstruing what some of the posters are saying. It is not a PVP encounter... it is PVP style. Where you have to think both as a PVP player and a PVE player. You can't just use straight PVE tactics. You opponents in this fight use some of the same mechanics that a good PVP team will use, including trinkets, CoS, Paladin BoPs, etc.. I am not a good PVPer, but I have to think like one in this fight. I have to keep an eye open, as a hunter, and not just sit in a standard shot rotation. I have to be ready to tranq away BoPs, Hots, Heroisms, etc. to keep us from getting blown down by the burst dmg after some of the AoEs buffs that get cast. I also have to be ready to trap any given ranged that is doing mass dmg to the group. Things that don't normally get done in a standard boss fight but is quite often done in PVP.

So when people say it is a PVP fight, they are half right. It is a PVP scenario in a PVE wrapping.

Nicole: Britt is correct. Ranged doesn't usually have to move to start dmg, where as a melee class has to get into melee range to start doing damage. That could take as much as 1-2 seconds and in that time a ranged could already be as much as 4-10k ahead of the melee in total damage and already have as many as 2-3 DoTs or spell effects that increase the damage they do. So when you see that the SPriests, Mages, Warlocks, and sometimes the Hunters are up on the top of the damage charts, that is completely normal.

[Muffin Man]

-a nasty buff (75% AOE Dmg reduction) for the enemies that is a clear departure from the current Blizzard mindset.

This comment comes up a lot with regards to this fight. So this isn't just directed at you, but there are several fights where Blizzard has made it impossible to just AoE everything down.

Freya +3 the detonating lashers will probably kill your group if you try to AoE them down. (Oh and they drop aggro and chase random people just like this encounter too...)

4 HM when it first came out, the marks would deal too much damage and most raids didn't have enough dps to stack thane and baron in the back to aoe two horsemen at a time (not to mention the two in the back didn't even move).

IC, they heal to full whenever you kill one, so no point AoE-ing them down.

Emalon adds - they didn't heal to full, but one spawned whenever one died, so you only AoE-ed to pad the dps meters (seen plenty of people do this btw).

KT - the adds had too much life to kill in a reasonable amount of time so you just went for KT and healed through the add damage. Again AoE-ing would be a waste of time.

There are probably more/better examples but generally speaking boss encounters are usually a single boss so that also throws people about the champs I think.

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.

Not to be a Tankspot groupie, but given the very random nature of the fight I'm not surprised this video is as vague as it is. In fact your assertions aren't even correct, which again isn't a surprise since after 2 raid lock outs with the champs we can't derive any patterns yet (Tankspot did the video with just 1 lock out even).

First week we had this composition:
disc priest, resto shaman, boomkin, warlock + fel hunter, rogue, ret pally

Second week we had this composion:
ret pally, resto druid, spriest, hunter + cat, enhance shaman, dk

So the second week we had 1 healer (not 2) and 3 melee (again, not 2). In my 2 week sample size (shouldn't be drawing conclusions here really), there are no guarantees on composition.

This fight is just rangy but fortunately they give you plenty of time when you start to mark up targets and get a kill order/strat down. A lot of people split targets having tanks 'tank' melee other groups focus fire target by target (we do this). Some people just spam the hell out of CC, while others ignore it completely (we're somewhere in between). It's just going to take practice; I doubt there are any tried and true strats to this other than dispel... a lot.

I spoke to our RL after our second kill and he mentioned as a healer it was an adjustment because there's more raid damage but there's no one-shot someone levels of damage. So he had to get used to focusing more on dispels, offensive CC-ing, ect rather than spamming heals on the tank. I suspect everyone has this kind of adjustment to make (I go arms and play it as if it were a BG rather than tank it).

[Zellviren]

Not to be a Tankspot groupie, but given the very random nature of the fight I'm not surprised this video is as vague as it is. In fact your assertions aren't even correct, which again isn't a surprise since after 2 raid lock outs with the champs we can't derive any patterns yet (Tankspot did the video with just 1 lock out even).

First off, out of curiosity, which of my assertions "aren't even correct"? Granted, after two lockouts, spotting a personal pattern for an individual guild might be tough, but after speaking to numerous people from numerous other guilds on my server (and, of course, reading the input from people here at TankSpot), it appears my assertions are correct.

Have you experienced more than two healers, or less than two?
Have you found the melee combatants to not be the most dangerous to your raid?
Have you found that kiting and personal survivability aren't all that important?

So the second week we had 1 healer (not 2) and 3 melee (again, not 2). In my 2 week sample size (shouldn't be drawing conclusions here really), there are no guarantees on composition.

You are the only person I've seen/heard making this claim. Everyone else has had the composition I posited previously.

This fight is just rangy but fortunately they give you plenty of time when you start to mark up targets and get a kill order/strat down. A lot of people split targets having tanks 'tank' melee other groups focus fire target by target (we do this). Some people just spam the hell out of CC, while others ignore it completely (we're somewhere in between). It's just going to take practice; I doubt there are any tried and true strats to this other than dispel... a lot.

Generally speaking, I don't disagree. But while your decisions depend on the group make up you're faced with, as well as your own raid, and the fact your strategy will have to differ to make best use of what you've got, this is exactly how you would approach an arena match.

And, sorry to say, if I want arena I will form a team and PLAY arena. It has absolutely no place in PvE raid content. Personally, I'd rather they increased the difficulty of the other encounters significantly as opposed to providing this lazily designed encounter in lieu of genuine depth to this raid.

I spoke to our RL after our second kill and he mentioned as a healer it was an adjustment because there's more raid damage but there's no one-shot someone levels of damage. So he had to get used to focusing more on dispels, offensive CC-ing, ect rather than spamming heals on the tank. I suspect everyone has this kind of adjustment to make (I go arms and play it as if it were a BG rather than tank it).

There you go; you play it as if it were a BG.

How much more "PvP orientated" can you get?

I hear those that are saying "you just have to learn to use things you never thought you had to". And while that sounds great, I say again, that's what PvP content is for. Personally, the reason I enjoy PvE is because I like to look at an encounter in its entirety, figure out the best strategy and commit to it (TankSpot is generally a huge help in this). It changes slightly depending on our OWN group make up, but that's with a certain amount of min-maxing. The meat and bones of a PvE encounter shouldn't change so drastically week to week where you are practically having to learn a new encounter every reset.

Of course, the fans of this type of sloppy design will say "you just want a pre-described encounter to make your job easy".

Erm, no.

Blizzard have already proven with Alone in the Darkness or Firefighter just how difficult they can make an encounter without stupidly randomising it on a weekly basis. Yet, despite not completing these encounters, none of my raiders have the same frustration at failing as they do with the Faction Champions.

Because, regardless of what anyone says, creating a good plan, executing it perfectly well and then seeing it fail because a rogue decided to Shadowstep into the middle of your raid and kill two of them with Fan of Knives, is simply not fun.

[Muffin Man]

First off, out of curiosity, which of my assertions "aren't even correct"? Granted, after two lockouts, spotting a personal pattern for an individual guild might be tough, but after speaking to numerous people from numerous other guilds on my server (and, of course, reading the input from people here at TankSpot), it appears my assertions are correct.

Have you experienced more than two healers, or less than two?
Have you found the melee combatants to not be the most dangerous to your raid?
Have you found that kiting and personal survivability aren't all that important?

You are the only person I've seen/heard making this claim. Everyone else has had the composition I posited previously.

Well. I mentioned why I said your assertions were false. I got a single healer last week. Just scrolling through this thread there are people who had 2 healers / 1 melee / 3 ranged or 2 healers / 3 melee / 1 ranged. So basically it's not a fixed composition like you're claiming.

I actually *don't* find the melee to be the most dangerous, but I realize that's probably more of a raid to raid judgement which is why I didn't say anything.

The first time we cleared champs we had to kill the boomkin after the healers. His cc-ing was just too much for us. We left rogue and dk for last since we drew a warlock and his AoE was annoying.

Second time we went healer, enh shammy, spriest. After a few wipes we realized the spriest was killing us, so we moved him up to third in the order.

I know this is a polarizing fight. I treat it like a bg fight because I actually do pvp and it turns out that the champs are taunt immune on hardmode so tanks are even less useful than we thought. I also said BG instead of Arena because the faction champs act *nothing* like a well run arena team. They don't assist each other, they don't split your group in half via cc to pound the healers, or shut down heals to kill dps one-by-one, ect.

Anyways, people have already made up their mind on whether this fight has a place in the game or not... but it's there. It's just like Malygos P3 and Flame Leviathan, Blizzard wants to try something different. It's also clear that Blizzard wants the entire raid to think a little bit about actively trying to survive, rather than just letting the tanks and healers deal with it. The worms' with acid and fire debuffs, Icehowl's random charge, Anubarak chasing people, the Twin's Vortex, ect. From that perspective the champions fight is a much more extreme version of that. Just keep people alive and out last them.

[Reij]

We finally downed 10 man, but with a different comp. We focused on downing the clothies, then leather wearers, then mail, then plate. So we went Priest, Mage, Rogue, Boomkin, Sham, and Pally. Then 2-shot the twin valkyr. We've managed anubarak down to 1k, so hopefully we'll get it this week.

[Stuart07]

Do rogue dismantles work as it may help when your trying to burst down warrior/paladin

[mwally]

Good strat for a prot warrior on a healer doing interrupts

We decided to burn the holy priest first then go through the melee and other dps and leave the other 2 healers we had up and just interrupt them, which we had a fury warrior on the resto shammy and i was on the holy pally, while we had 3 other tanks on the DK, warrior and rogue.

I am a prot warrior and was on the holy pally interrupting his heals the entire fight since he was the last we killed, which i had 37 interrupts during the fight and should have had easily over 45(sometimes i would get misdirected buy the hunter and have to find my target again or cc'd by one of their guys). Whenever my shield bash, concussion blow, shockwave would be on cooldown i would run a bit away and then wait for him to start to cast a spell and then either charge or use intercept to interrupt them and daze him for a second or so, letting some of my interrupts come off cooldown and being ready to stop more heals.

The only time the holy pally got off a holy light was when i was in the middle of a frost trap and couldn't get far enough away to charge in and interrupt in time, but when i missed one would then would wait when i was far enough away to charge in on his next cast.

So all in all use your charge and intercepts cause they will stop alot of heals.

[fargoa]

Out of all combinations, the toughest would be those with 2 healers in the mobs. Although the strategy is about the same as 1 healer, i.e. to cut down the healers as fast as you can, the mechanic of the fight is dramatically different. That is because you need to find a reliable way to CC the 2nd healer while you are fighting the first one and dodging others mobs (or eating up their damages). However, that is not simple at all. As we all may have seen, most CC methods don't last long and PvP-styled diminished returns come into play here too.
One thing that would definitely help is the raw stamina of every team members and their gears, of course, the higher the better. The guide would be much more informative if such minimal requirement on gears/stamina/resist is suggested.
(PS. I haven't seen any 3-healer packs.)