One Light (25) roadblock: Yogg/Sara Healing themselves!

[Tzi]

Looking for advice here, if any have any...

I put together a one-time group from my raiding alliance to burn through Ulduar 25 and get ourselves the Ironbound drake meta. We've been extending for two weeks and picking them off one-by-one. Now, after crushing every other hard mode, we've hit a brick wall on One Light. Why? Because Sara is healing herself, and possibly Yogg himself.

Sara's health periodically increases, which means it takes on average 12-14 Guardians to trigger phase 1 if you time the explosions right. Worse yet, if you don't time them right and we explode the "final" one while she's casting (she can't transition mid-cast), she heals right after, and the phase could theoretically go on indefinitely.

Who cares about phase 1, right, it's cake? Well, unfortunately, no. Because it takes so long to trigger phase 2 -- far longer than it ever did back when we were wearing Ulduar gear -- by the time she flips, the adds are spawning very fast. That means we enter the transition with 4+ Guardians up. This usually means that not only do we start off right away behind on tentacles but we often have early deaths (tanks, melee from explosions, constrictors because DPS is split too much ways). We've seen that when phase 2 starts off this terrible, we never recover and everything snowballs from there.

The icing on the cake is that Yogg himself appears to heal between brain phases, although this is a little harder to confirm (at least one healing class was mind controlled and may be to blame). Even with us massively overgearing the encounter, the brain room team struggles to flip to phase 3 fast enough to avoid the already-behind-tentacle-group from getting overrun.

We're not a super elite group, but most of us are decent raiders, so I really don't think the issue is us sucking. Of course it has taken some work and learning and there is room for improvement, but we would have had this fight down already if not for the bug.

Now that we've spend over five hours working on him (for contrast, Firefighter took just over two), I'm ready to concede that we are incapable of beating him with the bug. It is heartbreaking after three weeks of hard work. As raid leader, I feel like I've really let the team down after all the work they've put it.

TL;DR: There is an obvious bug on Yogg that is making him difficult, if not impossible, to beat.

So what I want to know is:

(a) Have any of the guilds out there who farm 25man Yogg+0 weekly for the mount beaten him since 4.0.1? If so, how did you handle the healing?

(b) Does anyone have any fabulous ideas to try because we totally abandon hope of killing him?

Tonight is the last night of the raid and if I can't come up with any solid ideas, I have to tell my raid that we're giving up.

FWIW, here are other bug reports on this issue: Here, Here, Here and Here. Blizzard gives a "this may be a bug but sorry we can't help you" response to tickets.

[Icosiol]

I spent 7 months trying to teach PuG's how to do this one and we finally got it about two weeks ago. Here's what we did:

Phase 1: As you've found out, this phase sets you up for success or failure. Most of my PuG's were just failing with the one tank strat. so I adopted the two tank strat which is - One tank stands under Sara, while the other tank picks up the Ads. Mark the Ad tank (I prefer Star as it's more visible in a green and blue room) and melee follows that tank. When the mob reaches 50%, the tank with Sara taunts and melee stays with the Ad tank where ever he goes. Ranged finishes off the Ad and make sure it's killed right on top of Sara. Sara does heal a bit so don't be discouraged. Make sure nobody touches the clouds and it's rinse, repeat. The ads come faster as time goes on so you want to make sure that you get 8 downed quickly. If 8 are killed on top of Sara, you enter Phase 2, and you clean up the remaining ads preferably before the initial start of Phase 2.

Phase 2: First you must assign your "Brain" group which consists of 9 melee dps (or Hunter if you run out of melee dpsr's) and 1 healer. Assign which portal they enter and call out for them to get to their portals 10-15 sec before they spawn. Make sure "Brain" group faces away from the skulls to keep their sanity and split off equally to take out their targets so that they're on the brain with as much time to spare. You're looking at a bogey time of 20-30sec on the brain. Make sure they click on the portal to leave the brain so announce for them to get out at least 5 sec before they get trapped.
Top group consists of your ranged dps, healers and tanks. Constrictors are top priority. You see a Constrictor tentacle, all dps should be on it. Crusher is 2nd in priority followed by the Corruptors. Make sure you take them out in that order and move as a group. If you decide to go left, make sure the entire raid moves left and you'll find shit goes down quickly. Stay away from anybody who gets Malady of the Mind, and those that get linked immediately run to each other.

Phase 3: Assign before hand where you want the rally point to be. I like being at Yoggs mouth as it's easy for everybody to understand where that is. If they don't, kick them from your raid. Tanks and melee should face away from Yogg at all times. Tanks pick up the adds, Melee kills the adds. Ranged dps nukes Yogg but they must look away from Yogg when he does his Insane thing. (I forget what it's called). Healers must be aware that the tanks get POUNDED by the ads at first, but they lose power when they loose health. If your entire raid is up and you've got good position and nobody goes insane, GG, you got yourself a drake.

PS: This takes a lot of time and patience. This is a mechanic fight, not a dps race. I told everybody to turn off their dps meters because I could give two shits about it. I just wanted everybody to remain alive. Once they got that in their heads, we won. Good luck.

[Quinafoi]

I think your advice is a little out of context since the particular topic has to deal with working with the new bugs the 4.0.1 patch has caused in the Yogg-Saron encounter. In particular, since Sara heals during phase one from no source, you require more than 8 adds to push her into phase two. This is always the case now. Since the rate at which adds spawn increases over time, simply by saying you require 10 adds to push her into the second phase means the rate adds are spawning at that time is faster. This means instead of having one add extra entering the second phase, you now have two, three, or even four adds piled up simply because the rate they spawn increases the logner the phase runs. Also since she can't transition into phase 2 mid cast, if the random healing mechanic occurs during a cast she can effectively be droped to 1 hit point and heal before completing her cast causing her to not trigger the phase transition. Since this event can occur, it is also conceivable that this event always occur thus leading to the possibility that phase 2 never being triggered, though most of the time she would only get the unfortunate heal form 1 hit point once and the next explosion would be close enough in time that the random healing does not occur.

This isn't a problem with understanding how to do the fight. The problem stems from the fact that the fight is fundamentally altered by the introduction of bugs to the encounter. What the original poster is asking for is advice regarding dealing with the new dynamics of the encounter that you didn't have to deal with before because of the bugs introduced in the 4.0.1 patch.

Please read and understand the question before posting advice otherwise you end up posting irrelevant information. Simply restating the fundamental strategy as executed long ago does not address the issue of "new changes to the encounter".

[tecumsa]

We did yogg+0 for the mount after 4.0.1 dropped, and saw some of the healing going to sara. With spawning an extra guardian by having someone intentionally walking into a cloud, we never entered phase 2 with an extra guardian. The only thing we made sure to do as a raid was to make sure the Shaman weren't dropping healing stream totem, or any healers using AoE heals. The combat log doesn't show who or what is healing sara, so just be cautious.

The healing going to Yogg during the other 2 phases didn't happen for us at all, and we didn't have anyone get mind-controlled either. So most likely that is what happened.