Each time i pug heroic BRC we never make it past Karsh Steelbender. Typically most groups want to try and straight burn him and ignore adds.
From past experience i've seen that when he gains his armor buff back is when he summons the adds. So a strategy i'm wondering about is following:
First the tank taunts him (for example purposes he will get 3 stacks of the debuff each time he goes through the lava). He gains the initial 3 stacks going to the tank. We dps him and when he has about 3 seconds left on the debuff the tank drags him back through the lava and he gains another 3 stacks of the buff.
Dragging him back through before the debuffs fall off won't allow him to spawn adds. So now the boss has 6 stacks of the debuff. 3seconds before they drop the tank drags him through again. Now the boss has 9 stacks of the debuff.
It appears that the aoe damage from dragging him through the lava increases as the debuffs on the boss increase. So i figure about 9 is the limit.
At which point we let the stacks fall off and 3 adds spawn. All 3 dps burn them and the tank makes sure to kite the boss away from adds so the magma won't trigger the debuff.
Rinse and repeat from there. I'm just wondering if this sounds good? Or is there a better way of doing it? The only time i've successfully killed him was with BL and a everyone, including the tank, doing over 9k dps. I usually pug it but sometimes run with guildies.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
You don't wanna do 3 stacks at a time. Ideally you should build it up one by one, but more realistically you should aim for at the most 2. Easiest way to deal with adds is to have a DPS taunt/distracting shot it out and kill them one by one. As long as the tank doesn't touch them the dps should have no problem pulling aggro on them and pulling them away.
Your strategy is spot-on as the safe and easy method for downing him. Although most posts I read say increase his stacks by 1-2 maximum each time. This is done by barely cutting across the circle at an angle, barely grazing the fire, rather than straight through it.
My method was somewhat more hilarious, Get him up to 16 stacks, pop Time Warp and all my CDs.
I like your method Giliandrix to bad i can't find a pug healer to roll that way haha. Ya ideally 1 stack is the best but our tank was having problems with that. Next time i get it i'll see if we can't get this strategy down. Thanks guys.
Originally Posted by Destruyen
this is how i kite him through to get stacks.
i tank him where the star is and strafe through the fire the way the arrow is pointing around 4-5 seconds left on his buff. he will gain 2 stacks this way so you need to clear stacks around 12 by not kiting him through the fire and kill the adds. don't try tanking the adds yourself. the group should be around the blue square and all dps should focus/aoe down the adds. they don't have much hp so no one should die. this also keeps the boss from gaining extra stacks from the lava pools the adds leave on the ground when they die. once the adds are dead and everyone is somewhat healed up start running him through the fire again, he should die before you have to drop stacks for more adds.
don't laugh at my paint skills.....
Decent diagram so quoted it here.
Key points...
1, get as few stacks as possible each time. Once your kite through results in the party members health droping by about 1/3rd, stop kiting him through and let the adds come.
2, don't start kiting him through again until dps has killed the adds and everyone is healed up, the damage he does to the tank before you melt the armor is trivial and the healer can keep you up a very long time while you just sit there and wait.
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
I should also point out, the worst thing possible is to have the buff fall off just before you kite him through. Make sure to get your timing right so that you always renew the buff when you want to and don't accidently start stacking it again when you don't.
Having a good timer on the target's buffs will be helpful.
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
We did it by stacking a couple of stacks at a time slowly, never letting them fall and burning him down. Don't stop at 9 stacks, keep going as long as your healer is keeping up.
Alright, since people are more concerned with how many stacks you should go to rather than basing it off of status of the party, here you go.
Per stack, the boss does 1500 fire damage to everyone in the group. This means at 10 stacks, it hit for 15,000 damage.
Given that DPS and healers will generally have around 90,000-110,000 hit points depending how far progressed into heroics they are you will want to stop at around 12 stacks. Since on average he will take two stacks per kite through the flame, this means you can kite him through about 6 times. The reason you want to stop at about 12 stacks is because the 11th stack and 12th stack did 16,500 and 18,000 damage to the party or 34,500 * 5 or 172,500 damage to the party. I don't care how awesome your healer is, they won't be able to heal 172,500 damage in the 10 seconds or so before the next kite. You stop around this point simply because this is the point where continuing to kite him though will potentially lead to people dying. You kill the adds and take your time at this point allowing your healer to catch back up, and by slowing down at this point they can do so without needing to burn through all their mana using inefficient spells. You start droping the group below half health and healer has to burn through mana faster to get them back up. That is why when I posted I say to use about a third of the health of your other party members as a gauge of when to stop. When you see their health about a third lower than maximum it's time to stop, and based on current health pools this tends to happen around the 12 stack mark, if you are doing 1-2 at a time.
Good communication between healer and tank is very helpful on this fight. If the healer knows you will stop, they don't have to go into panic mode and start wasting mana because they know they will have time to catch up.
Some people have done this fight without bothering to kite him through at all. Granted it takes like two hours to do, but your healer can keep the tank alive basically indefinately, its the added damage caused by the encounter mechanics that actually burn through their mana.
Last edited by Quinafoi; 12-21-2010 at 02:15 PM.
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
Finding these tactics quite interesting... Havent used anything similar but have never had problems downing him in PuGs. Think I may give this a try to see how it compares to what I've typically been doing:
Just thought I'd add it here as a bit of an alternative!
Initial pull is when hes on the opposite side of the lava - Only getting 2-3 stacks tops. Let it wear off - AoE Tank the adds, slowly kiting so that when one dies, it doesnt stack too much from the lava. After all adds are dead, there'll usually be around 7-9 debuffs. Rinse and repeat. Although this method is definitely far messier in theory, I've had a few clean PuG kills doing it. Think I may give the favoured method a try in the next run to see how they compare.
Sorry but why even bother getting 2 stacks regulary? There's even an achievement killing him with 15+ stacks (required for Dungeon Hero Drake) so you should just start tanking him properly.
If you run only barely touching the fire you end up getting 2 stacks maximum, regulary you only get one. Always keep running in a triangle and draw him at ~2s left.
This way we easily managed to kill him monday night while getting the achievement.
I didn't say to get 2 stacks. I said your goal is to get as few stacks as possible each time. I said two stacks simply because of how fast it stacks it is relatively rare to see only one. If you read after your misquote I actually said the first thing after that what your goal was. "Get as few stacks as possible each time."
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
Also, the damage I mentioned earlier. If you are trying for the achievement you basically have to be doing it perfectly and only getting one stack at a time. And that is because the damage would be too great for the healer to compensate for if you happened to get two. If you got two stacks at 14 and 15, that's 217,500 damage for the healer to heal in the next ten seconds. Most healer throughput even burning cooldowns won't break 20,000 HPS. Doing the achievement requires very tight execution in order to insure that you only get one stack so the healer is able to keep up.
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
Blue posts say that this encounter has been hotfixed so that the stacks stay up for 17 seconds instead of 12, although the buff may or may not show it properly. As soon as this is fixed it'll be much easier for a healer to keep up with the damage while slowrolling.
I had a guild group that sort of did manage to roll through the achievement up to 18 stacks by having a resto druid in ToL pop Tranquility under the influence of Time Warp at 14, and a shadow priest popping Divine Hymn at 16. It wasn't 100% intentional (probably you'd do it the other way around if you were planning it out), and that is sort of a specialized makeup, but it did work, and if you have the group makeup on hand you might try it.
Not sure if this is off-topic, but you can actually make it a little easier by using cooldowns. We got the achievement with a tank who wasn't very good at kiting him through and would always get 2-3 stacks a time (it was one of his first times doing it so I didn't blame him). I can't remember out exact group comp, but I believe we had a DK tank, holy priest, dps warrior, mage, and a rogue I think at least.
Anyways, we pretty much just blew defensive cooldowns and rushed his stacks up. Mage iceblocked, rogue cloaked + feinted, holy priest GS'd + divine hymned, tank used his cooldowns, and I shield walled + enraged regen. Then once he got to 15 we used time warp and burned him down. We let his stacks reset of course, because after that it's a pretty bad idea to let them get higher. We got it on our first try just doing it this way. Of course this requires a pretty specific type of group, not sure how many other group comps can pull it off this way.
We got him today and the achievement. Popped BL and everyone went nuts. We did the strat everyone here has mentioned. It worked good we just didn't let it drop off at all and killed him right at 15 stacks. Thanks for the help.
i got the achievement a few days ago, letting the stacks get up to 12 then clearing the stacks. he was around 40% afterwards so i started kiting him through again up to 10 stacks and i just stood right in the middle of the fire when he got to 5% and let the dps kill him off. didn't pop any cd's but we all died with the achievement popping up. could have lived if we popped some defensive cd's but oh well.
oh and klausi, that's the exact same diagram i did showing the exact same thing....
-Jimmy
|Ex Tank|
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Figured I'd add a strat that I picked up from wowhead which has worked pretty good for our guild.
I kite the boss through the center to pick up 2 stacks or so of his debuff and then kite him to the grate. DPS all stays in the center. I move so I'm off the grate and then when the debuff falls off and adds come, I kite him walking backwards around the grate in a circle. Fire pools drop on the grate where no one is supposed to be standing anyways and he picks up stacks from the pools dropped by dead adds. Once adds are dead and he's got a few stacks of the debuff, I'll just step to the inside circle and wait for his debuff to drop and repeat the process. Very repeatable and pretty easy on the healer.
In a recent pug, our tank was kiting him around the fire and would try to get him inside and out quick enough to get 2 stacks and before they would fall off, he would go through to let the boss get 3 stacks this time, having 5 in total...We got up to 10 stacks and were able to kill him by then. This way, the healer had time to top everyone off and regen. some mana as well
This fight has been made significantly easier since the nerf. Having 15 seconds for the healer to catch up instead of only 10 makes a huge difference overall. 50% more time = 50% more healing.
"In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro, you need a montage." /w TankSpot WTB Montage for Raiders.
Why bother complicating it with adds? With most healers you can simply kite him in a triangle as mentioned above and get one stack each time. DPS should have no issues burning through him as you stagger cooldowns when his buff stacks higher than 12ish.
As a (barely)heroic-ready warrior tank I had no issue with this strategy. Sure, I died, but dps burned him dead a second or two after I bit the dust.
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