Tonight we tried Halfus on 10man and I can say it was a wipe fest. We had Slate,Storm and Time. Now Ii have been reading posts and I can not find a post with these three. We tried to release Storm and Time so we can interrupt and see the fire. Some tries we would go for Storm first, twice we did time first. The only time we got a dragon down was the time, but the tank died at the same time, bummer. We had 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps. Popped lust/warp as soon as the first nova was cast and the drakes were free. Any help on how to take care of thiis issue? Do we need 3 tanks. I Ithink our dps can do just damn well enuff with four of us and one of the tanks can eventually start dpsing with the buff u get from downing a drake. Any help will do. Thanks
Slate, storm time is pretty tame because halfus doesn't have double attack speed. If people are decently geared in full 346 there shouldn't be any trouble with tanking unless you keep getting hit by shadow nova. If you have a paladin just BoP/bubble the debuff off the first tank to buy yourself more time. Free storm + time warden to greatly reduce any raid damage, lust and burn drakes and keep tanks alive.
I agree with gacktt that your combo of drakes is pretty tame. Slate is a MS debuff and simply requires a tank switch. Storm has shadow nova which is easily interruptable after it's freed. Time afaik does nothing. I think you can kill this with as long as storm is one of the 2 freed first, and then freed the third when the first drake is killed. (I think some guilds do it with only 2 freed the whole fight, but we always freed all 3). If you don't have 2 interrupters, I think maybe try killing storm first. Otherwise try slate first because then you won't have to tank switch.
This is a dps race and I'd say never ever go 3 tanks. The fight is basically won if you can down one add drake without anyone dying. Lust when you do the first drake. If you can't dps down a drake before a tank death, it can be your healers, tanks or dps problems. Log your raids to check afterwards what went wrong. Check for damage taken by your raid. Are people standing in crap? Are your tanks not switching on MS debuff? Are the shadow nova reliably interrupted. (You should have 0 going off, except the first one).
It doesnt matter in which order you kill them to be honest. Once they are up in the air they will affect halfus. Make sure to free storm drake = that will allow you to interrupt the shadow nova casts, one shaman/rogue is completly enough for this. Since you dont have nether scion those stacks will go high really slowly, have your tanks switch every 6-8 stacks and you should be completly fine. Freeing slate dragon will give a stun to halfus from time to time for 8 seconds, that means even if your tanks has got 10 stacks they will just fall off before he applies another one after that long stun.
If you are having trouble with tank death free only storm drake and focus on interrupts and getting him down asap, once he hits 10% free slate dragon and that will sort out your problems with tank switches, once he is at 10% free your last dragon. He will slow down meteor by like 500% and it will be SOOOO easy to avoid each one of them, otherwise if aoe dmg on raid is too high coz u cant avoid meteors free time dragon second and then slate dragon as the last one.
hope it helps.
Slate Storm Time was the exact same drake comp we had last night.
Free storm first, Me + a Ret Pally on Halfus to Interrupt. Rest of DPS on Drake + Pop Heroism to burn it down. After that drake dies, free the Time Warden and burn that down too. When my stacks got too high 10-12, Ret Pally BoPed me and I canceled it immediately and re-taunted. Didn't need to free the storm drake.
We too had that combo. Is the drake combo the same for everyone week to week, or is it random per raid?
While not a terrible combination, don't underestimate how much the nova can screw with you. Between casting interrupts and range issues, even if you completely ignore storm, as many strats would have you do, it requires that much more positioning precision on the part of your raid.
Sent from my SPH-M910 using Tapatalk
This is pretty much what we have done, minus the BoP. A lot of guilds will tell you to pop multiple drakes but we have had a lot more efficient encounters with Halfus by only releasing one at a time. ie, we had the same 3 drakes this week. By releasing Storm we had our Warrior+Tank interrupt Halfus with the other tank and 4dps on Storm. By not releasing Time Warden you will take more damage from the buffed Fire Balls during the first part of the encounter. This is easily healed through for a short time. Once you release TW you will be able to easily avoid these. Slate does nothing for you really that is make or break at any point of the encounter.Originally Posted by Giliandrix
My raid group got this same drake comp this week and had terrible issues with it as well. This boss is on "farm" status for us , but this is the first time we've encountered this particular comp and we skipped BoT this week because of it.
Raid Comp:
Prot Pally
Feral Bear
Disc Priest
Resto Shaman
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Fury Warrior
Frost DK
Assassination Rogue
Survival Hunter
Granted 70% of the raid can interrupt but it isn't Shadow Nova nor is it Fireball damage killing us. From looking at the logs it seems that Hailfus' swing timer was buffed because he's stack Malevolent Strikes twice as fast as previous weeks ( without the drake that gives him 100% attack speed up)
Our general strat initially was for me ( prot pally) to tank Hailfus while the druid tanks time & storm. I can easily hold him to 10 stacks then bubble then hold till 4 and taunt. The problem we're experiencing is, either A: the druid dies ~ 15s into the fight ( hes better geared than I am - gemmed agi - very competent tank etc) or B: if we try to ping pong even with Divine Shield & HoP we get to a point in the fight where we both have Malevolent debuff ( usually I have about 5s left when the bear is at 7 stacks) and still have 1 drake up. Ive read a lot of threads here saying switch at 4 - which is impossible. The boss has 4 debuffs stacked before he even bends the 1st drake to his will. The debuff lasts 30s and if hes stacking a debuff every 1.5s that means basically a tank has to hold him and survive through 15 stacks before its viable for the other tank to taunt ( give or take a stack).
I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this issue but Ive looked through our logs of previous weeks kills vs this weeks attempts and I am certain he is stacking twice as fast with Storm , Time and Slate up. We've even considered having the hunter use her turtle pet as a buffer for us so we can catch up on debuff stacks but so far it hasn't worked. So if anyone has some viable strats on how to deal with this particular combo feel free to share it .
And since I would ask everyone in the raid is ilvl 350+ , we had Bane in ICC (pre cata) etc. So we're by no means bad or unorganized- just hit a little snag here and looking for some quality input. If you would like to see our logs I would be happy to provide the links to them in a PM.
Free the drake that gives him the possibility to use Mortal Strike asap - Until that drake is free he really spams the stacks. That basically means that the tank pulling Halfus will easily be above 4 stacks already by the time the off-tank has picked up this drake.
What we (Feral and Prot) did on this setup was me with a ranged freeing 2 drakes at once (Time Warden for the Nova and Slate for the MS I think?) with the Feral tanking Halfus to begin with, I pick up my drake and pull it to the Feral, the ranged lets the drake come so the Feral can pick it up - he's gonna get stacks FAST so you need to be quick - after you're there you can Taunt the boss with your Feral taunting the drake off you (so 2x Drake on Feral and Halfus on you). This is the time to chain your Tanking cooldowns (especially the Feral) because it's gonna be heavy damage. Bloodlust and burn the first drake down, use a cancelaura bubble macro to drop your MS at 4-6 stacks, once the first drake dies you can taunt swap.
We had this raid composition earlier today and we wiped a lot since its our first look at raiding in Cata but we figured it out and were able to improve but we're struggling on keeping the tanks up..We have been very unlucky.
What has worked for us is have a shaman on the boss for interrupts (our shaman is good to do it on his own) and we released 2 drakes, leaving slate..I popped TW to get the drakes down and when we got time warden at 20%, we released the slate dragon, finished off the drake and moved on the boss...We couldn't beat the enrage timer and it's because I'm sure like 2-3 people are probably missing about 2-3k dps but other than that, we got him down to 3%.
We had a hard time with his furious roar but I was able to fix that by blinking and counterspelling shadow nova before it goes out..
There isn't a lot of raid damage as long as everyone avoids fires and shadow novas are interruped. The key is to just keep tanks alive and with 3 healers, it's possible since the raid should be taking minimal damage
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks