Heroic Conclave of Wind

[Ciderhelm]

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video, I will be discussing the strategy for defeating the Conclave of Wind on Heroic Mode in the Throne of the Four Winds instance.

This video will assume you are familiar with the normal mode version of the encounter, and deal only with the changes present in hard mode. Conclave of wind, unlike the other hard modes in Cataclysm, has very few changes from normal mode--in fact, aside from a tuning increase, only one new ability has actually been added. Rohash will now occasionally cast a buff on himself called "Storm Shield." This will absorb the next 450,000 damage done to Rohash, and he will deal 30,000 damage a second to all players on his platform so long as the shield is active. Simply DPS the shield down ASAP to cut down significantly on the incoming damage. In addition, Wind Blast moves significantly faster now, and covers a larger part of the platform. The first wind blast comes immediately after storm shield, and tends to be the most difficult.


The AoE explosion cast by the adds on Anshal's platform deals significantly more damage, so you may find the most success using a kiter, rather than trying to tank them and DPS them down--a DK can easily kite them with Howling Blast.


A majority of this fight on hardmode boils down to your raid's ability to effectively split and balance your DPS to handle the Storm Shield and Rohash's ultimate. You'll want two players--ideally a healer and a DPS with a damage reduction cooldown--to absorb Rohash's ultimate. We chose to use a rogue, simply because he could cloak off the damage increasing stacks of slicing gale. The fewer stacks your raid members have before the ultimates, the better. You still need to kill all the bosses at the same time, and Anshal heals for significantly more now, so plan your DPS around that. In the end, we chose to send 9 DPS to Rohash and 7 to Anshal, but your balance may be different.


Get all the bosses low, knock out Anshal and Rohash, then get to Nezir and beat the snot out of him. As long as your dps is controlled well, this should be one of the easier hardmodes you'll encounter in Cataclysm.


Thanks for watching this guide. I have included footage of the encounter, along with some commentary about some of our specific strategy choices. If you're interested in future raid guides, subscribe to this channel. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them either in the encounter thread on tankspot or here on youtube.

[Blacksen]

"One of the easier hardmodes" - huge mistake. After failing to heed the warning of others, my guild fell into the trap: the biggest mistake a 2/13 heroic guild can make is trying Conclave next. Conclave drops terrible rewards for a lot of time investment. Go to heroic Maloriak (9 pieces of loot) or heroic Atramedes (very easy).

Also, this guide lacks a lot of useful information:

First, the AoE from the adds doesn't just hit significantly harder - it's lethal. A single tick will kill most raid members. Kiting them is the only option, which is very different from the normal mode. When Toxic Spores gets close in the timer, you must have everyone focusing on avoiding them. In the normal mode, kiting the adds is not optional because Anshal heals percent-based per add alive.

Second, the Wind Blast becomes lethal. Getting hit by Wind Blast dishes out ~100k damage. In 90% of cases, you will die getting hit by a single tick of Wind Blast. For this reason, it's strongly recommended that everyone use movement speed increasing abilities and get near the boss. If you stay near the boss, the amount you need to move is much less. Melee are ideal, but can get unlucky and taken out of melee range by tornado's at critical moments. Healer wise, priests are best with the ability to bubble before Storm Shield, use Prayer of Healing for powerful group healing, and Body and Soul to help avoid Wind Blast.

Lastly, the damage is extreme rather than "pathetic" like it was before. Tanks will need cooldowns for any Permafrost above 5 stacks. You'll want to coordinate Aura Mastery and raid-wide damage reducing cooldowns while stacking up to take advantage of healing cooldowns at Nezir. Not only that, but the frost patches now stack a debuff rather than providing an aura-type effect. Similar to heroic Rotface, every tick slows your movement speed by 20%. At 5 stacks, you will be stuck and will quickly die. To counter this, start spreading out with about 3-4 seconds left on Nezir's Ultimate. Oh, and your tank will need to rotate cooldowns on the plant platform. Anshal will hit for 250-300k unmitigated for the 15 seconds after his ult ends.

[swills]

I wish you guys would post some 10-man vids too.

The majority of the 10-man fights seem significantly harder than the 25s, and a lot of the strategies used on 25s don't apply to 10s.

[Scottpoet]

good guide

[Rennadrel]

I wish you guys would post some 10-man vids too.

The majority of the 10-man fights seem significantly harder than the 25s, and a lot of the strategies used on 25s don't apply to 10s.

10 man is all about raid composition, and most people aren't dense enough to run heroic mode encounters on 10 man with looking at how difficult and strict they are for tuning.

[Bovinity]

Oh, and your tank will need to rotate cooldowns on the plant platform. Anshal will hit for 250-300k unmitigated for the 15 seconds after his ult ends.

Because our other Nezir tank was basically just standing around on Anshal's platform when he wasn't on Nezir, we had them playing taunt ping-pong after Zephyr so they weren't just eating the buffed melee hits for the entire duration.

[Papapaint]

"One of the easier hardmodes" - huge mistake. After failing to heed the warning of others, my guild fell into the trap: the biggest mistake a 2/13 heroic guild can make is trying Conclave next. Conclave drops terrible rewards for a lot of time investment. Go to heroic Maloriak (9 pieces of loot) or heroic Atramedes (very easy).

This is probably debateable, although I'll grant that Maloriak is probably easier. However, Conclave is significantly easier than Omnotron, Magmaw, and everything past Halfus in BoT.

Also, this guide lacks a lot of useful information:

First, the AoE from the adds doesn't just hit significantly harder - it's lethal. A single tick will kill most raid members. Kiting them is the only option, which is very different from the normal mode.

Kiting the adds is not the only options, as there are multiple guilds that have DPS'd down the adds in the short time window before explosions.

Second, the Wind Blast becomes lethal. Getting hit by Wind Blast dishes out ~100k damage. In 90% of cases, you will die getting hit by a single tick of Wind Blast. For this reason, it's strongly recommended that everyone use movement speed increasing abilities and get near the boss. If you stay near the boss, the amount you need to move is much less. Melee are ideal, but can get unlucky and taken out of melee range by tornado's at critical moments. Healer wise, priests are best with the ability to bubble before Storm Shield, use Prayer of Healing for powerful group healing, and Body and Soul to help avoid Wind Blast.

If more information like this is needed in the guides, I'm happy to include it; however, we had a mix of melee and ranged, didn't need body and soul, and used a setup that gave us a bit of leeway on movement. I'm trying to avoid micromanaging raids in these, and simply presenting important information so that people can then figure out what exactly works best for their raid.

Lastly, the damage is extreme rather than "pathetic" like it was before. Tanks will need cooldowns for any Permafrost above 5 stacks.

I say this.

You'll want to coordinate Aura Mastery and raid-wide damage reducing cooldowns while stacking up to take advantage of healing cooldowns at Nezir.

I say this too.

Not only that, but the frost patches now stack a debuff rather than providing an aura-type effect. Similar to heroic Rotface, every tick slows your movement speed by 20%. At 5 stacks, you will be stuck and will quickly die. To counter this, start spreading out with about 3-4 seconds left on Nezir's Ultimate.

I believe the stacking movement debuff is present on normal as well, although I could be wrong.

Oh, and your tank will need to rotate cooldowns on the plant platform. Anshal will hit for 250-300k unmitigated for the 15 seconds after his ult ends.

Did not know this.

[Dannyl]

If more information like this is needed in the guides, I'm happy to include it; however, we had a mix of melee and ranged, didn't need body and soul, and used a setup that gave us a bit of leeway on movement. I'm trying to avoid micromanaging raids in these, and simply presenting important information so that people can then figure out what exactly works best for their raid.

Let me be the first to say, this is how I prefer these vids tbh. I make a lot of use of tankspot vids, among others I look up, and once we begin formulating our strats for our raid, they rarely follow exact or even close to what these guides suggest. Raiding is all about finding what works for you, not what works for everyone. The biggest contribution of videos is actually seeing the fight before hand, so we always have an idea what to expect. The details are ironed out after the first couple of pulls and as I said, we often deviate from the standard path.

I believe the stacking movement debuff is present on normal as well, although I could be wrong.

I believe it is as well.

I only have one question, concerning the adds on Anshal. Do you still need to kill the adds before the ultimate? I believe you said no but wanted to confirm this, since it seems unlikely that a single frost DK could kill all the adds in timely manner.

[swills]

10 man is all about raid composition, and most people aren't dense enough to run heroic mode encounters on 10 man with looking at how difficult and strict they are for tuning.

I'm not really sure if you were just being unhelpful, or straight up trying to insult to appear superior, or what really.

I've cleared several 10m HC modes. There's still a significant dearth of information on them.

[Predakhan]

I'm not really sure if you were just being unhelpful, or straight up trying to insult to appear superior, or what really.

I've cleared several 10m HC modes. There's still a significant dearth of information on them.

I also would like to see more heroic 10 man videos.

We tried this in 10 man and Rohash's shield destroyed us. There seemed to be no way to take down the shield fast enough and the healer had no chance to keep us alive long enough.

What are the platform breakdown for 10 man?

[Audibly]

I only have one question, concerning the adds on Anshal. Do you still need to kill the adds before the ultimate? I believe you said no but wanted to confirm this, since it seems unlikely that a single frost DK could kill all the adds in timely manner.

You do not. In fact, you can't kill them, because most of the time Soothing Breeze will spawn underneath them. They also won't despawn when the fight ends. Note that once Anshal dies and everyone else has bailed off that platform, you can go help burn down Nezir with the rest of the raid. As long as no one jumps back to Anshal's platform, you can either zone out to get out of combat, rebuff, change specs, etc. or you can leave and soft-reset the instance to get rid of them.

The single most important thing for Frost kiting is to make sure you're at the full 17% spell hitcap. The adds are level 88 and a missed Howling Blast can kill you.

[Xcuse]

I believe the stacking movement debuff is present on normal as well, although I could be wrong.

It definately is, I haven't had a single pull on heroic on this boss yet, but I recall having to lifegrip another priest out of the frost patch on 10m because she couldn't move, so yes, this is the case on normal aswell.

On top of that (for 25m) I'm pretty sure that the difficulty goes among the lines of Halfus -> Atramedes -> Chimaeron -> Maloriak. Depending on how good your healers are, how many melee you have and how good your raid is at movement, the 3 last bosses could change positions but Halfus is definately the one to start with.

In addition, Magmaw is (supposedly) much easier after the fixes aswell, so I guess you could choose between Magmaw and Conclave should you want to have a choice.

[Dannyl]

The single most important thing for Frost kiting is to make sure you're at the full 17% spell hitcap. The adds are level 88 and a missed Howling Blast can kill you.

Cheers for the response, that helped. I'm cringing at the 17% hit though. It's not often a melee is asked to get that kind of gear, so I'm thinking also a hunter could perform the kiting duty, saving the issue of stacking so much special gear for just one encounter.

[klausi]

Cheers for the response, that helped. I'm cringing at the 17% hit though. It's not often a melee is asked to get that kind of gear, so I'm thinking also a hunter could perform the kiting duty, saving the issue of stacking so much special gear for just one encounter.

Sounds like you didn't read the patch notes

"The spell hit bonus previously given by Virulence (Unholy) has been rolled into the Runic Focus passive effect that all death knights possess."

So all you need is the regular style hitcap (8%) that you maybe already needed on 10m interrupt duty anway.

[Dannyl]

Sounds like you didn't read the patch notes

Indeed I didn't. Pretty much stopped playing my DK entirely when Cataclysm came out

But still, still good news. Makes the whole thing much more do-able.

[Trexokor]

Oh, and your tank will need to rotate cooldowns on the plant platform. Anshal will hit for 250-300k unmitigated for the 15 seconds after his ult ends.

You're grossly overestimating the difficulty of the 15 seconds after Anshal's special.

3 of the 15 seconds are a non-issue, because he has to travel to you first. He has a large melee range, but the platform is also fairly large. They do their special every 2 minutes, almost precisely, if I recall. Save one of your major damage mitigation cooldowns for it, and keep a Holy Paladin on the platform if you've got one for Hand of Sacrifice. With these stacked, your tank takes as little damage as when Anshal is not buffed, and it lasts the entire duration. And Anshal hits very weak when he's not buffed.

[Legionella]

I would also like some more info on the 10 man heroic versions of some fights.For this fight its pretty hard without the right setup if not impossible. You can dps the shield down with 2 dps if they have huge burst potential like a frost mage. The other dps should always be a rogue since he can cloak of the debuff. This means if u havent got a mage in your group your option is to have 3 dps there but then youll have problems on the green platform handling adds.If you havent got a rogue you cannot do Heroic Conclave as far as I know GG Bliz!Dpsing down the adds and dmging the green boss is also very tedious and requires classes that can kite/slow otherwise its not doable apart from the very high dps you want to put out to actually do some dps to the boss aswell.All in all this fight is very much harder for 10 man groups (apart from the ones with the ideal setup) and in my opinion, fights with no real dependency on 1 or 2 specific classes are easier. Like Omnitron or Maloriak or even Valiona etc.

[Blacksen]

You're grossly overestimating the difficulty of the 15 seconds after Anshal's special.

3 of the 15 seconds are a non-issue, because he has to travel to you first. He has a large melee range, but the platform is also fairly large. They do their special every 2 minutes, almost precisely, if I recall. Save one of your major damage mitigation cooldowns for it, and keep a Holy Paladin on the platform if you've got one for Hand of Sacrifice. With these stacked, your tank takes as little damage as when Anshal is not buffed, and it lasts the entire duration. And Anshal hits very weak when he's not buffed.

I never said that it was "hard" - it's pretty easy, actually. As you said, your tank should move pretty far away to throw in travel time. We use a warrior that rotates shield block + last stand + hand of sacrifice with shield wall + trinkets. But if you don't have those up, he will one-shot you: that's the point.

[Papapaint]

I never said that it was "hard" - it's pretty easy, actually. As you said, your tank should move pretty far away to throw in travel time. We use a warrior that rotates shield block + last stand + hand of sacrifice with shield wall + trinkets. But if you don't have those up, he will one-shot you: that's the point.

Sounds like something players should already be familiar with from normal mode before watching this video.

[Fluffysteel]

Ive been watching TankSpot vids for a long time and they have been very helpful to my guild over that time. I make this post to tell Papapaint that i really enjoy the videos, no offense to any of the guide makers but Papapaint sounds human when he speaks. It makes it more interesting to me, he doesn't stray from the point of the guide but little jokes here and there keep me watching. All i wanted to say was thanks Tankspot for the excellent guides and thanks Papapaint for an enjoyable commentary.

Fluffysteel - Bleeding Hollow