Heroic Magmaw

[Aliena]

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video, I'll be discussing the strategy for defeating Hard Mode Magmaw in the Blackwing Descent raid instance.

Magmaw has become significantly more complicated in his hard mode form. As with the other Hard Mode guides, I will assume you are familiar with the normal mode encounter and deal primarily with the changes present in Heroic. That dastardly Nefarian has come to observe this fight, as he does the other hard mode encounters in Blackwing Descent. He floats around behind Magmaw and throws stuff at your raid to make the fight more difficult.


For the first 70% of the encounter, Nefarian will hurl meteors at your raid at roughly 35 second intervals. When the meteors hit, they will knock back any players within the impact radius--roughly 5 yards--and create a twisting line of fire that will slowly move back and forth. As of a recent patch, this mechanic will prefer players at range, so you shouldn't frequently see melee range meteors as in this video. The fires they make hurt pretty badly, so it's quite easy for a raider to die immediately after being hit by a meteor and lying in fire for the duration of the knockback.


More importantly, the meteor impacts will spawn Blazing Bone Constructs, giant skeletons which must be DPS'd down when possible, and require the addition of a tank in 25 man difficulty. He sends these out every 30 seconds, and it's fairly tough for a tank to handle more than two of them without generous use of cooldowns; as such, your best bet is to focus your DPS on skeletons until Magmaw's head is exposed.


Whenever the skeletons reach 20% HP, they begin channeling an 8-second spell called "Armageddon". They must be killed before the spell finishes casting, or else they explode and hit your raid for a significant amount of damage. For this reason, I would advise against trying to cleave down the skeletons, and instead focus your dps onto them anytime the head is not exposed.


When Magmaw reaches 30%, Nefarian gives up on his meteor strategy and instead chain-casts AoE shadowbolts. These hit for around 25 thousand damage, and can splash to other players; simply spready out, pop heroism slash bloodlust, and go to town on magmaw. He will still fall over during this phase, so it's actually a little easier than the rest of the fight; just a hard burn against your healers' mana.


Thanks for watching this guide. I've included some footage of our kill, along with some commentary to identify a few specific ways in which we handled certain mechanics. If you're interested in seeing future raid guides from Tankspot, please subscribe to the Zam official channel on youtube. Good luck!

[Kazeyonoma]

so is this done with 2 tanks? 1 for constructs 1 for magmaw? or do you need a 3rd tank to taunt off of magmaw when he mangles?

[Papapaint]

so is this done with 2 tanks? 1 for constructs 1 for magmaw? or do you need a 3rd tank to taunt off of magmaw when he mangles?

You do need a third tank, although it can also be done with only two tanks and very reliable add focus DPS.

[Blacksen]

I'm pretty sure you mentioned it in the commentary, but just in case anyone missed it...

In regards to the patch, the meteor change is now extreme. You can have everyone stack in melee range except for hunters and your parasite kiter. In the 25man, you need only 3 people at range to guarantee that all meteors avoid the melee. This allows you to have the other 22 individuals to never need to move.

Usually, the 3 people are your parasite kiter and hunters.

[Sh4ggY]

Hi all!

Im a 10-man raids tank healer, and never tried this fight in hc, but read a lot about it. So i have an advice for going to p2: hit the boss until 31-32 % wait for a head phase, pop bl and all dps cds, ignore big adds(if they arent in casting armageddon), just nuke the head like hell and u will get a much shorter p2. Much less stress for healers,tanks and dps. I didnt see anybody mentioned this here,that why i posted this.

[swelt]

I'm pretty sure you mentioned it in the commentary, but just in case anyone missed it...

In regards to the patch, the meteor change is now extreme. You can have everyone stack in melee range except for hunters and your parasite kiter. In the 25man, you need only 3 people at range to guarantee that all meteors avoid the melee. This allows you to have the other 22 individuals to never need to move.

Usually, the 3 people are your parasite kiter and hunters.

Can you expand on that? It sounds like quite a significant variation on the strategy. Parasite kiter?

Edit: Actually it is mentioned in the video, but only in passing and in the freeform bit at the end. So this is just a hunter or frost DK picking up parasites that spawn from the pillar of flame and running in circles?

One other thing: I think I observed in the Paragon vid, they used 1 tank for magmaw and a feral druid to soak mangles? (ie. cat most of the time, goes bear just before mangle and taunts, gets nommed, mangle returns to primary tank who has no debuff.)

[Del]

What class should we be using for parasite kiting?

**edit** Sorry I'm apparently bad at reading... More specifically, given the choice, hunter or frost DK? It seems to me that it would be a bit more challenging for the hunter, but I'd like to hear opinions from people that have done it. We have both a hunter and a DK that I trust to do it, so it's just a matter of saving some time by making the right decision going in.

[Urud]

I'm pretty sure you mentioned it in the commentary, but just in case anyone missed it...

In regards to the patch, the meteor change is now extreme. You can have everyone stack in melee range except for hunters and your parasite kiter. In the 25man, you need only 3 people at range to guarantee that all meteors avoid the melee. This allows you to have the other 22 individuals to never need to move.

Usually, the 3 people are your parasite kiter and hunters.

This is actually a really nice idea, thanks for testing the 'needed-to-be-outside' ammount of people.

[Papapaint]

I'm pretty sure you mentioned it in the commentary, but just in case anyone missed it...

In regards to the patch, the meteor change is now extreme. You can have everyone stack in melee range except for hunters and your parasite kiter. In the 25man, you need only 3 people at range to guarantee that all meteors avoid the melee. This allows you to have the other 22 individuals to never need to move.

Usually, the 3 people are your parasite kiter and hunters.

Incorrect, you need only one person at range. There are guilds doing this with only their kiter at range, but that makes healing him somewhat difficult and makes it tougher for him to pick up parasites if a meteor is landing on him too.

Edit: Actually it is mentioned in the video, but only in passing and in the freeform bit at the end. So this is just a hunter or frost DK picking up parasites that spawn from the pillar of flame and running in circles?

Correct.

[Muggins]

Incorrect, you need only one person at range. There are guilds doing this with only their kiter at range, but that makes healing him somewhat difficult and makes it tougher for him to pick up parasites if a meteor is landing on him too.

We managed to get him down last night on 10m initially trying only having the kiter out at range but kept getting constructs landing in the melee pile outside of the usual 'leaning forward' periods. When we changed to having 3 people stood outside they stopped.

[Vitasia]

We just killed this last night, experimenting with who was at range. We found that as long as two people stay at range, all of the meteors will go to those two people. We chose a DK kiter and a resto druid to heal him up, and it worked out pretty well. I believe we also had our hunters at minimum range stacked up with the rest of the dps, which ends up helping out a lot.

One thing to note using this strat: if either the DK or the resto druid go down, someone HAS to get out of range quickly to battle rez. If a meteor is cast while only one person is in range, there's a strong likelihood the melee or tanks get targeted.

The biggest difficulty for DPS would be moving during the vents, and knowing when to focus on the exposed head vs. kill the bone constructs. While the bone constructs have to be burned down fairly quickly, we really didn't have any trouble as long as people were focused on them.

The one issue with stacking up comes once he hits 30% and the shadow bolts start. We had everyone move at 31% to avoid any bad shadowbolts and spread out. Range burned down the last bone construct, then switched to Magmaw. We also saved Bloodlust for this phase when the head was exposed.

All in all, this wasn't a terribly difficult heroic once the kiter knows what paths to take and we changed strats to stack on melee. After Magmaw and Conclaive, I'm sure our DKs would like to go back to actually DPSing instead of kiting everything, though.

[kameelyan]

We're working on this in 10m and we use 3 at range (the add tank, a resto druid, and a dk kiter). That said, how are people avoiding Magmaw melee'ing random targets? It really is driving us nuts.

We had a 14% attempt, but couldn't get back to that afterwards due to him randomly melee'ing a dps right after an exposed head.

[Muggins]

If you're tank switching try to have the tank who's picking up the constructs taunt Magmaw after the other tank gets picked up and chewed on. You have to time it right however as sometimes he won't have a threat list when flopping around and it just gets plain ignored, as long as that tank manages to be at the top of the threat list after he comes up back off the spike we usually found he'd leave the melee pile alone.

[Ladiian]

We're working on this in 10m and we use 3 at range (the add tank, a resto druid, and a dk kiter). That said, how are people avoiding Magmaw melee'ing random targets? It really is driving us nuts.

We had a 14% attempt, but couldn't get back to that afterwards due to him randomly melee'ing a dps right after an exposed head.

I know this works on norm not sure bout heroic but to avoid mag randomly one shotting people do two things.

1: While the tank is being mangled he can still do actions. So make sure he is watching and right before magmaw gets impaled he should taunt back. So as soon as magmaw comes back up he is 100% threat on tank.

2: Have everyone in the melee group (so everyone bar add tank resto druid and dk kiter) have them move back about 10 yards, just enough so they are just out of melee range. Magmaw cant hit them if they are out of melee. You only need to do this until he focuses the tank again properly. Thats how we solved that annoying little issue.

hope that helps

[Khilbron]

Incorrect, you need only one person at range. There are guilds doing this with only their kiter at range, but that makes healing him somewhat difficult and makes it tougher for him to pick up parasites if a meteor is landing on him too.

After clearing Heroic Magmaw 25 last night, we started with 1 person at range along with the parasite kiter, and had 2 meteors select melee, after that we moved 3 people to ranged (4 counting the kiter), and had only 1 meteor select melee. To clarify as to what I mean by melee, we had everyone on the ledge almost to the point where tapping W would make you fall off, and we still received meteors in melee, however it is considerably more manageable. Also to note another Heroic change, the Bone Constructs lost about 2.5million health, so they are absolutely cleaveable in 25man.

[lora5]

good post

[Dagray]

In response to the question about Frost DK vs Hunter for add duty.

I've been attempting this fight on 10m w/ my guild and here's what I've seen so far in terms of adds (I'm the kiter (SV Hunter)).

1. Since Frost DK's Howling Blast was nerfed, they will end up kiting a large set of adds for a while. This is doable but harder.

2. Due to the recent buff to Hunter AOE, Survival (w/ Entrapment) is the absolute best spec for kiting these adds IMO. Granted, marksman can continually slow w/ Concussive Barrage, but they will have much less aoe and therefore will have more adds to contend w/.

3. As a Survival Hunter, w/ liberal use of Snake + Ice Traps, you can basically shoot and scoot the little adds to death before the next set pops. It's quite close in most scenarios but having the first set mostly dead when the second set pops helps immensely with kiting.

I'm sure that's it's entirely feasible to kite as MM or a Frost DK, but it just seems easier to rely on entrapment and other roots to keep them at bay while you lay into them. You just have to be careful that you dont over aggro the Bone Construct when it spawns. To combat this, just MD the bone construct to your add tank and hold off Multi Shot until it's out of range.

In depth SV kiting technique:

Have 2 others at range (mage, healer). Keep them towards the wall on the right hand side that way you always know where the constructs/packs of adds will spawn if not on yourself.

Make liberal use of Entrapment (SV talent, 2nd tier). It allows you to get 8 seconds of roots and ~75% uptime on slows every 24s. Save your snake trap for just after the adds leave your ice trap or just use it immediately after the ice trap root wears off to keep them in your explosive trap longer. Either way works.

Call for Frost Nova if you get into trouble or need a bit of time to help dps magmaw's head. Remember, Disengage & Aspect of the Fox are your friends.

All of this is based on 10m HC Magmaw w/ the following comp:

Tanks:
Paladin
DK

DPS:
Feral Druid
Fire Mage
Assasination Rogue
Shadow Priest

Healers:
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
Discipline Priest

Kiter:
Survival Hunter

[gabbu]

This question particularly for 25 man heroic version. In my old guild on 10 - normal we uses a warrior tank who just sits there and tanks the parasites with extra healing from victory rush (glyphed) every-time a parasite dies. This made the fight real easy as about 30 secs after the start of fight a new parasite will die every few secs making the warrior self heal a ton.

Anyone know if the parasite health and debuff changes from normal to heroic mode because I want to know if the abovesaid strategy will work on 25 heroic or not?

[Dagray]

About warrior kiting/tanking:

I'm not going to recommend that strategy. There are a few reasons why.

1. Parasite melee damage may be increased, and the debuff may have also increased as well.

2. If the warrior isn't careful he may over aggro the bone constructs when they spawn.

3. He'll still need healing even w/ victory rush.

With a normal kiter (DK/Hunter) the person only needs to be healed from Magmaw's ranged attacks if he/she does their job correctly. As a hunter you can effectively kill the parasites just before the next set spawns which will allow you to help dps magmaw a bit during head phases. Also, it seems bad form to just sit there and tank something that was intended to be kited.

That said, I would definitely try it out if you want. If it still works in heroic then you'll be fine as long as the warrior watches aoe damage if a construct is around and doesn't need too much healing from parasite damage. I highly doubt it will work though.

EDIT: Also, I'm pretty sure that there are alot more parasites in 25m which will increase your warriors need for heals. This is bad. You really want to save all of your healers mana for the 2 MT's, the raid and more specifically for when Nefarion whigs after you get Magmaw sub 30%.

For your kiters:

Frost DK: Prime Glyph of Howling Blast
MM Hunter: Spec: Concussive Barrage (2) Bombardment (2) Major Glyph of Ice Trap
SV Hunter: Spec: Entrapment (2) Serpent Spread (2) Point of No Escape* (2) Major Glyph of Ice Trap

Frost + MM = More slows, no roots, less aoe
SV = Less consistent slows, roots, more aoe

* = PoNE Talent is only if you're absolutely trying to maximize small add dps to give yourself time to dps magmaw without kiting while doing so.

[Giliandrix]

Just got it down last night! Survival Hunter kiting did wonders for my group.

As for 25mans, since they're easier than 10's in terms of group flexibility and class stacking, why not use a 3rd tank for it? Most guilds do I imagine. Warriors with Rend/Blood and Thunder/Glyphed Victory Rush/Shockwave, will excel at tanking the adds.