Heroic Magmaw

[Hempz]

Most likely lava spew has nothing to do with it.

When he picks the tank up, he puts a debuff on them called mangled. Lasts 2 minutes? I think and increases damage taken by 50%

Yeah I'm fairly certain it has nothing to do with the mangle, here's a few examples from the log.

[21:59:13.344] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 19145 (R: 5318)
[21:59:13.375] Magmaw hits Macoun 130163


[22:00:44.453] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 17435 (R: 4843)
[22:00:44.484] Magmaw hits Macoun 136062

[22:03:52.174] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 17380 (R: 4828)
[22:03:52.203] Magmaw hits Macoun 130401

[23:09:31.343] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 19552 (A: 2337, R: 2702)
[23:09:31.375] Magmaw hits Macoun 173531

Edit: I know that it's not possible to tell from the post here how far into the encounter we were, but I can assure you he was gibbed by a melee attack before a Mangle would happen, in the early part of the fight at least once or twice.

[Fetzie]

170k?

I have taken 90k hits (with the mangle debuff) unblocked without a cooldown up before, but your guy is taking double that. He doesn't even do that kind of damage to melee dps that take an errant hit before my taunt lands (about 100k w/o the ArP debuff).

I see a single swing with a block for more than 100k in my log from last night

[20:37:14.937] Magmaw hits Fetzie 73519 (B: 51090)

and a single unblocked swing above 120

[20:38:48.125] Magmaw hits Fetzie 121819

the rest are below or just above 100k total, for example

[20:40:30.937] Magmaw hits Fetzie 52180 (B: 36261)
[20:40:34.468] Magmaw hits Fetzie 59305 (B: 41212)

[Hempz]

Yeah that's why I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this or anything, maybe they're using a CD to prevent the extra damage? I looked at the Vodka Log from their H Magmaw kill last night and saw something similar..

[21:28:36.827] Magmaw Lava Spew Chowmein 16234 (A: 1494, R: 7598)
[21:28:36.827] Magmaw Lava Spew Grafarion 19719 (R: 5478)
[21:28:37.672] Magmaw hits Grafarion 111927

170k is a lot different than 120, but maybe they were anticipating it and had a CD used?

[Fetzie]

The boss has no mechanic that would allow him to do double the damage a mangled target would normally get. I have killed the boss 4 or 5 times and spent quite a few attempts on him and can say with 100% certainty that I have never taken a hit above 130k.

The normal swing is about 70k, the normal swing with mangle seems to be about 120k.

[Hempz]

When you took the 120k or the 70k with 50k block did you have the Mangled debuff? If not can you tell if it was after a Lava Spew or just sometimes he hits harder?

[Fetzie]

yes I did have the mangle debuff. Yes it was directly after a lava spew hit, however the boss is pretty much always doing a spew. I also have some 100k total swings as much as 8 seconds after a lava spew.

[20:38:51.812] Magmaw Lava Spew Fetzie 12154 (R: 7235)
[20:38:52.328] Magmaw hits Fetzie 41026 (A: 7054, B: 33412)
[20:38:55.656] Magmaw hits Fetzie Dodge
[20:38:58.671] Magmaw hits Fetzie 52233 (B: 36298)
[20:39:03.875] Magmaw hits Fetzie Dodge
[20:39:06.906] Magmaw hits Fetzie Miss
[20:39:09.921] Magmaw hits Fetzie 56782 (A: 1987, B: 40840)

As far as I can tell there is nothing wonky with how the boss behaves after a lava spew.

[Hempz]

From the pull when our tank was hit for 173k..

[23:08:27.625] Magmaw's Mangle fades from Macoun
[23:09:31.343] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 19552 (A: 2337, R: 2702)
[23:09:31.375] Magmaw hits Macoun 173531
[23:09:41.812] Macoun afflicted by Mangle from Magmaw

So you can see my confusion as this hit was clearly in between the Mangle debuff.

[Fetzie]

that mangle fading is probably the "chewing" stopping, the 50% armor debuff does not fade off unless you change the tank.

[Hempz]

It looks like I wasn't searching for the debuff properly, but our MT did have the Sweltering Armor debuff when he was hit for 170k. So thanks for your help with that, unfortunately, I still don't know why our tank would be hit for 170k and you were hit for 120k .

[23:08:27.625] Macoun afflicted by Sweltering Armor from Macoun
[23:09:02.984] Magmaw Lava Spew Macoun 19552 (A: 2337, R: 2702)
[23:09:03.171] Magmaw hits Macoun 173531
[23:09:04.968] Macoun's Sweltering Armor fades from Macoun

[Mslduth]

Heroic Magmaw (10m)
Group:
T: Pally / Pally / Warrior
H: Druid / H.Priest / H.Pally
D: A.Warrior / MM.Hunter / A.Mage / F. Druid

First off, let me say, that we are probably not ready for this boss. We have only attempted and downed Halfus on heroic mode. However, we decided to make an attempt on this boss last night for the heck of it.

That being said, we noticed a couple things. It appears that even with having 3 people at range, meteors were still striking our melee group. We decided to put all "ranged" classes at range (A.Mage / MM.Hunter / Warrior). The warrior tanked the worms. When we did this, unless we were just really lucky, it appeared the meteors stopped hitting melee altogether.

Another thing we kept running into:
I was tanking Magmaw until Mangled. Once I got eaten, our feral druid would immediately get hit for 170k damage. What's the best way to go about avoiding this? And also, we are tank swapping the adds for boss. The other prot pally is taunting Magmaw when he comes back up and i'm tanking the 2 adds (always have 2 at the end of the head grounding phase). They die relatively quick with our DPS, though.

The problem we run into is healing - It is just so much damage going around to everyone that the healers can't keep up, and they are healing for around 11-14k HPS.

Any help is appreciated - And yes, we know that we shouldn't do Magmaw 2nd :-P Just didn't want to clear BW since it's still apart of our regular raid week, as we have only downed Nefarian once.

Thanks in advance,
~Mslduth

*Quick Edit* - Most attempts land us around 70% or so after first ground phase. Then it goes downhill.

[Fetzie]

We did Magmaw second

I see you are using three tanks, correct? You don't need that You really don't need the third tank which is presumably there to take the boss so your MT doesn't get hit while his armor is reduced.

What we do is have our DK spec frost and kite the worms, our warrior tanks the skeletons and I tank the boss. You could either get the hunter to specc SV or your mage specc frost or fire to kite the worms, and tell one of your tanks to specc dps.

You avoid melee taking swings by telling them to not stand in melee range of the boss when mangle begins and the head phase ends.

If your group is taking too much damage it is probably because they are taking damage they should be avoiding.

This is a video of one of our magmaw heroic kills from a while back (I think our second of third kill). Maybe it will answer more questions.

[Mslduth]

Our 3rd tank tanks the worms...Don't see a point in kiting them and losing a DPS when a tank can just tank them, controlling them easily and still losing a DPS. Seems a bit screwed up that melee can't stand in melee range to avoid being insta-gibbed? And the group isn't taking anymore damage than is going out...so, it's weird. Maybe the healers just weren't prepared for the amount of healing required, but it was quite rough, that's for sure.

[klausi]

Don't see a point in kiting them and losing a DPS when a tank can just tank them

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/lylhs.../?s=803&e=1242
The world's highest ranked warrior tank takes another 37% damage from tanking and killing the parasites, that's additional 6.7k dps taken that needs to be healed. He can counter that to some point with using his victory rushs but you should notice that
a) they only use two tanks for this and killing the constructs with three ranged dps
b) 54k taken rdps, discount dk+warrior self healing and it's still an average of almost 15k hps required

We just use a hunter for the larvae (specced for either aoe slow with multishot as MM or just spread serpent sting as SV, killing them in about 10 seconds each time), no parasitic infection that needs to be healed and your melee can assist on the skeletons. Hps required? Only about 12k per healer.

[Mslduth]

Thank you very much for this. Will bring this up to our guild officers for future attempts. Now to find the huntards / mages / DK's we feel most comfortable with performing said role :-P

[Zellviren]

We actually put a proper night in on this yesterday and killed it with less problems than we experienced previously with our sporadic "let's give it a go lol" efforts.

Tanks: Blood death knight and Protection warrior.
Healers: Holy priest, Restoration druid and Restoration shaman.
DPS: Survival hunter, Retribution paladin, Affliction warlock, Shadow priest and Feral druid.

The key to this, we found, was getting the balance of the DPS right and (unfortunately) this is going to be the same for every single raid because I can't possibly tell how good your damage dealers are. However, should you spend a few wipes getting to grips with that then you'll find the fight a hell of a lot smoother.

Here's the set up:

With the exception of the hunter and the resto druid, everyone is in melee range. The DK tanks Magmaw throughout, with no switching, while the warrior tanks the constructs. The hunter deals purely with the parasites and the druid heals both her and himself while targeting the melee group with Efflorescence. The Holy priest concentrates on the Magmaw tank, helped by the shammy who concentrates on the Protection warrior and the raid. Having everyone grouped up helps with this significantly. Any mix of healers/tanks should be okay, but I'd personally use a paladin or DK on Magmaw (self healing when being eaten) and try to avoid using a Holy paladin.

So long as everyone is tight on the edge of Magmaw's fissure, pillars will only ever target the hunter or the druid. The exception to this is that it will occasionally target the warrior when he comes out to pick up the construct. This is a nuisance, but can be mitigated by good timing with pillars and our hunter is also very good and misdirected pretty much all of them. All told, though, I cannot stress this enough; keeping tight to the edge of the fissure is the key to avoiding pillars in the melee. Alas, on previous nights we've found that our 2nd raiding hunter has been a bit of a liability due to her dead zone and the problem almost disappeared in her absence.

The key for us was the right allocation of DPS to the constructs so that they went down in a timely fashion. In our case, we designated the Shadow priest, warlock and paladin to DPS them down and found that this kept them very much in line. The Feral targeted Magmaw throughout, until he neared 30% and we wanted to get a head phase burn. Essentially, we were seeing constructs drop to around 30% at worst before another spawned, and the construct tank should be clear on what he wants targeted for the head phase. For the most part, you want everyone on the head when it's down and you should only ever be otherwise if you already have two constructs up when it starts.

So long as you're keeping up with the healing, Magmaw will be below half health relatively quickly. You want to push him to in and around 35% and wait for the next head phase for the final burn with all personal cooldowns blown, including Bloodlust/Heroism/Ancient Hysteria. At this point, everyone spreads out and continues to burn away the last of his health. There will still be parasite spawns, but the Protection warrior now picks these up and uses cooldowns to survive the damage. It's likely you'll have a construct up (we had two) and these should also be ignored. If you have a raid wall (Divine Guardian and Spirit Link Totem is best), activate it and finish him off.

We got excited and forgot the raid wall, got surprised with the parasite spawn and suffered the usual excitement with a final phase burn and near-kill... Yet still finished him off with a near-death Heroic Leap which saw an undead carcass die in mid air for great justice. As a quick note, I should also say that we saw none of these bizarre swings of over 170k and we didn't plan around errant melee strikes on the raid; we figured it's not supposed to happen at all, but only happened rarely so it wasn't worth changing things up for.

Fundamentally, this fight is all on five people; your Magmaw tank has to mitigate as much damage as he possibly can, your three healers have to be up to it and your kiter needs to be on the ball. Tips if you choose to use a hunter would include two things:

1) Traps are your friend. Ours used macros to ensure they were always up when she needed them, but please don't ask what those macros were..
2) Don't try to kill each wave before the next one. By kiting, they WILL die off eventually and you shouldn't feel pressured to kill them - just stop them killing you.

All told, this fight isn't bad at all once you realise what's causing pillars in the melee group and start killing constructs as efficiently as possible. Our composition definitely helps, but I don't think you really need a specific one to complete this. It's more a question of perfecting the plan than perfecting the execution, as there is a bit of leeway for personal errors throughout.
Good luck.

[Fetzie]

In ten man, phase two begins at 12 million hp. If the head comes down at around 42% you will need to call a complete damage stop at 35% otherwise dots will push Magmaw into P2 prematurely. You can only safely push the boss below 12m life when the head is on the ground to avoid nef shooting shadowbolts at you.

[Zellviren]

In ten man, phase two begins at 12 million hp. If the head comes down at around 42% you will need to call a complete damage stop at 35% otherwise dots will push Magmaw into P2 prematurely. You can only safely push the boss below 12m life when the head is on the ground to avoid nef shooting shadowbolts at you.

I tend to have percentages showing during combat, as I find that simpler to manage - so thanks for that clarification.

Incidentally, here's our log for the kill - I find it to be pretty much on target in most respects and I doubt we're exceptional in any meaningful way.

[Kemanorel]

This is one of very few fights in which my hunter's minimum range didn't really affect me.

Last kill we had 5 hunters in our 25m. I volunteered (by whisper) to move into melee to save on the healing needed at range. At first I tried the "in and out" strategy but after a mistake in timing killed us all, I found a decent melee hunter h magmaw strat:



What makes this work is that since I am only targeting Exposed Head and the Constructs, standing in melee range of magmaw means three things:

-The only thing I cannot effectively shoot is Magmaw, who I am not supposed to be shooting until the final phase in any case.

-I was able to increase awareness and DPS since the only major mechanic I was worried about was Massive Crash

-Keeping Magmaw in melee range means I can keep the 20% damage reduction buff up almost the whole fight until the final push.

So, to any hunters who are having issues at range, or raid leaders who have "dead hunter syndrome," there is not any real reason that they can't go in melee range.