Majordomo Staghelm

[Pirika-Draenor]

I never really saw this question answered and it was the reason we weren't able to get the kill tonight. We had a couple 1% wipes because rng seemed to favor the cat jumping on our raiders building stacks. Is this an issue of our raiders not reacting quickly enough, or did you guys have a nice trick for ensuring that cat leap won't just gib dps?

We have someone calling out when Staghelm gets to around 85%.. which is seconds from him jumping.. remember, the closest person to the orb is the person hit.. so if you run back or off to the side far enough, it won't stack right in front of the orb. Even if it does, it's simply a matter of the closest person to the orb. We would have a healer and a RDPS switch off, which worked well, with a third RDPS standing by for callout.

When Searing Seeds expires, the raid member will explode everyone else within 12 yards of him for more than 60000 damage, so Whenever someone's debuff is about to tick off, they need to run out of the raid and away from other people. No one can tell you when to do this, you have to keep an eye on your own debuff timer. Failing to leave the raid in time will almost certainly result in a wipe.

If one of your healers uses VUHDO, they CAN tell you when your timer is up. I don't know about other addons, but I do know that it shows for all three of our healers. It's best to watch your own timer or at least have DBM yelling at you to get out of the group, however, it worked well for people to pay attention to the raid fully, until their name was called out in vent that it was about time for them to run out. This helped our group a lot and it also helped us healers coordinate better, as we could see when the other healer was going to be somewhat out of range or in motion and unable to help heal the raid for a moment. Mind you, we also run 10m.. I'm not sure how well this strategy would work with 25m.

[Shambells]

So just in case there are other 10 man guilds out there without a protadin or a disc priest(yes we do exist, blizz), I thought I'd share some learning. Our comp looks like this:Prot warBlood dk who is frost for this fightRet pal Hance sham (me)Assassination rogueFire mageSurvival hunterHoly priestHoly paladinResto druidThe important thing we learned was that you cannot really get through a burning orb phase without getting screwed on 10 man. Therefore, you have two options. You can try to two heal it and bring another dps. This idea won't work because you'll never be able to put out enough HPS to get out of the first phase w/o blowing every CD you have. The other one, which we did with done success, is to extend the first phase as long as you can without losing ppl. We popped hero as soon as the 4th stack went up. Then proceeded to heal our butts off til just before the 7th stack. Clear communication is key. I'd call for aura mastery and give a countdown for when I wanted it so that I could be sure it'd cover two scythes. As soon as the 7th went off id call for tranquility, which carried us through to the 10th stack. One more raid cooldown and we couldve gone to 12, but blizz is stingy with them. Either way, ten stacks let's us get him low enough that as long as you don't screw it up later, you should be able to kill him right around the time your healers go oom and you ranged dps starts dropping like flies. My general impression of this fight is don't bring more than 1 melee so you can have your healers not have to eat orbs. Also, bring a disc priest and a protadin. Or just have some super awesome raid coordination and a helluva lot of praying. Our stacks were 10 5 4 2 dead. We couldn't figure out a way to not get screwed with him jumping on orbers; so just plan on that happening and hope he's dead by then. If you want some numbers our dps was avg at 19k with a high at 21 and the low at 18. The healers were all neck and neck at 16k HPS and were all completely oom for the last 30 seconds or so. That was with the ret and hance throwing out our heals when we could. A very satisfying kill.

[Tengenstein]

We had no problems with Orbs on 10 man with a resto shammy/holy pally/holy priest setup. We pushed 8-6-6-5-5-5-5. We pushed lust on the third Scorpion phase with 3 healers, 3 ranged, and 3 melee, with a total raid DPS of 126k (alot lower than yours, our top was 22k our lowest was 15.5k just above the tank). We had 1 healer and 1 ranged eating each orb. They didnt' have to stand near each other just making sure they where the person nearest the, its not diificult to have them staning 12 yards apart and be the nearest 2 people to an orb. healers only had to put out ~13k hps.

[Shambells]

Figured out why my raid is slower to progress. The RL (moi) is a moron. We had the ranged on TOP of the orbs. Wish I'd thought of that would have saved some time. So to others here's the lesson learned. Put the two ranged on the opposites sides of orbs so they don't both get jumped on. Still, in 10 man, it's very likely that he'll jump on the person currently taking stacks so I still think it's a good idea that you kill him during that phase before he screws you, but that strat should at least make it take longer before you get screwed.

[Tengenstein]

But that shouldn't kill them. Cat phase has 3 people who you know are gonna take damage, The Tank, and the two orb soakers. assighn one healer to each of them and then throw whatever spare heals you have at the jump targets, who should be moving as he goes airborne to avoid the landings initial damage and thus only have to take 3 or 4 ticks of the AoE.

[Narina]

Not sure why I find this fight to differ from some of these comments so much but after reading some I had to post. We go 12-7-6-5-5-5, we BL on the first phase to get as much solid dps as we can on the boss. Biggest advice I can give for the move out phase is to make sure people are ONLY going 12 yards, people slipped up and were 15-20 yards away sometimes on our early attempts. All should be back and stacked up for the 5th and 6th scythe so healers were capable.

Something important to note (we have not done this so I cant confirm it works), but forums have posted that mages/paladins (I assume rogues too, but they were not mentioned) can go outside and Iceblock/shield their debuff away before the first scythe goes off and still be stacked. Apparently when they do this the debuff automatically blows regardless of timer so make sure they are out of raid. Hopefully someone can confirm/deny if this actually works... sounds like it could be problematic to ensuring 7 people stacked on 10 man though.

I have not noticed that cat jumps ALWAYS target closest person to orb at all. We have 2 stack on each orb in 10 man with the rest just outside the circle and it seems random. The way we set up our orb pattern seems to be invaluable to me:

2 range stack about 10 yards to the west of each orb. When cat jumps there they move to 10 yards North. When cat jumps there 10 yards East. Then 10 yards south (you'd be really unlucky to be forced here if only allowing 5 adrenaline like we do). This controls the circles on your terms (it may lose a little dps, but it reduces RNG deaths severely). The range switching we do just like Baleroc, the "main" person starts closest, moves just further than the swap partner, then back when debuff expires. Only one person on each orb has to move to swap, not both. Range should be pre-moving on each jump... there is absolutely NO reason to take more than 3 ticks of damage, really should be 2.

Thats pretty much it... We stack back up for the kill during scorpion.

Also, to shambells - Are you sure your 10-5-4-2 kill is accurate? Our dps is about an 18k avg and it takes us a lot longer than you, plus we stretch phases longer.

[Fetzie]

Something important to note (we have not done this so I cant confirm it works), but forums have posted that mages/paladins (I assume rogues too, but they were not mentioned) can go outside and Iceblock/shield their debuff away before the first scythe goes off and still be stacked. Apparently when they do this the debuff automatically blows regardless of timer so make sure they are out of raid. Hopefully someone can confirm/deny if this actually works... sounds like it could be problematic to ensuring 7 people stacked on 10 man though.

Bubble/iceblock/HoP used prior to the debuff cast will stop it even being applied. Also the tank can share an orb with a ranged dps (last night I went to 10 stacks on heroic without any real issue)

[Shambells]

So to reply to above: I mis-typed our stacks, it's 10 6 5 4 2. Should make sense now. We've killed home twice by simply burning his face off in the orb phase and barely paying attn to orbs. It's really not worth going past 10 stacks in the first phase for three reasons. 1) you are unlikely to have sufficient raid cooldowns unless you are paragon. If you are, 2) you run a severe risk of not spreading out in time before the next probably fatal scythe, as there is only three seconds in between them at that point. 3) to top it all off, you only get 6 additional seconds of dps from ten to twelve stacks. Next, we are lucky to have some defensive cooldowns that we can cheat with. Two pallies run in after the first cat phase and immediately god bubble, our dk dies the same with AMS and the mage uses ice block. If you time it correctly you won't receive the bomb debuff. Makes that phase much simpler. Lastly, we've consistently found that Once dom is below five % it is safe to call a straight up burn on him and ignore the orb mechanic. He will due before you do. It's worked smoothly twice now, and we find it simpler to just not have an orb phase per se.
Edit: I hate you auto correct.

[Narina]

Bubble/iceblock/HoP used prior to the debuff cast will stop it even being applied. Also the tank can share an orb with a ranged dps (last night I went to 10 stacks on heroic without any real issue)

Ahh, good to know, especially if/when we start him on heroic. Glad to know there is some truth to this.