Tankspot Raid Guides 10 Man Edition: Alysrazor (Normal)

[Aggathon]

Tankspot Raid Guides 10 Man Edition: Alysrazor (Normal)

This fight is probably one of the hardest so far on 10 man simply because it is so compartmentalized and every person needs to do their part. As with most strategies there is more than one way to skin a cat and alysrazor is no different. We did many iterations and the version stated in this guide might not work out for you, but I’ll say the two most common setups:

The first is the 3 healer setup, You have 3 healers, 2 tanks, 5 dps. I strongly encourage to have 4 DPS on the ground phase and 1 in the air, I’ll explain later. Basically this version takes longer, however it may be more stable since you have 3 healers instead of two.
However, the way we finally did it, and the way I like best since it leads to a faster kill and subsequently less odds of someone messing up is 6 DPS, 2 healers, 2 tanks.

Okay, so enough of the babble about setup that you might not understand because you haven’t tried the fight yet so you don’t even know what I mean by on the ground or in the air.

Here’s a brief summary of how the fight goes, I will get more into the details as I go into the strategy.
According to the Dungeon Journal, Alysrazor has 4 phases. I think it’s more like 2, there’s phase 1 where people are killing adds pretty much, and there’s phase 2 where all the DPS are laying into the boss. Phase 1 starts when you pull the boss and will repeat once phase two is over. Phase 1 is a lot about add management. There are several jobs:

1. Flying people. These are people that pick up 3 feathers right off the bat and fly in the air chasing Alysrazor.
2. Blazing Initiate DPS – these people are in charge of killing blazing initiates during phase 1 and blazing initiates are their number 1 priority, especially interrupting. Blazing initiates cast a spell called fireoblast, and if an initiate gets off more than a couple casts, it is highly likely to wipe you if not give you some significant problems.
3. Tanks killing voracious hatchlings. Some brief time into phase 1 after the first blazing initiates have spawned but usually before the second, two big fiery eggs will fall to the ground. Your tanks need to run over and each get close to one. Whoever is closest to the egg gets a debuff called imprinted. Imprinted makes that hatchling focus the imprinted target for the entire time it is alive or the imprinted target dies and it also allows the imprinted target to do 1,000% increased damage against the hatchling that has imprint on it. Sorry no fun revenge cleave damage here.

Alysrazor is going to fly around in the air. When she does this she will spawn two things in the air behind her, either incendiary clouds or fire rings. The people flying want to fly through the fire wings because it increases the duration of wings of flame (allowing you to stay flying) and gives a buff that increases haste by 8% per stack and stacks up to 25 times (200% haste). I’ll have an entire section about these guys more below. Occasionally alysrazor will do what I like to call a strafing run and will fly low to the ground and do an AoE claw in the middle of the room along the north/south line. Sometimes she’ll start from the north and go south, sometimes south and go north, the big thing here is just DON’T STAND IN THE MIDDLE.

Alysrazor will do this strafing run 3 times (once when you pull her/the phase starts and then twice during phase 1). Each time she will drop more feathers. I’ll detail this in the actual strategy section though. When the timer for molting comes up the 4^th time (or 3^rd depending on if you count the first strafe of the phase as one of the strafing runs) then phase 2 starts.

FEATHERS: I’m going to take this time to talk about feathers. Whenever Alysrazor does a strafing run, she spawns a bunch of feathers behind her. I think it’s somewhere between 8 and 10 I don’t remember at the moment. These feathers give you a buff that stacks. Each stack increases your runspeed by 30%, and if you get 3, you are able to fly around in the air. Unless you are an air DPS, don’t get 3, it’s not worth it and may hog feathers from others that need them. The runspeed buff also allows you to cast while moving! It’s pretty legit. I’d favor allowing healers and tanks to get feathers after the two people that fly up to DPS. It’s really nice for phase 2 if everyone can have at least 1 stack of the runspeed buff

Phase 2:
The most important thing about phase two is: DON’T GET HIT BY TORNADOES. At the start of phase two, your only job is to not get hit by tornadoes. If people who were flying and have the ridiculous speed increase can get the fire rings on the ground safely then get them, but if you weren’t a flying DPS don’t worry about the rings, just DO NOT DIE TO TORNADOES. I cannot stress this enough. There will be a big tornado in the middle of the room, so don’t stay in the middle of the room and people flying need to get close to the ground so they don’t die to fall damage or get hit by harsh winds. From the big tornado in the room several tornadoes will spawn outwards and then proceed to move in circular patterns around the room in random clockwise or counter-clockwise positions. I suggest watching a video for this because it’s hard to explain, but the tornadoes do move quickly.

I will take this time to interject some tips/strategies about tornadoes:

1. Clipping a single tornado is survivable, if you barely hit one it’s no big deal, it’s when you get full on railed by one or hit multiple tornadoes that you’ll die. Don’t take this as a license to hit tornadoes, far from it in fact. Just relax about this phase and it’s okay if you slightly mess up, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do have to not suck at it.
2. CAMERA DISTANCE. Try to put your environment distance and your camera as far out as possible for this, the right camera angle and a far distance so you can see both in front and behind you and see what tornadoes are coming is very important. Sometimes Alysrazor will fly over you and will sort of mess up your camera angle, so just be prepared for it and know how to compensate or move your camera angle quickly if it becomes a problem.
3. My personal favorite strategy to avoid tornadoes is really simple, since the tornadoes are in “lanes” I’ve simply just stood in one lane until a tornado was about to hit me, then stepped into the next lane, then strafed back. It’s almost non-stop moving because the tornadoes move so fast, but even without a speed buff I was able to effectively avoid tornadoes this way
4. In case this doesn’t work I have some other suggestions that other people have told me that worked for them. It kind of relies on getting 1 or 2 feathers that lay on the ground after alysrazor does her strafing runs.
   1. Follow a tornado until one passes you on the left or right then follow that one, rinse, repeat. If you don’t have a runspeed buff then this is pretty much just what I said in 3), heh
   2. Run towards tornadoes and move out of their way and quickly back into its lane when it passes. I personally don’t like this method because I think it increases the likelihood of getting clipped as you dodge a tornado coming at you, but some people swear by it so I thought I’d mention it.

Hookay, now that you’ve survived the tornadoes, on to the rest of phase 2. Once the Tornadoes are done (I think they last about 30 seconds) alysrazor lies vulnerable in the middle of the room trying to regain fire energy. She summons two adds to her side that try to channel more fire energy into her. While she’s on the ground she takes double damage or something big like that. If you have a clean transition you’ll want to bloodlust here. The two adds that she summons can be dealt with by stunning/interrupting them, however don’t worry about trying to kill them, they have too many HPs to be worth it and I don’t even know if you can, just DPS the boss, that’s the important thing. Have tanks worry about controlling the two adds to extend the burn phase as long as possible.

Once Alysrazor reaches 50 energy, she will come back up. At this point a tank needs to taunt and the entire rest of the raid should stack up somewhere that is NOT in front of her because she will start doing her AoE cleave thing but she has to be tanked during this. This is a good place for tank cooldowns and after this let the adds that give her fire energy give her the fire energy asap, because once she hits 100 she gets out of this phase. She also does an AoE hellfire like thing that needs to be healed through, and once she hits 100 fire energy she will knock everyone back for 50k, so everyone needs to be above 50k when this happens. Again, good time for cooldowns.

Live through that and phase 1 starts again. Rinse and repeat, but the 3^rd time alysrazor lands, she will do an enrage and will not ignite and go back in the air, your tanks have to just constantly tank her and they will die fairly quickly. However if none of your raiders are dying and the 2 DPS in the air are doing their jobs, then hitting the enrage shouldn’t be an issue.

The strategy: Okay so I ‘ve already typed almost 4 pages and I haven’t even gotten to the real strategy yet. I guess I talked about Phase 2 a lot, but Phase 1 is still pretty vague. So here’s why you bring 6 DPS, 2 healers, and 2 tanks. It’s all about phase 1.
I’ll start off by talking about what the air DPS do and detail that. A lot of people seem to have problems with it (and even I still sometimes mess up, it’s fairly exacting to fly around while holding your rotation and avoiding clouds and flying through rings before they despawn).

Flying:
After picking up 3 feathers you will gain the “wings of flame” buff. It initially lasts for 20 seconds so you then have 20 seconds to fly through a fire ring to keep the buff up. This buff is DIIFFERENT than the Blazing Power DEBUFF. The Blazing Power Debuff has a much longer duration (I think about 40 seconds or something) and are not an indication of how long you will be in the air. Upon passing through a fire ring, the maximum amount of time you have to fly through another ring is only 15 seconds. So another way to say that is that flying through a ring only resets the timer on wings of flame to 15, not 20.

There are some tricky things to flying. First, don’t panic too badly about incendiary clouds. At least on normal you can hit a few and be fine, they won’t knock you out of the air or anything but they will do damage and you will be flying too high in the air to be healed back up by your healers for the most part. Avoid them as you can but if you have to hit one for a ring or accidentally hit one it’s not a huge deal unless you are hitting a lot of them and die, in which case it is a big deal and you may have just wiped your raid.

The other tricky part is when Alysrazor does her strafing runs and flies close to the ground. When she does this she will always spawn the fire rings above her, and she will summon 3 fire rings when she does this. However, she will also spawn 2 incendiary clouds for every 1 fire ring. They will be directly above her lined up horizontally. It’s late and I don’t have time to photoshop something or make an MS paint pic, so hopefully you can either see this in a video or my word picture is good enough. The fire ring is not always in the same place for different strafing runs, but for the same strafing one it will always be in the same place relative to Alysrazor for all 3 spawns… let me explain.

.....X...X...X
-->X...X...X -->
.....O...O...O

Okay well in Word that looks nice and pretty, but I have no idea if it will format right. Anyways the arrows show the direction alysrazor is flying in and the Os are the rings of fire and the Xs are the incendiary clouds. So on this particular strafing run you want to be on alysrazor’s right side because that is where all of the rings will spawn . The next time she does a strafing run though, the rings might be in the middle and the incendiary clouds on the left and right sides of her. I really hope this isn’t confusing but I know it probably is. When I make a video of this I’ll try to be more clear.

Why is this important? Because while it is always important to keep your wings of flame buff up, it is the most important here, because if you miss the last ring of the strafing run, you will lose the buff unless you are very lucky and time it perfectly because after the strafing run it is about 10 seconds before alysrazor spawns another ring, so if you only got the 2^nd ring of the 3 in the strafing run, the time from getting the second buff to the new ring spawning is about 15 seconds and you’ll lose the buff and fall to your death and die. If you do miss this ring, fly to the ground, find a feather, wait for wings of flame to fall because grabbing a feather will not refresh the timer, and click on the feather after you lose your buff and you’ll go right back into the air.

I highly suggest setting up a timer or a poweraura or something to keep track of your wings of flame buff timer in a heads up fashion. If you mess up and have time to fly to the ground so that you don’t fall to your death, it could save your raid, or it might let you know if you accidentally missed a ring or something.

I’m also going to dispel more rumors about the rings. Some people have been saying that when 1 person flies through the ring it disappears, this is simply not true. It may look like it, but it’s not true. The rings only last for 3 seconds and ANYONE that flies through it while it is up will gain a stack of blazing power. After 3 seconds it goes away. Dems da truths.

If you’re a pro and get over 25 rings of fire, you’ll gain a buff called Alysra’s Razor and it will increase your critical strike chance by 75%. If you get a couple of rings during tornadoes to keep this buff up, then your alysra’s razor buff and your 200% haste buff will still be up during the burn phase and you can do some serious damage. It’s pretty fun.

Ideal classes for flying:
Some say melee are good, this is for two reasons. The first is that the DPS on the ground have to move a lot, so it hampers melee because they have to move more, and the second is that melee can’t get GCD spell casting capped, that is that melee’s attack speed gets the full benefit of the 200% haste, but some casters will just get GCD capped and won’t get the full benefit, however DoT classes will still get the benefit of the haste, so affliction locks and shadowpriests also make good choices for the air. I actually like melee on the ground, the melee I’ve sent have been smart about initiate spawns and are very valuable for interrupting fireoblast, which is critical to the fight. The BEST class seems to be fire mages though. They do ridiculous DPS. You might think that arcane mages would be awesome especially with the mana return they could just spam arcane blast, but really they can’t, the mana regen isn’t enough, even as affliction I’ve had to life tap a couple times because towards the end of the fight I was just dumping mana like crazy. So really all that happens is arcane mages get GCD capped and do OKAY damage, but fire is better.

Okay so now that you’ve all graduated from flight school… time for ground school (har… see what I did there, can you tell I’m writing this at 1am?).

PICTURE TIME!
There's a problem with the picture, currently working on fixing it. For some reason I can't just make it show up as a picture but here's the link to the picture! [image]http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/3...eonepositi.jpg[/image]

Our feral druid was kind enough to make this picture Vibra and Alathia are our two healers, so we split the 8 people left in the raid downstairs into two groups, and east group and a west group. Each group has at least 1 DPS that can interrupt, 1 tank, 1 healer, and 1 more ranged DPS. DPS Shamans are great for this fight if they spec into the 5 second interrupt thingy, they can get every fireoblast.

You’ll also note the spawn locations. When the initiates first spawn, they spawn two at a time at a set timer. I’m pretty sure that once you kill them a timer starts for the next one to come down, so if you kill them quickly your DPS should have time to help out your tanks on your respective sides a little bit to get the voracious hatchlings down. Watch out for brushfire (which CANNOT be interrupted, don’t try) and plump lava worms. Taking avoidable damage will stress your healers. Tanks, if there is a plump lava worm on top of a blazing initiate, eat it early it will probably be overall less raid damage.

So anyways, the first initiates that spawn will be in the north east and the south west, so 2 DPS from the west group will go to the south west spawn and kill it then immediately head to the north east spawn point where the 2^nd initiate will spawn, rinse repeat. There will be 2 DPS that do the same on the east side but they will start with the north east spawn then the second spawn on their side will be the south east spawn. With interrupts on every fireoblast and DPS being careful of avoidable damage, this is easily two healable and the adds should die quickly.

Tanking: So I mentioned earlier that the tanks will get imprinted and do 1000% increased damage against their voracious hatchling. This is true and the tanks will do a butt load of damage, but sometimes it’s not quite enough to get them down on their own, so if DPS have downtime between initiates, help with the hatchlings but make sure initiates are still your number 1 priority, not interrupting fireoblast will wipe the raid, mainly because when the initiates do cast fireoblast, they get a buff that increases their damage and I think cast speed.

So ya, enough about the initiates, on to the tanking. The hatchlings will start out with a debuff called “satiated” and when they have this they will not enrage. It lasts for 15 seconds and can be refreshed by dragging a voracious hatchling over to a plump lava worm where the hatchling will eat the worm, get satiated, and the lava worm will go away. However, when the bird is not satiated it will have a debuff called “hungry” and when they are “hungry” each melee attack has a chance to make them throw a “tantrum.” Tantrum itself is the actual enrage, not hungry. Since there will not be enough plump lava worms to ensure that the voracious hatchlings will never be hungry there are a few tricks the tanks need to pull off. First, wait to get a lava worm until the worm is actually throwing a tantrum. This increases the time you can go without needing to eat a worm. However, if a lava worm is just in a really bad spot and you need to eat it so that the DPS can kill initiates, then do it. Otherwise you’re just going to have to tank the enrages. If you know you’re going to have to tank tantrum (which only lasts 4 seconds), call it out so your healer is aware and/or save a cooldown for it. Shield block is awesome here, but even minor trinkets or enraged regen may be enough, especially if the DPS aren’t letting fireoblast go off and the healer is on his/her toes for your side. If you have to, shield wall or barksin or whatever to stay alive here. The only other place a tank needs a cooldown is perhaps at the end of the burn phase when Alysrazor is between 50-100 energy.

The voracious hatchlings need to die before the tornadoes activate, and once the timer for phase 2 is below 30 seconds, no more initiates will spawn so that is the DPS’s mark to finish up any initiates that are up and help finish off the hatchlings.
Anyways, this guide is now 7 pages long and I fairly thoroughly explained what to do in phase 2 up top, so just scroll up to read it.

I’m sorry that this guide may have seemed kind of ramble-y, but as you can tell there is a lot of information in this fight and on 10 man, the devil is in the details. I really hope this guide helps people. As usual ask questions or feel free to PM me. Hopefully this guide is still coherent even when I was writing it so late at night. Happy Hunting!

Also: sorry I haven't had the time to put up more guides, I will put them out as I can.

[Terra]

Thanks Aggathon. I hope to have a better night tonight working on him after reading this. Also, thanks for joining our vent to discuss Baleroc with our healers. We ended up dropping him in both our 10 man groups last night in large part due to your help.

[Aggathon]

No problem, 'tis what I do! I'm just glad to get some feedback on this guide specifically, because honestly it's really long and I just hope it appears coherent to other people, I probably should have made like an outline or something before I wrote it to make it flow better, but instead I just kinda sat down and started writing. Seriously folks, please post comments on this guide. If it's too confusing somewhere let me know and I'll try to clarify/make it better.

[Terra]

It makes sense to me, but I think my ability to understand it was helped a lot by making attempts last night enough that I did actually get to see a phase 2. I think this is one of those fights where there's so much going on it's overwhelming at first, but as you start to understand it, it becomes conceptually much simpler. So if you don't understand the guide above, I'd say make a few pulls and then come re-read it. It should make more sense. One question I've got. As a tank on the bird w/ impression. How much DPS were your tanks doing. I was getting between 80-120k, but didn't feel like it was enough.

[Aggathon]

That's about what our tanks do. Our feral druid is usually behind our warrior and needs a little help at the end. Our warrior pops reck if his add isn't low at the end and that pretty much finishes it off most times.

[Terra]

So with what I learned from this post we went from OMG this is hard can't break phase 1 to, phase 1 is a pushover. We've got it all under control except a few people that need some Dance Dance Revolution practice in order to survive the fire tornadoes. Due to tornado deaths, our best pull last night was about 40%.

[Aggathon]

WRT the tornadoes: Check your logs once they're posted and see if the people are dying to fiery tornadoes or harsh winds. If it's harsh winds then maybe they just didn't get the message that they can't go to the edge because they'll die.

[Aggathon]

/console cameramaxdistancefactor 5

^ that might help too. I know our prot warrior was dying every time until he did that and then he was fine. Ellsoull was having problems too because she had her environmental distance all the way low so she couldn't see the tornadoes coming until it was almost too late. She's died a couple times since that, but she's definitely improved a LOT.

If a ground DPS dies, you can take a DPS out of the air and put them on the ground killing adds. We had to do that because we had a new melee on the ground that died to tornadoes, 1 airphase with 2 DPS was enough and we killed it during the 3rd burn phase (right as Alysrazor hit 50 energy). So we sorta 9 manned it, heh.

[Terra]

I did /console cameramaxdistancefactor 10 and scrolled out to maximum for phase 1 because I kept having issues backing into brush fires or not approaching a lava worm correctly as tank. The pan out fixed then. Then as the tornadoes were coming I zoomed back in, otherwise the bird flying overhead could obscure my camera. I'll look for harsh winds on the people dying most often (because for the most part it was the same people).

[Sliph]

I've been looking through worldoflogs, I notice a lot of the guilds on the first page (dps records) seem to be 1 tanking this fight, would this be viable for a guild that hasn't killed it yet?

[Fetzie]

I don't see how you could one-tank alysrazor, to pick up one of the birds you need to be about 30 yards from the other. The damage from two enraged birds would almost definitely kill you, and I don't think it would be possible to deal 36 million damage to the two birds in time.

Use two tanks and 3 healers, don't try anything out of the ordinary (you cna do that when you know you can kill her easily to make things less boring)

[Ion]

Also, meter cheesing nonsense is the worst of all ideas...never look at top parses on WoL and think "oh hey that's a good idea". It rarely is, and most often it's just a terrible idea that's designed entirely to cheese the WoL meters.

[Aggathon]

Also, meter cheesing nonsense is the worst of all ideas...never look at top parses on WoL and think "oh hey that's a good idea". It rarely is, and most often it's just a terrible idea that's designed entirely to cheese the WoL meters.

^ This

2 tank it. We prefer to 2 heal it (as per the strat), but some guilds prefer 3, kinda depends on your makeup.

[Kerchunk]

Also, meter cheesing nonsense is the worst of all ideas...never look at top parses on WoL and think "oh hey that's a good idea". It rarely is, and most often it's just a terrible idea that's designed entirely to cheese the WoL meters.

I think that's obviously very subjective. There are many < 6 minute kills on WoL and all you need to do is browse their logs to see it's a perfectly legit kill with very skilled players. I don't see where any amount of "cheese" is involved.

Now, do you want to 1-Tank it as your starting strategy? Definitely not.

2 tanks and 3 healers and we were able to get an 8:49 kill which is very respectable based on average times, so that's where I would start personally. But, it's silly to warn people away from altering their strategy once they are comfortable with the fight. If their raid can support it, it's the only way you're going to achieve the < 6 minute kills that are readily viewable on WoL.

I don't think it would be possible to deal 36 million damage to the two birds in time

It's very obviously possible. You can go and read the logs right now. I seriously doubt people are fabricating these logs just to troll WoL.

[Ion]

I think that's obviously very subjective. There are many < 6 minute kills on WoL and all you need to do is browse their logs to see it's a perfectly legit kill with very skilled players. I don't see where any amount of "cheese" is involved.

The fact that they're 1 tanking it on normal and doing it in less than 6 minutes means they're cheesing...if you CAN do that, you should be (and probably normally ARE) doing it on heroic. The fact that they're even DOING it on normal means they're cheesing.

It's very obviously possible. You can go and read the logs right now. I seriously doubt people are fabricating these logs just to troll WoL.

Clearly you'd be surprised.

[Kerchunk]

I guess you and I have different defintions of cheese then. To me "cheesing" means you're making creative use of or exploiting a particular fight mechanic in an unintended way to make the fight easier and therefore achieve what would otherwise be impossible for a normal group.

Just going in with an incredible group and maximal strategy? I wouldn't give that a negative label like "cheesing." It's an impressive accomplishment and we should aspire to things like this, not tear them down.

Saying they "should" be doing Heroic mode is a bit presumptious, don't you think? Maybe they're working on other bosses in HM and don't want to learn HM Alysrazor yet? Maybe they're 7/7 HM and this is how they keep the content feeling fresh and interesting - finding new strategies and experimenting with new approaches to old fights to see what's possible. They're basically inventing their own "hard mode." It's a bit of emergent gameplay and it's awesome if you ask me.

Again, not the sort of behavior I think we should be condemning as a community.

Clearly you'd be surprised.

Not really. I'm sure fake logs exist, but not every < 6m Alys up there is a mock.