Advice on 10 man Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn

[crymson]

Hiya folks, let me just thank you all in advance for any help you can offer.

I represent a fairly casual raiding guild which while slow proceeds at a fairly steady pace through content. Normally.

However we have run into a brick wall, 10 man heroic Warmaster Blackhorn is stopping us cold.

Here is where things stand, We are running 3 Heals, 1 tank, 4 ranged, 2 melee. We have the deck divided into quadrants with 2-3 people assigned to soaking barrages in each quadrant. We seem to be having no problems with the deck adds or the drakes, we down roughly 1 set of each for every Twilight Onslaught that hits the deck, usually getting a 4th twilight onslaught and a second broadside just about half way through the third set. We have come very close to downing the 3rd sets of adds but cannot seem to turn the corner. Either people start dying to combinations of barrages and charges from the deck adds or there is a failure to top someone off for a twilight onslaught or there is so much deck fire it becomes overwhelming.

So I am looking for some advice on clearing this encounter, we have tried 2 heals 5 ranged and 2 tanks and several other combinations. We know that come phase 2 having one tank is going to be lethal, but single tanking has gotten us furthest through phase one so far. What I'm wondering, is there something we are overlooking or not understanding? Is there some glaring item we have missed or is this fight just as ridiculously out of balance as I think it is on 10 man?

Thanks again for any possible help.

[Tengenstein]

the fight is Harder than every fight before it. People should not be getting hit by charges. At all. Ever. If there's a purple swirly and a charge you either just clip the swirly and have the charge miss , or you don't take either. setup a CD rotation for the onslaughts, PW:B the first, Tank 2pc the second, spirit link the third, you're gonna need 5 or 6 with 2 tanks, and get used to doing it with 2 tanks. if people are soaking well there shouldn't be that much deck fire, and remember as soon as the gnomes start dropping water on it it's extinguished as far as the games concerned.

Got any Log parses we can look at?

[captanmurdoc]

you would be best off 2 healing and 2 tanking this fight. the dps mix is easiest with a range heavy comp but bring your best dps, we got our first kill with 3 melle. a class that can multi dot efficently is going to help a lot (boomkin, shadow priest or affliction lock work best). once you start being able to down each set of drakes in 1 go the fight gets a lot easier and youre almost to your kill. one thing we do that not every does but seems to help us a lot is when we get to the third set of drakes, we put all range and 1 melle on the range side drake (right for us when looking to the front of the boat) and leave the rest of the melle on the adds, letting the left side drake fly away once gives us time to clean up the melle adds and let some of the fire die down when its not as hectic. once you see phase 2, a kill is soon to follow. i think it took us 4 more attempts after seeing our first phase 2 to get it down (our second time getting to phase 2). also, make sure your dps know its a long fight and you can use your cooldowns in phase 1 without missing out on them in phase 2. shoot to have the first set of melle adds dead as the first sapper is dropping onto the boat without letting the drakes fly away. also, what teng said is completely true, you dont need to soak every twilight barrage so if theres a charge going through it, let it hit and if you would have to soak alone without any kind of cd like barkskin, shield wall ect, dont risk the death. we assign people to pairs and certain areas of the boat to watch, we have 1 person marked as the leader in the pair, if the leader doesnt go in, the person paired with them shouldnt unless they have some way to mitigate some damage (the mirror of broken images works nicely for it if you can sacrafice some dps). The third set is the most difficult part of the fight, just keep plugging away at it and everything will click.

[crymson]

Thanks for the advice, our raid comp is not always the greatest due to attendance issues and our best dps includes 2 melee. It is heartening to hear that you were able to down him with 3, the changeup on the third set of drakes sounds very useful and having a lead person for each quadrant is brilliant. I'm going to take all your suggestions back to my raid group I'm certain this will help us a great deal. And people are just gonna hafta watch what they are standing in :-)

Thanks again.

[Fetzie]

If you can get all the drakes down quickly, so that none of them fly away, then soaking the small barrages becomes much less of an issue. If a Drake is there, kill it.

We split the raid into ranges and melee. Ranged dps kill the right hand drake, melee kill the left one. The adds are tanked in the left drake to take cleave damage. Drakes have the highest priority, other than sappers. If you let a sapper through in P1, you might as well wipe the attempt.

All ten people soak the large AoE. If a small AoE is next to two people they call it out and soak it. Otherwise only the tanks soak them.

Fire spawns at around 70% ship life, 40% ship life and 20% ship life. Try not to get cut off from the raid, and try to ensure a clear path through to the large AoE blast. Make sure you look out for charges, it can be hard to see the indicator through the fire.

Getting to phase two is basically the end of the fight. Be sure to have the tanks hold the boss and goriona on the same spot, with the tanks standing about 90° apart. Then only one tank will take the dragon breath. Bloodlust, nuke Goriona until she lifts off at 20%. Then kill the boss. When a tank taunts and the boss is below 30% life, he should have a minor cooldown running and be at 100% life. Blackhorn is easily capable of taking 50% off a tank at low boss health with a melee swing and devastate combination. Sub 30% a tank should use a major cooldown if he has two or more stacks of Sunder Armor. A tank is in immediate danger of dying if he gets a fourth stack of Sunder Armor, the debuff should, however, never go beyond 3 stacks.

[crymson]

I really like that system of using the melee on the one drake cleaving especially since our two top dps are a warrior and rogue.

Thanks for the input, continuing our raid tomorrow night I'll update with our progress.

Thanks again :-)

[Takethecake]

I've only done this fight on 25 man but it sounds like the key points are the same. Some of the important things we stress on this fight are:

- Kill drakes on the first harpoon. We also let one drake from the third set get free from the harpoon to ensure the final elites are dead.
- Each set of elites should be dead before the next set of elites spawns.


If the second or third set of elites/drake are a problem you can lust then in order to ensure a clean transition into phase 2. We used to do this but after the nerfs it is no longer needed for us. Also we don't use dps cooldowns on the first elite / drake set because it isn't needed, saving them for the second elite/drake combo helps keep the adds slightly cleaner.

Mainly it sounds like people need to pay attention to their own survival though. People dieing to barrage or charge can't happen, especially in a 10 man setting with just 1 rez.

We have our fire mages soak the 4th onslaught alone due to it being the worst one as far as timing goes for dps. This does considerably more damage to the ship but by no means is lethal, and it allows our dps to focus more on the adds and drake that is just being harpooned down. Not sure if that is an option with your raid.

[tawnos]

Well I have only done it once this past week on two toons (and one of those was 25m) but you definitely don't need to 3 heal it. The phase1 deaths aren't going to be because you didn't have enough heals but because of people being oneshotted. The tanking is nowhere near as difficult as it was when most of the guides were written (i.e. pre-debuff) but you still aren't going to be able to reliably onetank it in phase2. In my 10m guild's first kill i did manage to mostly onetank it when the other tank died during goriona (and actually we only had one healer up as well after that point) but it was just some huge luck with avoidance resetting sunder stacks and thats not something you can rely on.

The biggest thing to acclimate to (in my guild's runs at least) has been the fact that people insist on trying to soak way too many barrages. Those who can soak them without much danger or dps loss should do so but people want to try to get to every one and at this level of the debuff its just not necessary. I think its counterintuitive to wow players but the mindset of phase1 being a huge dps race is the proper one despite there not being a rage timer that explicitly says 'you didn't do enough dps', which is normally what marks a dps race in WoW.

Oh, and sapper macro. Our arcane mage finally started doing more damage than me (blood dk) to the sapper after i whined enough about people not having a macro.

[Fetzie]

Oh yeah, we always 2 healed it. Back then you couldn't do it with 3 because then you didn't have the damage to kill the stuff in P1 in time, which meant the ship died. If you can't do it with two now, either your healers need to shape up, or your dps need to learn how not to take damage (more likely tbh).

[marklar]

confirming and adding to what most people here are saying. don't feel bad about hitting a wall here; it's definitely a step up from the first 5. the good news is it's very repeatable after you get it.

PHASE 1
1) 2 heals, 2 tanks - there is absolutely no way any tank can survive phase 2 alone. 2 melee is fine, although more would get difficult.

2) assign quadrants and partners for the small swirlies - if you're getting overwhelmed by fire, you might be letting too many hit the deck. tanks and melee all share one quadrant. nobody eats a small swirly alone, unless they have a cooldown. don't eat small swirlies with 2 stacks, even with a partner. better to let it hit than to die.

3) no drakes should ever fly away after being harpooned. we put our highest ranged dps in the back left quadrant with a healer (melee is front left). at least one of the melee runs over and helps with the left drake. that leaves 3 ranged on the right side so that drake is no problem.

4) by default, all 10 people stack in big swirlies - anyone with 2 stacks of the debuff stays out. we rotate cooldowns when needed (4-piece tanks, spirit link, barrier, etc).

5) have a plan for sappers: concussive shot, death grip, stuns, etc.

PHASE 2
congratulations! once you start seeing phase 2, the fight is almost won. phase 2 is very, very easy compared to phase 1.

1) have your best tank pick up blackhorn - NO DAMAGE on blackthorn except the tank (melee gets to watch and make a sammich).

2) make the dragon land, then the same tank picks her up while the 2nd tank taunts blackhorn. we tank both near the front of the ship, with the dragon facing slightly sideways for the breath.

3) heroism/bloodlust here with everyone on goriana, because the stupid dragon takes up so much room. we have the ranged stack ~12 yards away from blackhorn to be out of range of the roar's interrupt, but close enough to easily dodge shockwave. stacking up makes the healing debuff ignorable with AoE heals. if you have decent dps, you should be able to avoid a tank swap until she flies away.

4) don't get hit by shockwave! sounds obvious, but the only way to really fail phase 2 is to have your healers get consistently hit by shockwaves and/or roars.

5) tanks taunt swap when sunder falls off, and cycle cooldowns once blackhorn is < 50%. his damage is very heal-able these days, so you really don't need to save heroism for the end.

[crymson]

Yeah tbh I kinda suspected the deaths we're seeing had nothing to do with healing issues, we have really capable healers so I don't see any issues with 2 healing it.

We were one tanking it partly to accommodate the extra healer and still have enough dps.

A sapper macro, yeah I think everyone is just going to hafta make one regardless, atm only a couple ppl were using one.

I see what you eman about it being a dps race despite the lack of an enrage timer, and I do think we simply have too many people trying to soak too many barrages, we are getting deaths at about the same point every time and usually the same people. Which leads me to believe its exactly that.

Thanks for the updates this is going to help hugely :-)

[ironshoe7]

Have all your ranged start up above the bridge. They can get off a few shots on the first drake as it flies by, then jump down. We basically do what Fetzie described except we don't soak ANY little barrages. If you can kill all the drakes on the first harpoon, and you can get the sappers, you will get to P2 with roughly 10% boat health without purposely soaking any. A LOT of this fight is RNG on the stupid fire spawns too.

[chubtohd]

This fight was the hardest one in DS for our raid team. It took us 97 attempts compared to 23 on Spine and 3 on Madness (all during the 20% buff)

-2 Tanks / 2 Heals, this is a DPS race on the drakes really with fire thrown in for fun
-Our tanks stack up next to where the right drake is coming down. The DPS the drake and let AoE dmg work on the adds
-For the swirls, we just made sure to take the first 3-4 then ignored them completely afterward.
-Initially we did better with just 1 melee dps in the raid.
-The sapper is a little whore...sometimes we had to leave the warrior tank out of the big swirl, with shield wall active, to lock him down
-P2 is a joke if you can manage to have your range avoid shockwave. As long as their stacked 10 yards away and can move, you won't have any problems
-

[Tengenstein]

How is it RNG? the fire spawns when the boat hits 75%, 50%, and 25% health. And as long as you don't let the boat drop too quickly theres more than enough time for the gnomes to put out each wave before another spawns.

[Fetzie]

The location of the fire and the direction in which it spreads is RNG. Fire stopping spawning in P2 also seems to be a matter of RNG, every other kill has us wiping because the game decides that the fire should continue to spawn well into P2.

[marklar]

We were one tanking it partly to accommodate the extra healer and still have enough dps.

the thing is, the damage people are taking is either very heal-able or it kills you from 100% to dead. even 10 healers can't stop the latter.

i highly recommend running DeathNote for this fight (well, all progression fights really), and calling out what is killing the first couple people every attempt. you may find a pattern, which you can then fix.

[Fetzie]

We were one tanking it partly to accommodate the extra healer and still have enough dps.

If you need to drop to one tank to have enough dps in P1, you don't have the dps to finish P2 before the single tank dies the second time (assuming you can combat res him). Two tanks, two healers. If people are dying in P1 tell them to stop being bad at the game. All of the "random" damage is completely avoidable.

[crymson]

Thank you ALL for your very kind analysis, it was a huge help, we downed him tonight, our first night after getting your advice.

We killed him after 5 attempts, our first time seeing P2, and our 46th attempt overall.

Again thank you all!! As always Tankspot rocks!!

[Theotherone]

Gratz, we got him for the first time on Wednesday and did it the way Marklar said. Took 6 attempts with the full raid team; we practiced with one tank for about 1/2 hour to see the fight, before our second tank logged on. The 25% nerf was a big help since we had a healer go dps and he was pulling 16k and our shadow priest with a 404 ilvl was doing 12 - 16k (a constant issue since FL, but the rest of the dps and the tanks were kicking ass). We found our biggest issues were the charges and people trying to take swirls alone - too used to regular.

By the time Garonia went down I was on fumes for mana and just at that point Lay on Hands came off cooldown as did Divine Plea. A lot of luck.

Took one shot at spine and learned quickly that you can wait to dispel lol.