02-08-2006, 08:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-08-2006, 08:10 AM by Skandranon.)
MongoJerry,Feb 8 2006, 02:51 AM Wrote:I just killed him tonight after two wipes, and my general review: Thumbs up! Most of the things I said above were right. The fight is much more about dealing damage yourself rather than having Hakkar kill himself.
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I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment that the Hakkar changes were positive. The fight is fun again: tanks no longer go afk, alt-tab, or eat while tanking, and the entire battle is a lot more interactive. Not only that, they managed to do it without introducing other bizarre bugs such as the Berserker's previous Zone Crash ability and Hakkar's temporary Tractor Beam.
I think the most important part of grasping the new Hakkar strat for me was to throw out everything I knew about the old Hakkar. To those who haven't fought him in 1.9.3 yet: there is functionally no penalty to doing damage to him yourself, and the changes to siphon blood (its damage to Hakkar when you are poisoned has been reduced to 200/s from 500/s) means that you *have* to. Killing sons is no longer the primary method of DPS on Hakkar, just a way of making certain that his 90-second drains (twice as long a delay as before) don't fill him up too much.
As a further tip for others, I recommend spending some time discussing the impact of each of these changes among yourselves before trying the fight. Yes, it's theorycraft, but theorycraft can be useful. Upon reading this list of changes, I and a few of my guildmates went off on a few promising lines of speculation regarding strategy alterations, and our newly devised tactic plus a few on-the-fly alterations were enough to take him out on the first shot. He isn't really harder, just different, and once people adapt to the changes, he'll be back to vending epics soon enough.