Hakkar Changes

[Lissa]

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.
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Avarice ran through him last night, got him on the second try. Definitely more involvment for the raid and now the Hunters don't have to go running all over chasing Sons. What we did was station one Hunter at the north side of the stone platform towards the mid point and one on the south side of the stone platform towards the mid point. The hunters then alternated pulling up sons by just targetting firing, and then letting the raid know they were coming. This allowed the Hunters to keep DPS on Hakkar for most the fight and just get Sons as needed. When we took him down, we took him down around the 9 1/2 minute mark (maybe a little earlier). We can also confirm that it does indeed appear to be 1 minute 25 seconds on the drains (meaning there are 7 total drains before Hakkar goes nuts and the 7th should come just before he goes nuts).