Thaddius

[Skandranon]

We basically stand on each other for the stacking damage buff (you get 10% damage added up to 200% so i was getting 6k hits with my Frostbolt etc.) and go clockwise when their is a polarity shift.

Going clockwise is going to hurt more than it helps. Giving people a longer (curved) path to follow as opposed to straight lines increases the chance that someone a step or two behind is going to bomb the raid.

Negative Charge and Positive Charge are periodic effects that check every 5 seconds. Between those five-second intervals, they don't care where you are relative to one another. So run directly through Thaddius, in a straight line path to the other group. You'll run through oppositely charged people doing the same thing, but so long as you're on your correct sides before the debuff ticks 55 seconds, you'll be fine.

We got him to about 90% surviving two polarity shifts and then we are all dead. Some questions: Do you drop people whose computers can't handle the encounter? We have 3 people that always screwed up the charges and wiped the raid always claiming lag.

Well, there's two lag issues at play. The first one, which I experienced personally for a while, was that older hardware servers (hi Stormrage) simply couldn't handle the Negative and Positive Charges. Each of these effects checks every other player in its radius every 5 seconds to see if it blasts them or buffs them, which is 40 buffs checking 19 players each = effectively, 760 buff events needing to be processed every 5 seconds. The usual effect was massive ability lag, but the server wasn't above randomly disconnecting people (BZZZAPPP!).

The other kind of lag is player-specific, and it looks like that's what you've got. Some people's machines, for whatever reason, can't handle his Polarity Shift casting animation, and either experience massive slowdown or grind to a halt. Simplifying the shift (run forward in a straight line, do not pass go, etc.) should help, but if they can't handle even that, then you'll have to drop them. A solution, I hear, is in the works, but for now these people are SOL.

Does Thaddius have an aggro ceiling or is he proximity aggro like Patchwerk?

It is possible to pull aggro on Thaddius, just difficult. A Defiance specced MT will generally be creating enough extra threat to overcome the fact that all the DPS classes are also doing tons of damage. The exception is if a fire mage gets a string of crits: due to the way the buff interacts with Ignite, they can rapidly find themselves rolling 30,000+ point ignites, which pull aggro in a hurry.

Does the fight have a max length, eg 5 minutes or so and its game over??

After five minutes, Thaddius berserks and his chain lightning inflicts 12,000+ points of damage per jump, which obliterates your raid in a matter of seconds. You need to burn away his seven million hit points before then, requiring a raid DPS of about 22,500. If you lose too many people early, you've essentially wiped, since every person dead is 10% less damage for 19 other people (no more Charge buff) as well as losing their own damage.

Finally, does the raid wear NR gear or use NR pots?

This really depends on your raid mix. If you're short healing, DPS classes can probably consider some epic NR pieces (blues or greens probably gimp your damage output too much). If you've got a lot of healers, NR gear is unnecessary.