Loatheb

[Sword_of_Doom]

Very interesting fight in Naxx. Basically he has about 5 million hp and has a number of abilities. Copied from WoWwiki.

Attacks and Abilities
Loatheb has around 5,330,000 HP
Corrupted mind Loatheb places a 1 minute linked cooldown on all healing spells, including cleanse/dispell/depoison. This means you only get 1 healing spell to cast per 1 minute, including cleanse/dispell/depoison. Anything that heals, removes a debuff, or otherwise prevents dmg on others (PWS) pretty much is affected
Poison Aura melee range. 196 Nature damage inflicted every 6 sec in 10 yards. 12 seconds duration.
Inevitable Doom Loatheb begin to cast it after 2 mins in fight. Inflicts 2550 Shadow damage after 10 sec. 100 yards, every 30 secs. 5 mins after engaging, this will be every 15 secs.
Fungal Bloom Critical-hit chance increased by 50%. Spell critical-hit chance increased by 60%. Spells and abilities cause no threat. Get from envionment, you can control who gets it. 90 secs duration, every time only 5 people can get it.

We had our first night of full attempts on him and got him to about 50% or so with no buffs or pots. We die out usually after the second doom. I am well aware that buffing and potting are necessary for this fight but we wanted to make sure our healing strat/rotation and DPS were on par with killing him. No point in wasting the consumables that are needed for this fight without certainty of killing him.

Some questions:
Ideally you probably want to kill him before 5 minutes right? After that dooms are every 15 seconds or so making it impossible for the raid to outheal the damage.

Secondly, are all world buffs necessary for this fight (like Dire Maul, Hakkar, Dark Moon Faire etc.)?? Our guildleader would like us to take the couple of hours to do that and than one shot Loatheb. Personally i think thats not necessary but having not killed him yet thats not a very convincing argument. For those of the Lurkers that have beat this fight, did you use all available world buffs on your first kill?

Thirdly, is it necessary to have more than 5100 hp for this fight, considering you could survive two dooms (or a minute of fight time)?? I am thinking its a good idea but there was some resistance from the raid to do that.

Essentially you are looking at taking 15, 300 damage over the course of the fight and nobody can heal you but yourself.

Some thoughts on this fight would be nice:)

[Skandranon]

Some questions:
Ideally you probably want to kill him before 5 minutes right? After that dooms are every 15 seconds or so making it impossible for the raid to outheal the damage.

The killer with quicker dooms is that it tends to take out healers first, leading to gaps in the rotation on the tank, which means tanksplat in short order. You want him dead by 5:24 (just before the first 15 second Doom goes off). Sub-5 minutes is a plus, but it's really the Doom at 5:25 which will probably start killing people.

Secondly, are all world buffs necessary for this fight (like Dire Maul, Hakkar, Dark Moon Faire etc.)?? Our guildleader would like us to take the couple of hours to do that and than one shot Loatheb. Personally i think thats not necessary but having not killed him yet thats not a very convincing argument. For those of the Lurkers that have beat this fight, did you use all available world buffs on your first kill?

It is not, strictly speaking, necessary. That said, I was sporting Spirit of the Zandalar, Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, Sayge's Dark Fortune of Damage, and even Lordaeron's Blessing when I killed Loatheb for the first time. Loatheb is an absurdly stiff DPS check and every little bit helps (although I think Dire Maul would take too long).

We still prefer to get the world buffs when they're available, because of the high cost of a Loatheb pot-wipe (how much time do you really want to spend farming GSPPs?). Last kill both dragon heads were hanging and the Faire wasn't in town, so we made do with just Spirit of the Zandalar. Since the removal of the cooldown on Spirit of the Zandalar, there's really no reason not to get it, especially when it's a portal-Stormwind and a quick flight away.

Thirdly, is it necessary to have more than 5100 hp for this fight, considering you could survive two dooms (or a minute of fight time)?? I am thinking its a good idea but there was some resistance from the raid to do that.

This depends on your consumable rotation. Figure out what it is, then do the math for dooms and pots (assuming each shadow potion absorbs only 1950 shadow damage; any other assumption is unsafe, and yes, I've gotten a 1950 and 1953 consecutively on a Loatheb kill, so it DOES happen). Once you've gotten an idea of your consumable rotation and the damage inflicted by incoming Dooms, you'll arrive at a magic number for HP which is going to be in the ~5000 range.

In practice, everyone will exceed this amount without even changing gear. Load up on the cheap HP buffs: a Kickin' Chimaerok Chop, some Rumsey Rum, and an Elixir of Fortitude. Spirit of the Zandalar helps here too: it doesn't persist through death any more, but its +15% stats is now applied after all buffs instead of just to base stats. 15% additional stamina works wonders for survivability: low-stam healers can even use the Dark Fortune of Stamina buff instead of the Damage one if the Faire is in town.

This fight boils down to correctly managing three different rotations (perhaps they should have anagrammed "rotation" instead of "healbot"). You need a healing rotation on the MT to keep him up. You need a spore rotation to make sure all your DPS classes get the buff on time and keep up raid DPS. Finally, you need a consumable rotation that is 100% guaranteed to keep you alive until at least the 5:00 mark. Once you've gotten these things worked out, just do them in the right order at the right time for five minutes and you win.

[Sword_of_Doom]

The killer with quicker dooms is that it tends to take out healers first, leading to gaps in the rotation on the tank, which means tanksplat in short order. You want him dead by 5:24 (just before the first 15 second Doom goes off). Sub-5 minutes is a plus, but it's really the Doom at 5:25 which will probably start killing people.
It is not, strictly speaking, necessary. That said, I was sporting Spirit of the Zandalar, Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, Sayge's Dark Fortune of Damage, and even Lordaeron's Blessing when I killed Loatheb for the first time. Loatheb is an absurdly stiff DPS check and every little bit helps (although I think Dire Maul would take too long).

We still prefer to get the world buffs when they're available, because of the high cost of a Loatheb pot-wipe (how much time do you really want to spend farming GSPPs?). Last kill both dragon heads were hanging and the Faire wasn't in town, so we made do with just Spirit of the Zandalar. Since the removal of the cooldown on Spirit of the Zandalar, there's really no reason not to get it, especially when it's a portal-Stormwind and a quick flight away.
This depends on your consumable rotation. Figure out what it is, then do the math for dooms and pots (assuming each shadow potion absorbs only 1950 shadow damage; any other assumption is unsafe, and yes, I've gotten a 1950 and 1953 consecutively on a Loatheb kill, so it DOES happen). Once you've gotten an idea of your consumable rotation and the damage inflicted by incoming Dooms, you'll arrive at a magic number for HP which is going to be in the ~5000 range.

In practice, everyone will exceed this amount without even changing gear. Load up on the cheap HP buffs: a Kickin' Chimaerok Chop, some Rumsey Rum, and an Elixir of Fortitude. Spirit of the Zandalar helps here too: it doesn't persist through death any more, but its +15% stats is now applied after all buffs instead of just to base stats. 15% additional stamina works wonders for survivability: low-stam healers can even use the Dark Fortune of Stamina buff instead of the Damage one if the Faire is in town.

This fight boils down to correctly managing three different rotations (perhaps they should have anagrammed "rotation" instead of "healbot"). You need a healing rotation on the MT to keep him up. You need a spore rotation to make sure all your DPS classes get the buff on time and keep up raid DPS. Finally, you need a consumable rotation that is 100% guaranteed to keep you alive until at least the 5:00 mark. Once you've gotten these things worked out, just do them in the right order at the right time for five minutes and you win.

Thanks for the reply.

We had two attempts tonight.

First attempt, we got him to 7% and everyone keeled over at the 5:10 mark.

We reloaded, 1 hour later, we killed him at the 5:30 mark. Then the remainder of the raid keeled over. What a rush, survived to the kill and then get killed by the doom.

Basically for both attempts we went with the Hakkar and Head of Ony buff and used every imaginable consumable. Used 3 Shadow pots per attempt. So i can see now why there was much complaining in the R&D forums about the cost of the consumables. We have to do that every week:( O well, fun fight and surprising small learning curve for us.

[nobbie]

You're currently looking at ~5 greater shadow pots per person per attempt when fighting Loatheb.

[The Gnu]

You're currently looking at ~5 greater shadow pots per person per attempt when fighting Loatheb.

How do you mean? There's not enough time to use more than three. (one at the start, one at 2.10 and one at 4.10)
We've killed him once so far, used the Onyxia buff. We've had a couple of wipes in the 1-10% area without it though, so I doubt it will be neccessary more than for a couple of weeks.

[Sword_of_Doom]

How do you mean? There's not enough time to use more than three. (one at the start, one at 2.10 and one at 4.10)
We've killed him once so far, used the Onyxia buff. We've had a couple of wipes in the 1-10% area without it though, so I doubt it will be neccessary more than for a couple of weeks.

Ya the timers we use for the fight for self healing is as follows:

Beginning---Shadow pot
2:10 Shadow pot
2:40 Bandage
3:10 1440 Healthstone
3:40 Bandage
4:10 Shadow Pot
4:40 Bandage
5:10 Healthstone

Anything beyond that is tough as the dooms happen every 15 seconds (2550 shadow damage).

So we only used 3 Shadow pots per attempt. Our aim now will be to use no world buffs and lower the time it took us to kill Loatheb. We had a screw up in the beginning with positioning in regards to the spore spawn that probably cost us 5% or so in DPS and also quite a number of people missed the Crit buff so with some more improvement in execution we should be able to lower our time.

[Tuftears]

Congrats! We'll look forward to enjoying the GSPP farming fun when we get up there.:)

Maybe 5 GSPPs per person is so people can share with those who forgot to bring theirs?

[Alrin]

If you "forget" to bring consumables on fights as important as progression/wing endboss fights, you should probably get hit over the head for it.
Really.

[The Gnu]

We've killed him two more times now, and I have to say that a *lot* of dps can be gained from being more efficient with the spores. We're not using either world buffs or flasks anymore, but still maintain a comparable dps to what we had with the Onyxia buff.:)

[Arethor]

Thirdly, is it necessary to have more than 5100 hp for this fight

I've made a little bit of a fun competition to see how much HP I can get for Loatheb, as I'm as fully buffed as I'll ever be, and because as a warlock HP = mana and because .....well it's fun.

Screenshot from our last kill.



This is without DM buffs, Flask of the Titans, Faire buffs and Lucky Rockets. I had almost as many HP as the MT before he popped his Titans and Spirit of Zanza