Heroic Beasts, 25 Man

[Mordekhuul]

Any tips out there from those that have worked through beating this encounter on heroic mode?

Having finally put some time in on Yogg25 last night and taken him out, I am turning our raids towards heroic mode ToC25.

After an hour on beasts, I'm honestly not sure we have the DPS for it yet, so DPS benchmarks or tips would be appreciated, as would tips on keeping the 3 tanks alive (lost tanks during phase 1 every pull).

[Lissa]

Any tips out there from those that have worked through beating this encounter on heroic mode?

Having finally put some time in on Yogg25 last night and taken him out, I am turning our raids towards heroic mode ToC25.

After an hour on beasts, I'm honestly not sure we have the DPS for it yet, so DPS benchmarks or tips would be appreciated, as would tips on keeping the 3 tanks alive (lost tanks during phase 1 every pull).

This what I've garnered from talking and reading:

The raid has to average around 6.25k to 6.5k DPS per DPSer

Three tanks seems to be pretty standard for the first two fights (more on why three is useful below).

When you start getting to late in Gormak, tanks should take a maximum of 1 impale and then it should be removed by a Paladin HoPing them (Pally tanks should allow another Pally to us HoP on them instead of using DS as they will need DP). If even a second Impale gets on the tank at that late stage, there is a good chance they can be killed between casts even with heals pouring in.

Cooldown use is highly required, without proper use of cooldowns you're likely to lose tanks especially on Gormak late.

When Dreadmaw is roaming, have two tanks on him, one primarly holding him until they get the Burning Bile. Once the initial tank has BB, the other tank taunts and the tank that has BB clears poison from those that get poisoned from Acidmaw.

Icehowl requires everyone to be on their toes and requires everyone to react immediately as you no longer get the speed buff, this means that if someone near the charge target doesn't move immediately to get out of the way, the raid will wipe if Icehowl hits someone (since you can't clear the enrage and he almost one shots tanks in normal while enraged).

[Mordekhuul]

Hmm, I have no clue how to push raid DPS that high, though what measure of DPS you mean is always a question (every tool calculates it differently, and I'm just looking at world of logs here).

ToC25 normal mode is so mind-numbingly easy - would be nice to get the heroic version down before the next tier comes out, otherwise its all a bit pointless and lacks challenge.

[Skandranon]

Any tips out there from those that have worked through beating this encounter on heroic mode?

Having finally put some time in on Yogg25 last night and taken him out, I am turning our raids towards heroic mode ToC25.

After an hour on beasts, I'm honestly not sure we have the DPS for it yet, so DPS benchmarks or tips would be appreciated, as would tips on keeping the 3 tanks alive (lost tanks during phase 1 every pull).

Hard to give advice without specifically knowing where you're having trouble, but it sounds like you're having issues taking out Gormok before the worms come in, and losing tanks. How are you tanking Gormok?

With regards to DPS, the requirement is not as high as it was pre-nerf. You can do just fine with an average of around 5.5k. The key is to practice a lot and get used to the fight, like properly spreading out and moving the minimum distance to keep the max dps time on Gormok.

All that said, if you just got Yogg-25, then you'd be well served with another few weeks of farming normal and maybe putting in some time on some of the easier Ulduar hard modes. The first four bosses of Trial of the Grand Crusader-25 are tuned for guilds between 2/9 and 5/9 Ulduar hard modes, at the very least, which is marginally ahead of where you are now.

[Sir_Die_alot]

Icehowl requires everyone to be on their toes and requires everyone to react immediately as you no longer get the speed buff, this means that if someone near the charge target doesn't move immediately to get out of the way, the raid will wipe if Icehowl hits someone (since you can't clear the enrage and he almost one shots tanks in normal while enraged).

The enrage can be tranqed off now. It's probably still going to cause a wipe though because of the lost DPS time during the time he would have been stuned.

Edit: A guild I used to be in (and still have a lot of friends in) is working on this so I frapsed our own kill and threw in a few annotations for them. Feel free to ask if we did something you didn't expect.:D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9xopvX0AOo

[Swiss Mercenary]

DPS numbers on this fight are inflated, thanks to Phase 3. As such, if you aren't getting to phase 3, they will be lower.

If you have 2 strong paladin healers, you should be able to 2-tank this fight. Beacon makes Gormok a joke. If one of the paladins gets a snobold on him, Aura Mastery Concentration Aura, and burn it down ASAP.

My guild always used 6 healers and 2 tanks for it. In Phase 1, the paladins, druid hots, and myself (Resto Shaman) are doing the bulk of the tank healing. Towards the end of the phase, when a tank gets high DOT stacks, we chain healer and tank cooldowns.

Phase 1 is the real DPS check - if you can clear it without Heroism, you can beat the fight. We found that we were about 20 seconds off, until we went from 3 tanks to 2, and from 7 healers to 6. After that, it was only a question of everyone surviving Phase 1 and 2, and the fight was in the bag.

You shouldn't be concerned so much about overall raid DPS, or your top performers, as looking at the weakest links, and doing your best to improve the performance of those people. Another DPS tip is that in Phase 1, have ranged that get Snobolded run into the Melee pile - and have the melee classes target those Snobolds, while hitting the boss with their cleave abilities.

Come to think of it, "Cleave" is the answer to DPS in TOGC. Bring the class, not the player, and all that. Warlocks and Hunters need not apply.

On the bright side, if you can down Beasts, the next 3 hard modes are, in compraison, very easy. Twins is downright sad, if the raid stacks at the door.

[Pantalaimon]

Come to think of it, "Cleave" is the answer to DPS in TOGC. Bring the class, not the player, and all that. Warlocks and Hunters need not apply.

Man, if my mage got a cleave that would be seriously epic.

Gotta stop drooling now.

But you're pretty right.

[SwissMercenary]

Man, if my mage got a cleave that would be seriously epic.

Gotta stop drooling now.

But you're pretty right.

Living Bomb. It happens to be your highest damage spell (For 1 global), too - on a single target.

Two targets? You'd be mad to not maintain it on both.

Three? Warlocks are drooling with envy at this point.

Five? Not even a contest.

Of course, in my guild, all the mages specced Arcane, to the point that we don't even have the scorch debuff anymore.:rolleyes:

At least now that we are working on Anub, they've stopped messing around with a second-rate spec. (Second-rate, only in the sense that it can't cleave... And cleave is king. There's nothing wrong with Arcane for single-target damage. Unless you have to move around. Or it means the raid just lost 5% spell crit.)

[Frag]

Don't have any warlocks? Make one of them the debuff b*****es, mages have been doing it for long enough.:D
~Frag

[SwissMercenary]

Don't have any warlocks? Make one of them the debuff b*****es, mages have been doing it for long enough.:D
~Frag

Why would we have our only warlock respec to a lower DPS spec (Affli), when we have 4 mages who could respec to a higher DPS spec (Fire)?

[Pantalaimon]

Why would we have our only warlock respec to a lower DPS spec (Affli), when we have 4 mages who could respec to a higher DPS spec (Fire)?

Because fire isn't the highest dps spec, barring gimmicks? (yes, AoE for an entire fight is a gimmick, I'm looking at you Anub).

Anub heroic we go FFB, not fire, for blizzard damage synergies.

Skan, help a brother out here:P

And the preferred ISB warlock spec would be Demo, not afflic, allowing elementals to be skipped, or at least drop a DPS totem instead of ToW. Unless you're doing Y+0. There's plenty of evidence floating around showing demo locks are more than worth their personal DPS loss in pretty much any situation where a pet is viable.

[Swiss Mercenary]

Because fire isn't the highest dps spec, barring gimmicks? (yes, AoE for an entire fight is a gimmick, I'm looking at you Anub).

The evidence I've seen pointed to theorycraft that was based off Arcane Blast and Arcane Power being multiplicative, when they are additive. I ran some of my guild's mages through Rawr, as well, and their numbers are within 2%, on single-target fights.

Given my own experiences with both specs, that doesn't surprise me.

Arcane needs gimmicks to outperform fire. Gimmicks where stacking cooldowns will let you pull ahead of fire.

Fire needs cleave gimmicks to pull ahead. And good gosh, there's plenty of those in ToC.

Gormok's pretty equal for both of em. Snobolds benefit from AoE, Arcane does more damage in P3.

Jarraxus arcane does somewhat better.

Faction champs, mages are frost.

Valkyr, we tank them in cleave range, and mages have to orb catch. Fire is the more mobile spec. In regular mode, sure, arcane gimmicks win. In heroic mode, given the movement, fire's the better idea.

Anub, Fire wins. FFB wins even more, but if you aren't going to respec...

Of five fights that we do, fire does better on two, and worse on one. Unless you are progressing through Jarraxus, are for some reason stuck on Phase 3 of Beasts, or not put your mages on orb-catching duty on Twins, there's no reason to bring Arcane.

And the preferred ISB warlock spec would be Demo, not afflic, allowing elementals to be skipped, or at least drop a DPS totem instead of ToW. Unless you're doing Y+0. There's plenty of evidence floating around showing demo locks are more than worth their personal DPS loss in pretty much any situation where a pet is viable.

Demo suffers from range issues, making the spec perform much worse then theorycraft would indicate. Their execute range talents have a very small window of opportunity, due to the way they proc, and the time that it takes for their projectiles to reach the boss.

In terms of buffs, what you are saying does ring true - but probably not going to work for my guild unless we can get a second warlock, since our current one can top charts even on cleave fights (Something our mages don't even come close to. They might be closer if they were fire, though. They do great on regular modes, but put them in heroics, and they flounder). Anub is the only one he can't do so on, and he will be respeccing destro, to pop cooldowns on adds.

[Pantalaimon]

I ran some of my guild's mages through Rawr, as well, and their numbers are within 2%, on single-target fights.

Given the wildly differing hitcaps, I'm not terribly surprised. You really have to pick one spec or the other; going from Arcane to Fireball is not nearly as simple as hitting the "Secondary Spec" button. Even regemming is usually inadequate - you really need two entirely different sets of gear.

Given my own experiences with both specs, that doesn't surprise me.

It does surprise me. Patch day, I swapped to Arcane and gained 500 dps on beasts, and never looked back. Perhaps I'm 'doing it wrong'.

Fight-by-fight stuff.

http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/clazz.../8/0/3/320

Or perhaps everyone's doing it wrong. Discounting Anub and FC, 6/120 (5%) of top-20 mages aren't Arcane.

In terms of fight mechanics, I guess we'll just have to disagree on Beasts. Arcane can manadump before each phase transition, before you even consider cooldown abuse when the Yeti thing hits the wall.

Valk'yrs I address a bit below.

Anub is one huge gimmick fight. Honestly, it's the first "end boss" in a very long time that I felt *annoyed* when we beat him, as opposed to satisfied. There's only so many times I can cast blizzard before my brain turns into some sort of primordial mush.

...put your mages on orb-catching duty on Twins, there's no reason to bring Arcane.

Considering the broken nature of Incanter's Absorption, I'm really not sure why you would put mages on Orb catching. 6 out of the top 40 recorded personal DPS on WoL for heroic Valk'yr *aren't* mages. WMO's class DPS comparison has us nearly a full 2k above anyone else for the fight. Mages basically have 4.5-5k spellpower for the entire fight; you'd be hard pressed to NOT top meters.

Additionally, even if the rest of your ranged is full of fails who can't catch orbs, I'd argue that the DPS of soakers is very much secondary to their survivability. Mages tend to have 2-4k less health than other soaker candidates, and Fireball spec has the ever-so-loved Playing With Fire, which means they take 3% more damage. I'd even go so far as to say Fire mages are the worst possible choice for orb catching, even if they throw on Mage Armor instead of Molten.

In terms of buffs, what you are saying does ring true - but probably not going to work for my guild unless we can get a second warlock, since our current one can top charts even on cleave fights (Something our mages don't even come close to. They might be closer if they were fire, though. They do great on regular modes, but put them in heroics, and they flounder). Anub is the only one he can't do so on, and he will be respeccing destro, to pop cooldowns on adds.

Point conceded. Everything takes a back seat when you start talking about individual guilds/situations; you can only address vague generalities in strategy threads like this.

That being said, have you had any extended P3 attempts? Warlocks tend to run into mana issues, and lifetapping requires additional healer attention/coordination. As such, it's generally best for warlocks to go demo simply because it gives you the best mana longevity. Given you only have one warlock, though, it may be possible for him to do whatever he wishes and have a personal healer.

[Skandranon]

Because fire isn't the highest dps spec, barring gimmicks? (yes, AoE for an entire fight is a gimmick, I'm looking at you Anub).

Anub heroic we go FFB, not fire, for blizzard damage synergies.

Skan, help a brother out here:P

Well, okay.

Yes, Arcane is the best damage spec with two fairly significant limitations that basically don't come into play at all in Trial of the Grand Crusader. Firstly, Arcane requires you to be relatively immobile. That's trivial. It also requires that fights be relatively short, which, compared to previous raid tiers, ToGC fights definitely are. Personally I went from about 7.5k to 9k on Beasts from going Fire->Arcane, so yeah, I saw an improvement, to say the least.

Gormok's great for Arcane. I mean yes, you can LB both the snobold and the boss, but there should never be more than one or two snobolds up anyway, and the snobolds don't get hit by the explosion, which reduces the 1-global value of the spell by quite a bit (the explosion constitutes about one-third of a living bomb's damage). Not only that, but the ability of Arcane to basically carry its damage ramps across units means that ranged can perform add duty without performance loss, which is huge. The highest Fire numbers come from mages that stick to Gormok and just drop Bombs on Snobolds, which is fine but realistically they're just stealing their numbers from other classes picking up their slack on the adds.

Moreover, other aspects of the fight are great for Arcane too. The numerous interruptions give Arcane the ability to evocate repeatedly at no DPS cost, which Fire can't reasonably take advantage of. Not only that, Arcane's burstier nature, with multiple short cooldowns, is much better when you can have cooldowns recharge on dead time.

As for other fights, Jaraxxus is obviously an arcane mage's playground, since you can pop a cooldown basically every other time you steal Nether Power and in your straight Fireball spec you can basically hit whatever trinket you got and Combustion maybe twice. DPS isn't entirely relevant on FC, but I like Arcane as the spec for that too. Without conventional aggro tables, there's really no reason not to pop everything right off the bat and do 20k dps for 20 seconds on the first target.

Valks is one of those obvious gimmicks. I think if we all fought it the way Blizzard expected us to fight it, basically individually Ikaruga'ing it up on the floor, Fire would win on account of Ignite double-dips and its superior mobility. But pretty much everybody uses some variant of a strategy where some people intercept orbs and some people stand still, and Arcane mages gain a lot from standing still. On our last kill I did 16k DPS and I mistimed a bunch of things and dodged a couple of stray orbs to boot. Now, regardless of class, putting your best players on orb catching is the best strategy, but mages go ahead of any other ranged in terms of who I personally would want standing still first.

I was a slow adopter to Arcane, really. I stuck with Fire through the first couple clears of Trial of the Grand Crusader, but then a guildmate brought a fairly mediocre geared mage alt to a ToC-10 and put up some interesting numbers, so I decided to experiment a little. It took a run to pick up all the minor playstyle shifts, but it really was better once that happened.

[LochnarITB]

[soapbox] It pisses me off that this discussion is even needed - It pisses me off that frost is not even in the discussion because having it equal in PvE would make it OP in PvP - It pisses me off that the older this game gets the more Blizzard's lack of ability to balance forces players to spec for DPS rather than for the style they like to play - If Blizzard would finally balance the classes and specs across their roles and lock them down, they would have a solid base to design against for all the content that players really want and would have more resources available to crank it out for their voracious players [/soapbox] Lochnar - FFL*





*Frost For Life

[SwissMercenary]

Given the wildly differing hitcaps, I'm not terribly surprised. You really have to pick one spec or the other; going from Arcane to Fireball is not nearly as simple as hitting the "Secondary Spec" button. Even regemming is usually inadequate - you really need two entirely different sets of gear.
It does surprise me. Patch day, I swapped to Arcane and gained 500 dps on beasts, and never looked back. Perhaps I'm 'doing it wrong'.
http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/clazz.../8/0/3/320

Or perhaps everyone's doing it wrong. Discounting Anub and FC, 6/120 (5%) of top-20 mages aren't Arcane.

I stand corrected. Or at least, you've changed my mind about the influence of the gimmicks in NB/LJ.

Considering the broken nature of Incanter's Absorption, I'm really not sure why you would put mages on Orb catching.

After thinking about it, I've realised that it's because our hunters are more retarded. Fair enough.

That being said, have you had any extended P3 attempts? Warlocks tend to run into mana issues, and lifetapping requires additional healer attention/coordination. As such, it's generally best for warlocks to go demo simply because it gives you the best mana longevity. Given you only have one warlock, though, it may be possible for him to do whatever he wishes and have a personal healer.

Oh, our warlock will respec to Demo for P3, but it will be more for Meta/Immolate then anything else. I guess less life taps will help.

[Lissa]

That being said, have you had any extended P3 attempts? Warlocks tend to run into mana issues, and lifetapping requires additional healer attention/coordination. As such, it's generally best for warlocks to go demo simply because it gives you the best mana longevity. Given you only have one warlock, though, it may be possible for him to do whatever he wishes and have a personal healer.

You lifetap before phase 3 begins or just as it starts to get you down to where you should be healthwise. If your Warlocks are holding onto their health before phaes 3 begins or shortly thereafter, they're doing something wrong. You life tap down to 35% to 40% just as phase 3 begins, then you use Life Tap 1 to maintain the life tap glyph buff and shouldn't be in harms way and should have enough mana to finish out the fight.

And also, Demo *is* the way to go. The DP buff should never be down and a properly geared Demo Warlock is going to be looking at 4k+ SP (I'm around 4.4k full raid buffed, my IotDS fully charge through pre-fight LT1s, and Life Tap glyph up). This beats getting the 280 SP from Flametongue Totem by far. Just make sure that you stand as close as possible to the middle of the raid as you can get so that all spell casters get the DP buff. Also to add further to this, DP is typically up 90% of the time or more, this means that a Demo Warlock should be looking at giving all spell casters about 360 to 400 more SP at all times (80 to 120 more SP than Flametoungue) which equates to roughly a 120 to 180 DPS boost for each offensive spell caster in the raid (this is more an avearge as some spellcasters get more of a DPS per point of spell powers than others depending on their specs) so you're looking at a RDPS in of 120 to 180 x # of offensive spell casters (usually this equates to around 600 to 900 more Raid DPS for 5 offensive spell casters, not sure what kind of HPS this allots to with healers).

[Lissa]

Avarice got TotGC 25 Beasts down last night with about 7 second to spare on the enrage, here's what we did:

1) Left one Snobold on melee up for the transition from Gormok to Worms. When Gormok dropped, had all DPS go all out on the Snobold, started Hero (Bloodlust for Horde) about 3 to 5 seconds before worms went active to make sure the Snobold was dead and we had it when worms went active.

2) Had two tanks assigned to mobile worm, when the first tank got hit with Bile/Toxin, the other tank would taunt while both worms were up. If tank had bile they would then go find people with Toxin and get them detoxed and once everyone was detoxed, move back and tank over the worm again in the case of Dreadscale (if Acidmaw, the toxified tank would get away from Acidmaw to get cleared of toxin so they weren't left standing in a poison puddle). Once Acidmaw was down, the two freed up tanks went DPS (in this case two bears went to cat).

3) On Icehowl it was just a matter of getting the freeze breath off whoever was being targetted by Icehowl along with Melee standing at maximum range so as not to get hit by the whirls. Also, we had one person get hit on our kill, but we were able to make it through since one of our hunters got a tranq in on him to get him out of enrage before he smashed the tank.

Raid Composition was:
2 Bears and 1 Paladin for tanks
3 Healing Priests, 1 Disc, 2 Holy
2 Holy Pallies
1 Resto Druid
2 Rets
2 Fury Warriors
2 Rogues
2 Hunters, 1 Surv and 1 Mark
2 DKs, 1 Blood and 1 Unholy
1 Demo Warlock (moi)
3 Mages, 2 Arcane and 1 Frost
1 Elemental Shaman
1 Shadow Priest

We got a chance to play with Jaraxxus for about an hour and were able to get him to 50% on the 4th pull of the night. He's definitely easier than Beasts, but he still is a DPS check with getting the Portals/Volcanos killed before too many adds stack up. It's definitely a fight where keeping everyone alive is a must to see it through. The hope is that this coming lock we'll repeat Beasts and get LJ down and get a look at FCs.

[Sir_Die_alot]

We got a chance to play with Jaraxxus for about an hour and were able to get him to 50% on the 4th pull of the night. He's definitely easier than Beasts, but he still is a DPS check with getting the Portals/Volcanos killed before too many adds stack up. It's definitely a fight where keeping everyone alive is a must to see it through. The hope is that this coming lock we'll repeat Beasts and get LJ down and get a look at FCs.

I don't know if that is your regular raid comp or not but if you usually have a warrior tank. We use our warrior tank on the adds so he can sunder the portal/volcano for the extra dps. The portals are the nasty ones. Save 2 minute cooldowns/trinkets for them you shouldn't get more than 1 mistress add if you have done it correctly. Also I've heard paladins can taunt nuke the portals too.

The other thing is getting legion flame on a melee can kill all of them. Make sure they know to be extra aware of it because DBM isn't very good about alerting you beyond a raid warning (which is easily lost in the spam) that you got it.

3rd is the tank should point Jaraxxus to the side of the raid not directly away (as is reflexive) if the raid stands by the door and the tank points him south the portal and volcano *will spawn closer to the raid.

*sometimes it will spawn in a random location if Jaraxxus is casting lightning or some other ability on somebody. I've had people try to argue this as a flaw with the strat but this is a flaw with pointing him in any direction. Most of the time being in a better position is better than always awkward.:)

[Lissa]

Our comp varies a lot week to week, some weeks we have a more even split across classes (except for Warlock, I'm the only regular in this regard) and specs. Some weeks we end up stacked in one or two classes due to people being unavailable for whatever reason.