25 Man Hard Mode Hodir

[Mordekhuul]

I know some folks on these boards have done this, perhaps even a long time ago, and I wonder if anyone has tips for how to organize the chaos of this fight.

We didn't really dedicate time last night, but as a preview to working on it, we used a tank-in-the-corner strat for the first time. Our tank, a feral druid, tanked in the corner next to the rare cache.

This did a nice job of keeping all of the NPC's within spitting distance of the raid, and it was definitely easier to find them or each other, I admit.

However - what we are debating now is how to make sure that the singed debuff stays up while also prioritizing the highest DPS buffs for our ranged DPS (startlight and storm power).

From the tankspot video on this, they seemed to indicate that starlight was most important for ranged DPS, and that dividing the ranged into two groups that each stood in separate moonlights was an effective way of making sure storm power was utilized. I'm not sure I saw that...often the moonlight we saw wasn't near a fire, and on our kill singed fell off a lot.

I did also like the suggestion of marking the two mages and having each ranged group assigned to break one out, and only breaking them out. This seemed effective and made the NPC's less of a distraction.

Still, and I know it might improve with time, we only had one person breaking 13k DPS, and it was our mage ... who promptly ripped aggro from our feral tank and got killed.

Tips on how to organize the madness of getting buffs while avoiding falling ice and on how to put out high DPS without your tank losing aggro?

[PapaSmurf]

A Feral tank will not be able to hold aggro on Hodir hard mode unless he's in moonbeams. A significant portion of a Bear's threat comes from maul which is impacted by haste. If you want to do a strat where you keep Hodir stationary by the cache you'll need to go with a paladin tank or maybe a warrior with the new devastate.

As far as buff priority, for 10 mans we were finding that singed > crit > haste. keeping all ranged in the fires allowed us to get the singed debuff up much quicker and make sure that it never falls off. As you noted, you won't always find moonbeams near fires and the time the range need to move to keep the stacking debuff off will negate some of the haste effect. This isn't as important in 25 man where you'll have more ranged to apply/keep up singed. If you're finding that singed drops off at all during the fight you'll want to move more people into the fire to make sure the debuff stays up all the time.

We also found that stacking all ranged in the fires would allow them to get the crit buff more quickly and more often. We beat the hard mode timer by 40 seconds last time we killed Hodir using this strat.

PS

[Sir_Die_alot]

As you pointed out the singed debuff is pretty much required. What we do is dedicate 1 or 2 hunters to be full time on the boss. Their job is to keep this debuff up, if it falls off they have to answer for it.

Second is its your elemental dps that kills this boss, especially mages. One of our mages is one of those crazy people that consistently pulls at least 18k dps on this fight (I've seen him as high as 24k). How he manages this is whoever gets the crit buff is required to run to the ranged casters and spread it to them FIRST. ALso he hops around in the light beams (duh).

Make sure your melee, and whoever else you have assigned to it, is breaking out flash freeze. Review recount and question people who have low damage numbers on flash freeze because they are probably just being lazy. Put raid targets on the actual npcs (there is a macro you can copy paste for this somewhere) and assign people to break those out if its necessary.

There is also a mod that keeps track of the time to kill the boss (I forget what it is called at just this moment) use that to make sure you are on track. Don't cut it close if you are more than 15 seconds off and he is getting close to death call a wipe. We have lost quite a few hard modes simply because we were a second or 2 off our dps.


BTW on an off topic thing I like firefox but I just fell in love with it. I had this all typed out and the power went off just before I could hit "add reply". Seeing it still there when I loaded firefox back up makes me rather happy. :lol:

[Concillian]

My experience is only for 10 man, but:

Singed needs to be up 100% of the time.
A corollary to that is that the mage NPCs need to be broken out ASAP, because there is a limited amount of time the debuff will stay up before it needs to be refreshed.

Cluster ranged around fires, this increases the likelihood of ranged getting shaman buff from other ranged. Healers should really not be near fires or melee, as shaman buff on them is bad. They can run to ranged if they need to spread it, but you don't want them to accidentally get it spread to them. The healers should be near one of the ranged clusters, but not too close.
Do what you can to get mages and ele shaman the crit buff, these are your big damage dealers.

Have DPS use pots when they're hasted + shaman buffed. We see people who average 6-8k DPS spike to 25k when they have both buffs. Adding a wild magic or speed pot is a big boost.

Anyway the whole fight is about managing the NPC buffs. It took us one night to learn it (10 man) and every kill since has been 1 or 2 shot of hard mode. The learning night it was wipe after wipe of being at ~20% at three minutes, then we said last pull and people hunkered down and we killed it at 2:54. Next week was 2:20 or something. Once you learn, you learn.

[Mordekhuul]

Yeah - the chaos of the 25 man version is just a bit daunting compared to the 10 man for me, but we haven't spent serious time yet.

The 10 man hard modes just seem so much more generous....I mean, XT hard mode on 10 man was a joke the first time we tried it, months ago, and one shot it, but on 25 man (even with a few weeks of full clearing ToC25 for loot behind us), we were barely getting the heart down (with bloodlust) when our first XT hard mode kill on 10 man we did it without bloodlust.

Assigning 2 good ranged DPS to keep singed up sounds like a great plan - simplifies one of the worry points on the fight and let's the other ranged focus on staying grouped and turning to break out the mages after a flash freeze.

I wonder, for the other ranged DPS (mages, dest warlocks), whether it is more important that they find fires or that they group up around moonbeams. Either way they would be clumped for a maximum impact from the storm power buff - but in one case they have haste and in another they don't have to waste time moving to drop biting cold debuffs as often.

Also - do you really have melee break out the mages (assuming mages are the only two you stop dps long enough to break out, since they keep the fires up and break the other NPC's out) - seems like a long way for them to run, but perhaps compared to losing DPS time from a warlock or mage pulling 15k...

[Skandranon]

Toasty Fire is far more important than Starlight for ranged. Not only does more people stack Singed a lot quicker, but not having to move more or less makes up for the 50% haste from Starlight. The most important thing about Storm Power is that it should be spread quickly - yes, it benefits casters more, but realistically being pre-clumped or leaping into the nearest clump of players is the best thing to do. Definitely recommend a paladin or DK tank to keep threat.

I've heard that breaking out only the mages works for some people. Every time I've done it, we've broken out all of them except the priests, since they're the only NPCs that don't provide a damage buff.

Lastly, consider raid-compositional adjustments. You don't need, for example, seven healers on this fight. It's been done with two, and is routinely done with four healers by most guilds that already have it.

[Kevin]

The 10 man hard modes just seem so much more generous..

I think they are in general, but it's so hard to tell because most people who do 10 man hards were doing them with 25 man gear and they are designed with just 10 man gear in mind I believe. We run into stuff a lot where strats for 10 man stuff are written up by 25 man guilds in 25 man gear, and they just don't work in 10 man gear. :)

They became A TON easier for us with TotC gear, and the higher ilvl badge gear.

[Mordekhuul]

Lastly, consider raid-compositional adjustments. You don't need, for example, seven healers on this fight. It's been done with two, and is routinely done with four healers by most guilds that already have it.

Yeah, we were running 3 healers for our attempt.

[Lissa]

Do what you can to get mages and ele shaman the crit buff, these are your big damage dealers.

*cough*DestructionWarlocks*cough*

On the last few Hodir runs, I've seen my DPS spike, several times, into the 35k range, most of the mages and our Elemental shaman are down near 30k or 24k (Mage former, Ele Shaman later).

[Mordekhuul]

*cough*DestructionWarlocks*cough*

On the last few Hodir runs, I've seen my DPS spike, several times, into the 35k range, most of the mages and our Elemental shaman are down near 30k or 24k (Mage former, Ele Shaman later).

Destruction is quite fun. I swapped mains a few weeks ago from my tankadin (unfortunately leaving us with one fewer high TPS tanks) to my destruction lock. It's been a blast...now if I can just get ahold of one more trophy for the tier 9.25 2-piece...