CThun down!

[MongoJerry]

Paladin shields are an advantage, allowing a paladin to soak bolts for twelve seconds without taking damage, but not so great as one might think: paladins can deck out fairly quickly in the Nature Resistance mail patterns available from Cenarion Circle faction, raising their NR to levels where the bolt is easily handled by the same Prayer of Healing that's keeping up the people around them.

You use Prayer of Healing? We tried it for several attempts and finally abandoned it, because some people would die waiting for the three second cast to go off. We switched to assigning one healer for every two people, a tactic that ended up working a lot better. What the paladin shield does is allow the raid's healing power to concentrate on fewer people, so it in effect not only protects the paladin but also protects the other members of the front line team. In an extreme case, you could stack the deck with eight paladins, but let's say you stick with only around six paladins. Each paladin could quaff a nature protection potion before the 30% burndown, absorb a few hits and then shield. Doing so means about 15 seconds during which the healers, including the paladins, can concentrate their healing power on the remaining 10 front-liners. That's basically a 15-second head start to the burndown, which is forever in that fight.

For those who haven't seen it, yet, it's quite a sight to behold. At 30% Huhuran goes berserk with a poison volley that hits the nearest 16 targets. At that point, you have to burn her down as fast as possible. Once a crack in the dam starts -- i.e. once a couple of people die -- a chain reaction occurs as the poison volley starts hitting the back of the raid. It's a disspiriting sight to see Huhuran at 1% life with half the raid still alive and then *lose*.

You make a great point about equipment, though, Skandranon. The fight is definitely getting easier as we're starting to collect better nature resistance equipment. When we first ran into Huhuran, most of our gear was green "of nature resistance" gear and stuff from Mauradan. But we've been hard at work crafting and finding NR gear off AQ bosses. Also, we've managed to down the green dragons a few times in cooperation with some other Horde guilds on the server, so our tanks have been able to get the epic NR rings and a few decent pieces of tanking NR gear. Once 1.11 comes out, our casters and rogues will be able to get some decent Cenarian Circle NR gear. So, yeah, that will definitely make a big difference with both Huhuran and Viscidus.

Besides, it's not as if Horde doesn't have their own interesting advantages on this fight.  Nature Resistance totem is the obvious one

Not really in this fight. What really matters is keeping your front 16 up, and four hunters can provide the nature resistance aura necessary for those groups. I can definitely see the advantage of Nature Resistance totems in other fights, though.

but I've heard interesting things about what Grounding Totem does on this fight for those guilds willing to give up their NR totem and try it out.
[right][snapback]108343[/snapback][/right]

I'll ask our shaman about this again, but I know our shaman tried it out and abandoned the idea. Either the Grounding Totem idea was just misinformation (like stoneform apparently) and the tactic doesn't work, or the tactic wasn't practical. I think it just didn't work, but I'll check.