Lurker Below woes

[Klaus]

We just downed him last week.

The skinny for us:

CCing the melee adds (Guardians) was too dangerous and error prone. We tank them all from the start and focus them down first. As you say, a cleave can instakill on a sheep break no matter how fast your mages are. They also teleport so you can't just stay away from the sheep -- they can be off on an island in an instant slaughtering squishies. Hunters misdirect onto assigned tanks as dispatching the guardians is the hardest part.

All the ranged adds are CC'd as best as possible while we FF down the melee adds one at a time.

We put no tanks on the islands, the ranged attackers don't need tanking to be killed. We let the island teams decide whether to kill their adds or leave them sheeped (as you stated, a new one will not spawn at the next submerge). They just aren't that dangerous. It seems most of the time the islands will have time to kill at least one of the two easily before he re-emerges.

Potential problems with our strat: If you don't have enough CC for the ranged adds, they can cause trouble. We're well stocked with mages and hunters, and warlocks can handle one also.

To clarify a bit:

We tank the melee adds on the main island, at the spots (more or less) where they run to just before they activate. The little pause before they go active gives the tanks a chance to get to the right spot and get ready to pick them up. The MT gets one, two OT's get the others. We also position healers on the outer edge of the main island, closest to the outer islands. These healers are responsible for the island they are nearest, and they also heal the OT's during the adds phase.

Ranged adds on the islands get CCed as best we can. As vor-lord said, we've had enough CC so far that they've been controlled until after the melee adds are down. If they weren't, I think we'd just have to heal through the extra damage. It's my experience (as a shadow priest) that one of them doesn't hurt all that bad - it's certainly not the insta-death that the melee adds can dish out on cloth. When we do kill a ranged add on an island, my island hasn't been tanking them at all. The four of us (elem shaman, shadow priest, hunter, mage) can destroy one fast enough that they just don't hurt us very much.

So, if you've been sheeping two melee adds, I would have those mages switch to sheeping two of the ranged adds. Move your island tanks to the main island, and DPS down the melee adds first, then work on the ranged adds. If you've still got one up when lurker resurfaces, they cause much less havoc - and with enough dots on them they'll just die during the spout anyway. :)