Faction Champs

[Lissa]

Any of the other 25 man guilds find the faction champions a lot more challenging this week or see a big difference in difficulty depending which of the 14 were up this week versus last week?

Our first week on the champs we one-shot them pretty easily, with little prep. This week, as a couple of Terenas Lurkers can support (thanks for coming guys), we wiped on them half the night and didn't get past.

Between the burst of the ret paladin, the warrior's bladestorms, and rogue + hunter DPS, we just couldn't really control them enough to keep people alive. By the time the first 1-2 mobs died we'd have 5+ dead, and always two of our best healers among them.

This was despite moving me from ret to prot so I could wrangle the rogue all fight with taunts and stuns, and having 1-2 other tanks doing similar things to the ret and warrior, having interrupts assigned to the 3 healers, and a kill order that (we changed throughout the night), but ended up being disc priest, then shaman, then tree....never quite got all 3 of those down before a wipe was called.

We had all of the champs last night except boomkin, warlock, holy paladin, and enh shaman, for reference.

We had non-healers doing a lot of dispelling so our 6 healers could focus on their task (even moved up to 7 healers at some point in the night) and had 2 interrupts on each of the healers not being focused down. Shaman were purging the focus target like mad. Polymorph was pretty useless, considering the amount of raid AOE that goes out incidentally (frost fever being spread, thunderclap, whatever else), but...

The best way to deal with the faction champs is to find out which healer is most dangerous and deal with them first and work your way through them.

When it comes to the melee faction champions, the best way to deal with them is to kite them. When they latch onto someone, even if it is a healer, the person just needs to kite.

The two most dangerous faction champions, damagewise, are the Mage and the Hunter. The Warlock tends to use Hellfire a lot which is completely avoidable and the Shadow Priest doesn't do that much damage usually. The Mage hits hard (around 15k arcane blasts) and the Hunter hits hard and quick.

Ultimately your kill list should go:

Resto Druid -> Discipline Priest -> Resto Shaman -> Holy Paladin -> Mage -> Hunter -> Hunter's Pet -> Warlock -> Warlock's Pet -> Shadow Priest -> Moonkin -> Rogue -> Ret Pally -> Warrior -> Shaman -> DK

Surprisingly, the DK is the least worrisome of the Faction Champions as it doesn't seem to take full advantage of the DK powers.