10-08-2005, 01:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-08-2005, 01:24 AM by MongoJerry.)
THE ADVENTURES OF NERIAD -- CHROMAGGUS AND A FIRST SHOT AT NEFARIUS
![[Image: chromaggus1.jpg]](http://www.lurkerlounge.com/mongo/chromaggus1.jpg)
On Thursday evening (October 7th), The Core gathered to take on Chromaggus, the large and nasty demon dog that is the second to last boss in Blackwing Lair. Two nights previously, The Core had taken down Ebonroc in a Tichondrius all-server first. However, Easy Company, an Alliance guild, took down Ebonroc an hour later and quickly followed up with a server first kill of Flamegor. The next evening, The Core returned to Blackwing Lair, took down Flamegor, and made a few modest attempts on Chromaggus, getting him to a whopping 95% health, before calling it a night. The race to be the first guild on the server to kill Chromaggus was on.
After watching videos of other guilds killing Chromaggus, we chose to pull him all the way back to the stairs leading up to the suppressor room. This is quite a long way back in the instance, but it's a place that provides a lot of corners to hide behind or dive behind when needed.
![[Image: chromaggus2.jpg]](http://www.lurkerlounge.com/mongo/chromaggus2.jpg)
There's a lot going on in a fight with Chromaggus, as you'll see, so we wiped three times, while trying to get it right. On one wipe, Natural, our main tank, missed all three of his opening hits. His combat log read like this:
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Neriad dies
(I swear! I didn't do anything!) Chromaggus walked right down to the main party and killed everyone. (Let's see... 1/20th chance cubed = 1 in 8000 chance of that happening). But once we got everyone's roles settled and rehearsed, the fight turned out to be incredibly simple.
![[Image: chromaggus3.jpg]](http://www.lurkerlounge.com/mongo/chromaggus3.jpg)
The first step in killing Chromaggus is to set up the tanking and healing groups and their positions. Unlike every other Blackwing Lair boss, Chromaggus can be consistently tanked by one tank for the entire fight. If that tank dies or loses aggro during the fight, it's game over, but the fact that you don't have to deal with arranging and healing multiple tanks simplifies things greatly.
Natural, The Core's main tank, locked Chromaggus down about halfway down the top ramp. Meanwhile, two teams of five healers each were assigned to be main tank healers. Each team consisted of two priests, two druids, and one mana tide spec'd shaman. These main tank healers stood on a line that would enable them to be in line of sight of Natural but yet be out of line of sight of Chromaggus's area of effect attacks. These healers never had to move at all and never took damage from Chromaggus except from debuffs (described below). The two healing teams rotated approximately every thirty seconds for the sake of mana regeneration and to prevent any possible problems with healing aggro. Chromaggus doesn't really do all that much damage to the main tank, so the rotation combined with Innervate and Mana Tide totems every few minutes were more than enough to keep the main healing battery going indefinitely.
![[Image: chromaggus4.jpg]](http://www.lurkerlounge.com/mongo/chromaggus4.jpg)
The second step in killing Chromaggus is to make sure all the dps characters know how and when to dodge in and out of line of sight with Chromaggus. Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks occur on timers, and RaidAssist already has built into it an eight second warning before the area-of-effect attacks go off. So all dps players have to do is run in, dps, run out when the 8 second warning comes up, wait for the area of effect attack to go off, and then run back in again. As you can see in this screenshot, two mages have stepped out of hiding to shoot at Chromaggus. Most of the raid's dps was upstairs behind Chromaggus to maximize their dps, though.
It's important that the dps players get this process down, because as you can see in the second screenshot above, one of Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks is called Ignite Flesh, which is an undispellable debuff that causes 657-843 damage every three seconds for over 45 seconds (longer?). That's the long way of saying, "You die."
(By the way, there's some confusion about whether using line-of-sight is considered an exploit. As explained by a GM who is in our guild, the line of sight exploit involved placing Chromaggus in a special bugged location where the main tank and the dps could hit Chromaggus somehow remain out of line of sight of Chromaggus's attacks. In other words, the tank and dps could just stand there hitting Chromaggus and never take any damage from him. That's different from the technique described here where people have to constantly run in and out of line of sight to avoid the aoe attacks. Doing this is considered fair game).
![[Image: chromaggus5.jpg]](http://www.lurkerlounge.com/mongo/chromaggus5.jpg)
There is also one other gimmick to Chromaggus that the dps classes can pay attention to, a gimmick that partly gives Chromaggus his name. Every once in a while, an emote pops up that says, "Chromaggus flinches as its skin shimmers." This indicates that Chromaggus's resists have changed. At any given time, Chromaggus will be particularly susceptible to damage in one school of magic, taking four times the normal amount of damage from spells in this school of magic, while simultaneously being very resistant to all other forms of magic, taking one-fourth the normal amount of damage. So after Chromaggus's skin shimmers like this, the spellcasters tested out to see what school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to and fired appropriately. Of course, there is a danger in this of pulling aggro. Some screenshots posted on the Blizzard forums showed people getting 10k fireball crits. If a mage got too many of those in a row, he or she could disastrously pull aggro off the main tank. So one has to be cautious especially in the early stages of the battle to not nuke too much using spells in the school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to. It may be exciting to see big numbers pop up on your screen, but since the main tank healers can hold up the main tank indefinitely, there's no time crunch involved with this fight. It's better to under dps and have a longer fight than to over dps and pull aggro and wipe the entire raid. Still, late in the fight when it was clear that Natural had Chromaggus permanently locked down, the spellcasters had fun dishing out the damage. In addition, whenever Chromaggus became susceptible to arcane, mages who had talent points in Arcane Subtlety (-40% aggro generation when casting arcane spells) had a field day.
The third step in killing Chromaggus is also shown in the screenshot above. Like Magmadar, Chromaggus "goes into a killing frenzy" occasionally, so the hunters need to Tranq Shot him to neutralize him.
On Thursday evening (October 7th), The Core gathered to take on Chromaggus, the large and nasty demon dog that is the second to last boss in Blackwing Lair. Two nights previously, The Core had taken down Ebonroc in a Tichondrius all-server first. However, Easy Company, an Alliance guild, took down Ebonroc an hour later and quickly followed up with a server first kill of Flamegor. The next evening, The Core returned to Blackwing Lair, took down Flamegor, and made a few modest attempts on Chromaggus, getting him to a whopping 95% health, before calling it a night. The race to be the first guild on the server to kill Chromaggus was on.
After watching videos of other guilds killing Chromaggus, we chose to pull him all the way back to the stairs leading up to the suppressor room. This is quite a long way back in the instance, but it's a place that provides a lot of corners to hide behind or dive behind when needed.
There's a lot going on in a fight with Chromaggus, as you'll see, so we wiped three times, while trying to get it right. On one wipe, Natural, our main tank, missed all three of his opening hits. His combat log read like this:
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Neriad dies
(I swear! I didn't do anything!) Chromaggus walked right down to the main party and killed everyone. (Let's see... 1/20th chance cubed = 1 in 8000 chance of that happening). But once we got everyone's roles settled and rehearsed, the fight turned out to be incredibly simple.
The first step in killing Chromaggus is to set up the tanking and healing groups and their positions. Unlike every other Blackwing Lair boss, Chromaggus can be consistently tanked by one tank for the entire fight. If that tank dies or loses aggro during the fight, it's game over, but the fact that you don't have to deal with arranging and healing multiple tanks simplifies things greatly.
Natural, The Core's main tank, locked Chromaggus down about halfway down the top ramp. Meanwhile, two teams of five healers each were assigned to be main tank healers. Each team consisted of two priests, two druids, and one mana tide spec'd shaman. These main tank healers stood on a line that would enable them to be in line of sight of Natural but yet be out of line of sight of Chromaggus's area of effect attacks. These healers never had to move at all and never took damage from Chromaggus except from debuffs (described below). The two healing teams rotated approximately every thirty seconds for the sake of mana regeneration and to prevent any possible problems with healing aggro. Chromaggus doesn't really do all that much damage to the main tank, so the rotation combined with Innervate and Mana Tide totems every few minutes were more than enough to keep the main healing battery going indefinitely.
The second step in killing Chromaggus is to make sure all the dps characters know how and when to dodge in and out of line of sight with Chromaggus. Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks occur on timers, and RaidAssist already has built into it an eight second warning before the area-of-effect attacks go off. So all dps players have to do is run in, dps, run out when the 8 second warning comes up, wait for the area of effect attack to go off, and then run back in again. As you can see in this screenshot, two mages have stepped out of hiding to shoot at Chromaggus. Most of the raid's dps was upstairs behind Chromaggus to maximize their dps, though.
It's important that the dps players get this process down, because as you can see in the second screenshot above, one of Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks is called Ignite Flesh, which is an undispellable debuff that causes 657-843 damage every three seconds for over 45 seconds (longer?). That's the long way of saying, "You die."
(By the way, there's some confusion about whether using line-of-sight is considered an exploit. As explained by a GM who is in our guild, the line of sight exploit involved placing Chromaggus in a special bugged location where the main tank and the dps could hit Chromaggus somehow remain out of line of sight of Chromaggus's attacks. In other words, the tank and dps could just stand there hitting Chromaggus and never take any damage from him. That's different from the technique described here where people have to constantly run in and out of line of sight to avoid the aoe attacks. Doing this is considered fair game).
There is also one other gimmick to Chromaggus that the dps classes can pay attention to, a gimmick that partly gives Chromaggus his name. Every once in a while, an emote pops up that says, "Chromaggus flinches as its skin shimmers." This indicates that Chromaggus's resists have changed. At any given time, Chromaggus will be particularly susceptible to damage in one school of magic, taking four times the normal amount of damage from spells in this school of magic, while simultaneously being very resistant to all other forms of magic, taking one-fourth the normal amount of damage. So after Chromaggus's skin shimmers like this, the spellcasters tested out to see what school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to and fired appropriately. Of course, there is a danger in this of pulling aggro. Some screenshots posted on the Blizzard forums showed people getting 10k fireball crits. If a mage got too many of those in a row, he or she could disastrously pull aggro off the main tank. So one has to be cautious especially in the early stages of the battle to not nuke too much using spells in the school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to. It may be exciting to see big numbers pop up on your screen, but since the main tank healers can hold up the main tank indefinitely, there's no time crunch involved with this fight. It's better to under dps and have a longer fight than to over dps and pull aggro and wipe the entire raid. Still, late in the fight when it was clear that Natural had Chromaggus permanently locked down, the spellcasters had fun dishing out the damage. In addition, whenever Chromaggus became susceptible to arcane, mages who had talent points in Arcane Subtlety (-40% aggro generation when casting arcane spells) had a field day.
The third step in killing Chromaggus is also shown in the screenshot above. Like Magmadar, Chromaggus "goes into a killing frenzy" occasionally, so the hunters need to Tranq Shot him to neutralize him.