Lurker Below woes

[ima_nerd]

My guild recently ventured into SSC for the first time to take on Lurker Below. We did enough attempts such that we had to clear to him twice and at the end of the night I really felt like we had made no headway. This is unusual for our guild because we have yet to not get any boss on our first night of attempts (Prince, Nightbane, Maulgar, Gruul, VR). This leads me to believe that somehow our strategy was flawed. Here's what we did:

1. MT in the water, tanking Lurker. No problems here. Prevents any sort of nasty OT-aggro-juggling business. Extra healing seems inconsequential.
2. One tank, one Warlock/Hunter and various DPS assigned to each island. Adds spawn, MT grabs one melee add, Mages sheep the other two. Island mobs are dealt with. One trapped/feared, other tank-n-spanked. Second one tank-n-spanked. All DPS moves to the MT target, OT grabs a second melee mob. MT's target downed, OT's target downed, Lurker comes back. MT resumes his position. This is the first point of discrepancy. We were waiting until after the first spout post-emerge to DPS the third add down. Someone reported that if you keep it perma-sheeped, the next add wave will only spawn two melee mobs. This sounds like a possible exploit but we were never able to even confirm it.

Our main problem was losing people in the add phase. The melee mobs had a tendency to get off at least one cleave before being sheeped which resulted in lots of death. The Mages want the island tanks to taunt the melee mobs to hold them still while they sheep. The problem I see with this is Rogues/EnhShaman trying to tank the island mobs. A few of us think the Mages are just sucking but we'd rather not tell them that until we really know for sure:whistling:

tl;dr : Need some tips on Lurker Below, too many people are dying on the add phase.

[vor_lord]

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.

[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. :)

[Skandranon]

tl;dr : Need some tips on Lurker Below, too many people are dying on the add phase.

The problem your mages are running into is that the melee mobs are not valid targets until after they've swum up onto the platforms, and then it's 1.5 seconds until they can be polymorphed, which is plenty of time for an attack to go off.

Position paladin healers at the points where the two melee adds that your MT isn't picking up get on to the platform, and have them Hammer of Justice them the moment they become valid targets. This should give your mages plenty of time.

[Kevin]

To clarify a bit:

And just to add to it. On the kill we only had 3 on my island. Mage, lock and hunter and we were killing the add the MT was tanking on the inner ring. We had plenty of time to kill one of the island adds.

As mentioned since the melee adds are the most dangerous by far (and the ranged adds hit harder in melee than they do with range) just stay away from the island ones and kill them they will stay at range and from what I've seen they hit harder in melee, they may not do as much total damage if you have someone in melee but it's way more focused and much more dangerous that way. Fear is also a great CC on the islands. At least on the one with the hole in it the ranged mobs don't move they just stand there feared and dying. A warlock could probably kill them both while Lurker was up just by DoTing and fearing them at times though this will cost you DPS on Lurker.

The only time I see someone on the island die is when they fight the adds in melee range too.

Another issue I've seen on some of our past attempts, especially when we have a lot of ranged is folks on the islands standing too close together. Spread out so you don't fling each other around if he targets you.

Island adds are easy to trap since after you see them come on the island once you know right where to have the trap to freeze them as soon as they are valid targets.

MD to the tanks is very nice to make sure aggro isn't pulled and the add goes nuts.

But 3 people can easily kill one of the melee adds and at least one island add before Lurker comes back up and fear is a valid CC if you don't have mages or hunters, use psychic scream or warlock fears to keep them from doing damage while you kill the melee adds.

I figure it's best to kill the melee mobs because while keeping them sheeped is perfectly valid mana has never been an issue on this fight as best as I can tell and you have nothing much else to do. Get rid of the most dangerous element just in case something goes wrong.

Of course we have great tanks in our warrior, druid, and paladin corps. Our DPS warriors with a shield on can tank one down just fine (if we use a DPS warrior that add dies first and if you only have one hunter they should be misdirecting to that warrior to make sure threat isn't an issue and to ease the extra healing burden). And since we nearly always have a feral druid, prot warrior, and prot/holy paladin on every run we have plenty of tanking for just 3 mobs.

Finally keep in mind that as mentioned you can stun the adds (and scatter shot them, etc). Do so. If you have a lot of rogues then stun lock them as you kill them. Warriors, druids and paladins have taunt, hunters can misdirect to help with the potential aggro issues this can cause. This helps with the healing mana usage that killing extra's can cause.

Of course one pull we had enough CC to keep all the island adds perma sheeped. We actually were sheeping inner ring adds for a bit on those and then the mage could sheep the trap or fear that was on the island.

[ima_nerd]

Thanks, guys. I'm cross-posting this to my guild forums. Keep the tips/experience coming if you think of anything else:)

[ima_nerd]

Thanks for the tips guys; we downed him tonite:D

Our first attempt we got him to 18%. I'm not even sure what happened but something on that add phase and the spout afterward resulted in lots of deaths. Our second attempt we nailed him. We ended up splitting our DPS such that all the adds (after CCing as many as possible) were being DPSed simultaneously. Every add phase we had all eight adds down before he popped back up. Putting our three tanks on the melee adds while CCing the ranged adds worked perfectly.

Silly healer gear for a couple people and DKP for me!

[Bolty]

Thanks for the tips guys; we downed him tonite:D

Awesome! Grats guys.

Silly healer gear for a couple people

Wait....what?

No heals for ima_nerd next raid, guys!

-Bolty

[ima_nerd]

Wait....what?

No heals for ima_nerd next raid, guys!

-Bolty

Next raid? I got my fifth Nether Vortex! PvE is for losers, time to go pwn with my Storm Herald:lol:

[Tal]

Next raid? I got my fifth Nether Vortex! PvE is for losers, time to go pwn with my SkillHerald:lol:

Fixed.