Welcome to Ulduar folks. If you made it past the lag, the vehicles, and the guard-dragon, and you didn’t get sidetracked by Ignis’ Hot Pockets, chances are you’ll soon find yourself standing in front of my favorite shiny robot in the game, the XT-002 Deconstructor. She just wants to give everyone a big hug . . . a spine-cracking hug, that is. She reminds me of eeeevil pet collector Elmyra from the Animaniacs. In all seriousness, Blizzard outdid themselves here. The boss’s animations and voice are oh-so-entertaining, and this fight provides a juicy-yet-manageable challenge for healers. Conquest downed XT on 4/21 using this strategy.
Essential Abilities
To effectively heal this boss, all healers need to make sure that their unit frames show the following three abilities. If you are a Grid or Pitbull user, add these to your custom debuffs.
Gravity Bomb
This ability places a debuff on a player. They need to move away from others to avoid causing AoE damage. This debuff does not tick immediately but rather does a significant chunk of damage at the delay of a few seconds. A player with Gravity Bomb will need a large heal once the ability triggers.
Light Bomb
This ability places a debuff on a player, and as with Gravity Bomb, the player must move away from others to avoid causing AoE Damage. This debuff is a strong, fast-ticking dot, and it lasts 9 seconds, dealing 3500 damage each tick. A player with Light Bomb needs immediate and steady attention.
Tympanic Tantrum
Of the three abilities, this one is the most dangerous. Tympanic Tantrum deals damage equal to 10% of each player’s maximum health every 1 sec for 12 sec. Nearby enemies are also dazed for the duration. Every player in the raid needs to receive a medium amount of healing in order to survive this ability. AoE and group heals (Divine Hymn, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Healing, Wild Growth, Tranquility) are good solutions.
Healing Assignments
In order to meet the dps minimum for the boss, you will probably need either 6 or 7 healers. These assignments will assume 6. Consult the following diagram for the optimum positioning of your 6 healers.
As always, the diagram is coded by class color. Our favorite arrangement uses a paladin and a tank healing-specced druid on the MT. On the raid, we have had good luck with using two priests, one shaman, and one raid-healing specced druid. In this diagram, you’ll notice that H3 and H4 are standing together, as are H5 and H6. The raid splits into two groups, and ranged dps stacks with raid healers. This grouping makes it easier for the person with Light Bomb or Gravity Bomb to run away. Your MT healers will have to cheat forward a bit of the pile of players in order to be in range of the tank. XT is big–approximately 10 yards across–and your tank will be on the far side.
Techniques
I’ve had the pleasure to both MT and raid heal for this fight, so I can share with you my top strategies for both positions. The key to this fight is using your abilities wisely.
MT healing
Two healers are necessary because this bot hits hard! Damage is spiky because the boss hits hard but swings slowly. We found a combination of a Resto Druid and a Holy Paladin to be very successful. The druid can keep some HoTs on the MT even through the Exposed Heart phase, in which there is no damage to the tank. We’ve lost the tank before when XT has come back with a vengeance, so be prepared with some HoTs or shields. Throughout the fight, the druid will probably be able to make a small contribution to raid healing. During Tympanic Tantrum, both MT healers will raid heal, and during the Heart phase, the paladin can probably dps, with the druid contributing as well if she is able to afford the mana hit.
Raid Healing
I learned the hard way that HoTs won’t cut it for Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb. For Gravity Bomb, have raid healers shield or pre-HoT and then time a big nuke heal to land as the bomb explodes. For Light Bomb, the player will need a series of quick heals (Flash of Light, Flash Heal, Lesser Healing Wave) or a combination of HoTs and direct heals. A Rejuv+Swiftmend is not enough. With my raid healing build, I was using HoTs + glyphed Healing Touch to good effect. Light Bomb is the more dangerous of the two bombs because it hits fast and hard.
For Tympanic Tantrum, HoTs and AoE heals are king. I was having great luck with Tranquility, Wild Growth, and Lifebloom during this phase. When you assign raid healers, make sure you distribute your AoE healers evenly on both sides.
Melee and Offtanks
There’s no way to get around doing double duty on this fight. At least one offtank will assist a couple of ranged dps with controlling the adds. Specific Raid Healers (perhaps H4 and H5) should be assigned to keeping the adds team alive.
Melee will need some attention, but Judgement of Light, if you have it, goes a long way towards keeping them healthy. We assigned our Resto Shaman to chain heal the melee group when she could.
DPS the heart!
All of the non-tree healers in your raid should switch to dps-ing the heart when it is exposed. Every little bit helps you meet the very high dps demand! I also recommend that any raid-healing druids switch forms and dps the heart. However, the MT healing druid should keep her HoTs on the tank, because XT returns suddenly and with a vengeance. If she can sneak a Moonfire in there too, by all means.
Mana Control
This fight has a few moments that will allow for OOFSR regen. It’s fairly tough on mana, and you will probably use a potion and your mana-restoration abilities (Innervate, Shadowfiend) if you are only carrying six healers. The fight is short with a 6 min enrage timer, but it’s fast and furious, so you can blow your mana if you’re not careful. If you find yourself running out, take a break instead of using your mana for offensive spells when the heart is exposed.
A Healer Check?
This boss tests healers in more ways than one. I like to think of it as a healing assignment check. Everyone has to do his or her specific job, and there’s no time for sniping. Moreover, you need a good balance of single-target and AoE heals to pull this off with 6 healers. There is both heavy Main Tank damage and extensive raid damage. Expect to use all of your skills.
Interesting. we used the same strategy and ended up at 2%-5% a couple of times. I would like to add that GridStatusRaidDebuff supports ‘Gravity Bomb’ and ‘Light Bomb’. Unfortunately, the support for ‘Light Bomb’ seemed broken yesterday (on several users) but I assume a fix can be expected.
Also, at the risk of making an unpopular suggestion: Body and Soul (new holy priest talent) is very nice to reduce the light bomb damage here. I have not extensively raided with the talent, but it has proven usefull (to a degree) in every encounter so far except Leviathan. I have yet to try the glyph of prayer of healing but it promises to be made of win for this fight.
There are a couple of ways to lay out this fight – the one above is successful, as is the one I’ve linked in my “website” tag.
Though it took a little adjusting, mostly in terms of getting the proper spacing so the healers can see each other as well, we got Deconstructor down this week.
@Zusterke’s First reply: Just got word from a guildie… GridStatusRaidDebuff has a fix for the ‘Light Bomb’ debuff:
http://www.wowace.com/projects/grid-status-raid-debuff/files/215-r113/download/
Grid users with that addon should only config the tantrum then. (sorry for the spam)
Thanks for these comments, i presume with a 10 man and three healers, you would have one mt healer and two group healers? standing left and right?
We’ve gotten some pretty good use out of the paladin Divine Sacrifice talent to soak up some of the Tantrum damage and ease healing quite a bit.
ACs last blog post..XT-002 Deconstructed
QSS got him down tonight after ~1.5 hours of trying. She’s a nice DPS and healing check, not to mention super-creepy. =)
You seem to imply that you are using multiple add tanks for this fight. We found that one tank (prot paladin in our case) could manage all of the pummelers, which freed up a feral Druid for DPS. Perhaps trying something like that might boost raid DPS enough to get him down?
Karthiss last blog post..Mangle – Skill name changes
Yes – group-targetable PoH plus glyph is super for tantrum and to top off melee if a melee gets light bombed (and is in one group). Circle of healing is not quite enough heal.
Also, we had a resto druid do tranquility on 1st tantrum, I did divine hymn on 2nd tantrum, and our spriest used his hymn on 3rd. Sadly we had no retadin to use his divine shield + divine sacrifice macro.
Though XT was relatively easy on ten man, blizzard sure has done a great job at tuning the enrage timers on 25 man to be super tight. Your raid will need to squeeze out every bit of available dps to kill him within the timer, this means that as a healer you will have to dps too and I must say I learned a few new tricks to maximize my damage. 🙂 Having your fiend already out when bloodlust goes off for instance helps a little, also don’t forget to power infusion a dps at the appropriate times if you’re a discipline priest.
Healing on the other hand is chaotic but pretty easy as long as people move. Because the tank takes so little damage (he would go 10+ seconds without taking significant hits), as well as raid damage continuously happening in different places due to bombs. we actually opted not to have assignments but to let everyone use their best judgment, which worked pretty well. The main risk of death is bombs during tantrum, particularly gravity bomb, and bomb adds killing the dps assigned to handle adds.You can NOT afford to have anyone die during this fight, the enrage timer is that tight, so bring a druid or two for combat rezzes and just keep making attemps until you get him down.
As noted above, body and soul is a great tool to help people that are bombed create distance from the raid quickly. Divine guardian (I think that’s what it’s called, paladin prot talent), along with hand of sacrifice will make tantrums a breeze, but you won’t have it up every time. It’s also very important to train your dps not to run out of healing range when they get bombed.
Overall a very fun but stressful encounter, I can’t wait to see what’s next. ^^
@Krunch: When you were referring to the cooldown ability cycle, are you referring to a 10m version or 25m version?
Divine Hymn is very powerful but is it the best choice? A serendipity PoH will heal 5 targets sufficiently to survive tantrum within 2.2s (more or less), add a non hasted for 10 targets in 5.2s or 15 in 8.2s. Compared to Divine Hymn which does 12 targets in 8s… there isn’t much reason to stick with Divine Hymn.
Also, it stacks pretty badly: PoH sticks to one group, Chainheal does too. This means that you can assign a shaman to one group and a holy priest to another. Diviny Hymn will negate the groups and may double the healing on some targets already covered by another player.
On the other hand, given 2 holy priests… it might be a good idea to let them cast 1 hasted PoH each and then proc Divine Hymn together.
We downed XT tonight, too. We used a pally and Disc priest (me!) to heal the main tank. I was healing the melee during Tantrums, and Divine Hymn works like a charm for it.
It’s a super fun fight, although the voice gets a bit frustrating at times.