Each week on Matticast we will be featuring a topic driven by our audience. You can submit your comments on this post, or e-mail us with your thoughts. You can even send us an audio clip (mp3 format please). This is your chance to have your say on what we discuss on World of Matticus. Also don’t forget, if you have general questions you’d like answered on the show, you can send them our way. Remember we record on Sunday nights, so get your thoughts in before then!
This week we are looking for the Dungeon/Raid encounters that are troubling your guild. Having healing issues on Vanessa Van Cleef, DPS troubles on Magmaw, need help with phase transition on Nef? let us know what bosses are troubling your guild at this point and we will do our best to help ya out.
Any boss in Grim Batol with a “bad” group (undergeared and/or standing in fire and/or not running out of the goddamn Blitz and killing us all). That place needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth.
Any of the following in a group without proper CC: Beauty, Lady Nazj’ar.
Any of the following with a bad/inexperienced tank: Ozruk, Karsh.
I can’t say I had actual *healing* problems on anything. When I had trouble, I was either undergeared (doing heroics with a healer, a tank and a DPS in ilvl 329 gear HURT) or trying to heal stupid. Now, in mostly heroic gear and some rep/crafted epics, I can heal pretty much anything, as long as the DPS is DPSing, the tank is tanking and I’m not standing in a puddle of death and killing myself.
I would preface this by saying so far all I have done is SFK on heroic (yeah 4 or 5 days in a row since I started doing my random and have only had time for the random each day).
I would say the thing I have trouble with the most is the stacks of the -healing debuff on the last boss (sorry I am terrible with boss names). It seems my tank just keeps getting stacks of that debuff until he is at -100% healing…Is there a way for him/her to avoid that? Is there a way I can make sure that I make it happen so that I get big heals off before he goes into that? What can I do (as a Priest) to make it work instead of wiping 3+ times and then getting lucky?
Did it for the first time last night. What we did was tank the boss on the bottom floor, and whenever the buffs would stack too high on our tank he would run up the stairs and then jump down. By the time the boss would catch up to him, not being able to jump down, the stacks would have cleared (it takes 8 seconds I think).
I’ve defeated a couple of the heroic dungeons with guildies and the one that has proved problematic so far is Throne of the Tides. Even the trash in there is pretty intense. We had problems with dying to the damage of the Swell ability of the Tainted Sentries when facing 2 at a time just before the Ozumat encounter.
Then when we finally mastered the first 2 phases of the Ozumat encounter we were never able to kill him before dying to Blight of Ozumat.
I felt kind of vindicated when I saw on the latest PTR patch notes:
Tainted Sentries Swell damage has been reduced.
The damage of Blight of Ozumat has been reduced by 25% per stack.
I’m allergic to PuGs. They make me break out in a rash (of anger). So I’m happy to say that dungeons generally go well enough as I only run in guild groups and we can communicate and coordinate more easily.
That being said, probably the two bosses we end up having the most problems on are the first boss in Stonecore because someone always seems to think they have time enough to finish what they’re doing during a burrow phase and gets obliterated and the first boss in Vortex Pinnacle because we always have 1-2 people who can’t tell the wind direction and spend too much time worrying about running around. And ultimately making friends with a neighboring tornado or two.
We’ve got the healing, we’ve got the dps, we’ve got the tank survivability and threat management. It’s just trying to kick those last vestiges of Wrath off and thinking, “It’s ok, I can just finish this cast then move” or other player issues that perhaps a few graphical setting tweaks may improve.
I’m actually not sad about this, though. These encounters have some mechanics that serve nicely to help people rewire their brains to the new format of the content and get away from those old play styles. We get through things eventually and people learn a bit along the way.
Heroics actually done: SFK, Deadmines, Vortex Pinnacle.
Attempted: Grim Batol, Throne of the Tides, Halls of Origination (only Rajh left)
I think that most of the encounters, and even trash are just fine. The fact we haven’t defeated bosses is ok by me. Usually means we are getting VERY tired, and frankly, the epitomy of STUPID is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We have made progress on all the bosses that are causing us trouble. Yes, they are challenging. There are a couple of things I think are overtuned, and need a bit of tweaking. But for the most part, I really like them. RNG should not kill my tank. Stupidity should kill my priest. And yes, both have happened.
This maybe the wrong topic, but since it is sorta related, I hope you don’t mind.
We just started raiding and have killed the first 5 bosses in only two raid nights. But we have had some serious issues with trash. While there are tons of guides and videos out there that deal with how to the grubs on Magmaw, there are almost none on how to kills the trash before Magmaw. We spent an hour wiping on that trash. Or the drakes in the in inner ring of BWD, what are they linked to? Why do they seem to respawn every 15 minutes? How can we pull the death orbs before Wyrmbreaker without at least two raid members dying on 10 man?
Just a thought, feel free to ignore me.
I’ve only done PUG heroics so far, probably won’t see any raids anytime soon. Healing as a resto druid the toughest boss I’ve healed through is most definitely, Forgemaster Throngus. Shield Phase is so rough with damage flying out the ying yang. This boss fight, is the only fight so far, that I actually have to blow all my cooldowns. Although I do feel that ALL of Stonecore is a Heroic check for all party members.
Siamat, Lost City of the Tol’vir *groan*
Good Evening World of Matticus,
As you were after raid encounters that are giving people problems I thought I would mention Halfus from the Bastion of Twlight. My guild has done a few bosses in Blackwing Decent, and have even 9 manned Magmaw yet we tried Halfus and found it very demanding.
The dragons we got were the Storm Rider and Time Warden as well as the whelps. We went with tanking up both the big dragons in an attempt to burn one down, release the whelps and finish both them and the second dragon (typically time warden) however no matter what we dud the tanks took a ridiculous amount of damage.
We had two Druids on the tanks and a holy priest (me) on the raid. I think the attempt that highlighted our situation and difficulty would be the one where we were around 45 seconds into the encounter with all healers almost oom churning out 13k hps roughly each to keep the tanks up.
I wouldn’t say it’s a gear issue as we have had no problems in other encounters, do you have any tips or pearls of wisdom involving this boss and drake set up.
Chuck
Al’akir when RNG goes blah on you LOL
– i.e. Tornadoes spawning near you just before wind burst;
Twilight Ascendant Council
– just started learning this and the mechanics seem interesting, just that the most important ability any raid needs is a Vent that does not lag :p LOL
As for Dungeons, SFK first boss in a PUG with no interrupt ability o.O . . . PUGs with people *cheating* the i329 requirement (especially if its a tank o.O)… Overall, I prefer guild groups or friends as they are people I know I can rely on to do their part. Cataclysm heroics is fun and challenging… as long as everyone pulls their own weight.
Blah.
I don’t know how to heal Hogger. Halp?
The toughest for me must be Altairus (damn those tornadoes !) and Forgemaster Throngus. Only downed each once, and on Forgemaster I wasn’t healing. The last boss of Grim Batol is also hard.
I’m noticing though, the difficulty of bosses is highly dependent on the composition of the group (amount of DPS, type of CC/interrupt available, etc.).
Grrr chimaeron! My guild has been stuck on him for about 2 weeks now, its so frustrating because we rocked the healing on every boss up to this point but the 10k mechanic is tripping us up. I might be crazy but my UI will often show people to be over 10k, but then when i check recount after they day it has them under 10k. Maybe we just have to many resto druids and need to wait for 4.06?
My raid (25 man) wiped 10 times on Omnitron Defense system before downing it last week. The week before we 2 shot it so I’m trying to figure out what our issues were. One issue that I know was that we were melee heavy (with only 7 ranged dps). However, there seemed to be a healing issue too. We had issues with people dying when Magmatron and Toxitron were both up due to the fire AoE. It seemed like too much damage was being taken overall and it wasn’t because people were standing in stupid stuff. Do you have any suggestions for healing this combination/this fight? We were running with 7 healers (2 priests (one holy, one disc), 2 shammies, 2 pallies and 1 druid).
We ended up going 7/12 for the week which was 4 new bosses for us so it was a good week, but it would be nice to not have the issues with this boss in the future. Thanks.
I’ve PUGd my way through all the heroics on my resto shaman and disc priest but have not touched raid content yet.
Stonecore is by far the worst heroic to get with a pug. Half my groups don’t make it past the first boss. Apparently it is fun to stand on the rumbling ground and not kill the little purple exploding adds any other way than running into them, followed by a big explosion. New tanks and melee dps cannot get past the 3rd boss, and the last boss is one of the hardest fights to heal of them all.
I don’t think it is worth a podcast, most of these people cannot be helped, even after I explain the strat multiple times but I just thought I’d mention it sense I didn’t see it in the comments.
Id love some ‘how to’s’ for Nefarian and Al’akir.
Nef has given us a real slap in the face – without the perfect setup we can pretty much call it before we start.
If we make it past jumping outta the lava to the platforms its a bonus lol Our best try was 34% – the kiting in phase 3 [or lack of] wiped us….so yea, any tips are most welcome x
Alakir… why is he so big, im a gnome…i look like a tiny dot compared to him ! Any tips on defeating him would be awesome.