Mother is too easy. We 2 shot her. If anything, the trash leading up to Mother was a pain. How quaint and ironic it is that we downed her on Mother’s day. Having capped our Shadow Resist helped incredibly.
Installing EasyMother made this fight a piece of cake.
Illidari Council
When Carnage first started raiding, we had minor difficulty on High King. We entered the caverns of Serpentshrine and manhandled Fathom-Lord and his lackeys. Following that, we infiltrated Tempest Keep and surprised Kael along with his advisors. Now we end up at the last of the multi-mob encounter before Sunwell: Illidari Council.
Healer Arsenal
2 Holy Priests (1 CoH, 1 Imp DS)
1 Resto Druid
4 Paladins
1 Resto Shaman
After 3 hours of wiping, I can say with absolute certainty that I want to bring in another healer for the time being.
2 Paladins and 1 Resto druid assigned to Gathaios tank
1 Imp Ds Priest on the mage tank
1 Paladin on the Rogue tank
1 Paladin on the Priest tank
1 CoH Priest on the melee group, the raid, and the tanks whenever possible
1 Shaman on the raid
And we’re still dying. Even after I devote myself to paying more attention to the Divine Wrath and Poison damages that ensue, we’re still dying. This is an endurance encounter, it appears to me. The enrage timer is like 14 minutes.
Cause of Wipe
The two things that lead to our demise:
- Tank death: Specifically, the Paladin tank can dish out 17k damage within 1 second. He gets gibbed.
- Raid buckling: We lose a player to a blizzard or a flame strike, or a combination of the Divine Wrath and poison. This player is usually someone important who is kicking or interrupting. Another player tries to compensate before another one goes down. Eventually, we lose this battle of attrition and our raid starts to slowly buckle before a wipe is called seconds later.
I really want another healer. I think that would help ease the pressure a little.
Pardon my ignorance, but at this level shouldn’t a Raid tank have 20-22k HP? I would think a 17k burst should be survivable.
I also assume the Paladin Tank is a someone tanking a Paladin type mob, not an actual Paladin Tank?
Matt, here’s our healing strat hopefully it will help you.
Pally Tank – Me and either another priest or a shaman.
Mage Tank – 1 Pally (Pally not needed here, but because we send our mage up the ramp it’s nice for the pally to be able to bubble to keep himself from getting gibbed)
Rogue Tank – 1 Pally (responsible for stunning or ranged taunting the Rogue when he’s trying to get lose)
Priest Tank – 1 Pally (Class not important here)
DPS near the Pally – 1 Shaman
DPS near the Priest – 1 Shaman or CoH Priest
I also have 1 druid who normally hots the Rogue and Priest tank, but he also makes sure to HoT the envenom target if it’s within his reach and generally helps with raid healing.
Pally tank healing – My normal healing partner is a priest I’ve been healing with for 2 years, we have binds to one another in vent and use these to communicate our movement in the fight. The other priest or shaman concentrates on stabilization heals and keeping a renew up on the tank and I lay out the greater heals. He also helps to raid heal if the melee gets low. A big thing (it may seem to simple to say but sometimes the simple things are the most elusive) is just making sure that he and I are spread out so we don’t have to move at the same time. When that priest isn’t available, I have a shaman who generally bounces chain heal off the tank and switches to healing touch when he sees me moving. Finally, your tank is going to have to move out of danger quickly. Nothing you can do will keep him alive if he’s standing in a blizzard, flamestrike, etc.
We have an elemental shaman interrupt the wraths and stand as a back up for heal interrupts during the melee shield. When this is available, it goes a long way to reducing incoming damage.
I’d caution against bringing in a 9th healer if you can help it, just because it’s a long fight and there are certain combinations of events that are pretty much guaranteed to kill you (Blizzard + Envenom, Flamestrike + Blizzard, etc). The longer the fight draws on the more often this combination is going to happen and the more likely it’ll take out someone you need.
Hammer: The tank on the Paladin is our MT Warrior. He tops at about 22k health, yes but the healers were busy avoiding the AoE cocktail and couldn’t stop to get him up in time.
Auzara: I’ll for sure keep those points in mind. I need to find me a large map of the room and see if I can get more creative with the assignments.
If you want Matt I’ll take a screenshot of the cleared space. I can send you a blank one and one marked up with our positions.
Gratz on Mom by the way. <>
Gratz on Mother, Matt!
Auzara is right; you don’t need another healer. Adding one will simply gimp your DPS.
We roll with 7 on this fight… and your current make-up is generally good. I would suggest swapping your assignment with the Resto Shammy’s.
(The melee are closer together, allowing Chain Heal to really have its full effect. I find it helpful to spec into Holy Reach for the better CoH radius – if X is 30 from me, and Y in their party is 30 from them, my effective reach is 60. I’ll toss it on someone at full health just to hit other people that are “too far” for other healers. Anyway, CoH is WIN for spread-out dps)
Personally, we stopped wiping on this fight when /I/ stopped trying to heal everyone.
MY job is to heal the Ranged DPS, and anyone who gets Divine Wrath or Poison. I also keep Renew on the Mage Tank and the MT. (I still occasionally sneak a CoH onto the melee if there’s trouble with a blizzard or consecrate)
Put simply: If I keep trying to heal everyone (and the temptation was huge, because of how much damage everyone takes) I run out of mana, I’m on GCD when someone gets poisoned, and I end up letting people die.
I also came to the conclusion that meddling a lot on other healers’ assignments gives them a false sense of what they need to throw out to keep their target alive. It enables them to be lazy, and teaches them bad habits. It reduces their ability to do their job properly…which tends to make me try to pick up their slack more, which exacerbates the aforementioned issues. In short: Don’t Do It!!!
Troubleshooting for Dead MT’s:
Check your recount, and make sure your Paladins aren’t just FoL-spamming. A good HL/FoL rotation (either 1:1 or 1:2, and NOT in the same Rhythm) will help a lot.
Your tank needs to have a full stock of Iron shield potions, etc. Also, check their gear. Mitigation/avoidance trinks help. Ex: Morose’s watch is MUCH better than just ANOTHER high-stam piece for this fight.
Sneaky tip for other Hordies: Troll Priests have Hex of Weakness. It reduces the effectiveness of healing by 20%. It COULD just be my perception, but I’m pretty sure it works on these guys… Toss it on the paladin every 2-minutes, and if a heal sneaks through, it will help you get back on track. Since I figured that out, we stopped having 1% wipes. 🙂 (Again, I haven’t monitored that one closely, but I do think it helps.)
Here’s to a dead Illybeans!
–Wynthea
Gratz on the progress Matt 🙂 Keep progressing or we are going to catchup 😛
My guild isn’t the most conventional. We only raid 3 nights a week, and don’t run normal class combinations. We usually have 3-5 priests in a raid, depending on what other classes show up. We may have had 10 healers last night when we killed Council on our first night attempting.
As long as the everyone is on top of staying alive, you should have plenty of time to kill them before the enrage. I don’t know what the normal kill time for Council is, but we had 1.5 to 2 mins left on the timer when they went down. Making the fight longer or shorter won’t affect much, everything is on a timer, and a longer fight means 2 more blizzards and 2 more flames strikes, which as long as people are on top of things shouldn’t mean much.
I have never seen where bringing in more healers makes people lazy, just that it allows us to be more specific with assignments. For example, I was the only one healing the Priest tank, and while I could have done that and healed the raid a little, I didn’t. I never ran out of mana and the tank never died. This also relieves some of the pressure of the healers to heal the raid and allows the healers to keep themselves alive a little easier. If you’re put in the position where you have to chain cast to keep somebody alive (and if you stop they’ll die) then either you are going to die from the blizzard or your heal target will while you’re moving. Any situation shouldn’t be that extreme, but I think you get the point that I’m trying to make.
Like I said, we aren’t a conventional guild and thats just my limited viewpoint.
Good Luck, and grats on Mother
Grats on Mother! At this rate, Illidan will be down in like 2 weeks! 🙂 Keep it up!
For starters, make sure that everyone KNOWS that their HS (or healing pot) is NEEDED for when they get envenom.
The divine wrath target needs a heal for 3k+ in 2 seconds or less to survive that and possibly an AoE.
Suggest swapping your IDS priest to the MT for one of the pallies. Have them interrupt cast their max rank Gheal and dance with the 5 sec rule to maximize efficiency, and save PoM and Renew for GCDs they have to burn by dodging AoE, and cast Binding Heal on the MT (and themselves, obviously) when they take damage (and when envenom starts ticking!). This ensures that you have at least one self suffient healer on the MT at all times, that wont panic about their green bar.
This isnt a stack up and CoH fight. People need to spread out and pay attention. AT MOST only one person should be hit by any AoE and ONLY 1 tick! (consecrate excluded). It may not be as much of healing issue as a people aren’t avoiding avoidable damage issue. You guys beat Archimonde, which should have taught everyone in the raid how to pay attention and avoid taking needless damage.
Best of Luck!
Agreed with what others have said. You have plenty of healers for this.
Depending on how you position the encounter it will make things easier or harder. I assume that you are positioning like most other guilds / strats have it set up?
Rogue: Far Left
Mage: Top of the stairs where he starts out.
Priest: Either on the top of the stairs or by doorway.
Paladin: Far Right so you have plenty of room to move around
Our Setup:
Rogue – Paladin Tank (me) with a priest healer. She simply Renews, PW:S. Occasional Gheals. The rogue hits like a schoolgirl. The biggest problem is the poisons. My priest healer cross heals the Mage Tank.
Mage – Tanked by a mage obviously. Has a Pally healer assigned to keep spamming FoL etc…assisted by the priest mentioned above with Renews, etc.
**Those two healers handle the left side of the room. Tell your Paladin tank (I’m assuming they’re tanking the rogue) to heal when the rogue has Vanished. I do, it helps.
Priest – Druid tanking this with 2x Rogues, 1x Enhancement Shaman and a mage with it as a Focus incase it gets to the point where she get’s BoP’d. Paladin Healer and Holy Priest here for healing the melee group. Obviously she can NOT get a heal off.
Paladin – Warrior MT for Spell Reflect. Druid and 2x Paladins focused on that person. Shaman needs to spam chain heals on Melee. Between consecration dmg, Flamestrike and Blizzard they will be busy. Tell them to wear their big boy pants, this is their time to shine. Druid can help with HoT’s on melee but number 1 priority is that Warrior Tank. Yes, they can take 15-18k DMG w/o a heal if people are moving.
** EVERYONE has 11k health. **
We had a Resto Shaman (we run with 3, go figure) tell us he would be fine with 9k health. “I have WTF-NS Heal” Next fight he gets envenomed for about 7k and then Flamestrike as he’s casting a heal on himself. Squish. Next attempt…he had 11k HP. Dead Council.
It took us quite a few tries at 75%-80% wipes then all of a sudden one adjustment and people just doing their job and surviving and bam…loot sandwitch.
Now, time to tame the blind rogue…
Grats on Mother and Council, caught right up to us, we got Council yesterday. 8 Healers and we were well under enrage timer. Indeed 2 pulls before we had got to 1% healed, Got to 2%% healed and got to 3% before a 3rd heal back to 12% and hitting the enrage.