[Faction Champions] Preparation for Boss #3

Belloc wrote:This is seriously one of the best fights currently in the game and people are shitting all over it.

Quit sucking.

Yeah.
Most fun I've had doing an encounter in a long, long time.

Oh and for the record, one-shot the 10-man version too. On all 3 of my toons. One of whom is a prot paladin.


EDIT: I think a lot of people are underestimating their ability to force a DPS to attack them by rotating through your two taunts. And once that target goes taunt immune you can just switch targets to a different DPS.

Not only that... but, as a paladin, we can single-handedly taunt away an assist train. I've seen plenty of times where a ranged is being pursued by 2-3 mobs... one righteous defense and they've gained a precious 3 seconds of time, which is huge.

I wanted to mention that for this fight I went with my Proly build (prot spec healing)

I could taunt/silence/interupt/stun/heal like a pro it was awesome.

I enjoyed my tank role here.
But my guild is pvp-retarded. When the RL said "think of this as a scripted arena 10v25", virtually everyone told that they either sucked at or hated arenas, often both.
god, i see two weeks of setting PVP macros for that in hard mode. so much.
We got:
3 Healers
- Shaman
- Priest
- Druid
3 ranged
- Hunter
- Shadow Priest
- Mage
4 melee
- Death Knight
- Ret paladin
- Warrior
- Rogue

GOD. DPS TRAINS ARE ANNOYING.
Matter of luck. 2x paladin tanks chain-taunting 2x melee each and switching with the cc team on ranged and back every time, and still
still
"<randomwarlock>, how you died?"
"*checks grimreaper*
"1.31 seconds 100% - 0%. DK gripped me, paladin was near him, and rogue ShS'd. When i was at 30%, thinking that i made it, the mage came and threw me an Arcane Barrage for 8k."
"..."
"and the healers? i mean, we're running 8heal, someone must have done something"
"i got a PW:S, but it wasn't enough"
"..."

i see a nerf incoming. simil-pvp encounters in pve are annoying. you can't make a tactic, learn the encounter, perfection your way and kill them: you just have to hope that they don't train dps... 1shots are luck. nothing more, nothing less.

Btw, we got them killing Priest, then rogue, then other healers, then random dps.
but that was the only try that we got 25/25 past priest, so that hardly mattered... 0 priests, 0 rogues. god, no. just no.

Yeah it was one of those fights as a raid leader of a semi-casual guild I look at like a big pile a paper work between me and my loot piniatas.

Making a big complicated strat and assigning everyone and their abilities helps marginaly. In the end it looks like a big cluster F... CCing on the pull. Assigned taunt-kiters. Assign interupts... but wait! I have a FoK specced rogue. I don't need to assign interupts. I did anyways and he got about 200 in 25 man, my shamans got about 10.

What the hell am I gonna do when they nerf FoK? Ughh....

One of the things that most annoys me about this encounter is the way many/most of the people of who enjoy it start ridiculing/belittling anyone who speaks up & says they hate it and/or find it hard. Yeah, this happens a bit for plenty of encounters, but this encounter really seems to have brought out both the tears & the "you are bad loser tard l2play hello kitty adventures" in people.

As a player, I'm ambivalent about it.. I kinda enjoy it but, particularly on 10 man, I dislike the RNG enemy comp element where you end up thinking "oh god.. warlock/spriest/tree/r.sham... and our only offensive dispeller is Bob-the-nub-holy-priest who we brought along to be nice to". As raid leader, half my raid loves it & the other half wants to burn the encounter designer at the stake... it does not make my life more relaxing.


My guild's "strat":

- Minimal CC/interrupts + flat-out DPS zerg is the only way we've found that really works well for this encounter in the 25 & two 10 man versions I've run. Unfortunately on 10's you can run into comp vs. comp problems tho where you just don't have enough of a necessary ability (i.e. the 10's comp I mentioned above.. bob's name has been changed to protect his identity ).

To use our 25 as an example tho, we had tree druid, holy paladin, disc priest, dk, warrior, rogue, enh. shaman, warlock & hunter.

- We had one warlock banish->banish->banish->fear->fear->fear->repeat the tree. One good warlock can do this, one bad warlock is lucky to achieve the 2nd banish (tried it in 10 man with a bad warlock).
- Prot warrior sat on the holy paladin & completely locked him down. We actually ended up killing the holy paladin 2nd or 3rd last, just cos the prot warrior had him locked down so totally he didn't matter.
- DK tank + Tankadin kited the melee back & forwards through 2 hunter frost traps. Ranged/healers were spread out around those frost traps so they could kite the melee back through them if they were at risk. There is no DR on a frost trap tho, so that didn't really happen... frost traps are seriously OP here. The key difference between this fight & genuine versus-players style fight are that the enemy melee can zerg a disc-priest/tree/clothy in less than 1 second, but use their closing moves in such a retarded manner that they're easy for smart tanks to control.

That's all the CC/interrupts we did. We had one lolret-gone-holy who had 200+ cleanses, and that was ~90% of the cleansing. We blew bloodlust & everyone zerged the priest, then everyone zerged the tree, then everyone zerged the DK - cos he'd deathgrip people into the enemy melee - then everyone zerged the warrior, then everyone zerged the enh sham, then we mopped up the rest. In case you were wondering, on our successful attempt 13 pure-dpsers + 4 tanks pulled 45,000 raid dps... on the many fail attempts where we tried cute larger scale CC/interrupt finessing we were only pulling about three quarters of that because too many people were being forced to stuff around sheeping/cycloning/fearing/whatevering.

Honestly, for 25 man, don't over think it. Control 2 healers, tank-kite the melee-train & brute force it. It'll just get even easier with more t9 gear. When we tried finessing the encounter, it just caused too many problems from the less fluidly reactive members of our raid team.

It's just like Gluth.. you could do elegant kiting, but why bother when you can just smash it really hard with a really big hammer? Hence I don't really find this encounter cute or elegant, and I think it will become extremely faceroll with better gear. Oh, and because the melee train is the big danger, I honestly don't envisage any significant change on the hardmode other than a higher required raid DPS. Melee-train's weakness is that they can be controlled & boosting their dps so they snot cloth in 0.5s rather than 1s makes no significant difference.

Totally agree with the notion that this fight can end up being a bit tricky on 10 man if you run into composition issues, which is more likely than in 25. We had horrible issues with this fight because of that; we ended up with resto shaman/resto druid/warlock/shadow priest/arms warrior/ret pally, and didn't have anyone in the raid who could single-handedly lock down one healer. The warlock and priest were pretty much chain fearing (and we didn't have a shaman for tremor totem), and the warrior/pally combo were gibbing clothies all over the place (and we were very cloth heavy). Combine that with a raid full of PvPphobes who aren't used to thinking on their feet so much and you have a very painful, wipe-filled raid evening.

Note that I'm not trying to blame a single part of that on encounter design; there's a pretty clear solution to all of our problems (namely: suck less and don't bring a stupid raid composition to this fight). But for those of us who don't have particularly large rosters to choose from on a given raid night, we are more susceptible to running into problems on Faction Champions because of it than any other fight we've done before. Again, an observation rather than a complaint.

"Bob-the-nub-holy-priest who we brought along to be nice to"

Thats the root of the issue. I think you hit on it right there.

The real thing that people are divided over is whether or not having "Bob-the-nub-holy-priest who we brought along to be nice to" in your raid is OK if you are expecting to be successful in t9 content.
So far, for Boss 1 and Boss 2, it HAS been ok.
For Ulduar hard-modes, for the most part, it wasn't ok, everyone has to be at least marginaly competant.

I don't think it's unreasonable that by the 3rd boss of the highest level of content in the game we reach a point where you can't bring a raid that carries retards or a guild with 9 warriors and 1 resto shaman and have some kind of reasonable expectation of success.
The problem is that Boss 1 and Boss 2 set everyone a false precident that they should.

Joanadark wrote:The real thing that people are divided over is whether or not having "Bob-the-nub-holy-priest who we brought along to be nice to" in your raid is OK if you are expecting to be successful in t9 content.

Yeah, I reckon you're probably right on that count.. I think you've also managed to cement for me why I'm finding the raid organisation so annoying for this.

There is a place in PVE raiding for someone whose idea of gut-wrenching excitement is to interrupt a 2s cast once every 10s for up to 10 minutes(? - i forget exactly what zoidberg's enrage timer is).

Similarly I've found some excellent arena players who I've avoided bringing to raids before, cos despite their 2200+ ratings they've got all the discipline of a chipmunk on crack.. they need to be moving, they need to be doing stuff, and they can't stand where the hell they're told & do what they're told ("but I saw something happen to frank over there, so i had to help him" ... "that's frank's job to deal with, shutup & do what you're meant to do").

My "Bob" raider can be an excellent player who's extremely reliable & will produce excellent numbers at whatever task I set him to, provided I tell him what to expect & outline his job properly. But he's got the on-the-fly independent judgement of a rock.. he'll move out of fires perfectly every time (provided he's been warned beforehand there's the chance of a fire & to move out of it), but you do not want to try & explain prioritised debuffing to him.

In 25 man, we'll carry him fine. In 10's it's gonna be a long time before he gets to see anything further.

Is it reasonable to randomly put one person in a 10 man crew under extreme pressure to be absolutely A1 at their job in top end content?.. Probably.

But I hope it does scale past rapidly, cos I'm going to want Bob's idiot-savant discipline in future fights and it doesn't make life easy having to drop him for undisciplined & sloppy players who've got good on-the-fly reactions.

I tanked this tonight on 10man, I never liked the "PvP" encounter in MgT but I quite enjoyed this. We got holy priest, holy pally, rogue, enhancement shaman, boomkin and mage (I felt really lucky that we avoided the Arms Warrior). We stayed in tank gear/spec and basically linebacked the melees with taunts, snares and stuns. It took us three attempts to down it, the first wipe was largely just due to people not using CC, interupting, dispelling and using PvP oriented stuff (wound poison etc.) so it wasn't that relivent, however I noticed something between the two other attempts from my perspective.

I was sitting on the enhancement shaman, mainly trying to keep him off the clothies. I've read that they effectively drop aggro every couple of seconds, and from doing it tonight, I would tend to agree. However I noticed that they appear to be much more prone to staying on one target if other targets are substantially further away. In one attempt I noticed that he stuck to me the vast majority of the time and was very easy to pull back when he did break because I wasn't needing to use taunts as often therefore stopping DR stacking up. On the other attempt where incidentially more people were near him he ran free more. He was much harder to hold onto (he therefore hit taunt immunity much sooner) and was much harder to drag back away. Since this is the first time I've done this encounter, Im not sure if this was entirely RNG/luck based or if they have some kind of coding which makes them favor sticking to a target rather than running around and therefore not hitting anything.

Has anyone else noticed this type of thing happening?

Ret.

We had our tanks take the rogue and warrior off to one side with a single healer (holy paladin for durability) and they mostly didn't get away unless someone ran too close to them due to running away from the other mob's focus or to get their CC off.

This is a fun fight IMO in 25 because you can assign specific things to people and that doesn't leave you with too little DPS to chain down the others. In 10s it's much harder because you can't take too many people away from direct DPS in order to CC the mobs or else you'll have too little DPS to burn your focus target down before DR becomes complicated.

I think there will probably be a nerf to the 10 man sometime soon because this is another fight where the 10 man is harder than the 25 mostly due to comp issues and I can't really imagine trying to do it without 25 man raid gear.

Anyone else do this without a FoK rogue?

I dont think we ever did it WITH a FoK rogue.

Our FoK rogue has almost 300 interupts in 25 man + mind numbing and wound poison being applied. I can only imagine that's a bit OP.

(Mabey it was 200, but still a lot)

I had one rogue spamming FoK with wound, and one spamming FoK with mind numbing on our 25 man. Granted, it was like 15 guildies and 10 pugs. I dunno, just seems overly powerful, but we were up against a tree, a disc priest, and a resto shaman, so the heals were still mostly instants and we had some great purging on our dps target. We had issues with dps getting killed, so I assigned a tank to the warrior, dk, and ret paladin(who we left to the very end) and we burned warrior, dk and rogue on 25 man in that order. Once the rogue was being dpsed we pretty much never lost anyone for the rest of the encounter.