[Faction Champions] Preparation for Boss #3

Threatco wrote: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)

FoK records ridiculously more interrupts in the combat log than it actually does, so if you're just seeing 300 in the log, he did less than 100.

still an amazing interrupt spell though.

Ultimately the only utility that prot brings that ret doesn't is the avengers shield silence and 20 second stun cooldown, and it sacrifices a lot of damage to bring those things which are fairly marginal at best. Taunting to break assist trains is still viable as ret, as is using hand of protection (and hand of freedom to break stuns, if you take divine purpose) and wearing plate (or even pvp plate) is just as good for absorbing a bladestorm tick or two.

From my experiences this past week with this fight on 10man and 25man (in which we one-shot both encounters, and in both of which I was prot, "in case") tanks simply aren't required and you'd be better off bringing a pvpspecced ret or even pve ret over a prot specced paladin. This may change with the hardmodes, obviously, but we'll have to see when they are released. This coming week I will be specced ret and wearing ret gear purely because I feel it contributes more to the raid than prot does, even with the extensive cleansing, stunning and avengers shield usage at 25s and 10s this week past. Perhaps we got a good combo and it will be worse this coming week, I don't know.

Lastly, I'm not somebody who mashes macros, somebody who keyboard turns, or somebody who doesn't know how to play. I have many hours played on my paladin and have tanked all encounters hardmode and otherwise, and it disappoints me that so many people in this thread were willing to dismiss my point of view simply because it differs to their own. I would have expected the "you're just bad, l2play" comments on the WoW General forums, but not these.

We tried this on 10-man last night. Our set up:

Resto Druid, Disc Priest, Holy Priest, Blood DK, Frost DW DK, Frost Mage, Fire Mage, Elemental Shaman, Rogue, and me Prot spec. For the record, we currently have no warlocks or warriors in the guild, which is a shame because I really thing Intimidating Shout and Howl of Terror would help a lot on this fight.

Opposing team: Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Ret Pally, Rogue, Warlock, Boomkin

We struggled at first for a number of reasons - people wanting to AoE near CC'd mobs, slow CCs, but mainly the fact that we tried to CC the shaman and burn through the priest first. After about 4 attempts we switched to CCing the priest and blowing through the Shaman first - if only to get rid of Earth Shield and his totems. We also had a problem where people were convinced that, because the mobs were PvP flagged for diminishing returns, they needed resilience gear for the fight. Even after I said, repeatedly, not to bring anything but your Medallion of the Alliance - in case we decide we need it. We also had a lot of complaints about a "pvp encounter in pve" which I pretty much shrugged off.

For my role, I just stood away from everyone else, cleansed when I could, used Hand of Protection/Divine Shield/Divine Sac every time it was off CD, tossed Avenger's Shield when it was off CD, and kept constantly taunting the Ents, Paladin and Rogue.

My guild might feel otherwise, but the fight's really not that hard.

First post in this forum in quite a while. But, this fight was great enough to warrant the effort. There's another forum thread about this so I'm not sure which is the main one.

Anyway, this encounter can be approached purely from a PVE perspective as mentioned previously. However, I believe a PVP approach is viable as well. Here are a few observations I have noticed on both 10 and 25. For starters, I don't claim to be good at arenas. I've just done it enough times with a lot of solid people who were nice enough to teach me some things. IMO it was a great idea for the devs to come up with something like this and I hope to see similar encounters.

- SpellAlert addon works for this encounter. SA is mainly a PVP mod but since the NPCs are using abilities that are no different from regular players, you will see the warnings. I am not sure if DBM is currently updated for this encounter, and I'm not sure if that's even possible given the nature of the fight.
- Communication is key. Like an arena match, it's important to call out certain things like who (on your side) is being targetted, when CDs (like BoP, Div Shield), when CCs are being used, etc. Some raids take this for granted, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in a radio silence enforced guild/raid.
- By simply having more GCDs, a raid should be able to beat the opposing arena team. The raid team will always have more members at the start and their combined abilities, used correctly, should be able to beat NPCs that have higher HP and dmg. It's like Wintergrasp. You have 5 tenacity against 5 opponents. If you beat them, they were too busy doing DPS rotations on you and ignoring everything else. Which leads to....
- All classes must use all of their abilities (as GC calls it, their full toolbox). Mass Dispell, gouge, hamstring, roots, cyclone among many others. Unfortunately, some raiders will neglect those utilities because of disinterest, laziness or because they just want to pad the meters. I've seen this, and honestly I don't know how to remedy it.
- One particular ability for paladins is turn evil. When glyphed it's instant, so with a rotation of fear, taunt, stun, holy wrath can pretty much lock out a felhunter.
- I'm not going into specific strats yet but I will say that tunneling a healer for the first kill is not a must. I disagree with wowwiki saying that arena teams usually focus on the healer. In arenas, a lot of class roles are switched around. Locks and priests can tank a lot of pressure. Mages in RMP rotate sheeps more than frostbolts. For this encounter, non druid healers can be locked out with a versatile rogue or a combination of interrupts. While this happens, the real pressure can be applied to a dps class.
- This might have been brought up already but if a master dies, the pet will remain.
- The NPCs do not seem to have PVP trinkets.

Hope this helps.

Took our 25-man group 4 attempts to down Faction champs, the first few wipes were from having the warlock up and people not figuring out to move away from hellfire's, so once we stuck our rouge on the warlock, we easily downed it.

Also, if you have Holy Paladins, make sure they beacon your most important/high target risk clothies, it helped a ton.

I went holy for this fight, and we had one other holy paladin. I beacon'd our only warlock who seemingly always had a mob on him, and the other pally beacon'd our disc priest who was spamming bubbles on people, since she also was focused down numerous times.

Mirumoto Taikishi wrote:We tried this on 10-man last night. Our set up:

Resto Druid, Disc Priest, Holy Priest, Blood DK, Frost DW DK, Frost Mage, Fire Mage, Elemental Shaman, Rogue, and me Prot spec. For the record, we currently have no warlocks or warriors in the guild, which is a shame because I really thing Intimidating Shout and Howl of Terror would help a lot on this fight.

Opposing team: Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Ret Pally, Rogue, Warlock, Boomkin

We struggled at first for a number of reasons - people wanting to AoE near CC'd mobs, slow CCs, but mainly the fact that we tried to CC the shaman and burn through the priest first. After about 4 attempts we switched to CCing the priest and blowing through the Shaman first - if only to get rid of Earth Shield and his totems. We also had a problem where people were convinced that, because the mobs were PvP flagged for diminishing returns, they needed resilience gear for the fight. Even after I said, repeatedly, not to bring anything but your Medallion of the Alliance - in case we decide we need it. We also had a lot of complaints about a "pvp encounter in pve" which I pretty much shrugged off.

For my role, I just stood away from everyone else, cleansed when I could, used Hand of Protection/Divine Shield/Divine Sac every time it was off CD, tossed Avenger's Shield when it was off CD, and kept constantly taunting the Ents, Paladin and Rogue.

My guild might feel otherwise, but the fight's really not that hard.

I really like your attitude towards this fight. You have it right: it's certainly not a PvP fight, and it's certainly not hard. If you approach this fight with every tool in your arsenal or, at the very least, the simple belief that you can manage it, you'll be fine.

People sitting around crying for nerfs really piss me off. People actually trying to figure out how to handle the fight... they are the ones that deserve their kills. Grats to you!

Our first couple of attempts back at the start of the week felt rather futile and frustrating, really didn't think we were getting anywhere (I think we got the first mob down to about 80% on our best attempt).

Went off and did Ulduar for much of the rest of the week, came back on the last raid day and one-shot it. Took two groups into the ten-man immediately afterwards and one one-shot it, the other took two.

Thanks for all the tips here, they helped immensely. I'm a bit nervous about how we'll cope when they nerf FoK, but until then, we're back on course for progression.

I have to admit, while I wasn't expecting to (particularly after those first few frustrating pulls), I really felt like I was being useful. Sure I wasn't doing significant DPS, but cleansing (I LAUGH IN THE FACE OF YOUR UNSTABLE AFFLICTION!), taunting, shielding and the little bit of mitigation having everyone BoSed gave me did a pretty good job.

I never used Hand of Freedom, that's one to bear in mind for the future. Ooops. Or, for that matter, Divine Sacrifice. That was dumb.

I did it this weak with no FoK rogue in 10 or 25.

Realy the ONLY thing you have to do to win this fight is taunt-spam kite all the melee NPCs. Once they are out of the group its easy. Avoid the warlock. Burn 1 healer then the other. Pretty darn easy IMO