[25 Heroic] Twin Valkyr

Well we killed it today. We wasted a lot of our attempts on this fight trying to make a unique strat work that turned out not to have been as good of an idea as we thought it would be, dropping us from the 45 we started Twins with to a more modest 18 remaining. But a kill is a kill I suppose, and I like our new strat a lot better.
Despite that we learned a lot working on this fight that will be very useful in successive weeks, and almost a hundred guilds seem to be stuck on this fight, so I thought i'd make a new thread specifically about the hard mode.

This fight is very interesting, and refreshingly different from anything we've seen before. The closest thing I'd liken it to is the vanilla 4 horsemen because of the intricate polarity choreography you are forced to do. Twins is definately a step up in difficulty from anything that precedes it in the instance. I'd put it at Freya 3-tree level or higher.

Before I get into the fight let me start by calrifying some of the vocabulary we used in our theorycraft about it:

Polarity - the attunement you get to either Dark or Light when you click on the 4 floating portals in the room.
Portals - the things you click on to get your polarity. There are two Dark portals and two Light portals arranged diagonally accross from each other.
Orbs - the black and white balls of Concentrated Darkness/Light that spawn throughout the encounter, not to be confused with Portals.
"Popping" Orbs - Moving into close enough proximity to an Orb that it explodes and splashes it's effect in a 6 yard radius.
Catchers - A player who stands near a group of players that all share the same polarity, and who has the opposite polarity from the group and serves to protect them by popping incoming orbs that are his polarity so that they do not hit and gib the group.

Important Things We Learned

-If you do not have a polarity, you will obviously be taking ticks from both surge of darkness and surge of light. Touch of Darkness/Light will also always prioritize players with no polarity. As a result, if you by design or accident have someone who does not get a polarity at the start of the fight, they will take 13k incoming DPS after resists until they do so or die.

- "Light" damage is ACTUALLY Fire damage. Fire aura, and hence fire Aura Mastery, work on all forms of Light damage. Dark damage is obviously Shadow damage.

- Twins do not actually do magical attacks to tanks, so all incoming damage on tanks except for the normal Surge ticks that everyone takes is physical. When one of the twins has Shield and is casting the heal, the tank on the other twin will take progressively more and more damage because of the stacking Twins Spike, and will need some form of damage reduction cooldown by about halfway into the 15-second heal cast.

-Touch (Touched by the Dark/Touched by the Light) goes out on 4 people at a time, will always take the form of the opposite polarity to what you currently are, will never go on tanks, and is immediately cleared by switching polarities. It ticks for about 4-6k every 2 seconds.

-The abilities the twins use are randomly selected from the four posibilities, and may occur in any order, but will not repeat until all four possibilities have been exhausted. So, for example, if the first ability is Dark Vortex, the second is Shield of Light, the third is Shield of Dark, you know with 100% certainty that the next one will be Light Vortex, but the one following can be anything.

-Enrage is at the approximately the 6:10 marker.

-Portals block line of sight for some reason. Lol?

-You should kill them either shortly before, or shortly after the 5th ability. Abilities come every 45 seconds.

-Attacking the target of the same polarity will deal approximately 30% of the damage you would deal to the target of the opposite polarity. We found that by putting all the melee with full synergies on one target, and all the ranged with full synergies on the other target, we could break all the shields without any problem with just everyone switching onto the correct target, without anyone actually changing polarities.

-Vortex hurts. Some strats involve catchers not switching polarities for vortex, but they will require multiple cooldowns, and even then it will be rough.

-Orbs always move in directly straight lines. They do not chase you or follow you. They spawn and divide the room into a grid, and bounce if they hit a wall. Because the room is circular, this can cause them to have weird trajectories and sometimes intersect in tragic ways if they are not popped early. Popping a orb of the wrong polarity causes 15k damage that splashes onto anyone in a 6 yard radius. Thus, taking two orbs is generally an insta-gib for anybody except a tank, or a catcher stacking stam and fire/shadow resist.

- Every time you change polarities or pop an orb of your polarity you gain a 70% speed buff for a short time.



I'm going to give it a couple days to go into detail on our specific strat, and the other strats we tried, but the above should give you a good head start in the information you need to devise a winning strat of your own that works for your group.

I'm in the process of uploading my fraps footage of our kill right now and I'll post a dl link when it's finished. I always run progression with all kinds of timers and meters running and my stopwatch up, so its a good vid to look at if you're trying to discern information.
Aurelius should have our professional kill video up within a few days.

thanks for this.

After using 17 attempts on beasts this week and then 2 shotting jaraxxus and faction champs respectively we wasted the rest of our tries on twins this week.

We tried various positional methods, various soaking and dps methods but ultimately we just had people dying to orb explosions far too often and the occaisional forgotten coolodwn leading to a tank death.

Many times due to deaths we lacked the dps to finish off shields.

To give some idea of our survivability issues we rarely if ever met the enrage.

We're half considering making some of the lower health players wear some higher hp gear pieces.

Glad to see people are finding success, our main issue is the orb soaking and to be honest from everything i've read so far it seems the only way to handle it is to get good at handling the orbs, there doesn't seem to be a very precise strat for making it much easier.

This is the positioning strat we used.

ignore the teletubbies, its an inside joke.

Hmm, delicious info. although I doubt we'll get to the fight on 25 soon.

You made a mistake though, you should call them balls, not orbs.

For sure the fight is difficult, but I differ with the OP. Twins is easier than Freya 3x (pre nerf) because there isn't much RNG involved in terms of instant-gibs (ie Storm Lasher + Ground Tremor or Fury/Roots + Ground Tremor in quick succession). Many top end guilds spent 100+ attempts on the old version of Freya's hard mode. Those same guilds are spending 20 or less on Twins.

Now Anub'arak on the other hand...

Anub'arak is hard compared to the other bosses.

There are quite a few random events in this encounter, like bad orb spawns or Touch of Light on players that are far away from the opposite portal.

Thanks Joanadark, great info!

questions:

How many healers?

Do the healers soak?

Psykewne wrote:thanks for this.

After using 17 attempts on beasts this week and then 2 shotting jaraxxus and faction champs respectively we wasted the rest of our tries on twins this week.

We tried various positional methods, various soaking and dps methods but ultimately we just had people dying to orb explosions far too often and the occaisional forgotten coolodwn leading to a tank death.

Many times due to deaths we lacked the dps to finish off shields.

To give some idea of our survivability issues we rarely if ever met the enrage.

We're half considering making some of the lower health players wear some higher hp gear pieces.

Glad to see people are finding success, our main issue is the orb soaking and to be honest from everything i've read so far it seems the only way to handle it is to get good at handling the orbs, there doesn't seem to be a very precise strat for making it much easier.

This is pretty much what we were going through last night on Twins, except we called the orbs balls. There were ball catchers and too many balls flying at people and ball explosions and black balls chasing people. We stopped calling them balls.

He took two balls to the face and died.

So we had our first five tries at the end of yesterdays' raid. We tried to use the positioning Joanadark posted earlier:
Melees & both Twins - one corner (near a portal you would need to switch fast)
Range divided in two grps are standing near both appropriate portals
Two Catchers near each of these three Grps + me the one Tanking the Valkyr which is Range DPS Target

We failed hard in these five tries people were immediately dying when orbs began to spawn. Our camps seemed to be too near to the walls. And our Healers were some kind of overstrained healing the aura und some rnd touch of X (which also killed some players especially catchers who were quite far away from a switching portal) and catching all these wrong orbs at their grps.
We only had one tree druid with us but I believe they have a loot easier job doing the catching than any other healing class.

So my questions are:
Do I interprete your positioning picture the right way? And is ours' then similar to yours?
How many catchers do you use for each camp?
How active is your dps in getting the orbs? Seems to me that much more people would benefit if the camps would walk together to near cross-ways of orbs rather than doing the ego trip and getting them alone.

we use 3 catchers total. thats all. I highly reccomend NOT having your healers catch, with the possible exception of one really really skilled holy priest catching for melee.
One thing to note for catchers, when you get Empowered, you gain 20% of your mana, so we normally use one holy priest as a catcher who wears full PvP gear gemmed for stam and uses a lesser resistance flask because due to the number of empowers you get as a catcher he can just chain PoH into the melee camp wheneever he gets a free moment to breathe.
We normally use two arcane mages for the other two catchers, but hunters would work just as well.

tried catching as hunter on normal yesterday, blows chunks for personal dps >.>

This is a fight where personal dps, even raid dps, completely doesnt matter at all.

handleing the big orb spawns is almost the entirety of the fight's difficulty.