Killing City Bosses

The talk in Modus's Magni Bronzebeard thread got me thinking. Many of the challenges are somewhat generic to all instance bosses (avoiding/beating defending players), and some are specific to that particular boss. Let's take this as an opportunity to talk tanking shop (and/or pvp shop?) about killing world bosses, no matter the faction.

My bias:
I've almost always played Alliance; I have a lowbie horde alt on Firetree that I haven't played in ~2-3 years (or more?), and thus my memory of Horde cities is weak. I've never seen an assault on a city boss, so I could be talking out of my ass for most of this.

General Concerns:
In order to kill a city boss, we must:
- have enough of a raid for both damage and healer longevity
- mitigate/avoid special attacks
- be able to either avoid or fend off the onslaught of enemy players. (This is, I believe, the harder part.)
- fight in-town, to avoid leashing

World Bosses
Starred bosses are the ones you can get achievements for.

Alliance
* King Varian Wrynn (Stormwind)
* Tyrande Whisperwind (Darnassus)
* Magni Bronzebeard (Ironforge)
* Velen (Exodar)
and
High Tinker Mekkatorque (Ironforge)
Arch Druid Fandral Staghelm (Darnassus)
Jaina Proudmoore (Theramore)

Of these, the best ones IMO are in Darnassus. Fandral is a dick, and I bet nearly the entire town would cheer you on for ventilating his spleen. Moreover, his tower has only one entrance, so you can guard it more easily from PvP, I expect. Tyrande is in a temple, and you can I belive fight her on the second floor. Similarly, the Exodar has several raised platforms that could probably be well defended... though I bet there are lots of guards nearby.

Horde
* Thrall (Ogrimmar)
* Sylvanas (Undercity)
* Cairne (Thunder Bluff)
* Lor'themar Theron
and
... others? I don't know who they'd be, aside from Varimathras.

Sylvanas looks like a relatively tactically sound fight -- single entrance, etc, and around the outer ring of Undercity, which is less populated (and has a back entrance).

Cairne looks rough; he's very centrally located. Perhaps moving the fight underground where the forsaken hideout is would be a good idea -- I seem to recall that being off the beaten path.

Theron is, apparently, best fought in the "inner sanctum". I can't comment on defensibility vs players, though.

Thrall is, of course, the Big Man. You might be able to fight him in his throne room, but you might have better luck moving the fight elsewhere to the Valley of Honor, for example. This way, your pvp-defenders can be far enough from your kill team that you're unlikely to get seeds/aoes/etc inside the fight.

.... I'm lazying out, now. I'll try to update this if people post Good Stuff about tactical positioning or Things to Watch Out For on the various fights.

(reserved for boss-specific stuffs)

(reserved for moar boss-specific stuffs)

its probably easier for the horde to kill the world bosses since on my server darn and exodr are almost always unpopulated where as org, TB and undercity are evenly populated and silvermoon only take a minute to get to from UC
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"Pally tanks don't die, They just stop to Regen"


http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Dreadmaul&n=Umio

taking the Thunder Bluff fight to the cave would be a VERY bad idea. That is where we port in from shat.......

For Sylvanas, you just want to separate her from Varimatharas. I have been in the UC for several Alliance raids on her, and I have never see the Allies drop her when she is near V.

For Thrall, you just want to make sure that you clear up to him. There is a troll in there as well, and trying to deal with both could be a problem. AND, you want to come in from Ashenvale/Azshara. Saurfang and the skads of Hordies in the valley of lag will make it so you really go nowhere.

For Silvermoon City, just don't try to take him and the Blood Knight chic at the same time. They tried to take them all on in SMC last night, and I don't know what the blood knight was doing, but she was wiping people FAST.
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My Paladin
TBC: {11/11 kz}{2/2 gl} {1/1 mag} {6/6 za} {6/6 ssc} {4/4 TK} {4/5 MH} {9/9 BT} I HATE YOU ARCHIMONDE

We had a pretty large group of 40+ well geared players mostly BT/Sunwell and tried to take out Lor'themar.

Of course we all gathered at ZA and rode up from there, we grouped up outside the front gate and then the server crashed. :-/

We finally all got back online and rode to the throne room.

- We setup a caster group to deal with incoming Horde.
- We had a "high hit rating" melee group on the bosses.
- We had Casters DoTing Bosses and DPSing when they could spare time from killing horde.
- We put one tank on each of the three bosses killing them in order easiest to harderest and AoE tanked the guards.
- We did some research on the fight before hand so we'd know the abilities.

Issues:
The main trouble we had was with hit rating and actually hitting the boss.
Our DPS wasn't doing much damage when they did hit aside from specials. The bosses did hit hard at times because they can crush, if a tank did die some DPS would also end up gettign killed because our other tanks often had taunt resists.

I think we ended up getting him down to sub 10% marks and maybe even sub 5% but it took so long that enough horde eventually showed up and overran us. Pretty sure there were around 40 horde there by the time we wiped.
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I know last night on Terenas, we stopped the group right before the bosses because we were falling through the portal faster than they could deal with us. It was great.
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My Paladin
TBC: {11/11 kz}{2/2 gl} {1/1 mag} {6/6 za} {6/6 ssc} {4/4 TK} {4/5 MH} {9/9 BT} I HATE YOU ARCHIMONDE

We took a raid of about 25 to belf city a couple nights ago, killed everything we saw and started to kill the elites. Everything was going well until someone noticed that we were killing the wrong skull mobs and the boss was still alive >.>

All in all it was pretty easy to ride through town, zerg down guards, etc..

Problem we found was the boss resisted almost anything we did and hit like a truck >.> No me gusta!
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My guild (Horde) got 40 people in to IF to have a shot at the king (3 hid in a room and summoned in the other 37). We had done this prepatch and got to fight for a few minutes before the king's chamber was swarming with allies. This time we lasted all of 10 seconds in the kings chamber. He was hitting the tank for over 14k on a non critical hit..... not to mention the multitude of guards that seem to just keep coming from inside the walls. Maybe doable at level 80, unpossible at level 70 IMO.

All instance servers were down yesterday. So we took what was left of the hyjal raid (15? 18?) and asked arround for more people.

We got a full 40 person raid, rode from ZA up to the Blood Elf City.

We came to the boss fast (had to dismount 3 times to kill guards) and killed the Skull next to him.

I did tank the boss. 6,5k Crushing, 4k normal, 3k Arcane whatever. Not that hard I say. 2-3 Healers can do it.

Problem was the very low DPS on the boss. By the time we had all NPC Gaurds down, we had 20+ Horde there (another raid had attacked Undercity just a few minutes early..) and then we started to die.

We waited for the other raid to attack UC again so horde would move there to rezz and try again. But again, to many NPC Guards and to much time.

It IS very much possible to tank this with a 25 person T6 Raid. 6-7 good Healers and DD with very high Hit. Problem is 5 Mio HP against that Level (I don't know if he counts as 73, 80 or 83, but feels a lot more resistant then 73, think 80?).

With 80 we can do it. I'm sure. Or with 70 IF the instance servers are UP. Cause with so many bored players there was to much resistance.

City Leaders are currently level 83.

I've been involved with the killing of all 4 horde bosses now. I was tanking. Someone mentioned +hit being a problem and it really is the biggest problem. DPS cannot pull agro because taunts will miss.

We killed all four bosses by cheating. We teamed up with another guild on the server and created two 40 man raids. We actually took two night to kill everything. And we traded which guild gets the tag. So while we've killed every boss now neither guild has completed all the achievements. I believe we each have one left (we went back and killed thrall a second time).

The only advice I would give, is to:
1. Make sure you have numerous tanks (especially for Cairne)
2. Make sure that there are people assigned to handle Horde players. For us, we had a generic rule that melee stays on bosses and casters kill horde. It was a simple rule.
3. The most important element is always surprise. And therefore the hardest thing to do was to take two 40 man raids and strike quickly. We had one raider leader in both Vents to help communicate between the two raids.
4. It helps to know which guild is getting the tag because it means the guild who doesn't have the tag can safely release and run back without fear of losing the achievement. However, we did have to delay a couple kills when some people were dead who belonged to the tagged guild. We almost lost the UC boss because of this. We had to hold her at 3% for a long time.
5. Be careful with the UC boss, she evaded on us and reset. The fight ended up taking over 20 minutes including the evade.
6. Thrall seemed the easiest actually. Just make sure everyone stays inside and doesnt agro unnecessary guards.
7. Cairne and the lady in UC were definetely the hardest. We felt that the lady in UC was the hardest. Fight cairne in the tent and get out of LoS of all the horde. For the UC boss we had the entire raid up on top of the platform after getting that first evade. Someone was probably standing on a box or something. Regardless, it helped a lot that the raid was all up on the platform.
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We took about 20 mostly Sunwell geared people to Darnassus, and tried the priestess.

Easy to tank, though my TPS was missing a zero (literally) due to missrate. SoV 5-stack kept falling off

After about 7-8 minutes, we had her at half. Then the Alliance Sunwell guild turned up and killed us.

Will be easy enough at 80, as defenders will have under 5 minutes to "defend". Zerg in, Bloodlust, kill boss before the defenders turn up.
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This isn't the "Offtankadin" forum.
Knaughty
Naxx-25 15/15 pre-buff

Nihilum did it. World 2nd.

http://nihilum.mousesports.com/en/news/1267,for_the_horde__archivement_completed/1/#comments