nailbat.us

That was some good learnin' last night! Let's take some time to figure out what we cantake with us into our next attempts. As the Ony tank, I can't offer much, but I'll offer what I can.

1) Ony tank shouldn't try and do too much - #1 job is to avoid wiping the raid to the electric discharge, which requires frequent repositioning.
2) Shadowflame breath: CD through it! Mirror of Broken Images ++ here.
3) Try to make sure that an add near Onyxia is CCed out of the two spots where she will breathe, and out of any potential melee/tank AoE.

How was add CC? There was some messiness over people standing close to rooted adds, but other than that, the problem cleaned itself up pretty well over the night.

And then... lava swimming tips!

Oh, man, that was ridiculous. There's something like six skeletons, all with real threat tables, so "let's tag all of them and hope" wasn't gonna cut it, especially given the giant heal spikes the tank healers have to put up early on. Turns out you still can't spell Cataclysm without CC.

The skeletons seem to drop Infernal-style in the outer ring of the room, kinda looks like a Shadow Crash. If I saw a crash circle in time I could actually fire a Freezing Trap directly in the circle and trap it as soon as it spawned, but for ones close to/on top of a dragon it seemed better to have one of the other CC-capable DPS bring it away from the group and lock it; too much risk of a freezing trap tripping off of a dragon butt hitbox. Not sure if locking the add at spawn will be an issue long-term (I remember something about skeleton bodies being a factor in phase 3) but that's Future Ted's problem.

The adds themselves collapse after 50 seconds (100 point energy bar, drains 2 every second) assuming they're kept out of either dragon's breath cone. Any long CC will effectively take them off the table for the duration of phase 1.

Phase 2 adds are basically three General Vezaxes with the "Kick me or your friends die" shtick, seems like. Of course, between the magma jacuzzi and Hugh Nefner's random air phase damage it's hard to tell what's actually killing me. ...Well, cept for that last attempt. I know how I died for that one. :p

Healing wasn't terribly bad in the first phase. I think we have that part down for the most part. My main priorities was trying to keep Dom up and I found myself healing Danny a lot cuz he was taking heavy damage from trying to kite things. What was really tough was after jumping onto the platform from the lava and then immediately having to spam heals on people who were still swimming in the lava and the air assault pounding on everyone who was already up on the platform. I didn't realize until after the raid that instead of trying to single target heal during that phase, I should also hit radiance as soon as I've jumped up. Blah. I think if we have 2 more solid nights of doing that fight, we'll be able to beat it.

For the adds I found I was messing up less once I stopped focusing on them, just tried to drop a trap somewhere in the middle so Danny could lead one into it and focused on my role. It seems to be such a focus driven fight you can't really afford to try to do as much as you might in another fight. At least not until we have this guy down on farm.

The jump is... interesting. I had rotten luck making the jump, I kept either getting bounced on the lip, or being too far and not going up. And one time I somehow ended up on the opposite side far away.. that might have been lag.

Repenting an add seems to work well, as long as it's far enough that neither Dom, myself or other melee catch it in a cleave-like effect. They basically just stand around and then die on their own. The lava swimming, well, that's an absolute pain the ass...

Solid progress on execution tonight. We have definite improvement on the first two phases. We need to solidify the following things before we're fully in control of phases 1-2 though:

1) Consistent interrupts and fast magma jumping
These are connected. Get to the top of the pillar! Kick your add.

2) Cooldown coordination on Electrocute

The double-DG was good. For the third Electrocute, if no DG is up, use personal cooldowns! Divine Protection, Barkskin, Cloak of Shadows, do everything you can to avoid that electrocute!

Any other suggestions or observations?

Before the lava rises, position yourself a bit out from the pedestal then spam spacebar. Once the lava is at its full height, jump up, then hit forward when you're in the air. Will avoid the lip and I had really good success getting on top on the first try.

Feint was working well for electrocute.

As for lava swimming, same as what brad described. As soon as lava rises, I also kept hitting that spacebar to jump, so I barely actually swam in that lava visually, though I don't know if that actually helped in game. I was (luckily) never caught in the lip and was able to always make it on first try and kick. One time I was actually afraid I made it up before the tank did.

There's actually no worry about getting up before the tank does - the Phase 2 mobs never actually attack. They stand there, suck up DPS like a sponge, and hit Blast Nova.