Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Need more rage

And no this isn't a reference to our beloved Ratters....read on.
But first my obligatory excuse for not posting :Tis the bee-sy season for us worker bees(see what I did thar) and this has resulted in me posting less and less. To be honest there hasn't been much to report until recently. But recently some good news has accumulated, beginning with my guild has downed Rage Winterchill (hence the title), and to be honest the guy is a breeze as long as you have a pally tank to help with the waves. We also are at a stage where we are one-shotting the whole of ZA and pushing for the third chest (almost there), and lastly we downed Solarian last night and truly she is an idiot check as Karthis pointed out.

So my current progress stands at:
Kara - FULL
Zul'Aman - FULL
Gruul's Lair - FULL
Magtheridon - FULL
SSC - 2/6 (Lurker and Leo)
TK - 1/4 (Solarian)
Hyjal - 1/5 (Rage Winterchill)
BT - 0 (<---Only a matter of time)

So lets look at the bosses I got
Rage Winterchill:
Personally the guy itself is the easiest boss I have seen, its the waves before him that will test the raid more than he will. So assuming you have a pally tank make him stand right in front of the knights looking towards the direction the waves will come from. Make sure no one stands in front of him at all points of time, because they will aggro the mobs in the wave due to proximity before the tanks. Now all the other tanks stack up near him. As a druid tank you perform the hurricane pull with barkskin, let it go for 2-3 ticks and switch to bear form the moment they get close enough to start hitting you, by now you should have aggroed the majority of the mobs and once near you the Paladin's consecrate will catch the rest of them up. At this point in time all you do is swipe, an occasional demo roar if the warrior isn't doing his job, and watch to make sure no mob goes rogue on your caster groups who will be AoE-ing like there is no tomorrow and the tears swelling up seeing their dps meters will make them incapable of reacting in case of a loose mob, and if one mob goes rogue you or another non-pally tank goes and pulls it back to the group for the AoE to continue.

You do this with all pulls except with the abomination pull, where tanks take one or 2 abominations and pull them aside from the group until they have solid, and by that I mean solid aggro on them, at which point all tanks converge again on the pally tank for the AoE to commence. Healers will need to be solid because the tanks will be dealing with not only the melee damage from the abominations but also the poison aura from all the abominations.This is only an option assuming your healers can heal you through it, else it will need to be single target killing which is slower and can be an issue since the waves are timed and if you aren't done with one wave before the next one comes it could result in serious mana issues.

The necromancers don't involve any tanks since they are sheeped for the most part then single targeted by the raid dpsers resulting in an explosion the kind of which leaves behind only a mushroom cloud.

Note: It is important for mana users to drink/eat after each wave

When the boss finally comes after the 8th wave apparently he can be held off by 3 rogues distracting/vanishing him, but it didn't work too well for us, so we let him come. At this point one tank picks him up and then drags him towards Jaina and her buddies who help in killing him. Now he has only 2 things to worry about. The first and foremost is "Death and decay" which causes damage in a certain area, its in the range of 2.7-3.3k per tick, and the only option is to run out of it. The downside is to see this you need to max your graphics, I relied on DBM to warn me and ran towards raid members who weren't moving at all. As soon as it ends, you feral charge him and continue tanking him near Jaina. His second and more annoying ability is to encase you in ice which causes some serious damage (by serious I mean killer), so there are 2 options, to heal through it or to use your PvP trinket. With our abundance of well geared healers we decided to heal through it.

This fight was to be tanked by a tank less geared than both of the guild main tanks (me and my buddy Tier), since this tank had seen this fight on his healer alt (I don't like to give up my position as main tank but I don't like to argue either so went along with it). Half way through tanking Rage, the tank died and I had enough threat despite being in cat form to immediately pick him up and make Rage eat some dirt.

The rest as we know is now history.

Solarion I shall discuss on another day.

Edit: Can't seem to be able to upload pics to Blogger so they will come in later.

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