I wish that Sif were less annoying, that’s for sure!

Anyway here are my preliminary notes for a strat, once we kill thorim I will add in all the usual stuff I do about what were the little things that we had to overcome to win.

Shopping list
2 tanks (one feral? see notes in phase 2 for details)
1 offtank DPSing type for the gauntlet adds
6-7 healers each with 1 piece of Frost resist gear
2 SPriests in full Frost resist
your best DPS each with 1 piece of frost resist gear

Gauntlet Team You need 2 healers, 1 tank, 1 offtank/DPS type and a bunch of ranged.
Now how many ranged you will need depends on your raid makeup. If you have some serious hard hitters, you probably don’t need as many. You do need enough to really smash your way through as fast as pixelly possible. Tanks need to be chain pulling the adds, and engaging the mini bosses as soon as they can. The second mini boss should be engaged at the top of the stairs – we send the tank and one healer up there straight away while the OT and the ranged burn down the adds at the bottom of the stairs, and make their way up (dragging the adds with them). Smash the second miniboss and get to Thorim asap. If you are a bit slow, add more DPS into the gauntlet team until your balance is right. This will be different for each guild and possibly for each team!

Arena Team
1 aoe tank, the rest of the DPS (including the 2 shadow priests), the rest of the healers (about 4 or 5 of them). Same tactis as per normal, just theres less of you, so stay alive!

‘Sif lose your illusion!
Ok, you engaged hardmode. Grats on the free achievement! Now the real work starts.

First up and most importantly is positioning to deal with all the extra frost bollocks Sif does.
Here is a picture from WowRaid

On the floor is a circle outside of which is the “blizzard zone” There is no reason for anyone to be caught here. Ranged should be in groups of no more than 3 to avoid death by chain lightning. Other than that, dodge the lightning by moving where the arrows say. Healers and SPriests MCing stay in their safe zones. DPS Thorim like a mofo!

MCing SPriests? Pfft Who needs bloodlust anyway?
Yep your 2 priests by this stage should be in control of a Warbringer each from the arena – which provides us with a constant heroism! YAY! Trust me, you will need them to get this done in time! The DPS of the Warbringers should be about equivalent to the SPriests output so no loss there.

Tanky McFurpants
Unbalancing strikes in this mode are much more unbalancing. You CAN get your furry friend to pop on PvP gear, and hit 625 resiliance. The math says this will mean your Fur tank will stay uncrittable (as there are no crushing blows) even through unbalancing strikes. This might work for you. Otherwise, get your 2 tanks taunting off each other every unbalancing strike and make sure your healers are on the ball for the cutover.

Once you get to about 8ish lightning charges, tank needs to start cycling cooldowns, get to 10 and you want the healers jumping in and helping out, by 12 make sure you have a rotation on keeping a CD up on that tank at all times, by 15 you will get oneshot.

Once you get thorim to 50% ish, get a soulstone on him in case of emergencies, and make sure you are ready to rebuff should something untoward happen.

Other general hardmode tips
Allocate your groups before you engage. Get everyone practising in the main room while one mob is sheeped or MCed. Make sure people are familiar with where they have been allocated that night.

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Random Hodir is Random. And hodir is certainly not as easy as all the strat sites make out it is.

The two main issues are tank threat and DPS. Maximising your use of all the buffs, and making sure your tank can hold threat once you do get that right.

So here is the collection of information I have found trawling the intertubes. For some reason, there seems to not be a place where it is all collated – so I hope this comes up high in the search engines.

Shopping list:
1 tank (no Frost resist gear required)
3-4 healers
20ish of your awesomest DPS (which is probably your entire group!)
some kind of frost resist buff/aura/totem

Boss position: There are 2 schools of thought to this, hold hodir near the rare cache (so the adds gravitate to the middle, making them easier to bust out) or Tank hodir in the middle (and move him around a bit to keep melee with starlights as much as possible). We found that we are getting better DPS keeping hodir in the middle, but your mileage may vary. Both positions are valid.

Movement: This is a high movement fight. The reason for this is you cant get your stacking debuff go more than 2 stacks (or the healers cant keep up), you need to get into starlights and also be near toasty fires and get out of the way of falling snow. Tanks need to try and keep hodir as stable as possible, especially if tanking in the middle as it is VERY possible to move hodir accidentally into melee range and suddenly the mage sitting safely on 120% threat is oneshot (as melee range is 110% threat and you pull, as opposed to 130% for ranged)

Releasing Adds: Everyone releases adds as we engage Hodir. We mark up the mages and the shamans and release them first. The second time, we allocate a team of ranged and melee to get the adds out. Generally, these are the most bursty classes generally hunters and paladins. The last time, we only get out the mages and shamans to get back onto hodir asap.

Toasty fires and the Singed debuff: this stacks 25 times and then only requires 1 hit every 25s I think to keep it up. Explosive shot has 4 chances to replenish the stack for each shot, so probably should be included as much as possible in a rotation. Keeping this up is vital to killing hodir in 3 mins. For those people for whom movement is an issue (channelers or those with longish cast times as part of their main rotations) you need to get yourselves to a toasty fire as soon as you can.

Starlight: For those that value haste, this is probably a priority for you to get into.

Storm: There are reasons this should be in the ranged – the main one is that all the other buffs stack stupidly well together. Ranged are more free to move around than melee are and are able to get all 3 buffs at once (and should be actively seeking to do so). Singed also will benefit more from storm. The long and the short of it is, allocate your biggest ranged DPS (in this case, generally mages and warlocks) into a group of about 5 or 6 and mark them up. Everyone should be taking the storm buff to that group as soon as possible. Yes, it is possible for mages to crack 20k dps if all the planets align. I nearly fell over when I saw it with my own eyes!

Tank threat: This is a big problem due to the nature of the DPS requirement (to deliver 32.5 million damage in 180s by 20 people each person needs to AVERAGE just a smidge over 9k dps). Obviously, you need to have threat gear on. Pally’s can benefit from the 25 stack, warriors have vigilance, DKs have their AM shield to help with frozen blows, and I have not yet read an account of a bear MTing hard mode. We use a Pally Tank and that seems to work the best.

But even then, threat is often an issue. 1 solution is getting the storm buff to the tank… but this gimps raid DPS. The best, but most delicate, solution is get a ranged to pull threat, taunt off them then get the ranged to aggro dump (ie hunters FD, mages invis, hand of salv, sould shatter etc etc). Doing this once or twice will make sure that firstly the ranged are not actually holding back (very important) and secondly the tank will build threat faster than they normally could. We use this to great effect.

When any of the ranged DPS in the marked group starts to get close, they call out that they are going to go for a threat pull. Our Pally tank then watches and waits for Hodir to change aggro and immediately taunts back, and gets the benefit of the extra aggro. This will take a bit of practise and some clear calls over your VoIP of choice. But it is the single most effective way of dealing with the threat issue we have found.

Cooldowns and heroism: This is best not blown at the start. You want the best possible moment to do all of this and it requires a few things to set up. You need the tank to be ready with good threat, and his taunt OFF CD (just in case). You want that singed stack to be at 25. You want frozen blows to be done, and you want a good number of fires, starlights and the storm buff to be in a good place. You want the full 40s of heroism to be used. This is best achieved AFTER the first flash freeze. Call heroism and save your CDs for this.

Flash freeze: Never get caught in it. Duh.

Frozen blows: There should really only be 2 frozen blows during this fight. A ret pally can use DS in conjunction with bubble if you have a low performing pally (ie a holy pally in offspec is a good example, like ME!). The other one should be covered off by a healer. Divine hymn should account for it exactly like in XT hard mode.

Healer makeup: you can pretty much take whatever you want, but Pallies should be last on your list due to their very static nature and lack of AoE heals. You want your best AoE healers and one kinda sorta MT healer. 4 at the most.

DPS makeup: Ranged heavy is preferred.

I think that is all the relevant information. Making it all happen smoothly is not as easy as people seem to be making out on the strategy sites! ARGH! I hate that!!

Making sense of the information
The way we managed to get this done was as follows:

Prot pally Tank (taunting when necessary)
Tank Hodir in the middle
6 top hitting ranged to stack up and stay on boss and be marked for all storm buffs
All other ranged spread out
1 group (hunters/ret pallies – but a team of 6 burtsy players not in the big hitter group) allocated to add extraction
Explosive shot to maintain singed.
Found that an ele shammy helped a stupid amount with DPS even if undergeared or an alt/offspec.

There will be a lot of sacrificing goats to the RNG gods, and for a long time you will find that your goats are not very pleasing. Don’t lose heart! If you are close to the line one attempt might be 10% and the next might be a 40% simply based on where your fires, and beams and storms end up! Just keep practising getting that storm buff to the ranged group and getting adds out as fast as possible. Eventually, you will all get it right and hodir will die.

This is a very difficult strat to explain – if you have any ideas or require clarification please comment!

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Also known as I choose you, Steelbreaker (25) or Iron Council. I present the Achievement Awarding Strat!

Shopping list
2 tanks
1 OT/DPS
6 healers (at least 1 druid – they are ridiculous good in this fight)
all the DPS you can poke a stick at.

Tanking
Setting up the pull is important, and how you tank steelbreaker is also important. I will come to that in a moment.
When you pull the 3 bosses you need to separate them in a very specific way to deal with their abilities.

Tanking Middle Size Guy
First up is middle size guy. Move him on top of steelbreaker to take advantage of probability of the blue runes. No magic there, just burn him down. Move mobs out of the blue stuff, move yourselves into the blue stuff and go hard – blow your 2 min CDs.

Tanking Lil’ Guy
Move this guy off to the right (or left – just decide before hand). This guy is tanked by the OT/DPS tank as he is the easiest to tank, and gets the OT into DPSing for Steelbreaker. This guy needs interrupts. We have often have a DPS warrior with sword and board tanking him to help out with this. Or get a lock to pop his felhunter on this guy to help. Pets do seem to be bugged at the moment, so if you are the lock with the pet, make sure you have set your pet correctly before engaging in the fight. This is more important than DPSing.

P1
Now, the position of this guy relative to steelbreaker is important. You need to move him as close to the steelbreaker tank as possible, without the steelbreaker tank getting copped by the AoE. You need to make sure your Steelbreaker tank knows where you are so they can position correctly toward the end of phase 1.

P2
All the Melee attack from as close to steelbreaker as they can to try to minimise the chances they get the debuff, more on that later. Burn this boss and run to steelbreaker when melee have to run out. Also, all ranged and healers should be stacking on steelbreaker, and healers should start autoattacking steelbreaker to help with mana issues later on. The debuff soakers need to move out to range of steelbreaker, but still in range of middle guy. Toward the end of P2, they will need to move into their P3 soaker positions (which may be out of range of middle guy)

Tanking Steelbreaker
He gets tanked in the middle. We use a pally because they can self dispel. If you don’t have that luxury, make sure you have someone allocated to dispelling fusion punch as soon as it is applied every time.

P1
Tank on top of middle sized guy, move steelbreaker out of blue runes and stay on top of the middle sized guy. This is really important to do as it drastically reduces the time required to kill middle sized guy, and there is more mana all around for healers and DPSers for Phase 3. At the end of P1, start to move steelbreaker into position 20 yards from lil’ guy, ready for debuff soakers to do their thing.

P2
Tank him, don’t die.

P3
Ok, this is the fun part. You should have a full raid alive at this point or you wont make the soft enrage (ie 3 tank deaths which is 2 mins)

Tank pong is where this is headed. Steelbreaker pops on a debuff on the current target which after 30s makes you EXPLODE and kill everyone in range. So, watch that debuff, and at 10s call out, your other tank should be ready to taunt at about 5s. Get a soulstone put on you, or have a druid at the ready, because once you explode you need to get back alive as soon as possible so you can be rebuffed ready to tank in 20s. And believe me, that is not a lot of time to prepare! Get up ASAP!

The second tank blows a short CD to help the healers when he taunts and tanks now for 25s then explodes. Tank one takes over. Tank 2 is SSed or brezzed and rebuffed.

Tank 1 is now going to be hit REALLY hard. Start blowing all your CDs to stay alive for that 25s starting from your taunt – that first hit is a doozy, and healers will be frantic. Stay alive (until you have to die).

Tank 2 has the same deal but has to deal with EVEN MORE damage. So your best mitigating tank needs to be tank 2. Blow everything you have to stay alive, healers will be pretty oom by now so help as much as you can and DPS really need to burn like your house is on fire.

Ensure you have a dispeller allocated to dispel fusion punch properly. We use a pally tank to tank steelbreaker all the way through because they can dispel themselves, however after they DIE you need to make sure someone is ready to step up and take over for the second tank (and again when the pally tank is dead the second time)
–
That’s the tanking positioning.

Healers simply plonk themselves slap bang in the middle of the room and heal their brains out.
Ranged DPS follow the runes in P1, and go join the healers in P2/3.
Melee DPS follow the runes in P1, jump on middle guy from as close to steelbreaker as they possibly can in P2 and in the middle in P3.

Here is more interesting-ness you need to deal with.

DPS requirements
Maths says everyone needs to be pulling an average of 7k dps each for P3 (not overall, just P3) to kill steelbreaker within 2 mins. Realistically, you need people pulling more to cover the people pulling less (ie healer offspecs and the buff tankers, see below). However, this is very achievable with a heroism, blowing all CDs and haste pots. We recommend you wait to use your heroism until all DPS have had time to put up all their debuffs on the boss.

Here’s a handy tip: Have the DPS that do debuffs switch early onto steelbreaker (about 5% left on little guy) so that everything is set up and ready as soon as little guy dies and you can blow all your cooldowns and heroism straight away.

In phase 3, you will need to have a rogue with Wound Poison or a hunter with Aimed Shot up on the boss at all times. This reduces the amount he heals every time a tank dies! Which is really important and can make the difference between a wipe and a kill!

Debuff tanking
From P2 onwards, Steelbreaker drops an electrical debuff on a random ranged (and by ranged I mean ranged to STEELBREAKER) player that hurts a lot. It lasts 20s and he casts it every 20ish seconds and YES IT STACKS! 2 stacks on one player can mean WIPETASTICNESS (17k ticks with the second tank death and 2 stacks) if you are not aware or if your healers are close to oom (which they guaranteed will be)

Since hunters HAVE to be at range to hit stuff, they usually get the job of tanking the debuff. Yay? Not so much. Make sure all hunters have nature resist going on, either aura, or flasks or totem. The totem is preferred as it impacts DPS the least.

SPriests, it seems, can mitigate the debuff by up to 25%. First of all they have shadowform but they can also spec into Spell Warding which reduces another 10%. Spell warding is a tier 2 holy spell, so SPriests would have to specifically spec into it for this fight. Now, that might not be doable for some guilds, but I am fairly certain that most people are dual specced these days, and if you knew up front you were doing this fight, you could sort out a second shadow spec to cover it off. SO! 25% reduction, plus a nature resist aura/totem is certainly wonderful for this. However, spell warding spec can drastically reduce an SPriest’s DPS. Be mindful of this should you chose to use it.

Now, you have 3 or 4 team members that can tank the debuff. Get them to spread out (so they dont damage each other, 15 yards apart. DBM’s /range function is invaluable here). They simply stand out there and DPS from afar. Having 3 or 4 people is playing the numbers game. It is fairly unlikely they will cop 2 debuffs, but if they do, they need to cry out and the healers need to cover that of VERY quickly. It is healable through if you have resto druids and disc priests. If your soaker has 2 debuffs, load them up with hots and bubble the begeebers out of them. But, as always, prevention is better than a cure. Make sure your soaker team is in place at the end of P2 and starting their rotation at that point.

Healing
This is the hardest part of the fight, getting the healing right.

With 6 healers there is not a lot of wiggle room, and certainly no room for error. You need to have 3 MHs and probably 3 raid healers. But again, your mileage may vary. You may have to reduce your healing team to 5 if you are struggling with DPS. But, there is no point practising this boss if you cant keep everyone alive.

P1
One MH per tank, and steelbreaker tank gets 2. Be in position EARLY so you can plant and start healing just before the bosses get to the tanks – the most dangerous part of the fight is right at the beginning. Be careful.

P2
The next most dangerous part of the fight is changeovers as bosses die – watch the boss health, and when you get to about 5% be ready to change your target, move and prep early rather than later. Each boss death ups their damage output, so be aware of that and be ready.

Healer on the first tank moves off onto steelbreaker, and 2 healers on the raid, including one to start looking after the debuffs. Pally bacon really shines at this point for MT healing. Use it liberally.

P3
Again, prep early, watch the boss health in P2 and be ready for the changeover to P3. Each taunt is dangerous, load up the new tank with hots and be ready with a big heal – dont forget, the tanks now have significantly less buffs on them due to being dead and at the SAME TIME Steelbreaker will be hitting harder. Be Prepared, boyscouts!

All heals on the MT, and 2 healers on the raid, one healer only on the debuffs. Here, again, your mileage may vary depending on your healers ability, but that should approximately get you through.

Mana is a big issue, you will be riding oom by probably half way through steelbreaker, so save your mana pots and tricks for P3, try and conserve mana throughout P1 and 2. If you have mana regeneration CDs, use them early if they are on a 2-3min CD so you get 2 uses of them in the fight. Also, autohit the boss – you will be in melee range, not only will you heal yourself from JoL and LotP, but you will likely get mana back from a JoW. This is important.

Allocate “oh shits” to the tanks. Guardian Spirit, Pain Suppression, Hand Of Sanctuary. Get the Tanks to use CDs and call for these as they need them. For example, the way we set them up is as follows:
Tank 1; Personal CDs -> tank 2 taunt
Tank 2; Personal CDs->Tank 1 rezzed->Oh shit 1 on tank 1->Tank 1 taunt
Tank 1; Personal CDs, calls for oh shit 2 -> Tank 2 rezzed -> Oh shit 3 on Tank 2 (Steelbreaker dead yet?)-> Taunt
Tank 2; Personal CDs, calls for oh shit 4 Steelbreaker dead.
–

How do you know if you are going to get steelbreaker down in time?
A good rule of thumb for this fight is being able to get steelbreaker in the low 40 percents before the first tank change. If you are not getting him AT LEAST below 50% chances are your DPS will be slow – because your hero will have run out by this point.

Think of it like this:
Steelbreaker has effectively 120% health.
Tank 1 – remove 55% (boss on 45%) with hero
Tank 2 (boss up to 55%) – remove 35% (boss 20%)
Tank 1a (boss up to 30%) – remove 30% (boss dead)

That is what you are aiming for. With ToC gear coming out, this will be much more accessible to everyone. The loot drops are still fantastic and the sense of satisfaction from killing the boss is second to none!

Good Luck!

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I had the best fun raiding last night in some time. Last night even beat Monday’s Yogg kill. What was last night? It was FLAME LEVIATHAN with 4 TOWERS! It was fun, it was controlled chaos (in many cases just chaos) it was wipetastic.

A few useful things to know:
If your armour is at 0% durability, the vehicles dont care, you still get the bonus as if you were 100% durability. So save money and don’t repair.

Pyrite is a rare commodity. Use it at all opportunities!

Anyway onto the strat. We set up ourselves and ran very similar to the tankspot strat and I recommend you have a look at that to familiarise yourself with this. I also recommend doing 2 or 3 towers first to practise your throwing of people onto FL and getting shutouts, as this is vital to the success of the fight.

Shopping list as per tankspot:
4 Choppers
4 Siege Engines
3 Demolishers with 2 Shut down teams ready to roll
2 Demolishers on pure DPS (have best geared players as drivers)

OK, I will write up the tips in sections, some might overlap, but I hope that it will give you 2 or 3 perspectives on the fight.

First and foremost – DON’T PANIC! There is Stuff going everywhere, beams, and fires, and smoke and rockets, and adds and not to mention FL himself as well as the pyrite! It really looks insane out there, but if you stick to your job, and don’t be a hero, everyone will be fine.

Second and almost as foremost - stay alive. If you stay alive (even if your stacks drop off the boss or you get stuck behind some fire) you can keep fighting. You just cant do your job dead. This fight shows you the meaning of that more than others.

Third and pretty darn important – do your job. Don’t be a hero and try to DPS the boss if you are a siege passenger. Your job is not to do that, and you will find that you will fail if even one person doesn’t stick to the plan.

Vehicle jobs:
Siege engines drivers – your job is to interrupt Flame Vents, light tar and smash adds. You also need to not stand in any beams or fires. This is actually harder than it sounds. Tips on that in the adds section. The drivers should have decent gear.

Siege Engine Passengers – you guys are not there to DPS the boss. Your job is to get down pyrite, light tar, and kill adds oh and rescue anyone who got ice blocked. Believe me, these jobs are really important, as the demolisher teams will desperately need you to be keeping the adds off them and refueling their pyrite.

Choppers – you want your choppers to have over 800k each or they will die to unavoidable aoe by the end of the fight. These guys drop tar and ferry the shut down team back to their demolisher after they get spat out. Mark up the choppers and allocate them a demolisher (and hence 2 members of teams) to ferry. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Demolisher drivers (DPS) – mashing 2 is your job. You need to keep that pyrite debuff up at 10 as much as you can. You need to do this while not standing in beams and fires, and while being close enough to FL to hit him, and yet close enough to pyrite to restock. The debuff needs to be refreshed with a pyrite hit every 10s to keep the stack up. That gives you a bit of time to move around if you need. Talk to your passenger for speed hits.

Demolisher passengers (DPS) – shoot down pyrite, collect pyrite (write a pyrite targeting macro, it helps something like /tar pyrite) and keep your demolisher stocked. You are supplying the main source of DPS for FL. It is vital you talk to your driver and guide them as the driver cant see where the pyrite is always. We found grabbing pyrite at about 60% kept the stocks put at 100% most of the time with no losses (as by the time you grab the pyrite, chain it in, and tip it into the tank, the driver has used about 10-20%)

Demolisher driver (shutdown) – you have the shutdown team on board, so your DPS will be lower. Try as best you can to keep up 10 stacks on FL, but it is likely it will often drop off or you might run out of pyrite. Be aware of where your chopper is, and during a shutdown ensure you collect your passenger safely as a priority. You are also in charge of flinging them up. Aim your shooter OVER the head of FL, and as long as you get within cooee FL will actually chain them in. You also need to behave like a DPS driver. So read up on that.

Demolisher Passenger (shutdown) – there are 2 teams of you. When you hop in the passenger seat, the second guy cant get in. But you can hold 3 people when one passenger loads themselves up in the cannon, so it is a 2 stage process. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND. You will get launched as soon as FL is out of shutdown. Get up on top and do your job. When you are flung off, get onto your chopper asap. The chopper will get you to your demolisher where the other passenger should now be loaded into the cannon ready for the next shut down. You can jump stright from the chopper to the demolisher (no you do NOT have to dismount first!) and sit in the passenger seat. Wait for the driver to fling the second team up and now your job is that of the DPS demolisher passenger – PYRITE PYRITE PYRITE! When the next shut down occurs, keep your demolisher stacked, keep an eye on your chopper, and when they are getting near, load yourself up so the other team can climb on board. Rinse, repeat.

Shutdowns
Read the FL 2 towers for how shutdowns work and why they are so important. This time, instead of 1 team, there are 2 rotating teams as explained in Demo passenger (shutdown). The first shutdown, throw up 4 people so that first shutdown is as past as possible, we also use heroism. Our teams were as follows:
Shutdown 1 – Ele shammy (OH+Hero), Lock, lock, ret pally. The ret pally had a special task to smash a tower and bubble when they hit the ground and run themselves back to their demolisher (I was the demo driver in this case). We called where I was going to be, and I moved to pick my passenger up. No chopper ferry required. But a non repeatable occurrence.
Shutdown 2 – Mage Mage Boomkin (OH)
Shutdown 3 – Ele Shammy (OH) Lock Lock etc

All shutout team members were marked up, as were the demos. Choppers were watching carefully where their demos were and where their passengers were. Demos were doing the same if possible.

I cannot express how important getting the shutouts right is. You will need 3 or 4 shutouts to kill FL, but as you get better that number will reduce (2 is the lowest I have heard of)

The Towers
Mimiron – big diagonal lines of fire. This is a pain because the fire is generally where the pyrite drops. Simply avoid the fire and you will be fine.

Hodir – beams that iceblock you. Possibly the most annoying tower defense. These whiteish beams randomly wander around the field, at some point they will slow right down and follow you in a straight line for about 5s, they then stop and drop ice from the sky (hodir is nothing but original) flash freezing anyone within about 10 or 15 yards of it (yes, you can be frozen and NOT be in the beam – its aoe). Simply ignore the beams until you see them lock on then move directly forward or backward until you see them stop and they start moving randomly again. You are now safe. DO NOT TURN, just straight forward or back is sufficient to get out of the aoe burst.

Thorim – his hammer is a pain, a whole heap of AoE damage that is virtually unavoidable and docks about 1/3 your health. Siege engines save your shields for this. Demos and choppers… sorry, it means you have to be more careful about casual damage from screw ups! At all times try to stay out of the blue beams crackling with electricity, they hurt.

Freya – lasher adds, big and small. You can kite the adds into tar, or hope that someone is paying attention and kill them. One pyrite throw clears out a LOT of adds, and is occasionally worth it. Otherwise, siege passengers and demo passengers need to keep on top of them.

The pull
Before the pull we spend a goodly amount of time cluttering the field with pyrite so the demos can park themselves early on and let loose while there are fewer towers running. Demos launching people get in range and get ready to launch. The one demo NOT launching someone starts the pull, and BAM its on for young and old.

The fight
Stay alive, if that means dropping your stack of 10 then do so. Avoid AoE as much as you can. This fight is about staying alive, and doing your job. Don’t be a hero, please! If everyone executes their jobs perfectly this becomes an amazingly smooth ride. Enjoy it, FL is, in my opinion, the best fight in the entire instance.

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So, My guild defeated Yogg last night, not in part due to practising on 10 man.

Yogg was recently nerfed (you can look up the changes on the blizzard website) and I dont actually think it will make much of a difference to anyone still working on downing him with 4 watchers. It WILL make a huge difference to the hard modes (not losing as much sanity being the major one). No MCs in Phase 1 doesn’t really make a huge difference to the phase, it just removes the RNG from it and causing needless wipes. So, I actually agree with that one. Nerfing the spawn rate I think was unnecessary.

Shopping list:
3 tanks
5 healers
8-9 melee
9-8 ranged

Tips for the fight with 4 watchers. At all times your raid should maintain their own sainty. The green beams give you back 20% per tick.

Phase 1
This was fairly straight forward. We stand near the door to avoid the gas clouds. Tanks ferry the adds to sara. We DPS the adds to about 30% before switching to the next one. We also have about 3 ranged DPS who are capable of dodging clouds nearer the centre to finish off adds that need a hand. We do not spawn an extra add, we dont need to to just kill yogg. Once Sara is dead, split the additional mobs up and smash them down. Healers watch and heal up the explosions.

Key things:
Make sure every add hits Sara. Do not spawn any extra adds. Keep this phase under control and clean up all adds before phase 2.

Phase 2
You must have cleared out all the phase 1 adds before the tentacles appear! Very important.

Melee team
There are 10 portals, East, North and West. Allocate 9 melee and one healer to enter these portals. Allocate groups of 3 to the 3 sides to make it easier. Once someone enters a portal THAT PORTAL VANISHES, so the allocation really does help. If you are having issues, allocate individuals portals, but I hope that would not be necessary.

If a melee gets put in a constrictor on the way to their portal, the other 2 melee must get them out. If by chance that melee is the last one through the portal, and they are nowhere near the ranged team, sorry… wait for a b-rez – that is literally bad luck. The melee need to look after their own.

If a melee gets brainlinked, who ever is brainlinked with the melee MUST go with them to the portals, then return to their own job once the link severs as the melee go in the portal.

This is all about tentacle control. The faster the tentacles are killed in the portals, the less spawn in the main room. Melee are on the clock, do not skip a sinlge tentacle, and smash them as fast as possible. Blow all cooldowns on the first portal phase – and get the yogg brain to about 75%. Dont forget to turn your back to the skulls. This is not as easy as you might think. But with a bit of practise you will learn where the skulls could be (they are randomly placed in the room) and where to stand to minimise their impact. I cant really describe them here, just practise will help. But generally, if you have your back to the room and are facing the tentacles, you will be ok most of the time.

Once the tentacles are all dead, you head into the brain room. Yoggs hitbox is huge so eyeball the exit portal and head toward it as you DPS. There are dangly tentacles which move around and CAN get in the way of you clicking the exit portal and get you insane. Be aware of this and don’t nub it up.

When melee get spat back out, they need to clean up all the corruptor tentacles they can possibly find.

When the portal phase comes up again, melee head back in (cleaning up corruptors and constrictors on the way) and this time blow heroism. Again, get to Yogg as soon as possible without missing a tentacle (remember killing tentacles in the portals means less outside) and smash him to about 50%. Pop out, kill corruptors and constrictors.

Third portal, blow any CDs that have come up and get Yogg to 30%. It is imperative that this happen on the third portal phase. Any more and you will run over the timer and probably be overrun with tentacles in phase 3.

Ranged Team
You guys get to stay outside. Mark up the main assist (your best ranged player) with an icon. Ensure that person has the ability to put their own marker back on themselves as DBM will probably remove it if something happens to them like brain link. If possible have a couple of people spamming a macro to mark up the assist. I also recommend reminding people on vent/ts to keep stacking on star (our symbol).

All ranged must stack on star and assist star at all times.

Now, what star has to do is this; smash crushers (moving off the crusher when the tank calls for it, more on that in the tanks section), get people out of contrictors whenever possible, and when there are no crushers or constrictors up, kill corruptors. They will move to wherever the next crusher is and clear out the area around that.

When the portal team kills all the tentacles and are on the yogg brain, the tentacles become stunned, making them much easier to kill and no new ones spawn.

Rinse repeat. If you find at any time that you are becoming overrun with tentacles call a heroism (requires a second shammy in the main room team) to help clear them out during a stunned phase if the melee were a bit slow that time (this might happen on the third portal). At the end of each stun phase there should be very few corruptors up. By few I mean less than 5.

Tanks
Your job is to reset crushers – the big huge tentacles. This is done the following way; Watch for the cast, call for DPS to change targets, wait a second until the stacks drop off, run in and hit the crusher, call for DPS again. Rinse, repeat as necessary.

Healers
There really isn’t a lot of healing going on. Stay with the ranged team and heal as required. What IS necessary is decursing, and there will be a lot of it.

Phase 3
OK, so you made it to P3 with perhaps a crusher up and a couple of tentacles. Most of the raid is alive and no one is insane.

Adds:
Tanks pick up the adds as soon as possible, they hit like mack trucks to begin with, but get the pro melee team onto them and they soon shrink down into kittens. Get your taunts off as soon as you can, and stay with your back to yogg the entire time. This should be not too bad to achieve.

Melee:
DPS adds. You should be able to do this with your back mostly to yogg for maintained DPS time.

Healers:
Stand with your back to yogg and heal and decurse. Watch the boss timers for add spawns and time a nice big heal for that first hit from the add – it’s a doozy.

Ranged:
Melt brain. Go hard, everyone is counting on you.

Troubleshooting:
Ok so you make it to phase 3 consistently, but you are still wiping. What’s going on? Ask youself these questions:

Was P1 perfect?
Were all the adds from P1 dead before tentacles from P2 spawned?
Did melee kill all the tentacles in the portals?
Were brain link and the green death beams managed?
Were constrictors killed in a timely manner?
Were crushers dead by the end of the stun?
Did melee keep corruptors under control after a portal phase?
Did ranged stack on star and assist correctly?
Did you get to P3 in 3 portal phases?
Were there 1 or less crusher and 5 or less corruptors up at the start of P3?
Were there 23 or more alive, un MCed raid members ready to go into P3?
Did everyone stay calm in P3 and do their jobs?

If you answer no to any of these questions you need to figure out why you answered no and fix it. And just remember, the fix for a problem in P3 might be in the execution of P1!

This boss has the best wipe enrage mechanic I have seen! I wont tell you what it is, I just hope you get to experience it because that it part of the learning curve to kill yogg!

Good luck

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