As a GM, you are responsible for making decisions for the guild, especially in terms of how your raid week is broken up.  Pre-Ulduar, it was easy to break up the raid nights — my guild, <iRaid> usually raids 3 nights a week, so 1 night was usually Maly/Sarth, another night (or night and a half) was Naxx, and we usually had a spare night for 10 mans, VoA, or other things.  When Ulduar hit, we kept Naxx around as an OPTIONAL raid for a few weeks, then dropped it completely.

Up until recently, and before our Yogg kill, we used our full 12 hours of raiding (4 hours a night times 3 nights a week) on regular Ulduar.  Now that we can full clear the place with relative ease, and have begun heroic hard modes, breaking up the time has become increasingly difficult.  Here are some questions that I have:

• How many hours a week can we spend on hard modes and still manage to kill Yogg weekly?
• Does Yogg even need to be killed weekly, since hard mode loot is better than Yogg loot?
• As a progression-based guild, shouldn’t hard mode progression be considered more important that either farming hard modes that have already been downed or downing Yogg?
• With patch 3.2 nearing, should the focus be to simply get as many *new* hard modes down as possible?
• Is it necessary to farm hard modes that have already been completed if we can’t 1-shot them, or should we be more focused on killing new hard modes?

They are all tough questions, so maybe some unbiased opinions from other people could help enlighten me.  My mindset is more like — we are a progression-based guild.  Our focus should be killing new content (in this case, new hard modes).  Everything else, including getting people the gear they want, is secondary to our primary goal.

I understand that more gear will help us complete other hard modes, but its really a time crunch.  I consider 3 raid nights a week to be semi-casual raiding; and adding a consistent 4th raid night to our plate isn’t really an option at this time.  If re-doing Heroic: Heartbreaker is going to take us a few wipes to down it again, should we really waste the time for the one piece of i239 instead of using those 30 minutes on a hard mode we haven’t downed?

A *lot* of my raiders need Yogg loot.  Whether it be their T8 shoulders, or another piece, most people (myself included), want to kill him weekly.  However, we don’t 1-shot Yogg; we only recently downed him for the first time.  A Yogg re-kill could take nearly 1-2+ hours if we don’t have all of our main raiders on.  Is the time investment worth it?  Wouldn’t investing time on Iron Council hard mode be the wiser choice?

So — I guess my last question is — what do your guilds do?

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Summary

The XT-002 Deconstructor fight is one of my favorite fights in Ulduar, and is considered by many to be a “free epics” fight.  The amount of raid damage keeps healers on their toes, while the adds and heart phase of the fight makes the DPS happy.  It’s a simple 2 phase fight with a hard enrage.  The Deconstructor is one of the four bosses you must kill in order to receive the Heroic: The Siege of Ulduar achievement.

Recommended Raid Composition

You will need two tanks for this fight; one to tank XT-002 the whole time, and another to tank the large Pummeler adds that he spawns during his Heart phase.  6-7 healers is normal for this fight, and you will probably want to assign group healers to certain groups to keep the raid topped off during Tympanic Tantrum.  As far as DPS is concerned, you should be able to bring whatever classes you like, but I do recommend assigning AoEers (I usually just tell my mages to handle this) to attack the Bomb Bots and Scrap Bots during this fight.

XT-002 Abilities and Add Abilities

Tympanic Tantrum – Does a total of 120% of your health evenly throughout twelve seconds.  Even if your healers aren’t the best, your raid can survive this off a simple health stone or health potion.

Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb – These are two things that DBM will mark people for and they will have to run out of the raid group for to keep the raid alive.  The Gravity Bomb ability will drag people to it once the debuff wears off, while the Light Bomb ability will deal damage to everyone in range of the person until the debuff wears off.

At every 25% of his health, adds will appear from the 4 junk piles at every corner.  There are Scrap Bots, Boom Bots, and Pummelers, which need to be dealt with.  Pummelers will need to be tanked for the duration of the fight by your OT (they don’t hit hard), Scrap Bots should be AoE’ed down, and Boom Bots should be focus-fired down by your ranged, and hopefully near Scrap Bots (they deal damage to everything when they explode).

The XT-002 Deconstructor Fight Strategy

Engage the Deconstructor, ensuring to fully HoT up your main tank while the raid gets into position.  In the image below, you can see where we tank XT-002, in between two of the junk piles on either end of the room.  The reason for this is that he WILL NOT SPAWN ADDS ON THE TWO JUNK PILES HE IS TANKED NEAR. That is crucial to this fight, and getting some of the achievements that this fight can offer.

It shouldn’t be any problem keeping your tank or raid up (even through Tympanic Tantrum), and DPS heavily.  At 75% he will enter his first heart phase.  I recommend popping Heroism/Bloodlust during the first Heart phase, and if your DPS if somewhat decent, you should be able to bring him at or near 50% (the next Heart phase), when he is re-engaged.

All of your DPS should be focusing on the heart during the beginning of this phase, and your OT should be picking up the Pummelers (they have too much to kill them).  As I mentioned earlier, I usually assign my 3 mages to AoE down the Scrap Bots and Bomb Bots, which can heal the boss for 1% of his total health (each individual bot), and we usually end up doing it cleanly.

Depending on how competent your raid is, you can either stay clumped up into a couple of groups during the fight, or stay spread out.  Each method has its own pros and cons; we used to stay clumped in 3 groups (1 melee group, 2 ranged groups), but now that we have perfected the fight we just let everyone stand where they want and run out when they get either of the debuffs.  That is up to you.

Using the placement I recommend will save you a lot of difficultly on this fight, as placing him in the middle of the room will allow adds to spawn from all 4 quadrants of the room, and should really simplify the entire fight.  Make sure you don’t kill the Heart while DPSing it (doing so activates hard mode), and you should have this one in the bag in no time.

Macbook

XT-002 Deconstructor Screenshots

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