Lock and Load - Heroic Lei Shi

Lock and Load

Lei Shi No More

After over 50 attempts this week, we managed to put down heroic 25M Lei Shi. The fight is a blast, and overall one of my favorite fights of all time. The simple twist of new mechanics and a very sharp enrage of 7 minutes makes this fight one of the most tightly tuned fights of the expansion in my opinion. 

I don't usually explain the overall mechanics of fights in these blogs, but as a ranged DPS you may be asked to control the debuff. Lei Shi gains a circle around her in about a 25yd radius. When outside this circle you slowly gain stacks of the debuff Scary Fog. The way this was managed in our raid was we had three warlocks cycling the debuff while never taking more than 10-11 stacks. Using warlock Demonic Gates to quickly gain access to the boss and to get back out without losing stacks seemed to be the most efficient way to do this. I never took the opportunity to stack the debuff so I don't have first hand knowledge of it, but this seemed to be the gist of how they managed the debuff. Where this fight gets tricky is the positioning of the raid, tanks and the debuff. If a 10 stack of the debuff gets in the raid and a Get Away! happens it's a insta-wipe. Using 4 specific stack spots, 1 for each tank, 1 for the raid, and 1 for the debuffs we managed to avoid having these issues.

Hunters are super super strong on this fight, finally. With the 5.1 changes, Get Away! has no effect on our overall DPS. There are some tricks to managing your BM cool downs, and maybe I can help you with some of these. My Talents looked like the following:

1: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera

2: Wyvern Sting

2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk

2: Dire Beast

1: A Murder of Crows

1: Glaive Toss

Standard Glyph Setup: Animal Bond, Marked for Death, Deterrence

The first thing you may notice about this set up is that I have taken Wyvern Sting in the level 30 tier. It's a super strong talent for this fight. Warlocks are super beneficial for their Banish ability as it is an unbreakable CC. Fears are super strong as well from priests and warriors. I wasn't assigned to a specific CC area as we had 3 warlocks and 2 shamans. I used Wyvern on the closest target to the boss as often as possible, as well as followed up on CCs with traps. The very last add phase at 20% of the bosses health is one of the biggest tests to a raids ability to really communicate a target, get everything CC'd and push through. One add incorrectly CC'd can cause a wipe. 

The fight has a DPS pattern that allows CD's to be managed in a such a way that you never was any BW's. The fight will always go in such a way that directly after an add phase you will have some sort of special. About 5-10 seconds after the add is killed, the boss will special. Saving CD's till after this special is announced will always be beneficial to you. I managed to grab my 4 set this week, but didn't test if the 4 set will have to change my opening, there is some speculation that it does. I'll be blogging sometime next week about the impact of the 4 set and what I think it about it, and how it will change BM as a whole.

Here is the video of the kill:

-Divinespeed <LA> US Stormrage

LAGuild.enjin.com

Lock and Load - HM Blade Lord - HM Spirit Kings

Lock and Load

Hello there internet! It's been awhile since I had the time to sit down and just get some stuff put into this blog. It's suppose to be a weekly thing, but hey, I'm pretty busy most of the time and trying to get all that needs to be done requires some things to be put on the back burner. First thing is first though. Patch 5.1. This patch brought some pretty ground breaking things to hunters as far as our mobility and raid utility. We've always got the bitch jobs for kiting, and running to and from a boss to do some random job. I rejoice these tasks now. Oh, you need me to keep kiting this add on Heroic Spirit Kings? No worries DPS still on the up. The post 5.1 change to Serpent Sting was extremely nice and something I personally thought Blizzard would overlook. It's not a ground breaking change, but it buffs all 3 specs, survival a bit more than the others. It also gives us a reason to use focus on multi-dotting when playing survival. The biggest thing this change did to hunter's was made every hunter 100% have to have a SV spec now when fighting any boss that has multi-dotting capabilities. I like the changes to MM as well as AotH to make our class competitive single target. Let's talk about a few fights!

Heroic Blade Lord Ta'Yak

This fight is super super interesting for hunters, as it's a single target fight, but really tests a raids patience and ability to control the boss in such a way that you are never overwhelmed. I think the fight as a whole will certainly test a lot of guilds. As for Huntering this fight, I took a pretty standard Beast Mastery talent set up of:

1: Post Haste

1: Silencing Shot

2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk

2: Dire Beast

1: A Murder of Crows

1: Glaive Toss

So this fight I will start with the 1 and only new mechanic this fight brings. Blade Tempest draws all players towards him and after a short period he basically kills you. There are a few tricks to this mechanic that you can utilize. If your raid has 3 druids you can rotate stampeding roars to quickly get you away from the boss and out of his kill you mechanic. If your raid has 3 druids that are smart enough to use their roars in a good rotation you *may* consider Crouching Tiger Hidden Chimera, as you can have a deterrence for every single unseen strike. The reason I like post haste for this fight is because if you happen to hit your disengage a bit early during Blade Tempest you will just stop and not fly backwards at all. Post haste gives you the ability to still get away when this happens. 

DPS on this fight is pretty simple. Get your Bestial Wrath lined up for AFTER Unseen strike, Unseen comes every 60-65 seconds, so if you have it lined up slight before, as your third BW will be, be sure not to waste any as you can't attack the boss during Unseen Strike. You can DPS while running away from Blade Tempest. During the 2nd phase you can also send your pet to attack the boss from about half way down the hallway with a /petattack macro. You can take advantage of being able to move and attack also during the tornado phase, just don't derp into a newly spawning tornado (it will happen). Be sure to get Serpent Sting up on the boss immediately after each unseen strike if it has fallen. Overall this fight is a lot of fun, and hunters bring some of the best DPS to this fight if you manage to do it right.

Heroic Spirit Kings

Fuck. This. Fight. I am so happy that we were able to get this boss down in just over a week, about 125 pulls (including resets). The fight is a true test of your entire raids ability to face mechanics and deal with them quickly. It's a rapid fire test of your abilities as a raider. Everything from stop DPS mechanics, to don't stand in bad stuff mechanics, to interrupts, dispells, enrage removals, dodge mechanics. It's all built into this 1 10 minute stand against the 4 kings. I took a standard Beast Mastery talent set up once again: 

1: Crouching Tiger Hidden Chimera
1: Silencing Shot
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
2: Dire Beast
1: A Murder of Crows
1: Glaive Toss

Will start with mechanics again and what hunters bring to the plate during this fight. The most important things hunters provide in this fight, outside of our strong single target DPS, is a ranged interrupt, Tranquilizing Shot, and the ability to attack a 100% reflect damage without taking damage. On top of all this we are extremely mobile for all of the dodging/kiting mechanics you may be faced with. King 1 is a pretty standard stack and nuke with a lot of movement. His new ability you simple stop attack, wait for a dispell and continue. This is the same with the next boss. When the 2nd King is active take it on yourself to spread out from other people once the first king has died. We have mobility, other casters do not have this same ability. Let them nuke while you find a sweet spot not within 8 yards of anyone. When the third king becomes active at 30% remaining on the 2nd king, you should be in an interrupt group with other ranged to be sure no no shadow bolts get off. These are very dangerous and when combined with almost any other damage, will certainly 1 shot a person. When the 4th and final boss is active you should be in charge of dispelling the enrages via Tranquilizing shot. Glaive toss and multi shot (Non SV) are also very helpful in breaking mind control if you don't have a priests halo/warriors Dragon Roar.

This is a very simple nuke and win fight as far as DPS'ing goes. Not much is going to significantly help or hurt you in this fight, when 2 bosses are active you may try to roll 2 serpent stings, but the main priority is always killing the lower health boss. There is honestly so much going on towards the end of this fight I was so focused on just making every single global matter when the boss wasn't reflecting. When he got to high energy in cowardice phase I basically just kept DPSing, using much less arcane shots as it was really the only ability that could hurt me for a lot. Here is our kill video from a mages PoV, I look to get back to recording this week!

Logs: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/195797/

Will be back to writing more here soon! Expect more of the Weekly Raider as well!

-Divinespeed 

<LA> Stormrage (US)