Protectors of the Endless Spring is by far one of the most frustrating fights of the tier in my opinion. The damage buff you are given in this fight from killing the little sha's doesn't transfer to your pet, therefor nearly making BM 100% useless on this fight. I played survival with a talent set up of:
3: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera
2: Silencing Shot
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
1: Fervor
1: A Murder of Crows
1: Glaive Toss
So, the first thing you will learn about this fight is that hunters are pretty god awful at it. You 100% should not be using any multi-shots in this fight even with 3 adds present. Although it's tempting to flex your epeen a bit, don't do it. Stick to your single target rotation, including BA>Trap. Single target damage is absolutely the most important thing in this fight. The next thing you will learn, depending on your strategy, is that if you are in a late soak group, your damage will suck, nothing you can do about it. I took the glyph of Ice Trap over the glyph of Deterrence for this fight. Deterrence blocks 100% of lightning storm, and is really the only time you will need it. Even with it blocking it, you shouldn't really need deterrence for anything, your passive 15% reduction from Iron Hawk should be more than enough for your healers to heal you through any of the dots in the fight. Having your pet on defensive stance while you are switching to adds if your group has you doing it, is a must. We have free mobility, so be right on your adds as they die to get stacks, no excuse to ever miss a stack of your buff. Tranquilizing shot can be used to dispell the healing buff if your healers are slow at doing it, but really you shouldn't have to do it. Overall, I didn't enjoy this fight in anyways, and cringe every week that we have killed it since. Here is a kill video from one of our mages PoV:
What an entertaining and exhilarating fight to take part in. I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy this fight when going through strategies and reading up on the fight. A lot of mixture between BM vs SV and how the fight goes from phase to phase. The biggest difference in this fight from normal to heroic is more or less like putting 100 pounds on your healers shoulders and hoping they can carry you through the fight. You will wipe quite a bit early in the fight trying to figure out exactly how to deal with these dissonance fields. A few things to note as a hunter. You will NEVER EVER EVER get Cry of Terror, but this does not mean you are a melee. You still need to stand out with the range. Also, you should never be near a dissonance field, hunters do absolutely nothing to bring down the health of the fields. Your raid staying spread out is very important so your healers can save as much unneeded heals as possible. With the strategy my raid decided to do I played Survival and took a set up like:
3: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera
1: Silencing Shot
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
2: Dire Beast
1: A Murder of Crows
1: Glaive Toss
(I ended up playing SV on our first kill, but I still believe BM is better for this fight during progression)
I decided very early on that BM would be the way to go for me. I played a few pulls as SV and was never quite on the same level as BM for the way we decided to handle phase 2. During the add phase we had each of our small add tanks put a mark on 1 of their adds each and we nuked that single target add in each group. Your tanks take WAY less damage when the number of adds is reduced from 4 to 3 in their groups. and with fixates going out they take less damage even more when they aren't being attacked by these adds additionally. I used little to no AoE during our first kill of this boss. Fixate damage has a range of 20 yds and will cause more frustrating deaths than anything on this fight. MAKE SURE YOU AND EVERYONE IN YOUR RAID GROUP HAS A WEAK AURA FOR FIXATE. You must immediately start running to the sides of the room if you get fixated if you choose to use a similar raid positioning to us (See video). Deterrence is extremely helpful on dissonance fields as it reduces the damage taken from them by 50% (glyphed). Deterrence is again strong in phase 3 if you get cry, deterrence just before you get feared to reduce that damage. We had our warlock dropping his soul well during both add phases, I think I used 4 healthstones in our kill attempt. These are very very strong and should 100% be used off CD during field explosions. Also using silencing shot during the add phases to interrupt Dispatch is very important and you should be trying to interrupt every one that you can as melee sometimes have to run out for being fixated.
Overall this fight is super fun and that last phase feels like it's never going to end. Having healed this fight since our first kill, I can tell you, your healers will appreciate anything you can do to avoid damage/heal yourself. As a hunter we have our passive 15% reduction, but deterrence and health stones are VERY helpful. Just some additional help your raid may need. We had about 6-7 spell casters jumping in the corrupted fields as soon as they came up and getting CD's such as barrier and spirit link totem to support. This allowed us to get these fields knocked down before the raid dipped too quickly. The last phase we had our third tank stand in front of the raid group to take the Heart of Fear damage. Honestly, I never even noticed this mechanic even though I had one on me. Good luck with this one, it was overall a short encounter for us! Here is video, I hit record after the first add phase was over (sorry!).
I've fallen behind a bit on these blogs, and I always say I'm going to get back to doing them full time and just seem to fail to catch up. So here we go, 4 blogs in the next couple of days covering the past few weeks of heroic kills.
This fight, for a good player, can be one of the absolute most frustrating fights you may ever encounter. Your entire raid team needs to know how to handle the mechanics of the Muted Construct, and the people outside really need to know how to throttle damage up and down. We wiped on this fight several times due to people either killing the construct too quickly, or people not knowing how or when to use their Amber Strike properly. We used 2 tanks, and had a melee DPS taunting the construct ~5 seconds before flings to keep the monstrosity in place. You also tank the monstrosity near a pillar in the front of the room to keep your tanks from getting knocked all over the place with the stomp. I think survival is a hunter's best choice for this fight. It's also the one fight you can say, being a scumbag is ok for progression. Multi-shot your way to some high damage and a fight that can be a lot of fun.
Here are my Survivaltalents for this fight:
1: Crouching Tiger Hidden Chimera
2: Your choice
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
1: Fervor
1: A Murder of Crows
2: Barrage
Basically for this fight I considered myself a melee class. When the "Ranged on adds" calls came out, I usually maintained sticking to the boss/construct and nuking them down, while cleaving off with multi-shots when I would hit 3+ targets. I used a combination of BA and explosive trap, mainly using BA during phase 2 for the single target damage on the monstrosity. Make sure you A Murder of Crows the boss in phase 1, monstrosity in phase 2, and the boss in phase 3. You do this because no other targets will be alive for more than 30 seconds. Make sure your tank left in the suit for phase 2 continues to keep stacks on the boss as well as refreshing stacks when needed on the monstrosity. Going into P3 the boss will actually just melt if you do the fight correctly to this point. This is where BM makes the argument of being a better choice for this fight. I honestly don't feel it would be worth it, as you wouldn't even get your full 36 second burst in during this phase (Yes if done right, it's that short). You still burst extremely higher as SV, especially if you can carry a LnL into this phase. Make sure you don't attack the boss too early as he is still taking his huge reduced damage till he is done channeling in the middle of the room. Overall this isn't a bad fight for hunters, and a great fight to practice those scumbag techniques for future farm content. Here is a video from a mage PoV, forgot to record on the kill! Will try to get a video of our kill next week!
It's been awhile since I have had the time to sit down and do a blog, although as a guild we have been very busy over the past 3 weeks. After Lei Shi we set our sight on moving through HoF in it's entirety. With a lot of new recruits and a holiday schedule we struggled through a couple of heroics that should have been killed a lot sooner than they were. With nearly a full roster back from the holidays we managed to put down one of the toughest bosses of the tier, Imperial Vizier. Here's my brief explanation of the three fights.
Heroic Garalon
This fight was a true test of your entire raids ability to handle mechanics and damage. With the raid being able to handle these mechanics this fight is extremely simple. If the each individual raid member does their job the fight slowly snowballs to be much easier than you would anticipate. It has an extremely high DPS check, as well as healing check, and is absolutely not something to take lightly. Here is my quick hunter tips for this fight.
Spec:
3: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera
Doesn't matter, not useful
3: Spirit Bond
2: Dire Beast
1: A Murder of Crows
1: Glaive Toss
Here's my reasoning for this set up. Having deterrence for every other crush, or when your healers don't have CD's/weak CD's. No interrupts or CC's needed for this fight, so tier two can be anything. On this fight you are constantly lower than 98% so throughout the fight Spirit Bond will do more healing than Iron Hawk would damage reduction. The next three are the pretty standard BM choices. The A Murder of Crows choice is questionable, and I've heard some people taking Blink Strike here, but I think I still like crows. Just always crows the boss.
Dash, Dash, Dash. Having the maximum uptime on your pet's dash when it's moving from body to leg is so helpful. Also, with the strategy we originally did with this, we had range switching to a far leg without going to it. If your guild is using this strategy, when your pet is attacking a leg, regardless if you are near the leg, it gains the buff. So any time a leg is up make sure your pet is in it, it's a DPS gain, even with the travel distance. Overall the fight is a lot of fun, but requires a ton of raid awareness and concentration to meet the extreme healing and DPS requirements.
Here is our first kill:
Heroic Wind Lord
So, Heroic Wind Lord is definitely a boss you should be doing relatively early in your raids progression. We ended up 24M'ing the boss on our first kill, because it's that much of a joke. I played SV on this fight as it seemed to be the obvious choice for all of the AoE. Although I have played BM on it since, and it's equally as good if done correctly. There is a good chance you will be chosen to CC adds, which is no issue for a hunter since our trap has a 40 yd range, and lasts 90 seconds. If you aren't chosen to CC adds, you may be put in the interrupt rotation on the menders. I went with the set up of:
3: Crouching Tiger Hidden Chimera
1: Silencing Shot
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
3: Thrill of the Hunt
1: A Murder of Crows
2: Barrage
There is a lot of debate in my opinion about barrage vs. glaive toss. Barrage will definitely do more overall damage than glaive toss, but you lose a lot more globals while channeling barrage. I still think barrage comes out on top, but like I said there is debate on it. Avoid wind bombs and really just stay alive. Deterrence will full block the rain of blades, and whirling blade. Normal AoE rotation for the most part. Save your Stampede for when you will pop hero after the 2nd set of adds die and you are single targeting the boss. If you play BM you will pretty much save your CD's for the areas where the boss is taking the 600% increased damage. Hitting for over a million is fun. There honestly isn't a lot to this boss mechanically, so I can't give too many hints on it. Here is our kill video.
Heroic Imperial Vizier Zor'lok
Finally this week we managed to finally down arguably one of the hardest bosses of the tier, Imperial Zor'lok. This fight is an absolute blast and I really enjoyed our progression on this boss. The fight is a single target, avoid mechanics and win type of fight. The fight does not have a strict enrage, and is truly a test of your entire raids ability to avoid mechanics, or mechanic. The set up I took was a very base BM set up.
3: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera
DON'T TAKE A TIER TWO TALENT
2: Aspect of the Iron Hawk
2: Dire Beast
1: A Murder of Crows
1: Glaive Toss
So, going from top to bottom here. CTHC is a good talent for the last phase, where your deterrence will block all of the yellow pulses from Attenuation. Deterrence will only lower the damage of the green sonic pulses, so ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS avoid them. There is a point in the last portion of my video that shows a good place to run from them, but some quick thinking is sometimes needed ;). Your tier 2 talent provide no benefit in the fight at all, and will actually hurt you if you get mind controlled, as it's one of the first abilities your character will cast, so don't take anything. Also, burning your deterrence before the third platform is also a good thing, as below 60% health the MC likes to pop and sit in a full deterrence (see video). As for the rest of my talent choices, they are your standard single target BM choices. When switching platforms or staying on a platform having a pet dash macro as well as master's call handy is very nice to help quickly move your pet. My video also provides some nice showing of what to do if you get behind the group while running during the attenuation. It will happen, don't be stupid and die to them all night. It does nothing but frustrate the rest of your raid when you are needed a brez every single pull. Hunters are rather strong on this fight do to not losing too much damage while moving, although damage isn't really an issue on this fight with it's very long enrage timer. Stay alive, do some mad damage, and enjoy this fun fight! Here's the kill video.
Sorry for the late post on these 3 bosses. I've had a ton of questions about my opening rotation lately and will try to get to that very very soon! Hope you enjoy the videos!
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.
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!
So, it's been awhile since I sat down to write one of these things. The past couple weeks have been loaded with several things for me. Call of Duty was released, Diablo is somewhat interesting again, and that raiding thing. Let's talk about that raiding thing. We have put in a few extra days the past two weeks to try to catch up as we lost nearly an entire week due to the hurricane smashing the faces of a few of our raiders. All in all it's been good though, getting a Spiritbinder Heroic kill as well as finally pushing through 25m Heart of Fear made the past two weeks extremely good for us. We plan on pushing onto the third raid instance with an extra night tonight, and hopefully clean that place up, as it doesn't seem it's too difficult on the normal mode.
So the topic I really sat down to hammer down today was self preparation and how this really ties into your raid progression. It seems this past week on our first normal Heart of Fear clear we ran into a ton of issues with people showing up to raid extremely unprepared. By unprepared, I mean they showed up to a progression raid with absolutely no knowledge of the encounters ahead, the mechanics that these fights bring and how they could contribute to the raid team. When trying to be the best guild you can absolutely be these small attentions to detail can really make a difference if everybody in the raid has just done research on how their class can approach a fight. Small details such as knowing you can BoP a person before entering Dissonance Fields, can save your raid a headache. Knowing how to interrupt on a fight such as Amber Shaper can, and will, save your raid a wipe or two that definitely did not need to happen. When you show up completely blind to fights you are causing your raid to spend time on something that really did not need to happen. An issue where you mess up a mechanic will happen, everybody is human. Admit you made a mistake, wipe the fight and pull again. I'm as bad as anyone at trying to figure out ways to solve an issue the raid continues to have. At the end of the day, know your job, what you need to do, and leave everyone else's job up to them. With good leadership the people who constantly mess up with slowly be fed to the sharks and you're raid will grow stronger. Play your class to the best you can do it, and know how to deal with mechanics. Most guilds will take a strong mechanical player with slightly less damage, than a more weak mechanical player with higher damage.
