Patch Day. I'd have to say this was the smoothest patch day I have seen yet. Came home from work, logged on and ready to raid. No Server crashing, bugs, addon or DC problems, quite pleased. Before getting into how our raiding experience was I'd have to say the new dailies were pretty fun. Not a lot of time necessary and they generally had a sense of progression and reward. Now onto the good stuff.
Firelands Trash
Have to say that Firelands trash is pretty damn annoying, basically everything was designed for melee players to feel useless and/or a flaming smear on the ground. Large golems that kick you into turtles. Turtles that knock you into exploding scorpions. Scorpions that chase you into roaming packs of snake men. Speedy elementals that show up and knock you into other elementals. Basically it all sucks and you have to kill a ton to make Shannox show up and if you don't kill him in a timely fashion you gotta start all over again clearing trash for another hour.
Shannox
We expected Shannox to be the easiest boss to start with but ended up being the hardest we had to face this week. Go figure. The most irritating thing about Shannox is he pats all around the zone and it takes around 5 mins so if your not ready to pull when he comes around you gotta sit on yer ass until he comes back around. He's got to be the biggest Huntard in wow. We spent about a day and a half on Shannox until we downed him.
The biggest curve ball despite all our preparations was the fact that Shannox and Riplimb are untauntable. This is pretty much what set us back from the start and it wasn't until wednesday that we found the right way to handle this. We tried several things such as 3 tanking with one tank on riplimb and two on Shannox. Threat was the biggest issue with MDs not really being much help and glyph of salvation giving moderate success in alloying the tanks to drop their stacks. Our best attempts were with 4 tanks however, adding another to Riplimb.
On our kill we just used two tanks, one on shannox, one on Riplimb. We discovered that if you time it right and trap Riplimb after the boss throws his spear, both tanks will drop their stacks because Shannox only gives stacks with his spear. Another big tactic was killing Rageface right off the bat which made the damage of the raid much more manageable as well as on the tank. To combat melee and tanks stepping on traps our Shannox tank just kited the boss around. First Boss downed.
Beth'tilac
If Shannox was the hardest boss we fought Beth was the easiest. We pretty much followed the strategy that I posted last week with some minor tweaks. We used 2 tanks, one top, one bottom. We sent a few melee up with the tank and 3 healers, who got the boss down around 78%. Down below we split up the ranged dps in 3 groups with frost traps on spiderling spawn points and one rogue with crippling poison and 2 warlocks with glyphed shadowflame in the other 2. This ensured that all the spiders were slowed between 50-70% and could easily be DPSd down. We had 2 melee on drones full time and the rest of the dps would hit the drone if they had nothing to do. My job as an Unholy DK was to deathgrip and taunt the spinners down and kill them. Once the team was up top I just attacked the drone until Smoldering Devestation then I would switch back to spinners.
The final phase was just a raid cooldown rotation and DPS burn. Easy.
Lord Ryolith
With some attempts on Alysrazor we decided to hit Lord Ryolith first. In theory this fight is quite easy but we over complicated it so much that it took us about 3 and a half hours to down. The biggest issue was steering the bus as we liked to call it. We all had different ideas of how it should be done and it seemed people got confused because everyone was making calls in which way he should be turned. Basically what would happen is Ryolith would get way too close to the lava and just stand there pivoting slowly until we got him back on track. By that time there were way too many volcanos going off that we wouldn't be able to keep up.
I generally decided as an officer that we should just keep him constantly moving on a path which can kinda be seen on the terrain. That way he wouldn't be slowed down by hard turns and could just mow down volcanoes in his path even if we narrowly missed a couple. That worked but I was still competing with what other people felt was a better way to handle it. Finally on our kill attempt I got our raid leader to silence vent and I just made all the directions. I honestly just watched ahead of me and backed up the boss like a truck into a parking space and kinda keep the next two volcanos in focus. I would call to walk straight into the nearest volcano and begin calling for a left turn to line up the following one. This worked, we won, last phase is a joke.
I'd have to say that this fight is 100% steering the raid and not the boss.
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