My guild is having problems with Bonethrasher. We've gotten pretty good at doing the dance to avoid his smash and cleave, but every once in a while someone just drops dead out of nowhere. This happened to me once when he was standing clear across the room from me; something hit me for over 10k. Probably closer to 15k since I was at nearly full health. Because there's no combat log, I can't be sure what happened, but since then I've seen it happen to several other people. They get 1 shotted from something other than a cleave. What can that be, and how do I stop it??

 

Also, we've been cc'ing the two cats so our admittedly undergeared dps can focus solely on the boss, but somehow the cc keeps getting broken, not just on 1 cat but on both cats. I've threatened people with virtual bodily harm if they use any aoe, but it happens every single time. It happens so often in fact that people think Bonethrasher himself is breaking the cc, but I've assured them this isn't possible. (Is it??) Jesus Christ why can't we just have a combat log? If I didn't know better, I'd think some jackwagon in the raid was deliberately wiping us every time.

1. His frontal cleave has a long range, he can hit you across the room, you gotta be behind him. What we do is look who he is targeting, then that person stays in place and recieves damage, while the rest run behind the boss.

 

Other thing can be - he has a huge hitbox, so watch you distance, sometimes it seems you're standing behind him when technicaly you stand infront of him and get hit.

 

 

2. Both cats can be CCed and if noone hits them - they stay CCed. Someone is waking them up. In your group I mean.

His cleave is total messed up.

 

Yesterday, i was standing behind him, on the other side of the areana. He did his swipe. The mob was looking to the outside (away from the middle), and one was tanking him there, so no one else get the swipe.

 

Boss does the swipe. The tank, only person i his front, got no damage at all. But me and two other, in his back, on the other side of the room, got hit.

 

It happens not really often. But it does happen. And its annoying if this cause a wipe.

There's a few issues here. Very often, his animations are not sync'd with his attacks. So if he is moving/turning and then swipes, the direction of the attack may actuallly be his PREVIOUS position. Very often he turns around, and swipes behind him because of this. It's a total PIA.

 

There is also an issue with standing to one of his sides. If you are standing behind him and he turns a little and a swipe goes off just right, you wind up (i am assuming) getting hit twice. In HM this equates to about 25-30k damage and an insta kill. We havn't pinpointed how to duplicate it, but when someone gets insta-shot they are almost ALWAYS hit by a cleave from the side.

 

As for dying clear across the room - his cleave is NOT that big. If he's cleaving people across the room, something is VERY wrong. More than likely you were standing on a corner and it killed you somehow. There seems to be some very unusual behavior depending on if you are standing against a wall or on an edge during encounters.

 

Anyways, if you are dying from 10-15k hits, you are probably undergeared for HM. Im guessing you are running normals, in which case it's not his cleave at all since it only hits for 6-8k (as far as I can remember) in normal mode. Try standing in the center circle at all times and see if that helps.

I would say his agro changing style cause these problems. Sometimes he is switching agro really fast. And it can happen, that he is on player A, than the agro switch to player B for 1 sec, he does the swipe, and agro switch back to player A. So he does not turn around or change his direction, but he is "casting" the swipe with a target behind him, or even across the room for some reasons. And this cause the strange behavior.

 

Yes, the range of the swipe isnt this big. you can easy stay on the other side, and not have to worry about it at all.

 

But soemtimes its just chaotic when he does the swipe to some strange directions.

I believe the mechanic you may be having trouble with is his pound ability. This is not the pound that knocks everyone into the air, but the one that specifically roots someone into the ground. This pound gives them a debuff that lets them take increased damage from the boss. On Hard or Nightmare, I've seen players get hit for well over 30k damage from his cleave. Being a Sorcerer, I just pull people away and they run back in when it wears off.

 

That being said, there is a much simpler strategy than dancing around to avoid his cleave, and while there is still a lot of movement, it adds a lot more predictability to the fight. My guild runs with 2-3 Ranged depending on who's signed up, 2 healers, and 3-4 melee.

 

We have one RDPS at the north, south, and east ends of the platform, just inside the metal ring. The healers are at the Northeast and Southeast, generally. When the cats spawn, they're instantly CC'd and ignored the entire fight.

 

The melee should stack in the center, and the person with threat should keep Bonethrasher faced West. They will eat his cleave damage, which can be easily healed through if just one person is getting hit.

 

When he goes after the healer, or the ranged, they run slightly forward and turn him roughly 90 degrees so that way if he does his knockback, they don't go flying into an acid pool.

 

Once this is done effectively, healing is quite minimal and it tends to make him pretty easy, but again, that all depends on everyone doing their job properly. I prefer it to just running around in circles though.

I believe the mechanic you may be having trouble with is his pound ability. This is not the pound that knocks everyone into the air, but the one that specifically roots someone into the ground. This pound gives them a debuff that lets them take increased damage from the boss. On Hard or Nightmare, I've seen players get hit for well over 30k damage from his cleave. Being a Sorcerer, I just pull people away and they run back in when it wears off.

 

 

^^^This!

 

The debuff that comes with his smash will make the next series of hits do way more damage then normal so that person needs to be aware of that. Basically a cleave or hit from adds will take them out immediatly. I've also seen sorcs kill themselves because of this debuff as well which might explain any deaths from across the arena.

Poster above me has explained the "one-shotted" observation.

 

1. He cannot be taunted - so there is no such thing as tanking on this mob other than the first few seconds of the fight.

 

2. do not ever stand on the metal outer ring - if you are backhanded while standing there you will die as you will be knocked into the acid (unless a very fast ally-grapple is put on you).

 

3. As stated above once you have been pounded into the floor you will have a debuff placed on you that increases damage upon you, after getting this you are best to stay as far from him as possible, use your deaggro ability if you have one.

 

4. There will be a "pig" Gamorrean guard mob appear & as long as he is alive the damage from Bonesmasher is increased (it has a red "godlight" on it so highly visible) this needs to be killed immediately.

 

5. The cleave can easily be "flip-flopped" onto the raid if a player that is the target ran through the mobs legs or moving around while targetted, every single player needs to be able to recognise when they are the target & not blindly run around like a headless chicken, learn how to do this or wipe your team. The more melee you have the more critical this becomes.

 

There is a "drag you around with him" bug, be very very careful of this, if you are moved around without your control you are experiencing this bug & can be hit whatever direction he is facing when he swipes, only way out is to move yourself out of his range entirely as fast as possible.

Edited April 4, 2012 by SkuzBukit

Bonethrasher has some serious animation and aggro issues.

 

Sometimes his cleave will go into a completely different direction than he's looking.

 

He likes to switch targets on a whim, resulting in some quick and uncontrollable movement.

 

While his hit-box is huge, so is his range. His 10m long arms have a 20m range for some reason.

 

All this makes the boss not hard per say, just really, really annoying.

While running HM karagga last night, we ran into a few issues.

 

The swipe attack would hit for some very excessive damage on multiple people at the same time, who were not standing by each other. In one case 4 people were 1-shotted at the same time and they were spread out at the north, east and south sides of the ring.

 

I was hit with a swipe for 30,074 damage and did not have a pound debuff (I had only been hit with 1 swipe prior to that for 8k, the person that did get hit with pound was on the other side of the ring from me). It was just before he was at 50% and the ads spawned.

My guild has downed and farmed NMM KP for weeks now and we ran into this on KP. They are dying BECAUSE OF THE AOE SMASH. I posted this before. It must be a bug because it is unavoidable. The person with the debuff is getting hit for 20k+ when BT does the aoe super smash.

Just to add my experience to this, we've done NM a few times as a guild as people want it for alts and fresh characters. Never had any real problems with it until tonight. We had some crazy high swipes going on which one-shot killed each person. The one-shots we had were 22k, 26k, 31k and 51k. I was one of the healers so I could see that they had full health at the time and no debuff. The 51k swipe was on me. There were more one shots but these are the ones I wrote down in my notepad towards the end. We wiped several times as he kept doing that. These one-shots happened multiple times across several attempts. In the end we gave up and switch to HM which had none of these problems but of course, no title for those that wanted it.

NiM BT is a crapshoot at best.

Ive seen my raid team get one shot one by one and theres nothing that can be done about it.

Its almost funny hearing our 27k shadow tank scream " *** thats utter and complete BS" over vent

Something's up with this guy since 1.4 because the run past him this week was mechanically different than previous encounters.

 

During our HM run this week I was one of the healers and I noticed that BT did several snap 180's ending in either a smash or unusually quick swipe on his new target.

 

His animations were either much quicker than normal or he wasn't winding up like we're accustomed to, because people were't able to get out the way, so swipe damage was well above the norm for us.

 

Raid damage in this fight was generally greater than previous runs and was more on par with NiM than HM.

 

We did 1 shot the boss so my post is more of a bug report, or heads up to groups going in with number under-geared toons than anything else.

noticed the same thing. he will change targets and swipe immediatly. maybe dps is getting ot the point of smashing through some of the mechanics.