I'm asking this on behalf of our 8-Man HM TfB group. We have managed to down him twice now, but not without some complications on two specific issues...

 

The first question is about the platform movement. We are having issues across the board with inconsistent results when moving from platform to platform.

 

The most annoying issue is random death. Someone will walk through a portal to move to another platform, and instantly die. Death log says killed by Kill Player (0 Damage), or something to that effect. We would assume it is because you die if you fall off the pillars, but that doesn't make sense because we have people fall off pillars and NOT die, just get ported back to the home platform with not even any damage taken.

 

On a somewhat similar note, we also see an abundance of people not "making" it to the next platform. They will either fall short, and end up on the ledges beneath the platform, or not land on anything at all and fall into the void and get ported back to the home platform or die. It seems to be a random occurrence...none of us ever jump through the portals, we all just walk through them; on top of that, we've all noticed that we can be a little off-center of the portal when we walk through it and still make it through just fine, but we've also noticed that we don't make it even when we walk into the portal head-on.

 

Anyone have any tips for moving effectively through the zone?

 

The second issue we're having is a Phase 3 issue...

 

Is there an effective way to handle surviving this phase? I get that it's supposed to be an intense burn phase, but it just seems like whether you survive this fight is completely random. Everyone in the raid seems to get hit, the tanks can't prevent them from rotating through our entire group, and the healers usually end up oom by around 6-8%. Everyone blowing their DCD's gets us to about 5-6%, and then it's just about hoping and praying enough of us survive to get that final 2-3%...is that just the design of the fight, or is there a better way to handle the damage taken?

With regards to the portal movement, some of our people had the same problem. I noticed that some of the portals look like they are off of the corner of a platform, however while I'm moving around I always walk off of the sides (which means I'm not actually walking into the portal, but sort of off to the side of it) and I haven't had the problem yet. I don't know if that's the issue, but perhaps the effect of the portal only triggers if you walk off the sides, rather than the corner?

To the first question, this is a commonly reported problem with the phase 2 of the fight (both SM and HM). I don't have any confirmation on this or not but I speculate the reason you occasionally die during platform movement is due to the way you enter the portal. If you jump into the portal or come off the platform not perpendicular it seems to raise the chance of this happening. My thought is that if you jump you "fall" a bit from your entry coordinate and you land in the other platform; same thing with coming off the edge not perpendicular. By landing in the platform the game recognizes that your character is "stuck" and automatically tries to "unstuck" your character, which since you are in combat, kills you. Again, speculation, but the theory seems to be consistent with the times I've experienced this problem.

 

For the second question, I've read that your tanks should be spamming their taunts in this phase. But since the terror continues to drop aggro you have to roll them in order to catch most of the damage on the tanks. I'm not a tank, and I've not done the terror on HM, so this is simply hear-say so take it with a grain of salt.

For the last bit, is there a raid wide aoe? I dunno I never paid attention, too busy handling taunts.

 

If there is, obviously you cant stop all the damage, but from a tank PoV you need to be taking advantage of the taunt and aoe taunt. From waht I've seen, taunt says it will last 6 seconds, however it's not an aggro drop that's happening but a random aggro phase, similar to say Bonethrasher but happening a lot quicker! i.e I think a taunt is being applied on a random member every few seconds.

 

For example:

 

0 sec: Tank 1 uses Taunt

4 sec: Tank 2 uses Taunt

8 sec: Tank 1 uses AOE Taunt

12 sec: Tank 2 uses AOE Taunt

16 sec: Tank 1 uses Taunt

20 sec: Tank 2 uses Taunt

 

After which point, if he aint dead you'll start dying soon. You could space the taunts out more to try and make them last longer, but it should be enough to burn the remaining 12% hp.

The way that Phase 3 works is that every every time you are hit by the bosses Phasic Spit, your aggro is cleared. The boss himself, however, maintains a steady and constant aggro table aside from that mechanic, so it can be predicted to some degree and taken advantage of.

 

I'm assuming you have your raid spread out on platforms so that no spit every does splash damage to anyone except the intended target. If not, that's your easiest fix.

 

After that, you need to have your tanks taunt swapping, as previously stated. One thing to be careful of is that it *is* a relatively long burn, so you do not want to be overlapping your taunt durations. Tanks should always be watching their target-of-target as well, so that they never taunt off when it the boss is on the other tank. Only taunt when it is their turn and the boss turns to a DPS/healer. Always wait for the previous one to fall off before having the next tank taunt. Healing priority should always go to the tanks first, then your highest 2 threat DPS. The reason for this is that the lowest threat DPS and healers should only pull once, maybe twice on the boss before he dies, and thus only require a single heal or HoT to survive 2 spits.

 

Threat is significantly more complicated than this, but if you *assume* everyone is pulling the same threat/DPS, a simplified rundown of this phase would look like:

 

Tank 1 is hit (taunt duration)

Tank 2 is hit (taunt duration)

Tank 1 is hit (mass taunt duration)

Tank 2 is hit (mass taunt duration)

Tank 1 is hit (taunt duration)

Tank 2 is hit (taunt duration)

Healer 1 is hit once

Healer 2 is hit once

Tank 1 is hit (taunt duration)

DPS 1 is hit once

Tank 2 is hit (taunt duration)

DPS 2 is hit once

DPS 3 is hit once

Tank 1 is hit (taunt duration)

Tank 2 is hit (taunt duration)

DPS 4 is hit once

Repeat.

 

Keep in mind that is a simplified rotation. In reality, certain DPS will be overtaking the healers threat repeatedly, as well as other DPS' threat. This is the reason for the healing priority. Tanks always need to be healed up first and foremost. The longer they stay alive to taunt, and pop cooldowns (very important), the longer you have. Once they're down, it's a matter of dragging out your wipe long enough to get the kill. Your highest threat DPS will probably get hit 2-3 times for every 1 time your healers or lowest DPS get hit, so they need heals the second most...just enough to allow them to take a 10-15k hit, then back on the tanks. With the exception of tanks, no one should ever take a consecutive hit, and should not take a second hit for another 30 seconds or so (two sets of taunts + ~6 seconds of hits on other DPS), if not longer once mass taunts are back off cooldown (if the boss is not dead).

Edited October 25, 2012 by Synavix