Setting up Grid to deal with Penetrating Cold

The last step in killing heroic Anub'arak is dealing with Penetrating Cold. The easiest way for us to do this was to have all the healers install GridStatusRaidIcons if they didn't already have it.

Wootshock provides the following setup information

First open up the configuration

/grid config

Go to Grid>Status and click on Auras. Type into the Debuffs, add new debuffs textbox Penetrating Cold and press enter

Go to Grid>Status click on Raid Target Icon: Player (not Player Target). Note the Priority. Click on the Color Box. Raise the percentage bar up to 100% and press Okay.

Go to Grid>Status>Auras and click on Debuff: Penetrating Cold. Reduce the Priority to 1 below whatever Raid Target Icon: Player was set to.

Go to Grid>Frame and click on Center Icon. Check the boxes for Debuff: Penetrating Cold and Raid Target Icon: Player

Faction Champions Heroic

So my theory on Faction Champions is to stop treating it like a PvP fight. Most people when they first see the fight think "Hey, it's a PvP fight, let's treat it like PvP".

This is incorrect for a few reasons.

The first is that from a gearing perspective, you're still dealing with level 83 mobs who need a lot of spell hit, and aren't affected in the same way by resilience. So for gearing you definitely want to be using your PvE gear and in many cases your PvE spec.

Secondly, what makes PvP challenging are unpredictable opponents who are constantly adapting and changing their strategy based on what you do. Faction Champions is a fight with predictable PvE enemies who behave in predictable ways.

Third, the health pools are completely different. In PvP a lot of the game is about co-ordinating CC, counters, and target switches rapidly to gain a kill. In Faction Champions the fight is about muscling your way through NPC opponents one at a time. The sheer size of the health pools means you're not really interested in target switching at all.

For my guild the best way to do this fight is to approach it as a PvE fight, but apply PvP knowledge to better understand the PvE mechanics of what is going on and what is likely to happen.

First and foremost we assign a tank to control each enemy melee. Since they are not tauntable, you tank your enemy melee much like you might tank something in PvP. Hamstring, Chains of Ice, Concussion Blow, Piercing Howl, Charge Stun, Death Grip, etc. Every enemy melee is handled by one of our warriors and Death Knights. Once you have done this you basically treat every enemy melee as a Buru the Gorger. Yes, they choose their own targets, but when you are chosen you just run away and kite them. Every so often they might get close to you, but your tank can use a stun or you can use a cooldown to take a hit and not die. Just imagine there are 4 Buru the Gorgers who constantly target switch - because in many respects that's exactly what they are.

Secondly, stick an interrupter on each enemy healer.

Thirdly stick some non-breakable CC on enemy DPS. This includes Cyclone, Hex, Stuns and to a lesser extent, warlock fear. Counterspells from mages are also extremely useful.

Finally, make sure there's 1-2 people who are aware they will spend 90% of the time dispelling, particularly the kill target.

From there it almost doesn't matter what order you kill the opponents in. Since you have assignments and the fight is very much about controlling the enemy melee, slowing down their ranged damage and negating their healers, just about any kill order could work.

Learning Northrend Beats Heroic

Northrend Beasts has been a real challenge.

Gormok

• We use a 2 tank rotation.
• We DPS all Snobolds immediately
• Isisnile tanks first up to 3 stacks
• I tank going to 4 stacks. In the last 20 seconds I pop both Heart of Iron and Eltrigg's Oath
• Isis tanks up to 4 stacks while I am healed through my 4 stack bleed. Isis gets a Guardian Spirit or a Bubble/Sacrifice moving into the 4th stack.
• Isis bubble cleanses the 4 stack bleed and I get a Pain Suppression as I'm taking over. I pop Survival Instincts and Barkskin moving into 3 stacks, which is about when he usually dies.

Worms

We've been bloodlusting on the first worm, Acidmaw. Our goal is to burn down Acidmaw before the 2nd submerge.

There's a lot of sources of death on worms. The most common are:

• Melee engaging before a tank has aggro on the worm
• People getting knocked into poison clouds
• Ranged standing too close to each other for burning bile.

Icehowl

Generally speaking the feeling in the guild is if we can get an attempt with 25 people standing gonig into the Icehowl phase, he'll die. So far the best we've had is 24 people standing and we wiped at 1%. The whole Icehowl phase is very straightforward we just need to work on Jormungers more.

That said, we use Frost Aura, we spread healers out, we use Shattering Throw on the second stun combined with speed potions at that time.

Ulduar Raid last night

Things we've noticed in Ulduar since the patch

• FL+4 continues to move while shutdown
• On XT, you can't disable 2 patches anymore by tanking him on the side of the room. You can, however, disable 1 of the patches by tanking him in the corner, so that's what we did.
• The Kologarn achievement Rubble and Roll has changed. It now requires only killing 25 Rubble over the course of fighting him, rather than 25 Rubble within 10 seconds. This makes the achievement much easier.
• On Thorim, the adds seem much more likely to follow the tunnel group down the tunnel. This is somewhat annoying but is countered easily enough by having people in the arena taunt/aggro the adds.
• Also on Thorim, the DBM timer for the activation of hard mode was slightly off sync with the actual activation of hard mode. I activated the event with 2-3 seconds remaining (which is what I usually do) and Sif was just barely leaving by about 0.5 seconds.
• Although there are reports of Steelbreaker's Overpower debuff lasting 35 seconds but the explosion still happening at 30 seconds, this does not seem to be the case for us. The debuff was still timed correctly for us.

Steelbreaker wipes

I love World of Logs.

Attempt #1: Insufficient DPS. Bigunit Meltdown.

Attempt #2: Didn't make it to P3

Attempt #3: Uninterrupted lightning whirl meant Slapswell died early, lack dps, no soaker

Attempt #4: Insufficient DPS. Bigunit Meltdown.

Attempt #5: Combat log confirms Demoralizing Shout fell off, Isis died

Attempt #6: Slapswell died during the third tank phase to the raid damage. The last direct heal was 12 seconds before his death. Static Disruption + High Voltage = owwwie.

Attempt #7: Slightly late taunt results in Marteeni dying.

Attempt #8: Reapafied died during the third tank phase to the raid damage. Last direct heal was 10 seconds before his death. Static Disruption + HIgh Voltage = owwwie.

Attempt #9: Bigunit death in at start of P3 due to melee damage

Attempt #10: Bigunit dies to Fusion Punch in phase 1 before we downed Molegim

Attempt #11: Bigunit dies to melee damage during phase 2. This may have been the attempt where we moved around more than usual causing a lapse in healing

Attempt #12: Nujai Divine Sacrifice death

Attempt #13: Insufficient DPS. Bigunit meltdown

Attempt #14: Insufficient DPS. Bigunit meltdown

Tuesday's raid night

Wound up short-handed last night at raid start time. Senorita and Wootshock had a family dinner. Reapafied's account was hacked last week and he hasn't gotten it back yet. Lilithian and Deathpod had Blizzard authentication issues and Slapswell was on business so got in late.

I hate skipping raid nights. If there isn't something to do it has so many negative effects. First, it gives people an insecurity that in the future they could go out of their way to make a raid only to have it cancelled. This fear leads people to not try as hard to make the raid, which causes more attendance issues. Secondly, we only have 12 hours a week to raid so losing 3 hours is just terrible. Thirdly - doing "something" is usually better than sitting around at a meeting stone doing nothing.

So - we 20-manned Sarth 2 Drakes. A lot of people still needed the achievement, but we didn't want to give up a chance at Pennant Cloaks and Unsullied Cuffs (which wound up dropping). Turns out - 20-manning Sarth 2D really isn't that hard these days! Who knew? Especially if you down Shadron, burning through Tenebron and Vesperon is really kinda easy.

Three Lights in the Darkness

So our next challenge is Three Lights in the Darkness. We decided to exclude Hodir based on anecdotal advice on forums. Excluding Hodir means you lose the Ice Block save in the event of a death. In addition to everybody just generally playing tigther we had to make a few strat tweaks.

• Two healers are moved closer to the middle of the room in phase 1, so we can heal people more readily through things like Sara's Anger
• During the transition from phase 1 to phase 2 we treat it as strictly as blowing up Guardians during phase 1, we don't want any melee in range of the Guardian.
• Decursing is as big a deal as ever in phase 2. We had one person die when they got Curse of Doom and then jumped into the portal. The Doom went off and they died.
• Standing in Green lasers has never been a good idea, but more than ever without the save.
• During phase 3 you have to watch AOE on the brain. If you AOE the brain (say, Living Bomb) and get aggro from an Immortal Guardian, it can aggro on the mage before a tank has time to pick it up.

Overall it wasn't a bad night, getting Yogg to below 10% multiple times. Depending on how the schedule goes I expect we'll have Yogg+3 down this week.

In the coming raid week we are planning on working on:

• I Love the Smell of Saronite In the Morning
• Three Lights in the Darkness

1% Steelbreaker last wipe

Roydon happened to catch one of our best wipes ever on Fraps.

To give you some details of what's going on. In Steelbreaker last the main tank gets a debuff called Meltdown that causes him to explode after 30 seconds, killing the tank and anybody within 15 yards of him. In addition Steelbreaker performs Static Disruption and somebody not at melee range every 10-15 seconds. Static Disruption affects not only the target but everybody within 10 yards and is pretty much a wipe if more than 1 person is affected. Finally, anytime somebody dies during the final burn phase, Steelbreaker heals for 10% of his maximum health.

To handle Meltdown you need to plan on using a tank rotation. You are going to lose a tank every 30 seconds, and you have to burn through all his health before you run out of tanks. Whisperwind eleven uses Bigunit (Warrior), transition to Isisnile (Paladin), combat rez or soulstone Bigunit, who then takes it for a third tank set. If we haven't killed Steelbreaker by the time Bigunit blows up we lose.

To handle Static Disruption everybody stacks at melee range on top of each other except for the hunters. The hunters space themselves out at range so that they are the sole targets for Static Disruption.

Finally, in order to deal with the 10% health gain, nobody can die other than the tanks blowing themselves up. Since a tank blowing up takes out anybody near them, we form a triangle around Steelbreaker. 20 people in the raid form one point of the triangle, Isisnile is at the second point, and Bigunit is at the third, 15 yards apart from one another.

Which brings us now to this video. During the transition from Isisnile (tank phase #2) to Bigunit (tank phase #3), somehow (we're not sure how), Sychotic momentarily got aggro, but wasn't getting melee attacked. There are rumors of it being a bug with Fusion punch if the target of the Fusion Punch is no longer valid. Whatever the case may be, Sychotic got targetted with Meltdown, then Bigunit was tanking and got targetted for Meltdown. At 60,000 health left on Steelbreaker Sychotic's 30 second timer was up and he exploded in the middle of the raid, taking out 20 people and causing Steelbreaker to heal to full.

Steelbreaker down

We got Steelbreaker tonight. Here's some details of what we did

• Dropped down to 3 hunter soakers. Put a shaman with healing stream totem in their group as well as the shadow priest for Vamp Embrace to provide some extra peripheral healing on the soakers
• We relied on dropping in 3 tank phases. We stopped having our tanks run out when they are low and instead just used DBM range checker. /range - set it to 15 yards. Tank makes sure there is nobody else in range and as the countdown is coming they just stand there until the last second.
• We preplanned druid innervates onto healers that would need before Phase 3. When Brundir was at about 10% the feral druid and boomkin innervate the two holy priests who were, at this point, in desperate need of some mana. But you do it now so that you aren't wasting the GCD during the burn.
• Also at 10%, Isisnile (our 2nd tank) taunts Steelbreaker to gain a tonne of threat, Bigunit then immediately taunts back. This secures Isis as #2 on the threat list. As we go into the burn phase, Isis doesn't have to taunt during the first transition. Bigunit dies and Steelbreaker automatically turns onto Isisnile. This buys us a few extra seconds for the burn.
• And of course - full DPS consummables including speed pots and Wild Magic pots.

Congratulations Whisperwind Eleven! On to Yogg+3

Steelbreaker attempts

We've nailed Steelbreaker last phases 1 and 2.

Phase 1 the biggest risk is the MT not getting Fusion Punch cleansed off quickly enough and Steelbreaker being left in a Rune of Power for too long. Otherwise it's very straightforward.

Phase 2 the biggest risk is in positioning everybody correctly so the ranged DPS and healers correctly outrange the Overcharge coming from Brundir. The positioning is well demonstrated in TankSpot's Hard Mode IC video. Check 2:00 into video

Phase 3 we're having trouble coming up with the DPS required to kill Steelbreaker. WorldOfLogs has a cool feature that allows you to get DPS charts for only a specific part of the fight. This allows you to see how much damage people are putting out during the only part that really matters - the Steelbreaker burn.

So we got Steelbreaker to 3%, which has lead to the following possibilities for closing the deal

1. We could try going to a 4th tank transition, in which Isis is combat rezzed and tries to tank Steelbreaker in a 4th stack.

2. We could drop down to 5 healers and see if that's enough to keep everybody up

3. We can have Bigunit respec to Unrelenting Assault revenge spam for this fight, which is supposedly really good for his personal DPS

Hopefully we'll be back in there tonight. Bullydot's going to miss the raid and given that he was #1 last night, we might try Yogg+3 instead.

Steelbreaker Week 4

I say Steelbreaker Week 4, even though it doesn't feel like we've been working on it that long. For the last 6 weeks we skip Iron Council on the way to Yogg - I think most guilds do this. The idea is to kill Yogg and then backtrack for Council as time allows.

Well for a few weeks we'd kill Yogg with 1-2 hours left in the raid. This allowed for a little bit of Steelbreaker learning time followed by a Runemaster Molgeim kill.

The Good: Taking a glimpse at the boss gives everybody a context when they read web strats and watvh videos

The Bad: In 1 hour on a new boss, a lot of the time is spent remembering everything from the previous week and setting things up for that night's composition. This meant many Steelbreaker nights had very little "new lessons"

The Ugly: Because of the new lesson phenomena over 4 weeks it has lead to this feeling that we've been stuck on Steelbreaker for a really long time.

Fortunately, we finally got a solid 2.5 hours to work on Steelbreaker on Monday and got solid learning time.

We're using a 2 tank strategy for Steelbreaker. Warrior (Bigunit) on Steelbreaker, Isisnile (Paladin) on Molgeim and Brundir goes untanked and we heal through his damage.

Random tips:

• Elemental shamans can Thunderstorm to knock Brundir out of Rune of Power
• If an elemental shaman does this, it knocks Brundir 20 yards, which is the size of his Overload, which means DPS at the very edge of the Rune of Power don't have to move
• During Phase 2 we use a Death Knight to death grip Bundir to Steelbreaker's butt
• Our entire raid stacks on top of the Steelbreaker tank. The elemental shaman measures 20 yards from Brundir using Wind Shock as a reference. When Wind Shock goes out of range, she knows she safe from Overload and the whole raid stands on top of her. (Except for the melee and 3 ranged soakers of course)
• Melee, when running out on overloads, can (and I think should) run through Steelbreaker and through the rest of the raid. This keeps them in melee of Steelbreaker, reinforces a reference distance of safety and keeps them in range of heals as well as Nature Resist totem.
• We recently tried putting a glyphed Healing Stream totem in the same group as our ranged Hunter soakers - it does a significant amount of healing.
• We tried having a priest heal the soakers for a while but the soakers are all standing spread out so we switched to using a Paladin healer on soakers
• On the Brundir part of the phase, 1 person is assigned to interrupt only Lightning Whirls, while everybody else interrupts whatever.
• We switched to having DPS in phase 1 if a Rune of Power was close so that we didn't get a fresh Rune of Power just as we were trying to do a transition. We do DPS off in phase 2 if Overload is coming off cooldown just as we would transition to phase 3.
• When Brundir is getting low Warlocks Curse of Doom on Steelbreaker, timing it so that it goes off during phase 3
• When Brundir is at 10% we have all DOT classes switch to Steelbreaker to get a head start. Classes that benefit in some other way from a lead time switch at 3-5%
• As always, we try to bloodlust as soon into Phase 1 as possible, and everybody pops a DPS pot.
• 
  

Introduction

Question: Why is this blog here?

Answer: I believe in open sharing of information. I want to document the details of how Whisperwind Eleven is organized, how we raid, and what we learn. I want to share the details of our boss kill strats, the stuff hidden in the details.

Willferal recently joined Whisperwind Eleven to raid with us. Will is an absolutely phenomenal player with a great personality who really knows his stuff. He's also a member of Unholy Aura on his main Splitty. Somebody asked me recently - aren't you worried Will will share your strats with UA? To put simply, no - I don't worry about that. I want UA to be successful, I want all the Horde guilds on Whisperwind to be successful. If another Horde guild passes Whisperwind Eleven on progression that's fine - perhaps they'll return the favor. There are so many strats publicly available the truth is that downing bosses lies largely on reading strats off the web, having a good team, and then adapting those strats to your team. Finally it involves working out small details specific to your raid.

I had an applicant ask me where our private forums are. I was a bit confused by this, as we don't really have any private forums. I don't really care who reads our forums - it's not like we have leet strats we don't want other people to see.

I raided with Cobrakai on my warrior Joulez a few weeks back. They had an extra spot for Yogg-Saron learning and I was eager to see them down that guy. I worked hard to be a good raider - bringing mats and pots. Being spec'ced correctly. Following orders, being respectful to the raid leader and offering up observations as they came to me. I want to see Cobrakai be successful too.