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.
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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.