*Crawls Into a Hole to Hide*

Yes, yes, it appears we will be trying out Bastion of Twilight tonight. (blah, blah, blah...you know with all the "if I get picked to go" stuff goes here) And since I picked a feature boss last week I figured I'd do the same this week. However, this week, I went with the one I seem to be most afraid of.

Let me just say...."OMG, I'M SCARED OF HALFUS AND HIS DRAGONS!" Why, you may ask? Well it's like Omnitron Council on crack. Apparently, there are 5 dragons but only three will be active. Which dragons you get is random each week!

This is a total "If Then" fight. If this dragon is active, so this but if that dragon is active to that instead. You know, that sort of thing. Holy crap this is going to be confusing.

However, based on what I've studied, this is what I know.

The first dragon I'll talk about is the Slate Dragon. When he is up, Halfus will gain Malevolent Strikes. This applies a healing debuff, and will require the tanks to swap to drop the stacks. Releasing this dragon will cause the boss to periodically be stunned for 12 seconds.

Secondly lets talk about Storm Rider. Activating this dragon will cause Halfus to gains a shadow nova attack. It does roughly 30k shadow damage and knocks everyone back. The good thing about releasing this boss is it will allow you to interrupt the scary nova attack. The not so nice part, is it seems the first shadow nova will go off regardless and you're healers will have to deal with the damage before you're able to release the dragon and start interrupts.

Next is Nether Scion. If he's up Halfus’ attack speed will double. Releasing him will cast a debuff that will reduce his chance to hit, attack speed, and damage done by 25%.

Then there are the stupid Emerald Whelps! If they are up the dragon gains scorching breath and behaves much like the bost in Grim Bartol. You know the one that will engulf everything in front of him in a purple flame. Yep, nice repeat of the mechanic Bliz. If you release the whelps, then they case a stacking poision that reduces the dragon's damage done. But you know...don't be stupid...get out of the way! Your healer will loves you!

Lastly is the Time Warden. When active the dragon will spit random fireballs at people. *sigh* Thanks!

So that's how the adds go. From what I can find, the ideal way to handle them is to kill the 2 most annoying drakes first and then focus on the boss.

And if that's not enough, below 50% Halfus will periodically cast Furious Roar, which will deal somewhere around 10K dps to everyone in the party and knock them back.

Oh and did I mention he has a 6 minute enrage timer? Yep, fun times!

Happy Hunting everyone.

Interesting Facts...

1 - We 2 shot Magmaw last night (our second time into BWD)
2 - We 6 (or 7 or 8ish) shot Omitron Council
3 - We were not prepared for anything past that - planning wise
4 - Throne of Four Winds is CRAZY!
5 - Raid bosses are rigged to not drop cloth healer lootz!

Raid night number two was a big success. Though a little shocking since we didn't know there would be a raid #2 until Tuesday night. Our all powerful, all knowing raid leaders came up with this wonderful plan to alternate Monday and Wednesday raid nights between Twilight Baston and Deathwing Decent. This was designed to allow for more people to be able to raid each week.

Both Monday and Wednesday night's raid queue had at least 15 people in it. Not to mention both filled up unbelievably fast. The idea was for those people that had not been able to attend on Monday to take preference over those that had.

Because of this, completely reasonable logic, I was pretty sure Kyn and I would not be needed last night. However, I assume they still wanted to fill the raid at least half way with people that already knew that fight and would be able to help those that hadn't.

If that was the purpose, it worked! As I said, we were able to 2 shot the boss with no problems at all. Honestly, it would probably have been a one shot except we had a ranged dps accidentally step too far away from the boss. Doing so caused the lava pillar to spawn in the middle of the ranged and melee, which as everyone knows also spawns the parasites, which caused way too many people to get infected thus caused a wipe.

It also seemed that no one expected us to down the Omnitron Council as quickly as we did since research hadn't really been done on the bosses after them. It was funny to see people standing around wondering what to do next. The suggestion was offered to end the raid early but being the adventurous people that we are, we decided to give the first boss in Throne of Four Winds a go.

Now this is normally when I would tell you how the fight mechanics work and what I learned from it. Sadly, the only thing I can tell you is there is a lot of jumping and switching and switching back and full on cray stuff going on. Basically there is 3 platforms and each holds a "boss". You divide your group up between them and when certain things happen, part of those groups have to jump from on platform to another, wait for some big event, then rush back and hope the people they left behind didn't die.

So yeah, totally CRAZY stuff. I'm sure we'll get it, and it was very fun and educational, to at least see the fight. But we'll venture in next time, a little more prepared!

Have a wonderful weekend and happy hunting everyone.

BWD In Review

Well, they say pictures are worth a thousand words. So there is mine! I'm very proud of what the guild was able to do in our first Cata progression run.

I guess you're wanting details, or maybe not, but I'll give them to you anyway.

Our raid composition went something like this:
Tank 1: Druid
Tank 2: Warrior
Healer 1 and 2: Druid
Healer 3: Priest
Melee DPS: Warrior, Death Knight, Druid
Ranged DPS: Mage, Druid

Yes, you are reading correctly. There were 4 (count them again 4) druids in our raid.

We did things a little differently than what I discussed in my post yesterday. But all in all the fight went pretty much the same as everything I had been reading. Instead of having the ranged DPS and healers form a group in the back, we all stacked up with the melee.

Because we were under the understanding that Magmaw would only shoot the flame pillars under the people that were out of his melee range, it made sense to have the casters and healer to group up on the melee. We had our frost DK staying towards the back of the group so the pillars would pop under him and he was then responsible for kiting the adds around until they died.

This strategy worked very well, once we had the kiting under control. When done correctly the kiter did not take much damage at all and allowed the healers to focus on the massive damage going towards the tank.

Don't get me wrong, this was a very healer intensive fight and I was battling with my mana pool the entire time. The saving grace for me was phase 2. Phase 2 did allow me to channel my mana regen abilities. Sadly I did learn that this was just one of those bosses that my shadow fend would NOT attack so he did me no good at all. Thankfully, I found the glory of a little thing called Potion of Concentration. This was a life saver....literally! (Thanks Cart!)

Honestly, now that we've completed the fight, this guy isn't nearly as scary as I had originally expected. Yes, he's hard and it's taxing on everyone in your raid. It requires you to be able to work together and communicate. Thankfully, our guild is good at mechanical fights. We know when to move and don't take it personally if someone yells for us to GTFO of the bad stuff on the ground!

We did get a couple of good attempts in on the second fight but that will be another post for a later time.

Have a wonderful week and happy hunting!

Black Wing Decent - Enter into Hell!

As it stands, today is the first venture into BWD for Whispers of the Fallen. As a guild we are schedule to make our first attempts tonight at 8:00 PM EST.

Every Monday and Wednesday for last 4 weeks or so, we've been running scheduled heroic nights as a guild. We've put together as many groups as we've had people signed up and ran for gear upgrades to prepare us for this fight.

Personally, there are a couple of items I would have liked to have had before going in but otherwise I think I'm as ready as I can be. With buff food, potions, flasks and lots of studying I'll head into the raid tonight as long as they don't choose to sit me.

As I had imaged, the first raid queue filled up with 10 people in less than 60 seconds. Last check, we actually have 15 guild members signed up.

Well, none of that is the point of today's post. Mainly, I'm going to run a break down of the first boss encounter so that I can review the differences between the strategy and the actual event tomorrow.

Based on my research I know the following;
1 - Magmaw is going to nomnom on the tanks faces
2 - Magmaw does not move for the entire fight.
3 - Magmaw is going to shoot pillars of lava from the floor
4 - All ranged need to group up and move according to the lava pillars
5 - Aggro resets after phase 2 ends and before going back to phase 1
6 - Many adds! Deal with them!

Ok, so I know more than that.

During phase 1, the raid will break into 3 groups and resemble something like this:

-------------------------------------BOSS!--------------------------------------
................Melee DPS........................... TANK!............................


.................Ranged Spot 1.................................Ranged Spot 2.....

As the fight progresses, Magmaw will use an ability that shoots lava pillars out of the ground under the ranged group. When this happens the ranged and all healers need to quickly move to their second designated area. Once the pillar spawns, a wave of Lava Parasites will spawn in the previous spot. The ranged dps has to dps them down before any of them can reach the caster group. This means using push backs, slow abilities or anything that can prevent them from reaching the dps and healers.

The second thing that needs to be handled is Lava Spew. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be avoidable and the healers will have to heal through it. Because it comes shortly after the lava parasites, it's important to kill the adds as quickly as possible.

Lastly, there is Ignition. This will fill half the room with fire that looks like it's coming out of steam vents. Obviously, we move out of this because we're all experienced and responsible raid members that will not stand in bad stuff.

The first phase of this fight seems to be a test of healer mana. There is no enrage timer, as long as there is always someone in the melee range of Magmaw, he will not enrage. So keeping everyone topped off as much as possible is key.

During phase 2, Magmaw is going to cast mangle on the current tank and do massive amounts of damage. In addition he has second ability called Massive Crash. This does exactly what it says, it will do massive damage to the already hurting tank. Again, this has to be healed through. Tanks should have mitigation techniques ready and use them during this part of the fight.

Secondly, during phase two, two of the melee dps will need to use the spikes to jump onto Magmaws head. This will allow Magmaw to remain down for 30 seconds and increase the amount of damage done to him.

During phase two, the only damage being delt should be to the target tank. This is a good time to have your healers pop their regen abilities because it may be the only change they get during this fight.

Last thing to remember is that at the end of phase 2 before the restart of phase 1, Magmaw drops aggro. This will be where the tank switch happens and dps need to allow time for the new tank to gain aggro.

Though this fight seems complex, it appears to be more about endurance and less about complexity. If the healers can make their mana last and the group is aware of what's going on, it should be easily managed.

Well that's about it for me today. We'll see how close, or far off, I was based on my actual experiences tonight!

Good luck and happy hunting everyone!