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!