Levitate ALL the Things!

Sorry for posting so many of these lately, but farming on my Priest has become an endless source of amusement for me.  Did you know you can levitate both Tilled and Untilled Soil?

I grew turnips today because my husband requested that I try levitating a root vegetable.  Perhaps tomorrow I should try carrots.

So far I’ve discovered I can levitate tangled, parched, infested, alluring and growing crops. Unfortunately it’s not possible to levitate wild crops or occupied soil.  (But wouldn’t it have been awesome if you could lift up the occupied soil and reveal the virmen there?)

My Priest is still only level 85, so she hasn’t been gaining any rep with the Tillers yet and it will be a while before she has access to a plow — but I really want to see if it’s possible to plow while levitating.  If you’re a Priest with access to a plow please test it out and show me screenshots!  Bonus points if you’re in shadowform at the time, because a shadow plow has got to be more amusing than a normal plow.

Priest Farming is the Best Farming

Ok, so, not only can Smite healing hit Runty crops, but it turns out that crops can be Levitated!

I discovered this when I went to give myself the speed boost from Levitate and instead created a flying pumpkin.  I nearly died laughing!

Gotta Protect Those Runty Crops

Runty crops are smaller and more delicate than other crops, and so it only makes sense that they’d need a little extra care, but this is ridiculous:

For some reason Smite healing can hit Runty crops and even proc Divine Aegis shields on a critical hit.  Too funny!

Breaking the Will of the Emperor

Must catch up on boss kill posts…  I still have two bosses from Heart of Fear to write up after this…

We’ve killed Will of the Emperor 3 weeks in a row now.  This fight is much easier than Elegon, but it’ll probably still take a few attempts for your tanks and melee to learn the dance.

Ingredients

We used the following raid composition:

• 2 Tanks
• 2 Healers
• 6 DPS (3 ranged, 1 melee on the boss full time, 1 melee tanking the Emperor’s Strength and helping kill adds)

Phase 1:  Add Tutorial

Will of the Emperor starts off deceptively easy.  Every few seconds a new set of adds will spawn and it will be trivially simple to DPS them down quickly.  This might lull you into a false sense of security; however, once the two bosses spawn the fight becomes considerably more difficult.  Think of the first 90 seconds as a brief tutorial where you’ll be introduced to the three types of adds you’ll have to deal with.

• Emperor’s Rage:  These spawn two at a time from the alcoves at the far end of the room. They will fixate on random players, meleeing for moderate damage if they reach their target.  Although they die quickly they are much lower priority than the other adds.  It’s best to CC or slow them while you kill the more dangerous adds.  Stunning them causes them to change targets, which is very effective for getting them off your healers.  If you’re a Druid (as I am) the talent Faerie Swarm is particularly good for this fight, as it’s a free, instant, spammable slow that can be cast on multiple targets simultaneously.  (**Edit: I know the tooltip on Faerie Swarm says only one target can be slowed at one time, but the debuff is appearing on both adds and they appear slowed when I use it, so I assume that either the tooltip is wrong or there’s a bug working in my favor for once.)

• Emperor’s Strength: They spawn one at a time from alcoves about half-way around the back wall.  They have a normal aggro table but they do NOT melee their target, so pretty much anyone can tank them, (except for the actual tanks).  We assigned our Frost DK to these guys, since he can just throw on Blood Presence and easily hold aggro.  Keep them away from the tanks and healers, since they do an AoE stun called Energizing Smash which will really screw up the tanks’ ability to dodge Devastating Combos.  The stun is pretty easy to avoid as long as you stand right on top of the add and just run through him to avoid the effect, but your healers will be much happier if you don’t make them move to avoid it.  Every time Energizing Smash is cast the stun effect grows larger, so you want to kill them before it gets too large for the tanks to avoid.

• Emperor’s Courage:  These are the most dangerous adds and should be your top priority.  They spawn one at a time from the alcoves on either side of the room closest to the entrance and will fixate on the tank furthest away from them.  If they reach the tank they will use Impending Thrust, applying a stacking debuff that reduces the tank’s movement speed by 25% per stack for 10 seconds.  This will definitely prevent your tank from dodging the Devastating Combos, and probably lead to a wipe.  Emperor’s Courage are immune to attacks from the front, so your DPS must get behind them quickly.  Ideally DPS will already be in place as the Courage spawns.

This encounter is a long endurance test and there is very little damage going out during this first phase.  Healers should conserve their mana by healing as little as possible until the bosses spawn.

Phase 2: Kill the Adds.  Stop DPSing the Boss and Kill the Adds.  I Mean It.  That Means YOU, Mr. Uberleet Deeps!

The absolute most important part of this fight is killing the adds.  It will be very tempting for your DPS players to ignore the adds and focus on the boss, but they must resist that urge.  If you fall behind on the adds you will probably be overrun with them and wipe.  Each wave of adds should be dead before the next one spawns, and Emperor’s Courage should die before reaching the tanks.  We did assign our Rogue to full-time boss duty, but otherwise no one should be damaging the boss unless all adds are dead.

Instead of just describing our boss positioning, I decided to make a little annotated diagram.  Isn’t it fancy? 

The two bosses will spawn from alcoves next to where the Emperor’s Rage adds spawn.  The tanks need to pick them up and bring them over to the bottom of the staircases.  (You don’t want to tank them where they spawn because that area will soon be full of adds, and dealing with Devastating Combo and add abilities in the same area would be pretty difficult.)  To complicate matters, each boss casts Magnetic Armor on his main aggro target.  Magnetic Armor pulls the tank to the boss if the tank moves more than 15 yards away from the boss, so the bosses can only be moved very slowly and carefully.

Healers should be prepared for pretty substantial damage to the tanks, because those melee swings are no joke.  We assigned one healer to each tank because it can be difficult to keep both tanks in range when they are dodging the boss combos, but we still cross-heal quite a bit.

Devastating Combo

The two bosses have an energy bar that fills at the rate of 1 energy per second, up to a max of 20 energy.  When the energy bar is full they perform a Devastating Combo: a series of 5 attacks over 15 seconds.  These attacks must be physically dodged — you must move out of their area of effect in order to avoid taking damage from them.  The direction of each attack is clearly telegraphed by the boss animations, so it’s simply a matter of practice and it shouldn’t be long before your tanks and melee learn to get out of the way.

There’s two possible attacks, chosen at random, that make up the Devastating Combos:

• Devastating Arc: The boss deals damage to an area either to the left, right or directly in front of him.  You can tell which by watching how he holds his sword: Over the left shoulder the attack will be to the right; over the right shoulder the attack will be to the left; pointing forward the attack will be in front of him.  Anyone hit by Devastating Arc will get a stacking debuff that reduces their armor by 10% per stack.  This can be very dangerous.

• Stomp: Deals damage in a 12 yard radius around the boss, but also stuns anyone caught in it for 2 seconds — which means you are very likely to eat a Devastating Arc if you get hit by this.  That 12 yard range is pretty evil too, since the tank can’t move more than 15 yards away from the boss without being gripped back by Magnetic Armor.  Again, it will take your tanks a bit of practice to learn where the sweet spot is.  If the boss is about to cast Stomp he will hold his sword above his head.

While your tanks are learning to dodge the combos they will probably take a significant amount of damage.  Successfully dodging Devastating Combo will greatly reduce the incidence of tank death.

The other reason you want your tanks and melee to successfully avoid Devastating Combos is that doing so will grant them the extra ability Opportunistic Strike.  This will appear as an extra action button in the UI, (as so many extra abilities do nowadays).  Opportunistic Strike deals 500k damage in 10-man normal mode, so the more often it can be used the better.  If you’d rather use a keybind than click the button use the following macro, which works on any of Blizzard’s extra action abilities:

/click ExtraActionButton1

Though you might have already known that, since I’ve been using that macro since Dragon Soul.

Titan Gas

Every 2 mins 30 seconds the room will fill with Titan Gas for 20 seconds, dealing AoE damage to the entire raid and increasing the damage done by the bosses/adds by 25%.  Melee DPS is also increased by 50% during this time (the poor ranged DPS get nothing).  No adds spawn during the gas phases, so kill all the adds before Titan Gas and burn the boss.  This is the best time to use Bloodlust/Heroism and other DPS cooldowns.  Since the bosses share a health pool we marked one boss to focus down so we could take advantage of as many debuffs as possible.  DoT classes will probably still want to multidot both.

All ranged DPS should stack up on the healers to take advantage of AoE healing.  This is a good time to rotate raid healing cooldowns.  We were two-healing, so I covered the first and third Titan Gas phases with Tranquility and our Mistweaver Monk covered the second with… whatever it is that Monks use for such things.  >.>  We had our Shadow Priest help cover the second with Vampiric Embrace.  I also put Symbiosis on our Shadow Priest to give him a baby Tranquility to use in case of emergencies.

Getting the Kill

As soon as you have the adds under control and your tanks/melee have learned to dodge Devastating Combo a kill is inevitable.  It’s a long fight, so stay focused and resist the urge to ignore the adds.  Even when the boss is low on health you should continue to properly deal with the mechanics, unless you are running right up against the enrage timer.  They’ll die, just be patient.

Good luck and have fun!

Geek Love is the Best Love

For the last couple of years I’ve been experiencing random pain that doesn’t seem to have a cause, at least not according to several doctors I’ve consulted.  This week I’ve been experiencing a new kind of pain that, once again, doesn’t appear to have a cause.  This morning I was curled up in bed feeling sorry for myself and my husband decided to come hold me for a while and stroke my hair to comfort me, and we had the following conversation:

Me: I hurt.  I think I’m broken.  I’m probably defective.  You should take me back and get an exchange.  I think I’m still under warranty.

My Husband: Nah, wives are like yaks.  They don’t do exchanges.

Me: You should send someone out to find you one that isn’t a Mean, Smelly, Angry, Stabby, Very Bad Wife.

My Husband: (laughs)  But I like my yak!

Me: Awwww….   ^_^

We Killed Elegon and You Can Too!

All righty, that’s more than enough procrastinating.  We killed Elegon over two weeks ago, it’s high time I got cracking and wrote this here boss post.

Elegon is the most difficult fight in normal Mogu’shan Vaults.  This is not so much because of the mechanics themselves, but rather because of the unforgiving enrage timer.  The first time we managed to reach the final phase we simultaneously hit the hard enrage (with the boss at about 40% health).  Our next few attempts we managed to find ways to save time.  Which is probably a good way to approach the fight actually: Work on learning how to handle the mechanics and then work on shaving time off each phase.

What You’ll Need

There’s not a lot of flexibility in terms of raid composition for this encounter:

• 6 DPS in order to effectively deal with the Energy Charge adds in Phase 2.
• 2 tanks
• 2 healers

To give you some idea of the DPS requirements, on our first kill we had an average of over 97k DPS per damage dealer.  But don’t worry too much if that looks hard to pull off right now — remember that you will be stacking a damage increasing debuff on Elegon which will greatly increase the amount of DPS you’ll be capable of doing.

Oh, and both our healers did more than 50k HPS; but again, there’s a buff that increases the amount of healing people receive while standing in the center ring.

Phase 1: Entering defensive mode. Disabling output failsafes.

We had all the ranged DPS and healers stack up next to the console that starts the fight, just inside the center ring.  Standing in the ring causes you to gain two debuffs, one of which causes you to take 5% more damage per stack and the other which causes you to deal additional damage and receive additional healing.  There’s a sweet spot on the very edge of the ring where you can simply jump to reset your stacks, which can be handy for reducing movement; however, I found that it was a bit tricky to find it again when the phases repeated.  Healers can actually stand outside of the ring most of the time (at least on normal difficulty) to reduce the amount of damage they take and avoid having to move to reset stacks, but if a healer takes damage they should step into the ring to take advantage of the healing buff.

Elegon himself is immobile in the center of the room.  Since the room is very large the tank and melee DPS might get out of range of the healers.  We had our tanks angle the boss so that the tank’s back was about in line with the first pillar next to the console.  This kept everyone in range of heals but prevented the raid from being hit by Elegon’s breath attack.

We found that it wasn’t necessary for people to reset their stacks very often.  As long as everyone reset their stacks right before an add exploded (melee included) the damage was easily healable.  Tanks reset their stacks every second add by taunt-swapping the boss.

The current off-tank should grab each Celestial Protector add and bring it close to the ranged stack point.  These adds take increased damage while standing inside the ring, but they must die outside the ring or they will deal additional AoE damage when they die.  DPS need to pay attention and not kill the add until it’s outside the ring.  This is complicated a bit by the fact that the adds will not move while they are casting.  Give your tanks enough time to get them into position.

Healers need to remember to quickly dispell the Closed Circuit healing debuff that is applied to random people in this phase.  Two debuffs are applied at the same time, and it’s cast about every 12 seconds, so each healer will need to dispell one person.

The challenge of this phase was balancing DPS on the adds with DPS on Elegon himself.  In order to beat the enrage timer we needed to push Elegon into the next phase right after the second add died.  You do NOT want to get a new add spawning just as Elegon hits a transition.  It’s possible to recover from this if you are very quick to kill the add and move into position for Phase 2, but it takes DPS away from Elegon.  It also generally causes people to get flustered and panicky, which can lead to mistakes.

Phase 2: Approach! Feel the power of the titans!

This phase is pretty simple, but executing it well might take a bit of practice.  You’ll want to assign one DPS to each of the 6 pillars around the ring.  These DPS players need to be able to quickly kill the Energy Charges before they hit the pillars.  This may be more difficult for DoT classes or any spec with low burst.  Tanks (and possibly healers) can assist the DPS players as necessary.  The Monk ability Touch of Death is particularly useful for quickly killing an add.

Every successive wave travels faster, so at some point you’ll be unable to kill the wave and an add will hit a pillar and trigger Phase 3.  Every wave of adds also adds a stacking debuff to Elegon, causing him to take an extra 10% damage per stack.  Thankfully, even the wave you don’t kill will add a stack.  We managed to kill 4 waves and then ignored the adds and focused on the boss during the 5th wave.  This gave us a 50% damage increase after the first Phase 2, and a 100% increase going into the final phase.

There is a slight pause between each wave of adds.  This is the ideal time for the DPS to quickly drop their stacks and maybe throw a bit of extra DPS at Elegon himself.

There should be one healer and one tank on each side of the room.  Every time an Energy Charge dies it will deal a small amount of AoE damage to the raid, but as long as the DPS are managing their stacks this shouldn’t be much of an issue.  This is a great time for healers to regenerate some mana.  Healers should also stay near the middle pillar on their side to keep everyone in range.

Phase 3: Drawing from reserve power.

As soon as an Energy Charge reaches a pillar Phase 3 will begin.  The inner ring will collapse — make sure you don’t fall to your death! — and each pillar will become a targetable mob called an Empyreal Focus.  These foci will be linked together by Energy Conduits that deal high damage to anyone attempting to walk through them.  Every so often, Elegon will also place Energy Cascade fail patches under random raid members.  You must move out of these immediately to avoid taking lethal damage.  Each Energy Cascade will spawn a Cosmic Spark add.  These adds melee extremely hard, but they can be CCed and picked up by the tanks.

We had some difficulty with this stage at first, but we discovered a couple of ways to make it easier.  For one thing, you may have noticed from my header screenshot that we got the achievement on this boss.  This is because we realized that getting the achievement would actually make the fight easier.  You see, at first we were getting overwhelmed with Cosmic Spark adds.  Then we realized that every time a pillar was brought to zero health Elegon gains a stack of Overloaded, increasing his damage and casting speed by 20%.  Notice the casting speed part: The longer it takes to kill the pillars the more adds he’s going to summon.  Killing the pillars both pushes Elegon into the next phase faster and greatly limits the number of adds you have to deal with.  Therefore, each DPS player was responsible for killing their own pillar.

Once the six pillars were dead we grouped up again at the main console.  This can be a bit chaotic, as there are still fail patches to be avoided and adds to deal with.  You want to avoid being meleed by the adds if at all possible.  Stun them, CC them or kite them.  As soon as the inner platform reforms, drag the adds into the ring and kill them quickly — they’ll be taking additional damage there, but also dealing additional damage too.

Transition Back to Phase 1, and the Cycle Repeats

When the platform reappears a tank must be ready to immediately pick up the boss, otherwise Elegon will death grip the entire raid to him.  It’s possible to use this death grip strategically to kite the Cosmic Sparks into the inner ring, but this is dangerous.  For one thing, the grip deals a fair amount of raid-wide damage.  If anyone is low on health (from being meleed by adds, for example) they may be killed by it.  For another thing, people are likely to become disoriented by the grip, and may be slow to get back into position.  We found it was safer for a tank to just pick up the boss.

After that Phases 1-3 repeat again.  The only difference is that there’s more health to burn through in the second Phase 1, so we kill three Celestial Protectors instead of two.

Final Phase: Let the energies consume you!

After the second cycle is over the final stage begins, which lasts until the end of the encounter.  As soon as the platform reappears everyone should move into the inner ring.  Anyone standing outside the ring will take very high damage at this point.  Even inside the ring there will be a lot of AoE damage.  This is the point when we used Bloodlust and started rotating raid healing cooldowns.  Our Shadow Priest also uses Vampiric Embrace at this point to help out with healing.  Use personal survival cooldowns, healthstones, etc.

Don’t forget to step out of the ring quickly to drop your stacks!  I found that stepping out every three stacks seemed to be ideal at this point.  If you let your stacks build up too high your health will start dropping and you may not be able to survive stepping out to reset them.

Otherwise, just DPS the boss down as quickly as possible.  Good luck!

Pause in the Updating Schedule

So, not only have I not written anything but raid guides since MoP launched, recently I haven’t even written any of the guides!  I’m a bad, lazy blogger and I beg your forgiveness!  This isn’t even a full post but rather a quick update to let you all know that I am still alive and planning to update more soon.

That Guild is 6/6 in Mogu’shan Vaults now.  We got Elegon down on Thurs. Oct. 25th and Will of the Emperor down on Mon. Oct. 29th.  On Tuesday of this week we cleared Mogu’shan Vaults in less than 3 hours and got a bit of a start on the first boss of Heart of Fear.  So I better get cracking on those boss posts or I’m going to end up with a bit of a backlog!