The difficulty in Siege is bothering me a bit. I don't know if it's just dumb plain easier than I was expecting, or if the abilities being used at least in normal mode are scaled so that they can be powered through by out-healing or out-DPSing them by a team with sufficient gear from the previous Heroic tier. The team is certainly well geared, probably averaging out to the high 530s, which isn't that exceptional considering most heroic guilds are averaging in the mid 540s, but it's certainly a hell of a lot more gear than most normal-mode guilds. Anyway, we'll see how it goes in the second half of the raid...
After a (relatively) quick and painless kill of the Sha of Pride, we got a bit stuck on Galakras and wound up spending all of our second night on him, struggling to work out how exactly to transition into phase 2. We came back on the third night, and struggled again for a bit, but after dropping a healer, realized how quickly adds died and that made the transition quite easy. We wound up killing it fairly quickly at that point, I think. With barely an hour left in raid, we walked up to the rather intimidating Iron Juggernaut and after a quick wipe, wound up hitting enrage on the second pull with about 1% left on the boss. Unsure if we just got lucky, we tried again and killed him in a couple of more pulls.
With about forty minutes remaining we walked into Orgrimmar itself and began clearing out a ton of trash. The courtyard is about as crowded as you might imagine a player-populated Orgrimmar might be on a moderately populated server - probably a bit overboard, but at least it was simple trash and went down quickly. I was expecting to spend a considerable amount of time on Dark Shaman, but our first attempt got them to 50% and the second (or third?) one got the kill. I was fairly stunned at that point.
Now, I'm all for taking credit when it's due, and I think our team is quite strong, but this seems ridiculous. To kill the 6th and 7th boss in a raid instance this quickly feels.... weak. Throne of Thunder had Jin'rokh, Primordious and Twins, who were just as silly, but they were three bosses out of a set of twelve and the others all demanded a fair amount of work. Perhaps these two along with the first two are the "gimmies" of this tier, leaving 10 bosses to work on, which I suppose is okay, but two bosses, back to back, that die quickly, to fairly sloppy play, feels... I guess weak is the best word for it.
Anyway. Last time I covered the first 3 bosses, and now it's tips time for the next 4.
Sha of Pride
This is fairly easy for tanks.
You'll be swapping with your co-tank on a very tight timer, so you need to be extremely alert to the Wounded Pride debuff. Do not let the boss melee your co-tank when that debuff is up, and never taunt while your debuff is ticking. Other than that, we handled one of the two prisons along with a healer who cheated in our direction, and picked up the small adds from casts of Reflection.
Leave the Manifestation of Pride to the DPS - we actually tanked in the opposite direction of the room from him, so that the DPS could take turns soaking the Pride rather than have it splash us all the time.
Lastly, as your Pride grows, watch out for casts of Swelling Pride, step AWAY from puddles below 50 Pride, step INTO your puddle after 50 pride, stand AWAY from people after 75 Pride, and at 100.... well, kill the boss before the next cast of Swelling Pride or you'll be permanently MC'd.
This one isn't too terribly hard. Same Heroism/Bloodlust for when the boss hits 30% and rip into him before he turns your entire raid.
Galakras
You'll either be the tower tank or the add tank. If your Healers overgear the instance, 2 healing it makes the fight a lot more manageable. 3 healing it leads to extra adds hanging about a bit longer, but it's not that big a deal.
Add tanking is fairly simple, keep Shaman interrupted and stunned as much as possible, kill banners, and for gods sake, watch Fracture that the Bonecrushers will cast on the Faction leaders. If the leaders die, the fight will reset. Stuns are great for interrupting them, then taunt them back, or have an Elemental Shaman or a Druid stand behind them and push them away. That's probably the hardest part of tanking the adds.
Tower tanking is also fairly simple, run in, agro the adds at the bottom, run up the stairs, don't fall down, engage the mini-boss at top, don't get knocked off. I found turning off unit frames and turning off floating combat text for this fight helped considerably, as the area is small, the graphic is confusing, and doesn't display the area affected, and your line of sight is interrupted by flying drakes. Once the mini boss dies, drag any adds up to the archers and cleave everything down. Do that twice and you're ready to transition.
Ideally, you want to transition without any adds. Shaman will heal the boss and Bonecrushers will still try to kill the Faction leaders, and if they die, you will still wipe.
We wound up lining up in a row, everyone stacked behind the boss, person with the Flames of Galakras ran to the back of the pile to allow the orb to be soaked, and people moved in and out to manage their own stacks. We tank-swapped at about 5 stacks, and then whenever the debuff dropped after that point. Make judicious use of raid-wide CDs, Warlock cookies, personal CDs and so forth as Pulsing Flames will start to hurt quite a bit about half-way through.
Iron Juggernaut
Position the boss close-ish to a wall so you don't get tossed too far during Siege Mode, have the raid spread out between the boss and the wall, and we held the boss parallel to the wall, to keep range on the tanks. We swapped at 3 stacks, making sure the first swap came just before Crawler mines came out.
The most important job for tanks on this fight is to dodge shit in the ground, swap for stacks of Flame Jet and soak as many Crawler Mines as possible. I found that I could easily soak 2 each time, and if they weren't too spread out, I could soak all 3. Since the damage is physical you can mitigate quite a bit. If you time it right, you can have Shield of the Righteous up for the first, heal up and take the 2nd one with a Glyph'd Divine Protection. If you need to take a 3rd naked, it shouldn't kill you with ~800k health. With a 30 second DP you should have it up every time your turn to soak comes up.
You can also Bubble-soak all 3 during Siege mode quite easily and take no damage at all as everyone is being tossed about, though watch out for the oil puddles. Honestly, that's all there is to this fight.
Taunt as stacks reset, use a cool-down for the third cast of Flame Jets (it starts to hurt quite a bit around there), have a plan to soak mines, collect loot.
Kor'kron Dark Shaman
I don't know how much I can say about this fight. I'll just outline our plan going in:
- Each tank picks up one Boss and one wolf
- Kill the wolves quickly without putting any damage on the bosses
- Swap Bosses every time stacks of Froststorm Strike every time they reset
- The tank not currently soaking Froststorm Strikes should pick up adds spawned from Foul Gyser from range (they do a huge amount of pulsing damage around them and do further damage in the spawning area) and then kite them while ranged DPS burn them down
- Move away from.... pretty much everything else
We started near the barrier by the Bank, kited back towards the gates, then moved up towards the Drag. That's it.
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New week tonight - hopefully we can put these seven on farm and move into the second half of Siege. Other than the wonky difficulty, I'm enjoying the tier quite a bit. I only wish I was under a Blue banner instead of Red.
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