Saturday 23 May 2009

AMOV Special: Ulduar 10 Part 1 - The Siege of Ulduar



After finally downing Malygos, AMOV are now working their way through Ulduar. Like Naxxramas, Ulduar is a big raid, containing 14 bosses and on their first visit to Ulduar, AMOV tackled the first section: The Siege of Ulduar, which includes the first 4 bosses.

AMOV Raiders:

Tanks

Caparzo - Prot Warrior
Deekay - Unholy DK

Healers

Heloko - Holy Paladin
Chisuka - Disc Priest
Valeriya /Tessera - Resto Druid/Holy Priest

DPS

Valilor - MM Hunter
Succi - Feral Druid
Jammiedodger - Combat Rogue
Rosencrantz - Fire/Frost Mage
Nvision/Valeriya - Ret Paladin/Balance Druid

The Flame Leviathan

Overview

The Flame Leviathan boss is the first boss in Ulduar which must be defeated to progress further. It's a vehicle based encounter and if you've come here after Malygos, you'll probably be thinking "FFS, not another vehicle boss fight" but unlike Malygos - this one is fun!

There's 3 vehicles to pick from; A Siege Engine, Demolisher and Chopper. In a 10 man raid, you will be picking up 2 siege engines, 2 demolishers and 2 choppers, with the first 2 siege engines/demolishers taking a driver and passenger and the chopper with just a driver.

Before you get to the boss, there's loads of adds & towers to kill but it's not too difficult if you stay as a group. Your vehicles scale to the iLevel of your gear (Download the add-on rating buster) so the better geared raiders should be driving.

The boss is fun, everyone engages him and he picks a target at random (either a Siege engine or Demolisher) and he has to be kited around. The demolishers also fire their passenger up and into the boss where they destroy his turrets, making him take more damage for a few seconds and enough time for them to jump off and back onto the vehicle.

Result

After clearing the trash leading up to the boss - and wiping once when a tank decided to clip through the landscape into oblivion (Don't boost over ramps) - we came up to the boss. In went 2 Siege Engines, 1 Demolisher, 2 Choppers...hang on, 1 demolisher? Yeah, we had one locked out! /facepalm. I blame Heloko for this - women drivers eh? ;)

With one vehicle down on our first attempt we ended up wiping. However, as we died, ressed, got repaired and back in - the demolisher that wasn't in the fight then engaged the boss - died and a massive AoE from the boss killed us all again. 2x repairs, nice!

Our third attempt well pretty smoothly, we got past "Human Cannonball" NVision's "Fire me, fire me please" spam and took him down. I won some pretty sweet loot too: The Pyrite Infuser - now I'm hit capped without any +hit gems, enchants or buffs! Sweet.

Not worth linking the WWS for this boss really, it took 5 mins 5 seconds.

Hunters PoV

Nothing special here, we can't get launched due to our close-range deadzone but nothing else to consider really.

Razorscale

Overview

After downing the Flame Leviathan you come to a crossroads, dead ahead is the deconstructor boss and to the right and left are 2 optional bosses, the left being Ignis and the right being Razorscale. Razorscale has no trash to deal with before you engage him so you can go quickly from the Flame Leviathan to Razorscale.

To begin the encounter you have to talk to an NPC standing nearby and then some adds come up from the ground. These get tanked and AoEed down. As this is going on, 2 harpoon guns get repaired by the NPCs (A bit like the ones in Utgarde Pinnacle) and they need to get fired to get Razorscale down. When he comes down everyone turns to nuke him until he goes back up and then return to the adds (The OT keeps the adds while Razorscale gets nuked). Once Razorscale drops to 50% HP he will land for good and it's a tank and spank from there (with the tanks swapping due to a debuff).

Result

After the first boss, NVision had to leave so we got Tessera in and Valeriya went to DPS mode. We did the boss as described above, wiped once and killed it on our second go. It wasn't a very hard fight, everyone just needs to keep out of the fire! For the harpoon firing it makes more sense for a ranged to do it (less distance to travel) or anyone that can clear the gap quickly or maintain DPS with pets/DoT while running towards them. In this run I figured that I was probably best to do this so I volunteered.

In our first attempt the healers were running low on mana, so Rosencrantz kindly switched from Fire to Frost so we could get some replenishment and it paid off! If you look at the stats below, most of the raiders "DPS Time %" increased which goes to show we we a lot more effective in attempt 2! Surprisingly, Rosencrantz DPS hardly dropped at all, only by 5 overall! (That's down to the increased AoE ability of frost according to Rosencrantz)



WWS report here.

Hunters PoV

This is quite a long fight with lots of mobs with no mana bars so mana was a big issue for me. The mobs which come up from the ground need to be killed in order or AoEed down. On our first attempt I went to go for a single target approach and on the second I chose to go AoE and volley them all down. Obviously it was back to Single target on the boss.

In single target, failed attempt 1, I was in aspect of the viper for 17% of the fight, that's a long time and as a 50% damage reduction that means I had to nerf myself for 8.5%! I got 13k mana back from AotV, 5k from Rapid Recuperation (when in Rapid Fire mode) and 2k from Judgement of Wisdom - we had no replenishment!

Attempt 2 I went for a more AoE approach so the mana-expensive volley came out to play. As expected, this meant I was in AotV for longer - 19% of the time, which is 9.5% nerf. This could have been even worse if it wasn't for the increased mana I received from other sources (Rosencrantz switching helped). This time I got 16k from AotV, 7k from Rapid Recuperation, 8k from Judgement of Wisdom, 7k Replenishment, 4k mana pot and 0.4k from hymn of hope. So for me to stay out of AotV here, I would have to find another 16k of mana from somewhere!

So what does this all mean? Well it means going AoE is more mana expensive but the result was this: Attempt 1 DPS = 2763 Attempt 2 DPS = 3808.

I can also calculate roughly the benefit to me (not to mention every other mana user) of Rosencrantz switching to frost. If I had no replenishment then I would be in AotV more for the extra 7k I got from replenishment. If 16k = 19% uptime, then 23k would be 27% of the time, thats 8% longer. My DPS with the 9.5% nerf was 3808 so without it would be 4208 so the benefit of replenishment is 50% of 8%, so Replenishment reduced Rosencrantz DPS by 5 but increased mine by 168!

Isn't maths fun :p

Ignis the furnace master

Overview

Before engaging Ignis, you have to clear the trash before him, which is the hardest trash we've come across yet and when Blizzard said that you'll probably wipe on the trash in Ulduar they meant it! They come in pairs and need to be tanked seperately and generate lots of things to look out for/avoid - some are probably harder than some of the Naxx bosses! No simple AoE threat/DPS here. Some do have a 0.9% chance of dropping the Golemheart Longbow, which would be a nice upgrade for me! :D (Still no Envoy of Mortality though)

The boss itself is hard but optional. It's quite an interesting fight, the boss needs to be tanked and moved around in a circle so the tank doesn't stand in the hot spots he leaves around. He also summons Iron Constructs which the Off Tank needs to pick up, walk into the "hot spots" (scorched ground) until the turn molten and then walk to the water - at this point they turn brittle (You have +50% crit on them at this point) for a few seconds and must be shattered (Killed by 1 hit if over 5k damage) ideally by a ranged DPS because of the AoE damage. For every Add up the boss gets a buff so taking them down is a priority. If this wasn't hard enough, Ignis also picks one person at random and puts them into his HelokoSlag Bucket, where they take a lot of damage and need to be healed through (can heal themselves in there also).

Here's a useful video from tankspot.com for the 10 man encounter:





Result

Our strategy here was for me to Misdirect the boss onto the MT (Deekay), who was standing near the left pool (as you look at the boss) and from there he would tank the boss right in an anti-clockwise circle avoiding the "hot spots". Everyone else was behind the boss and I was on Shatter duty.

I won't lie, this didn't go well. We wiped 7 times. We had a few different problems, from critical people going into the slag pot and dying, add's getting lose and causing trouble or having too many adds up at once, giving the boss too many buffs. Having a hunter on shatter duty isn't ideal as it pretty much means I have to bank on one of my big hitting shots critting, otherwise I have to wait for the cool down! I was luck this time though, every one did crit (the +50% helped!) but for the one that didn't, I was able to use readiness and fire it again.

Attempt 6 was our best one, we lasted 4 mins 36 before wiping. If you have a look at my stats below, if Chimera shot crits, it's easily over the 5k damage to shatter and arcane/aimed are too...just. Bit risky, I think a class which can do a guaranteed crit/hit over 5k would probably do better but I don't think shattering was our problem.

Hunters PoV

This is a long fight and as a MM hunter, that means mana is going to be an issue if you're on DPS duty. If you're on shatter duty you can all but forget about DPS on this encounter. To ensure that I could shatter a construct as soon as it was ready, I didn't fire any Chimera shots once they started coming as I didn't want to waste the Cooldown. As MM's main offender, not using it means no DPS. I also didn't use Aimed Shot, just in case Chimera didn't crit. Nice loot available from Ignis too! (Relentless Edge, and a possible down-grade: Rifle of the Platinum Guard)


XT-002 Deconstructor


Overview

The final boss of the Siege of Ulduar area and can be accessed even if you're too scared to fight Ignis!

First off, have your sound on in this battle, the deconstructor sounds funny and his/her (not sure which) animations are good too! There are 3 phases to the fight, phase 1 where he/she has their heart in and phase 2 where it's out (I'm not quite sure why you'd rest with your heart out but I suppose I'm not a robot).

In Phase 1 you have to tank the boss facing away from the raid and just DPS away. He will cast 2 debuffs on random players (Searing Light and Gravity Bomb) at which point they must run away from the raid in different directions until the debuff expires, a little like with grobbulus. The boss also does a harsh AoE move which will need a lot of healing to be done.

Phase 2 the boss rests to get some HP back. In this stage he pops out his/her heart which melee doubles any damage taken to it and also 3 adds start spawning from the corners which either need to be Nuked fast (Boombots), AoE'd down (Thingys) or picked up by the OT (Pummellers). If the scrap bots reach the boss they can heal him so they need to be taken out by the Melee DPS if they get to close.

Results

It was getting late when we arrived at the deconstructor (we were at Ignis for some time!) and one of our healers (Valeriya) had to log out for bed, so not only was it our first time on this boss but we had to 9 man it! (We started our run at 9:06pm and we were at the deconstuctor at 12:01am, having spent about an hour wiping on Ignis). 

Out tactics were fairly straight forward, Caparzo would tank the boss facing away from the raid, Deekay would pick up any adds and Rosencrantz and I would nuke any adds coming which weren't getting picked up by Deekay.

We did get over-run by the adds a few times and it took us a while to get used to the encounter but on our 4th wiped and called it a night and headed off for some much needed rest! The WWS report will only show our wipes but we did come back the next week and defeat him with 10 but more on that next week....

WWS Report

NEXT WEEK IN ULDUAR.....

Will Hardmode, the new top-DPS in AMOV, help us progess?

Who will be the first to hit on Valeriya?

Will Caparzo hit first?

Find out next week on THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF AMOV!


3 comments:

  1. Edited the wording of the end bit (sounds a bit better now) and changed 2 errors (memory lapses) about the vehicle fight and when we actually defeated the Deconstructor! (Thanks Tessera!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. hmmmm one line about me in a wall of text blog update.

    ./sadpanda

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well you should have joined us sooner! Not sure how you could have got more of a mention in a raid where you weren't present other than:

    "I wish Hardmode was here........we could do with someone to summon".

    :p

    ReplyDelete