Heroic Omnotron Defense System Guide and Tips

I’ve been dreading publishing any sort of guide on this fight specifically because it is the one fight that no one farms.  In 10-man Heroic Omnotron is almost unfarmable because of too many erratic elements in the fight.  This will represent one of the harders fights you will encounter and no amount of gearing is going to fix that.

If you’re progressing this is going to be a good thing of course because this fight and Conclave of Winds will give you something to do while you are waiting on gearing.  I can’t give a definitive way of one-shotting this boss as it will be different every single time you pull it.  Instead what I can offer you is tips on dealing with odd combinations and how exactly the fight works.

As stated you will probably not farm this encounter any time soon and you will probably just end up killing it if you get combinations that are easier to deal with throughout the whole fight.

Composition

Before anything I’d like to discuss composition.  There are variable successful options available to you depending on the balance of gear in your guild and/or people’s abilities.

This fight is one, tankable but you need one very well geared tank for this.  If you feel you need more healing or DPS and decide to turn that off tank into an off healer or half DPS remember you will need to shift positioning.

You may also want to get a misdirect available when a new robot activates.

This fight is also four healable.  The DPS requirements to complete this fight are insanely low so if you feel that raid damage or tank damage is too high for you currently just sub out a DPS for an extra healer.  All this means is that DPS have to be switching over to oozes very quickly when Toxitron is out.

Obviously you can choose to sub out a tank or a healer for a DPS.  This fight is also two healable if you have two really good healers for it.

Obviously I will say that a balanced 2-tank, 3-healer 5-DPS raid is going to be the most stable for this fight.

For DPS this fight favors ranged pretty heavily however you will want a melee or two to handle interrupts.

Before I go over the robots make sure that all dots and damage is cleared off of each robot by 40 energy (maximum 90 energy).  This means 0 damage period beyond 40 energy.  So warlocks, shadow priests, moonkins, and unholy DKs need to time their dots appropriately and switch to using moves that do not reapply dots at the appropriate time.  Too many dots up will always spell disaster.

As a rule of thumb you should try to keep everyone semi-stacked in the middle of the room for every single one of these robots.

Robot #1: Magmatron

Magmatron has two powerful and dangerous abilities to worry about.

The first is an AoE flame attack that will take everyone down to roughly 50% HP.

The second is a fixated line attack of fire that if a person is not healed through will kill a person.  This means you will want the person selected for this ability to either move away from everyone or everyone to move away from this person.  Which happens will be situational.

At the end of every phase each robot will throw up a protective shield that if damaged will have some negative repercussion.  Magmatron’s will do blasty AoE damage if it is broken.  Although it is possible to heal through this alone consider it an automatic wipe if this shield is ever broken.  Each shield will get applied at 40% Energy (they have energy bars)

A preventative step for DPS classes is to time your dots to fall off before 100%.

So yes, a lot of the stuff from normal except it all hits harder.  Think for a second any of these effects happening simultaneously with any of the other robots I’ll describe.

Robot #2: Arcanotron

Between all of the robots I think this might be the second hardest one to handle.  Arcanotron has two spells to deal with.

The first is the normal Arcane Annihilator.  This is most often the last part required to get Achieve-a-tron.  In normal Annihilator will hit for 50k.  Heroic Annihilator will hit for 100k.  Normal it’s nice to get as many of them as possible, in Heroic you HAVE TO GET THEM ALL.  If you cannot get them all you should bring in the fourth healer who during Arcanotron’s main responsibility will be to drop pre-emptive hots, shields and heals on Arcanotron’s targets.

It will obviously be far easier for two people to do interrupts than to bring in a fourth healer to try and pad people’s effective health.

The second ability is Power Generator.  This drops a pool on the ground that will increase damage done of everyone in it and also regenerate mana.  DPS and healers will need to abuse these puddles to get ahead on DPS and replenish mana.  The fight is long enough that DPS do not need to use them (although they should) but healers most indefinitely should.

Nefarian will occasionally shoot a black ice lance at the Power Generators.  This will cause the pools to expand in size and explode.  Like all effects there is a +1 yard on the visual effect so make sure you’re clear of them.

Arcanotron puts up a shield that when attacked will increase his haste.  If Arcanotron gains too much haste Arcane Annihilator will eventually be uninterruptable and will lead to the untimely death of 1-2 raid members.

Robot #3: Electron

This is one of the weaker sauce robots to deal with, however this is the one that has positional requirements.  Electron has two abilities.

Electrical Discharge is a pretty standard AoE chain lightning move.  You should moderately spread for this so it doesn’t target too many people.  It is likely to hit 2-3 targets.

The second ability Lightning Conductor causes one person to pulse AoE damage.  This person just has to be clear of hitting anyone.  Don’t make efforts to run away from people because of the secondary effect.

Nefarian will shoot a black ice lance at the target of lightning conductor every now and then. This will cause lightning conductor to transform into Shadow Conductor.  Shadow Conductor will cause everyone outside of the radius of the shadow conductor to take the damage they would have taken from lightning conductor.

This means at least one of your tanks will be taking insane damage during shadow conductor.  Also everyone should be loosely spread but close to everyone for when this hits.

When electron puts up his shield every attack done to him will make the tank take bursty damage.

Robot #4: Toxitron

This is also going to be known as Wipe-a-tron.  Toxitron is the single hardest of the robots to deal with.  Toxitron has two abilities.

The first is Poison Protocol.  Poison Protocol will spawn three ads each with roughly 300,000 HP.  These ads will chase a random raid member (except the tank tanking Toxitron).  You can obviously see this is why solo tanking this fight might get a bit chaotic.  The bombs will explode dealing 130,000 HP in damage and placing a patch of ooze on the ground that will tick for 20-25k.

Hunters/mages should be wary about using feign death or invisible as this will cause the slimes to just choose some other poor unsuspecting fool to chase.

These oozes should be kited away from the next ability.

The second ability is called Chemical Bomb.  This will place a light damaging AoE on the ground.  This increases the damage taken of anyone in it.  This effect also has a friendly fire component so any enemy units in it will take bonus damage.

As a part of good strategy you will want to try your best to move whatever boss is currently being DPSed into the pool.

Nefarian will pull everyone into the Chemical Bomb.  This is why you want ads moved away from chemical bombs.  Despite the damage boost gained from having them in the green pools the risk of a bomb hitting someone is too high.

Toxitron’s shield is the only one that you can have damage rolling on.  New applications of damage however will place a stacking dot on you.

Combinations

It’s the combinations of any two of these robots that proves to be potent.  Although I am giving tips that have worked for me in the past your composition may require something different.  Some of these are going to feel impossible to deal with, that’s why the solutions for them are so hard and co-ordination intensive to carry out.

Combination #1: Toxitron and Magmatron

Basically any combination with Toxitron is going to suck and this one is no different.

This combination is most likely going to require you to use a raid cooldown.  What’s going to happen is you will have everyone pulled into the green ooze puddle (which increases the damage you take) and Magmatron’s going to do an AoE attack.

If players do not move out of the ooze immediately they will die. Even if they move out of the ooze the raid will still be taking a lot of damage.  You will need people stacking loosely and have a spot to run to to restack for AoE heals.  You will also need an AoE raid cooldown as soon as you get sucked in.  These include aura mastery, divine guardian, power word barrier, and anti-magic zone are all going to be powerful abilities here.

Obviously as you go through this list you will find using a raid cooldown is the only available option so obviously if you get too many bad combinations you will just wipe.  If you do not have a raid wide cooldown available mini cooldowns like shield walls, frenzy/enraged regeneration, felward, iceblock, etc. can be used.  Your raid simply must be aware that this particular combination is volatile and can be an instant wipe.

Combination #2: Electron and Toxitron

The combination to worry about here is Slimes and Shadow Conductor.  As I said everyone should always be semi-spread.  When shadow conductor comes everyone stacks up.  In the shadow conductor.  The shadow conductor target has to slowly move away as your raid attempts to kite the oozes.

Remember that your DPS will have 2 second casts they are laying on the oozes.  Basically your melee won’t be able to touch these slimes so you will have to keep your ranged in mind at least until shadow conductor goes away.

Combination #3: Toxitron and Arcanotron

This is one of the easiest Toxitron combinations to deal with however it does have a unique challenge to it.

Basically in order to kill this boss you have to get every single Annihilator.  If you miss one then someone dies.

So Nefarian does this move where he pulls everyone into the ooze.  This means your two regular interrupters are going to be away from Arcanotron.  You will need someone ready with a ranged interrupt.  Most tanks have a ranged interrupt.  Obviously the more ranged trying for this one critical interrupt the better.  You can even have a resto shaman try and hit it.

Combination #4: Electron and Arcanotron

This is the easiest combination to deal with.  The only major concern is that you will want to stack your shadow conductor on top of Arcanotron and have your Electron tank move in closer (to the middle if possible).

This is just so that you can get interrupts while shadow conductor is going on.  Other than that your Arcanotron tank should be wary of where the Nefarian influenced pools are.

Combination #5: Electron and Magmatron

This is another particularly easy combination to deal with however there is one OMFG THIS SUCKS moment.

This is when you are all standing in the shadow conductor and Magmatron fixates a target for his in-line flame attack.  Obviously the target has to move out of the shadow conductor.  This person is likely to die.  There’s so much damage going around your only option is to hand of sacrifice him, guardian spirit, and pain suppression are all viable options.  Another is that said person dies and you battle rez them.

Combination #6: Magmatron and Arcanotron

The only thing to really worry about with this combination is to make sure that your raid is not in line between the two robots.  Basically the line of fire can only hit the interrupters or tank if it targets either.  This means any pools from Arcanotron that are between the two robots will have to be abandoned.

These are the six possible permutations but just because you get them doesn’t mean you will get these random crappy effects.  It’s entirely possible you’ll get the hardest combination and move through it with ease.

If you can deal with all of the combinations you will kill this fight.  It’s not unfarmable but it is far harder to farm because with the random orders it will be different every single time.  In a 25-man you will have multiple CDs to deal with every scenario possible but in 10-man you’re going to have less resources meaning you will be praying to see Toxitron as little as possible.

13/13 Guilds Skipping Bosses

In most dungeons there was a natural progression of bosses.  In order to get to the next hardest boss you would have to kill the hard boss in front of you.

The late Wrath model changed this.  However in Wrath people still did everything on heroic.  It was often seen as a sign of weakness if you didn’t parse your logs or if you didn’t do everything on heroic.

Something is changing in this expansion though.  Guilds are killing 10-man bosses once and then never again, specifically Omnitron Defense System, Chimaeron, Nefarian, Twilight Ascendant Council and Al’akir.  For whatever reason people are just happy killing each of these once and just doing them every now and then.

It’s kind of a shocking development and largely a failure in design.  Generally speaking boss encounters should become easier as you gear up.  The incentive of gearing up is that gear will make things easier.  If getting gear just increases an unimportant number (DPS/HPS).

Certain encounters may just be too hard or have too many randomness factors to be worth farming consistently.  For example heroic Omnitron adds random hard mode combination efforts IE: mass death grip into ooze with lightning conductor.  Or on Nefarian getting a tail whip and a crackle together.  Given how many times these will occur during progression it kinda makes sense why people don’t farm these.

All the while everyone farms Bastion of Twilight heroic so that they can get their shots in at Sinestra.

It may ultimately be necessary to have more boss encounters like Bastion of Twilight in which you are required to kill them instead of these optional wing dings like Blackwing Descent in future content.

When Blizzard made the first Kael’thas nerf it was because the two guilds that killed it could not/did not want to repeat their kill.  It was deemed that farming Kael’thas was simply, not worth it’s time.  How is the current Blackwing Descent any different?

Blizzard Loves Competition

When Blizzard senior developer, CEO, and ultra nerd Michael Morhaime announced that he was looking forward to the launch of Star Wars The Old Republic he wasn’t talking about playing it.  Michael was referring to the new growth that every single new MMO brings to the MMO gaming market.

MMOs these days are not getting produced by small time nobodies.  The Old Republic is getting made by Bioware which gave us Knight of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises.  These are no titles to scoff at as each of these was a best seller for each year it was released and had many rewards.  Bioware is a known industry standard for quality games and has made its name on its success.

And Blizzard has no fear of this.

No fear at all.

Blizzard’s own research shows that the majority of people who leave WoW to play another MMO most subscribers will keep their subscription to WoW.  More so yet most people return to World of Warcraft.  This means they suffer no serious revenue losses from new games being made.  The top selling games of all time in this order are WoW: Cataclysm, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, WoW: Burning Crusade, and World of Warcraft.

Blizzard’s systematic growth can be said to be due to creating a high quality game that meets the expectations of it’s gamers, is fun, and they have an advertising budget large enough to support multiple B-rated Hollywood actors during prime time commercial hours.  All of that is fine.  However I’d think this is why they keep customers, not really how they get them.

With every single new MMO that has been released Blizzard has had some sort of content patch or expansion ready for it.

When Age of Conan was announced for launch on May 28th Blizzard had a patch ready for a week before (2.4).  Boom Sunwell gets released.

Six months later Warhammer Online comes out, Blizzard releases Wrath of the Lich King patch, the single biggest patch in the history of gaming.

Blizzard does not release these patches because they are trying to directly compete with these new MMOs.  They put out this content so that people who return from this MMO will have something new and fresh to do.

I mean imagine if you leave WoW because you’re bored to go play Rift and then you come back to the game and…. nothing has changed.  What is the first thing you’ll do?  Try and find another replacement for WoW, maybe even consider cancelling your account.

What a new MMO brings is new advertising revenues for the genre.  Every single new MMO to come out has ended up on more and more shelves with more and more advertising revenues.

Of course once a people get a taste of an MMO, where are they going to head to after their MMO becomes unpopular?  Well of course, the most popular MMO on the planet.

Rival MMOs act as game way MMOs for people who are not really willing to become attached to Blizzard’s products.  WoW has a stereotype of making addicted zombies out of people and people would rather not.  A friend of mine played Lord of the Rings Online and DC Universe but could not bring himself to play WoW simply because he didn’t want to get “addicted.”  I’m sure if I actually put any pressure on him at all he’d jump into WoW simply because he has been introduced to something, “WoW like.”

In the end Blizzard know exactly what they’re doing and if other people didn’t invent these MMOs, Blizzard would.  They serve a function that is so invaluable to the WoW franchise that without them you would see a very different weaker game.

Archaeology and Its Failure as a Profession

When Blizzard first announced archaeology to the world it was done as an almost required profession.  The original idea was that with archaeology you would select a “path” that would give you access to new glyphs.  These new glyphs were what is today’s Major Glyphs.  That is glyphs that are powerful enough to make a difference but not a significant part of your DPS/HPS/Tanking.

As an example on my warlock my choices of glyphs for raiding are Shadowflame 70% snare, Life Time Global Reduction, and and 5% more damage being transferred via Soul Link.  As you can see none of these effect my DPS and none of these are necessary or vital for normal mode kills.  On heroic however a snare can be used to ad kiting and damage is so insanely high that soul link glyph may be considered necessary.

This was a way of blizzard making professions for hardcores and casuals.  As an example of a good secondary profession cooking is not a requirement for casual raiding but you will require a cook in your raid for higher tier profession.  A casual can do cooking quite easily however will gain less benefit from it because of how little they play.  However the hardcore will be dropping feasts every night for content that actually requires it.

Archaeology in the same way was presented as being great for hardcores.  One of the first glyphs they released was 15% stun reduction.

What ruined this was Blizzard’s announcement of the “Path of the Titans.”  There were 5-6 paths that people could take that were modeled after traditional raid roles, that is absorbing damage, dealing damage, utility, kiting, and healing.  When people saw the paths and what these glyphs offered they couldn’t help but cry “OP.”  Because of this “path” theming involved with the glyphs a +1% healing glyph for warlocks and warriors would be insanely overpowered in PvP content.

The path of the titans offered what Blizzard has been aiming away from, open endedness.  With this giving people almost infinite customization it meant that there were more likely to be unexpected consequences.  I mean who could know for example if a DPS Warrior on the Path of the Thunderer is going to be going to be able to make warrior damage retarded.  Or maybe you can one-heal content if you have 7 warlocks on the path of the lifebinder.

After only a month of testing this out they already found too many anomalies and realized that they would not have the game out for Christmas if they added this paths system in the game.  It was also around here that they reduced all talent points down to 31 talent trees and changed mastery so that it was simpler.

What this left archaeology with was something was butchered and made useless.  Without the Path of the Titans and Ancient Glyphs all that remained was the vendor trash relics you attained.  They added in some BoA epics to make it something worth getting but they had gutted the heart of archaeology out.

Not that I disagree with that change.  The paths system was stupid and I said that as soon as they released it.  The number of permutations for very upsetting ancient glyphs was ridiculous and was going to be too large a time investment for every single person in the game.

Unfortunately archaeology produces nothing that will get used beyond an intro level of raiding.  Unlike cooking, fishing, and first aid which will be strong for all tiers of content…. archaeology is a profession designed for maybe three months period.

In the end the failure of archaeology is that it is nothing but a time sink.  But unfortunately after you get what you want from archaeology you find yourself with better things to do.

Battlestar Galactica Online Beta Begins

Battlestar Galactica Online’s open beta testing is go.  The game was in closed testing since November 8, 2011 but today they have brought the game online to the public as a free to play beta.  This is basically going to be the game itself.

As many of you may know I’m a HUGE Battlestar Galactica fan.  So obviously I’m going to jump right into this, as a Cylon.  I think the success of this game will depend so heavily on it having a second viable faction.

I’ll be playing through this game for the next few days and hopefully by then I’ll be able to provide a decent review.  For now join me, I’m Troublmaker on Cylon side if anyone is interested in missioning with me.  Note, it’s a browser based MMO so you won’t have to download much to play this.  As you can see from the screen shot below for a brower based MMO the graphics are quite good.

When Stargate Worlds developers created Stargate Resistance and were eventually sued and shut down I felt that space MMOs may potentially just be a dead franchise.  Hopefully Battlestar Galactica will save this with what feels like very fun game play and an active questing system.