Heroic Cho’gall 10-man

Of all the guides I’ve written this is one that I’ve dreaded discussing for quite some time.  This is because in truth this lay out of the fight may not end up being particularly helpful to your guild.  You may find some other neat trick for killing this boss.  You may have success with more tanks or less tanks.  You might find stacking up everything and AoEing things works for you.  There are literally hundreds of approaches to this boss and many of them will be raid build specific.

I’m going to describe it as a 3 phase fight, keep in mind most people call it a 2 phase fight.  These people of course are retarded and don’t understand what the word “phase” means.

Phase 1 – Most of the Fight

Cho’gall phase 1 is Cho’gall and two different kinds of ads.  You probably notice them in normal however they instantly get soaked into Cho’gall so you don’t really see the effect of them.

The shadow ads must be DPSed down.  Each one of these that is absorbed by Cho’gall will increase Cho’gall’s damage by 15% and stacks infinitely.  The duration of this is about two fire ads so in order to remove this buff you need to kill two fire elementals consecutively.  So failing here is not an option.

The fire ads must be DPSed down.  Each of these will increase Cho’gall’s damage by 10% and the next attack will add another 32000 fire damage to the tank.

You will want a sufficient number of ranged to be on this.  Much like your normal strategy you need to stack on the back of Cho’gall for AoE interrupts.  If Cho’gall gets even a stack of Devotion it can be a wipe.  You will want two AoE interrupters (AOE fears, shadowfury and dragon’s breath are all great).  You will get four devotions total.

Cho’gall has an enrage timer that is pretty strict on this fight.  So you will need to find ways to ‘cheat the meters’ on this fight in order to  beat it.

Corrupt your Mages: Mages need to fail as much as possible to get their Corruption to max.  Easiest way to do this is stand in the grey pools on the first phase 2 ad death.  Fire mages with mage armor up are going to take reduced magic damage and should be spammed shields.  You will want a disc priest for this.  Other than the shields mages will be unhealable.  However mages should survive up until Phase 2.  Basically this adds another DPS to your raid for 75% of the fight and you can brez, soulstone, or ghoul him for Phase 3.  Mages, do yourselves a favor spam pyros and fireballs, they’re insta cast.  Warlocks can also probably get away with it, given it’ll be riskier without iceblock.  Make sure an interrupter is designated for just the mage as he will need to be away from the raid.

Skip Fire and Shadow Ads: These ads do a tonne of damage and it stacks up pretty insanely.  However you can probably handle not killing some as long as nothing stacks up.  You will need a raid wide cooldown for every shadow ad and a tank cooldown for every fire ad.  This will allow you an extra 10-15 seconds of damage on Cho’gall for every cooldown you can use.

Raid Stacking: This is the single most common way people cheat the meters.  It is as old as time itself.  The idea behind raid stacking is that you build a raid to synergize certain buffs and empower a raid set.

Phase 1 Tanking Position

Different people use different tanking positions for Phase 1.  People are going to like different scenery or may handle Phase 2 differently.  However you will need to have 35 yards of distance between the boss and phase 2 ads.  To this extent there will need to be at least 35 yards behind

The position above is pretty standard for a lot of heroics kills.  However a lot of people do not like being in the middle of that ground symbol because it masks retical spells making tanking, healing and DPSing harder (you have to assume the retical is there).  But yeah you just need to have this sort of space between the boss and Phase 2 ads.

Phase 2 – Adherants

In phase 2 an adherant will spawn.  Normally you just spread out and kill it.

In heroic you have to group up, dodge shadow crashes and interrupt mind controls.

So for this you will want to make two stacking groups.  One of them will be at range dodging shadow crashes and the other will be in melee interrupting Depravity.

Okay here’s where it gets tricky.  You will need people available to interrupt Conversion in both groups.  You should expect two in either groups.  As well you will want a consistent interrupt for Depravity (one for each ad).

There are many ways of placing the corpses of adherents.  However I would suggest using your first one as the marker at roughly 35 yards from the boss.  The next one should get dropped to the left and past your first one.  Second one to the right and past your first one.  You should have three pools decently close on each other.  If you end up getting a forth just throw it behind all of them, you probably won’t have to deal with this one.

Phase 3 – Yes THIS is Phase 3

In phase 3 pretty much half of your raid is going to get corrupted.  That’s kind of how it has to be.  The phase operates as normal except now you have these larger crusher tenticles.  You will have to ignore these.  They have too much health and deal too much damage for anyone to give any attention to.  The only thing really to pay attention with them is not to stand next to them.  The smaller tenticles you will still want to kill.  Your melee should only kill the ones that are in melee range and your ranged should only go after the ones that are at ranged.

If you have dealt with Phase 1 effectively you should have enough time to finish this Phase 3 before you get over run by the big crusher tenticles and your entire raid is unhealable.

Best of luck on your Heroic Cho’gall kill.

Heroic Theralion and Valiona 10-man

So while waiting for someone to log on we decided to pull this boss on heroic and see what happens.  What happened was we almost one-shot it.  Of course we made some plans for this boss, as should you.

There are two main differences between this boss on Normal and Heroic. Before I get down to how to deal with them I’ll describe them.

(1) Tank Phasing: The boss applies a stacking debuff on the tank.  Once this debuff hits 5 it will dump your tank and anyone within 15 yards of him into the twilight realm.

(2) Twilight Captains: In the twilight realm there are these dragonkin twilight captains.  Outside of the twilight realm they will appear as unattackable beams of light that shoot random beams of light at raid members.  Over time these twilight captains will stack up so someone will have to kill them in the twilight realm.

Alright so let’s do some low responsibility DPS training!

People With Nothing To Do Training!

In different fights different people will have important roles that if they do not perform them well and specifically, it’s a wipe.  This section is for all those interchangeable people who do not matter on this fight, your surplus DPS.

When each drake is in the air they will cast something on the raid.  The first drake in the air is Theralion.  Theralion will cast Twilight Blast on your raid.  From your strats you’ll know you spread for this because it is an AoE attack that targets one player.  What they don’t tell you is… it is dodgeable.

I wouldn’t suggest this for less mobile DPS classes like moonkins and warlocks.  But for classes like mages, hunters and melee who are insanely mobile dodging it will be worth while.  It’s definitely worth while trying to dodge it later in the fight as things get more insane and your healers are griping for mana.

The position for the attack is decided as he finishes casting.  So you let the dragon cast and move very quickly shortly after.  If you are a DPS in this fight I’d use some of your initial learning wipes to master this as it will most indefinitely come in handy later.

Another important note for DPS is that you can DPS either (or both simultaneously) drakes.  This means even if you are too far away from one drake to DPS it you should try and look for the other while you make your way to the main target.

Now that, that is covered.

2. Shadow Realm!

Your tank will phase into the shadow realm, that sucks.  You will take advantage of this by sending some DPS down with him to deal with the captains.  You want DPS that can tank magic damage and do a lot of nice bursty damage.  Melee with good mobility work fine.

What did we use?

I don’t want to say that it’s an exploit but it’s most definitely not something blizzard would have thought of when designing this encounter.  Basically instead of taking a group of people down to deal with this you take down a single Sub Rogue,

Sub rogues have insane numbers of survival tools, including feint reducing damage even more, recuperate granting DPS, killing mobs giving more recuperate and slice and dice, and most importantly shadowstep granting burst damage and mobility.  A sub rogue will need no healers and can stay in the twilight realm permanently working down ads.

The alternative is sending two DPS and a healer down to deal with this.  It’s a poor solution but if you have no rogue it is the route you will have to take.  The main difference here is once all the ads are dead your two DPS and healer will come back up.  They will only go down when the tank hits five stacks to clean up ads and then come back up.  With two DPS down there they will die insanely fast.

These ads have rouglhy 80,000 health so it doesn’t take much to destroy them.

3. Did Someone Say Tank Swap?

Tank swap on this fight is based on your composition and how confident you are in your DPS.  We used a single DPS in the twilight realm permanently so we felt we could afford to lose an extra DPS to bring in that extra tank.  However if your DPS is weak you really will not be able to afford it.

If you can afford the extra tank your off tank taunts the boss as soon as your main tank is transported to the shadow realm and goes back to doing his thing (which ends up being nothing).

An alternative approach is to have DPS either tank it or kite it.  Hunters and plate DPS can handle this fine.  The boss should be kept relatively centered so that the tank can pick it up when he comes from the twilight realm, try your best.

4. Meteor Positions

While Theralion is on the ground you may remember that Valiona is up top shooting Meteors at people.  In normal mode you would handle this by stacking a melee and a ranged group and then moving your ranged group around to dodge big piles of void badness.  In heroic this will not work because two targets will be selected for the AoE debuff that pulses based on your damage or healing.  With two of those in your raid you’d just blow up your raid.

So instead you will have  your regular melee stacked group on top of the tank and your range spreading around the boss.

It should be noted that you only need to split meteor damage with one person.  I was awfully far from the boss and unable to get into melee in time so I just followed one of our healers around until it hit.  On one instance I netherwarded and soaked a full meteor myself (not suggested at all).  Instead what you want is a constant weaving of ranged running into melee and running back out after meteor lands.

It’s honestly not even a huge DPS loss.  I still pulled 22k DPS on our first kill while constantly being meteored.

You will find black stuff spreading all over the place so make sure that people are spread out in the first place.  Much like in normal you want to be as close to the black stuff you dodged so that the next time he targets it on you he will cover less surface area with black stuff.

You will end up finding  yourself adopting this approach into your Normal strategy (if you do it on alts) as it ends up being easier anyway.  It’s a healing and DPS upgrade by doing it this way.

Best of luck on this kill, if you’re following a rational progression path this one should fall over easily for you.

Heroic Halfus 10-Man: Drake Kill Order

It’s no secret that 10-man heroic difficulties are proving to be far harder than their 25-man counter part.  There are still some heroics that are “impossible” to kill.  Halfus was one of the ones that wasn’t actually too bad.  Halfus relied on some pestilience type DPS.  Unholy death knights and fire mages are the premier users of this sort of damage and spread DPS.  Every cage opened offered a 100% damage increase on Halfus so when these diseases and ignites spread around they were doing the 500% bonus damage from Halfus.  This allowed you to see mages and death knights throwing out 65-70k DPS.

The fight was nerfed and buffed at the same time.  No longer can you just release every single drake and AoE them down.  It is a buff in the sense that you cannot just exploit with AoE class mechanics.  They made it so that Halfus only gained the 100% damage increase after a drake died.  The nerf comes in that you no longer need to release every single drake.  In fact you only really need to handle as many drakes as you do in 10-man.  As you kill each drake the value of your unholy death knights and fire mages will go up but initially they will not be rocking the meters like before.

Setup

This is still a fight that favors range pretty heavily.  However melee cleave will have some success in small numbers (1-2).  You will want three healers and three tanks.  One of the tanks doesn’t have to be that geared as he will be tanking a single drake.  Every now and then he’ll pop all of his cooldowns and tank Halfus to get the MS stacks off of the off tank.  We used a feral druid for this wearing DPS gear in tank spec.  He pulled 30k DPS so he was a worthwhile investment.  We suspect as our tanks get better gear we’ll just skip on the DPS tank and just two-tank it.

Our DPS setup was one fire mage, one destro lock, one survival hunter and one unholy death knight.  You can literally use any combination of DPS to complete this just make sure that you bring someone who does DPS.  These are heroic level achievements so you will want a raid in mostly epic for this.

Tanking

You have three tanks so you will need to use them ideally.  You want your weakest tank tanking the Nether Drake who will die first.  This tank needs to be slowly kited towards the rest of the drakes as the tank builds threat on it.  We used our feral druid tank for this.

Your second strongest tank will be tanking Halfus.  Remember that the mortal strike debuffs will be stacking up so at some point he will need a tank to taunt off of him, this will be your weakest tank.  Your weakest tank will be responsible for chaining his cooldowns until he stops tanking this boss.  Keep in mind you will want to have the Nether Drake dead before you taunt off the Halfus tank.  If you do not you both will have to switch roles (which will be insanely hard on the healers).  Both of these tanks will be solely responsible for getting interrupts as they are tanking Halfus.  The cooldown on Halfus’ ability is such that a tank should get every single one.

While you are tanking nothing (because of the mortal strike debuff) do not attempt to tank anything.  You will have a powerful mortal strike debuff on you and anything you tank will just kill you.  Instead just focus on doing some damage to the drakes that your third tank will have high threat on or make sure to get those interrupts.

Your third tank will take the most damage and will be tanking three things throughout the fight but only two at a time The Storm Rider, The Time Warden and The Orphaned Emerald Whelps.  You do not want to release the orphaned whelps until the second drake is near death.  There’s a lot of damage and releasing the whelps is not necessary until this point.  Once the second drake is dead a DPS needs to be assigned to open the cage and release them.

Once all the whelps and drakes are dead the three tanks will need to rotate amongst each other and get any interrupt they can.  At this point in the fight it is simply a burn phase.  The Slate Dragon will be left alone.  The benefit of another 100% damage is simply not worth it, nor is the 15 second stun on Halfus.

Healing

Poor healers.  The fight stays pretty extreme on healers.  You will need designated one healer responsible for each tank.  Keep in mind that the person assigned to heal the tank tanking a single drake will, be doing most of the raid healing and the other two healers will have to stay mostly on assignment to their tank.  Until the second drake is dead you will be going pedal to the metal.

However since the AoE is dodgeable the only AoE you will have to deal with is the Scorching Breath from the Proto Behemoth.  This gets minimized once the whelps are released.  Just make sure that your DPS are dodging the red circles on the ground.  You have 8 full seconds to get out of them so there’s really no excuse for getting hit by it.

AoE healing spells are obviously going to be great here.  Healing rain, lightwell, radiance and wild growth are all potent throughout the first half of the fight and are very good during the knockback filled 50% burn on Halfus.  Try to make sure to rotate mana cooldowns effectively.  Mana tides are amazing and getting innervates from DPS druids is good.  Also make sure that in your raid build you have a source of replenishment.  With three tanks in the raid slotting in DPS for replenishment is rough, but you will need it.  Currently these specs carry replenishment:

1. Retribution Paladin
2. Destruction Warlock
3. Frost Mage
4. Restoration Druid
5. Shadow Priest

If you don’t have one of these you will probably need to respec someone in your raid make up or all out replace someone.  If you have to trade out a fire mage for a frost mage it will be worth it in the long run (given he won’t be setting any crazy DPS records). On a lot of these hard modes we have found it especially hard to squeeze in replenishment.  I know on Heroic Maloriak we actually had to go without Replenishment period.

DPS

Since patch the DPS job in this fight is DPS (no more interrupts on Halfus).  Be aware that your kill order is going to be Nether, Storm, Time then Halfus.

Note the whelps will be released and out but they will not be your primary DPS target.  You are free to use spells like ignite rolls, living bomb, pestilence, shadowflame, starfall, hungering cold, blade flurry, killing spree, cleave and whirlwind.  These moves deal fairly good single target DPS but will also give a little bit of AoE damage to hit the whelps.  Remember that the goal is not to kill the whelps but to let them die from random cleave AoE that you use anyway.  The whelps do not do a lot of damage, the drakes do.

Once the third drake is dead get on Halfus regardless if there are whelps up or not.  Those whelps will die pretty fast from Halfus based cleaves so leave that to cleave damage.  If the whelps are not dead before you hit the 50% point there is something wrong with your DPS and needs to be fixed.  It may actually be that your guild is doing TOO much DPS now and will actually need to focus some AoE on those ads (what an odd problem!).

This is a strat we used for our first kill with DPS ranging from 30k-60k (a good amount of DPS for this fight is closer to 90-100k).  Our healers were running low on mana and so when we first did this we did it this way.  Now that our healers do not oom and our DPS is higher we do release the whelps right away and start cleaving them down immediately.  If you feel like your DPS and healing is up to the task of dealing with the whelps that is entirely fine and your choice.  However remember that you do not have to release all of these drakes in 10-man and if your healers cannot handle that much do not make them heal that much.