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.

Post 4.1 Occurrence

Well Patch 4.1 came out and a prediction I made a while back has come true, tiering off heroics is bad for heroics.

Basically before this patch what happened was everyone was in a giant queue, horrible players and not horrible players.  If you’re wiping and you replace members you will eventually cycle in a team that will be able to kill the boss.  This meant that bad players could get gear, learn content and with enough work, show up in your Algaloth groups.

So now all the people who were carrying those players are entering the ZG/ZA queue for the 140 valor points.  These same people are not quite good enough for raiding, hence why they even need loot from ZA/ZG.  So these people are going to be willing to wipe some time in ZG/ZA anyway just so they can get the epic loots.  This in turn means an even emptier standard heroics queue.

What this is, is a tiering off of non-raid content in a more severe form than raid content itself.  Raid content might be tiered off as Normals and Heroics.  Right now dungeons are tiered off into Normal, Heroics, and Zandalar Heroics.  This would be less severe if the new heroics were in the regular heroic queue, but they’re not.  They’re specifically tiered off and targeted at high end raiding.  Why, I might ask was the Wrath model of locking you out of these dungeons so bad?  People understood it, it made sure people got in, but it didn’t suck the life out of non-Zandalar heroics.

This reminds me a lot of Burning Crusade heroics model.  Without an LFD tool people were forced to choose and decide which was better or worse.  What ended up happening was three tiers of heroics: easy normal heroics (Botanica, Mechanar, Slave Pens, etc), slightly harder heroics (Ramparts, Shadow Vault, Black Morass, etc.), need to be nerfed heroics (CoT Escape from Durnhold Keep, Shattered Halls, Auchenie Crypts, etc), and the inevitable…. Magister’s Terrace.

While Magister’s Terrace served the purpose of gearing people up to fill in holes needed to enter Black Temple/Battle for Hyjal Summit.  Although it was very hard it was a dungeon designed to transcend three tiers of raid content.

However the older tiering off of heroics was unnecessary and ended up leaving people behind.  If you could do harder heroics why would you ever do the easier ones?

This ‘problem’ will exist for quite some time since as people get good from normal heroics they’ll eventually move up to Zandalar Heroics.

For now all this means to me is I won’t be gearing up alts.

Patch 4.1 Comes out This Week

I’ve spent more time writing about Rift than WoW as of late simply because there is nothing to talk about in WoW.  Everyone has been in anticipation of the 4.1 patch for quite some time.  Not that 4.1 adds too much to the game that is particularly valuable but 4.1 is a stepping stone to 4.2 (the Firelands patch).

4.1 comes out offering class corrections to ‘balance’ out the game once more.  It also re-releases Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub as new 5-man dungeons.  The 5-man dungeons on top of their regular benefits will offer pets and mounts.

The least exciting news of course is that pretty much everyone is going to be respeccing again.  I’ll personally be running around with Affliction and Destruction.  Now with haunt doing so much damage and pets hitting like trucks the spec becomes very viable, destro only being needed for Al’akir and Cho’gall.

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?

10-man Heroics Nerfed

As per expectations 10-man heroics continue and will in future be nerfed.  When the very best guilds started switching to 25-man dungeons in order to stay in competition progression wise with the best guilds in the world, everyone knew something was up with 10-man progression.

Posted below are all the raid nerfs implemented:

• Atramedes will no longer sometimes snap back to his starting location as he finishes casting Sonic Breath.
• Magmaw overall damage and health was a little too high on all difficulties and has been reduced slightly. In addition, on Heroic difficulty, Nefarian will now prefer ranged targets when spawning Blazing Bone Constructs.
• Maloriak’s Scorching Breath should no longer incorrectly share its damage among pets. To offset what would be increased damage per player as a result of this fix, the damage dealt by the ability has been reduced on Heroic difficulty.
• Players will move at the same speed, even when setting their normal speed to “walk” using the keybind, when Nefarian casts Dominion.
• The Omnotron Defense System encounter has had its health reduced by 15% on Heroic difficulty, and the damage of Incineration Security Measure has been reduced.

This is a sigh of relief for most guilds.  The Atramedes random whirlwind breaths was often a cause of wipes in my guild as people would often get blamed for running through the boss even when they did not.

Bolded is something that is so common that it was considered almost necessary to kill Maloriak.  If you’ve read my little guide on Maloriak you can put pets of all types (including snake trap) in the breath and basically exploit the raid mechanics to make the damage healable.  If you did not do this your healers would barely be able to heal everyone up in time.  The snake trap was especially potent because with 4 snakes up it felt like no one took damage.

I’ll be edited my Maloriak guide to this change.

I should note though that even with the nerfs the heroic difficulties are still hard and you will still have to deal with other hard mechanics of these fights that a 25-man guild can still do with ease because of higher resources.

Except for Atramedes, Atramedes will always be easy.