Firelands: Shannox

[kaasi]

[GM Fright]

Detailed strat:

http://www.icy-veins.com/shannox-detailed-strategy

[Ourstateobzen]

Ok, so it's time for more MSPaint adventures.

This is the way the strat was going at the end of lst night's raid.


Self-explanatory.


Spear comes down at me, I run across to the little hill I found. Riplimb turns back about halfway through that trek.


I chill out, let my stacks reset, the dog gets slowed, etc on the way to the boss, gives him back his spear.


I get back into position 1, continue tanking riplimb as normal.

All the while, healers are healing AND AVOIDING SHIT, dps are dpsing AND AVOIDING SHIT, and the two shannox tanks are fighting over threat.

DID I MENTION AVOIDING SHIT? BECAUSE YOU SHOULD BE AVOIDING SHIT.

[Vyvii]

I LOVE, LOVE the drawings!

[Ourstateobzen]

Now, I did have another idea which could be implemented if the SHANNOX tanks were having trouble dropping stacks. If they weren't, then disregard this and we continue doing things the way we did last night.

We could change it to look more like this:


We divide the ranged and heals into two groups, one (probably smaller) to be assigned to heal me and kill riplimb, and one (larger) to heal the shannox tanks and kill shannox. And whoever kills Rageface still kills that bastard.


Try to make as much sense as you can out of this convoluted mess of a diagram. The key difference here is I will, when the spear lands, run directly towards shannox. During this time, huntards will lay one frost trap in between the dog and the spear. The dog will get the slow once on the way to the spear, and again on the way to the boss. Another huntard (yes this strategy revolves around having two huntards) will lay a second frost trap between the first frost trap and Shannox, thereby effectively having three full frost trap effects before the dog ever makes it to the boss with the spear. The reason this would help is that shannox will NOT give any stacks to the main tank, so long as he doesn't have his spear in hand. So, we maximize the time both 1) the dog is not attacking me and 2) Shannox does not have his spear.

Honestly, with this strat we can probably get it down to two tanks, if done properly. But like I said, it's just a possibility, if the tanks weren't having problems, we can stick with the way it is.

[GM Fright]

I feel like making the shannox tanks just manage their aggro is probably a lot easier than that mess. Toss a couple frost traps on and around riplimb and it will only make things easier.

[GM Fright]

Also, our DPS needs to kick it up about ten notches.

[Sterne1140]

This can actually be a 2 tank fight imo. Shannox uses his spear to build stacks. If the dog is frozen while Shannox's spear lies there waiting to be retrieved Shannox can't apply his DoT. Kiting,hunter traps, chains, Shannox ice trap can all be used to keep his spear away.

Pie dropped his stacks 3-4 times during our last good attempt.

Easy enough once the kiting tank gets a feel for it. Hunters also need to be on board with traps.

Easy enough I think.

[Iateyourpie]

Yeah I didn't have any problems losing stacks constantly when riplimb was taking his time returning that spear, never once went past 3 stacks till the very end i got to 6 and it dropped

[Alastonn]

Alright, been reading alot of strats and different plans and i think i found one that might work. Last night (as I saw) people we're dying because of Rage Face. What i was thinking is we BURN Rage face once he's dead theres Little raid damage going out. That means most healers can focus on one Tank (in This Case, Pie tanking Shannox) Because he will be taking 30% extra damage due to Frenzy but Healers should be able to keep him up due to the little raid damage. Riplimb will be damaged and should be about dead when Shannox hits 30%. Once RipLimb is Dead we pop Timewarp/Blood-Lust and Kill Shannox. Also (Found out something useful) When Riplimb is Getting Shannox's spear, a Mage can cast Slow on Riplimb and make it take twice as long for Riplimb to run back to Shannox. I don't know if the Slow Plan would work if we even have an Arcane mage but sounds very, very useful. Hope Any of This Works, See you at Tonights Raid.

[Tavie]

Some general comments from last night. First and foremost, I really think the strat we were using on the last pull worked well. While theoretically I can see where the fight can be 2-tanked, I believe that having 3 tanks creates some flexibility for those off plan events (like the tank being trapped in ice). I was able to single heal Obzen and if you look at the meters, he was taking a ton of dmg, from a healing perspective, I am concerned at the ability to keep up the second tank if there are delays in transition. The spike damage on that fight can be pretty intense.

From a healing perspective, I think the strat we were using allows us to heal with just 5 or 6 healers too. If you look at the logs from the last fight, alot of our healers were clearly bored to tears. Converting 2 maybe 3 heals to dps will benefit the raid.

For a 5 man heal setup, I would try the following:

Palladin, Shaman (Alaston and Yeetawh) on the tanks (2 healers.. with the pally switching beacons and focus as the tanks swap)
Shaman or Druid on the 3rd Tank ( I did that last night, but easily a shaman could )
Disc Priest plus 1 on Raid heals (further discussion below)

I know it sounds crazy to think of 5 healing this, but when you look at the mechanics and the numbers from the logs, there really isn't a ton of raid dmg, and a lot of that is avoidable. Now we haven't seen phase 2 (post 30%), so that could invalidate some of this, but from the videos it looks to be the same mechanics just more dmg on the tanks without the dogs.

Atonement Spec Disc Priest on Rageface. I discussed this with Klik last night and we thought it would be a better fit for his spec to have him focus on Rageface. The shields and the atonement healing seem well suited to the task of healing someone who is pinned to the ground getting eaten by a dog. This healing coupled with some assistance from the second raid healer might increase the survivability of the target. With the movement and target switching on the main tanks, atonement healing is less than optimal. We thought it would be worth trying.

Given the stability we found with healing and raid dmg last night on the last few attempts, I was also thinking we should just burn down the dogs to 2%-4% health (a little more if we think stopping dps is going to be a problem) and then burn down the boss. That way at 32% of boss health, the dogs can be finished off and hopefully get a smooth transition in the next phase. Alternatively, we could burn down Riplimb, then the boss, then Rageface in order to avoid killing Rageface early as the ranged try to cancel is "rage" ability. The goal here being to minimize target switches, so folks can focus on avoiding crap and optimize dps at the same time.

Last comment on raid positioning, with Obzen taking Riplimb over to the side and the spear always landing where Riplimb is, the raid as a whole could minimize raid dmg by spreading out well away from Obzen. Something we didn't do last night. Also they should try to stay 8 yards away from each other, mainly so that they can see there feet better. I noticed last night that people tend to cluster which is less than ideal. The would be especially useful on the the charger trash.

Another Tavie TL:DR special.

[Yeetawh]

I do not want to 5 heal this. If some healer gets caught in crystal, we are screwed. Our dps is strong enough that we can have more healers and to be safe I think we should.

Ideally the raid shouldn't take much damage other than getting our faces raged on occasion. So I believe that we just need to make sure healing assignments are laid out clearly(since I missed the beginning of the raid I didn't know what they were). But we would have whoever on tanks and then the raid healers should be in charge of healing the Rageface target. I have raid icons turned on my healing thingy so as soon as I see a skull appear I know that person is about to get wrecked so I can start spamming heals on them. Having probably two people watching that should be alright as long as the dps start critting on Rageface quickly.

I do agree that Riplimb should be kept alive as close to shannox's 30% as possible because of his Magma Rapture ability:

[Ourstateobzen]

Yeah, there is a very strong emphasis on avoidable (AVOIDABLE AVOIDABLE AVOIDABLE) damage on this fight. We could (read: SHOULD) go the entire fight with the only dps damage taken being the occasional face rage. Don't get hit by traps.

Also, as to Rageface being burned, this would make it so dps would be taking zero damage EVER, because you ARE avoiding traps, letting the healers focus all of their attention on the tanks.

And yes, Riplimb must absolutely be killed second.

[Tavie]

I think Yeetawh is probably right, I didn't see that stacking debuff aspect of the magma rupture. So in phase 2 having the extra healer would be useful and necessary on the off chance one gets trapped.

We should also begin thinking through a cool down rotation for phase 2, with 60% more dmg coming 60% faster, we will definately need one I suspect.

My best guess is, we have at most 75sec to burn down the boss before the magma rupture is a wipe. The raid needs to burn down roughly 25mill HP in short order. Given the limited time, there will only be time for one round of cool downs.

Also we may want to have heal cool downs just after each pulse of the magma rupture. Tranq and Hymns. Clearly raid stacking is not a good idea because of the increased importance of trap avoidance, so I am unclear on the range mechanics of spirit totems, would that be useful in this situation with the raid spread out? What is the effective range there? We were stacked up on its use for Chimaeron, is that a requirement?

In a 75 sec period, is there going to be a tank swap? Wondering if we will have 2 tank cooldowns to work with here.

[GM Fright]

A lot of good ideas. I think we can figure something out that will work for us. Let's kill him tonight.