[DRAGON SOUL] Warmaster Blackhorn

[Lithasola]

The new Loot ship ! I hope ....




http://www.learntoraid.com/2011/11/27/w ... 25-normal/

http://www.icy-veins.com/warmaster-blac ... d-strategy

The key to this fight is protecting the ship from dmg, this is done by handling 3 waves of various adds. Tanks will pick up the Twilight Elites of which there is a few different kinds, 1 per tank, should be tanked side by side so as to avoid tanks hitting each other with the cleave from their add but allowing the melee to cleave the mobs. Melee will concentrate on burning these down, Ranged will spread out behind the melee, you guys will concentrate on the Twilight Assault Drakes that get reeled in to the sides of the ship by the harpooners. Ranged will have to pay special attention to the charge that the Elites do, a graphic should show the direction the add will run in, get out of the way, melee too I assume but you guys will notice it better than ranged will. All bets are off once Twilight Sappers spawn, drop everything and nuke it down, these guys do a kamikaze run to the ships hold where they will explode and cause massive dmg. Remember we must Soak the void zones and kill the sappers asap to keep the ship alive.

The void zones I speak of are Twilight Barrage from the drakes in the air, these will show a graphic on the floor, this is the baby version of the attack, it needs at least 3 people to soak it or the ship takes a hefty hit of dmg. Ranged should be able to cover this and the dmg is shared so the more the merrier. If its near melee then melee can help soak too. The bigger version of this attack comes from Goriona, Blackhorns mount and is called Twilight Onslaught. Everyone should stack up on this much bigger AoE area to help soak the increased dmg, I suggest leaving tanks out of the pile to save any problems with cleaves from thier adds.

Once 3 waves of each add has been dealt with (or all the drakes flying around are dead except Goriona) P2 will start. Blackhorn will come down and must be tanked facing away from the raid, tanks will need to taunt off one another as he uses devastate which sunders your armor, taunt after 2 stacks. Ranged people will need to move out of range of his disrupting roar (10 yards) but not so far away that they cant avoid his shockwave (conal attack) when he turns to cast it at a random person. Shockwave deals dmg and stuns you for 4 seconds. While hes on the ground Goriona is flying around launching balls of fire at people on the deck. Twilight flames targets a random person and leaves a patch of purple fire on the ground for a while, ranged just avoid this and nuke the heck out of the drake, melee will be concentrating on the boss at this point. Once the drake gets to 25% she will retreat and we can all concentrate on the boss. this is the burn phase, the longer the boss is up the higher his stacks of vengence and eventually he will become to powerful to tank.

Im unsure of the best points to use raid saves and AoE heals but I would guess its when we are soaking Twilight Onslaught as the whole raid should be taking a lot of dmg at that point. Also Tanks will get stacking debuffs from the various Elites that they tank so saves may be required there if the adds are slow to be nuked down.

[Lithasola]

So no comments here ? What you dont think theres anything we could do to improve on this fight ..... come on people !

Ok then since your all stuck for ideas how about I ask for some feedback to build on what we did last night.

1. Positioning - were people happy with being grp'd and given a certain area to cover ?
2. Tanking - was the tanking positioning, incoming dmg anything else of an issue ?
3. Healing - should we set up a rotation of raid saves/heals for Twilight onslaught ? We probably will have to set up tank saves for the end of the fight when Blackhorns stacks of Vengence get higher. How did you feel running from area to Twilight Onslaught AoE and back again ?
4. Ranged dps - you guys seemed to be coping well with the drakes, you seemed sure you couldnt handle the sapper on your own along with Rommie when asked are you sure about this 1.8 million HP with stuns slows and a deathgrip....whats the chances ?
5. Melee dps - did positioning of the Twilight Elites seem ok, were you guys able to use plenty of cleaves, also it doesnt look like your able to avoid the charge from them at all is there any way around that ?

Come on guys we need some discussion in here.....

[Tsumecho]

Sorry Bossbear, been busy this morning you know :S

Something I thought about last night with the issues we had with the Onslaught and Sapper at the same time. What about if when that happened we had the rogues controlling them with stuns until Onslaught was over then the rest could help, surely with the number of stuns available we could manage? Also are they immune to Roots? If not, a druid could root the Sapper till Onslaught had hit? Or a combo of roots and stuns?

I'm just trying to think of things that could help there, cause that seemed to be one of the bigger issues for the short time I was in the raid.

[Lithasola]

Agreed Dylan, this was the reason why I was asking if ranged + Rommie couldnt handle the sapper without help from the melee. If the melee could continue and just soak then go back to Elites things would be a lot simpler. Ranged could nuke the sapper from the Onslaught AoE site, and having 1 melee that might not be stacking means the dmg shared over the raid (ranged, healers and remianing melee) would be easier to heal up again.

[Bravebeard]

- I found it helpful to use a targeting macro with an instant spell for sappers.
The one I used look like:

/tar twilight sapper
/cast arcane shot

Ranged wont be able to get down sappers without melee. Or at least it looked like that.

- Splitting up the raid in areas seems like a good idea. Maybe 4 groups is enough though, 6 seems a lot?

- slowing traps on the floor makes swirly things hard to see, I'd recommend not using them.

- There was sometimes a request to MD adds to tanks. This felt a bit unreliable, hunters normally stand with their backs to where the adds spawn so the process goes like: noticing the add, interupting an on-going cast, making sure you have focus, turning around, casting MD, casting a couple of arcane shots. It was rare that this happened before the add had made up their minds on where they wanted to go.

If tanks are of the opinion that the cant get the adds on their own. We'll need to figure stuff out, perhaps its just hunter awareness that will come when used to the fight...

[Tsumecho]

As a druid, I have 2 stuns, a "slow" and a root. Bear form -> charge + bash then kitty -> ravage for combo point + maim and then a possible root if needed.

Not sure what else there is we can do. There are a number of other stuns available also of course, so its up to RL's at the end of the day.

[Tan]

Don't think hunter MD is still needed. We got the hang of knowing where the add was going to land and the taunting went better.
They sure don't give us much time to taunt them though, its land-and-hit-some-poor-bugger (mostly a drood, don't know why :p ) but that shouldn't happen too often anymore in the next couple of fights.

We DO still have a problem that we can't get rid of our debuff in ph1, though the healers didn't seem to have too much of a problem keeping us alive so i guess we can just disregard this?
Healers, did u notice having more trouble keeping us alive towards the end of ph1?
If not, u can scratch this already from your todo-list Lith ^^

[Alaedon]

2. Tanking - was the tanking positioning, incoming dmg anything else of an issue ?

our position seem ok we could use our range skill to get the elite when they land and to keep elites near each other to give the melees chance to cleave them.. the problem that i saw was some ppl were hiting the new elites while we had at least one elite alive the one i was tanking .. that cause problem that after i use hand of rekon on the elite to taunt it that i lost the aggroo to the person that hit it ... so ppl should keep in thier mind they can't hit any elite befor the tank had it...now back to the elites sometime they died really fast like the one i had one me was about at 10% when the new elites come and other times the elites was over 50% which lead after while for me to have about 3 elites on me and tan to have 2 which really was hard to handle .. so think we need more pew pew at the elites or i am out of cds when the 3rd wave of elites come.. last thing MD could work at the start but after that its wil be hard to hunter to know which elite need to MD to which tank as we swap the elites at each wave to change the debuff except if we have one hunter for each tank to MD the right elite at each wave.

[Caireann]

I wasn't there yesterday, but I think that's possible to have SPriests soaking the small barrages solo if specced to additional dmg reduction - 21% passive (if I remember right how much shadowform granted), plus own shields, we could go with having less ppl grouped to run to the small ones, hence better dps on adds. Ofc if that's possible, may require checking out ;) Other than that didn't see your fight guys so will add more next time.

[Giruy]

Overall we have a reasonable approach, as we can, when paying attention, get to the next phase, its just execution.

1. The small barrages appear to be handled ok so no need to micro manage too much there.
2. 1 melee (preferably Dk) and ranged, that should give us a root, a chain and FN. The dps requirement on the add isn't all that demanding so should be manageable.

Mistakes I made (and probably repeated by others):

Soaking too many barrages and expecting to get heals, need to pick and choose what small barrages to soak depending on health.

Crossing over the charge animation, I assumed incorrectly that it was only the destination that was deadly, not the entire animation line.

Phase 2:

Not seen enough of this but is very similar to the last boss in Utgarde Pinnacle but with added drake and fire. The killer is clearly the cone damage so someone calling that out is probably imperative.