I am preparing a couple of proper guides for the new ICC encounters, but in the meantime I am going to share some of the wisdom I’ve absorbed learning these with my guild:
Marrowgar-
- When he bone storms, don’t stop DPS. Just move out of the way if he gets too close.
- Always take the spikes out first.
- He resets threat after his bone storm, so misdirect.
Despite not doing much of this correctly, we managed to get him down so fast I didn’t get to feel the pain of my mistakes. It’s a good thing I’m pretty, because I’m sure not getting this raid slot for my skill.
Deathwhisper-
- Adds first, boss when they’re down.
- Pick an add tank and help him first. Be ready to run to the back or the other side if something is still up when you’re done.
- Marks is best for this fight because your volley is buffed, and you can roll serpent stings on an add and the boss (assuming you have the chimera shot glyph)
- When you’re AOEing adds, feel free to swap your serpent sting on Deathwhisper for a viper sting. Chances are you’ll be running low on mana- even if you happen to have a judgement of wisdom on your target, volley won’t proc the mana gain.
- Do. Not. Stand. In. Anything. Including the path of a ghost!
This is a simple fight to describe, but it is more challenging than it sounds.
Gunship-
- If you’re on offense, bind your rocket pack to something like shift-mousewheel up. Helps prevent you from getting stuck and killed on the enemy ship.
- Also, if you can arrange to do some incidental DPS on a second target (like a rocketeer) while you focus the mage, do it. For me this meant keeping a serpent sting up on one of them.
- If you’re on defense, make sure to get good use out of your misdirects.
- If you’re on a canon, get good at not letting your gun overheat.
To be honest, I only saw one part of this fight- the coolest part! I got to use a jet pack to jump back and forth and kill mages :)
Saurfang-
- This is the fight we’re currently working on.
- It feels like, on 25, that there’s not enough room to avoid sharing the blood nova.
- For this fight, SV definitely has more DPS and utility than MM. MM has too much of a ramp up to effectively do more DPS than SV on short lived beasts, and SV can proc lock and load with frost traps. Also, if you’re doing it right, you’ll be moving a lot, and that harms MM more than SV.
- Pre-pot, and blow all cooldowns before the first beasts spawn- you’ll get enough time to use most of it on the boss.
- Before every beasts spawn, run to the bottom of the stairs and drop a frost trap, and then disengage back to your position.
- Every beast phase, you have to tab target a beast, distracting shot, concussive shot, and then beat the snot out of it. Ideally your frost trap should have procced a lock and load that will do most of the DPS.
- Have a mouseover distracting shot macro set up, and use it as soon as you see any beast catch up to anyone and start attacking, as long as your beast isn’t on you.
- If you see a beast in melee (because someone forgot to stop AOE), do not mouseover taunt- you’ll risk taunting Saurfang. Tab target to the new one, and distracting shot it.
- Chances are your raid will save heroism/bloodlust for his 30% enrage- since you pre-potted, you should have a potion available for this. Also, depending on the time taken, you might have other cooldowns available.
- Whatever you do, make sure that you always kite beasts before DPSing Saurfang. Even if you’re at only 2%, a single beast hammering away on someone will quickly get Saurfang back a ton of health.
Like I mentioned, I’ll write a proper guide to this once I’ve done it enough.
In other random news, while researching my SV PvE spec for Saurfang, I discovered that even though I have a fairly high passive armor pen, as well as an armor pen proc trinket, my SV build does more DPS than my MM build. I don’t know if it’s the new gear or the patch 3.3 changes, but I suggest you go take a look at femaledwarf.com and see if you’re in the same situation.
I think I may have too much money for my own good- I bought the battered hilt this weekend, and proceeded to finish a really truly cool quest line that resulted in my new 2 hander. Since they nerfed the drop rate on these, the prices had sky-rocketed to 20k gold. Well, I’d rather buy this than a vanity mount gold sink any day.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
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Shadowstreak
I see you’re at the same part my guild is at. Some of my people just can’t kite for the life of them, and not all of our DPS is high enough to burn the boss down really fast.
The first three fights were fun though! Especially gunship. But as much fun as you had with your jetpack, I got to be in a cannon doing damage to their ship, and that was awesome. :P
Oh, and keep your eyes out for the bow that drops off of Deathwhisper! We got it the second night we were in there, but I let it pass to the only other hunter that raids with us. Which I don’t mind, ’cause he’s my 2′s parter. It’s a NICE bow though. I even trained the bow skill to use it when it drops, which I never did before out of Dwarven stubbornness.
Just wanted to share something that helped us get Saurfang down. We tanked the boss a little down the stairs and were able to place a couple ranged behind him. It really helped clear up some room out front for people to move.
Additionally, if a ranged got hit with Mark of the Fallen Champion we had them move into the melee group to keep them from getting hit with Boiling Blood or Blood Nova. It made the healers job a lot easier.
We’ve been putting ranged DPS with no minimums (mages and shammies) behind him, but your trick might be interesting. We haven’t been switching people around.
i have found that at least on the first 3 bosses of the 10 man, hunters have a ton of utility which is nice and helpful for the raid. MDs on marrowgar were key. Also, we found in the 10 man having melee on the adds for deathwhisper like tankspot suggests was just leaving us with dead cleaved melee, so hunters took over. Having the ability to tranq shot fanatics and kite the big ugly guys took a lot of damage off the tank. We are also good to kill mages on the gunship with our rapid instant dps. Leave the low dps on the guns. Saurfang we still have issues with, mostly healers letting people die or getting out of range when kiting or just not enough dps. ice traps do not work, but frost does as mentioned. Up until saurfang it was really pretty easy. I am sure we have a rough road ahead of us though for sure.
Which buff are you tranqing? and off of which type of fanatic?
i believe it was off of the melee type, so i think they were the cult fanatics. I think the deformed fanatics (big green guys) also has something that was removable. buff maybe called vampiric might, but not positive.
On the Marrowgar fight, the timer for his whirlwind coincides nicely with deterence if your heals are having an issue.
Disengage is good in a pinch.
On Deathwhisper you’re actually probably better off viper stinging an adherent and leaving serpent sting on the boss. Serpent sting does a lot more damage to the shield.
On Saurfang I just manually run in and out to lay the trap (I get a spot close to the front so I don’t have to move too far) and then my disengage is up if I need it later in the add killing.
The only time I would swap my serpent sting to a viper sting is to avoid going into aspect of the viper while volleying adds. The fact that it drains mana at all is just a side bonus :)
Yes, but unless there aren’t any adherents up, you’d be better off putting the viper on one of them instead of the boss for mana regen, assuming you’re actually serpenting stinging the boss in the first place.
There is no way I’d buy a Hilt for 20k g…. I’d rather have a motorbike; it’ll last longer! I have Lupine Longstaff at the moment so I’m not totally desperate yet; I’ll do the quest line eventually even if it’s just for lore :)
For Saurfang you actually want to just let anyone that gets marked die. This will lead to a linear growth of his runic power rather than an exponential growth with healing through mark. My guild, which is by no means cutting edge managed over 15 people above 6.2k dps and still could barely get him while keeping people healed. Letting marked people drop and stacking dps against 3 healers and 2 tanks worked exceptionally well.
That’s really an interesting idea- I’ll bring it up in guild :)
Marked person dies –> Saurfang gains 5% health and your raid loses dps.
Solution: avoid getting marks in the first place.
We actually ended up getting him down- avoiding marks is of course the primary goal, but there’s a steady unavoidable trickle that serve as a sort of enrage timer.
We got him down last night on 10man. We were able to delay the first mark till we got him down to 45ish% and and the second mark at sub 10%. I am a bit confused about the “let them die” strat. I was under the impression that death does not clear the mark of the fallen debuff and he continues to gain blood power from it.
That is the only way that it has more than a passing impect on the fight. If death clears the debuff next time I’m telling the raid member to jump off the Skybreaker if they can.
Death does not clear the debuff. So if the marked person gets brezzed then they will come back with it (just like insanity during Yogg).
I’m not sure if he continues to gain points from the dead person or not.
Regarding the Mark on Saurfang, if you let people die he will HEAL himself.
” If a player dies with Mark of the Fallen Champion, Saurfang will heal for a significant amount so it is extremely important to keep focused heals on players afflicted with the debuff.”
That my friend is a bad idea. We had that problem and the healers were letting people drop but he kept healing himself pretty fast. We had him at 5% and he skyrocketed to 25% in a matter of seconds.
Hmm.. That’s actually got me thinking. I’ve had dual-spec for God knows how long, always had my second spec as a soloing spec but, perhaps I should switch to SV for this fight if it’s going to be a boost. Makes sense with Lock and Load.
On the Battered Hilt, I’m planning on farming mine. Few packs at the beginning of Pit of Saron, a big elite skeleton and several non elites. You can farm those, run out, reset, very soloable. Though not sure whether to get my shadow priest in there instead of my hunter because of shackle. Either way that’s worth noting if they’re really selling for 20k on your server :o
I don’t know how many others are as impatient (and just a little stupid) as I. I know the drop rates have been nerfed badly, but I don’t know how badly either.
I think the nerfed drop rate is pretty bad. I’ve been running all three instances twice a day since launch (two characters, my Hunter and my Shaman), and I haven’t even seen a Hilt drop.
So with 6 runs per day for the past week, haven’t even seen a Hilt. That’s a low drop rate.
Disc priest friend farmed those trash mobs for 3 or 4 hours I think before he got one, it stole his evening I know that much :p but I think he earnt a bit while farming, gained a few Abyss Crystals and such.
Looks like they’ve made it unable to farm from the mobs I mentioned, time to actually run the silly place and buy myself one.
Jaedia, when you say it looks like they’ve made the Hilt unfarmable, how did they do this? Do those mobs no longer drop the Hilt at all, and if so, which are the mobs that drop it?
All of the trash mobs, except for the Elite skeletons with the little non elite skeletons with them, in Pit of Saron do drop it.
It’s just those skeleton mobs that now don’t, because they were soloable. Now there’s no point.
Just wondering when is the next Hunting Party podcast incoming. Thanks.
Soon ™? What? No dice?
It’s in Faeghleis’s hands now- his production company has started a new contract, so I expect a longer turn-around on his production.
after 2 wipes at Saurfang we decided to make some changes and our RL came up with a great ideea. all 3 priests were sent to respec to discipline. So now basically everyone in raid had shield up and made the kill to be an extremely easy one. also got us to be the 4th guild on srv that made the achi(i`ve gone and made a mess) in 25man. Also we are not imba geared(5k GS average)
I take it when the pets hit shields he doesn’t get the buff. Smart raid leader if that is the case!
Ive been trying SV tonight and I cannot get the same numbers I do with marks all the time. When I get “lucky” and get black arrow procs i get about the same dps as i do with marks if i dont get black arrow procs for like 2 or 3 black arrows (which seems to happen far to often) i get like 1-2k less dps. I cannot see how SV is viable when they numbers are so random apart from for that one fight where you can force it with frost traps.
I get the exact opposite results- could you send me an armory link, or maybe a worldoflogs link to outdps@gmail.com?
sure.
I tried out Surv for Saurfang this week and saw a significant dps increase (about 2k) over marks from last week. Part of it can be attributed to gear upgrades (Deathbringers Will and Zod’s Repeater) but I think the biggest change was the burst damage on the adds and procing LnL so often.
Given the loot from 3.2 and 3.3 the classic Surv spec that was so popular during Naxx and Ulduar isn’t top dps any more. With so much Armor Pen on gear it’s better to shift a few points around as auto shot and aimed shot benefit from ArP.
I grabbed the spec off the “best possible dps” thread from Elitest Jerks.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cbZ0eVoohZx0ci0cIhgdqhsz:Afi
Mileage will of course very depending on gear and what not. femaledwarf.com, Shandara’s spreadsheet, and Rawr will always be better than following a cookie cutter spec.
Haha ive been using that spec since nax. maybe 2 points dif but the 18 in mm is where it counts. Ive always been out dpsing people.
On Saurfang i usually misdirect my add to the kiters on the opposite side then distracting shot near the end of my range, i also grab the other add when it gets too close to the other kiter. Distracting shot is seeing alot of utility lately.
Hm I’d rather buy a vanity mount than a piece of gear that gets replaced too quickly anyway. I’d rather wait for the battered hilt to drop than dump all my gold for one.
I end up using deterrence during Bone Storm if Marrowgar gets too close. The duration of it is just long enough to get back on dps once he moves out of again. One problem we’ve had with him is when he lays down fire on top of someone who is spiked. Seems to be instant death unless you are a plate wearer.
Well we actually 2 shotted Saufang the day before on our very first ever encounter. Had spent the first week wiping too hard on DW cuz we did’t manage to balance out Adds Versus Boss DPS.
Anyway, some stuffs that might help:
Since there are 5 Blood Beasts, we are equally distributed into 5 groups around that semi circle. Mainly 2 Ranged DPS to 1 group. Group 1 to the left to Group 5 to the right. Hunters, Mages and Shammy will be situated at frontal of their group and be prepared to stagnant their respective Adds. Shammy has a Earthbind totem or w/e it’s called which helps a ton. Hunter will lay a trap, distract or use their hardest hitting shot to draw their respective blood beast with mages as the last resort to further hold down the remaining blood beasts incase they are not dpsed down quickly. Generally, 2 DPS to 1 Blood Beast should generally get the blood beast down really quickly before they can even reach us (which is what happened to us on our 2nd successful attempt).
Things to note:
1) Melee DPS must NOT use any aoe based skills when blood beasts are inc. Tank also must not taunt them by accidence.
2)This fight is actually noticeably easier on 25man as the Adds only has 100k..with many more Dpsers.
3) Those inflicted with Mark appeared to persist through Death/wipes. Those inflicted should go in, collect their corpse and exit the instance and then manually proceed to Saufang again without using the portal. This should help.