Please use the following link as a reference and in addition of what Jahaa already explained for our strategy : Wowhead’s guide on Mythic Aggramar

I  will list below a few things we will try to do differently/ few more details&tips :

P1 :

First of all, we will need to deal with Flame Rends. We will use two groups :

-tanks+melees+holy paladin → first soak of each Taeslach Techniques sequence

-ranged+healers (but not holy paladin) → second

This is because ranged need to deal with Ravenous Blaze and sometimes don’t have the time to come back to melee range to soak.

For intermissions, we will use the warlock slowing tactic in order to delay the point when the embers reach Aggramar, If our slowing warlock doesn’t have enough time to dot them all as requested in a timely manner, we will need to slow/cc them as much as we can at start of intermission to give more time to the warlock in charge (7+ seconds more for each CCd ember). So it’s important that people’s positioning reflect the plan.

What we could do possibly is CC/freeze (Ring of Frost)/slow(Tar traps)/ … 4 embers on one side of the room, let the warlock dot 4 embers on the other side, then use a gateway to reach the CCd adds and dot them, then proceed to kill the Flame adds.

There are multiple ways to do this, we will see depending on what we can do.

We will let two embers free of anything, because we will have them explode right at the start of intermission. See after.

IntermissionS :

We will not do exactly how it’s described in WoWhead’s guide (for both). In fact we will have the two tanks make Flame adds go through the two embers north of the room, and tank the Flames approx. where the embers spawn. They will be buffed and so will quickly reach Aggramar and explode, giving us two debuffs to deal with for 15 seconds. At that point we will use a first set of Healing CDs (will depend on composition, but minimum two), and maybe personals.

We will also do the single grip / stack of two embers, those embers will be the ones that we will let explode on Aggramar right at the start of P2/P3, either by gripping them to aggramar or by letting them reach him normally / having the tanks move Aggramar to them if needed. Two more debuffs to deal with, so another set of Healing CDs.

This will let us deal with 6 embers of the principal wave in each phase.

At the end of intermission, to give us a few more seconds if we are late with adds, and if it’s possible, we could try to use Ring of Peace right on Aggramar to prevent the adds from reaching him. But it’s not really advisable since RoP is really usefull to slow the adds during the phases.

P3 :

during P3, it’s not necessarily a rush against the clock of embers. But the rush still exists because of the boss enrage timer and the mana of healers, having to deal with all abilities + a constant flow of debuffs. We might want to lust at start of this phase when most people will be in position to damage the boss, that means after ranged have been dealing with the empowered flare.

It will be important for the gripping death knights to have the WA showing the energy of embers on top of their nameplate, because we will have different levels of energy to deal with in this phase (empowered flares make 3 new adds pop each time, they are spaced by 1minute each), and they will need to prioritize gripping the embers with higher energy.

If you have questions/suggestions as Jahaa wrote, please ask them now that we have time to adress the issues before we go fight the boss.

Thanks for reading.

That’s probably interesting but i don’t get your point exactly. Are you questioning the “3 adds at a time” strat? Would you please like to give more details?

Let me explain our reasoning there :

-we thought one range stacking point (purple) was the way to go for P2 from the start. This was to ensure most people were in range of the two healing CDs we’d use to deal with the second set of ember explosions.

-But people were not able/willing/disciplined enough to get back to their respective P1 positions right after the flare, or were just not stacking, so we were fucked up either by empowered adds or by lack of healing (spread raid) or by Ravenous Blazes.

-So we went for a two stacking point strat. But this proved difficult for healers at that point to deal with the second set of explosions, because the ranged were spread out.

-So having more adds explode during intermission was a solution, and using all healing CD’s during intermission to deal with that was ensuring people would survive after intermission anyway since there would not be any major damage spike after that. The key to this is to stagger adds explosions to let the raid be more or less topped of before the third add explosion which would do a lot of damage to the raid. Our aim was to have the two empowered adds explode asap, then make another add explose.

I personaly think the two solutions are equal in theory, but having more explosions during intermission + more healing CDs is our best bet given our raid’s global discipline and awareness. Also, this WE when we got past intermissions it proved to be our best tries. We still need to be better at handling/timing/staggering the explosions + maybe adapt our healing CD’s use. Remember that we need the explosions to be quick enough for the debuff to run out soon after intermission ends (or even just before it ends) because the healers might have problem to deal with 3 stacks of dots while moving to stacking points and dealing with the flares.

As for flares, it’s nice to remember the timings but the pattern was explained during the raid :

-First one is right after intermission

-Followings are after Taeslach techniques sequences (which are spaced by 1 minute each)

But yeah, definitly, after intermission/techniques we do have time to stack properly to bait the flares and after that we have time to come back to our P1 positions. Doing this with discipline and in a timely manner will be mandatory if we want to kill the boss because of P3.

Thanks for your insight it’s always appreciated 🙂

It’s better if people react to those post rather than during the raid when we are already discussing things in officer chat pull by pull to see if we can improve, so we don’t have much time to discuss/explain.

Intermission :

A) Yeah a bursty CD would probably help to recover the first big explosion but in fact the biggest will come with the third add, because for each dot we have the damage of the next explosion/dot increases by 100%. That’s why i thought it was better to use Paladin’s CD in the middle of the pattern and hope it could help top the raid’s health before third explosion then make use of other CD’s to fight versus DOT + top the raid. That’s also why we want to use our personal CD’s before the first two adds explode, so that the raid doesn’t suffer that much damage and the Tranqs/HTT just fight through mostly the dots.

Here you can see it on the graphs of our best pull, which was surprisingly the first one with the 3 adds explosion strategy :

I’m not sure where the spike from your graphs come because we clearly see the pattern is different here. But yours were taken from wipes so it’s difficult to tell. If you want, check out every healer’s output for this try (#9 on Sunday) and you will see it follows the damage pattern nicely. I looked at more of our best tries and during intermission the damage/healing pattern is always the same.

So i really don’t know, given we manage to go past to it without fuckups, if we want to do things differently.

B) we can’t because it would means swirlies in melee all the time so it’s better to do as we are since we mostly manage to kill both adds in time, depending on who gets swirlies and who does not.

Phase 2 : 

A) Maybe we could try to come back to this strat but it’s not really usefull for P2, if we do not have another double explosion to deal with -hence the 3 adds explosion during intermission-. As i wrote, it’s either 2+2 with one stacking point and people being disciplined enough to stack and come back to their P1 position in time, or 3+1 and two stacking points, having people on yellow (left side of the room) have more time to come back and dps more.

I’ll also say that if you position yourself correctly for flame rend soak, which is the last technique everytime, after that you are basicly back to your stacking point mostly. If we all had to go to purle, then people on the left who are far away from this stacking point would have more to travel, either to be on the good part of the cone of flame rend to be knocked back on purple, or to go to purple after being knocked back. That’d probably mean a big dps/healing loss.

In P3 we won’t stack neither on purple nor on yellow but on red, behind the already existing adds. We will use a SP (myself) to mass dispell the 3 adds who will automaticaly be empowered by the flare which spawns them, and given reaction time/ if we do things correctly, they should be approximatively at the same position as other adds, on the same axis vs the boss. It will make our CC chain easier to execute. For P3, basicly ranged on the left and on the right sides of the room will have the same distance to travel to go to this point : being KB to yellow (left) / purple (right) then proceed to red (all).

So all in all, this two stacking points have their merits. But only if we don’t have to deal with another double explosion. Will probably be the case in P3 but we are not there yet 😀

B) This is mostly what we do, but i’ll add a few comments :

• warlocks are not that immobile if the fight is predictable, and this one is. We put our demonic circles at our starting points on the far right or left, and after KB from flame rend, if we use our demonic transportation we are directly back there. Also, after baiting the flares, a short walk and transportation makes it easy. And basicly, being on the far sides also helps us DPS more because we are pretty safe from moving there even with Ravenous Blaze.

• Druids and mages are centered. For P3, our SP would also probably benefit from that kind of centered position, first to be able to mass dispell and come back quickly to his spot, but also if it’s possible to trigger sephuz by mind bombing adds at clever moments. But if it’s me (provided we won’t certainly have this wonderfull SP application in the meantime) I will probably start from my actual point (farthest left) and use mania to increase my movement speed. I won’t be able to trigger Sephuz with anything else than mass dispell the adds, which will help me come back to my spot sooner, but on the other end being far left (or right) means no movement at all for Ravenous blaze, which should offset the Sephuz problem, hopefully.

• I will also add here that dealing correctly with Ravenous Blaze if you have a center position is important. Meaning if you don’t get it, you should go directly in melee range so that your neighbour(s) who has(ve) it have more room to position and stay in range of the boss the most they can, to continue DPS/healing. Remember we will only have one RB to deal with each time after first intermission (only two consecutive in P1), but with all the movement required during the fight it’ll be important to maximize our dps/healing when we can and that means sometimes leave people with blaze in range of the boss.

• We can’t really afford too many “melees” because we don’t know exactly how the Ravenous Blaze work. It’s supposed to debuff you when you first get it, then it can be cast on melee if there are no valid targets, and it’s a wipe. We forced ourselves in a 10 ranged (ranged dps + healers – Hpal – MW monk) setup when we made our first tries two weeks ago, but came up with a 9 ranged targets setup after all and it works fine. But i don’t know if a 8 ranged targets setup would work. So basicly i think our setup + positions right now is nice.

C) The point you make regarding keeping tanks alive is valid. But we’d need more ranged dps options for this, see above 🙂

And as for dispells, remember we need to dispell Foe Braker, nothing else, so basicly at any time you’d dispell you would have either another Foe Braker, Searing Tempest -and at that moment not being too close would be a good idea 😀 – or Flame Rend to deal with after, meaning at that point tanks are mostly safe anyway.

D) see above as i described, if you stand on the good side of the cone (either left or right) you get KB where you are supposed to be, mostly.

That’s also my own opinions regarding what you wrote, not telling you say stupid things and it’s definitly nice to have people interact here, that’s what those topics are made for 🙂

For healing CDs, you maybe have a point but as i wrote, we went past intermission few times quite safely so i’m not sure it’s a healing CDs rotation problem, it’s mostly a problem of people avoiding swirlies / not using the right defensive CDs at the right time. But again, i’m not healing on this fight so even if usually i’m the one trying to organize them, having the healer’s opinion on it is always beneficial, i can’t figure that out exactly myself.

For the rest, i think our actual organization will work for the whole fight, i’m quite confident we can kill the boss with it if everybody is disciplined and does his job. There are a lot of options, but now that we had our best pulls with one i think it’s better to build on this basic tactic rather than changing things again and go back to wipe the time everybody learns from their mistakes with another one. Off course, if we see some things need to change for any reason, we’ll change them 🙂

Sorry for the late reply, this has been a really really long week lol

Nope I agree, it’s always nice to knock ideas and thoughts around the park a bit 😀

You see the spikes in my graph when you zoom into the high output section, as the full view always seems very smooth until you dig in a little more 😉 I’m also going to try a slightly different build this evening to see if it helps here.

-cracks knuckles- ok lets see what this weekend brings to the table, onwards to victory!