Raiding - Downing the Guardian to the gates of Hel(ya)

In Trial of Valour this week we did Odyn and it went very smoothly. The shield hits for nearly nothing now, so that makes it easy (that must be the nerf, as well as the change to the health pool of the adds), and people seem to be moving a lot better for phase 3. A nice clean one shot so then we could move onto Guarm.

When we tried it for the first time last week we were quite encouraged by our first attempts of 26 and 25%. However, after that we seemed to go downhill. We realised that the DPS requirement was a bit tight and people really had to not die for us to kill it successfully. We needed every bit of damage we could get (as well as follow simple raid mechanics).

Guarm is a 3 headed beast that will hit the tanks and if you are in front closer than 25 yards then you will die if you're not a tank. The melee all stand at the back leg of Guarm whilst the rest of the ranged spread in front, hopefully 5 yards apart.

There are these "licks" which spread to others if you're closer than 5 yards. The worst one is the ice one, which freezes you and whomever was within that 5 yard range. One person frozen is not too bad. 3 is definitely ugly! And all of the melee iced is definitely a disaster! The fire lick is also pretty awful for everyone around that person, as the aoe damage does hurt. I suppose the shadow lick is the same, but for some reason I don't seem to notice it as much because it's a healing absorb rather than a damage. Probably bad if that person suddenly starts TAKING damage, I suppose!

Guarm breathes out some colours on the ground, and we have assignments for which colour to stand in. For each person that doesn't stand in the colour, Guarm gets a stack of Frothing Rage for each player that doesn't stand in a colour, meaning it does 5% more damage each stack, so it's imperative we do our best to get to our colours. Standing in the wrong colour once you've already soaked a colour is an insta death so everyone was doing their best to get to their colours.

Then there was the stampede. You'd think it would be easy to avoid but still people are dying to it - though in reality there is a lot of damage being dealt from it and that's not just from being trampled to death. Healers have been saving their cooldowns for it but we hit enrage a few times and we had to keep saying that we can't have any deaths! A couple of 6% enrage wipes on Wednesday made it feel like we were close but just needed a bit of tweaking and concentration.

Thursday came around and this time we got it!


It didn't take long either, only a few goes, but we did have the hang of it already. That was pretty exciting.

After that.. Helya. Umm... Yup. That was already hard on normal.

Bloody awful, is all I can say. So much damage going out, so much to do! Tanks complaining they have it rough, healers complaining they have it rough, DPS complaining it's hard to get to blobs. From a healer point of view it's bloody horrible with all the dispels and Ram and I do the majority of the dispels so we were out of mana, and had to depend on Dil and Nerd to do the rest of the raid. Kiting orbs through everyone wasn't a particularly proud moment on my part, and we had a few wipes from blobs getting through and exploding and killing us all. We persisted for about an hour before we decided to call it there since we weren't really improving much, and we didn't have a good grip on it. Xyn said that the reason why people weren't disheartened as yet was because we were still riding the high of the Guarm kill and he was probably right. It felt like the right time to call it and I'll have a good look at some videos later.

Overall, a good night, but raiding will be winding down from now since it's only 2 weeks till Christmas and people will be busy with work, family, parties and shopping. We'll see how we go!

Comments

  1. You guys are at a higher level than us .. we've just killed Helya on Normal and I know for a fact those dispels were brutal. I don't know how many dispels there are supposed to be (if there's one per healer, or only a set amount, for example), but for us we had three healers and three dispels each time. What I ended up doing was using Skada to track Dispels for the current fight, and then I could see who hadn't done one yet that time around and give them a nudge.

    There is a bit of a knack to the dog (on Normal anyway) for the stampede. When he was setting up for it, we'd try to make for the central area a bit so you have more time to avoid him and to help with AoE heals, but basically you don't stand still .. as soon as he's run past you, you run over to the other side, making your way back to your 25+ range at the same time. Especially for healers because that's really the only time we can do our big CD heals, you need to be out of range in time to do it.

    The main problem we had with the dog was his leap - which is supposed to jump to the biggest clump of people, but he still sometimes seemed to ignore the pile of melee and go for ranged.

    We had our first go at Odyn Heroic last night - wow he chucks out a lot of damage. It was mainly trying to cope with the mini-boss being up at the same time, but still being apart from the boss - there just seemed to be so many more people taking damage from the spears/balls and from the Horn of Valor (melee mainly). I think the melee were feeling hard done by because they had to run so far in order to do dps. I'm wondering if we should split the dps and leave the melee on Odyn ...

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    Replies
    1. You have to get those adds down quickly for Odin so just get the melee to do the ones closest to Odin. We have ranged soaking the shield as much as they can (or whomever is in the area).

      With Helya, I'm still trying to work that out. Last night we did it on normal and I just did tank dispels and had two others doing the other dispels, and a 4th on backup. There only seem to be 3 debuffs to dispel, and man I wished I could just dispel the tank ones straight away because it sucked when they waited and suddenly both had it and I could only dispel one!

      I'm not sure if I can use the Skada dispel tracking, but maybe an icon for dispelling would be good...

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