Raiding - Success! How we dealt with Heroic Hellfire Assault

Back we went to Hellfire Citadel on Thursday ready to try Hellfire Assault again on heroic.  I admit that after reading a lot of the negative comments on MMO Champion's forums, I wondered if we would be able to do it. However, my friend Fanglore told me that he was doing it in a PuG in heroic and they got to 50%. Ok, so it's just how WE are doing it that's the problem, I thought.  If a PuG can do it then we can too.  Aimei also said that the more people we had, the harder it was to do.

So at the start of the raid we discussed again the kill order priority. The Felcasters convert to Terrors after a period of time (according to Icy Veins) but they could stay up for a while before they turned into terrors.  We weren't sure if they turned into Terrors after a certain % health but we treated them as if that was how they worked.  When those Terrors were up they did massive amounts of raid damage that needed a healer cooldown to get through and if we had two morphed into Terrors well that was pretty much a wipe.

The Berserkers were an issue for tanks on Wednesday, but now we had the melee dealing with them and ranged were on them also until the Siege tank came out.  We still had adds all over the place and then we finally decided to nominate a main assist who could call out also (Punchynok) and the target switching was better.  Tanks were living longer and for the first time we managed to get to 50% in the encounter.

Then we noticed we had little adds heading up to the cannons and damaging them, because we had a few insta wipes and it was from the cannons dying.  We managed to a really good attempt in but there were SO many adds around.  We had stopped cleaving and gone to single target (as suggested by multiple sites) because we were worried about 2 terrors metamorphing and wiping the raid, but there were so many adds up by the end, it was crazy.  Aza and Owl had been AoEing the whole time and after more then an hour of wiping (but making minor progress mind you), they said that the adds were not going down fast enough because the raid DPS was too low with the single target.

A lot of the mythic guilds had just cleaved the adds down, and now that we had a kill order, we decided to give that a go. Voe had been running the munitions up to the cannons (and needed a couple of heals as he headed up the further the fight went on) and Kelthal had been keeping an eye for stray adds on the cannons - if you just shot them they would come away from the cannons and peel onto whoever aggroed them.

So, on our kill attempt, we killed all Berserkers first, with one focussed but still cleaving.  As soon as a terror transformed that was immediately killed, and it made a huge difference on healing.  Tanks were easier to heal.  All range were pretty good with switching to the siege engines - we tried to have the ranged standing behind the boss (so that the boss was between the ranged and the cannons) so they could spend longer DPSing the siege engines, but I'm not sure if that worked out as people had to move constantly because of bombs on the ground and fire being belched out. Interrupting the engineers doing their repair took us a while to get done well, but once we were onto that it was a good, as people were actually now watching for and interrupting it.

Siege engines are not all made equal!  Crushers were a huge priority for being killed FAST and everyone had to make sure they stayed out of its way as it would kill you if you ran headfirst into it. At least they had no ranged abilities so there was time to get them.  The Flamebelchers and Demolishers tended to wander around the raid a bit (unlike the Crushers who made a beeline for the cannons) and their damage was easy to avoid - mostly fire and bombs on the ground.  As long as it wasn't done around a cannon it wasn't too bad and they went down when there were no priority targets (like Crushers, Terrors or Beserkers) to kill.

Healers concentrated on the tanks when there were 2 or more Berserkers up and the tanks also managed their stacks better, cycling their cooldowns so that one tank held both Berserkers for a period and the other let their Slam stacks drop off and then taunting the Beserkers to them.  The Berserkers were killed faster too, so the stacks and swapping went a lot smoother.

The AoE method worked, adds were better controlled with the cleaves as well as the focussed cleaves that occurred on those adds that were priority target.  I hate to say that Aza was right, but he was, and we managed to get the first boss down.

Personal loot yielded 5 loots for 21 people, with Koda not only looting Gorebound Wristguards but also rolling Flickering Felspark (totally DROOLWORTHY).  Kelthal and Ultrapwnd got Forward Observer's Camouflage cloak, Punchynok also got Gorebound Wristguards, and Fallnapart got Blastproof Legguards.  Owl got Sparkburnt Welder's Cloak, Sevrus got Powder-Singed Bracers, and Kyjenn got Flamebelcher's Insulated Mitts.  It was pretty cool to see people getting loot!

Yuuda came late (but in time for the kill) and we also had Teknoman make an appearance, and I was hoping he would have transferred his mage over by now, but so far he hadn't done it yet.  I am wondering if he is going to, and I hope that he does. It's nice to have a mage.

Hwired and Madcow missed the raid, but Kaillynn was here this time on her priest and she did quite a good job with healing.  My healing was appalling (but Koda was amazing! Rag too, he's always bloody amazing) but who cares, we got it down!!! Yay Frostwolves!

We had a little look at Iron Reaver and we managed to make a dent in it - it seems quite doable if we just move out of the bad stuff and use our healer cooldowns at the right time.  I'm looking forward to more heroic raid on Monday!  And with our recent success, I think we will do normal HFC on Sunday since it's so easy!