Thursday, February 24, 2011

Magmaw - Off-Tank Add's Strat

Last weeks Magmaw kill for my guild was a little different than usual. Due to a few of our regular 10 man group being away the group that was formed was a not the normal lineup and more importantly, was a little melee heavy.

This led to an interesting discussion as we headed to Blackwing Descent and discussed how we were going to kill Magmaw effectively with the group we had. It was during this discussion that I remembered a strat I had read a few days earlier that was proposed and executed by another guild in the same situation and the strat posted online on the Tankspot Forums.

The strat for a 10man group was simply this. A Paladin off-tank would stand out away from the group while the rest of the raid, including healers and any ranged DPS, stood in melee range of the boss (most important!). Then what would happen is that the Paladin off-tank would always be targeted for Pillar of Flame and would be close to the Lava Parasites that spawned to easily pick them up, in fact the exact strat that was used was that as soon as Pillar of Flame was being cast and the spot for it marked the Paladin would drop a Consecrate so that he had aggro straight away as the adds spawned (the off-tank still moved out of the Pillar spawn point to avoid unnecessary damage).

This allowed the rest of the raid to concentrate DPS on the boss which brought about a very speedy kill indeed.

Now there are several things that you think might happen to the off-tank:

1. Adds overwhelm the tank - the adds only melee for roughly 12k damage per hit which was easily healed through by the healers

2. As there are no slowing effects on the adds and the off-tank is getting hit an insane amount of new Lava Parasites will spawn due to the off-tank being infected multiple times - not true, the infection debuff only stacks to 3 making the number of extra adds that spawn easily manageable

3. As more and more Pillars of Flame occur there will be too many adds for the off-tank to handle - not so, the Paladin off-tank was easily able to single-handedly DPS down most if not all Lava Parasites between each Pillar of Flame

So there you go, a good alternate strat to the one first proposed on most boss strat sites, and one that is much more effective than the original strat. Even if your group is not particularly melee heavy I recommend using this strat as it greatly shortens the fight overall and gives you more time to get stuck in to the other bosses in the instance!

1 comment: