New Patch 4.1 Changes

Just read the latest updates to the Patch 4.1 Patch notes and read something very interesting concerning the changes to the Atramedes fight outlined below:

Blackwing Descent
Atramedes

• Searing Flames now causes a 6-second cooldown on Modulation.
• Searing Flames no longer increases Sound on players.

The change to the cooldown on modulation is great, Searing Flame with a high ping can mean that 1 to 2 ticks can go out raid wide which is a lot of damage, that followed up shortly by Modulation has meant that there's been a few death's to this rather nasty chain of mechanics.

The last change to Atramedes is good too, Searing Flames is currently the only other ability apart from Modulation that causes unavoidable sound increases to the entire raid. The fight should be about avoiding abilities that increase your sound level...you should be rewarded for playing well and avoiding sound increasing abilities, there shouldn't be 'no matter how good you are you're going to be penalized anyway' abilities in any boss fight in my opinion!

Blackwind Descent - Chimaeron

Well after a short hiatus I'm back to blogging! My personal life got a bit crazy there for a while and my blogging took a backseat for a while but now real life has settled down the blog posts will start coming again and support for my followers as well!

 In my return post I'd like to ease back in to blogging talk about Chimaeron, one of the bosses in Blackwing Descent. Chimaeron, once learned, is quite an easy and straightforward fight. But this isn't a general strategy blog, this is for all the rogues out there!

So, what tips do I have for rogues?

The first is positioning, something that rogues, especially combat rogues, should be smart about. As everyone must be 6 yards apart during the 'normal' phase (the other being the 'Feud' phase) it is best to position yourself directly behind the boss away from any other melee and the off-tank. For combat this is the optimal position as when Killing Spree is used it will drop you in the middle of the boss at the back, when this happens I find it easier to back pedal while continuing to DPS Chimaeron...it is possible to manoeuvre in a different direction but I find my fingers get less tangled if I back pedal!

The second major tip concerns the use of Feint. Feinting is only really useful in the Feud phase. Use your first feint when his cast bar is at 20.5 seconds, then feint on CD and you will have feint up for all the ticks. This saves a lot of damage that needs to be healed in this very healing intensive phase...your healers will thank you for using Feint during Feud.

Well that’s it, short and sweet! My travels through this tier of content is such that my guild is at 10/12 now and so more updates on more bosses (that I've experienced firsthand) will be coming in the not too distant future.

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!