mur-blaragl-arag!

May 18, 2010 in News, Raiding

Teq is busy working on his healing gear, so he asked me to post something on the home page to keep things active and lively.  Today I’m going to talk about the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter.

Image shamelessly taken from wowwiki

It’s not immediately obvious from the picture here, but Valithria has a boo boo.  This is almost what you would call a reverse boss.  It’s an escort quest that never really goes anywhere.  If you’re thinking a dragon should be able to take care of herself, you’d be right.  In this case you need to heal her up to full health before she’ll be able to escape her bonds and fend for herself.  There’s no real boss here, just lots and lots of adds.

Healers

This fight was made just for you!  Oh boy are you going to be busy, there’s so much going on!  First off you’ll need to assign some roles for this fight.  In most cases there will be 3 healers, and for this fight it’s especially important.  One of the healers is going to be a dedicated healer on Valithria, one will float between raid healing and healing Valithria, and the third will focus primarily on raid healing.  All three healers will need to keep an eye out for Dream Portals.  Dream Portals will appear every 30 seconds and contain green orbs that you need to collect to get a stacking buff, this stacking buff boosts your healing and mana regeneration, so it is very important to hit every wave of portals or the stacking buff will drop off and you’ll likely fail the encounter.  Each portal will only accept one person, so the healers need to each enter a different portal.  A small green glowing dot appears on the ground before the portal spawns, so you will be able to position early.  You do all that right and you’ll win the day.

DPS

So many adds, so little time.

Assign 2 dps to handle Suppressors, one on the left, and one on the right.  Suppressors apply a debuff to Valithria that makes the healers job impossible.  The top priority of those 2 dpsers is to kill Suppressors.  The rest of the time they should be helping out on other adds.
Everyone need to kill Blazing Skeletons fast since they literally lay waste to the raid.
A ranged dps should be assigned to kiting zombies.  Hunters and frost magi work well for that sort of thing I’m told.
Ranged DPS should focus on Abominations.  You know the big fat guys.  Pew pew them.
Melee DPS should focus on Archmagi.  Stabbinate them.

Tanks

One goes left, one goes right.  Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!  Each tank will take one side of the room.  Lots and lots of adds in this fight, I hope you like AoE tanking.  Stay away from the Zombies as they apply a stacking armor and nature damage debuff, if you must aggro them, try to kite, but a range dps should be kiting them if possible.  You’ll primarily be tanking Abominations, Archmagi, and Blazing Skeletons.

Archmagi have a frost volley that you should interrupt.  They also mark the floor where an ice column will appear.  The ice column knocks people around.  Can you fly? No, so it is a good thing to dodge.
The Abominations have a gut spray.  It’s quite icky, so point them away from the raid.  When they die they spawn little slimy worms, so prep your AoE threat for that.

The whole raid

Don’t stand in front of Abominations.  Unless you like slime and death.  In that case go for it.
Don’t stand on the ice column marks on the ground.  Unless you can fly.  In that case go for it.
Don’t stand in the mana voids.  Unless you don’t have mana.  In that case go for it.
Don’t get too far away from your healers, it’s easy in this room, but don’t do it.  Unless you are invincible.  In that case go for it.
The fight is on a soft-enrage timer, you start getting too many blazing skeletons to deal with and you die.

That’s all I’ve got.  Hopefully if you have any comments or corrections you’ll help out a murloc and post em for me.  Hope to talk to everyone soon!

Yer Pal,

Sherloc

6 responses to mur-blaragl-arag!

  1. Boss has hard enrage timer too. :-(

  2. Emphasis again on these burning Skeletons. Ideally i think you want them dead just as they start their cast. The healers have their hands full and cannot afford to be dedicated to healing through this fire AoE pulse.

    Also…something about bloodworms?

  3. I should have mentioned that in the dps section, huh? I mentioned it for the tanks. Bloodworms spawn when Abominations dies. They gets the AoE.

  4. This sounds like a fun fight, unfortunately I have only had one chance at it and can’t wait for the next time.

  5. I think we totally have this. I think it’s just a matter of practice, the healers getting a good transition worked out, and dps pushing on the kill order. We may also want to examine our positioning a ways into the fight; I know that when things have been going for a while, we can get spread out and move from where we’re supposed to be, which results in two key issues, in my opinion: (1) Potentially ranging from the raid healer, and (2) not being in the correct position to tank/dps adds down correctly. We’re calling them out over vent, which is great.

    But here’s the thing, from my perspective. I LOVE getting to go into the portals pretty much 66-100% of the time, depending on raid makeup. My heals are hitting for 40k a pop with 10 stacks of the buff. I’ve gotten up to 25 stacks. I don’t even know how much they hit for at that point. So, as a Paladin healer, I keep Beacon on Valithria (who is my focus target), and raid heal. But even with throwing out potentially 100k heals roughly every 1.5 seconds (I don’t end up getting to judge much during this fight, which helps my haste), raid members are still dying. That could mean I need to sharpen up my rotation and toss in the occasional Flash of Light (which should be down to GCD at that point) and Holy Shock (instant cast), which should still pretty much instantly heal any raid member to full (yes, even a raid-buffed, cooldown-popped Cippebear), or potentially also mean we could polish the positioning and targeting cycle.

    Is there someone who’s relatively light on duty that we could assign to quickly mark targets as they spawn for kill order? I could even try to target whatever’s skull’d and judge Light on them for some extra healing to anyone smacking it.

    As I say, I think it’s all polish, and we got it. I can’t WAIT for the practice shots tonight!