Hi there,

Anyone know or care to speculate on when you get locked into an instance ?
( Of the timed instances, MC/Onyxia/Zul'Gurub )

1) Is it the first time you enter it ?
2) When you kill your first boss ?
3) When you kill your first trash mob ?
4) None of the above.

I have no clue, and it has bugged me for a while. If anyone know, or can point to a post somewhere that I couldn't find by searching for instance in Lurkerloung, amazon basin or general/quest forums at Blizzard, I would be grateful.

Grimjack

This.

On a related note, how does cascading instances work? A guild on my server recently got a 3 day ban for doing this in MC.

Here's the way one guild on our server managed it:

1)Lets say your guild kills Luci on Monday, getting through the first six bosses.
2)On Wednesday, two people from your guild (not in the first raid) attend another's Luci/Mag raid.
3)Thursday, the group locked into the first instance finishes it, killing Ragnaros.
4)On Sunday, your raid ID is expired. Have the two that were on someone else's run start the raid, everyone else joins in (with no raid ID), and you go from there wiping out bosses. Here's the kicker: You've got all but two MC bosses to down, but your raidlock still expires on Tuesday. You can now manage to kill Ragnaros 3 times in 2 weeks.

Even worse, you've now essentially stolen that ID from the group the random players were with. You're progressing in somebody else's instance.

If your guild is big enough, you could manage to do this without outside "help". Do it right, and you're looking at about 3 Ragnaros kills a week.

I don't know... but if I had to guess it goes something like;

Designate an A team to get locked into the instance, and the ones who get the loot. At 1% Boss health, 80% of the raid leaves the raid and the A team finishes off the boss. Rinse repeat.

Two conditions...

1. If a boss has not been killed in an instance, then you will be saved to that instance when the first boss is killed.

2. If a boss has been killed in an instance, then you will be saved to that instance upon entering.

I have heard multiple times that killing destroyers will lock you in the core. Quark is right, Kandrathe is not.

It get's worse than that, I have heard of a guild that had enough lv 60s (mains and alts) to kill Luci on day 1 (thus locking the instance).

What you would see if the following:

Monday Raid 1 of 20 kills Luci
Tuesday Raid 2 of 20 kills Luci
Wednesday Raid 3 of 20 kills Luci
Thursday Raid 4 of 20 kills Luci
Friday Raid 5 of 20 kills Luci
Saturday Raid 6 of 20 kills Luci
Saturday Raid 1 + 20 others not from raids 2 through 6 finishes off Mag through Rag
Sunday Raid 1 + 1 from Raid 2 + 19 others not from raid 3 to 6 finishes off Mag through Rag
Monday Raid 1 + 1 from Raid 3 + 19 others not from raid 4 to 6 finished off Mag through Rag
Tuesady Raid 1 + 1 from Raid 4 + 19 others not from raid 5 or 6 finish off Mag through Rag

and you repeat, mix and match however you want and you basically can down Rag every day if you so choose after you start the initial rotation. I'm not sure what happened to the above guild I heard about, but they were doing exactly this and were flaunting it on their own server boards. I can only hope that Blizzard permaband the accounts involved in this.

Thanks for the quick replies people.


I guess then that noobing Onyxia wont lock you in as long as you do not kill her

Takes me at least some training to get the right positioning during phase three.

Tommy

This Monday my guild got locked into ZG after we crossed the first bridge.

This caused some commotion as we thought someone we invited had already downed a boss (or something similar), but on exploration all the bosses were still up.

I'm still not sure what caused that, it's never happened before.

Her penchant for just not moving in Phase 3 (newer behavior that didn't used to be as bad) doesn't help either. Sometimes she just won't move. You have to get secure aggro (and I had to land 20 sunders one time to get it without anyone else attacking her on one attempt I really don't know what the hell was going on there there). Then you have to move slowly a lot of the time. She's teleported me back to her several times when trying to position her in phase 3.

We actually just warn the raid that she might just get parked in a spot that isn't as nice and that the whole raid may end up on one side of her. This isn't a big deal since she will fear less often the more DPS you have on her so the tank should be able to stance dance all the fears if you can keep the DPS up.

Of course she'll also be flying in her sitting animation for us. Phase 2 ends anywhere from 45 to 20% for us (yes she landed in at execute level health for us). She'll tail swipe people standing in front of her (i.e. right by the main tank). She just does weird stuff to us now so we just stay fluid, are happy that we all have a lot better gear than when we first faced her and kill her anyway. But she seems to have gotten a lot buggier in 1.8.

She's majorly bugged, been confirmed on the raid forums (someone killed her in phase 2, she never dropped, others have talked about her dropping into Phase 3 at 6%). So, there are definite problems right now.

I've read of even stranger things, like people killing her in phase 2 and not getting locked into the instance, thereby able to do two Onyxia runs back to back. I know the first time she started acting this way for us, Ventrilo was abuzz.

"Um... why hasn't she landed yet?"
"I dunno. Just keep the autoattack up and we'll see what happens."