So Vael and I have been spending a lot of time together recently, and I'm not sure I'm happy about that

This is actually only our second week on him, and we're getting under 10% consistantly. Would anyone be able to share any strategies they find helpful?

I play from a mage perspective, and Mage DPS has been subpar on this fight compared to others. The constant interrupts and fire immunity presents some problems for us (mages).

Since this is primarily a DPS fight, we've been concentating on keeping the rogues healed and soul stoning the hunters. It seems that in order to have a really good attempt we have to be lucky with the BA. Is this always the case? Do guilds never really put this guy on farm status until the gear is just so sick that DPS can rip through him no matter what?

Our priests are relying on Holy Nova for the most part because it's not affected by the casting interrupt. Do other guilds use prayer of healing? Are 8 priests necessary for this encounter?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

EDIT: Bleh sorry about the title typo, I can't seem to edit it out (Fixed --Mav)
-MB

I'm not a mage, but wouldn't AM be enough damage? It wouldn't be affected by the intterupt, if you had the talents. Vael is worth a respec for a while.

Are you saying you are letting your hunters die then soulstone, because they are still effective without mana? That's an interesting way to get back at them for all the repair bills they skip.

If you are going to such lengths, and considering stacking 8 priests, it sounds like you have a raid wide lack of fire resist. Since there is no mana to worry about, alot of very gimpy gear looks alot better. If everybody has enough FR, healing should not be a problem. One healer should be enough to keep a group up, with some time left over for the tank.

Everybody should have a stack or two of Fire Protection pots. I recommend against popping one at the start of the fight. It will just get boiled away at a time when you should have adequate healing anyhow. If you get an unlucky string of BA's on your healers, you can pop the pots then to save healing for the tanks.

I can't really see soulstoning hunters to all that valuable on that fight. Essence of the red gives everyone unlimited mana/rage/energy and hunters really don't benefit much from that since they rarely have mana problems anyway. Also once you die you lose the buff and most likely aren't worth ressing at that point.

Rogues, warriors and priests are the key to the fight. Rogues can do an insane amount of damage with the buff. Warriors need to all be in tanking gear and ready to tank when their turn comes up. For us this was the easy part for a long time since we had a pretty good idea of what order our tanks would get aggro based on gear and spec. Also make sure they are spamming execute once he gets to 20%, its a huge amount of damage.

Holy nova rocks if you have priests with it, but PoH works too, not every priest wants to spec holy. 8 priests would be nice but you would lose dps. I think we usually have 5-6 priests with druids picking up the last couple. A couple times we have had a shaman keep a group up, but that only works if you are horde, and have one group with really solid FR gear since its hard to keep up with the heals like that. I don't know much about paly heals but I doubt they could keep up.

FR gear helps a ton here. Everyone needs as much as they can get, and it needs to be good gear. Green 'of fire resistance' stuff doesn't really help much. Fire protection pots can help the mages and warlocks to avoid spell interupts for a little bit. We have been killing vael for quite some time and we still wipe. Its really hard to save an attempt when the first 4 or 5 people to get BA are priests. The key is to make the most of the fights where a bunch of hunters get it. (Sorry hunters )

/disagree ;-)

This is the one fight where it pretty much doesn't matter how gimped you are, thanks to Essence of the Red. You can pile on the damage *especially* when you have burning adrenaline. It's worth trying to keep whoever has it alive as long as possible.

We use prayer of healing rather than holy nova; as it heals for more, you can cast it less often and spot heal/dot vael in between.

How many tank transitions are you going through?

You don't need the talent. Interrupts lower the duration, not the DPS. Since mana is no concern, cast it again when the duration runs out.

I haven't seen Vael, but I've read of mages using Arcane Explosion there since it's higher DPS than Arcane Missiles.

Casters should have at least 150 and melee should be well into the mid 200s as they should hold out longer.

Rogues dominate the fight, if you want a nice boost bring 6-7 rogues and you will see the damage pile up on him. Also remember to have the rogues vanish when the MT gets burning adrenaline.

Our mages pop ice barrier/fireward and GFPPs and are usually able to spam the frostbolts.

As Delc said we have killed him on Tich for many months and occassionaly have a wipe or two.

As for healing - we have our shamans spam heals on the MT - I dont know how hard the pallies heal. Both holy Nova and POH work. The key to the fight is to keep the rogues alive, so as you lose priests to BA start moving druids/priests to the tank/rogue groups.

I wear ~255 unbuffed FR, I HS/Shield Slam/sunder in def stance till 19%, then all the warriors execute. If a tank dies and I've got aggro, I move to the tank spot, and keep executing. After 19%, no def stance needed. A warrior with Essence of the Red can execute-tank ftw.

Tanks for this fight: It's very important to be flexible and not tied to a particular order. Be ready to move when *your name* pops in that target-of-target box. If you don't move fast enough, people get tailswiped, and that slows down DPS. I build as much aggro as I can for my place in the order, but I always err on the side of *not pulling aggro off the current tank early*.

Thanks for the advice.

My spec allows me 3 points in AM, so I'm 60% able to get em off, with a pally I'm sitting pretty well.

We figured that Hunters could do the most damage without BA, hence SS them.

I don't mean to imply that we had 8 priests on the raid, but I confess wishing it. Druids are struggling to keep their assigned DPS class group up. Mages, Warlocks and hunters are going 150 min FR (unbuffed) to max DPS. We're well geared (in ZG/MC terms) and able to craft any MC stuff we need.

Personally I could go to about 225 (self buffed), but I'd lose out on some damage. With a priest in the group spamming holy nova I don't have any problems staying alive, never even have to take a fire pot. If the priest get's BA'd though, the group is toast

We're going through a 5-6 tank rotation. However, I think that the "everyone executes" at 19% could be a big help to us. I think we had some people staying in defensive. What about the use of an undergeared tank or a druid to take the first BA hit? What gear order do your put your tanks in? Is your MT first or last? Would SSing a Warrior for executes be better than a hunter?
-MB

Druids heal the tanks, paladins heal the groups of people that have better FR and don't get priests with them. This is because the paladins give another 60 FR and the damage rates on those people are slow enough (thanks to the higher FR) that they can cycle Holy Light, a 2.5 second cast, through the group. The 1.5 second cast paladin heal is pointless. Most paladins are happy when it crits for over 900 damage on a target that has blessing of light up. It's not a heal, 600 damage healed is just something that might buy you enough time for someone else casting a real heal to get it to land when the next regular hit comes in. So you can heal for ~2400 damage every 2.5 seconds or ~1300 damage every 3 seconds (that is figuring about +300 healing and blessing of light on the target).

Just have a few druids spamming regrowth, and a few spamming healing touch and you get plenty of healing on the tanks fast enough. Paladins will also throw heals at the tanks now and then (as will priests between PoH or Holy Novas) but the druids are what we use to heal the tanks.


Holy Nova is used simply to add a bit more DPS to Vael and it does work as mentioned. You might still have to PoH every now and then during the HN spam, but it works well from what I've seen.

If a healer can't keep a group up, you are low on FR. They should be able to keep a group up, plus have some left over.

5-6 tanks should be enough. Execute spam should close the gap in damage. If you are currently losing people to the fire aura, fix it with more FR gear. That will help more damage, because a live mage in greens > a dead mage in damage gear. If you are still going 5-6 tanks, without losing people to the aura or cleaves, and you still can't kill him, you fail the gear check. Spend a couple more weeks in MC, try to clear zg and aq as often as possible for more weapons, and try again later.

In our raids we soulstone rogues - our reasoning being that they lose the least damage potential from missing Essence of the Red.

I tend to disagree with Mavfin - for a group learning Vael, I think you want tanks getting aggro in the right order. Warriors shouldn't be moving into position when they get aggro - they should be moving into position when the previous tank gets BA, so that Vael will not move one millimetere following the transition.

I've heard the KLH Threat Meters can be useful for determining the aggro order.

Things that can go wrong in the Vael fight:

1) A tank dies early. This means you usually lose another tank to the BA the previous tank should have got. Warriors are a primary source of damage at 19% and below so you want to keep as many alive as possible for as long as possible.

2) Someone gets aggro that shouldn't (rogue or ranged DPS). Vael turns, breaths, and cooks half the raid (his breath has a nasty DOT component as well as the direct damage).

3) Not enough damage. Typically this happens because people die too early. You want non-BA deaths kept to an absolute minimum.

I'd stack on all the fire resist you can when you're learning the fight - you can even use the Blackrock spire fire buff. Once you've mastered the tank transitions, you can start skipping the buff, and replacing some resist gear with damage gear.

Vael is a very technical fight - it took our guild a long time to beat him, and even longer to beat him without at least one wipe.

Chris

We're using threat meters and in general have a great transition going. All signs point to FR problems although I think we all have 150+. We have done the UBRS buff thing before, and would consider it again.
Thanks for all the helpful hints.
-MB

If people that aren't BA'd are dying, then you probably either have a healing strategy problem or an FR problem.

That's all philosophy, and how skilled and flexible your tank corps is. The way I posted works better for us, but YMMV.

The issue with that is that if a tank is too quick to position he goes with the BA'd tank. I've found that the best place to be when I think I'm close to being the next on his list is to inch forward until I'm just in cleave range and then run when the tank BA's. Its worked pretty well so far and has less reliance on me having perfect timing. Plus if it turns out I'm not the next I can slip back into place easily enough. And we won't mention the times I execute tanked him down with the UTB. >.>

Use CTRA to find your secret slackers. Also, have you considered all of your DPS buff options? Wizard Oil, arcane pots, mongoose pots, sharpening stones, flasks....

My guild wiped on this guy for the better part of 2 months, but now he is utterly farmed. The only time we wipe on him is when we get 3 or 4 priests BAed in a row or we have a new app with us who didn't listen to instructions and blows up the raid. Icebird's guild seems to be closest to mine with what is done.

We don't bother on this one. If we fail we wipe and reset.

I agree with Icebird. You want to know who will get aggro or you risk spraying the whole raid with his breath. This is a certain wipe. We have 3 melee spots, the MT, the next tank up, and the DPS. The next tank up sits just off to the side of the MT out of breath range but at an angle so that when he gets aggro it won't hit the rest of the raid. When he gets it he moves to MT spot and the next tank up takes that spot. We almost never need a 5th tank and because of which don't designate one. Occassionally we get some DPS deaths and we need a 5th, thanks to KLH we know who it will be.

Some tank BA tips:
I pop shieldwall when I get BA. This helps me last just a little bit longer when the fire damage just starts stacking like crazy.
When the MT gets BA top off the next tank up and keep him that way. A cause of many of our wipes were the next tank up didn't have the hitpoints to take the initial attacks.
Don't quit healing the tank when he gets BA. Keep him up as long as possible.

We originally got it for this fight, its now a required mod. Not only does it let you plan out aggro issues, it lets you see who is screwing up and pulling it way in advance.

Actually, our secondary tanks stand on the opposite side of Vael from the rest of the raid so the risk is getting the front row people tail swiped rather than breathed on. It's not a *huge* deal to get tail swiped, though the breath would be.

I would also like to clarify that we notionally set an order of tanks according to how they have done in the past. I usually tend to get aggro first or second so I usually end up tanking Vael first while our Thunderfury tanks take #'s 2 and 3. After that it gets tough to predict so we go more along the lines of how Mav suggested - everyone watches the MTT window and if they think they're going to have aggro, they start moving before they even show in the window. Then whoever has aggro makes sure he stays in the MT spot while everyone else backs off.

It's not quite as responsive as Mav has indicated.

Of course lately we've only been using 2 or 3 tanks for the whole fight. It's been awhile since we've gotten to #4 unless something goes wrong.

But when we were learning the fight for the first time, when we had no one in the raid who had killed Vael, we were pretty concerned about tank order and we practiced to make sure we did have the order so that the healers and tanks could be more responsive. It helped. After pretty much everyone was used to the fight and had more experience with other fights that required flexibility like that we didn't care about it nearly as much.

O.O

Arcane Explosion? Don't you have to go near him for that? How do you avoid the chain-cleaving? (Same goes for Holy Nova)

What's your positioning? Ours is MT is in front of the throne. Warriors and rogues are on the left side of Vaelastrasz near the hind legs to avoid his chain-cleave. The rest of the raid is positioned on the floortile with the X.

Yeah, when we started out we definitely were working to hold a good order because we had to. Once we got the strategies down and started improving our gear it became less necessary to execute everything flawlessly and so we've slowly shifted toward more fluidity. However, we could never have done that without the experience of winning this fight so many times and the gear for all members of the raid that brings increased survivability, increased healing and increased DPS output.

We finally got past him last night. Execute spam was the key. I'm really happy we were able to progress past this annoying bottleneck in just 15 attempts. Getting Razorgore down was much more difficult (we ended up with a pretty unconventional method, but we're able to drop him every time now). Thanks for all the advice. Looking forward to making progress in BWL.
-MB

Congrats! Now you get to learn the fun that is the suppression room!

Big congrats!

Targeting about 150 fire resistance for your raid is good. While you're learning the encounter, PoH is good to use (cast PW:Shield on yourself first to not get stuttered so much). Eventually, the priests can use Holy Nova if they want to if they are in groups willing to bunch up near Vael, but I wouldn't bother with that while your raid is learning the encounter. Priests shouldn't have to spam PoH either. I throw out a heal or holy smite or two in between each one.

Regarding dps, it's all warriors and rogues. Mages and hunters basically stink in this fight. The biggest contribution they make is in being chosen for burning adrenaline rather than the priests. Harsh but true. Back when mages could only make four waters at a time, some of our mages would make water during the fight so that they were ready to hand out stacks of water to people before the clear to the Broodlord.

Grats!

Hahaha, that's hilarious!

Essence of the Red = the ultimate water-maker!

-Bolty

Stand where the rogues stand. Or at least by the rogues that aren't notorious for getting cleaved or tail-swiped.

This still happens when you're doing the encounter yet are somewhat overgeared I usually have between 60 and 70 seconds left on Essence of the Red when Vael goes down nowadays, and that allows for quite a lot of turbo rebuffing, crystal water and cinnamon rolls.

Gratz

We'll get there too, eventually, but summerbreak and burnout has hit our raid alliance hard. We are still gearing new members up for BWL (and Rags again, how embarrasing ). We had some big problems with Vael, the few times we tried him, after 2 seconds there were 10 poeple dead and nobody quite knew why

Thanks to all your input we have a better chance at getting past him now too, I /lub the Lounge

take care
Nuurabsaal

If this is any consolation to you.. you're not alone. People leaving. Compounding the fact is that some 'Elitist Jerks' who we very well equipped left our guild to join a more successful guild. Mentioning in passing that we 'are too slow'. That was quite a serious setback. We're back at square one in AQ40. And Vaelastrasz is still a heavy obstacle. We can be even glad that we still get through Molten Core to see Ragnaros. Last time we downed him with only 36 people.

And yesterday we had our first Ragnaros kill again in a few weeks, for the reasons mentioned earlier we never had the force to deal with him UNTIL NOW! Weeeee! It was our usual ridiculous raid-setup again, with 3 priests and 2 druids and about 2 million warriors against 4 mages, but it was one of the smoothest kills we ever had. Warriors and Rogues were really disciplined, we had only one melee death pre-sons and mopped the floor with them, everybody was back in position for Rags about 30 secs before he reemerged, a record for us.

It feels great to get back to a point where we can safely assume we have the whole of MC on farm again (even if we somehow always have to include a wipe at Sulf these days, before killing him with no casualties on second try, pffff ).

and for the record, I still lub the Lounge

take care
Nuurabsaal

We call these "Wake up wipes" on SR. We get them every so often. Stuff you know and have on farm...can still wipe you if half the raid is sleepingfighting.

We have number issues too. We recently broke out of our alliance and started raiding as a solo guild. In that time we had to face tough odds, knowing that it would just hopefully be easier next time when we recruit enough to fill raids. Last week we downed Vael and Broodlord with 37, last night we got Vael to 1% with 33.

It's all possible wtih a little luck on the BA targets and some good execution.
-MB

Belated congratulations, my dear, and exactly what *is* that strategy for Razorgore?

A crit for 900 with Flash of Light seems low to me. Tribade who is healing speced but still in some green usually crits closer to 1200. I just tested a few and saw only one crit below 1100 (with Blessing of Light). Flash of Light heals through Scholomance and Stratholme. I would hope that a paladin in MC and BWL equipment could do somewhat better.

For this encounter where mana is not an issue, maybe Holy Light is a better way to go.

Pallies are wearing like 200-250 FR gear, there isn't much +heal FR gear out there, so the Flash of Light is more or less base with +200 or so healing in MC gear + chants. FoL is 343-383 (or 363 avg), with talent that jumps to 406 average blessing of light adds 115 so you are at 561 average now. You only get I think 42% of your +healing on FoL.

The 115 from blessing of light does seem to get a crit bonus so I'll just consider that part of the "base" FoL. So to get a 1200 FoL crit you need a base FoL of 800, so you need (800 - 561) / .42 = 570 +healing.

Yeah you can have that, but you can't ge that on gear that also gives you 200+ FR, even though you can pretty much give up all your mana and mana regen for the fight. Maybe I'm missing a few enchants. 300 healing I could see on the FR gear, but again that is only gonna give a 'base' FoL of 690 which will be just over a 1K crit.


I still personally find Holy Light a better way to go pretty much all the time. FoL is more mana efficient but the more +healing you get, the less that becomes the case, and the HP/s of Holy Light is about double. So 1 to 2 times the HP/s for only like a .5 to 1 HP/mana reduction (depends on the HL rank)? Yeah FoL is rarely my spell of choice.

Although it's a little off topic, considering the source, I'm inclined to acquiesce to the request.

I'll assume so I don't cramp my fingers that you have read various strats on RG already. Most guilds use hunters to kite dragonkin, but we found this a huge hassle. We also needed some more redundant DPS on the orc mages. The result was having hunters use a Feign Death/Slow trap rotation while DPSing in assigned corners. Warriors do all the kiting due to better survivability.

Paladins all gather in the middle of the room and heal tanks as needed. We mark tanks with the overhead icons for easy reference. MT on Razor is the first controller, his backup controlls until the next phase after that. Then it's a ping pong battle between the tanks while DPS goes crazy. For some reason the person who has the most agro on RG tends to get conflagged almost constantly, so we make our 2nd tank take all the conflags, while our MT goes toe-to-toe.

Hope that helps.

Took a page right out of Avarice's playbook. That's pretty close to what we do on SR.

I have nothing to add to this post. To be honest, the only reason I'm replying is because everytime I see "Vael" I think "Veal" and now I'm hungry.

Actually I think we don't bother having hunters feign and frost-trap. That's a pretty neat idea, but my worry would be that the hunters would aggro mobs that cross the traps, if they weren't aggroed by a warrior already. Might work if you do it on top of a platform, where mobs shouldn't be unless they're being kited.

We did it last night actually, were short on warriors and the trains were getting a bit too ugly so we did it to break them up a bit. Warriors kept the mobs just fine, but we didn't drop em till there were only like 8 eggs left.

Well, that and a n00b controller (me) kinda slowed it down

As well, relying on a skill that has about 40 resist checks in that room is a bad idea. It's a nice skill if you are able to use it late after the room has fully popped and you can do it. That's why I called for the traps to break up some of those trains. Most of the mobs were pretty good on the tanks, and the slowing effect for the 2 hunters (of 5) who were able to FD helped out to just spread the trains out a bit.

But rely on it as a strat? Nah. Our warriors have the training down pat.

And we downed him too tonight, on the ninth try total, if memory serves. We even had the obligatory 1% wipe

Following our smoothest Razorgore kill ever, with only Dragonkin kiting, we moved from 23% on first attempt to the kill. It's all about tha tanks mon!

We pushed further towards Broodlord but since it was late we called it a night after a nasty wipe in the Suppression Room (oh I hate it already ). Next time we know we don't have to be moving quite that fast.

Let the lootlord- and dragonfarming begin!

take care
Nuurabsaal

EDIT: almost forgot: 4 priests and one druid

Congratulations! Very nice work.

I feel for the poor druid though, having to MOTW the whole raid.

and the whole thing like 13 times! (hehe, two wipes on trashmobs after Vael, talk about loosing focus )
raid-level druids are more valuable than Twill set items on Twilight's Hammer, they are so rare!

Broodlord pwned us today (with me absent), but we gor Vael on second attempt, looks like we got the magic going.

take care
Nuurabsaal