My guild got to see Thaddius on Monday night and worked all night on him tonight. Its a great encounter, one of the more creative in WoW. All the talk about how lag is a killer was not true for me but was for some in the raid. People get disconnected very easily as well. I know some of my fellow Lurkers have done this encounter and i have some questions.

We handle the adds Feugen and Stalagg with ease (they both have to be killed at the same ala Core hounds in MC etc). Jumping over to the next platform usually 2 or 3 miss, but generally we have a full raid going into Thaddius. Our main problem seems to be the polarity shift. We keep everyone on the left for a negative charge and everyone on the right for a positive charge. We basically stand on each other for the stacking damage buff (you get 10% damage added up to 200% so i was getting 6k hits with my Frostbolt etc.) and go clockwise when their is a polarity shift.

We got him to about 90% surviving two polarity shifts and then we are all dead. Some questions: Do you drop people whose computers can't handle the encounter? We have 3 people that always screwed up the charges and wiped the raid always claiming lag. Does Thaddius have an aggro ceiling or is he proximity aggro like Patchwerk?. I am guessing he has around 7 million HP so getting the stacking damage buff seems to be a key to this fight and going all out DPS. Is that correct? I have yet to watch a video of this fight because i actually wanted to experience it myself. I am considering this one of my favorite fights of Wow along side of Nefarian and C'Thun. Its quite the creative encounter. Does the fight have a max length, eg 5 minutes or so and its game over?? Finally, does the raid wear NR gear or use NR pots? The chain lightning seems to do a fair amount of damage and i tried a NR pot on a few attemtps and it seemed to do the trick. I think we will get him this week, we have 2 Full raid nights to try him.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Going clockwise is going to hurt more than it helps. Giving people a longer (curved) path to follow as opposed to straight lines increases the chance that someone a step or two behind is going to bomb the raid.

Negative Charge and Positive Charge are periodic effects that check every 5 seconds. Between those five-second intervals, they don't care where you are relative to one another. So run directly through Thaddius, in a straight line path to the other group. You'll run through oppositely charged people doing the same thing, but so long as you're on your correct sides before the debuff ticks 55 seconds, you'll be fine.



Well, there's two lag issues at play. The first one, which I experienced personally for a while, was that older hardware servers (hi Stormrage) simply couldn't handle the Negative and Positive Charges. Each of these effects checks every other player in its radius every 5 seconds to see if it blasts them or buffs them, which is 40 buffs checking 19 players each = effectively, 760 buff events needing to be processed every 5 seconds. The usual effect was massive ability lag, but the server wasn't above randomly disconnecting people (BZZZAPPP!).

The other kind of lag is player-specific, and it looks like that's what you've got. Some people's machines, for whatever reason, can't handle his Polarity Shift casting animation, and either experience massive slowdown or grind to a halt. Simplifying the shift (run forward in a straight line, do not pass go, etc.) should help, but if they can't handle even that, then you'll have to drop them. A solution, I hear, is in the works, but for now these people are SOL.



It is possible to pull aggro on Thaddius, just difficult. A Defiance specced MT will generally be creating enough extra threat to overcome the fact that all the DPS classes are also doing tons of damage. The exception is if a fire mage gets a string of crits: due to the way the buff interacts with Ignite, they can rapidly find themselves rolling 30,000+ point ignites, which pull aggro in a hurry.



After five minutes, Thaddius berserks and his chain lightning inflicts 12,000+ points of damage per jump, which obliterates your raid in a matter of seconds. You need to burn away his seven million hit points before then, requiring a raid DPS of about 22,500. If you lose too many people early, you've essentially wiped, since every person dead is 10% less damage for 19 other people (no more Charge buff) as well as losing their own damage.



This really depends on your raid mix. If you're short healing, DPS classes can probably consider some epic NR pieces (blues or greens probably gimp your damage output too much). If you've got a lot of healers, NR gear is unnecessary.

Random thought, haven't done the fight, but if I remember right, the problem is that you need people of opposite polarities to be at range from each other, or they do significant damage to each other.

Wouldn't it make sense to put people who are exceptionally laggy off to the side, away from either group, if you only have a few? Then they don't have to care what their polarities are.

That doesn't work, because the more people of the same polarity who are next to each other gives you a massive damage multiplier for each person involved. If even only a few people are seperated, the multiplier across the raid won't be big enough and you won't do enough damage to kill him in time.

The "four corner" strat is godly in this fight as can be seen in this video:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=26179

It is far more forgiving of slow, lagged, or even disconnected people than the straight "run straight across and pray everyone left in time and makes it" strat. Everyone who gets a positive polarity sidesteps toward the slime. Everyone with a negative polarity sidesteps toward the wall. The tank shifts sides during this moment. People who sidestepped to the right then move straight across to join the people with the same polarity and everyone moves back to the middle. It is incredibly simple (watch the video!), and since everyone sidesteps a little, it reduces the distance that a given person has to travel before they are far enough away from other people. Like I said, it's incredibly forgiving of slow and laggy players, and it doesn't take long to teach people how to do it.

Positive --> Acid
Negative --> Wall
If you moved right, walk across
Move back to middle

The concern that Mongo posted is the primary issue, but if you have more than one laggy person in the "safe spot", there's always the chance that they get opposite polarities on a shift and blow each other up. The platform is simply not big enough to find separate safe spots for three or more people.

That explanation really explains why some machines can't handle this encounter. Also, i can't imagine doing this event on Stormrage considering how difficult C'Thun was when i was on Stormrage. I am quite impressed that you guys do this event. On Cenarius i have zero server or client lag. Its remarkable the difference between Stormrage and Cenarius. New Hardware is the bomb and currently we have 6 guilds on the Alliance side that have 6 or more bosses down and 4 that have 8 or more (2 are currently working on the 4 Horsemen). Personally i think its largely because of the hardware.

Thanks for answering the questions, that helps a lot Our MT has 5/9 Dreadnought and is Prot Spec and our OT has 5/9 Dreadnought with Thunderfury and Prot Spec. We also have a Fury Warrior with Thunderfury. Not sure how much of a difference that makes on this fight. So tanking was not the problem even though when our MT went down it was game over fast.

Its too bad that this fight seems to be based off how good your computer is. Now i see why there was a lot of complaining in R&D.

I am downloading this now, thanks for the tip. I have found with videos we always end up using our own strat because usually the vid is not the strength of our guild. For example, i had 3 excellent videos of the Gluth fight from a Mage perspective kiting the zombie chow. We tried that for a night and believe me it was fricking hard. I was able to get about 10 in somewhat of a kite and survive a couple of decimates but we ended up having way too many strays and therefore Gluth would constantly eat them and regain his health. We decided to go with Warriors kiting with piercing howl and use a Frost Nova rotation of Mages to freeze them in place. Using that strategy we got Gluth in one night of attempts.

I am curious about this video. Looking forward to seeing it.

After watching it, it makes a lot of sense. It still doesn't take out the factor of someone lagging. Even stepping right or stepping left does eliminate the fact that the lagger may still be too close. But this strat seems to take out the element of when you cross sides of interacting with the wrong charge. We probably will give this a try.

The main thing is that by having everyone sidestep, it reduces the distance one has to travel before you are out of range. Two people going 5 yards in seperate directions takes less time than one person going 10 yards in one direction. This means that someone can lag (or have brainlock) for a second or two and still be able to get out of the way. I heartily endorse this strat.

*** OURO SUBMERGED FOR 20SEC ***

Haha...

So what killed them all at the end? Server lag still giving them a polarity shift even after boss is dead? I didn't see anyone on either side get close to the ones on the other, and the guy checking loot didn't trigger a whompage for a long time so I don't think it's him.

-Bolty

I haven't seen the video, but I suspect what kills them all at the end is what kills us all at the end. Negative Charge and Positive Charge buff any player who is also Negatively or Positively Charged, but they damage any player who isn't the same charge - which is to say, each type of Charge damages uncharged players just like it damages oppositely-charged players. During the fight, the charge debuffs last one minute and are refreshed every 30 seconds, but once Thaddius is dead, the charges will count down and wear off.

Here's the problem: the last check made by each charge occurs immediately after the charge wears off, at the zero-second mark. So imagine that I'm in the middle of a mass of positively-charged folk. Positive Charge wears off simultaneously, and my Positive Charge does its last check. Positive Charge has already worn off everyone else, so it reads that everyone else has no charge (i.e. "not positively charged") and hits them for 2000 nature damage. Everyone else's Positive Charge makes the same check, sees that I and other people no longer have a charge, and proceeds to blast us. Everyone hits everyone else, mass death ensues.

At least they're considered PvP (no durability damage) deaths

How exactly do these encounters pass QA?

I mean, WTF.

-Bolty

I love this description. It's so positive!

This is why it's very dangerous for players who didn't make the original jump onto the platform to run back around and try again. When they get to the group, they'll be uncharged and *zap*!

I've never seen a player not get the charge renewed though, even if they make the run back through the slime after a failed jump. I always figured it was an Emeriss type ability. (hits everyone currently in combat with the mob)

People coming back with a negative charge over the positive side or vice versa can be somewhat hazardous though, depending on what tactic you use.

Oh WOW that looks like a fun fight.

Took me a few shifts to work out the rules from knowing nothing about the fight. Looked to me like:

1) there are designated "positive" and "negative" sides. Anyone with the particular charge should be on the appropriate side

2) if you get a polarity CHANGE you step right, move across the platform.

3) if you stay the same, you step left and wait for anyone coming across from the opposite side.

4) both sides then move back into the centre and continue to DPS

5) rinse/repeat

Update:

We ended up dropping 3 people who constantly disconnected on the fight. We also used what Rylea suggested as far as movement in this fight. Just back and forth. After dropping the 3 laggers we went from 73% to 8% to 0.3% to kill. Haha. The 0.3% was a classic. But it always seems to work that way. Fun fight, too bad its pretty tough on a lot of computers.