Twins and others

First, an administrative note: I'm going to be moving on the 7th, and following that, it may take a while before I can play again. I'd like to keep posting, so I'm going to set a once-weekly post schedule for myself. It should be easy to come up with one thing per week to write about even while not playing, starting with a series of guildes for the newly 80 hunter. I'll be on the road this coming Tuesday, though, so I'm going to make the first post now, especially as I've been wanting to make it for a bit now.

I'm actually going to write up a quick guide for the Twin Val'kyr instead of Faction Champions, not least because there's not much to say about the champions fight. DPS the primary kill target, keep an eye on healers and use freezing trap to take pressure off them, use deterrence/FD/disengage to keep yourself alive. That's it.

The twins are actually a really fun fight, though, and I like the design enough that I even made a crude picture:

1. The black and white circles are the dark/light portals, respectively.
2. The triangles are the two Val'kyr.
3. Red diamonds are melee DPS.
4. Blue circles are ranged DPS and healers.

The tanks are, of course, on the opposite side of their targets from the DPS. How it works is your entire raid starts as either one color or the other, it doesn't matter which. Let's say you decide to DPS the dark one first. You'll pick up light essence as soon as the portals spawn, then go down to stand in your position within clicking range of the dark portal. This is so that the second you need to swap portal colors - either to break a shield or avoid a vortex - you can do so instantly.

Every time you swap colors, keep that color until you're forced to change. The twins share a health pool, so there's no advantage to switching targets any more often than you have to. Further, every time you swap colors, you need to run (or disengage!) over to the color that's now your opposite and stand on it. In other words always stand on a portal that's the opposite of your current color. Knowing when to switch is really easy - the game itself tells you in no uncertain terms.

Stacking tightly on each other is important if you want to maximize your DPS. The light/dark orbs that swarm the coliseum regularly give you a buff if you run into one of the same color, but the buff is granted to anyone within a short radius of the orb "splashing". That means that if everyone is stacked up, everyone builds stacks of the buff faster and gets more time spent under the empowered light and empowered darkness buffs. This also means that everyone has to be sharp about avoiding orbs of the opposite color, but they're really not that hard to avoid.

This isn't a particularly difficult encounter, but it is quite a bit of fun, I think. Seeing those nice big numbers is always exciting.

The first two ToC encounters

I've been through Northrend Beasts and Jaraxxus on both 10 and 25 normal difficulty now. They're both fairly trivial on 10, as far as mechanics to learn go, especially from a hunter's perspective. The difficulty does ramp up some on 25, but not hugely so.

Northrend Beasts is split into three phases, one for each beast. The first is Gormok the Impaler, and the big thing a hunter will want for him is a macro with the following line:

/target snobold

No really, /target snobold. I know right? Who knew we'd ever need to do that in an actual raid? Then all you do is watch for snobolds to jump off of Gormok's back and on to a raidmember, target them, and go to town. I've tried having my pet attack the snobolds but he never seems interested. I'm not sure if that's a bug or intended, but it doesn't matter too much: ranged shouldn't have a problem popping the snobolds, and your pet is still chewing on Gormok, so at least he's doing damage (unlike the XT heart phase since patch 3.2).

The second phase is a couple big worms. While fighting these guys, remember to stay spread out 10 yards from other raid members, keeping the paralytic spray from hitting more than one or two raid members is important. If you do get targeted with the spray, find the person with burning bile and clear it off before you get stunned. Ideally, there will be a designated spot away from everyone else for people with paralytic poison and burning bile to meet and fall in love, but it's not always practical (sometimes bile hits a tank, for example). Also, keep in mind that while the paralytic poison slows you to an RP-walk, disengage works at full speed, so take advantage of that.

There's a little target-swapping too. I think probably the most common strategy is going to be "DPS the one that's rooted in the ground". Which one that is changes every few seconds when they both burrow under ground for a bit. When they pop back up, the stationary one will still be partially in the ground, while the one that needs to be kited around will have its tail visible. The goal is to kill them fairly close to each other so you're not stuck with several paralyzed people and no burning bile to dispel them with.

The last guy is Icehowl, a Really Big Yeti. He's... really easy. All the cooldowns you blew on Gormok should be back up by the time he comes out; hold on to them. DPS him like normal, and drop to viper if you have to. He's periodically going to throw everyone to the edge of the coliseum and stun them, then face towards a person. If you're in the arc that he's facing, run the shortest distance out of that arc the second the stun wears off. He'll then charge that direction and, unless someone was too slow, he'll be stunned when he hits the wall. This is when you blow your cooldowns, since he's taking increased damage during this time. This is also why you vipered up a mana bar before the stun, so you've got all the mana you need right now.

Beasts is a pretty long encounter with a lot of target switching, meaning a lot of time with no judgement of wisdom. Mana does become a problem, but it's pretty manageable.

Jaraxxus is a step up in difficulty from Beasts, but it's certainly not on the order of learning Mimiron or Yogg pre-nerf, or even the pre-nerf Auriaya pull (christ that was a bitch). Jaraxxus' fel fireballs need to be interrupted or they're going to kill a few people, but melee should be able to manage that. He also regularly puts a 10-stack of a buff on himself, one that I can't find on wowhead or mmo-champion, but it needs to be purged off quickly. Ideal for this job is an enhance shaman or two, and if you don't have them then a mage. Hunters can purge it, but the 8 second cooldown on tranq shot makes us bad candidates for the job, since it needs to get stripped off fast, before he one-shots someone with his lightning. The lightning is chain lightning, so everyone should keep a 15-yard separation from each other. Easy on 10, but still doable on 25.

He periodically summons two kinds of mobs: Mistresses of Pain and infernals. The infernals have an annoying blink ability and are in general a bitch to pick up, so help out your friendly off tank (or tanks) with a misdirect and enjoy the glyphed cooldown reduction on killshot. The Mistresses do a couple things that truly suck for the healers, but luckily we don't have to worry about them. I think we can maybe help them out with one, though. Spinning Pain Spike is one of those abilities that does just a little bit more than 100% of your health in damage, so something like a disc priest's bubble is necessary to keep it from killing people. However! I think that maybe we can FD when she jumps over to us and short-circuit the ability. I'm not 100% sure, as I've only had the chance to test it once, but if I'm right and it works, it's a nice way to take a little pressure off of the healers for this fight.

Oh, last, he'll occasionally put a debuff on you that makes you spawn a little pool of green fire every three seconds. Stutter-run to the outside ring of the coliseum if you get it so you don't leave a bunch of fire in the middle of the raid.

That's all I've got for now, we'll see what the Faction Champions look like next week.