Tips or tricks for this baddie?

Errrmm... As far as healing goes:

Bring lots of aoe healers ;p lots. Resto shammy, 2 resto druids, 2 holy priests, a paladin. Resto druids are INCREDIBLE on this fight ;D

As for paladin healing...Here is last week's parse

You're in Divine Guardian spec. I thoroughly recommend using that spec for this fight. 20% extra shielding on sacred shield can be a life saver. According to the parse the tank was getting hit for an average of 22k on melee hits, so every shield counts. I don't know whether the logs are accurate but Divine Sacrifice absorbed 400k damage out of two tantrums.

The first week we did him we had two tries where the MT died. After that I realised that you can't afford to heal anybody other than the main tank except during the tantrum. The tank can go splat in 2 or 3 hits. Beacon helps a lot with the spot healing but you have to be very judgemental about who you heal. A quick holy shock on a raid member who's on 5% hp but that's as far as it's safe to risk it

As for positioning, the raid stands in the middle of the room in front of the boss. People with void zones go left, and people with light bombs go right. That way when the light bomb goes off, the off tank knows where to pick up the spark.

The fight seems like a dps/heal check. If you had to compare it's mechanics to something what would it be?

We've been attempting this for the past 2 weeks and have got him down to roughly 30% multiple times. Our problem seems to lie in the fact that we've been 5 healing it so our DPS can get the heart down in ample amount of time. We may have to add a healer and pester our DPSers to bring it up a notch! Even our healers DPS while the heart is down! ^_^ We've got the spark mechanics down fairly well and when a wipe occurs it's typically because we can't keep up with the tantrums.

Our healer composition is usually 1 Holy Pally, 1 Drood, 1 Disc Priest, 2 Holy Priests. It does vary a bit. Our Resto Shaman has been in and out so when he's on we will snag him. We also have a Shadow Priest who procs his Divine Hymn during one of the tantrums after the heart has been pwnt.

That's a tricky question, to be honest. I thought and from a healing perspective I can't really come up with a solid answer.

Once you break the heart there is usually something to do with every GCD (at least as a raid healer). There is a lot of little aoe damage to the raid, and it's usually constant (light bombs running out will clip people, life sparks will aoe for a good 5 or 6 seconds). There's spike damage to one or two random people in the form of light and gravity bombs. And then every minute or so there's the massive tantrum aoe.

Do you guys stack and just have bombs run left and right or do you have more of a loose spread of the raid?

What kind of healers are you running?

Our setup looks something like this:
Holy Pally - tank
2 holy priests - One watches groups 2/3, one watches groups 3/4, they split group 1.
1 resto shaman - Specifically healing light and gravity bomb targets. Will chain heal during tantrum if a light/gravity isn't active.
1 resto druid - Tank as a priority. Beyond that support raid healing wherever she feels it's needed without stepping on the priests' toes too much, and only when the tank is stable.

Gravity bomb + tantrum is generally the biggest cause of a fatality for us. In between 2 ticks of tantrum the person will take a 16-19k spike. It's very very very very very hard to live through if the person is not constantly topped off in tantrum, which in and of itself is very hard to do.

Expect mana issues in your raid healers. It's a long fight. Myself and the other priest end up using our fiends twice, and we each get an innervate, sometimes he gets 2. Late in the fight we'll have our boomkins/ferals tranquility on one of the tantrums to help with raid heals, as well as paladins bubble/divine sac or shadow priest Divine Hymn.

Hmm a lot of the bosses in ulduar follow a similar trend really. Think of XT hard mode as just a more intense version of the same model.

XT-002 Hard mode: Heal the main tank, heal the people with light bomb, AoE heal hard on tantrum, kill the sparks.

Kologarn - heal the main tank, heal the gripped people, aoe heal every so often, kill the adds when the arm drops.

Hodir - heal the main tank, AoE heal on frozen blows. Kill the frozen npcs.

Auriaya after the adds phase - heal the main tank, heal the raid on a sonic screech. kill the feral defender.

We killed him for the first time this week, it was pretty intense but it didn't really take us too many attempts. (And one of our healers wiped us at 5% while tunnel-visioning with a bomb during tantrum =x.)

I guess some people don't use a tank at all on the sparks, but we found things were much more controllable that way because they hit pretty hard if they get onto a clothy.

We used 6 healers (+ a ret paladin, of course...)

Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, Holy Priest, 2x Resto Druid, Resto Shaman.

Holy Paladin + Disc Priest on the main tank (though the Disc priest switches to raid heal during tantrums)
BoL + Raid healing druid assigned to keep an eye on the offtank.
Resto Shaman assigned to focus solely on people who have bombs, especially during tantrums.

Everyone else was on raid healing, unless they were needed to cover for another healer. The disc priest switched to raid healing during the tantrum as well.

I think from the healing perspective the most important part was to ensure the assignments are covered when a healer has to run out with the bomb, requiring clear communication. Several of our healers were struggling with mana by the end.

I believe for dealing with the sparks we had specific ranged DPSers who were responsible for burning it down, while the melee and several of the ranged who were in classes that aren't so great at target switching stayed on XT. Our spark uptime was nearly 100%; I understand some people have burned them down faster to reduce healing load, presumably at the expense of some frictional dps loss on XT-002, but this worked alright for us.

Here are our breakouts. Nivwar was the main tank, Revenir was the offtank. You can see we had quite a bit of help out on him with druids, partially when his assigned healers were moving and partially when they had GCDs to spare.

http://wowwebstats.com/6btdeoikbdk6e?s=424042-592573

Kallisti can I link you one of our regular XTC kills to get your input? I feel like you guild is similiar to mine and I want to see if we have the dps to get the heart with 6 healers. My guild has 2 resto droods, 2 healadins, 1 disc priest, 3 holy priests and a resto shaman to choose from.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/tnER ... 919&e=2181

We only raid 8 hours a week so planning is paramount. Any input is greatly appreciated thanks to all so far.

we killed him for the second time last night, easy one shot after you figure things out. we even had an unfocused melee drop a gravity bomb on the boss at 20% or so. we used 6 healers last night (2 holy priests, 1 disc, 1 pally, 1 shammy, 1 druid) which is probably one more than is needed, but that's just how our raid turned out. down 2 dps (extra healer and a 2nd tank, we used heroes on the heart with all healers switching to DPS.

after trying some different stuff last week, the positioning we liked was to have melee and two ranged groups in a large triangle behind the boss. people with gravity bomb ran out of the raid towards the back/sides, light bomb went into the middle. when the spark popped, we had a prot pally taunt it and get it out to one of the front sides and most ranged dropped it.

tantrums were bo-Sacced by the pallies when possible, it makes a huuge difference.

WMO @ http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/5685930#damageout

(Sidenote: if you did 7200 as kitty without hysteria or tricks, would it be rude to ask for them next time to try and get on top damage lists?)

We downed this for the first time today. Osogrande's is pretty much what we do. Same healers, same positioning strat, etc. Our OT was a warrior, but I doubt that makes a difference.

We had two Paladins....holy and ret. We were able to chain four DGs together. HoP works nicely with XT's TT. The only thing you need to watch out for is the Light Bomb, as that may kill you with HoP/DG up. Anyone getting hit by Light Bomb will hurt you. I realized this the hard way. Fortunately we were able to burn him down after I died, despite being the MT healer.

I know how it goes with limited raiding time; we raid a similar amount of time. What we actually did is just take a single attempt with very basic strategy the week before to see if we could break the heart after the last round of nerfs, and to see how it went. (note, if you're close, the heart can still break after he takes it back up if there are dots on it, but if you're having trouble breaking the heart you're going to have trouble with the enrage timer.) After that wipe, we killed him normal mode and did some planning and tweaking before coming back the next week.

It looks like we're relatively similar progression-wise. Honestly, the biggest thing for this fight seems to be DPS to me. Did you ever kill XT before the first round of nerfs (when they reduced tantrum damage?) It's slightly worse than that for the raid healing, since you may well have a spark up at the same time, and for a much longer period of time. It looks like you did most of that normal-mode kill with 5 healers up, so that speaks well of your chances with the healing corps.

I personally wouldn't take two holy paladins to the fight if I had a choice; the fact that one of the two people we had covering the tank could peel off and raid-heal when needed really helps us quite a bit with 6 healers. I expect you definitely want two priests as well, since they largely can handle two groups on their own.

Here's our last normal mode kill; it looks like yours was a bit longer so you might have a bit of an issue with the enrage timer, but I think our previous kill was on the high side of average for us, so you may still be alright. (227s vs 261s)

http://wowwebstats.com/2usoms6vkyc5g?s=156099-198661

Thanks for you input. We beat the fight after 5 wipes. Not as hard as I expected. I think Hodir will humble us.

Congrats! Yeah, wondering about that one myself.

congratulations! the same thing happened with us, a few wipes then a kill and we were left with a "wait that's it?"

Best of luck on hodir!

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-d ... 185&e=5787

Here is our log. We definately hit the enrage and downed him a second or 2 after amongst many cheers.

We got our first kill last night. We had taken a look the previous night, just to check if we could kill the heart etc, after spending most fo the night getting our first FL +4 kill.

Our kill was 43 seconds before the enrage using 6 healers (4 druid, 1 H Priest, 1 Pally, should I count a ret?) and two tanks.

I think one of the aspects that made our kill faster was that we tanked the sparks in melee aoe and just had two ranged focus on them. This was enough to mean that we never had two up for very long but looking at other parses it increases the damage quite a bit from Static Charged (roughly 5k damage per second extra versus a similar guild using a ranged burn strategy, this is about 20% of the total damage). The extra damage felt very healable but it may have made tantrums harder.

On our earlier attempts we were messing around with Paladins using the raid wall on a 50% shield and that wasn't working in anyway. We ended up having 2 tantrums with no raid wall/divine hymn for. We asked the raid to use healthstone on the second of these.

We only had Gift of the Wild to help on nature resist.

I think when we are going back the next time we will probably add 1-2 more ranged dps to killing the sparks. The extra tank, being able to tank them in the melee aoe feels like he pays for himself in extra dps. It also simplies the fight a lot. Having most of your dps being able to focus fully on XT makes the enrage far easier.

Btw doesn't 4k hps from a Ret's JOL just feel like a broken mechanic.

Got him tonight after a couple nights of trying.

We have been using the "2 group (melee and ranged), Gravity run left, Light run right" method and it seems to work well.

Had a Warrior tanking, with a DK OTing the Sparks as they were DPSed down by 5 dedicated ranged (2 mage, 2 boomkin, lock).

Were originally planning on 5 healers, but a DPSer couldn't make it so we went with 2xHoly priests, Pally, 2xResto Druids and a Shaman.

Thanks to Ummeiko actually for the healing strat above... we'd been using the Group up portion of the strat before I'd read it, but the healing was a little more spread out, after we implemented your ideas above we 3 shot him.

Logs here: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-Ja6DePK3kh21xsEJ/dashboard/?s=943&e=1564

Our raid composition tends to change each kill due to people afk for a few days and what not but nothing really special is needed to achieve this.

Tank on XT and Tank for Life sparks. We usually use a Prot Paladin for XT and then a feral druid that can dps down the heart with us and then just switch to bear form and get the life sparks when they're up.

Misdirect XT to the left hand side of the room and have the tank's back to the wall and hold him there.. it's like in between the 2 garbage piles in the corners. (Just incase you didn't know if he's there the bots will only spawn in the other 2 piles and since the room is wider than it is long the bots will take much longer to get to the raid etc) Then have your raid in a big clump behind him about 11yds back from the melee group; so you'll have:




Light Spark Tank



(Wall) Tank/XT/Melee............................Rest of Raid



Gravity Void Zones Dropped here


Then as the Gravity and Light bombs are given out you move accordingly. We use 'light goes right and gravity goes left'. The light bomb ppl will move towards the tank on the right hand side that's waiting for you.. and then drop the spark and run back to the group. The gravity bomb marked ppl will go to the far left hand side and drop the void zones along that side and try to overlap/condense them as much as you can without standing in them/getting out of range of heals/or being too close and pulling the ppl in the raid. Make sure you use a /range and set it to 15yds to be safe for both debuffs. Healers should dps some on that 1st heart phase as well, any dmg you can do is always helpful. If someone gets a gravity bomb then a light bomb right after just have the lifespark tank run and meet them half way'ish. And if you have a light bomb then get a gravity right after just drop the void zone around the stairs/off to the side.

It's a pretty intensive healing fight for the fact that it's heavy raid dmg and kinda longer (depending on ur dps) so you can certainly pop your fiend once around when XT is about 75-65% health and then once again for the last 15-10% health. I always use the mojo flask in this enounter and just planned my regen accordingly(coordinating w/the other healers mana tide/hymn of hope/etc) and never even needed an innervate. We usually heal this with disc and holy paladin on the XT tank, a resto shaman on the Life spark tank/life spark debuff victims, and 2 holy priests on raid. The ret paladins in the raid also will occasionally use Divine Sac on the XT tank in tantrums if he is kinda low for our liking. Being in a big clump your priests can use holy nova easily and then have one Coh the melee while the other is Coh the Range. Then for tantrums just have party assignments for your PoH. The only unfortunate issues is if a healer is out with a gravity/light bomb and then tantrum hits.. make sure to get heals to them/pick up their assignments a little.


Pretty easily done with some practice and good raid awareness/mov't. Just remember light right and gravity left.