Halfus is hard!
February 17th, 2011 by Setta
(This ogre stomped us good)
I know that sounds obvious, but it would appear that we have not got Halfus on farm yet. Last night was a combination of needing more gear and a strategy that wasn’t terribly effective. At this point, I’m fairly sure we’ll need to free two drakes to get him down when there is that much AoE going on.
Beyond that, our attempt on Bastion of Twilight is done this week, next up is the Conclave of Wind! We’ll be hitting that Monday and I have a strong feeling that they won’t hold against our assault. The Conclave is all about execution and I know we have the gear to destroy them. I’ll post a quick strategy with links a little later today.
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- Posted in Dungeon Delving, FTC News
I’m still at a loss for which of the drakes in that combination should go down first. While killing the warden or whelps decreases overall aoe damage, I feel the shadow nova, while trivial damage wise, might contribute more to the encounter’s complexity.
Perhaps the healers have more insight, but it seemed most of the relevant wipes (wipes we were actually doing good on until…) were because of tank deaths symptomatic of healer’s being OOM. Is it perhaps because the healers are being forced to use their fastest, inefficient heals because the chance of being interrupted would cause a player’s death? Or was it simply because of the AOE damage being too great that they were spamming AOE heals?
The answer to that might help in the future. If it’s cuz of AOE damage sponging all the mana, then killing whatever deals the most AOE damage (Time Warden? since it makes the Fireball Barrage avoidable entirely) would be ideal. If it’s inefficient single heals because of interruption fears (Shadow Nova) killing Slate Dragon first would be ideal as it makes Shadow Nova almost a non-issue since a single player (tank) can interrupt it solo.
Or perhaps if the nova isn’t the issue, then killing the drake that reduces the most damage (whelps) is the idea since their debuff double dips on the proto drake reducing it’s breath by 6000 and it’s fireball barrage by 6000. This would make the breath almost trivial and aid the healing on the fireball barrages.
I think it comes down to what’s eating up all the healer mana?
Just some thoughts
Just some thoughts
Far as I can see, the only real option for reducing incoming AoE damage (which is the mana sponge) would be to release more drakes. The fire breath from the proto-drake is immensely powerful, dealing about 60k damage to everyone. My guess is we have to mitigate that by releasing the emeralds. The Shadow AoE could be mitigated as well, by releasing the Storm Drake. This would greatly reduce incoming AoE to the entire raid, but make the fireballs impossible to avoid.
However, that might be acceptable considering all that mana that would be going to AoE healing would instead go into healing the tanks. That would make the entire fight a DPS burn – kill the drakes before they kill the tanks.
Overall the entire encounter with this combination (Storm, Whelps, Time) is difficult because of the massive damage the whole raid takes, or the very high damage the tanks take. Essentially once two drakes are down the fight becomes a lot more manageable, but how much mana would we have left at that point? Lots of RNG, though avoiding the shadow nova might make it possible for healers to use their more efficient heals for raid and tank damage.