Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey there, this is your Pal Pallie and welcome back to Git Er Raid. If you thought I liked
the normal version of this fight, do you have any guess if I'd like the heroic version?
Here's a hint, HELL YES! Its Spoils of Pandaria Heroic 10 man time and we've got presents
to open. As with normal mode, you split your raid into two five man teams with a tank and
healer each. We'll talk a little bit about group makeup later but for now, the general
rule will be to try and make the teams as even as possible in terms of dps and that
includes the healer and tank dps.
Before getting too deep, lets identify the big mechanic change for heroic here. When
you kill the contents of a box, an Unstable Spark gets sent to the other team's side that
they have to kill. It immediately starts casting Supernova and if it is allowed to finish,
it will likely wipe your team. Its about 500k damage to everyone. Good thing you have about
10 seconds to kill the Spark before it goes off. That is really the only change to the
encounter but it obviously comes along with a lot more damage from everything plus all
the health of the adds are increased of course.
Now one important thing to note is that it doesn't matter the size of box you open, only
one spark will be sent for every box's contents you kill. So if you open like 17 small boxes,
you send 17 sparks. But if you only open say 2 larges, 6 mediums and a few smalls, you
end up sending less. And thats the big part of setting up your strategy ahead of time.
You want to minimize the boxes that you open and reach the 50 energy per side just like
in normal mode. Remember, each small box is worth 1 energy, medium boxes worth 3 energy
and large ones are worth 14. There are 2 large boxes, 6 mediums and quite a few smalls.
So lets think about this, most people like the large adds because its usually one big
target to smack down. You can also combine it with maybe a small or two depending on
your comp. If you end up killing both big boxes, thats already 28 energy accounted for.
So we need 22 more. If we want to send a minimum amount of sparks over, we could then say we'll
take out all 6 mediums. That's 18 more energy so we only need to pick up 4 small boxes and
we'll be at fifty energy. And with that, we'll send a total of 12 sparks. This is typically
the setup that most raid groups go with. There's a balance to be struck here. If you can group
up the pulled adds into the middle where the sparks spawn, you can also cleave them down
with everything else. Thus you could maybe open up more small boxes if you want but realize
that is more dps you need to dump into sparks. Its not too much more as the sparks are about
800k health in 10 man heroic.
So if you decide on your approach to the boxes, the next thing to decide is the order you
open them in. This is all on the tanks and healers to decide just how much they can handle
at a time. We went through a number of different strategies along the way. Most of them are
valid, you just have to be very tight in how quickly you open boxes and pay attention to
sparks and boss mechanics. What we settled on was my team would focus on opening up the
medium and small boxes we wanted early on in the cycle. Then we would finish with a
large box. The other team would open their large boxes one after another and once those
were gone, would work on the mediums and smalls. In this manner, we would be sending many sparks
to them while they were focused on the big guy. It was easy to stack the big guy in the
middle and cleave down sparks. Then when we were working on our big guys, they would be
sending us lots of sparks which we would then cleave down.
What we actually ended up doing is modifying this strategy just slightly. We would open
up one large box first and then would work on mediums and smalls and again end on the
large. It just helped us get through the large guys since they are a major source of raid
damage. We'll talk a little more specifically about each add type on each side but for now,
big guys equal big raid damage. Find whatever works for your raid and maybe it varies between
the Mogu versus Mantid side. But just realize one last thing here, things are tight so whatever
you do, you need to be pulling quickly and minimize any downtime. That is huge. If you
have a medium box add at 30% health, that next box better be cracking open milliseconds
later. Get on it!
So lets talk Mogu side first. As in normal, the dangerous adds are the medium ones and
in heroic, the big guy is really annoying and harmful. The big guy doesn't do anything
different from normal but you have to pay attention to the number of stone statues he
has out. If he has more than 2 out and he's about to cast his aoe, you are in for a major
hit. Even with only 2 out, its pretty bad. So your focus has to be on killing those statues
as fast as possible. Again, try to keep the big guy in the middle so you can cleave any
sparks but it will also help to cleave those statues.
Moving onto the mediums. The Anima Golem is certainly an add whose raid mechanics you
can't screw up or else it spells bad news for you. Gotta handle the matter scrambles
and you have to have the tank move him quickly out of the red crap on the ground. You can't
afford to have that stuff heal anything. Get the fudge out! And likewise, the Shadow Ritualist
isn't too terrible to start but you can't let him live for a long time or else his Torment
dot can get out of control. Healers should try to dispell it as much as possible to reset
its damage increase but best to get the Ritualist killed as soon as possible.
Thats really it to highlight on the Mogu side, so lets turn to the Mantid side. The big guy
with the bombs is the same as normal mode, but he's likely to be alive a little longer
so you'll need to be smarter about placing bombs around the room. Its also pretty smart
to use immunities to ignore the bombs until the last second. The only thing about doing
that is you need to be careful you don't explode your bombs while standing near someone else.
How many times did I deterrance my bombs and yet step on my team destroying them instantly.
Don't ask.
The mediums on Mantid aren't as tricky as the Mogu ones but be careful of the windstorm
from one of them. It hurts a lot more on heroic of course. You should still try to dispell
any buff these guys get otherwise you might lose your tank. Likewise, the tank killer
on this side happens to be one of the small boxes. Its sneaky to notice but one of the
small box adds is called the Warcaller. It can buff itself to do more damage plus it
can apply a stacking armor reduction on the tank. Tanks should be very careful here. Either
cooldown through it or run away. The add slows down when this happens and can be kited. Having
your tank at 80% armor reduction at some point is a bad thing so watch for this.
Just a few more things to mention before closing out. First, we haven't talked about the green
boxes with the monks. Some raid groups find these guys pretty deadly and thus sort of
weave them into the first few groups of boxes they open. We didn't find that at all and
popped both of them at the same time and burned them down to get their buffs before starting
to open other boxes. The only one that caused us problems every now and then was the Brewmaster.
If he gets you with that Keg Toss and then is able to Breath fire on you, it can be a
bad day especially if he manages to get a healer. Just be careful avoiding the Keg Toss
and if you can't do that, just try to get away from his breath no matter what. Again,
we usually killed him off before he even got to this point but it can happen.
While on the subject of the monks, you really should pay close attention to what buffs you
get. Its nice to just get the dps buff or the tank one, but the really super nice one
is the healer buff. In case you don't know it from normal mode, you, as a healer, get
a big wave of healing and damage that comes from your front. Its going to happen every
8 seconds and its really super nice for healing, but more so, its great for all the little
adds and sparks. In fact, when my team got that buff, I had to worry a lot less about
the sparks and the stone statue adds as our disc priest would masterfully point that wave
to slaughter those types of things all the time. So healers, step it up and use this
one to its full advantage. Your team might need the extra dps to beat the enrage timers.
Beyond that, we should really talk about the transition between the two quadrants. Hopefully
your team is finishing off enough adds to get to 50 energy in time to hit the lever
but there are some tricky things to note here. First off, the lever actually takes a few
seconds to activate so be careful you don't use this with only 2 or 3 seconds left on
the clock. You risk it blowing you all up anyway even though you might have clicked
it in time. Secondly, don't immediately jet into the next room with everyone. Its highly
likely that one or the other team just barely finished off an add and then was able to open
up the next quadrant. BUT, that last add dying would send a spark over to the other team.
If you forget about that spark, it blows up and you are likely dead.
So at least leave one person behind for a few seconds while you start your opening routine
in the next quadrant to handle any remaining sparks. It can be super frustrating to get
to the end of a quadrant with plenty of time to spare and then as you go into the next
quadrant you all instantly die for no apparent reason. Its usually because of a forgotten
spark. This issue can also be helped a little by good communication between the teams. For
example, if one team accidentally opens an extra small box at the end and then kill its
contents as they move to the next quadrant, they should call out to the other team to
watch for that spark. If you are beating the timer by quite a few seconds on both sides.
It might even be helpful to NOT click the levers until about 10 seconds left so that
any remaining sparks can spawn and be killed. On initial progression, you may not have that
luxury but if you do, waiting might be a valuable thing to do.
I promised we'd talk a little about group makeup so here we are. You should be mindful
of what kind of 5 man teams you are putting together. Overall the best groups will be
balanced in terms of dps but you may want to be mindful of missing buffs and debuffs
between the teams. Using something like MMO-Champion's raid comp calculator would help you see what
each side has. And don't forget, you might have a healer that is stronger in dps, so
take that into account as well.
So when to use *** is probably the only remaining unanswered question. And I'm sorry to disappoint
but its going to depend on what your raid team finds difficult. Given the range of ***,
you can customize each team and use it whenever they need it most without impacting the other
team's strategy. For my raid team, we choose to use it on the first big add spawned on
the Mantid side as that one seemed to hurt us quite a bit. It also helped lessen the
amount of bombs strewn about since we killed it a little faster. What I'd be careful about
is using it in the first quadrant and then judging that because you are beating the enrage
in that quadrant, you'll be fine in the second quadrant. Maybe it was a raid comp thing but
it felt like both groups took a little longer killing the Mogu side off so maybe its more
valuable there. My guess would be the statues that spawn from the big guy add to the overall
dps you need to do and thus hitting the enrage is harder there. Whatever you feel like for
your groups makeup, go for it.
So in summary, tanks open many many presents in a prescribed order. Move anima golems out
of red stuff and keep pulling as quickly as your healer and dps can stand. Healers, watch
for the big aoes from the big guys and do your duty if you have the healing buff from
the monks. Dps, just cleave, cleave and more cleave while watching for sparks to kill.
The average ilvl of our group on this first kill was pretty high, around 570 and here
are the healing and dps charts for reference. Thanks for watching and please comment, like
and or subscribe to the video if you found it helpful and....have a good one!