Our little 10-man got Mimiron down tonight, and I’m super excited about it. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of 10-man guides about it, so here is exactly how we did it and how we evolved towards killing him (I do hope you read the last post for last week’s tries though), with very few ranged to boot!

Group setup was:

Prot warrior, cat druid, retribution paladin, blood DK, arms warrior, mutilate rogue, destruction warlock (yes, just a single ranged DPS. It can be done, melee heavy groups, do not despair), resto druid, holy priest, resto shaman.

Phase 1:

Guardian Spirit the first Plasma Blast, Shield Wall the second, glyphed GS the third if it happens. GS glyph is a real godsend during this phase. We stopped Heroism-ing in P1 during tonight’s tries, but we never got a third anyway. MT always tries to drag him back to the middle after it Shock Blasts to spare the melee dodging various rings of mines. DPS pops cooldowns anyway, they will be back up for when it matters.

Phase 2:

A feral druid’s nightmare. No matter how hard you try, you can never be behind him. Popping short cooldown survival abilities is nice (I Barkskin every cooldown), but healers will have plenty of time to regen during Phase 3, so have no fear. Our paladin popped FR aura to ease the Heat Wave damage.

Rapid Burst will not track a moving target, so melee can keep moving out of the cone. Keep your ranged properly spread and more than one will never eat it. We call out every Rocket Strike we spot – they are hard to see for melee, so keep your eyes firmly planted on the ground. Our ranged though seemed to have no problem whatsoever with them. We also call out Spinning Up with a short note, as in “melee safe, healers move” “healers safe, melee run behind” etc.

Phase 3:

The best way we found of doing it, that made it a complete joke with lots of regen time for healers was this. Prot warrior sticks Vigilance on the feral (or someone else who will get hit frequently. You just want the prot warrior’s taunt to be off cooldown as much as possible). The feral, in this case me, will tank Assault Bots in cat gear and spec. The prot warrior will camp out underneath the ACU, soak every bomb, and tank every Junk Bot. This is where Vigilance on the feral or the warlock tank comes in handy, as Junk Bots can get out of control.

This limits incoming damage to very manageable amounts. Any class who is capable of tanking can withstand hits from Assault Bots, our DK in Frost Presence probably would have done the job fine. The bombs hit our prot warrior for about 15k, certainly much easier than letting them go off on a clothie and get them one-shotted. Note that Assault Bots can be stunned, which cuts off even more damage.

When the ACU comes down (our arms warrior was the core looter) all DPS immediately switch to him. All the adds get dragged to him and get cleaved alongside. Make sure you leg it afterwards though, so that you don’t catch the next Bomb Bot.

We had ACU down in about three to four Assault Bot kills, and we never had more than one Assault Bot up at a time. All our healers ended the phase at full mana.

Phase 4:

This is where it will all go to hell in a handbasket, very very fast. Your most immediate problem will be the chance of the first Shock Blast and P3Wx2 Laser Barrage overlapping. The tank needs to sit there and take the Shock Blast to prevent the unit from running amok. Just GS it out if it happens.

Your second most immediate problem is closely related to the first. And it is the one that caused us about 10 wipes before we figured out a solution. Here is your data:

1. The hitbox of the Leviathan is much smaller than the hitbox of VX-001.
2. In fact, the hitbox of the Leviathan is really damn small.
3. Laser Barrage is a conal attack whose starting point is the very center of the hitbox of VX-001.
4. When the Leviathan turns, all units will turn alongside it, unless the VX-001 is casting Spinning Up/Laser Barrage.

What happened to our tank was that he would attempt to turn if the route of the Barrage included his spot. However, this is much, much harder than it looks due to point 2. Because the hitbox of Leviathan is very small, no matter what the tank does, there is a very high chance of him turning around and/or running amok to chase the tank. This results in the Barrage being likely to mess people up (remember, if he moves from the center, the cone that the Barrage affects can get bigger).

So then, we tried not turning him until the Barrage actually started if it was possible to do so. However, if the tank turns very little, there is still the very high chance of being gibbed, due to points 1 and 3. Even though the tank is technically not on the same side as the Barrage, the smallness of the Leviathan’s hitbox and his proneness to move can drag him over the tank, to the point that the tank is just inside of the tip of the Barrage cone (but still on the correct side of the Leviathan), leading to a swift wipe.

Here is how we solved it.

For melee, ranged and healers, nothing changes. The Leviathan faced the entrance of the room to start with. We all stood stacked up behind him, and DPSed/healed as usual.

When the Barrage comes, if the tank needs to move, he needs to backpedal out of the way slowly, yes, using the S key backpedal, preferably towards a wall, very slowly turning the Leviathan if need be. This is the one fight where backpedaling will save your MT’s hide. As melee and healers are starting from right across the tank, this negates the risk that the cone will get larger and envelop the people on the edges. In fact, the cone on the tank’s side will get smaller as your tank will be backpedaling towards a wall. (I really do need to make a diagram of this)

The try we put this strategy to use was our kill try. Our MT still bit it during the second Spinning Up, but I took over in bear form, and it was a kill from there.

Other than that, we still announced every Rocket Strike, Shock Blast, and other relevant stuff such as “oh shit the warlock tank is dead BECAUSE SHE BACKPEDALED OUT OF A ROCKET STRIKE”. The head died first, followed by the middle and the bottom.

Pro tip: Ret paladins can reach the head with Judgment and Exorcism. DKs can Pestilence diseases onto it. Our gnome rogue was actually able to hit the head if he jumped, I personally failed at it.

And this, folks, is how we overcame the challenge that was Mimiron.

We fail gusy D:

Well, I did announce the new “one piece per person per raid, unless other parties interested decide they can have more” rule last raid. Guess who wasn’t pleased? Our warlock who gobbles up loot like Pacman on steroids, regardless of who else needs it, and her boyfriend, but that was hardly surprising. Everyone else was completely fine with it, but then, everyone else possesses enough sense to know that we do our best to ensure every piece of loot goes to the person who will benefit from it most.

But what about offspec rolls? Cried she. We pointed out that a warlock hardly had an offspec like a hybrid’s. PvP spec, said she. At this point I had a brain overload, since ohmyGod you’re a warlock needs resilience there is no resilience on Ulduar gear jldsjla does not compute, but thankfully our MT pointed out that we will hardly let gear be DEd as long as there is someone willing to use it.

The way Stratomize, our paladin, put it, we have two options: Common sense, or Loot Council. I’d much rather we did Council since certain members of our raid group seem to lack this common sense thing (HINT: If you have epic wand and priest has green wand, please feel free to not roll on new wand), but it’s very easy for Council to look biased. So I guess new loot rule it is.

Also had to have a talk with resto shaman about his girlfriend’s consistent failure, since everyone always complains about her, and ultimately, people also see me as being at fault for inviting her. Since she and the resto shaman are a package deal, if we want to keep resto shaman we also have to get along with warlock, and we’re rather fond of the guy.

Resto shaman, unsurprisingly, found nothing wrong with his girlfriend’s style of play. I had hoped he also noticed that she was succeeding greatly at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and generally letting us down everytime we counted on her, but no. At the end, we agreed that everytime the raid decided she had failed, I’d mention this to resto shaman. I’ll start doing this tonight, and see how it goes.

Christ, people, please accept your bad. There is very little to be gained from not accepting it, and a lot from accepting it and trying to improve.

Oh and also, the subject of raid invites. This part manages to consistently drive me crazy, due to people who won’t accept or decline until the last second, thus denying the raid leaders the option to find a replacement if one person won’t be around. I think I will be creating a new rule saying that the event will be locked for more signs 24 hours prior to event start, and if you haven’t accepted your invite until then, it’ll be counted as a decline.

Well, my Vezax hopes were dashed by the cockblock that is Mimiron.

Thorim, as expected, didn’t take us more than 5-6 tries, and all of these tries were spent learning add-control in the arena. It seems to be the absolute hardest part of the fight. The strat that worked for us was:

*Prot paladin, feral druid, destro warlock, rogue, resto shaman, resto druid in the arena.
*Prot warrior, mage, arms warrior, holy priest downstairs. Tunnel group does their thing, they had absolutely no problems.
*Fast hitting melee classes such as rogues and ferals will be penalised in the tunnel due to an aura, so we chose to not send ours down. That, and we needed the feral, yours truly, up in the arena helping with tanking.
*Rogues also are a big help upstairs because they can dismantle the Champion to prevent the arena team from taking Whirlwinds. This is important as you’re all clumped up, clothies and all. If you lose even one person, things are probably going to get out of hand.
*We could have chosen to keep the arms warrior up as well, since the aura of the boss in the tunnels penalises melee classes pretty harshly, but we decided we’d rather have Shadowfury upstairs to help with add control.
*Everyone upstairs stands in the brown circle in the middle of the room. There will be little to no lightning damage like this, plus adds are tons easier to pick up.
*Prot paladin consecrates and does his AoE thing. I beared up, helped pick up loose adds, and generally swiped the hell out of everything.
*Hang on like this for 3 minutes and you’re set.

After Thorim lands, there is absolutely nothing to the fight – tank, spank, don’t clump up, enjoy the loot. We never once wiped on this phase. Just don’t lose a tank, since unless you can CR them you will wipe (we did lose ours, but I beared up and took over since I was in tanking gear from P1.)

Our tunnel group had to deliberately wait to not trigger the hard mode, so I have all the faith that we can do it once we clear Ulduar.

Mimiron, though, is another story. We put in some really good tries, and towards the end we were consistently getting to P4.

We opted for getting P1 over with as soon as humanly possible, in order to not run out of cooldowns to use for Plasma Blast. Our MT has the Shield Wall glyph and he swears by it, so even if he uses it in P1, he knows he will have it available for the next phases. So we Guardian Spirit/LS the first one (our priest also has GS glyphed, so if all goes well he will have it available for a third Plasma Blast), SW the second, and pop Heroism/DPS cooldowns right off the bat to ensure a third one does not happen. If it does happen, we’ll have GS again, but we never had it happening.

Sometimes he will wait for a long time to cast the first Plasma Blast (I am not too sure, but it seems that sometimes he can cast Shock Blast instead of the first Plasma Blast). That means if you are lucky and have sufficiently high DPS, you can get through P1 with just one Plasma Blast.

We had our ret paladin swap to his elemental shaman for Mimiron, and in P1, he would help heal Napalm Shell’ed people if someone had it during/close to Plasma Blast. It is a pretty tough amount of damage for someone to be taking, but you absolutely cannot afford to not have all three healers on the tank during Plasma Blast.

Preferably, your DPS would also pop survival cooldowns if afflicted by Napalm Shell during or close to PB. Mages can Fire Ward/block through it, druids can Barkskin, rogues can Cloak it off, whatever. Make people use cooldowns liberally, because in our opinion, P1 was the toughest of the first three. Fire resistance aura/totem also helps ease the Shell damage.

If you survived P1, P2 will probably feel significantly easier. There is not much to say, other than the fact that it’s again a healing game. Use fire resistance aura/totem to ease Heat Wave damage, pop any defensive cooldowns you haven’t popped to make life simpler for your healers, and nuke him down.

You might get lucky and never get Spinning Up/P3Wx2 Laser Barrage. If it happens more than once, you’re probably taking too long. At any rate, all it takes is for people to be aware, it’s really a negligible ability compared to others he has.

Watch out for Rocket Strike damage. There is no excuse for dying to it.

P3. Ideally you’d use a PvP specced warlock for tanking it (we did). Ideally your warlock is also not bad like ours and can keep aggro, so that your squishy mage and ele shaman do not meet an untimely demise (yes, I’m bitter).

I tanked Junk Bots in cat gear/spec in this phase to make our MT’s life easier. Drag them to melee and get them cleaved (<3 our arms warrior). Melee need to be focusing Assault Bots pretty hard, so that they will have as much DPS uptime as possible on the ACU + extra time in between to lose the Junk Bots. We assigned our arms warrior to core looter at this point. As soon as it comes down, let everyone stop whatever they’re doing, pop cooldowns, and nuke it down. As with other phases, the shorter it lasts, the better. You don’t really have the option of chilling.

Everyone needs to be dodging Bomb Bots hardcore. If you see one coming towards you, stop whatever you are doing and LEG IT IMMEDIATELY. They are pretty fast little buggers too, so run NOW NOW NOW. The explosion can easily one-shot lower HP classes – StratFu says they explode for 5k damage on normal, but trust me, from firsthand experience, it’s a LOT more than that. And needless to say, even losing one person can spell a wipe. We never killed the Bomb Bots, since they can be dodged and it’s a lot more important to just get ACU on the ground.

In between P3 and P4, you absolutely have to lose any leftover Assault/Junk Bots as soon as humanly possible. The start of P4 is pretty chaotic, no sense making it any worse.

P4 – we usually died at this point. There are a million things that can go wrong. Melee dying to mines, MT meeting an untimely demise, warlock tank losing aggro to mage who promptly gets owned, loose adds killing someone.

In all honesty, we’ll probably get him on Tuesday. We didn’t put in that many tries, yet we were pretty successful and progressed rapidly from wiping to Plasma Blast to getting to P4 consistently.

We attempted Hodir with frost resistance the first time today – 7 out of 10 raiders had over 300 FR, and we have all agreed that it makes the fight a lot easier. Icicles are no longer as penalising, so melee no longer has to move that much. Our tank was laughing at Frozen Blows – he resisted 50% off each hit. Not sure if it was a fluke, but we even ended up beating the hard mode + got the achievement for saving all the NPCs.

Tonight we’ll clean up Freya (here’s hoping your helm drops, Rageudder) and start putting in tries on Thorim and beyond. We probably won’t need more than 3 to 5 tries on Thorim, so I’m hoping we can beat Mimiron and put in some serious tries on Vezax. And dare I say Yogg? Vezax does not look like it will take long for our setup, as like I mentioned, we have pretty few mana dependent classes (pretty much only our healers), and our melee is great at interrupting.

And I finally got my Twilight Zone achievement last night, in a 10man zerg PuG (Grim Batol, I love you). We had pretty strong DPS – Sarth was consistently at 10% when he started yelling for Shadron to come down. But we had to sort out positioning requirements/not dying to void zones/not failing at fire walls, which took about five tries. Of the Nightfall was the one title I’d wanted since I heard about it, so I’m absolutely delighted.

After the rising popularity of Madcon’s cover of Beggin’, I ended up reading a comment online about how the healers in a player’s guild ressed people yelling “Ressin’, ressin’ you”. This was the inspiration for my next parody: Ressin’, a healer’s song.

Oooh
Stop your loving whine now, tanky
I’m ressin’

Ressin’, ressin’ you
Stop your loving whine now, tanky
Ressin’, ressin’ you
Make that loving table now, magey

I am pretty happy with the progress our little raid is making. We seem to have a steady lineup right now, and despite being _extremely_ melee heavy (Our DPSers are a warlock, a blood DK, an arms warrior, a ret paladin, and a rogue), we seem to be doing rather well.

Oneshot Flame Leviathan (but who doesn’t), Razorscale, Ignis, Deconstructor, and Iron Council. Kologarn took 3 tries, due to an unlucky disconnect and me being stupid with my AoE taunt.

Note to add tanks on Kologarn, do NOT AOE taunt them. Kologarn doesn’t care if he still has a valid melee target in range a la Ragnaros, but he does very much care if his primary aggro target is out of melee range.

Also note: You can do 10man Deconstructor with a single ranged, despite what people say. We lost our paladin to an unlucky bomb, but that was pretty much it.

The last patch has definitely made things so much easier, though. It makes me proud having beat those encounters on the first and second weeks. Tympanic Tantrum hits for pretty much nothing now compared to its old version. It’s also a lot easier to melt adds on Ignis – he used to be our bane and getting him down last week felt very good, but this week? We sped through him like he was nothing.

So, the new bosses. All I can say is that Auriaya, Freya and Hodir are very. Easy. They do require your tanks and healers to be moderately geared, especially Hodir (and we have both tanks in 4/5 Valorous and KT/Naxx25 weapons). But other than that, they come down to execution.

Auriaya’s hardest part is the pull, get the pull right and you’re set. It took us about 5 tries to get it right. The goal of the pull is not having both of her two adds pounce the same person. Even if that person is a tank, he will die unless he starts with defensive cooldowns popped.

This was our initial tries, but our tank died anyway before he even had a chance to pop Shield Wall. We tried pulling with totems and have them pounce the totems, but we were slow to react and it resulted in dead resto shaman. So we cheesed it and used our ret paladin to bubble pull to the tanks, from then on it went very smoothly and Auriaya died in short order. We only killed the defender two times, the third time it died to the cleaves anyway, just yell at your raid to move the hell out when the defender is about to die, and you’re set.

Hodir is a fight that requires your healers and tank to be geared. The end, really. You’ll probably fail with badly geared healers, unless they are incredible, and you’ll definitely fail with a badly geared tank. You don’t need extra Frost resistance. We did it with just the paladin aura. Lesser geared raids though might want to craft some FR items for their tank to survive Frozen Blows.

Our first three tries were spent learning how to recognize where to stand during Flash Freeze. There are a LOT of blue things on the ground during that fight, and they all look like each other. You are meant to look for the large blue runes. Not the tiny ones that appear when he is NOT casting Flash Freeze and meleeing normally instead, and signal an icicle falling on your head.

Once you find this extremely large blue rune, stand right outside it, and wait. You will see something drop inside it from the ceiling and the rune will turn white and solidify. Now is go time, so run in immediately. Flash Freeze should hit in the next 1-2 seconds. Do NOT go in before you see the icicle fall, as it will knock you back to someplace where you probably won’t have time to run back in before the freeze hits.

Note that you must have Projected Textures turned on in your video settings to see all this. It sucks for those with worse-off rigs, but yeah.

Frozen Blows will hit your tank and raid very. Hard. Rotate through tank and raid cooldowns, and do whatever it takes. Our next few tries after we learned Flash Freeze were spent learning how to deal with Frozen Blows. What finally worked for us was to have one dedicated healer doing nothing but spamming heals on the tank (resto shaman) and the other two topping off the raid (disc priest, resto druid). In retrospect, we would probably have been much better off with the disc priest on the tank and resto shaman and druid on the raid, but eh, it worked, no one died.

Flash Freeze and Frozen Blows are the only two tricks in this fight, nothing else to it, really. Get the gear and figure those out, then you’re good to go.

Also note that the aura Hodir casts on everyone is not like Keristrasza’s aura – on Keri, any movement will remove all of your stacks but on Hodir one movement only removes a single stack. However, Hodir’s aura isn’t applied anywhere near as frequently as Keri’s aura.

As for Freya, she has a lot. Of. Trash. Nothing she has is particularly hard except the Elders themselves, just pretty time consuming. The specials of the Elders do hit quite hard and are pretty likely to kill your tank without heavy healing. At least one Elder (the first one) is resettable, I’d assume the others are too.

Freya herself is much like Gothik. I’d say she is also about as easy as Gothik. Her healing aura and Attuned to Nature stacks prevent killing her before all 6 waves of her adds are dead. You will get 3 waves of different adds, and the same ones in the same order again, and then finally Freya. Oh, and also one random tree that pops up during the fight and heals Freya and Co. if not nuked immediately.

We wiped on her once because our melee cleavers missed the memo about “KILL THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME D:” on the triple-add wave, we went back and did her again with success. There’s nothing else notable I can say about this fight. Once the adds are dead, you’d have a hard time wiping – her berserk timer is incredibly generous and she has only 1.4 million HP.

I’m guessing it will take us another two, maybe three weeks to clear Ulduar normally, given that exam and job schedules of our raiders permit. Not bad for a ragtag bunch that aren’t even in the same guild.