Dragon Soul Progress

Blackhorn

Sunday night two weeks ago Darkfall killed Blackhorn on 10man.

We'd been following a strategy where we tried to burn the drakes as fast as possible. But we kept losing people to all sorts of bad stuff: melee adds charging, purple swirlies big and small, or sapper not dying in time. We'd only gotten to phase 2 twice and while one of those was close to a kill it wasn't really repeatable.

So we changed up the kill priority. Three dps were assigned to the melee adds, and a fourth was to swap and help kill them if we called for them to be burned. Of course everyone was still supposed to swap to the sapper as soon as it appeared. We made sure that there were never more than 2 melee adds up at a time. It drastically cut down on the random amount of death due to charge. Only having two melee adds up at a time also reduced the tank damage a lot. And as a final relief for the healers we told everyone to only hop into a small purple swirly when they were at full health and it was close to them. That increased ship damage a fair amount, but as long as we got every single sapper the boat got low but didn't explode.

Somehow this worked. I can't tell if we were super lucky and happened to be able to kill the last 2 drakes before they could drop off a 4th pair of adds, or if the mechanics were fixed so that we'd only ever get 3 pairs of melee adds. Either way, after the 3rd pair of adds were killed the last drake or two was killed and we pushed through to phase two. We had a couple of snafus with the shockwave and devastating roar. But once people remembered to get out of shockwave while the casters stayed more than 10 yards away from the boss to avoid the silence of the roar the kill went reasonably smoothly.

Zon'ozz

Two weeks ago Tuesday night Darkfall had enough people to do DS25. The first two bosses are pretty easy. We had a wipe on Yor'sahj because people didn't listen and stacked when the boss had the green buff. There were a few people not on vent and that made it pretty hard. Honestly the only thing that saved us was the Yor'sahj addon that DraNgNon found for me a couple of weeks ago. The auto announce for slime kill target and stack/no stack and add kill order of that addon is just fabulous. And I really need to add a vent requirement to my raid advertisement macro.

However, Zon'ozz continues to be a thorn in our side. I do not understand how to control the direction of the ping pong ball. And that consistently fucks us. We've got the damage to kill him. We've got the heals to survive his tank damage and his aoe phase damage. But when the ball goes sideways everything gets screwed. We got him to 4% last night. 4%! But we didn't manage to kill him.

I think that I need to step up and tank him so that he is facing directly away from the ranged camp. I have been reluctant to do that, due to healing considerations. But on 25man both of the tank healers are standing in the melee group anyway so they are close enough regardless of how the boss is pointed. However, if we do that the ranged group can't be too far back, both for healing/dispelling reasons, and so that I have time to get the boss in position if the ball goes sideways.

Either way Zon'ozz makes me want to tear my hair out. We've been so close so often and a seemingly random ball bounce will screw it all up.