Okay, so my guild has spent a few hours playing with Atramedes over the course of two nights.
It’s pretty clear to me that a LOT of the mechanics don’t work the way they’re described on various strat sites. For example, you take more damage from Modulation based on your sound at the time, I believe.
I’d love to hear what you’ve discovered about Atramedes through your own attempts. I’d also love to hear how people deal with the air phase and gong usage in particular.
So:
1) What mechanics work differently than you thought they would, based on pre-raid reading or watching of videos? How are they different?
2) How do you deal with the air phase?
3) Have gongs ever respawned and been usable to you during the fight? (I’m getting conflicting reports of this.)
4) Do you find overall raid damage difficult to deal with or is it due to avoidable damage not being avoided?
Looking forward to your comments!
Also, I find it really sad that I was SO looking forward to this fight and now I’ve grown to genuinely not enjoy it in the least. :(
1) Sonc Breath and Roaring Flame Breath do not pick the highest sound target. Either that or the mod i have monitorin sound is flawed.
2) in their phase people should be moving as much as possible. Felnystnhad the same kind of mechanic. If it starts on you and you’re still, it will catch you. After the first person is picked, our MT (war) waits until ~21 secs left in the phase an hits a gong. This draws Atramedes to him for the rest of the phase. He uses all of his cd’s to stay alive. When Atramedes touches
The ground we gong again for dps/sound reduction.
3) No. Never happened. If it does, it’s a bug.
4) because modulation scales with sound, the more careless everyone is the more damage they will take. Searing flame should only be one tick and the Sonc breath should damage no one. Healers should be aggressive onthe ground phase.
We split the raid in two and have Atramedes in the middle. Makes avoiding everything much easier.
We didn’t look too much at the strats when we started, just the abilities themselves so can’t speak too much to the differences between what is said and reality, but…
Air phase is usually fairly simple. We try to extend how long any one person can kite the beam by all means possible. The beam will move faster based on sound of the targetted person though, and that one I can first hand confirm.
Some ways we extend kiting time of beam? Blink, kitty dash, Priest shielding (with body and soul talented), Lifegriping further from the beam, anything at all.
We have one person stand by the gongs ready to go with the first whack as soon as it’s called for (usually the same person we have standing by the gongs to get the AoE fiery thingy I forget the name of as soon as it starts). Also, preferably, the person hitting the gong will also be someone capable of moving well on their own, such as a mage or druid for blink / sprinting right off the bat as the beam will head toward them immediately after the gong is hit.
You then have someone else ready to hit another gong if it’s necessary, but you can in fact get it to one gong hit per air phase if you do it well. If you get to near the 4-5 seconds from the end of the phase mark, don’t hit another gong as during those seconds he’s actually already coming down.
Gongs once used should never respawn, if they are it’s buggy, the gongs are basically the enrage mechanic of the fight. If you use them all up before you can kill the boss you lose to the aoe fiery thingy.
The raid damage should be really minimal. Everything is avoidable except the big sound AoE thingy which does hurt a bit, so can have people stack in one spot to get the benefit of all the AoE heals floating around afterward (and also makes it easier for the beam target to then run whichever way they like without fear of nuking other people) and… That fiery AoE thingy.
That one is also unavoidable. At least the first tick or two. But if you’re taking any more on that, need someone faster on Gongs. The first one has no timer unfortunately, so just need to call it ASAP the moment it starts so the gonger can do his thing.
After that, DBM will time it for you so gonger can get ready in advance. You can’t preemptively interrupt it though, if you gong and stun Arch just as he was about to do it, it’ll just delay the cast until after he becomes unstunned and you’ll have to burn another gong.
But the moment he starts casting it, the very milisecond, gonger can do his thing and prevent a lot of damage.
Hope that all helps somewhat!
1) I wasn’t prepared for players with extra sound “rating” to be so darn squishy!
2) Everyone is kind of on their own. Although you can’t control the initial target with any regularity, whoever strikes the gong becomes the target thereafter. We have a single player in charge of gong strikes during this phase — it helps with fire control (he knows where he’s laid it down) and gong control (he knows what he’s already hit). Everyone else stays AWAY from the edges to give the gong-smasher a clear kiting/gong striking path.
3)We’ve had gongs respawn, but I honestly think it was a bug that has been fixed. When we did have a gong respawn, it was obviously NOT MELTED, and easy to spot. We haven’t had any problems with gongs not being melted and being unusable.
4)As a healer, I found this one of the easier fights to manage. Damage is fairly predictable once people stop standing in the bad. Also, having the Atramedes addon helped, because I was able to know which players would be taking higher damage from unavoidable attacks, and could buffer them appropriately.
1) The sound definitely has nothing to do with who is targeted for his fire breaths – he chooses a random target and chases them (unless you’ve reacehed 100 sound – then he smooshes you). And you are correct in that Modulation will do more damage the higher your sound is.
2) We’ve never seen gongs respawn – but we did have it buggy the first few weeks where gongs were not resetting our sound. This seems to have been fixed however.
3)We utilize 3 gongs/cycle. One to interupt the AE pulses in the ground phase, one right as he’s taking into the air to reset everyone’s sound to zero so that when he’s chasing them he is slower and they can kite for longer, and one while he is in the air and about to catch up to the kiter.
This gives us a total of 4 ground phases to get him down. If he takes to the air again, we cannot lower anyone’s sound, and we cannot stop him from killing people once they can no longer outrun him. Basically he needs to be dead before he lands for a 5th ground phase – we usually have him dead before he takes to the air a 4th time, but sometimes it’s not quite that smooth =P
4) The healing isn’t terrible in my experience. We assign 2.5 healers to the tank and 4.5 healers to the raid. The only tricky part of the healing is getting everyone topped up suffuciently from the AE to counter the modulate that follows shortly after. We keep all of the ranged/healers grouped up and the melee grouped up, which makes group healing pretty easy. We largely make it the players responsibility to monitor the damage they take by keeping their sound low. The air phase needs virtually no healing if people are playing well, as 100% of the damage in that phase can be avoided.
5) You didn’t have a five…but I do! As a raid leader grab a mod called Atramedes if you haven’t yet. It will pop up a box that lets you monitor the numerical value of everyone’s sound in the raid. Which means you know who is taking significant sound, who needs to be warned to watch their sound, etc. (as well as give you a heads up as to who will get nailed really hard by the modulate so you can throw a cooldown or two at them). It will also help you easily pinpoint who is struggling with the “stay out of the bad” mechanics in the encounter, as WoL doesn’t track sound generation from anything I’ve been able to find.
10m – so YMMV
1) Increasing speed of the breath in P2 based on sound of the track target.
2) Start of P2 everyone is moving. First target tracks counterclockwise in the room along the outer circle. Our rogue is assigned to hit the gong, as he can glyph for sprint and it lasts a really long time. As long as the first target isn’t calling for a gong instantly, we’re in good shape. Our retadin is also a good kiter, since he has a permenant speed boost thanks to Pursuit of Justice. You could abuse some Life Grip I suppose, but we’ve never done that.
3) Never had a gong respawn.
4) This fight is one where you are either going to take a ton of damage and wipe the raid, or your healers are going to be standing around. Avoiding the sound circles is pretty easy, and as long as you avoid the Roaring Flame Breath, the fight is really simpe (imo).
I really like the fight mechanics, since they really punish people who don’t avoid them – and can cause a raid wipe from having to use too many gongs.
To add a comment after reading Borsk’s comment – our air phase gong banger is a rogue or a druid with sprint. We have them kite/sprint after banging the gong in the air until Atramedes lands again and is picked up by the tank. We’ve never lost one of them during the air phase to anything but their own stupidity ;)
And as another aside…
We stress that people cannot move into the tanking area for the air phase because do not want fire there. We also flip Atramedes after the second air phase so that the raid is always by gongs that haven’t been activated yet.
Heading out of work, but my brief answer is this: Healing Atramedes is very, very dependent on how well your raiders succeed at not standing in ick/moving away from ick. They should be sidestepping the moving circles in ground phase, and moving out of everything in air phase. A large amount of damage is very avoidable. (My raid group seems to fail at this very often, putting a ridiculous extra burden on the healers, and we then all chew the DPS out for it, ha.) If people die to Modulation (I hope I’m thinking of the right one), they have allowed their sound to stack too high, and that is largely their fault (assuming that gongs are also being handled properly).
Well, I left my raid group a while ago that had this guy on farm, and I’ve taken to recruiting and leading my own raid group. Ulgh.. talk about no fun. I used to be able to just research what I needed to do to heal, and now I need to know all facets of every encounter.
Anyway.. I’m confused about that modulation thing as well kurn. People in my new raid group were commenting on the fact they take more dmg based on their high sound. And like you, I haven’t seen that reported anywhere. Although I don’t know enough to say that is how modulation works.
As for the air phase, I tell everyone to just get moving. As soon as he lifts up, you move. You can start hard casting once he hasn’t chosen you for tracking. I generally find if you’re moving when he lifts off the chances of people dying to his tracking are slim. I’ve also heard that you want someone with a speed boost to use gongs because he’ll destroy that gong immediately and normal people can’t use it? Perhaps you have an ele or enh shaman that can ghost wolf it, feral druid, rogue.. ret paladin maybe? Mage should also work. We had a hunter, but they kept dying so I think the mage might work best, but I’m going to try assigning that privilege to the enh shaman. In my last raid group, and ele shaman used the gongs (unless they were chased).
As for gongs respawning.. someone commented on that in my previous raid group. However I have yet to encounter anything like that in my new one. I think we did get respawns, but not useable respawns in our raid last week.
The best tip I can give you for dealing with sound levels, is stay out of fire.. should never ever hit fire (common sense, but it must be said every time) and when he spawns the sonar pulses, if you can’t get around them.. it’s best to run against the direction they’re going. You’ll only briefly be in them so your sound will hardly (or won’t) go up. A huge mistake, is trying to run in the direction they’re traveling to get around them.. and you end up spending 3-4 secs in them.
That’s about all I have for you. I think this is just one of those.. “wipe until people get it through their heads” fights. Your strat seems to be fine, and strats I’ve found on other sites work well. It’s just.. don’t get hit guys.
Oh yeah, not that you need to know, but I’ve found flash heals to be very very useful. I only run 10 man, but I’ve found FoL to be amazing in this fight. With modulation coming and searing flames shortly after.. sometimes you need to get people up fast. It’s a mana drain, but in the air phase, no one should require desperate hard cast healing.. so I plea then to regain just about all mana I spent in ground phase.
1. It’s been a while now, but I’m pretty sure I was aware of the “more damage for more sound” mechanic for Modulation going into our first night on him.
2. For the air phase, we typically have a warrior on gong duty. Heroic leap, intervene, etc. allow him to be really mobile. One of the priests also often shadows him and can throw a life grip to jerk him further ahead if needed. We *aim* for one gong during the air phase, but often end up using 2.
3. We’ve absolutely had gongs respawn on us on multiple weeks. However, they are *not* usable.
4. The great majority of the damage to the raid is avoidable or at least mitigatable (dodging discs to lessen Modulation). We have a lot of raiders that still have trouble with it, too, but that just means they’re not dancing right.
I also wanted to throw out that on the ground phase, we actually have 2 people positioned at the same gong to click for interrupts. It’s basically just insurance to help get it done as quickly as possible (and so long as they’re at the same gong, no possibility of wasting an extra gong).
Here’s video of us doing it (with Vent), maybe you’ll find it useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68befb8zDf8
What most people have said is fairly on the mark. I will add though that I have on occasion seen gongs appear as if they have respawned (i.e. un-melt), however they are not usable.
One thing to add is it seems sometimes your group can take a few ticks of Searing Flames after the gong hits (sometimes resulting in 30-50 sound *immediately* after a gong. Rather frustrating, but as far as I can tell it’s just something you have to “deal with” :(
1) The biggest effect that worked differently than we anticipated was the breath. Like a few of the other posters I thought it would target the person with the highest sound. Turns out, the speed of the breath is directly related to the highest sound in the raid. To deal with this as Atramedes starts to go to the air we make EVERYONE start moving (toward the perimeter of the room). They are not allowed to stop moving until the breath has announced it’s target.
2) For our air phase we have one person the entire fight assigned to gong duties. It is always our mage (he has the run speed increase and can blink). He is responsible for interrupts during the ground phase as well as hitting the gong at the right time in the air phase. When the breath chooses it’s target I Power Word: Shield with the Body & Soul talent the target to make them move faster. When the breath catches up the mage hits the gong (usually per a verbal command from one of the raid officers). The mage then starts running since the breath is coming after him. We make no effort to keep the fire out of the middle of the room… we found this to just make the mechanic convoluted since the fire isn’t a large trail and can easily be stepped through (if you look you’ll notice there is a “clean path” in between the patches of fire).
3) I read reports that they respawn for some people but I’m convinced that has to be a bug (or them going crazy). We have not had any gongs respawn and we’ve had some looong Atramedes fights.
4) I use an addon to help me keep track of who has higher sound levels (since the higher the level the more abilities will hit for). The healing on this fight should be a joke (I’ve solo healed a 10 man encounter almost from the start because of a couple “oops” from the other two healers). Don’t get hit by the circles and don’t get hit by the breath and it should make for smooth sailing. It really does seem like raid damage is directly related to the ability of your raid to avoid the random sound effects. The one spot I’ve noticed where healing becomes a little more intense is the air phase. I’ve watched our hunter (it’s always our hunter for some reason) get nailed by multiple fireballs in a row and die or nearly die. I don’t understand that mechanic but that’s where we tend to have people drop.
I’m not sure how useful it is but if you search for Short Bus on US-Detheroc you can compare the raid damage we take on Atramedes to your meters. We do 10 man but I imagine the individual damage taken charts should still reflect something similar between 10/25 man raids.
Raid dmg will go up based on the amount of ‘sound’ that a person/people have.
1> We have noticed that even after a gong hit, sound does not reset for everyone. This looks to be a bug with the encounter
2> at 30% use gong’s to stun him for all fire abilities (if you have any to spare we normally have 2 up at that point and use them to just burn him down)
3> Don’t be afraid to use a gong to ‘cleanse’ sound for those that have failed to move out of bad. (please refer to 1> & 2> for caveat here.)
4> Most important thing everyone has to keep moving in the air phase, if you are not moving you are dead.
5> Lastly, when someone has a high amount of sound they need the burn defensive cool downs to help themselves.
Keep it up you will get this guy!!!
Forgot to add youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8B4mFuHK8U
It 10man but we use the same strat/setup for 25man
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/atramedes.aspx
I found that to be very helpful, by the way. As a raid healer and as a raid officer. It shows the 5 highest sound levels in your raid.
One bad side is you can’t move the addon until after your first encounter with him so it’ll be smack in the middle (my experience, anyway). Very useful tool, though. Let’s me know how fast I can expect the breath to move, who I expect to take extra damage from the AOE effects, etc.
I’ve only done the ten man version of the fight before, but…
1.) The only thing we really picked up on that felt different is the flame breath does not pick the person with the highest (or lowest) sound in phase one, nor in phase two. Both targets seem to be completely random. When someone hits a gong in the second phase, he WILL always pick them as the new beam target.
2.) I can’t say we do anything special for the air phase. The few of us that have special abilities to help us move faster pop them, and we call out for the one raid member who is supposed to be hitting gongs to hit a gong just as the beam is catching up. We run with no priests so we can’t do B&S though I’m sure that’d be helpful.
3.) I don’t know if it regularly happens, but on our very first kill, with only myself, a tank, and a DPS standing from the third repetiton onward, gongs WERE respawning for us, and were completely usable. I don’t think this will matter since an enrage timer I believe is being added to the encounter anyway.
4.) As some people mentioned, I find this one of the easier fights to heal. Almost everything is avoidable, and the couple of things that aren’t are easily healed by people being grouped up to get AoE heals efficiently. I’m rarely thinking “wow I’m cutting mana really short, and there’s a ton of damage going out” unless one of the other healers dies early on to badness.
Potion of Swiftness saved our butts in phase 2. It’s a ridiculously low level potion – 1 swiftthistle, 1 briarthorn. Our alchemist farmed up enough to give all of us 20 of them, and everyone targeted by the fire trail was supposed to pop the potion. Worked wonders. We had one paladin healer who always seemed to be the target, so on our third attempt we all gave him extra potions and the dragon didn’t target him once, that’s when we got the kill.
He’ll target the gongringer after that, so we had a kitty ring the gongs then dash around so that we could control the second flame trail better.
We also emphasized that this fight is about control rather than dps, and if you have a choice between completing a cast-time spell or getting out of bad stuff, get out of bad stuff. I relearned where all my instant cast stuff is. I never had a mana problem on this fight because of all the movement, so don’t be afraid to cast quick-expensive if you need to.