So my last post detailed how crappy it is to be the one who makes decisions like “who gets their mount first?” and such. Shortly after posting that, we walked into Firelands with 25 people and got 23 people their Glory of the Firelands Raider achievements. (The other two in the group just need Only the Penitent…)
This post will detail how to go about getting those less-common achievements, or at least how we did them. I won’t cover the six heroic boss kills, nor Share the Pain, nor Only the Penitent…
The first tip is that we did all of these achievements on NORMAL MODE. That was a huge help.
Goal
This achievement basically means that, during the Beth’tilac encounter, you don’t kill any Cinderweb Drones while they’re below the web. If you are to kill them at all, you kill them above the web.
How to Get It
1) Send up as many people to the top of the web as you can while still assuring yourself of the ability to kill all Spinners and Spiderlings below. This should include a tank, at least one healer and some DPS.
2) Downstairs DPS should stop DPS on the Cinderweb Drones at 20%. Then ignore them. Their energy will tick down. When it reaches 0%, they will go up to the top of the web and will start to drain energy from Beth’tilac herself. This will have the side-effect that she will cast Smoldering Devastation sooner and, as a result, will transition to Phase 2 (the ground/burn phase) sooner.
3) As soon as a Cinderweb Drone goes up to the top of the web, DPS above should focus on it to kill it.
4) If a Cinderweb Drone comes back downstairs, YOU MUST NOT KILL IT. Off-tank it. If it is low on health, let it consume a Cinderweb Spiderling!
5) Tanks should swap between tanking Beth’tilac and when they get Widow’s Kiss, they should pick up any Cinderweb Drones that remain and then swap back. You will likely have 2 drones — one that has already gone up and one that just recently spawned.
We did this on our first attempt, although it was a little hairy and we needed to feed 1-2 spiderlings to a drone.
We had 1 tank, 2 healers and 7 DPS go up top with 1 tank, 4 healers and 10 DPS stay on the bottom.
Goal
This achievement wants you to defeat Rhyolith without ever turning him left. Don’t be fooled by the “while his armor is intact” crap. That means until he sheds it completely at 25%, not when all armor stacks have worn off. Also, damage to the left foot is acceptable, but as soon as he turns left, you are screwed.
How to Get It
Tikari, one of our melee officers and the one who “drives” Rhyolith, brought this solution to the table:
We will want as much direct damage, and as few DoT’s as possible – zero DoT’s on the left legs. For example, I’ll be going with instant/instant poison.
We will have the following calls:
1. Stop DPS (this means everything).
2. Soft right (~6 DPS or so to execute sweeping turns).
3. Hard right (~10 DPS or so assigned to legs opens up on them to make tight turns).Zero dps on the legs at the start. I mean, zero. We will let him walk forward, stomp, summon two volcanoes, and light one (hopefully one to his right – if not, we’ll deal). Then we will turn right (likely soft) on my call. I will try to keep a soft right call going to get as many volcanoes early as possible. Then as we get closer, we’ll switch to hard rights and just keep him spinning clockwise as we burn him as quickly as possible to force phase 2.
And that’s pretty much what we did. At about 50% or so, we blew heroism and EVERY DPS in the raid switched to the right leg and we turned him in circles for a little bit until he hit 25%, then we blew him up. Beautiful.
We did this on our second attempt (the first had nowhere near enough DPS to turn him, so we bumped that to 6 from 2). Raid comp here was 2 tanks, 6 healers, 17 DPS. Specifically on the legs: 1 combat rogue, 1 assassination rogue, 1 fury warrior, 2 frost DKs, 1 marks hunter, 1 elemental shaman and 2 arcane mages.
Goal
Drag Shannox all over the freaking map to each of the points required, then kill him.
How to Get It
A really simple, if somewhat long, achievement. (And we did it while someone in the raid was getting their foci from Shannox, too!)
First – clear a LOT of trash. You’ll need the space. Anything on the road from the Path of Corruption all the way to Alysrazor’s room and any wandering patrols.
Essentially, you want to pull him at the Path of Corruption. Pull him up the ramp of it until the achievement UI pane checks off “Path of Corruption”. While this is happening and Shannox is turned around again to go back DOWN the path of Corruption, DPS should open up and absolutely slaughter Rageface, to make the encounter slightly less complicated. This will, of course, cause Shannox to do a bit of extra damage.
Going along the road over towards the entrance, you’ll pass by Beth’tilac’s cliffs. Hug the cliffs and you will eventually get credit for Beth’tilac’s Lair. There’s a great spot just to the right of the ramp leading up to Beth’tilac if you’re having trouble finding a spot.
Then head over towards the entrance of the instance. Just a bit up the ramp from where the portal to Majordomo’s area is will be the border for “Flamebreach” and you just need to cross Shannox past that before spinning him around and moving on.
Next up, head over towards Rhyolith’s ramp. Make sure you’ve done Rhyolith FIRST (or at least his trash!) so that you don’t trigger the gauntlet. You just need to go a little ways up. Again, watch the achievement pane for credit, then turn around and head for Alysrazor’s room.
We had previously killed Alysrazor, so we just fought Shannox in there. We had already killed Rageface, so we killed Riplimb, blew heroism and killed Shannox.
Again, the raid comp was 2 tanks, 6 healers and 17 DPS.
Goal
Essentially, the goal of this is to not take any avoidable environmental damage here. No Brushfire, no Lava Spew, no Fiery Tornadoes and no Incendiary Clouds.
How to Get It
We sent five DPS up in the air, as per usual. This left us with 12 DPS on the ground, 2 tanks and 6 healers.
DPS had the instructions to focus the Initiates as they dropped to essentially blow them up before they got a Brushfire out. Stuns were useful here, since Brushfire is not interruptable. This helped greatly to eliminate the chance of hitting Brushfire, because, well, there were very few Brushfires to be found.
Tanks were given the instructions to eat their plump lava worms almost as soon as they could. On normal mode, you get 2 spawns of 2 worms each. We had the tanks use cooldowns through tantrums until the hatchlings were dead. This helped greatly to eliminate the chance of hitting Lava Spew, because the worms were barely alive long enough to clip someone.
The air team was fantastic in dodging Incendiary Clouds, so make sure whoever you send up is extremely comfortable up there.
Fiery Tornadoes were the sticking point, but we found a specific spot on the ground where tornadoes spawn near. Once we all clumped up on that spot and chased the tornadoes around from then on, it only took us a total of two attempts to get the achievement done.
Here’s the spot. It’s on the southern wall of the room. Here’s the picture — that’s the entance to the left.
As noted, the tornadoes will go CLOCKWISE, so you’re in a good spot if you’re just off the purple spot towards the entrance.
The biggest problem here was people “getting lost in the crowd”, so to speak. I nearly clipped a tornado because I lost track of where my own toon was and had drifted right a bit, and someone ended up clipping one, so we called a wipe and tried again. It worked beautifully.
Tips:
– Have the Achievement UI pane open (track the achievement) for Bucket List. It really helps.
– Use Raid Achievement for Do a Barrel Roll. It’s really handy and tells you what portion of the fight was failed and by whom. So if your whole raid team, for example, has gotten through a fight with Alysrazor and not taken Brushfire damage, and you already have that portion of the achievement, you can ignore any Brushfire failures.
Hope that’s helpful to everyone attempting their hand at Glory of the Firelands Raider! The other achievements are either really easy (Share the Pain, Only the Penitent) or depend on your group’s progression through Firelands (need all bosses dead on heroic except for Ragnaros).
Good luck!
Thanks for this! We have a couple of the annoying ones left, this’ll help clean them up. :)
I wanted to share a few Air Team tips for anyone that might be going up and needing to dodge those Clouds!
In order to maintain your buff you have to fly through fiery rings that are spawned constantly behind Alysrazor. In order to guarantee you receive the stacking buff from the ring fly through the EDGE of the ring instead of the middle. I’ve often witnessed that flying through the middle of the ring will not net me an additional stack and this wastes time and potential dps! Once you have 25 stacks you may sit in the middle of the air nuking Alysrazor if you’re ranged (thanks Srs for this tip, it worked great!). Make sure to refresh your cooldown before beginning the tornado phase, though!
When a ring is spawned two incendiary clouds are spawned at the same time. This set of three items is repeated identically three times (i.e., the clouds and ring will always be in the SAME position three times in a row). After the third spawn hang back a little and wait for the next set to spawn and reposition yourself accordingly. She will spawn 9 rings in the air during a complete rotation. A 10th will be spawned as she lowers herself to the ground and three more spawned while she’s doing her Talon on the ground. Rinse/Repeat. Just remember – count the three sets and you’ll be safe!
saif – Glad it’s helpful! I figure with the amount of time left before 4.3 (ie: not much!), more people will be looking at getting this done.
Serrath – Thanks for that! And thanks for being a great part of the achievements last night, especially on the air team. :)
grats on your new purple birdy mounts v2.0!
One small correction for anyone going in the Air during Alysrazor (on Normal Mode):
For the first “circuit” each time a Ring spawns, one Incendiary Cloud spawns.
For the second “circuit” each time a Ring spawns, two Incendiary Clouds spawn.
For the third “circuit” each time a Ring spawns, three Incendiary Clouds spawn.
Serrath is right about the positioning of the Clouds though.
Do a barrel roll, oh boy! We’re going in on Tues next week to tackle some of these. Good post, will be using some of these tactics