Quick post today.
Went to Firelands last night.
Spent a LOT of time on trash. Figured out that you basically have to kill one of each type of mob to spawn Shannox (although it might not be all mobs, we certainly did kill one of each mob before he spawned).
Felt ridiculously unprepared because Shannox and Riplimb are untauntable when we expected them to be tauntable. Stupid PTR!
It was a slow night and a lot of our enthusiasm was sapped by a combination of three things:
1) Changes to the boss meant changes in figuring out WTF to do about Jagged Tear.
2) Shannox’s patrol IS STUPIDLY LONG and takes FOREVER. You do a ready check and everyone’s ready and then like, 3 minutes later, THAT’S when Shannox patrols around.
3) Respawning trash, while understandable, meant that most of our good attempts were before our break and we didn’t even have a chance to really work out what we now believe is a winning strat.
On the bright side, I’m friendly with Avengers of Hyjal and bought the cloak.
On the not-so-bright side, Shannox is alive.
On another bright side, the other major 25-man guild on Eldre’Thalas ALSO failed to kill Shannox and wiped 17 times to our 12.
On the not-so-bright side, I think they also raid Wednesdays, so unless they fail hideously, we’ll probably only get the 2nd 25-man Shannox kill. >< Still, we caught up to them at the end of T11 with both of us at 7/13. Not bad since we raid something like 7 hours a week less than they do. (4 nights, 4 hours vs. our 3 nights, 3 hours.)
At any rate, I have RL stuff to do which will keep me from doing stuff in-game I should do. Tonight I raid with Choice and we’ll see if I get in for the fight or if I’m on standby. While my baby pally’s gear is much improved, it’s still not phenomenal, but Firelands normals are really made for people in 359 gear. Mine’s 356, so maybe with just a couple of JP purchases (?) I could hit that. Or just get some dailies done to get going towards some 365 gear. Rep would be great just to get the 378 cloak!
Okay, that’s my Firelands update. Anyone else have Firelands stories to share?
We had a very similar experience last night. Slowly figured out trash, worked our way towards where Shannox’s icon is on the map, only to not find him there. Killed trash randomly until he appeared. Had no idea what triggered it.
We got about 5 attempts in before trash started respawning and we just farmed trash for our last half hour of raid time (we only raid 2.5 hours, twice a week). His patrol is stupid long and stupid annoying.
Didn’t start on Shannox, headed on out to ms charlotte’s web.
The trash up to her ranged from easy to omfg. Those hellhounds are no joke.
Some funny stuff happened like, the tank falling thru the web too early or healing jumping up top 1st in error lol.
Fight seems very straight foward, add management is key. Should get her down tonight.
O.O with Shannox unable to be taunted how are you supposed to tank swap those jagged thingees.
Ahh…so THAT’S what that “Huntsman horn” bit is all about then!
8 Shannox pulls before trash respawn, then 5 Beth pulls. It is relatively easy to clear to the path below Beth. Her trash is alternately easy and scary.
We had a couple pulls of Shannox before we realized the taunt problem, then a couple more while we fixed dps aggro issues. We’re also dealing with trap issues and how much extra fun we have when those traps LoS the healers from the tanks.
Beth is totally doable and we had a very strong last pull. More mana/cooldowns and we could have forced it through, but a dead OT for Beth meant bad things after the MT was debuffed. Going upstairs is fun, just need to make sure tank then 1st healer are vocal about getting up correctly or another eager beaver will steal your ride. When Beth casts Devastation the team must get downstairs in the first couple seconds because the strands which prevent falling damage will despawn when Devastation hits.
Slice, we didn’t kill Shannox either but in the end we figured tactics where he and the tankable dog are tanked away from each other. Shannox does not apply the bleed unless he has his spear and the dog does not while fetching it either. The timer is a bit short even with this and our tanks had to kite a bit sometimes. I felt we started to get the fight but the trash respawned and we went for Beth.
For Shannox … I think we did it an odd way. But I’ll share anyway.
We had a tank on Shannox and another on Riplimb. Those two were separated by about 40 yards. When Shannox would start to throw his spear (red circle on the ground) the Riplimb tank would run him as far away from the spear spawn as possible (preferably putting a crystal prison trap between Riplimb and the spear). This bought us enough time for the Jagged stacks to drop on the MT before Riplimb brought the spear back and with the use of a priest’s Body & Soul proc the Riplimb tank would kite him until his stacks dropped.
The dps nuked Rageface until he was dead. From there we dpsed Shannox and Riplimb about evenly. We would have Shannox to about 30% and kill Riplimb. From there it was a nuke phase and raced to kill Shannox before his AOE killed us. We managed to do it but lost a few people on the last AOE wave from Shannox.
Good luck with him!
I’m curious … how DO you get him to spawn? I thought it was one of each, as well. We cleared a good 20 packs of trash … then pulled turtles (which we hadn’t killed yet) and he spawned after that. I’m wondering if it is just one of each type…
Oh … and is it just me or do those turtles make anyone else want to play Mario Kart? :P
They hotfixed the Shannox trash respawn timer to 4 hours this morning. And they’re nerfing that incredibly annoying pack of hellhounds on the Beth’tilac path. Apparently they have the same health on 25-man and 10-man, so they’re probably not so bad for bigger groups.
I think he spawns when you have a certain percentage of the critters on the south plateau dead. We didn’t touch the turtles and he spawned when we killed the second patrolling pack of fire nagas.
Serrath, that sounds like our kill tonight. For those who try, be careful not to put them too apart because Shannox will increase his damage output and kill a tank in 3-4 seconds.
It’s definitely not “one of each type” as we skipped the turtles today too and he appeared after we killed another pack of scorpions.
Our guild started on the spider queen, and we killed her on our first night of attempts (though in all fairness, half the raid had worked on her for at least an hour or two on alts). We then did some work on Shannox ourselves, though we weren’t close to a kill. We were getting the whole ‘stay out of traps’ thing down though! And the dog that runs amok kept eating my face. :(
UFTimmy – I had the advantage that half the raid or so had actually already done quite a bit of trash/rep runs earlier in the day, so we didn’t have to spend too long figuring anything out in terms of that. Except how to spawn the fucker.
What do you think of the spawn timer change from 2h to 4h? I know we were pretty pleased.
slice – Yup, had a good time with Beth’tilac on Thursday. 8 attempts and she was down, woot! Of course, we made it hard on ourselves. She healed to 96% at the start of P2 (from 86%) and we blew everything we had and just got her down.
Learn to Raid has a great strat up now:
http://www.learntoraid.com/2011/06/30/shannox-video-strategy-guide-25-normal-updated/
This video also really helped, although we had our DK do the running around since he’d actually watched the video whereas our prot warrior had not. >.>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49exM3UtXec
K – Yup! It’s interesting that it gives a bit of flavour, I guess, in that he’s not already spawned, but it’s certainly annoying.
Joe Ego – agreed on communication for Beth’tilac. We had 1 tank, 2 healers and I think 2-3 melee go up, so I had the tank and healers call out when they were up before DPS should take a thread up themselves.
We also had an inordinate amount of people disconnect if they fell down Beth’tilac’s central web section. Good times.
Imakulata – Definitely check out the videos I linked above, from L2R and another guild. Great strats if you’re having tight issues with the debuffs on Shannox.
Serrath – interesting choices! We preferred to use a Slow debuff (arcane mage’s slow + nether vortex talents) for that instead of a B&S shield, but kiting should work, too.
As to him spawning, I know you hadto kill at LEAST one of each pack and then a few more, but Nina’s comment above makes me rethink that. Consistently, whenever we don’t kill turtles or hell hounds, as soon as we kill that pack we’ve been avoiding, he spawns.
Weird, weird.
The turtles do not make me want to play Mario Kart, but I DO have an instinctual need to jump on them…
Nina – really? You got him to spawn without turtles? We’ll have to try that out!