Wednesday 15 July 2009

Ulduar melee attack

The Ulduar 10 raid ran last night, dare I say the Great Tank Drought of 2009 is over? The Elder Brethren faced Auriaya, Hodir, Razorscale and Ignis... with a raid consisting of 4 melee DPS and 1 ranged stood all on his own.

The melee-heavy nature of the raid caused certain issues with some of the bosses. Can you guess which ones?

Auriaya
We were all clumped together in front of the crazy cat lady, in melee range, so there were no issues here. She died first time to our army of DKs.

Hodir
Keeping moving was easy for us melee, the tank was dragging Hodir all over the place and jumping doesn't seem to interrupt any of the swings or casts. However, one key aspect of the fight is to get buffs from the fires, columns of light or storm clouds. The fires and columns of light are static and the buffs only last while you're standing in them, which is great for ranged but pretty impossible for melee if the tank is moving Hodir around, past and out of their range. The storm cloud can be got from the Shaman NPC and shared with the melee, so thats ok. Basically getting the buffs is hard!

Freeing the NPCs from their ice blocks is also tricky when 4/5 dps are melee, we ended up with little time to DPS Hodir because we were running around freeing NPCs. After a few wipes we left the Boomkin and Priest to their fate and concentrated on the Shaman and Mage.

A few ranged seems quite critical on this fight, to free the NPCs and stand in fires or moonlight. 1 ranged wasn't enough for our attempt. We eventually hit the enrage timer on this fight and gave up to go kill...

Razorscale
Loot pinata basically, the 1 ranged operated the harpoons and the rest of us were free to run around DPSing. With Magma totem and DK aoe thingies, we could just AOE the adds and then kick seven shades of snot out of Razorscale.

Ignis
You know the part where a ranged has to do a 5k+ crit on a brittle construct? Yeah. Our shadow priest actually managed to do this, which is good as we had no other options in ranged-type persons.

However we had limited time and after one wipe, decided to try a DPS race on Ignis while the poor off-tank kited all the constructs that Ignis spawned. We almost had the bugger too, but wiped with 100k health left.

...

I have noticed the composition of our raids have changed since Wrath. In TBC we were very ranged heavy, we only had rogues and some times we had no melee DPS at all. When they added the Death Knight class, a lot of ranged players switched to DKs and we are often melee heavy. I guess it doesn't help that I swapped from Hunter to Enhancement Shaman, but it is tempting me to change my off-spec from Resto to Elemental for Ulduar. I fear my Elemental DPS would be very poor tho.

Next time for Hodir, more ranged please!

5 comments:

AdrianG said...

Ele dps is pretty good actually :)

Jye Nicolson said...

Breaking just the mage out is usually sufficient (and you can't really afford to waste time on the others for hard mode anyway). Get your tank to kite Hodir to the moonbeams :)

B-Rab said...

Ele is good dps, but it can get a tad boring. Plus if you're melee heavy you are probably helping out more as being enhance with your buffs.

Of course, sometimes you do what you have to do, which is why I'm ele and not resto...

Whats my main Again? said...

46k lava burst crits on Hodir is awesome... don't think I have anything else to say about that :P

SolidState said...

Regarding Hodir, as Jye wrote, you only need to free the mage, he will free the other adds.

As for moving Hodir around - why? Have your tank stack good frost resistance gear and with a Paladin frost aura (or shaman totem) you should be good for tanking him in one spot. Have your tank get him closer to the mage so that melee are in range of fires and don't need to jump up and down. Same for healer, can be in healing range of tank and in range of fires.

Moonbeams are nice for ranged but the most important thing for melee DPS (is a raid like yours) is that whoever gets the storm buff, even healer or ranged DPS, runs close to the melee DPS so that they get the jumping buff.

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