Bertman vs the raid – Elegon

Our raid of 06.11.12

Yesterday we had the entire raids duration to make progress on Elegon.

We went in without our esteemed raid leader Loozi. Real live happens and Loos had warned us in advance so Gudran, Bala and me took over as raid leaders for the night.

Back in WotLK the three of us led Renown to a top 50 world ranking. Doing so implies we know our shit. Needless to say we were feeling confident in our raid leading abilities.

We got off to a good start. We figured out the trash fast.

You have these mobs that project a cone of lightning-y shit in from of them. Turns out you have to stand in it. It kicks you back quite a few yards and allows you to kite them quite easy.

The kiting is necessary as they gain a nasty buff for a few ticks that kicks your ass, even as a tank.

Of course, to fully benefit from the kick back, you can’t stand with your back against a wall. All that tanky knowledge that is ingrained in my brain went out the window for those trash pulls.

The next pull consists of those kick back mobs and one caster like mob. Our DPS just burned down the caster. We had Pug (DPS DK) tanking that mob but I don’t think it’s really necessary. He hits like a wet towel.

Gudran and me dragged the kick back mobs back in the hallway to avoid pulling the next trash pack.

The third and last trash pack before Elegon is the hardest.

5 mobs.

The big one in the middle heals so we owned him first. He doesn’t need a tank.

The two smallest ones are casters again and they don’t need to be tanked either, we killed them second.

Then it was time for the two remaining mobs to bite the dust. They were of the “kick back” variant again.

Once you get the strategy down it’s really really easy.

After the dust settled, we went over the Elegon strategy.

And gawd damn are we rusty.

Our explanation was all over the place, interrupting each other and even contradicting each other on some aspects.

I can’t say enough how happy I am that Loozi takes the brunt of the raid leading on his delicate little shoulders. I really don’t have the time to do all anymore. I think we have a good spread of the tasks in our guild right now, I hope everyone else thinks the same.

Anyway, back to Elegon and his raid-owning ways.

I had to go DPS for our attempts. I don’t mind going DPS for fights but sometimes I feel like me and Bala are the only ones with a viable off spec. Normally it doesn’t bother me to much but yesterday I got the feeling it hurt our raid a bit.

I am the best geared tank and having me go dps hurts the team. Especially since my dps spec is raid ready, but not amazing.

I’m not bashing anyone here, a good off spec is something that usually comes after we have farmed a raid a bunch. I realize we are very early in the expac and it’s just easier as a tank to pick up off spec gear I think.

Anyway, I went dps for the fight and Bala went tank. We did this so we could have two healers, two tanks and six dps which is apparently the best set up for this fight.

At first we didn’t get very far, we usually wiped after one or two of the bigger adds died. Turns out our healers had to move too much because the tank tanking the add just dragged it to the outside of the circle that was closest. We fixed that by setting a designated point on where to tank them.

It made the tanks and dps run a bit more but the healers had to move less, which is usually a good thing.

With that adjustment we got into phase 2. We failed to kill all the little adds early on, going completely unprepared into phase 3 and having people all over the outer ring unable to reach each other. Reason this happened was because the transition between phase one and phase two sucked balls.

After some tinkering with the strategy and explaining it through the use of every raid marker in existence we were ready to pull again.

Our strategy for the night was simple:

In phase one, when a big add dies, it does 100k damage to everyone in the raid. Bala, X-man and me rotated our raid wide cooldowns to lessen the incoming damage.

In phase two we used heroism to get the little adds down quick enough after three waves but that turned out to be overkill as on one attempt we killed five waves. In our later attempts we stopped using heroism on that part.

The tricky part was again the phase transition from phase 2 to phase 3. We wiped several times there due to people not being in the right spot or due to adds.

In phase three you have to kill 6 pylons before you can go back to dpsing the boss.

The pylons are standing around the room in a circle and they are connected with the pylon on the opposite side of the circular room. You have to kill the two connected pylons before you can get to the next pylon because as long as one of the pylons is active, a force field keeps you from continuing

The best way, the only way really, is to be where you have to be before the pylons activate there force fields.

Once again an explanation involving a lot of raid markers was needed.

I’m really glad that our guildies are very patient and actually involved with the strategy and come up with ideas too.

 Once we cleaned our shit up we got through phase 3, killing all the pylons with a minimum of adds up and then, once again, the phase transition from phase 3 to phase 1 kicked our asses.

I think the important things here are:

1. get a tank asap back on Elegon

2. use a raid cooldown to minimize incoming damage and personal, minor dps cooldowns to burst down the adds. I think the best place to tank the adds is where we kill the big add in phase 1.

Anyway, we didn’t have time to test that because our time was up.

We progressed from wiping in phase one almost immediately to wiping in the transition between phase 3 and phase 1. It may not seem like a lot but once we got that fixed it’s just rince and repeat and then kill Elegon.

I’m confident we can kill him. It may take a while though.

All in all, it’s a fun fight and I’m looking forward to more attempts and progression on him.

Props to our guildies for not complaining when we manhandled the explanation(s) and major props to Loozi to lead our sorry asses to victory time and time again.